Tag: Third Reich

The Hindu and the Muslim in India: A Communal Conflict?

A conflict can be called ‘communal’ if the opponent’s national identity is not questioned. But the Hindutva project questions the very political and moral legitimacy of Muslims.

To call the rising Hindu-Muslim conflict in India “communal” misses a vital point. A conflict is communal when the opponent’s national identity is not questioned, e.g. the conflict among Indian castes is properly communal. Upper-caste Hindus accept backward-caste Hindus as legitimate members of the nation.

By contrast, the mobilisation against Muslims in India reasserts national identity. It defines the opponent as foreign and, in the case of Hindutva, a separate ‘race’ blamed for the decline of the once powerful descendants of the Aryas – the Hindus. For this reason, some scholars have termed Hindu-Muslim conflict as an ‘ethnic’ conflict distinct from communal conflict, and others more explicitly call it a racial conflict finding hardly any, if at all, connection with religious differences.

The Christian, like the Muslim, is also an alien race in Hindutva discourses, though the Hindu-Christian conflict remains lower in significance and scale given the limited political salience of a relatively small Christian population. 

Admiration and contempt: two sides of the same coin

It may seem ironic that Hindu nationalists perceive Muslims as simultaneously worthy of emulation and exclusion. Positive stereotypes about Muslims, such as the fertility of the women and the attractiveness and courage of the men (the trope at the centre of the ‘love jihad’ bogey), are entwined with negative stereotypes of the barbaric, violent, non-vegetarian Muslim. But this paradox of admiration and contempt is quite typical of popular perceptions of racial superiority. Up until the early 20th century, the American South was riddled with pernicious narratives of animal-like black men – alluring bodies with violent dispositions – raping innocent white women. Indeed, in Hindu nationalist rhetoric, the Hindu-Muslim divide is unlike any other: it is a racial divide. In Swami Vivekananda’s words, the junction of “the Vedanta brain and Islam body” was a good strategy for the revival of the Hindu ‘race’.

But isn’t racism about blacks and whites? 

It is a scientific fact that race as an objective characteristic does not exist. It is a fluid and ambiguous idea constructed to serve social hierarchies. But the social construction of race does not efface racial belief: the popular understanding of race and the prejudice associated with it.

The fact that there are no Aryan or Semitic races did not stop the deployment of racial beliefs in Nazi Germany. Racial prejudice is also not solely about optics, i.e. observable characteristics such as skin colour. Groups with the same skin colour can be – and have been – racialised or treated as inferior, e.g. (white) Jews during the Third Reich or (black) Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda.

The genocide memorial in Kigali. Photo: Trocaire/Flickr, CC BY-ND

Racial prejudice is fundamentally a matter of relationship between groups and not about innate disposition of the members of the group. Once members of a group characterise themselves (and, consequently, others) as belonging to the dominant race, it leads to a self-assured feeling of being naturally superior or better.

This understanding can change from place to place and time to time. In pre-colonial India, the perceived enemy was the Turk, the Greek, the Persian – simply a ‘foreigner’ with no religious identity.

It was with the ideological and structural impact of colonial rule that several Hindu activists, such as M.S. Golwalkar and Dayananda Saraswati were spurred on to revive the original Hindu race, its destruction blamed on an alien race of Muslim invaders. The RSS’s recent imploration to Hindu followers to consider Muslims as part of their own ancestry, albeit the more violent descendants of this ancestry, points to Hindutva wordplay with race that keeps oscillating over time between the ideological and the constitutional.

Why should we care?

So what difference does it make whether to call the conflict communal or ethnic (or racial)? The difference lies in the implications of prejudice. Indian democracy has long remained a clever juggling act – pogroms against minority groups (Sikhs, Muslims, and Christians), camouflaged as spontaneous ‘riots’, are regularly deployed by self-professed secular and Hindu nationalist parties to consolidate the majority Hindu vote and, consequently, sustain the veneer of a fully functional democracy.

However, as opposed to the more recent Hindu-Sikh conflict that began in the late 19th century, the longstanding racialisation of the Hindu-Muslim divide by Hindutva proponents destroys both the political and moral legitimacy of the Muslim. Without political legitimacy you cease to remain a rightful citizen; without moral legitimacy, you cease to remain human. Racialised dehumanisation has historically often been a precursor to morally righteous war and genocide, e.g. the Nazi dehumanisation of the Jews, terming them ‘vermin’, and of the Rwandan state terming Tutsis as ‘cockroaches’ and, now, Muslims as ‘termites’ or biological danger that deserves exclusion and, at its worst, elimination.

Conflict vs violence

A silver lining to the murky business of racialised polarisation is that propaganda does not automatically translate into actual physical violence. This is because human beings, in general, are reluctant to commit acts of violence – committing an act of violence is different from joining a crowd of attackers because there is both a physical and, importantly, a moral cost to inflicting physical harm on another human being. In other words, there is a distinction between conflict and violence. 

However, when a group is historically resented and the state actively gives it a racial spin, violence against members of the group becomes easier: violence is now perceived to be morally righteous and retributive for it is being inflicted on an alien entity. At its extreme, this is comparable with the German brand of ‘eliminationist’ antisemitism, which justified horrific crimes against Jews as ‘necessary’. Before the rise of Hindutva in India, the historic resentment against Muslims did not manifest in as many instances of violence as seen today because non-Hindutva parties did not actively ignite existing racialised or ethnic polarisation. 

Pride in democracy, liberal Hinduism, and constitutional law have resisted the exclusion of the ‘foreigner’ Muslim (and Christian) fairly well thus far – one hopes it is allowed to stay that way.

Raheel Dhattiwala is an independent sociologist, formerly a research fellow and tutor at Oxford University. She is the author of Keeping the Peace: Spatial Differences in Hindu-Muslim Violence in Gujarat in 2002 (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

The featured image is an illustration by Pariplab Chakraborty. To view more such illustrations, click here

Interview | How Mysticism and Pseudoscience Became Central to Nazism

In the social crisis following World War I, esoteric and border-science ideas became a powerful tool of Nazi mobilisation, directed at demonising Jews and the Left.

In the late nineteenth century, industrialising Europe was the epicentre of what Max Weber famously named the “disenchantment of the world”. Traditional religious practices were being challenged by the forces of modernity, with church attendance troubled by the advance of Enlightenment, science, and secularism.

Yet the famous Weber quote often omits the second part of his thesis — holding that the world was also being re-enchanted by something new. New kinds of esoteric, religious, and border-scientific doctrines emerged as seemingly modern alternatives to traditional religion and science.

These included anthroposophy (an Austro-German variation on the esoteric doctrine of theosophy, which combined elements of eastern spirituality with Christianity, western philosophy, and natural science); ariosophy (a more explicitly racialist and eugenicist version of theosophy), World Ice Theory (a “border-scientific” theory insisting that ice is the basic substance behind all cosmic as well as geological and evolutionary processes on Earth), astrology, and parapsychology (the study of psychic phenomena and paranormal claims). This trend also included alternative religions, New Age, homeopathy, folklore, and renewed interest in Hinduism and Buddhism.

In his new book Hitler’s Monsters, Eric Kurlander looks at the specific influence supernatural ideas had on the emergence and consequences of Nazi ideology. He argues that the invocation and appropriation of popular esoteric, border-scientific, and religio-mythological beliefs helped Adolf Hitler’s party to attract supporters, dehumanise its enemies, and pursue its imperial and racial ambitions. But — the historian tells Jacobin’s Ondřej Bělíček — these ideas also took root in a particular sociopolitical context — one that’s reproducing itself, if not on the same scale, also in our own present.

At the end of the nineteenth century, a strong movement dedicated to supernatural ideas, esoteric doctrines, spiritualism, and occultism developed. What was different about this movement in Germany and Austria, compared to other places where these tendencies also flourished?

The uniqueness is twofold. On the one hand the investment in what I call the “supernatural imaginary” in Germany and Austria had a wider influence. It wasn’t just a discrete aspect of the everyday, like when you go to church or a séance on Sunday. It got integrated into the politics and social theories much more directly and ubiquitously. A lot of these esoteric figures started to draw political conclusions based on such beliefs.

That also happened in France and Great Britain, for example, but not to the same extent. On the other hand, the content of the supernatural imaginary, where you had many movements like theosophy, astrology, and so on, was also much more folkish and racial in Germany and Austria than France or Great Britain.

There were a lot of people talking about different races in the nineteenth century, not just in Germany and Austria. But when you look at the way that these alternative esoteric and border-scientific doctrines were deployed in the public sphere, race and antisemitism were seemingly more prominent there compared to France, Great Britain, and even the United States, which had its own folkish-esoteric groups, like the KKK and William Pelley’s “Silvershirts.”

In short, race was also part of the official language of science and social reform in Britain, France, and the United States, but it wasn’t at the core of border-scientific and occult practices; and such practices, conversely, didn’t play as central a role in right-wing ideologies or theories of politics or society.

You also mention that German folklore, mythology, Indo-Aryan religion, and racist theories were often actually a part of the German school system. You mention specifically the influence that Hitler’s teacher Leopold Pötsch had on young Hitler. Was this also a national particularity?

This gets at the concept of border science. Everyone was talking about Charles Darwin and the civilisational decline of the West, the rise of nonwhite races — all of which was a part of mainstream natural and social scientific discussions in the second half of the nineteenth century. Even left-liberal progressives and socialists used the concept of race at that time, which they would not accept now.

If you went to school in France or the United States in the 1880s and ’90s, you’d hear theories about the racial superiority of some groups over others, and theories of history that tended to idealise white men, or the history of your country, in a very nationalistic way. The difference is that in Germany and Austria, Nordic mythology and folklore became mixed in with this so-called “scientific” thinking about race, politicised, and then integrated into pedagogy. It not only happened in school, but in popular and scientific literature.

Many leading personalities of supernatural movements in Weimar Germany were later prominent Nazis. Did the other interwar parties somehow work politically with belief in the supernatural, or was this Nazi-specific?

There were undoubtedly some individuals in parties on the centre-left that were interested in astrology and German mythology, but they generally didn’t integrate it into their political ideas and propaganda. If you were a member of the two liberal parties, the Social Democrats, or the Communists, you weren’t that likely to invoke the images of vampires and the devil, werewolves or witches, to describe your political opponents and/or yourselves. Nor would you generally talk about swastikas or ancient sun wheels or “Sig” runes being a symbol of the Aryan or Nordic race.

But not only Nazis invoked this iconography. There were all sorts of folkish paramilitary groups that used these kind of symbols, that organised solstice festivals and talked about restoring German empire and resettling the European East with “Warrior Peasants.”

Also read: Why People Flocked to Hitler, and Why the Nazis Believed ‘Here There Is No Why’

Parties on the German centre-left, as in most countries, certainly wanted to argue in terms of what to do with finances, taxes, and education, but centre-right parties were just as likely to invoke emotional propaganda linked to race-based theories of Germanic superiority and the nearly superhuman danger of monstrous Jews and Bolsheviks, in ways that were hard to engage rationally or empirically. How would you argue with someone appealing to the quasi-mythical blonde and blue-eyed character of the German people, and arguing that your country has been colonised by a cabal of Jewish-Bolshevists, freemasons, and lesser races?

Not all Germans believed these things: many, perhaps even a majority didn’t. And remember that only a third voted for Hitler. The Nazis never got more than 37 percent of the vote despite the Great Depression and other factors. But people who voted Nazi appear to have been disproportionately invested in the supernatural imaginary.

I suppose that after the lost war in 1918 and the Great Depression these supernatural ideas must have spread throughout the German population. Can we say what sort of people tended to support these ideas?

History, sociology, and political science has shown us that while the Nazis did appeal to substantial numbers of Germans from all demographics, Catholics and workers tended not to vote for Nazis in high numbers. Conversely, Protestants of lower-middle class or rural sociological background voted disproportionately for Hitler’s party. What you find, looking at the way that the supernatural imaginary functions, is that it doesn’t appear as prominent in the urban socialist and worker milieu.

It’s not that the German working classes were immune to supernatural ideas — whether the occult, border science, or alternative religion. Certainly, some members of the working class read their horoscopes or believed in aspects of the paranormal. But for various reasons, the working classes were generally more insulated from the political consequences of such ideas due to the powerfully leftist, indeed often overtly Marxist, character of the urban, proletarian milieu.

Beyond the strength of this proletarian culture, the workers’ own socioeconomic interest, and their typical party affiliation with the Social-Democrats or Communists, we have Marxist theory’s intellectual emphasis on materialist explanations of sociopolitical reality. For these reasons, it was very difficult for non-Marxist parties and non-materialist ideologies to make inroads among the German working classes, especially among skilled workers in urban areas, who proved remarkably resilient to conservative, clerical, and to a lesser extent fascist politics throughout the interwar period.

Indeed, even among constituencies with a greater proclivity for non-materialist, faith-based thinking, such as rural and small-town Catholics, the strength of the Catholic social and religious milieu — reinforced by decades of Protestant persecution — insulated devout Catholics from alternative forms of supernatural thinking as well as radical-nationalist, disproportionately Protestant parties such as the German Nationalist People’s Party and the Nazis.

These ideas seem to have been most popular among middle-class Germans who perhaps weren’t devout Catholics or Protestants anymore, but who may have still been interested in alternative religious, quasi-Christian/quasi-pagan esoteric, and other supernatural ideas. These esoteric tendencies also seem to be noticeably gendered in Germany, especially where politics is concerned — which appears to be another difference between the way these doctrines spread and the “supernatural imaginary” functioned in France, Great Britain, the United States, for example, in comparison to Germany and Austria.

In the former countries it seems that women were nearly as likely to participate in these movements as men, certainly as followers, but also sometimes as leaders. In Germany and Austria, propagating esotericism, border science, and folkish paganism seemed to be an almost exclusively masculine enterprise.

You see that also in the Nazi movement, which was also very masculine. It’s mainly white males who were not particularly educated in terms of scientific training, but had some university education. White-collar workers, small businessmen, engineers, these are the kind of people that found these ideas most interesting. A similar demographic to those who enjoy watching shows about “Ancient Aliens” or lost relics or Himmler’s undead soldiers on the History Channel nowadays. It’s the people who have some kind of education, some background in history, but are open to pseudoscientific and faith-based arguments.

In many ways this resembles today’s groups of people who believe in conspiracy theories like QAnon, anti-vax movement, etc. How did the intellectuals, scientists, and authorities react to this pseudoscientific trend at that time?

Many leading figures on the Left or liberal centre observed this unhealthy investment in supernatural and faith-based thinking and said, “Here is a phenomenon which is anti-science, irrational, and preoccupied with magical thinking, alternative history, and religion and seems to be helping antidemocratic forces of the far-right. We should be careful about that.”

Bertolt Brecht and some socialists mocked the Nazis for flirting with such ideas in the press. They found it shocking that Germans believed in Hitler and Goebbels’s emotional appeals — in some cases written by Hanns Heinz Ewers, a horror writer famous for novels about vampires, mad scientists, and devil worshippers and briefly a Nazi propagandist. They couldn’t understand how any party could come to power that employed the contemporary equivalent of Stephen King or Clive Barker to promote their cause. Some supporters of the liberal parties, which lost many more of their voters to the conservative and far-right parties than the Social-Democrats or Communists, were even ready to blame their political failure on Germans’ irrational behaviour.

Alfred Rosenberg. Photo: Wikipedia

Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi ideologist, admitted that lots of people voted for Nazis because they were interested in the occult. The influential conservative political philosopher Carl Schmitt noted the widespread investment in what he called “political romanticism.” So, with the decline of the liberal centre, the only political parties that could oppose Nazis were the left-wing parties, but they spoke totally different language and were unable to compete with the Nazis in terms of their emotional appeal to nationalism and folkish rebirth, grounded in Germans’ “longing for myth” and desire to transcend the political and economic crises and social divisions of the interwar period.

What about Hitler himself? Could you describe what was his relation to supernatural ideas, occultism, or border science?

Hitler was perfectly emblematic of a typical Nazi party member — or certainly, Nazi leader — in this regard. He was not as invested in supernatural ideas, for example, as Himmler, Hess, or Alfred Rosenberg. He was always more skeptical about broader supernatural theories being made too prominent a part of Nazi propaganda. But he still drew on them and his rhetoric was infused with border-scientific arguments, the invocation of mythology and appeals to the emotions. Even if he didn’t buy into all the esoteric race doctrines that some of his colleagues did, he understood that it’s important for the Nazi party and he used that language.

In my book, Hitler’s Monsters, I mention Hitler’s famous quote in Mein Kampf warning against the Nazi party becoming home to “wandering scholars wrapped in bearskins.” Given the animal-skin-wearing QAnon Shaman who stormed the American capitol building in January 2021, this obscure comment from Hitler seems much more relevant. Like Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen, both of whom have publicly tried to distance themselves from the folkish “QAnon Shamans” in their ranks, Hitler worried the Nazi Party might lose support from mainstream middle-class constituents.

Even if Hitler publicly tried to distance the Nazis from esoteric and pagan religious groups such as the Thule Society and folkish “wandering scholars in bearskins,” he nonetheless still recognised that his supporters were attracted to supernatural ideas and conspiracy theories in making sense of an increasingly complex and threatening world.

What was the Nazis’ relation with supernatural ideas after Hitler came to power? You mention that it was dangerous for the Nazi party to let the supernatural movement and occultism grow, because they feared that it could get out of their control.

It’s not so much that they rejected supernatural reasoning. They were specifically afraid of occult groups presenting a sectarian challenge to a unified “racial community” led by the Nazi party. These occult and folkish doctrines and associations, like theosophy, ariosophy, Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy movement, and other folkish and messianic groups — which had their own rituals, secret traditions, and most of all their own Führer — were seen by the Nazis as sectarian. It meant that they had their own sociocultural identity and, potentially, ideology in competition with Nazism.

Hence many scholars point out the crackdown on occultism during the Third Reich — erroneously, in my mind, saying “look, the Nazis hated occultism.” But they didn’t. They tried to control certain kinds of occultism and other “sectarian” groups for many reasons, the same way they tried to control religion, social programs, women, workers, peasants, or industrialists. Their natural proclivity as a fascist regime was to try to control things and make everyone “work toward the Führer,” but it doesn’t mean they rejected esoteric or völkisch religious or border-scientific thinking.

Also read: George Orwell’s Review of ‘Mein Kampf’ Tells Us as Much About Our Own Time as Hitler’s

Their hostility to occultists, then, was not the same kind of blanket hostility as Nazi attitudes toward Socialists or Communists or certainly the Jews. They repeatedly accepted former occult leaders into the party as long as they stopped trying to maintain separate folkish-esoteric organisations like the Thule Society or the Werewolf Bund or the Tannenburg Bund.

The Nazis were also divided on what was “scientific occultism” and what was popular money-making occultism. Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess, members of the Reich Education Ministry, Himmler, and the SS, and even Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry at times worked to differentiate “scientific” or at least pragmatically useful occult doctrines and border-scientific ideas and individuals from what they called the popular or “Jewish” boulevard occultists like Erik Hannusen — who, they, claimed were just stealing money from people.

So, the Nazis surveilled and periodically arrested or interrogated occultists who were supposedly making money off undermining “public enlightenment.” But for Himmler, Hess, Walther Darré, and other Nazi leaders, “real,” scientific occultists, and border scientists could still investigate whether Thor’s lightning was magical or whether the position of the stars and moon promoted organic farming.

These “scientists” were sponsored by various Nazi ministries and especially Himmler’s SS. So, they selectively rejected some occult ideas and individuals as unserious and unscientific, but were also willing to legitimise and even employ them when they were sympathetic to the particular border-scientific or esoteric doctrine or völkisch religious belief. The dubious concept of World Ice Theory seemed to reinforce the idea of an ancient Aryan race and call into question “Jewish physics” like relativity and quantum mechanics. Hence both Himmler and Hitler sponsored it.

You mention that the supernatural imagination “gave an ideological and discursive space in which it was possible to dehumanise, marginalise the Nazis’ enemies and turn them into monsters”. Could you elaborate on how this worked?

Once you leave the realm of modern science, like biology and physics, and begin operating in the realm of the “supernatural imaginary,” where anything is possible or justifiable, once you start mixing biology with esotericism, history, and archaeology with folklore and mythology, you could turn Ashkenazi Jews from a partly European people who shared with Germans a common East and Central European ancestry, into wholly alien, biological monsters with superhuman and evil tendencies, behind everything malevolent that has happened in history.

The supernatural imaginary, which mixed science and occultism, history and mythology, also allowed Nazis to pick and choose the characteristics they would like to ascribe them to their enemy, comparing them to vampires, zombies, devils, and demons. It also allowed them to ascribe certain superior characteristics to Germans, sometimes drawn equally from mythology or border science.

Also read: When Hitler Realised the End of the War Was Upon Him

In their last-ditch effort to create an elite partisan division in late 1944, they invoked the name werewolves, from Germanic folklore. While werewolves were regarded as tragic or noble heroes possibly linked to Odin’s coterie or Norse berserkers, in France they were cursed beings linked to Satanism and witchcraft. In German folklore werewolves were therefore tragic heroes ultimately tied to blood and soil; creatures who would defend their forests and land against Slavic interlopers. Vampires on the other hand, were not tragic romantic figures or even heroes, as they were portrayed in France or Great Britain, but degenerate Eastern parasites linked to the Jews and Slavic peoples, who were trying to undermine German’s purity of blood.

Folklore, mythology, theories of aliens, World Ice Theory, frost giants, gods, and monsters were ultimately used to construe why Germans have a right to invade the European East and subjugate or destroy lesser races and so-called “Judeo-Bolshevism.”

Supernatural thinking had a multiplier effect on the violent policies that already existed in the eugenics of that time, abused in many other countries, including Britain, Sweden, or the United States, but never to the same, unbridled extent. The “secret” ingredient here, I argue, was “supernatural” thinking.

What influence did the supernatural imaginary have on the Nazis’ war effort?

Firstly, the supernatural imaginary influenced Nazi geopolitical views, which manipulated archeology, folklore, and mythology for foreign policy purposes. Himmler and Rosenberg developed these arguments, based largely on folklore, mythology, and border science that for thousand of years the Nordic people were the dominant civilisation in Europe and they had a right to reclaim that. Bad archeology, selective use of biology and anthropology, and mythology fueled a lot of ideas about the Eastern Europe and why Germans had a right, like the medieval Teutonic knights, to (re)conquer the East.

Supernatural thinking wasn’t the only factor in determining Nazi policy, but certainly reinforced the Nazis’ racist and imperialist relationships toward Eastern Europeans. Yes, at some point during the war Nazis negotiated deals with Ukrainians and Baltic states for pragmatic reasons, but ultimately they had this huge complex of supernatural thinking underlying their conceptions of race and space. It helped justify, for example, moving Poles out of their homes and putting Germans in their place or sending Jews off to death camps.

The supernatural imaginary was also directly linked to eugenics experiments during the Holocaust. One of the worst Nazi doctors, Sigmund Rascher, was a son of a leading anthroposophist, Hanns Rascher. You have this leading doctor very open to this idea of race and space — who accompanies Ernst Schaefer on Himmler’s Tibet expedition to uncover the ancient origins of the Aryan race — and he is later willing to experiment on human beings to test his and Himmler’s border scientific theories.

When you take the level of scientific ingenuity and confidence that Germans had going to the 1930s and you mix it with a regime immersed in supernatural thinking, led by Hitler and Himmler, who had no background in natural science, who were self-taught, who read folklore and mythology and dreamed about rocket ships, and provide the platform of terrible war where mass violence is already becoming acceptable, that’s very dangerous. Along with eugenics, it is part of what fuelled these horrible experiments and even the Holocaust.

A general view of the former German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz in Oswiecim, Poland, January 19, 2015. Photo: Reuters/Pawel Ulatowski

 

It seems like Germans who believed in supernatural imaginary really believed that Slavs are vampires, Jews are vermin, and Soviets basically monsters.

I can’t tell you that millions of soldiers in the field really saw Jews as a superhuman monsters; many Germans had Jewish friends and spouses both before and after the Third Reich. But the Nazis certainly used the supernatural imaginary to dehumanise Jews, Slavs, and Bolsheviks and transform them into an inhuman and inhumane enemy. Some ethnic Germans did report being attacked, admittedly during the trauma of war, by Slavic “blood-drinkers.”

The question is, how did that happen? My argument is that it wasn’t just the science of biology or imperialism or industrial capitalism or the mass violence and trauma of “total war” — important as all those factors were — but also the Nazi supernatural imaginary. How much someone really believe in the various doctrines, tropes, and ideas that constituted that imaginary depended on the person. At times, however, it seems like some Nazis really believed that there were whole other species and races the Jews in particular, who were simply inhuman monsters, whether literal or figurative, who had to be eliminated for “Aryan” civilisation to survive.

Ondřej Bělíček is editor of A2larm.cz. Eric Kurlander is professor of history at Stetson University.

This interview first appeared on Jacobin. Read it here. 

When Dhyan Chand and India’s Olympians Refused to Salute Hitler

The Indian contingent was one of only two teams to not raise their arm as they marched past the Nazi dictator in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, a protest made sweeter by the hockey team beating Germany to win the gold medal.

Note: This article was first published on February 4, 2020 and is being republished on August 6, 2021.

The Berlin Olympics were declared open on August 1, 1936. M.N. Masood, a member of the team, left a minute-by-minute description of the opening ceremony that provides fascinating information. It was nothing less than a grand spectacle of Hitler’s ‘thousand-year Reich’. The Wehrmacht was fully mobilised in setting up the support infrastructure and the competitors were transported to the venue in army trucks. The Indians, with Dhyan Chand carrying the flag, were by far the most colourfully dressed of the contingents present. As Masood noted,

‘With our golden “kullahs” and light blue turbans, our contingent appeared as members of a marriage procession of some rich Hindu gentleman, rather than competitors in the Olympic Games.’

But this was no ordinary ‘marriage procession’ – the members of the Indian team were about to make a huge political statement by becoming one of the only two contingents who refused to salute Adolf Hitler.

The opening ceremony of the Berlin Olympics was one of the great set-pieces of the Nazi era. As the giant zeppelin, the Hindenberg, circled majestically over the stadium, Hitler and his minister of interior arrived amid great fanfare to observe a military guard of honour.

M.N. Masood noted the fervour that the Führer generated:

‘When the Führer neared the Stadium, a multitude of young boys who were watching the proceedings from outside, saw their idol approaching towards them. With one great cry, they shouted ‘Heil, Hitler!’ and broke the silence of the Maifield.’

In four years, that war cry would reverberate around the world but the panzer blitzkriegs and the horrors of the holocaust were still in the future. At the time, at least some Indians were impressed by this disciplined spectacle of the resurgent Third Reich.

Spectators giving the Nazi salute during one of the medal ceremonies. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 3.0

As ‘the hundred thousand Germans in the Stadium stood to their feet and sang with one voice’ the two German national hymns – ‘Deutschland’ and ‘Horst Wessel-Lied’ – Masood writes that it ‘made a strange impression’ upon the Indian contingent and ‘not an eye was left dry’:

‘India rose before our imagination … somehow the spring of our national feelings was touched, and the unity and solidarity of the people in the Stadium made us look with shame and regret at our poverty, destitution and discord.’

Also read: Why These Indians Fought for Spanish Democracy

But nationalist aspirations were not the same as sympathising with the Nazi cause. What Masood does not mention in his elaborate description is the serious controversy the Indians created at the opening ceremony by not saluting Hitler during the march past. The Indians were the only contingent apart from the Americans to not perform the raised-arm salute as a mark of respect for the German chancellor.

Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta
Dreams of a Billion: India and the Olympic Games 
Harper Collins, 2020

British-loyalist newspapers like The Statesman were more focused on the defiant US contingent, making only a brief mention of what the Indians did. This was partly because of the dark cloud that hung over the participation of the US and the threat of a boycott by some of their athletes, with Jewish athletes Milton Green and Norman Canners staying true to their word. The high-profile American contingent, uncertain as to whether its participation might be interpreted as support for the Nazi regime and its anti-Semitic policies, had barely made it to Berlin after a narrowly won vote orchestrated by sports administrator and future IOC President Avery Brundage. But their contingent refused to dip its flag or ‘doff its headgear’ when passing the podium, eliciting ‘a certain amount of whistling from a section of the crowd’. The Berlin Games are remembered mostly for the exploits of the African-American athlete Jesse Owens, whose triumph disproved Nazi theories of Aryan dominance. For most journalists, the Americans were the story of the Games.

Yet, the Indian decision not to salute Hitler was a grand gesture of defiance, totally in sync with the tenets of the dominant stream of Indian nationalism and the Congress Party. This was perhaps why loyalist newspapers in India chose not to play it up. The Calcutta Statesman chose to place its coverage of the Indian defiance on its political pages as opposed to the sports pages where all Olympic news was usually placed.

It is important to note that G.D. Sondhi, one of the officials accompanying the Indian contingent, was deeply influenced by Nehruvian ideas. In the late 1940s, inspired by Nehru’s internationalist ideals and the dream of pan-Asian unity, he single-handedly evolved and created the framework of the Asian Games. At a time when Britain was courting Hitler with its policy of appeasement – just two years after which the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, was to triumphantly declare ‘peace for our times’ after the Munich conference – the Indian decision not to salute the Führer, it seems, stemmed ideologically from the anti-Nazi position taken by the Congress under Gandhi and Nehru. From the 1920s, the Congress had repeatedly opposed Britain in the event of a European war and regarded fascism and Nazism as forms of Western imperialism.

In 1936, the same year as the Indians were marching in Berlin, Nehru told the Lucknow session of the Congress that ‘Capitalism in its difficulties took to Fascism’ and ‘fascism and imperialism … stood out as the two faces of the now decaying capitalism’. It was as impossible for India to support Britain’s new opponents as it was to support Britain. From 1938 onwards, Gandhi began opposing Hitler in the pages of Harijan, at one point even sending him a letter to desist from violence. In 1939, the Congress resolved to ‘keep aloof from both imperialism and fascism’ in its session in Tripuri.

Also read: Why We Should Read a Nazi Memoir

There is no evidence to show any direct linkage between the Congress and the athletes’ decision to not salute Hitler in Berlin. But the fact remains that it was a political act, breath-taking in its audacity and in direct opposition to most other contingents at the Games, including the British. Managers like Sondhi were in all likelihood influenced by nationalist sentiment as articulated by the Congress leadership. The ‘marriage procession’ carried an underlying political message…

§

Against all expectations of a resurgent German team, Dhyan Chand and his team crushed Germany 8–1 to win their third consecutive Olympic gold. Forced to swallow their dire predictions, the sportswriters once again wrote flowery paeans and the title defence was narrated in great detail. Triumphant subheadings in The Statesman summed up the mood of the match report: ‘India’s Triumph’, ‘Science Scores Over Force’, and ‘Dhyan Chand in Form’.

This report left little doubt about India’s overwhelming supremacy: ‘In the second half science triumphed over force and the skill of Indian forwards, assisted by a hardworking trio of halves brought goal after goal. The vast crowd rose as one man as the Indians made raid after raid, completely outwitting the home defence with their speed and stickwork and their uncanny accuracy of shooting.

Goal after goal was scored to the bewilderment of the German side and though they played with their greatest pluck and gameness and managed to score once, they were a well-beaten team.’ It was in this game that Dhyan Chand truly came into his own in the Berlin Olympics.

Dhyan Chand scoring a goal in the 1936 Olympic hockey final. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Dhyan Chand had discarded his stockings and spiked shoes and wore rubber sole shoes, which increased his speed a great deal. That he was at his best is borne out by the handsome scoreline of 8–1. Dhyan Chand himself scored six goals. The German papers, which until then had been predicting a German gold, were full of praise for the Indians after the final. A correspondent for the Morning Post argued that Berlin would remember the Indian hockey team for long. ‘These players, it is said, glided over turf as if it is a skating rink and their flickering sticks had the Japanese, normally so agile, mesmerised.’ The reporter went on to conclude, ‘Nature seems to have endowed Indians with a special aptitude for hockey’. The legend of Indian hockey and the Games’ special affinity with what was still seen as the ‘Orient’ was embellished further.

Also read: The Experiences of Indians Who Fought Someone Else’s War

It is a tenet of Indian sporting folklore that Hitler personally met Dhyan Chand and offered him an officer’s commission in the Wehrmacht if he would play for Germany. This story is almost certainly apocryphal because none of the contemporary sources mention this incident and neither does Dhyan Chand in his autobiography…

§

The 1936 Olympic campaign finally put to rest any doubts regarding India’s hockey supremacy. India had won all its matches in style, scoring thirty-eight goals in the process and conceding only one. Dhyan Chand, once discriminated against for his inferior social status, had consolidated his position as the darling of the Western world. A statue of his was erected in Vienna. Another statue erected later in Delhi’s Dhyan Chand National Stadium remains the only sculpture dedicated to a hockey player in independent India.

His six goals against the Germans in the final were no less an achievement than Jesse Owen’s four gold medals in track and field. As Gulu Ezekiel wrote, ‘While on the track Jesse Owens exploded the many myths of Aryan superiority, which the Nazi forces had carefully propounded, on the hockey field Dhyan Chand created magic.’ It was not without reason that the government of India issued a postage stamp in his honour and conferred on him one of India’s highest civilian distinctions, the Padma Bhushan, in 1956.

This is an extract from Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta’s book Dreams of a Billion: India and the Olympic Games (Harper Collins, 2020).

Watch | ‘Similarities Between Hitler’s Third Reich and Modi’s India Growing Everyday’: Avay Shukla

In an interview to Karan Thapar, the former IAS officer said the parallels include intolerance of dissent, treatment of the opposition, deliberate policies designed to divide and polarize society.

Avay Shukla, one of India’s best-known and most widely read bloggers, whose pieces seem to go viral each time he puts them up on his site called ‘View from (Greater) Kailash’, has bluntly said “the similarities between Hitler’s Third Reich and Modi’s India are growing every day”. The comparison may have started in terms of the percentage of the popular vote that brought Hitler’s Nazis to power in 1932 in Germany and Narendra Modi’s BJP to power in India in 2014 but it now extends to many other aspects such as the intolerance of dissent, treatment of the opposition, deliberate policies designed to divide and polarize society, the attitude to the media and the cult of personality carefully created around the leader. Avay Shukla adds this is something every Indian must be concerned about, particularly because polls repeatedly suggest Narendra Modi remains as popular as he was when he first became prime minister seven years ago.

In a 40-minute interview to Karan Thapar for The Wire to mark the launch of his book India: The Wasted Years, which is a collection of his blogs, Avay Shukla said he began in 2013 as a supporter of Modi. However, when he realised that after winning power, Modi had gone back on everything he promised and, instead, imposed an agenda that no one had voted for, the retired IAS officer felt he had been conned and fooled into voting for Modi and the BJP.

In the interview to The Wire, Shukla talks about what he calls “Modi’s destruction of India”. He says it can be divided into three broad phases – demonetisation, 2019 and COVID-19. He says “a malevolent common thread” runs through the three phases. This is how he describes the thread:

“Subjugation of constitutional and regulatory institutions, gross misuse of enforcement and police agencies, undermining of the judiciary, politicisation of the armed forces, an overbearing arrogance and insensitivity to public opinion, ruthless crushing of dissent and false propaganda and image building on a Goebbelsian scale.”

In the interview, Shukla says Modi could not have achieved his almost total dominance but for the willing participation of civil servants, military officers, the judiciary, intelligence and enforcement agencies and the media. He adds: “I blame my own service and colleagues.” He says they are “silent and intimidated”. They don’t want to stand up.

Asked by The Wire how he compares present-day India under Narendra Modi to the India of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency and how he, therefore, answers an oft-posed question, “Who was worse? Indira or Modi?”, this is what Shukla said: “The damage being done now is far more fundamental and longer lasting. It’s almost irreparable.”

However, Shukla made a further important point. He said: “Indira Gandhi had the courage to declare the Emergency. She did so openly. Modi’s is an undeclared ‘emergency’ and, therefore, more insidious”. Finally, he said: “Indira Gandhi’s Emergency affected the administrative system. Modi’s, on the other hand, has affected the social fabric of society. This time the poison is seeping beyond administration into society itself.”

In The Wire interview, Shukla was also sharply critical of corporate India and its failure and refusal to stand up and be counted at critical moments. He said: “A corporate entity has the same legal rights as an individual, surely it should have the same moral and social duties as an individual – to condemn immoral ideology, to abjure hate and communalism, to not incite one community against the other, to distinguish between truth and falsehood.”

Shukla spoke about two icons of whom he is very critical. The first is Ratan Tata. This is what he has written of him in his book: “notwithstanding his tall claims to philanthropy, Ratan Tata always knows which side of his bread to butter and this is usually the winning side”. In The Wire interview, he explained what has brought him to this conclusion. Shukla said: “Tata doesn’t speak out on issues that should be condemned. He may fund an NGO or a school and give a couple of crores but that is small change. He needs to do more.” Shukla was referring to the need to speak out on issues where Tata’s weight and personality would make a decisive difference.

The other icon Shukla is critical of is Amitabh Bachchan. In his book, he writes: “Amitabh Bachchan has too many bones in his mouth to be able to bark.” In the interview, he explained why he has this opinion of Bachchan. He said: “Amitabh Bachchan cannot just ride the gravy train and make money out of it”. “He keeps quiet on issues where he should speak up”. Shukla praises Bachchan’s promotion of ecological, sanitation and health issues but was critical that on other matters the actor has nothing to say.

Finally, Shukla said the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens “will make this country a much better democracy”. He said: “For the first time in our 71 years history the concept of secularism has come out of … rarefied and elite portals … it now mingles joyously with ordinary citizens in the streets, parks and universities of India.”

The above is a paraphrased precis of Avay Shukla’s interview to Karan Thapar for The Wire. Though recounted from memory, it’s not inaccurate. There is, of course, a lot more in the interview than has been covered in this precis. Please see the full interview for a better understanding and appreciation of Avay Shukla’s views.

How Can America Heal From the Trump Era? Lessons From Germany’s Transformation After Nazi Rule

Defenders of American democracy would do well to study carefully the painful but ultimately successful approach of the Federal Republic of Germany to move beyond fascism.

Comparisons between the US under Donald Trump and Germany during the Hitler era are once again being made following the storming of the US Capitol on January 6.

Even in the eyes of German history scholars like myself, who had earlier warned of the troubling nature of such analogies, Trump’s strategy to remain in power has undeniably proved that he has fascist traits. True to the fascist playbook, which includes hypernationalism, the glorification of violence and a fealty to anti-democratic leaders that is cultlike, Trump launched a conspiracy theory that the recent election was rigged and incited violence against democratically elected representatives of the American people.

This is not to say that Trump has suddenly emerged as a new Hitler. The German dictator’s lust for power was inextricably linked to his racist ideology, which unleashed a global, genocidal war. For Trump, the need to satisfy his own ego seems to be the major motivation of his politics.

But that doesn’t change the fact that Trump is just as much of a mortal danger to American democracy as Hitler was to the Weimar Republic. The first democracy on German soil did not survive the onslaught of the Nazis.

If America is to survive the attacks of Trump and his supporters, its citizens would do well to look to the fate of Germany and the lessons it offers Americans looking to save, heal and unite their republic.

From Nazi ideology to democracy

The Weimar Republic, the first democracy on German soil, was a short-lived one. Founded in 1918, it managed to survive the political turmoil of the early 1920s, but succumbed to the crisis brought about by the Great Depression. It is therefore not the history of the failed Weimar Republic but rather that of the Federal Republic, founded in 1949, that provides important clues.

Just like Weimar, the West German Federal Republic was founded in the aftermath of a devastating war, World War II. And, just like Weimar, the new German state found itself confronted with large numbers of citizens who were deeply anti-democratic. Even worse, many of them had been involved in the Holocaust and other heinous crimes against humanity.

During the first postwar decade, a majority of Germans still believed that Nazism had been a good idea, only badly put into practice. This was a sobering starting point, but Germany’s second democracy managed not just to survive but even to flourish, and it ultimately developed into one of the most stable democracies worldwide.

How?

Denazification: ‘Painful and amoral process’

For one, there was a legal reckoning with the past, beginning with the trial and prosecution of some Nazi elites and war criminals. That happened first at the Nuremberg Trials, organised by the Allies in 1945 and 1946, in which leading Nazis were tried for genocide and crimes against humanity. A further significant reckoning happened during the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of the mid-1960s, in which 22 officials of the SS, the elite paramilitary organisation of the Nazi Party, were tried for the roles they played at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.

Defendants in the dock at the Nuremberg trials. The main target of the prosecution was Hermann Göring (at the left edge on the first row of benches). Photo: Work of the United States Government, Public Domain

To protect the new German democracy from the political divisions that had plagued parliamentary government during the Weimar period, an electoral law was introduced that aimed to prevent the proliferation of small extremist parties. This was the “5 percent” clause, which stipulated that a party must win a minimum of 5% of the national vote to receive any representation in parliament.

In a similar vein, Article 130 of the German Criminal Code made “incitement of the masses” a criminal offense to stop the spread of extremist thought, hate speech and calls for political violence.

Yet as important and admirable as these efforts were in exorcising Germany’s Nazi demons, they alone are not what kept Germans on a democratic footing after 1945. So, too, did the successful integration of anti-democratic forces into the new state.

This was a painful and amoral process. In January 1945, the Nazi Party had some 8.5 million members – that is, significantly more than 10% of the entire population. After the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany, many of them claimed that they had been only nominal members.

Such attempts to get off scot-free did not work for the Nazi luminaries tried at Nuremberg, but it certainly did work for many lower-level Nazis involved in countless crimes. And with the advent of the Cold War, even people outside of Germany were willing to look past these offenses.

Denazification, the Allies’ attempt to purge German society, culture and politics, as well as the press, economy and judiciary, of Nazism, petered out quickly and was officially abandoned in 1951. As a result, many Nazis were absorbed into an emerging new society that officially committed itself to democracy and human rights.

Konrad Adenauer, the first West German chancellor, said in 1952 that it was time “to finish with this sniffing out of Nazis.” He did not say this lightheartedly; after all, he had been an opponent of the Nazis. To him, this “communicative silencing” of the Nazi past – a term coined by the German philosopher Hermann Lübbe – was necessary during these early years to integrate former Nazis into the democratic state.

Where one was going, advocates of this approach argued, was more important than where one had been.

A dignified life

For many, this failure to achieve justice was too heavy of a price to pay for democratic stability. But the strategy ultimately bore fruit. Despite the recent growth of the far right and nationalist “Alternative for Germany” party, Germany has remained democratic and has not yet become a threat to world peace.

At the same time, there were increasing efforts to confront the Nazi past, especially after the upheaval of 1968, when a new generation of young Germans challenged the older generation about their behaviour during the Third Reich.

Another crucial factor helped make Germany’s democratic transition a success: an extraordinary period of economic growth in the postwar period. Most ordinary Germans benefited from this prosperity, and the new state even created a generous welfare system to cushion them against the harsh forces of the free market.

In short, more and more Germans embraced democracy because it offered them a dignified life. As a result, philosopher Jürgen Habermas’ concept of “constitutional patriotism” – as one interpreter put it, that citizens’ political attachment to their country “ought to center on the norms, the values and, more indirectly, the procedures of a liberal democratic constitution” – eventually came to replace older, more rabid forms of nationalism.

In the coming weeks and months, Americans will debate the most effective ways to punish those who instigated the recent political violence. They will also consider how to restore the trust in democracy of the many millions who have given their support to Donald Trump and still believe the lies of this demagogue.

Defenders of American democracy would do well to study carefully the painful but ultimately successful approach of the Federal Republic of Germany to move beyond fascism.

The US finds itself in a different place and time than postwar Germany, but the challenge is similar: how to reject, punish and delegitimize the powerful enemies of democracy, pursue an honest reckoning with the violent racism of the past, and enact political and socioeconomic policies that will allow all to lead a dignified life.The Conversation

Sylvia Taschka, senior lecturer of History, Wayne State University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

What a Biography of Hitler Tells Us About the Supporters of Authoritarian Leaders

The leader cannot order everything from above; so those below have the duty to “work towards” what their leader has signalled he wants.

The image of a gunman brandishing his pistol in full view of Delhi Police and shooting a student protestor at Jamia is profoundly unsettling. The picture of cops looking on idly while the young man went about his threats and shooting is an arresting image that signals the emergence of a new idea of the state in India.

The monopoly of violence evidently no longer rests exclusively with the state; it is now shared with right-wing vigilantes and mobs which enjoy the patronage of the ruling establishment – and that is a terrifying prospect for India. There are reports that the shooter is a member of the Bajrang Dal.

Also read: Editorial: Jamia, Hindutva Radicalisation and the Currency of Bigotry

The reasons for police inaction are not hard to discern. The BJP leadership, starting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah, continually indulge in anti-Muslim rhetoric. Modi brazenly dog-whistled recently by saying that anti-CAA protestors could be recognised by their clothes, Shah calls Bangladeshi immigrants “termites”, a BJP’s twitter handle puts out pictures of Arvind Kejriwal with a skull cap alongside images of burning buses, Muslim activists and doctors are harassed and arrested – no one, police included, is in any doubt about who the BJP government will target and protect.

Hitler: A Biography
Ian Kershaw

Given the frenzied nature of daily news, it is likely that the shooter will be explained away as a misguided young man but his act is a manifestation of how individuals absorb extremist messages by political leaders and head on the road to violence.

An account of this dynamic is provided in historian Ian Kershaw’s magisterial biography of Hitler – which explains how loyalists and ordinary citizens respond to authoritarian leaders, how they take cues from their rhetoric and act out their aggression in unanticipated ways.

This is arguably relevant to understand online trolling, vigilante violence, the attacks on journalists and civil society activists, and proactive policies by bureaucrats and ministerial minions.

Kershaw introduces the notion of “working towards the Fuhrer”, which is about officials and ordinary people carrying out the wishes of the leader in their own way.  The historian refers to a 1934 speech by Werner Willikens, an official in the Prussian Agriculture Ministry:

“Everyone with opportunity to observe it knows that the Fuhrer can only with great difficulty order from above everything that he intends to carry out sooner or later. On the contrary, until now everyone has best worked in his place in the new Germany if, so to speak, he works towards the Fuhrer.” 

Willikens continued:

Very often, and in many places, it has been the case that individuals…have waited for commands and orders. Unfortunately, that will probably also be in future. Rather, however, it is the duty of every single person to attempt, in the spirit of the Fuhrer, to work towards him…

Kershaw says that this tendency held the key to how the Third Reich operated during 1934-38, the years of “cumulative radicalisation” when the “Fuhrer state” took shape. 

According to him, “Hitler’s personalised form of rule invited radical initiatives from below and offered such initiatives backing, so long as they were in line with his broadly defined goals.”

“This promoted ferocious competition at all levels of the regime, among competing agencies, and among individuals within those agencies.”

“In the Darwinist jungle of the Third Reich, the way to power and advancement was through anticipating the ‘Fuhrer will’, and, without waiting for directives, taking initiatives to promote what were presumed to be Hitler’s aims and wishes.” 

Nazi party functionaries understood what “working towards the Fuhrer” was in policy terms and ordinary citizens also aided the radicalisation of society through denouncing neighbours to the Gestapo, casting political slurs, exploiting anti-Jewish laws to turf out business competitors and via “daily forms of minor cooperation with the regime at the cost of others”.  Kershaw writes that the Nazi system “could function without Hitler having to shout out streams of diktats. People second-guessed or anticipated what he wanted.” 

Something similar is playing out in India. The Modi government has made clear what its objectives are, which is to indulge in Muslim and secular bashing in order to constitute India as a Hindu majority state – and to exercise a measure of political and discursive control in pursuit of that objective. Within that frame every supporter has a role: a teenager with a gun, trolls on Twitter driven to exhaust and silence liberals, news anchors polarising opinion on a daily basis, Union ministers joining in slogans to shoot protestors, a civil aviation minister zealously urging airlines to ban a comedian from flying. All these amount to “working towards” the wishes of the leader.

Also read: With Jamia Shooter’s Illegal Pistol, Psychological Warfare on Protesters Reaches New Height

The fact that Modi follows bigoted trolls on Twitter adds a strong performative logic and a competitive dimension within the right-wing as Kershaw indicates. If the PM is watching everyone, then everyone is motivated to create spectacles.

There are at least three parallel processes undercutting democracy and the rule of law in this country. First, is that there is an organised dimension to hate speech and violence. The BJP IT cell don’t act as they do, in peddling fake news, without an express mandate; ABVP activists don’t just end up in Jawaharlal Nehru University with lathis without orders from above. Besides this, there is a radical weakening of state institutions, as evinced by Delhi Police acquiescence with the gunman’s action. And following on from that, there’s a third dimension – the nurturing of violent young men through constant indoctrination and propaganda via social media.

This will not end well. This sanctioned vigilantism is bound to find more and varied targets, given the hate freely expressed on social media. And there is no indication that the Modi government wants to stop this process.

Sushil Aaron is a political commentator. Twitter: @SushilAaron.

Nazi Design From VW Beetle to Leni Riefenstahl’s Films

A museum in the Netherlands presents the first major retrospective of creative design of the Third Reich, showing how Nazis used it as a propaganda instrument.


It’s no coincidence that the Design Museum in Den Bosch has chosen September 2019 to open the “Design of the Third Reich” exhibition: The city was liberated from German occupation 75 years ago.

The retrospective showcases exhibits from the Netherlands and Germany, including well-known designs such as the VW Beetle and the swastika, as well as films and photos from the era providing an impression of the impressive Nazi rallies and the 1936 Olympic Games.

Films directed by Leni Riefenstahl, who expertly transferred Nazi ideology to the screen, are also featured across the museum. “It all shows how much creative design contributed to the emergence of the perfidious Nazi ideology,” museum director Timo de Rijk told DW.

Also read: Reading the History of Nazi Germany as a Cautionary Tale for Today

Anti-fascist criticism

The Nazis presented a seductive image of prosperity and carefree pleasure to the outside world at a time when they were already building concentration camps, the show’s organisers say.

Design is often presented as a contribution to a better world, but in this case, it was an instrument of evil forces. “That’s why you have to take the trouble to analyse how the propaganda of the time worked,” the museum’s curators argue to deflect criticism of the project. The Association of Dutch anti-fascists (AFVN) had rejected the show as “provocative” and called on the city administration to intervene.

Hanna Luden, director of the Center for Information and Documentation on Israel in The Hague, described the exhibition as a “tightrope act” but conceded that it is “fundamentally good” to explain how propaganda can manipulate people.

Design is political

“Design is about every form of presence,” says Cologne-based design expert Michael Erlhoff, and that includes the staging of mass marches, clothing, gestures, language — “everything that we now associate with branding and corporate identity.”

Also read: As in Life so in His Death, Hubris and Delusion Defined Adolf Hitler

It was something the Nazis were well aware of, Erlhoff says. Design, he adds, is “massively political” because it shapes society. “Everyone can appropriate it and use it for their own goals.”

Museum director Timo de Rijk, meanwhile, isn’t after sensations: “Otherwise, I would have made a completely different exhibition,” he says, adding that he could have loaned a war-time guillotine from Germany. But he didn’t want that.

This article was originally published on DW.

‘Promise me You’ll Shoot Yourself’: Nazi Germany’s Suicide Wave

With the Allies closing in, thousands of ordinary citizens in Nazi Germany killed themselves in a wave of mass suicides. Florian Huber’s book on the taboo story is now available in English.


April 1945. The final days of World War II in Europe. Nazi Germany is teetering as Western Allies move in across the Rhine and the Soviet Red Army sweeps into the country from the east, with stories of its war atrocities preceding it.

On April 30, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler commits suicide, putting a bullet to his head. Other high-ranking Nazi leaders do the same. But they aren’t the only ones to take their own lives. By May 8, the day Nazi Germany unconditionally surrenders, thousands of ordinary German men, women and children had killed themselves in a national wave of suicides.

It’s a story that German author and documentary historian Florian Huber detailed in his bestselling 2015 German-language book, which was released on Thursday in English as Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself: The Downfall of Ordinary Germans, 1945 by British publisher Allen Lane. The translation, by Imogen Taylor, was also released by Text Publishing in Australia one month ago.

“What drove whole families, who in many cases had already withstood years of deprivation, aerial bombing and deaths in battle, to do this?” Allen Lane’s description of the book asks. This is the question that Huber sets out to answer through eyewitness testimony and archival research.

Germany’s biggest mass suicide

The book zooms in on the small northeastern German town of Demmin, where up to 1,000 Germans, out of a population of roughly 15,000, killed themselves — including children whose parents admonished them to do so. Some parents even took the lives of their children before killing themselves.

Also read: The Secret Battle: A Heart Gripping War Chronicle on the Realities of Shell Shock

“Over years, people had been indoctrinated by German propaganda about what was bound to happen should the [Soviet] enemy set foot on German soil,” Huber said in a 2015 interview with DW. Rumours of pillaging, rape, and barbaric disfiguration committed by the Red Army terrified the German populace.

“People believed that the only way to escape these horrors was to commit suicide,” the author added. Drownings, shootings, hangings, and ingesting poison were the common means of taking one’s life.

While Demmin is considered to be the largest mass suicide in German history, Huber underlines that the town was not a singular case, and that fear and panic was not limited to the Soviet Army’s advance.

“Many people felt a sense of guilt and entanglement. They were afraid of what might come next. Many could not even imagine what the world might be like after these twelve years in a state of emergency,” he said. “This sense of being doomed was not limited to the East German population. It prevailed throughout the country …Entire families committed suicide all over Germany.”

Taboo under communism

While the English publishers have described the book as a “suppressed” story and “one of the last untold stories of the Third Reich,” the British daily The Guardian pointed out that European historian Christian Goeschel explored the topic in his 2009 book Suicide in Nazi Germany.

Demmin’s cemetery stands a monument to those who committed mass suicide at the end of WWII. The topic was taboo and suppressed during the German Democratic Republic (GDR) years.

Also read: As in Life so in His Death, Hubris and Delusion Defined Adolf Hitler

But Huber explained in 2015 — when his book was originally published — that the topic was taboo in Germany for so long because, in his estimation, the former communist GDR took a hardline stance against anything casting a bad light on the Soviet Union and its Red Army.

Moreover, many of those who were liberated from Nazi rule after the war saw this time as one of relief, and sometimes celebration. “But what many others saw was quite the opposite,” Huber said. “So much so that they believed they had no choice but to kill themselves.”

This article was originally published on DW.

After Angela Merkel, What’s Next for Germany?

Germany’s long-time Angela Merkel era is coming to an end. But is it the end of one person’s dominance of the political scene, or does it forebode more fundamental changes to German society?

After Germany’s recent state government elections in Hesse, in which the party of German Chancellor Angela Merkel suffered double-digit losses, German media proclaimed the results amounted to a Denkzettel for Merkel. Denkzettel is one of those curious compound nouns that make the German language what it is. It literally means “think note,” but what it amounts to is a warning.

And it’s a warning Merkel took seriously. The following day she announced that she wouldn’t stand for her party’s leadership at their December conference, throwing open the race to succeed her.

She plans to remain chancellor until 2021, but it’s anyone’s guess if she’ll last that long. Alan Posener, writing in The Guardian, claims that “by this time next year at the very latest, she’ll be out of that job, too.”

So that’s it. The long Merkel era — she became Germany’s chancellor in 2005 — is at an end. But is it the end of one person’s dominance of the political scene, or does it forebode more fundamental changes to German society?

The rise of the far right

It may have been a state election, but it’s clear the voters were passing judgment on the political situation in Berlin and the infighting of a governing coalition made up by the CDU/CSU/SPD, three of the oldest and most mainstream German political parties.

The most obvious beneficiary of voters’ ire has been the far-right party Alternative for Germany . Once ignored as a fringe party of xenophobic nationalists, the AfD has drawn votes away from the less extreme right with its clear, if antagonistic, messaging on immigrants and the European project.

A second beneficiary of the inertia in Berlin has been the Green party. Often characterised in the media as leftist, it is actually more centrist in many of its policies, and it has proven itself to be a reliable coalition partner on state and national levels.

Its positions are almost diametrically opposed to those of the AfD, and yet it, too, is enjoying a bump in the polls.

Many view these developments as evidence that Germany isn’t safe from the recent wave of political disruption rolling over western democracies. Yet while this rearrangement of Germany’s political order may seem sudden, it has been a while in the making.

When we look back on the Merkel era, we see that the German version of the current voter dissatisfaction has its roots in some of the actions taken by Merkel and her government.

Debt crisis

The European debt crisis of the early 2010s did Merkel no favours. Protesters in Greece weren’t shy about depicting Merkel with a Hitler moustache after Germany led the European Union in demanding severe austerity measures from Greece in return for loans to prop up the country.

Also read: The Rise and Rise of Angela Merkel, or How to Succeed in German Politics

Merkel also paid the price at home. The AfD came into being in the spring of 2013 and garnered a surprising 4.7% of the vote in the federal election that September. The party had a simple economic message: Germany — and all of Europe — should abandon the Euro — otherwise, Germany would have to continue propping up the entire European financial system.

Refugee crisis

The AfD’s support would only grow as the result of Europe’s refugee crisis in 2015. Merkel made a bold move, opening Germany’s borders to Syrian refugees with a robust “Wir schaffen das!” (“We can do this!”) that was met with enthusiastic support. Time magazine named her “Person of the Year.”

The euphoria was short-lived, however. As the German Willkommenskultur (welcome culture) began to crumble, most notably after mass sexual assaults attributed to migrants in Cologne and elsewhere on New Year’s Eve in 2015, the AfD shifted its focus to immigration issues.

Merkel shifted, too, though more slowly, and in the run-up to the federal election of 2017 she began musing about the need for a burka ban. Other CDU and CSU politicians have tried to outmanoeuvre the AfD by taking ever more forceful stands on immigration. But this rightward movement has done little to stave off the AfD’s increasing popularity.

Neo-nazi crisis

The federal government’s inability to deal resolutely with recent violent neo-Nazi protests in the eastern German city of Chemnitz left many voters even more despondent. Merkel wanted the chief of the German domestic intelligence service fired for playing down reports that the protesters had chased migrants through the streets.

Her Interior Minister and sharp critic Horst Seehofer of the CSU, however, supported the embattled chief, giving him a ministry appointment and pay raise. A Deutschlandtrend poll at the time revealed the depth of voter dissatisfaction: The AfD had become the second most popular party in Germany, ahead of even the SPD.

Merkel’s legacy

Merkel’s legacy will be a mixed one. There’s no doubt she’s dominated Germany’s political culture during her tenure as chancellor, sidelining most party rivals with ease. But she has also punted decisions down the field in the hope that they might just go away altogether. Her steady-as-you-go mentality has been criticised as an aversion to decision-making.

Imperfect though she may be, Merkel has struck many observers as the last best hope for stemming the tide of populism sweeping Europe and threatening its institutions.

At the same time, her exit from the national stage lays bare the fissures in Germany’s political stability for which her government must accept some of the blame.

Germany’s post-war stature is largely due to a consensus among mainstream political parties on two fundamental points.

The first is the acceptance that the nation must atone for the crimes of the Third Reich. The second is the realisation that, for all its economic benefits, the most important reason for integration with Europe is its role in preventing Germany and Europe from slipping back into the abyss of totalitarianism.

Germany’s politicians will have to redouble their efforts to maintain this hard-won stability. That it can no longer be taken for granted is the real Denkzettel posed by Merkel’s departure.

James M. Skidmore, Director, Waterloo Centre for German Studies, University of Waterloo

This article was published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Nazis Pressed Ham Radio Hobbyists to Serve the Reich – but Survival Came at a Price

Under an authoritarian government, freedoms can come at a steep – and lasting – price.

When people have free and unfettered choices of activities, they both entertain and express themselves through their pastimes – whether stamp or coin collecting, scrapbooking, gardening or tinkering with electronic gadgets. But what happens when those free spirits – particularly those whose hobbies have taught them specialised technical skills – suddenly find themselves living in a dictatorship?

As a historian of national socialism, I note that my newest research into German radio hobbyists has found a cautionary tale. Authoritarian governments or movements often subvert and take over civic organisations – including seemingly unimportant hobby groups – as part of seizing power. My work suggests that people involved in technological hobbies, such as radio, may be able to retain a bit more personal freedom than those in less strategically important ones, such as singing or sports. But that liberty can come at the cost of complicity.

Radio and the Nazis

In the “Jazz Age” of the 1920s, people were fascinated with new technologies, including airplanes, motor vehicles and radios. Large industries grew from those fascinations, of course, but so did hobbies and groups of hobbyists.

In Germany – and other countries – radio hobby clubs thrived. Several hundred thousand Germans joined these groups, in part because commercial radios were very expensive, and clubs helped people build their own much more cheaply. Once built, they also tinkered with the radios’ insides, partly just because they could and partly to improve reception, particularly of foreign stations, which often offered more light entertainment than state-controlled German broadcasting. (The clubs also threw great parties.)

In 1933, the Nazis took power in Germany. They began a comprehensive and often violent process of remaking all of German society to serve the Nazi Party. Groups as diverse as choirs, political parties, sports clubs and chambers of commerce were shut down outright or taken over and purged of Jews, socialists, outspoken democrats and other people the Nazis deemed “undesirables.”

The groups that survived had to support the new regime. Radio hobbyists were particularly exposed because their skills involved building communications equipment.

The Nazis were especially interested in ham radio operators, who were part of a worldwide community of hobbyists who did much more than just listen to entertainment or news broadcast by others. They transmitted and received messages on their own. In Germany, people couldn’t buy ready-made radio transmitters and other technical equipment that were usable on the frequencies of interest to amateurs. Ham operators had to build their own equipment, which went far beyond the simple broadcast-band receivers most hobbyists built. They also had to – as is still true today – pass a fairly complicated technical exam to earn a transmitting license.

This meant that hams, whether or not they were electrical engineers or other types of scientists by profession, accumulated a fairly high degree of scientific and technical knowledge in electrical engineering and radio-frequency reception and transmission. They also got a lot of practical experience in using radio equipment, which only professional radio operators could match.

Ham radio’s survival

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda and popular enlightenment, understood the power that radio could have, both to disseminate Nazi propaganda and to connect groups who were resisting the Nazi takeover. So he moved quickly to take control of not only commercial broadcast radio stations but also the radio clubs and their members. Those clubs that wanted only to passively listen to broadcast radio and tinker a little bit were shut down.

The hams, who wanted to transmit their own information, found themselves in a difficult position. The Nazis knew that German hams had a history of illegal transmission without licenses and were likely to have unsupervised radio contacts with foreigners, even those from the Soviet Union or France, Germany’s former enemy in World War I.

Though there were only a few thousand licensed German hams, their technical expertise was too valuable to the regime to be completely dismissed. In fact, German ham radio operators and their clubs found themselves with several powerful Nazi supporters – including in the German military – who protected them from being shut down as other hobby groups had been. The government even doubled the number of available ham transmission licenses.

Hams could continue their hobby, but only if they collaborated, at times in ways antithetical to the hobby’s previous culture.

What the Nazis wanted from amateur radio

In the spring of 1933, as the Nazis consolidated power, Goebbels took control of the hams’ national organization, called the “German Amateur Transmission and Reception Service,” known by its German initials as the DASD. While ostensibly a private organization, it was forced to let the Propaganda Ministry choose its president, in consultation with the German military, and give the government veto power over other club leaders.

One of Goebbels’s hopes was that German ham operators could use their connections with ham radio operators in other countries to spread Nazi propaganda around the world. That didn’t prove very valuable: Most radio exchanges with foreign amateurs focused on purely technical information. In any case, the fact that many German hams could be heard on the airways was never taken by outsiders as proof of how wonderful life under national socialism was claimed to be.

German hams never bothered to tell the Propaganda Ministry how silly this international propaganda idea actually was and dutifully reported large numbers of foreign contacts.

Rebuilding the German military

More importantly, though, German amateur radio hobbyists were a big boost for the Nazis’ secret military rebuilding effort. The Treaty of Versailles, which had ended World War I, strictly limited how many people and weapons the German military could have. Adding – and communicating with – more units beyond the Versailles limits would require technically accomplished radiomen who understood shortwave radios and could send and receive Morse code at high speed. Amateur radio hobbyists fit the bill exactly, and were recruited directly into the armed forces, the intelligence services and the communications service of the diplomatic corps.

They also taught radio skills to active duty soldiers and future recruits, like the Hitler Youth and men preparing to join the German Navy. Having amateur radio hobbyists do the training let the German military avoid tipping off Britain, France, Belgium or the United States that Germany was rearming on a large scale. All the new radiomen on the air could be explained as just simple hobbyists.

The German ham radio organization, the DASD, provided other technical expertise too, such as identifying frequencies that might be useful for military communications. The SS Security Service even commissioned the DASD’s main laboratory to design and build miniature radio transceivers spies could use to receive orders and report their findings.

The price of survival

To keep transmitting under the Third Reich, German ham operators faced a terrible moral quandary. Like all members of German society, they had to accept close scrutiny from security forces. But to keep operating their radios, German hams had to participate actively in the Nazi regime, driving Jews and anti-Nazis from their hobbyist ranks and collaborating closely with authorities, including the SS and intelligence services.

In retrospect, the DASD’s relationship with the Nazis was too close. But it is in the nature of dictatorship not to allow people to stand on the sidelines. Ham operators who considered resisting the Nazis faced a special challenge: Unlike dance groups or musicians, radio technicians had strategic skills and therefore were more likely to be sought out and compelled to help the regime. Refusal might mean loss of economic opportunity at best, arrest, concentration camp or even execution at worst. The potential consequences were clear.

The ConversationFaced with the choice of flight, open resistance or collaboration, most chose collaboration, particularly because this allowed them to continue their cherished hobby. The problem is, in the Third Reich, there was no such thing as a little complicity. It is a sad irony that even hobby clubs, one of the pillars of civil society, were used by the Nazis to cement their dictatorship.

Bruce Campbell, Associate Professor of German Studies, College of William & Mary

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.