One of their brothers died fighting for Germany on the Russian front. Her parents and remaining brother got to New York by the end of the war. During those six years, Marianne went to school. In , Marianne moved to Panama, where her husband worked for a U. In , she and several other Latin American German instructors were invited by the Goethe Institute to visit Germany.
I was confused, hurt, overwhelmed, and unable to talk about it. She cried when we said good-bye. I did not. In retrospect, I would say she behaved in a direct, straightforward way, and I did not.
I never saw her again. Marianne moved back to the United States and, in , became an instructor of German at the University of California. I rejected her attempts to renew our relationship and, though I remained fond of my German relatives, I rejected Germany. She extracted what interested her, typed it up, and threw out the originals. In , nobody I met admitted to having been a Nazi. She may have been the first German, and certainly the first German woman, who tried to face her past with honesty.
Melita eventually came to be horrified by Nazism, and I believe she really meant the book as an apology. In a conquered and racially cleansed Russia, they would work on model farms and factories connected to the homeland by new highways, called autobahns. Hitler was the ideologue as well as the chief organizer of the Nazi Party.
By , the party had a newspaper, an official flag, and a private army—the Sturmabteilung SA storm troopers —made up largely of unemployed and disenchanted WWI veterans. By , the SA had grown to 15, men and had access to hidden stores of weapons. The regular army crushed the rebellion and Hitler spent a year in prison—in loose confinement. The book brought together, in inflamed language, the racialist and expansionist ideas he had been propagating in his popular beer-hall harangues.
Image: Bundesarchiv, Bild S Adolf Hitler giving the Nazi salute at a rally in Nuremburg in By , the Nazis were the largest political party in the Reichstag. In January of the following year, with no other leader able to command sufficient support to govern, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor of Germany.
Shortly thereafter, a fire broke out in the Reichstag building in Berlin, and authorities arrested a young Dutch communist who confessed to starting it. Hitler used this episode to convince President Hindenburg to declare an emergency decree suspending many civil liberties throughout Germany, including freedom of the press, freedom of expression, and the right to hold public assemblies. We've recently passed the th anniversary of the beginning of World War I, and a common refrain is that the end of that war and its treaty demands led directly to the Nazis and World War II.
Was the connection that simple? There is a connection, especially since Germans - Nazis and non-Nazis - genuinely believed that Germany was fighting for its freedom, even for its very existence - astonishing as that may sound to us today. But Hitler was very clear: World War II was not about former German territory assigned to Poland or about the national self-determination of Germans living outside Germany.
The war was about creating a new racial order in which there were German superiors and Slav inferiors and in which Jews had no place. It was about creating an exploitative empire in which might determined right.
The Nazis were not traditional German nationalists but radical revolutionaries in terms of foreign policy and morality. To what extent do you believe Germans were seduced by Hitler and the Nazis?
Or did they make more of a conscious choice? Germans after World War I were highly politicized. That is why we think of the Weimar Republic as a time of political turbulence and unrest. World Canada Local.
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