Foreigners found the salute contagious as well; on motorcar trips through Germany, Martha Dodd, daughter of the American ambassador, and novelist Virginia Woolf “‘heiled’ back” at enthusiastic Germans lining the road. After a group of international journalists posted at the Nuremberg rally listened to the speeches broadcast in their hotel, the “audience to a man and woman rose to its feet with its arms raised in the Nazi salute and joined in the emotional singing of ‘Deutschlandlied’ followed by the ‘Horst Wessel Lied.’” Singers included the previously suspicious New York Times correspondent Frederick T. Birchall, who reported on the incident.15 But precisely because Heil Hitler! became ubiquitous, it blurred the boundary between genuine and half-hearted support for the regime.

  In a final scrambling of signals, the perfunctory show of the palm could be instrumentalized in ways that served the collective. In the 1944 movie Die Deggenhardts, the “old man,” played by the illustrious Heinrich George, is identified by his old-fashioned courtesies—the handshakes, the greeting Moin, Moin, the very mumbled Heil Hitler! His time is up, and the “old man” is retired after twenty-five years of service in 1939. Ashamed, he fools his family by pretending to go to work every day until the truth comes out; then the accumulating hardships of war result in his reinstatement and thus the reconciliation of old and new, the reluctant Nazi and the national community. Such reconciliation can, the movie implies, be achieved through the higher purpose of war.

  How to evaluate going along with the Märzgefallenen and raising the right hand in the Hitler salute? Matthias Joseph Mehs himself counseled friends not to resist the pressure to join the Nazis if they feared personal disadvantage or loss of employment. He urged them to become “fake” Nazis. When he looked out at the crowds singing the “Horst Wessel Song” and shouting, “Heil Hitler!” he saw shame in the participants who remained loyal Catholics in their hearts. Yet Mehs also criticized acquaintances who allowed themselves to be “systematically misled and intoxicated.” He himself failed to distinguish clearly between the bad choices his fellow townspeople had been given and the stupid choices they made.16

  Like Mehs, scholars are positioned on the outside looking in at a strange phenomenon that occurred many decades ago. They carefully take a nuanced approach to understand popular support for Hitler. Rightly skeptical about making large claims for different kinds of people, historians have been uncomfortable with the proposition that many or most Germans desired the Nazis. A document such as Matthias Joseph Mehs’s diary highlights the role of pressure, conformity, and opportunism. These pressures are easy to reconcile with conventional assumptions about social behavior. Historians unpack words and actions, examine context, and scrutinize social origins, so they often do not take desire seriously. They have been reluctant to recognize genuine belief or true love.

  Most Germans preferred the Nazi future to the Weimar past. Millions of citizens were attracted to national renewal and the ideal of service to community, nation, and race. National Socialists repeatedly projected images of a reunited nation, and more and more Germans consumed and embroidered them. Outsiders such as Mehs depicted national celebrations as occasions when the regime enforced regimentation. Yet the scenes also revealed how many people participated in the collective activity, reinstating the nation and the Volk and thereby affirming the virtues of National Socialism. What Mehs sometimes regarded as coordination, most Germans experienced as spiritual renewal and uplift. This majority did not reassemble on every point of Nazi policy, certainly not on the deportation and murder of Germany’s Jews. Nonetheless, Germans came to identify their own prospects for a better, richer life with the fortunes of the new order; private happiness became deeply entangled with the establishment of the Third Reich.

  To explore consent instead of coercion means to engage with the social descriptions of collective life that the National Socialists themselves applied to modern politics: the importance of will and belief and the credibility of concepts such as national community, the people, and race. This is a vexed undertaking. Some might object that this method is “too colored by Goebbels’ propaganda”;17 yet we can only understand the glue holding the Third Reich together by recognizing how Nazi ideas moved people, by taking Nazi words seriously.

  The enduring popularity of the Nazis rested on the idea of the Volksgemeinschaft, the national or people’s community. This was not a Nazi idea or perceived as imposed or strange. On the contrary, Germans credited the Nazis with finally putting into place the national solidarity they had yearned for after the lost war and years of revolution and counterrevolution. Appeals for unity resonated because they promised to resolve the crass divisions of 1932. This is important because constituents who did not necessarily identify with National Socialism cherished the collective energy and unity of the national revolution in 1933. The legitimacy that Hitler and his regime enjoyed rested on a foundation of goodwill larger than the Nazi Party or its base. The so-called national revolution came before the Nazis, even if the Nazis were the indispensable means of its realization.

  While in principle antidemocratic, Nazis and their supporters genuinely believed they represented the German people. They shifted the terms of representation so that, in their conception, the people represented a unified and enduring community—one in which the sacrifices of past generations had laid the foundations for the achievements of the future. Free elections could not attain the will of the people; only the state’s task in preserving and strengthening the collective existence could achieve that. National vigor mattered, not individual choice. Considering ancestry and progeny meant thinking about biological stock in the long term. This sort of National Socialism underwrote policies designed to safeguard the nation against parasites, interlopers, and outsiders.

  The Nazis took the concept of the demos to a radical conclusion. There was always something dramatically embattled about their Volksgemeinschaft as they continuously seized on the evidence of German suffering. They assailed internal and external enemies—Jews, profiteers, “Marxists,” the Allies—who allegedly obstructed national regeneration. They offered a comprehensive and appealing vision of renovation but married it with the alarming specter of national disintegration. In the Nazi view, 1914 stood for renewal and life, while 1918 threatened revolution, chaos, and ultimately death. Getting to the ideals of 1914 necessitated refighting and eradicating the ideas of 1918. One of the most prominent words in this period was verrecken as in the suspicions that the Germans were about to perish or the belief that the Jews should. For all its appeal, the union the National Socialists promised rested on violence.

  Basic elements of the Nazi worldview, including the moral calculation that to preserve life meant destroying it, circulated widely in the Third Reich, meaning that coercion always accompanied consent. Melita Maschmann, watching the parade, glimpsed the blood sacrifice on January 30, 1933. Such violence was never isolated. Germans were perishing, dropping dead, finally awakening so that citizens constantly worked with and debated the evidence as they considered Nazi policies parsing strangers from comrades.

  The National Socialists’ will to revive Germany depended on a radical reappraisal of the future. History had no predetermined course, and phrases like “old times,” “new times,” and “good times” calibrated a new epochal way of thinking, one that made the Nazi future seem increasingly compelling and compulsory. When Hitler first addressed the nation over the radio on February 1, 1933, he spoke in terms of a normal legislative period: “Now, Germans,” he appealed, “give us the span of four years and then you may pass judgement upon us!” “German Volk, give us four years,” he repeated ten days later in the Sportpalast. Four years then slipped into forever. “The hour will come at last,” he prophesied, to establish “the new German kingdom of greatness and power and glory and justice.” Hitler had no intention of giving up power in “four years,” of course. “We have power, and we’re going to keep it,” Hitler told the party’s youth leader, Baldur von Schirach, on February 5, a week after he had moved into the Reich Chancellery. “I’m never leaving here.”18 The upcoming election, the new chancellor assured business leaders on February 20, would be the “last election.… There is no going backward.” Hermann Göring spoke more precisely: “The election on March 5 would surely be the last for ten years, or even for a hundred years.”

  After the elections, the “national awakening,” celebrated with such fanfare from Könisberg on March 4, hardened into the “national revolution.” At a cabinet meeting on March 7, Hitler informed his ministers that he considered “the events of March 5” to be “a revolution.” With the National Socialist victories, he explained to crowds in Berlin, “Germany’s destiny has not been decided for the next four years; no, it has been decided with finality.” The press echoed this idea. “Our state will stand forever,” reported a newspaper in July.19 “We are planning for a long period,” Hitler declared at the Nuremberg rally in September, and “just as we shall meet here two years hence, we shall meet here ten years hence and a hundred and even a thousand years hence.” Nazi multiplication totaled up a “Thousand Year Reich,” which the division of war would destroy in twelve. “When I took power it was a decisive moment for me,” Hitler recalled in 1941. “Should we keep the old calendar? Or should we take the new world order to be a sign for a new beginning in time? I told myself: the year 1933 is nothing less than the renewal of a millennial condition.”20

  As soon as Germans accepted the dating of the new calendar, the opponents of the Nazis were doomed, not because they had lost elections or been thrown into concentration camps but because they appeared, even to themselves, obsolescent. In the dramatic debate on the ratification of the Enabling Act on March 23, Social Democratic leader Otto Wels saluted the final triumph of “justice,” “freedom,” and “socialism,” the shared “principles of humanity.” He had faith that the “wheel of history” could never be turned back. But Hitler thought in cosmic dimensions. “You contend,” he addressed the Social Democratic legislators, who unanimously and alone voted against the emergency legislation enacting Hitler’s dictatorship, “that your star will rise again! Gentlemen, Germany’s star will rise and yours will fall.… What in the life of a people becomes rotten, old, and infirm will disappear, never to return.” The Reichstag minutes recorded “tumultuous cries… long-lasting acclamation.” The rising star of Germany had broken the “wheel of history.” The Nazis believed that their cosmic revolution had deleted the liberal revolution of 1789 from history.21

  In the debate, Hitler tied the Social Democrats to fourteen years of misrule and to an outdated system. Peace or war? Hitler pointed to the crossroads; the choice was backward or forward, “whiny” or “heroic.” The either/or, the unforgiving rhetoric of friend or foe that the Nazis mastered so well, was appropriate to the experience of extreme hardship and the sense of living on the edge of an abyss. It was the basic equation performed by millions of Germans who were hungry and wanted work. “The Weimar Republic is over,” concluded the Vossische Zeitung the day after the fateful vote. Over the next three days, Wels’s honorable speech, which sounded moderate, even apologetic, and Hitler’s quick-witted, hot-tempered “impromptu” reply, along with the loud heils and hurrahs and the wicked laughter from the National Socialist benches that interrupted the proceedings, were rebroadcast over the radio ad infinitum. The media gave authority to the “complete dressing down” of the Social Democrats.22 Wels’s humiliation underscored the National Socialists’ contention that Germany’s socialists were no longer credible. Otto Wels, who died in exile in 1939 at the age of sixty-six, is largely forgotten today.

  The “new beginning” resonated with particular force among German Protestants. One historian describes the “Protestant experience” of 1933, when churchgoers and clergy believed that the Nazi seizure of power had brought Germany’s Christlike “passion” since 1918 to a redemptive end. In the vein of the disciples’ stories in the New Testament, Protestants embroidered the years since the war as a biblical parable of suffering, sacrifice, crucifixion, and resurrection.

  During the Weimar Republic, the Protestant churches had felt themselves besieged. In the cities, clergymen melodramatically described irreligion taking root right in front of the church door. In Kreuzberg, one of Berlin’s working-class districts, the faithful pointed to “the enemy at the gates who outside on the streets of the big city, in rallies, magazines, and newspapers, uses every opportunity to drag what is holy to us through the mud.” Others felt that degeneracy literally surrounded the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in the center of the city: All around were “beer halls, cafes, showy cinemas, cabarets, bars, sparkling show windows, dazzling advertisements.” Saturday night never gave way to Sunday morning. “Life vibrates well past the midnight hour. Bustle, music, noise, pleasure, fancy, eroticism. All around the Memorial Church.” The striking spatial images, “at the gates” and “all around” the church, emphasized the physical threat to the very existence of the church.23 The world of the Protestant Church was in fact quite circumscribed, remembered one theologian; it regarded any willingness to compromise with other parties or tolerate diversity or fancy as a betrayal of well-established tradition: “You cannot put in strong enough terms this opposition between friend and foe, between who belonged and who was alien… between who helped and those who destroyed.”24

  If the cosmopolitan spirit of Weimar appeared life threatening, the church held up an almost biological idea of the German people as the source of vitality and virtue. The ideal of a blessed union between “Volk and God” replaced the old alliance of “throne and altar.” This direct embrace of the people in a newly renovated Volkskirche (people’s church) might have led clergymen toward a progressive religious socialism, but instead the “Volk and God” doctrine congealed into an exclusive ethnic, even racial, commitment. Like so many other institutions in Germany, the church was profoundly affected by the Great War. Two million German men had died. The “struggle for survival,” one of the most emblematic ideas of the early twentieth century, made the church keenly aware of the principle of difference in God’s creation of the earth. “God did not create humans as such,” argued one theologian, straining to reinterpret Paul’s words about the unity of all human beings in Christ in Galatians 3:28; he created “Jews and Greeks, Persians and Indians, Romans and Germans.” Since God created separate peoples, it followed that God also commanded his ministry to respect the “law of life” that determined the “internal and external form” of each of these entities.25 To recognize “each according to his nature” meant that the church’s commitment to the German people and to the solidarity and suffering of the German community radically qualified the indivisibility of God’s love and introduced ideas of artfremd (alien) and arteigen (characteristic) into everyday religious practices. The postwar nationalization of the church found concrete form in the pro-Nazi and openly anti-Jewish German Christian movement, which contested church council elections with stunning success in 1932 and 1933.

  Prominent theologians such as Karl Barth rejected the Protestant Church’s nationalist turn because it introduced “another God” to mediate the relationship between the individual and the divine. Barth would later write that the German Christian heresy was to augment “the holy scripture as the sole revelation of God” with a “second revelation,” namely, the “German folk.” For years, Barth had objected to hyphenating Christianity into “Christian-social,” “evangelical-social,” or “religious-social.” These combinations drew their legitimacy from historical time and thereby intruded on “God’s time.” They threatened to secularize and update Christ. This was the strong purist theological position of the “Confessing Church” in the “church struggle” with the German Christians in the years after 1933, but it offered little practical guidance on how to protect civil society. Barth rejected German Christianity in the Third Reich, but he did so in a high-minded way that also undercut any productive reconciliation of Christianity with the Weimar Republic.26

  For the overwhelming majority of Protestant churchgoers, the Nazi seizure of power was cause for immense joy. It promised to disperse the enemies gathered at the church gates while elevating the German people. Never again during his career, writes one historian, did “Hitler so frequently and so ardently implore God” as he did in the first weeks of his chancellorship. In his first radio address to the German people, the new leader vowed that the new government would “take Christianity under its firm protection.” It was “the basis of our entire morality.” On the Day of the Awakening Nation, the day before the March 5 elections, Hitler addressed “Lord God” with prayerful hope: “May we never become vacillating and cowardly.” The speech concluded with a thanksgiving that recalled the war years: “In battle our God was there standing beside us.”27 But the central motif of Hitler’s prayers was not the rightful place of God in the Third Reich but rather God’s recognition of the difficult struggle and special place of the German people in history.

  The various sermons of German pastors in spring 1933 display a subtle difference in emphasis between those who welcomed wayward Protestants back into the church and those who seized the opportunity to amalgamate the church with the revivified National Socialist people. It was a question of restoration or renewal. A tremendous surge of energy animated the followers of the German Christians who sought renewal by completing the nationalization of the Protestant churches. They believed that God manifested himself in history and in the “great turning point” in Germany’s history—“God with us” would be inscribed on the buckles of Wehrmacht soldiers. The church was “alien and indifferent” if it did not embrace the “destiny of the National Socialist movement.”28 A year later, the tide had shifted to favor traditionalists who insisted that “the church remain a church” (and “state remains state”) and resisted the establishment of a new “people’s church.” Both conservative restorers and völkisch renewers, however, gave Hitler’s national revolution credit for recovering the singularity, unity, and capacity of the German people. The Nazis, they said, had secured Germany’s future.

 

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