A Light in the Darkness: Part II

An early photo shows him, hatless and wearing a raincoat, haranguing passersby while snow fell.

In a propaganda masterstroke, he adopted the hooked cross, or swastika, as its insignia. An ancient sign of good luck and prosperity, the swastika appears in the art of many peoples.

She wrote that it took her less than a minute “to measure the startling insignificance of the man who has set the world agog....He is the very prototype of the Little Man.”

Even those closest to the Führer found him aloof and secretive. “He simply could not let anyone approach his inner being because that core was lifeless. Empty,” wrote Albert Speer, a close adviser.

A Nazi official recalled: “He scolded in high, shrill tones, stamped his feet, and banged his fists on tables and walls. He foamed at the mouth, panting and stammering in uncontrollable fury....He was an alarming sight, his hair disheveled, his eyes fixed, and his face distorted and purple. I feared he would collapse, or have an apoplectic fit.”

He believed the Führer, “sent to us by God to save Germany,” was “simply infallible,” incapable of error.

I have been asked many times what is the secret of Hitler’s extraordinary power as a speaker. I can only attribute it to his uncanny intuition, which infallibly diagnoses the ills from which his audience is suffering.

He sweated so profusely that the color of his uniform, he said, “invariably stained my underclothes.”

While she was attending a Nazi rally, an inner voice told her, “Well, for yourself you are now dead....Everything that was I had been absorbed into the Whole!” In this way, Melita and countless others succumbed to Hitler’s ideology.

We have no proof that Hitler read The Origin of Species. Most likely, he did not; nor did he need to. During his time in Vienna, newsstands sold cheap pamphlets explaining Darwin’s theory in simple layman’s terms.

Nevertheless, the theory captivated him, no matter how he came by it. What is more, he interpreted it in three ominous ways: natural law, racism, and anti-Semitism. The result was a witches’ brew that turned every humane value, every tenet of morality, upside down.

To his mind, the idea of race embraced more than traditional justifications of bigotry, oppression, and slavery. The Führer insisted there is no “human family” to which we all belong. He held that races differed as much as flies from butterflies.

Hitler’s personal lawyer and faithful flunky, Frank ranked his master alongside God.

Prudent people displayed it prominently in their homes; there was no telling when the police might barge in, and Mein Kampf served as proof of one’s loyalty.

In April 1933, storm troopers, Nazi bruisers in brown shirts and jackboots, went on a rampage. Their “wild actions” culminated in boycotts and vandalism against Jewish businesses.

Eventually, more than two thousand anti-Semitic laws, decrees, orders, ordinances, edicts, rulings, rules, and regulations would fill a four-hundred-page book printed in small type.

Eventually, more than two thousand anti-Semitic laws, decrees, orders, ordinances, edicts, rulings, rules, and regulations would fill a four-hundred-page book printed in small type.

These aimed at bringing “social death”—that is, denigrating, dominating, and segregating a minority so that it is no longer seen as human.

Der Stürmer, or “The Stormer,” was a virulently anti-Semitic Nazi newspaper.

A violently active, dominating, intrepid, brutal youth—that is what I am after. Youth must be all these things. It must be indifferent to pain. There must be no weakness or tenderness in it.

Erika Mann, novelist Thomas Mann’s daughter and a staunch anti-Nazi, estimated that children gave the salute from 50 to 150 times a day!

Small children recited this ditty:
Keep your Blood pure,
it is not yours alone,
it comes from far away,
it flows into the distance
laden with thousands of ancestors
and it holds the entire future!
It is your eternal life.

A bombing plane can be loaded with one explosive bomb of 35 kilograms, three bombs of 100 kilograms, four [poison] gas bombs of 150 kilograms, and 200 incendiary bombs of one kilogram.

Many of the Nazi leaders, however, appeared to be total opposites of what they preached as the Nazi ideal. This discrepancy prompted skeptics to ask: “What does the ideal Aryan look like?” One pragmatic response was: “As tall as Goebbels, as slim as Göring, as blond as Hitler.”

Nevertheless, racists insisted that Aryan features were the animal kingdom’s standard of excellence. That “birds can talk better than other animals,” said Nazi race theorist Hermann Gauch, “is explained by the fact that their mouths are Nordic in structure.” This would be funny if it were not so asinine.

A devil goes through the land,
It’s the Jew, well-known to us
as a murderer of peoples
a race defiler, a children’s horror in all lands!

Traditionally regarded as positive role models for the young, teachers now used boorish insults like Judenlümmel (Jewish lout) and Judensau (Jewish pig).

Nazis dubbed Christianity a “Jewish conspiracy” to “corrupt” the “Aryan” race and “poison” its blood.

At meetings, lectures, and outings, speakers denounced Jesus Christ as “this swine,” this son of a “Jewish tramp.”

To bolster its claim to absolute power, Nazism sought to weaken the bonds between parents and children.

Oh, they will perpetrate still worse things, and worst, most dreadful of all, they will be totally incapable of even sensing the deep degradation of their existence.

Sir Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, coined the word eugenics in 1883, defining it as “the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding”—“genetic engineering” for short.

To encourage baby production, Himmler created the breeding program Lebensborn (Spring of Life). In several secluded Lebensborn homes, SS men, married or not, would sire children with young women, married or not.

In 1913, former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt declared that “society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind....Some day we will realize that the prime duty...of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world, and that we have no business to [aid] perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.”

Eugenics experts deemed many of them “bad girls” who were “passionate,” “oversexed,”or “sexually wayward”—whatever those terms meant.

The Nazis soon took the next step: murder. Not that they used such a graphic term. They called their secret killing euthanasia, a gentle-sounding word for “good death” or “mercy killing.” The Nazis’ euthanasia program was their first large-scale effort to exterminate a group of innocent people—in this case, ill or handicapped Germans deemed undeserving of life.

Eminent people like English science fiction writer H. G. Wells, a self-declared “genius,” pontificated about “lethal chambers for the insane,” saying the “swarms of black, brown, and dirty-white and yellow people...have to go.”

Irish playwright and music critic George Bernard Shaw, a keen racist, urged wholesale murder. In 1910, Shaw called for “an extensive use of the lethal chamber,” since “a great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them.”

“Psychologically speaking, nothing is darker or more menacing, or harder to accept, than the participation of physicians in mass murder....[For] he or she is still supposed to be a healer—and one responsible to a tradition of healing, which all cultures revere and depend upon.”

“Woe to mankind, woe to our German nation if God’s Holy Commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ which God proclaimed on Mt. Sinai amidst thunder and lightning...is not only broken, but if this transgression is actually tolerated and permitted to go unpunished.”