Everything changes, as the Buddha said, but nothing really changes, as the French like to say, unless as the Buddha said, we change our own minds. To change the world, change the way you react to it. It's encouraging that the world now has more yogis and meditators and compassionate helpers than ever before, but the rising tide hasn't yet drowned the horror of what Brecht called "man's inhumanity to man." Man oh man. It's still out there in spades.
We live in a transitional time of uncertainty. Not knowing for sure, not being in control, not feeling comfortable all the time, into the vacuum created by not having no brainer black and white answers rushes fear. And people will do anything to get rid of that. Look at today's headlines everywhere.
The tsunami of Syrians fleeing for their lives, the selection of Angela Merkel by TIME as Person of the Year, the defeat of any rational gun controls, the fascist rhetoric of Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyu and Marine le Pen fast gaining adherents, the mass explosion of resentment by marginalized Muslims in Europe and the Middle East, by economically deprived Americans desperate to blame....we were here before in the 1920s. And it got us fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, Whatever you name it, it was all certainty all the time: all guns, no butter, all macho me first to hell with you all the time.
Maybe I see the parallels because in the mid 1980's I did extensive research on what actually happened to people inside Nazi Germany/Austria. Or to be precise, on what made people resist the lure of Hitler's ideology, which boiled down to guns or butter: guns will make us powerful, butter will only make us fat. With feint hope that it might be of benefit in changing a world view or two by explaining what's really happening behind the horrible headlines, here's a summary--it's a bit long for a blog post--of what I learned.
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Guns or Butter? What's It All About?
At precisely 6 AM on Saturday, February 27, 1943, a fleet of
trucks flying Hitler’s Waffen SS flag zoomed across Berlin’s deserted
boulevards and screeched to a halt at weapons factories. In less than a minute,
Death’s Head soldiers swarmed inside and emerged with uniformed laborers
snatched so brusquely breakfast dribbled down their chins. Brutally, they were stuffed
into the trucks which then boomeranged back across Berlin. Grossaktion had begun.
So-called “privileged” Jews-- longtime husbands of Aryan
women or mixed-race sons, were culled into a group craftily relocated several
times over the next dozen hours. Joseph Goebbels was that determined to prevent
any interference with his plan to give the Fuhrer a cheery birthday present: totally
Jew-free Berlin. Yet despite these precautions and his enormous power, Sunday
morning’s sun rose on a mob of middle-aged German women standing outside his ad
hoc prison of the moment shouting: “Free our men!”
Long before dawn, the women started showing up at what had
been a Jewish Community Center on Rosenstrasse. Many carried hastily assembled food
parcels the armed guards snatched as they ordered the women to go home. They
didn’t. Defiantly they stood in front of the building. Before long, 6,000
German women were packed into tiny Rosenstrasse, screaming: “Give us back our
husbands! Free our men!”
By that morning, more than one million “Aryans” who’d dared
to question, comment against or quarrel with the Nazi regime had been bustled off
to a concentration camp, tortured to death, maimed, hung, shot or decapitated. Four
months earlier, the exorbitant casualties of Germany’s first military defeat,
Stalingrad, had accelerated the reign of terror: 19 guillotines chopped around
the clock. Just the weekend before, authorities in Ulm had arrested 22-year-old
Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans, summarily beheading the students before
their parents even knew anything was amiss. The commandant of the Rosenstrasse detention
center, Sturmfuhrer Krell, ordered his SS guards to point their weapons and advance.
The men locked and loaded, hollering: “Clear the streets or we’ll shoot!” Sheer
masculine heft got the women pushed toward Spandauer Bridge but, like taffy, they
snapped back into Rosenstrasse and fearlessly resumed chanting: “Give us back
our husbands! Free our men!”
Tuesday morning the sun rose on a city physically devastated
by massive overnight Allied bombing to avenge the decimation of Coventry. Whole
sections of Berlin had collapsed, 160,000 homeless residents were wandering
dazed, and thousands of women were still crowded in Rosenstrasse chanting:
“Free our men!” For six days the shouts of their unrelenting protest carried
across Berlin, until the Interior Ministry ordered the SS to do something,
anything to shut them up. Unable to find a Nazi rabid enough to shoot an
unarmed crowd of middle-aged hausfraus, the frustrated SS released every man claimed
by a woman in the crowd. Word sped so fast, a divorced socialite raced to
Rosenstrasse and walked away with her ex, scion of the Ullstein publishing
clan.
That afternoon, another protest erupted when Grossaktion’s finale began at a Jewish
home for the aged. Dozens of women threw themselves on the sidewalk in the
Gestapo’s path. “Unfortunately,” a distressed Goebbels wrote in his diary,
“there have been a number of regrettable scenes at a Jewish home for the aged,
where a large number of people gathered …I ordered the SD not to continue
Jewish evacuation at so critical a moment.”
A month later, an insurrection SD files described as
“tremendous” erupted in Dortmund after a Wehrmacht captain greeted a foot
soldier on the street. The soldier’s unenthusiastic, almost leery, response to
the captain’s hale greeting made the officer so suspicious, he needed only a
question to realize he’d found a deserter. The captain shackled the lad and had
started to lead him away when a mob of 350 women converged, tightening their
ring until the terrified Wehrmacht officer abandoned the deserter and fled. The
women pursued him, shouting: “Here is real Revolution! Give us back our young!
Give us back our men!”
If historians talk at all about Widerstand, resistance,
during the bloody reign of National Socialism, they talk about clandestine
political groups organized to overthrow it. This allows them to compare what
happened in the terrifying dark inside Germany with the shining heroism of the Danes
and Dutch, even the Beethoven beaming French.
It also forces them to whittle vast possibilities down almost exclusively to
the aristocratic conspirators who came together in an attempt to assassinate
Hitler on the evening of July 20,1944. Their failure to do it is how historians
learned about Operation Valkyrie. The
perpetrators were immediately punished, their gruesome garroting gleefully
recorded in Nazi archives. After the war, German historians conveniently conflated this documented effort by
military men to rid Germany of Hitler with the Allied effort to destroy his
military, presto chango! turning the conspirators into postwar Germany’s “heroic martyrs.” What is
now called the Attentat, meaning assassination as well as attempt, pumped West Germany with enough
pride to claim kinship with Denmark, Holland and France. Left out of the Allies
D-Day 40th anniversary commemoration, the Bonn government arranged its
own gala on July 20, 1984 to mark the attentat’s
40th anniversary.
As an invited foreign reporter, my itinerary included a
visit to the Institute for Political Education, then the government agency charged
with distributing to schoolchildren and scholars all material accumulated on
every aspect of life in the Third Reich. When I asked the director how women isolated
at home with no access to weapons, warriors or policy found ways to sabotage
the Nazis, he dismissed me. “It’s hard to say because the resistance of women
isn’t notable. Of course many important ones did go into exile with their
husbands.” Politely I explained I had uncovered many stories of female
derring-do and dropped names I suspected he would recognize. One was the outlandishly
courageous 20-something Hiltgunt Zassenhaus of Hamburg who plotted and plodded
to singlehandedly save Hitler’s Scandinavian political prisoners from the
guillotine by finding a way to smuggle them out of the country in the nick of
time. She had already been awarded the Danish and Norwegian Red Cross medals,
the St. Olaf’s Award and knighthood, and in 1974 Norway nominated Zassenhaus
for the Nobel Peace Prize. Even West Germany in 1969 gave her its highest
civilian award: the Cross of the Order of Merit. “Well, yes,” he finally allowed. “There were
probably more women fighting Hitler than there are today involved in our
politics.”
According to statistics tabulated from documents found after
the war, the Nazis hung or beheaded 1,100 “Aryan” women for treason, impelled
another 22,000 to flee that fate, and consigned more than 225,000 to one of the
three all-female concentration camps set up inside Germany to severely punish disobedience.
Crimes against National Socialism ran a gamut from greeting a passerby with the
traditional “Guten Tag” instead of
the mandated “Heil Hitler!” to refusing to spit in the face, kick in the groin
or otherwise denounce your Jewish father. Caritas courier Gertrud Luckner of
Freiburg ended up in Ravensbruck concentration camp for carrying messages,
counterfeit papers and cash to Switzerland to support émigrés and refugees. Six
East Prussian farmwives were imprisoned for pretending eight “non-Aryan” babies
were their own. Frieda Fischer of
Hamburg died in the Wilhemsburg camp after she refused to work in a munitions
factory. Emma Granget was executed for writing to her son at the Front to feign
illness to save his life. Gertrud Seele, a young nurse and single mother, was beheaded
for commenting at a party that being forced to save old newspapers full of
propaganda only prolonged war.
According to Winston Churchill, what passed for German
resistance was visible only in terms of its dead. Indeed, I learned about these
female “traitors” for the same reason historians learned about the aborted assassination:
they got caught. Reading Nazi archives led a Princeton scholar to conclude only
middle-aged men tried to help Jews, nobody else. Dead bodies are such
conveniently indisputable evidence, strict reliance on Nazi documents has made
the official version of Widerstand
essentially Hitler’s: a forlorn story of failure.
History is of course the
original spin, what Napoleon supposedly called “the lies that are no longer
disputed.” Well, here is one that can be because neither Churchill nor Sara
Gordon nor modern professional historians obsessed with documentation ever
admit successful resisters were never included in Widerstand precisely because there is no written Nazi record of
what they did, and there is no written record precisely because they got away
with it. The secrecy, singularity and spontaneity of women’s wiles not only
saved thousands of other lives, but saved thousands of them from being one for
the books. Their untold stories of disobedience and sabotage inside the German
police state are exciting, fresh and ever relevant news that a disenfranchised,
unarmed individual need not feel hopeless in wanting to rebel against a terrifyingly
totalitarian system.
From Churchill’s perspective, the Allies went to war not to stop
slave Slav labor, rescue Jews or protect Communists, let alone end a reign of brute
criminality or restore to women basic rights of existence. They went to war to
crush the German military. Period. So there is no equation mark between the
valor of Ruth Andreas-Friedrich risking her life in Berlin every night to tune
into the BBC on a clandestine shortwave to deliver potential escape news to Hitler’s
hunted hiding in her basement with, say, the courage of Anne-Marie Bauer
listening in France to the BBC and storming Castres prison with a troop of Boy
Scouts to free a Resistence agent.
The French resistance was integral to the Allied military effort. Ruth
Andreas-Friedrich never got a chance to be.
History has little noted and not remembered the driving fuel
that pumped and pulsed through Nazism was not so much the rabid anti-Semitism
at the end as the even more bloodthirsty misogyny at the get-go. Hitler and his
thuggish Brown Shirts were masters of resentment who began in the Bavarian heartland
by blaming metropolitan Weimar Republic’s liberation of women for Germany’s
insurmountable postwar chaos. “It is clear,” the Party’s leading theorist
Alfred Rosenberg said, “the continued influence of women in the affairs of
state must be the beginning of public decadence.” Economically marginalized
working class men rallied to the agitprop that women had debilitated the nation
with their catastrophic “feminine” attributes: compassion, pacifism, and
concern for the weak-- the elderly, ill and young.
Like all fascisms, Nazism erupted as the collapse of the
established order crushed conceits of masculinity. At least one historian actually
calls fascism a massive male identity crisis, and that does explain why it
invariably gives the reins to the most obsessively brutal alpha males,
marginalizing women. (Its rise again today in Europe, Russia and ISIS does nothing
to disprove this.) The Weimar Republic that emerged from the ashes of World War
I readily acknowledged women’s value by giving them the right to work, the
right to speak up and vote, and the crucial right on which these depended: the
right to control their own bodies. Then as soon as Hitler was named Chancellor,
the Nazis systematically began to banish women from every conceivable public
realm and usurp their decision making. “The German woman from now on will live
in a state formed and led by the masculine spirit, in a non-parliamentarian and
conservative state in which, for a long time, she will not have any direct
influence as formerly.”
In the words of its great propaganda mastermind, Goebbels,
National Socialism was “a masculine movement.” It was the nuclear option in the
battle of the sexes. Lust for violent conquest as the declared apotheosis of
manhood handily ignited a war to isolate and imprison every last woman in the
Reich in silent domesticity. Otherwise Hitler could not hope to conquer the
world; somehow they would get in the way of letting Germany be great again. Goebbels’
coined the phrase guns or butter as
the uttered essence of the Third Reich, saying, “Guns or butter? We can do
without butter but not without arms. One cannot shoot with butter but only with
guns.” Himmler then justified the obsession by continually proclaiming: “Guns
will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.”
Butter was the despised sissydom of culture, childcare,
cooking and charity—code for women, now so reviled, high-ranking officials
referred to them as “nanny goats” who existed only to produce babies for the
Reich. To revitalize their war devastated country, the Nazis launched a massive
public works program that did not allocate so much as one Reichmark for family housing, public clinics, playgrounds, parks, public
schools-- nothing without immediate military merit-- dream come true for the
wealthy industrialists backing them. Butter
was code for social spending, anathema
to those industrialists, so factories
and farms were all converted from consumer to military production. Germany was
such a massive military industrial complex, stitching army uniforms instead of
baby clothes dried up one quarter of all small business by 1939. In their relentless
drive toward macho mightiness, Hitler and his henchmen squandered all resources
on palatial chancelleries and monumental bureaucratic warrens, arsenals, labor
camps, military training grounds, soldiers quarters, weapons development, death
chambers and invincible bunkers for the bigwigs. Clothing, food and baby needs
got hard to come by.
Categorically deprived of voice or vote, access to arms or
organization, even decisions about what to eat or name their kids, German women
had absolutely no way to launch a unified rebellion. They also had no incentive
to crush a military machine fueled by their sons and husbands. Their sole
option for action was the home front to which they were confined as prisoners
of war. Quickly they figured out that stuck here where they could not save
Germany, they could at least save others from Germany, and became ingeniously adept
at snatching every opportunity. As early as 1935, women in the Berliner Osramwerk protested their
exploitation in Hitler’s rush to armaments by setting up a subtle assembly line
slowdown: every day every seventh women failed to report for work. To help
hunted Communists, Jews and homosexuals of the arts community escape, Ruth
Andreas-Friedrich worked the black market, counterfeited papers and charmed
targeted seemingly sympathetic bureaucrats to get prisoners freed. In Plauen
near the Czech border, Margarete Kummerlow befriended two conscripted Slavic
laborers, a doctor and her orderly, and secretly got them into her house every
few days to listen to forbidden Allied broadcasts that gave them impetus to
escape. A Countess ferreted food to a rabbi.
The prominent Vogt family that owned the newspaper in
Osnabruck was always suspect, granddaughter Luise Stratton said, because they
were bilingual, educated, and entertained foreigners and intellectuals.
Secretly they tuned into whatever foreign radio stations they could, except
Sundays when local Nazi officials would check what they were having for dinner.
“Every house had to leave the door open so they could just walk in. Two idiotic
brown or black uniformed men would look at what was on the table. You were not
allowed to have butter or roasts.” Nothing but a casserole of pork and potatoes
or you had to pay a fine. Decades later, Mrs. Stratton still found that scenario
frightening but her grandmother, she said, was never perturbed. She was always exceedingly
charming, relaxed and gracious because in the basement of their 300-year-old
house, usually under the coal pile, she was hiding “enemies of the Reich” that
she would then smuggle across the nearby Dutch border. One was family friend
Erich Maria Remarque whose books had been burned. “I am quite sure my
grandmother was the mastermind of everything that allowed us to survive and
help others escape during those years,” Luise Stratton said. “Her diplomacy,
charm, good looks and incredibly good judgment were something to behold. She
had a way about her in the face of all situations that was something to marvel
at even to this day.” After her death in 1939, her daughter Frau Vogt-Hahn
continued her mother’s work and secretly nursed downed British pilots in that
basement, then smuggled them to the Dutch border where her brother Karl got
them on to England. Eventually she was
caught, sent to a concentration camp and freed after the war so broken, she
died within a year.
Testament to the width of women’s Widerstand was the bizarre occupation army Hitler needed to fight
on this home front: 40,000 Gestapo agents, about 20,000 SD (Security Service),
and massive network of block wardens and unidentified paid informers, along
with overcrowded jails like the Charlottenburg women’s prison in Berlin, and an
expanding supply of forced female labor camps for “traitors to National
Socialism.” With it all, the Gestapo never questioned how many young German
women rushed to marry conscripted foreign laborers, how many families filled
churches after Hitler said God was not in charge of Germany any more, or the
enormity of food gardens and chicken coops that suddenly appeared in the
backyards of women who claimed they were just trying to feed their children
when in truth they were either hiding the hunted or secreting food to
prisoners. The Security Police didn’t even notice the influx of nannies, cooks
and housemaids into affluent urban households where matrons loudly complained
that the absence of men left them unable to manage everything.
As it happened, I attended the main July 20, 1984 observance
in the company of Berlin-born Sybil Niemoller who had been invited to the
honors less as the widow of the famed Gestapo-baiting pastor Martin Niemoller
than as a surviving relative of Operation
Valkyrie conspirators. Her cousin Werner Von Haeften had carried the bomb for
the lead assassin, Colonel von Stauffenberg, and was instantly executed beside
him. Before the first war, her father, Freiherr Ulrich von Sell, had been
Kaiser Wilhelm’s personal factotum and later served as a district administrator.
He was recruited into the conspiracy along with her uncle Walther von Brauchitsch,
dismissed as Commander-in-Chief of the Reich Armed Forces on the eve of the
Nazi invasion of Poland, Since her 1971 marriage to the legendary Niemoller, Sybil
had been living in the Bundesrepublik,
yet she clung tenaciously to her postwar American passport and was visibly
anxious about attending these public ceremonies in her hometown. She told me she’d
reluctantly decided to come because she wanted to honor her beloved father, also
perhaps to remind the world not every German had been a Nazi. Plus she could
stand next to me, an American: a reminder she was now safe. While we stood
under panning TV cameras, waiting for the last dais dignitaries to take their
seats, memories were flooding in and she told me how everyone who came to the
von Sell house in Dahlem always talked in muffled tones, how as a teenager at
the time, she was chased away from all the hushed conversations. After the Attentat failed and she was hauled into
Gestapo custody, she understood why. As an innocent schoolgirl who knew nothing,
she was released-- adding with a faint laugh, along with three other girls she
knew who, it turned out, had each been arrested as the fiancée of her handsome
cousin Werner.
As the widow of Martin Niemoller, Sybil had just completed a
state trip to East Germany. She said it gave her a huge shock because she found
herself wondering how it was she’d never visited certain of its well-known places
before when every well-bred German child would have. That’s when she realized
for the first time how skillfully her mother had moved her around the Berlin
school system. She had never visited these jewels of Germany because she had
never been enrolled in the girls’ version of Hitler Youth.
“You know,” she blurted just as the music started, “yesterday, thinking back to prepare myself
for this and realizing what my dear mother went through to protect me, I quite
suddenly remembered Frau Thiele. Can you imagine! I haven’t thought about her
for more than 30 years and suddenly she comes back. As clear as you are
standing here, I could see her sitting at the sewing machine in the corner of
the front room.” At some point after the wars started, her mother and four
neighboring matrons of upper class Dahlem hired Frau Thiele as their family seamstress.
The woman spent one week of every month sleeping and sewing in each household,
a good worker-- inconspicuous and very polite. “One of those women,” Sybil
said, “was married to a high ranking officer of the SS. She really put that one
over on him.” Indeed Frau Thiele made it to the end. As soon as the Russians
liberated Dahlem, the seamstress stepped onto the street and loudly announced
she was Frau Wittenberg, a Jew whose husband had been lost in Poland, and a
Communist who disapproved of Dahlem’s wealthy having servants. She immediately fled
to England and was never heard from again. Sybil was genuinely disturbed, as
she put it, “to have so thoroughly forgotten about her. Of course, my mother
trained us to forget. We would’ve been killed if Frau Thiele had been discovered.
We had to take her for granted, especially after they took my father away. My
mother saw to it that I didn’t know who she really was until that day she
announced it on the street.”
A compulsory boarder could be a spy; the garbage man could denounce
you for eating English roast beef; under emergency anesthesia, a child could
blab. When one women told a Blockwart
who entered her house she was perfectly capable of getting her children educated
without outside meddling, she was sent to the police for thought correction. The
dragnet was so tight a mother and daughter sharing the last two
non-commandeered rooms of their family house could not risk telling each other
what they did during the day because knowing was as criminal as acting. “If we talk, plan, and recruit allies,” Ruth
Friedrich wrote in her secret diary, “we are hanged; among ten people there is
always one who is treacherous or loose-mouthed. Yet if we are silent, and only
vent our indignation within our own four walls, then we still keep the Nazis.” The
only solution, the final solution, was to trust no one and strike out alone,
spontaneously and in secret. Insolence like keeping handy a pile of heavy
looking packages to carry on the street to avoid having to salute “Heil Hitler!” Insurrection like getting
reconnaissance on the impending path of forced labor marches and under cover of
night scattering along the route scraps of food to look like randomly strewn
garbage. Sabotage like author Luise Rinser marrying a homosexual Communist
writer who’d already maimed his hand to avoid the draft. “It was a difficult
decision for me,” she admitted, “because I was seriously endangering myself,
but I did it to save his life.” And revolt: in Berlin normally shy librarian Fraulein
Danziger bursting into tears as she presented her Jewish roommate’s faked
suicide death certificate to the Gestapo and staged an ersatz funeral to
deflect them in their house-to-house Final Solution search. “They weren’t
looking for us,” elfin Gertrud Luckner told me. “They didn’t believe anyone
could act on their own without some organization’s backing.”
While bombs were falling on Berlin, Ruth Andreas-Friedrich
crouched in her basement and wrote in her diary. “…it’s enormously important
for people abroad to learn that even in Germany there are human beings, not
merely Jew baiters, disciples of Hitler, and Gestapo Cossacks. The rest of the
world knows far too little of that.” It turns out only 3% of the German
population were actively committed to National Socialism-- Austrians were far
more enthusiastic, while between 2-3
percent of the population is estimated to have participated in some form of Widerstand. That perfectly matches the percentage
of the French population whose much lionized resistance efforts have papered
over the abysmal horrors of their own Vichy collaboration. I don’t know what
percentage of the French percentage belongs to women like the seemingly
bumptious rural hairdresser who cleverly created wigs that disguised hunted
British airmen and French resisters enough to get them to safety or the amazing
“Hedgehog”, the woman in charge of nearly all of it. I do know an astounding
number of females across the continent threw themselves in harms way and two in
Paris weren’t French at all. One was a middle-aged British Red Cross nurse
named Mary Lindell who took to posing as a Countess. She greeted the newly
appointed, elaborately uniformed Paris Commandant and his entourage when they
burst in to the elegant offices of the Red Cross to commandeer them after their
triumph at Dunkirk, by rising from her desk chair full blown like a cobra,
exquisitely regal, head high, and scolded him with her finest countess accent.
“How dare you! Have you no manners? No breeding? A gentleman does not just walk
in on a proper lady! And take that damned hat off! You are in the presence of a
lady, not some scullery maid! Did you check your shoes? A proper gentleman does
not soil carpets! Where are your manners? Have you none?” The Commandant was so
flummoxed, he stammered an apology, said he’d come back later and fled, giving Lindell
time to get the downed Dunkirk pilots out of her closets and on their way back
to Britain.
At the same time, a
painfully shy, sixty-something American widow, Etta Shiber, living in Paris
with a British friend made during earlier shopping trips, decided the two
better evacuate. En route, the elderly widows stopped at an inn hoping to get food
and found a British airman left behind after the fiasco at Dunkirk. They tried
to help him out by hiding him in the trunk behind their suitcases, but when the
Germans intercepted the long column of fleeing cars and trucks to force
everyone back to Paris, the aviator was still in it. The little old ladies had
no choice but to hide him in their apartment until the more gregarious of the
two, Kitty, found the resistance underground that could get him out. That’s
when they unwittingly discovered nearly 1,000 other starving British soldiers
were still hiding in the woods around Concy-sur-Conche
and found themselves enmeshed in a major rescue network. By preparing false
papers while her friend made arrangements with the underground, Etta was on her
way to saving more than 150 British soldiers when the Gestapo intruded. Her
British friend was instantly executed, but since the Nazis weren’t yet at war
with America, Shiber was imprisoned, then usefully exchanged for a notorious
German spy in New York City.
Three
of the women in Widerstand inside
Germany weren’t German either. One was Mildred Harnack from Wisconsin, who had
married a German and used her English classes to recruit resisters to help those
who needed to flee. Her friendship with the American ambassador’s daughter,
Martha Dodd, gave her access to scarce American visas and she saved lives, just
not her own. She was caught after America joined the war and went to the
guillotine reciting Whitman’s “When
Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom.”
The other two were middle-aged British
spinsters whose passion for opera and fawning over its divas eventually took
them regularly to Munich where they were warmly welcomed into the cultural
community. Since this was just the moment the Nazi began their demonic attacks
on artists, homosexuals and Jews, two mousy English sisters who wanted only the
romantic glories of Aida and Ezio
Pinza’s voice found themselves pressed into ferretting out of Germany first fur
coats and jewels hopeful refugees would later claim for sustenance and
eventually the hunted themselves—all successfully. “Again and again, we used to
ask ourselves,” the younger sister said, “who are we, that the mere fact of our
having a little time and money and sympathy to spare transforms us into figures
of overwhelming importance …?”
Like
Etta Shiber, one of the Cook sisters got to write a book about her reluctant
exploits and a historian in her
native Wisconsin eventually wrote about Harnack’s heroism. The Germans who sabotaged
Hitler got no publicity at all and their story still has a heavy lid on it. Not
acknowledging women’s heroism is more or less to be expected, but not
acknowledging “good Germans” of any sort was the crux of Allied postwar
strategy. World War II was spun into an airtight Manichean narrative of how the
blare of absolute righteousness--with a touch of cockeyed optimism, triumphed
over the glare of absolute evil. Tiny, frail Gertrud Luckner told me, while in
Ravensbruck concentration camp she prayed for an Allied victory, thinking:
“When the fighting has ended and at last everybody sees what has happened, they
will understand what we have tried to do. But no!!” I turned out to be the
first person she dared tell about the outright hostility of the British as she
was marching west along the road from liberated Ravensbruck in her black and
white prisoner uniform, emaciated and half dead. “The British! I thought with
real joy. And they spit on me!”
After
V-E Day, no German dared to incriminate himself as a card carrying Nazi, which
made counterfeiting affidavits of innocence—what one resister called the German
equivalent of America’s Fifth Amendment –a booming business. Almost every woman
resister I met told me the Americans never bothered to question these phony
statements, never bothered to vet or probe anyone beyond their actual workaday skills.
They just wanted to get down to business without the complications of justice. “The
Americans were quite uninterested,” a woman who saved 62 people told me. “I was
working for them because they needed my medical skills and all those years,
nobody ever once asked what I’d been through.” The expedient return of Nazis to
their former jobs in industry, administration and security inevitably re-ignited
the lethal animosities of the home-front war. Desperate to squelch any notion they’d
ever had an option not to obey, re-empowered Nazis set about destroying any trace
of what resisters called “the other Germany.” Spite was the name of their game
as they viciously persecuted women suspected or known to have questioned or sabotaged
the Nazi system. Many resisters immediately emigrated, seeking asylum. One was
Hiltgunt Zassenhaus who lived and died simply as Dr. H. Margaret Zassenhaus, MD
in Baltimore. Over and over I was told America betrayed “the other Germany” by creating
the double jeopardy of reprisals and punishment designed to keep surviving
resisters as marginalized, fearful and silent as Hitler had.
The cover-up
continued. At the start of 1984, the Bonn government sent an exhibition about
German resistance—the attentat, the
Scholls, the Bonhoeffers-- to Lyon, hoping to stress a bond of shared
experience. Just as it was about to open, the infamous butcher of Lyon, Klaus
Barbi, was unexpectedly apprehended and rushed to trial, allowing the French to
boycott and vilify the effort. A year later, when the winter of 1985 headlines
were seized by the life and death of medical monster Josef Mengele, I was
disinvited from addressing a New York synagogue seminar on the Holocaust. “They’ll
stone you,” the organizer said, “if you even try to talk about the good ones.” Nobody
else wanted to hear about them either.
Exactly 20 years before I unexpectedly found myself in
Germany meeting Widerstand survivors,
I was in an undergraduate Economics 101 class at the Wharton School of
Business, where the University of Pennsylvania had revealingly stashed its
considerable department of political science. Like every other Economics 101,
we used the current edition of the legendary textbook, Economics, by MIT’s Paul Samuelson. Its early and most enduring theme
was Guns or Butter, a jazzy counterpoint
the venerated Samuelson used to explain the demands upon and allocation of a
society’s resources. To a 19-year-old in the age of Elvis, guns or butter seemed
an extreme, rather odd either or zero
sum scenario, suspiciously typical of male thinking. But this was before the
raised consciousness of women’s lib, so I just memorized, passed the tests and
didn’t question the red flag. In fact I didn’t think about the phrase again until
I started researching the flip from Weimar to Nazi Germany, and came upon it
right out of Joseph Goebbels’s mouth.
What made this discovery that Paul Samuelson had plagiarized
Nazi agitprop so startling was how it happened in that brief shining moment of the
Reagan Revolution, of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, of Phyllis Shafly loud
demands that women stay home. Endless headlines blared news of Reagan’s
military adventuring and absurd defense spending along side draconian social
cuts and the closing of longtime public institutions that sent a tsunami of
homeless people over city sidewalks. In small print on Op-Ed pages, critics
quoted Ike’s farewell warning: Beware the military industrial complex. On the
streets, people protested women’s access to medical help and questioned their
fitness to lead. As Guns or butter hit
my ears from the two speakers of one stereo, it became so difficult to differentiate
daily news from historic research, depression set in. Since nobody wanted the
story anyway, I abandoned the material and moved on.
Now tightly held secrets of Nazi history are leaking in a
trickle of new books. The material I stored away reminds us objects in the
rearview mirror are closer than they appear.
The guns or butter mentality that was Nazism animates our culture war
and polarized politics. The agitprop about the urgency of endless war, spending
even more on defense than requested, draconian cuts for domestic needs
including infrastructure, disparaging diplomacy as “weak,” the war on women,
police violence against black skin and criminalization of immigrants that
heartens economically disenfranchised white men, attacks on regulations and protections
as “nanny state”, the unrelenting persecution of protestors and whistleblowers
as not man enough, the defunding of public radio and public schools, and the
NEA, unrestrained surveillance, the worship of sports brutality and political
bullies, the bombing of abortion clinics and pseudo attacks on Planned
Parenthood, the demonization of transgender women and gay men—a category the
Nazis targeted for extermination, these are déjà vu all over again. Guns or butter is the comfortingly macho mentality
that might makes right.
Early and often, discounted and disenfranchised German women
recognized this. It’s not hard to see how their most obvious goal actually
matched the Allies’ and the lionized attentat
conspirators: to stop the war. The Fuhrer’s quest for endless violence
endlessly killed their husbands, fathers and sons. It bombed homes and farms,
created crippled bodies, took food and shoes from children. It left women no
rights to lead their own lives. And for
what?, they asked with increasing
disgust. For what? In 1939, a group calling itself “Berlin women
working in an arms factory” risked everything to issue a pamphlet entitled: “Advice
for the Working Women.” The advice was not to sacrifice their health and self-
determination to the nasty, pressured pace of Hitler’s defense factories since
that would only increase their family’s danger of waking to the terrors of war.
Hitler always demands more machine guns,
munitions, tanks, submarines….so working women should immediately demand higher
wages for this work because every Reichmark paid to them is one less for war
itself. Almost simultaneously a
Koblenz group calling itself Rhineland
Women and Young Ladies (Frauen und Madchen) surreptitiously released a
flyer asking German women what they were allowing their sons to do in Spain,
Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and Italy when they should be in the house, office,
factory or on the farm. The real victims of World War I had been Germans:
widowed women and crippled men. “Was all that blood spilled just to get us
bigger weapons? …Think of hunger, the children left by themselves…Do you want
this to happen again…? German women, as long as Hitler is at the helm, you will
not have peace even for an hour. Hitler must be overthrown! …If you topple
Hitler you can insure war will not be possible. Save the lives of your
children!” And shortly after, when war
did break out, another anonymous flyer appeared. “You alone cannot stop the
world war! But you can hasten freedom! You cannot expect to end the war for Germany
but you can end it for yourself! Speak to soldiers! Protest forced labor!
Protest the Nazi party!” Later, when the Reich was rapidly disintegrating under
the pressure of the Allies’ pincer movement, the Nazis made a fierce last stand
in Berlin. Crackdowns on its residents got ever more vicious, yet posters
popped up all over the beleaguered city. “Women of Berlin! Stop the defense of
the capital! ...You must be determined! Defend yourself against further war….
Women of Berlin! You are stronger than all the SS men and Gestapo when you make
up your mind to take a stand!”
Through the code word butter
the Nazis resurrected the patriarchal
Kaiser construct of women’s world as limited to church, kitchen, and children—and
maybe culture since there was not one book-burner among them able to believe a
pen mightier than a machine gun. In their world of guns, butter was also code for compassion, conscience, the consideration
known as charity. These “female attributes” the Nazis derided as debilitating or
decadent were exactly the traits that strengthened women, putting steel in
their spine as they fought to reverse the adage, the way Abraham Lincoln once did,
to Right makes Might. Attentat widow Annette Leber described Widerstand as “conscience in revolt.” Someone else calls her story: When Compassion was a Crime. Luise
Rinser said she only did “what my conscience dictated.” Many women, like
Catholic Helene Jacobs, explained themselves by quoting the Talmud: “He who
saves one life saves the whole world.” Others quoted the Bible. Hiltgunt
Zassenhaus said her father told her when fear took hold to remember: “He who
knows the good and refrains from doing it commits a sin.”
Seventy-five–year-old spinster Luise Folsche was so ashamed
of how Germany had railroaded Christianity, she went over the border to Belgium
and there finding the matron of the Bloch family for whom she’d worked more
than 50 years, she managed to hide her through the entire occupation. Three
hundred women and children threw themselves in front of a locomotive pulling
out of Württemberg with a transport of forced laborers (the police report did
not detail who they were) to disrupt all scheduled rail service and demoralize
its engineers by publically demonstrating against what they called the
“criminality of the regime.” The train did not roll over them. It has even been
reported that Count Berthold von Stauffenberg told his brother Klaus on the eve
of Operation Valkyrie: “The worst thing is knowing we cannot succeed and yet
that we have to do it.”
Moral potshots became assault weapons for those recruited
into the home-front war by what resisters called “conscience” or “character.” They
defined their crusade in Biblical quotes and as the moral obligation to not
commit the sin of complacency—“whatever.” Resistance was invariably described
in such personal terms, I had to ask if what the survivors thought they had
done was political, public Widerstand
like the conspirators of the Attentat or menschlichkeit,
privately perfecting your humanity. Guns
or Butter? To a woman, everyone insisted under Nazi totalitarianism when
what you ate was a political statement, Widerstand
and Menschlichkeit became one and the
same thing. “Menschlichkeit in those days,”
Dr. Countess Maria von Maltzan said, raising her voice sharply, “meant you had to be in some way against the
Nazis.”
As the youngest child of an extremely prominent noble family
with great wealth and vast connections, she didn’t have to get involved and was
the only von Maltzan to ever dare to. “We had in the little town by our castle
a burgermeister,” she told me, “and he was uniquely a wonderful democrat
without belonging to any party. He just said ‘to think and feel that all people
are important is the right way of living’ and he’s been a very good mentor for
me.” In 1925 von Maltzan was sent from Silesia to finishing school in Berlin
where one day she found a Jewish classmate curled up crying in a dark hallway. Troubled
enough to investigate, she discovered another classmate, Beatrice Farber, had
plastered the Jewish girl’s room with swastika posters smeared with Dirty Jew! “I found this so abominable,
I couldn’t find words but I did think of what to do,” von Maltzan told me. She
invited Farber into her room and beat her with a riding crop, hollering: “You
have no conscience! You have no decency! ...” The countess told me Beatrice
Farber came to perfectly symbolize the Nazis, irrevocably merging in her mind
the effort to help the hurt-- menschlichkeit,
with outrage against Hitler for the hurting --widerstand. “Anyone who cared about people had to be against
National Socialism.” Nobody did it better: swimming refugees across the
Bodensee or guiding them through forests at night, being courier for treasonous
Catholic newsletters, charming her Nazi relatives for information useful to the
resistance, working with the Sweden Church on an underground railroad, hiding
her lover in her apartment for three years—cannily inviting the Gestapo to go
right ahead and shoot up the sofa he was in, knowing they would never do what a
woman suggested. She even once plundered a Gestapo car and made the rounds of
victims on the hit list in it, urging them to disappear immediately, as though
she were merely playing a schoolgirl prank. “Well,” she said, “the Nazis forced
an honest person to become a criminal. That’s all there was to it.”
In a eulogy for her White Rose brother and sister, Inge
Scholl said: “Perhaps genuine heroism lies in deciding stubbornly to defend the
everyday things, the trivial and the immediate, after having been bombarded by
so much oratory about great deeds.” Not
one resister considered herself heroic, least of all Von Maltzan. She said, unlike
some of the officers of Operation
Valkyrie, she didn’t risk her neck for the promise of postwar glory. “You
don’t go into action thinking you’re going to be heroic! On the contrary,” she
said, “you are inexorably drawn in by your attitude and once you’re in, it’s
not so easy to get out. I’m certainly not somebody who considers herself
heroic. I’ve done what I found at the time was right for me.” Doctor Nelly
Planck deflected admiration for her audacity dashing through Berlin’s exploding
streets during Allied bombing raids to slip food and clothing into
Lehrterstrasse prison, by saying: “Whatever else is said, I only acted like a
normal human being.” Margot Mertens wrote to me from Vermont: “It was common
human decency. It’s a sad world when you have to honor that as heroic.”
May all beings understand the causes of suffering and be free of suffering.
~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/
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