Word: hitler
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When World War II ended, among the mysteriously missing was Martin Bormann, last deputy and close adviser of Adolf Hitler. Was he dead, or hiding? Nobody admits knowing. Now Bormann's son, Adolf Martin Bormann, is also missing, but for more romantic reasons. The 41-year-old Bormann, who became a priest in 1958, has left the order of the Sacred Heart of Jesus to marry. Bormann is waiting final clearance from the Vatican to wed a former nun in the Dominican order, so far identified only as "Sister Cordula...
...A.J.P. Taylor advanced the debatable argument that Germany has always carried with it a special kind of doom, and that the horrors of Third Reich totalitarianism were utterly consistent with the nation's past. Now, in The 12-Year Reich, Richard Grunberger draws a chilling corollary: Hitler's accession in 1933, he contends, wrought no sudden or serious changes in the daily life and social institutions of Germany. Most Germans took to the swastika as naturally as they would to a new hiking path in the Schwarzwald...
Grunberger, a Vienna-born historian raised and educated in England, is author of two previous books on Nazism: Germany 1918-1945 and Hitler's SS. In The 12-Year Reich, he employs a variety of sources to assemble a riveting portrait of the skillful Nazi corruption of an already rotting society. Grunberger even examines the peculiarities of Nazi speech and humor. Of all the jokes that a few dared whisper about Hitler, perhaps the most revelatory of him, and of the Germans, has the Führer in a fishing boat with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Mussolini...
...book is a mosaic of fascinating vignettes, both ghastly and ridiculous. Railway workers were allowed to abandon the otherwise mandatory Heil Hitler arm salute because it was mistaken for a signal and caused accidents. Goethe's favorite oak tree near Weimar became the central point around which the Buchenwald extermination camp was built. In one village, a neighbor told a mother that the name of her missing soldier son had been read on a list of German P.O.W.s held by the Russians. Far from being grateful, the mother thereupon denounced her well-meaning informant to the authorities for listening...
Grunberger thinks that the pre-Hitler Weimar Republic applied the merest veneer of democracy over what remained basically an authoritarian state. Thus the mass of Germans easily accepted dictatorship. Within a year after Hitler became Chancellor, the birth rate, which is normally a sure index of public confidence, rose by 22%. Crime dropped off noticeably after 1933. War preparations and economic recovery did away with joblessness. Living standards improved under the peacetime Third Reich; food shortages did not become severe until 1943, the fourth year...