Why weren't all the Germans like Maria von Maltzan? By Leslie Wilson

Nazi boycott of Jewish shops. Photo: German Federal Archive

One month after Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, the Reichstag building went up in flames. The arson was blamed on Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch communist, and he was executed for it a year later. It seems that most historians agree that van der Lubbe did set the building on fire - but what is beyond doubt is that it was a great opportunity for Hitler, who persuaded the President of Germany, Paul von Hindenburg, to suspend civil liberties. In the aftermath, Communists and Social Democrats were arrested, tortured and imprisoned. Some of them never emerged from the 'wild' concentration camps the SA (Brownshirts) set up. Some of them never got so far. The Social Democrat Minister-President of Mecklenburg, Johannes Stelling, was tortured to death and his body was tied up in a sack and thrown into a river. Twelve other Social Democrats were thrown in the same night. Paul Löbe, the former President of the Reichstag, was kidnapped, arrested, and put into a camp. Social Democratic councillor and officials in Braunschweig resigned their posts when they were threatened with violence; one refused and was beaten to death, and this pattern was repeated across Germany. Trades Unions and other 'Marxist' organisations (like the Schrader League that my grandfather had belonged to) were dissolved, often after the premises had been trashed and the administrators beaten or murdered.

And of course, the Nazis began to attack the Jews. Maria von Maltzan, a young German aristocrat, reponded to the boycott of Jewish businesses (which happened in April 1933), in characteristic fashion: 'Posters were fixed to Jewish shops with the words: 'Germans, don't buy from Jews!' I couldn't resist just going into such a little shop, with uniformed boycott supervisors standing in front of it. They stopped me at once and asked what I wanted to buy.' She told them she wanted to pay a bill. Once she was inside, the shopkeeper, an elderly Jewish woman, said to her: ''For God's sake, you're putting yourself in pointless danger!' Maltzan's response was: 'I hadn't thought of that for a moment.'

Maria von Maltzan, from book jacket

Maria von Maltzan was an exceptional person, stubborn, and if not fearless, a risk-taker. One can imagine how easily other people would be deterred by the heavies standing outside the Jewish business, particularly since they probably knew exactly what they were capable of. However, even Maltzan quickly realised that she did need to be careful. The Gestapo interrogated her as a communist sympathiser and a friend of Jews. Possibly she was saved from the worst by her aristocratic status and her father's reputation as a German war hero. Nevertheless, she soon learned that as a person involved in resistance, she couldn't be cautious enough.

And once she had achieved her doctorate in natural history, in Munich, she couldn't apply for any posts in research establishments or biological institutes, because such posts were reserved for Nazi party members, and she wouldn't join the Party.

I have been reading a book which I can't praise enough: Richard J Evans's 'The Third Reich in History and Memory.' It is a collection of essays, elegantly and accessibly written, and in the essay entitled: 'Coercion and Consent', he considers and rebuts the contention of historians that the vast majority of the German people supported Hitler and that an extensive apparatus of terror wasn't necessary.

This is based on the observation that the Gestapo, as an organisation, was far smaller than the Stasi in the so-called 'German Democratic Republic', and that after 1933 the concentration camps (as opposed to the death camps in the East) were used for criminals and 'anti-social elements.' However, these historians are ignoring the role of the courts in prosecuting anyone who stepped out of line, and many of these people ended up in prisons and penitentiaries.

This struck an immediate chord with me, having sat one afternoon in the German historical Institute reading reports from a German court (I think it was Hamburg). The example that stuck in my mind was the man who had joked in an air-raid shelter that Hitler had invaded France to get back his ball, which had been shot off in the First World War. The story about Hitler's missing ball was of course commonplace in Britain, and perhaps the man had got it from secretly listening to the BBC. In any case, he got a hefty prison sentence, and there were many other such cases.

In 1935, 23,000 inmates of state prisons and penitentiaries were classified as political offenders. Others were just guillotined. Contrary to what David Cesarani claimed in the Letters Page of the Guardian when 'Alone in Berlin' was published, the judicial murder of the elderly couple in Fallada's book was far from exceptional.

Ploetzensee prison Berlin: photo ThoKay

When, shortly before her death, I asked my grandmother what it was like to live under the Nazis, she glanced over her shoulder before she answered; so I saw the 'German glance', which her contemporaries in the West had been able to abandon. My grandmother's ongoing mental illness, her hours of brooding and inner anguish, had preserved it intact. What she remembered, first and foremost, from living under the Nazis, was fear. She told me then about Nazi women coming to the house and inspecting everything and then saying: 'You're scum. You'll end up in concentration camp.' That must have been in 1933, when my grandfather was fighting for his job. However, the 'German glance' was necessary, if you were going to say anything incautious, in a world where the Nazi surveillance apparatus extended to the lowest level officials, the 'Blockwart' whose job it was to collect and transfer information about everyone living in his small area. Nazi womens' organisations, schools, and the Hitler Youth, all kept tabs on the population. Bruno Bettelheim undoubtedly had this in mind when he remarked that the whole of Germany was a concentration camp.

Maria von Maltzan couldn't take up the career she wanted because of her political views; other people were threatened with the loss of their jobs if they stepped out of line. My grandfather was one of millions controlled by their jobs (he also had a mentally-ill wife and I would think her safety, every time she was taken into mental hospital, was guaranteed by his being a senior police officer. If he had been a dissident, she might have been murdered as so many patients were.) Nazism was no different from any other totalitarian state; people were controlled through their jobs.

Of course there were people who were enthusiastic about the Nazi state. The unpleasant refugee Czekalla in my novel 'Last Train from Kummersdorf,' talks big about killing people in Russia, and finally mutters that he was meant to be a big landlord out there. Some people will go along with all kinds of abuses for personal benefit - and the Nazi system made it its business to bring out the worst that the human race is capable of. Brutality, racial hatred, callousness, were promoted as virtues in Nazi Germany. Sebastian Haffner, in his 'Defying Hitler' describes how he and his fellow lawyers were taken off to a kind of boot camp and given military training. (this seems to have been standard practice, with professionals) 'It was remarkable,' he observed, 'how comradeship actively decomposed all the elements of individuality and civilisation.' We all know that soldiers commit horrific crimes, both off their own bat, or because they are told to. In his study of German police units who were taken off to murder Jews, Christopher Browning shows how powerful the sense of peer pressure was, in persuading the policemen not to step out, where the option of doing so was given them. ''Who would have dared,' one policeman declared emphatically, to 'lose face' before the assembled troops.' It's a situation I explored in 'Last Train from Kummersdorf' where the lad Hanno tells the girl Effi how his friends were tormenting an old Jewish man, and he walked away from it - and felt guilty afterwards.

photo: Wikimedia Commons

I once gave a talk to a group of schoolchildren about how people could be brought to participate in mass murders, and when I told them about this, the boys, in particular, all nodded reluctantly, and understood exactly what I was talking about. It's what happens in the playground when children are bullied, and I don't think I'm trivialising it when one considers that bullied children often kill themselves.

However, one must also remember that one motive for establishing the 'controlled' situation of the extermination camps and the gas chambers was that the troops who had been carrying out killings were getting post-traumatic stress disorder, which suggests that they did have some kind of conscience about committing murder. And also, the men who stepped out of murder duty were often self-employed, and didn't feel they needed to worry about their future work prospects after the war.

At this point, I can imagine someone saying: 'Oh, yes, but you're fuzzing ethical issues. People are always responsible for their actions.'

And this, according to Richard Evans, is a key issue. 'Anything that implies constraints on the free will of historical actors puts a potentially serious obstacle in the way of establishing their culpability.' In other words, if one questions the validity of the 'consent' of ordinary Germans to Hitler, one provides perpetrators with the excuse that they acted under duress, which could get them off in the courtroom.

I'm not a lawyer, but I can see the ethical problem. It seems to me, though, that those men who took part in the murders of Jews in eastern Europe definitely did commit murder. And if you have done such a thing, it cannot be changed, even if you acted through fear, or, in the case of the younger men, were so conditioned by propaganda and bad teaching that you had no ethical equipment to stop you doing this. You've still done something bad and it cannot be undone. But I think the greater responsibility lies with the people who planned for this to happen.

The idea of willing Nazi supporters, about a nation who were eager to invade other countries (in fact the initial response to the outbreak of war was largely fear and gloom) has been a part of the story the British have been telling themselves about the war for the whole of my life. A few years ago, I went with a Jewish friend to watch the documentary about Belsen which appalled the British when it was shown after the war (it's not easy to watch now, either). The commentator said: 'If you hadn't fought the war, this might have been you.' (It wasn't at any stage stated that the poor people in the camp and the mass graves were mainly Jewish.)

mass grave, Bergen-Belsen. Photo Lieutenant Alan Moore

The fact that the Germans were deemed to be particularly monstrous, peculiarly inhumane and cruel, gave extra lustre to the war that had been fought against them, and undoubtedly made people feel their sufferings had been worth while.

There's something else, though. If you discount the fact that Nazism was a terror state - and I still hear people and read people doing so, even nowadays - it may be a reassurance. 'They' were different, 'they' came from a corrupt culture. If you assert that Nazism could have been fought by simple acts of refusal (there were quite a few, and many of them ended in the deaths of the dissidents), then naturally, it couldn't possibly happen anywhere else, like here. I think that's a very dangerous illusion. If we are convinced, for example, that British people wouldn't stand for that kind of thing, we may ignore the fact that similar structures of surveillance and criminalisation of dissent are being set up, not hypothetically, but now, as I am typing these words.

I think the danger in Britain is not of a sudden slashing clampdown, as in 1933 in Germany, but a slow creeping paralysis that makes it harder and harder for anyone to dissent. Where that may lead is hard to tell because no more than Germans in 1933 are we capable of looking at history from the other end and seeing what is going to happen. However, just consider that people who oppose fracking have recently been described by Tory politicians as 'extremists.' I will say no more.

Denounced by Leslie Wilson

This is a photocopy of a letter written eighty years ago this week, denouncing my grandfather, Lieutenant Bernhard Rösel, of the Zabrze-Hindenburg police force in Upper Silesia, to the new Nazi authorites in Germany. It was written by his superior officer, First Lieutenant Goede, (who  sat on the commission that tried his case.) The story I have to tell is mainly based on his police file, which I read in the German Federal Archive and then had photocopied. I wrote an article about it years ago in the London Review of Books (the link is at the end of this blog piece).

My grandfather had belonged to a kind of police trades union, the Schrader League (now the official association of the Saxon police force), which had a Social Democratic orientation. His crime was that he had refused to apply to join the Nazi-oriented Police Officers' Association when Goede had invited him to before Hitler came to power, but preferred to remain in the Schrader League. 

My young grandparents on their wedding day

After the Reichstag Fire, the Nazis were rounding up Social Democrats and taking them to so-called 'wild' concentration camps, along with the Communists. This was the first great purge of Nazi Germany and many of its victims died in those camps. The Schrader League was therefore closed down, and its former members would have good reason to feel terrified. But colleagues of my grandfather who were already members of the Nazi police officers's association (which was now the only possible police association) suggested he should apply to join. 

He grasped at this lifeline and applied. Goede spoke against him, quoting Rösel's earlier turn-down, and said he had only joined because the Nazis were now in power, therefore he wasn't suitable to join. However, the other police officers wanted Rösel in (he was always respected and liked by his colleagues) and he was admitted to the POA.

The next item in the file is a transcript of a statement by a police constable called Kullik, who was hauled in to answer accusations relating to a conversation he was supposed to have had with my grandfather in 1931. There seem to be two documents missing, as Goede's denunciation is 003 and Kullik's statement is 004. It is clear that Kullik was answering accusations my grandfather was supposed to have made against him. Now, when I wrote about this for LRB, I assumed that my grandfather had denounced Kullik, maybe to get in before Kullik could speak against him. I didn't like that, but, it has to be said, I didn't much like my grandfather (see the personality of Hanno's father in Last Train from Kummersdorf) and was perhaps unfairly inclined to think he had done such a thing.

Now, reading the documents again, this seems less clear. There is no written denunciation from my grandfather, and it seems possible, on re-reading, that my grandfather and Kullik had had this dangerous conversation and someone else reported it to the Nazi authorities. Perhaps he was hauled in for questioning and told that Kullik had made allegations against him, whereat he came out with what Kullik had actually said.  

I do believe that my grandfather did in truth say he couldn't understand how Goede could belong to the Nazi party, and called him that wonderful word 'Gesinnungslump' (ideological slob). It's just the kind of word he loved to use. Then Kullik apparently said that if Goede led the Nazis in an attempt to gain control of the police station (which would hardly have been unlikely in that era of street-fighting and imminent civil war) Kullik would have been the first to shoot a bullet into his belly. Kullik then said that my grandfather totally agreed with this. My grandfather's answer, when he was then read Kullik's statement, was that he had never said any of these things, and that he had always tried to remain politically neutral as a police officer. But had the Nazis attempted a coup in 1932, to fight them off would have been the duty of a politically neutral police officer.

There had also been an article in the Ostfront (a Nazi Upper Silesian daily paper) in early 1933, complaining that there had been a Communist meeting in Biskupitz (now Biskupice, a district of Zabrze) and saying that the local police clearly didn't realise there had been a 30th January (the date of Hitler coming to power). According to one Senior Constable Franz Rückert, he mentioned this to my grandfather, who remarked, perfectly correctly at the time, 'that the meeting had been authorised, and if the National Socialists had tried to break up an authorised meeting, they should have been controlled with truncheon blows.' This remark, again, was not dangerous at the time - but by the date Rückert was interviewed, the 24th July, not only the Communist party, but also the Social Democratic party had been forbidden. 

The investigators: Captain Bär and First
Lieutenant Goede

Thus began nine months of hell for the family. Reading the documents, what I find there is always terror.
The law that hung over my grandfather's head was the Law for the Reform of the Civil Service (policemen were civil servants). The aim of this law was to get rid of leftists and Jews. The threat that hung over Bernhard Rösel might seem bad enough for an ambitious young officer with a wife and little daughter to support; being sent to a different police station, to spend the rest of his life as a lieutenant with no chance of promotion.

However, Goering, when introducing this law, said: ‘You must bear in mind that your signature is often equivalent to a death sentence.’ What it meant was spelled out by the Nazi women who, my grandmother once told me, used to descend on her at home, inspect the books on the shelves, and say: 'You're scum. You'll go to concentration camp.' After the war, my grandfather said to my mother: 'I could have resisted the Nazis, but I had you and your mother to think of.'

A letter to the commission, written by my grandfather in August: he says he was shown nothing in writing, only had the accusations against him read out to him. Much of what he said in his defence was not written down by the commission. He had been at firing practice, at 9.45 in the morning, when he was fetched without warning and taken to the commission on the back of a motor bike, not knowing, as he was questioned, whether he was 'an accused or a witness.' I can imagine that motorbike ride, and the fear he must have felt. On the other hand, I can also imagine that he had been rehearsing what he would say whenever that happened, probably any time he had leisure to do so.

 My mother remembered my grandmother's headaches, how she was depressed and would lie in a darkened room. She remembered that one day she heard my grandmother cry out: 'No, Bernhard, no!' and something fall on the floor. Then her parents left the room and little Gerda went in, to see her father's revolver lying there. I guess this was in August, when the commission decided against him. My mother heard her father say: 'He told me it was the only way.' Perhaps 'he' had told my grandfather that his suicide would have given my grandmother a widow's pension.

Breslau, 14th August, judgement passed on
Bernhard Rösel 

Only then my grandmother went off, dressed in her best clothes, and begged 'a very important person' to help. And sure enough, when the case went up to Berlin for ratification, the authorities there decided that it wasn't proven and my grandfather should remain a police officer eligible for promotion.

 Happily ever after? Hardly. My grandmother took an overdose of something and was taken off to hospital. She suffered thereafter - as I have written before - from acute anxiety and periodic nervous breakdowns, and a 'paranoid' conviction that Hitler would destroy Germany. And thus she became a hostage for my grandfather's 'good' behaviour - as he once indicated in a letter to my mother.

As for my grandfather, he had to live with the fact that the regime he had been kicked into shape to support had made him complicit in its crimes. During the war he came home on leave and one night my mother found him drinking in the kitchen. He told her he had seen dreadful things. Done dreadful things, probably, but there was no evidence against him, and there is nothing in the file.

 This blog has already got longer than it should; but I have to say this. What do all these events, eighty years ago, mean to me today? What do I draw from them?

Well, I have long realised that I couldn't condemn my grandfather unless I had stood where he stood and done differently. I do clearly remember what it was like to stand in the dock having committed civil disobedience in order to contest the deployment of nuclear missiles; to feel as if the whole of society was against me. It wasn't good. And that was in a democracy, and nothing worse than a fine was going to happen to me.

 From what I've read about Nazi Germany, and from psychological experiments that have been carried out since (like the Milgram experiment) it's clear to me that once there is an authoritarian situation, backed up by terror, only a very few people will stand out. Heroes are rare. And no decision is simple, especially not if you have a family. It is too easy to say, as people have said to me so often: 'The Germans should have defied Hitler.' Harder to do it.

We live, at present, in a culture where people are being lied to about disabled  people. They have been told that welfare fraud is rife among them, that most of them are scroungers, and guess what? People start abusing the obviously disabled and even attacking them.

apologies for home-made cartoon!

It is only weeks since legislation was passed in this country to establish secret courts, whose purpose is partly at least to avoid damaging disclosures coming out about our secret services' involvement in torture. They have attended torture sessions and questioned the victims. But we will hear no more of this from now on. There is, of course, a reason given, to protect 'agents in the field.' I just wonder if the reason is good enough. The screams coming from the 'wild' concentration camps in 1933 were supposed to be justified by the cessation of the pitched battles on the streets between Nazis and Communists. Order had been restored, most citizens thought, and were relieved.

Britain is not a dictatorship, and yet human rights abuses have been creeping in, not to mention abrogation of our rights not to be snooped on by the state, of our right to protest - and most people, like the Germans of that time, just get on with their lives and allow these things to happen. Objectors are called naive, even traitors.

Yet if we 'defend' our democracy by setting up abusive systems, then we ourselves become the people who are destroying it.
You can read an extract from the London Review of Books diary piece and download the rest at

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n23/leslie-wilson/diary