Part 2 Road to War

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Throughout these first years of the Third Reich, Hitler imposed a process that the Nazis called Gleichschaltung, which means standardization or making things the same. All political parties except the Nazis were banned as divisive. Leftist union leaders were arrested and replaced by Nazis preaching the harmonious unity of the working classes (strikes were banned). Joseph Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister, rallied students to a vast bonfire outside the University of Berlin, where the works of illustrious liberals (Emile Zola) and Jews (Heinrich Heine) were consigned to the flames. Jews were barred from public office, the civil service and professions like teaching and journalism. The basic idea behind all this was embodied in the slogan "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer" (One people, one nation, one leader).

Some of the best and brightest left the country. Thomas Mann left, and Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Paul Tillich, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder. Some of the less fortunate fell into the hands of Goring's police and ended up in a little village outside Munich where the Nazis had built their first concentration camp. It was called Dachau. This was not yet the era of the gas chambers but rather of the truncheon, not mass murder but the gradual silencing of all opposition. "They came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist," said Pastor Martin Niemoller, a former U-boat commander who had once briefly supported the Nazis but eventually spent four years in Dachau. "Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up."

Throughout these ugly years, though, the majority of Germans seemed fairly content with their New Order. "The Nazi terror in the early years affected the lives of relatively few Germans," recalled William Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, who went to report on Germany in 1934, "and a newly arrived observer was somewhat surprised to see that the people of this country did not seem to feel that they were being cowed and held down by an unscrupulous and brutal dictatorship. On the contrary, they supported it with genuine enthusiasm. Somehow it imbued them with a new hope."

They had some very practical reasons. Hitler had substantially revived the economy. Unemployment, so pivotal in bringing him to power, had dropped from 6 million to less than 1 million between 1933 and 1937, this at a time when the U.S. was still wallowing in the Depression. National production and income doubled during the same period. This was partly owing to Hitler's rearmament policy, but also to more benign forms of public spending. The world's first major highway system, the autobahns, began snaking across the country, and there was talk of providing every citizen with a cheap, standardized car, the people's car, or Volkswagen.