‘Inside Hitler’S Germany’ Entertains More Than Informs

“Inside Hitler’s Germany: Life Under the Third Reich” by Matthew Hughes and Chris Mann (Brasseys Inc., 224 pages, $34.95).

Since its ignominious collapse in 1945, Nazi Germany has entered the realms of both history and mythology. It is hard to say to which realm “Inside Hitler’s Germany: Life Under the Third Reich” makes a greater contribution.

Written by two British military historians, Matthew Hughes and Chris Mann, this glossy-paged book belongs to a genre whose purpose is more to entertain than to inform.

It does this by providing plenty of short, first-person accounts, most of them anonymous, of what it was like to live in the Third Reich. While most are told from the point of view of ethnic German soldiers and civilians, the authors never say when the statements were made nor under what circumstances.

Furthermore, they make no attempt to assess either the validity or the credibility of the quotes, much less identify their source.

We are told, for instance, that Hitler “described his ideal woman as a `cute, cuddly, naive little thing - tender, sweet, and stupid.”’ Yet just when he made this statement, or to whom, is never revealed.

The authors also claim that, after the British and French declarations of war on Sept. 3, 1939, Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe, shouted at Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop over the phone: “You’ve got your damn war! It’s all your doing!” Again, no attribution.

“Inside Hitler’s Germany” does provide a great deal of interesting trivia. Did you know, for example, that the Hitler Youth divisions sent into action toward the end of the war were given rations of chocolate instead of the usual cigarettes? Yet the authors offer little analysis beyond such vacuous phrases as, “The community was all, the individual was nothing.”

Perhaps it isn’t fair to judge what primarily is a picture book by its text. “Inside Hitler’s Germany” contains 280 photographs, some quite striking, taken from the holdings of the Robert Hunt Library in London.

Some are well known, such as Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin meeting at Yalta, or the powerful picture of the terrified 10-year-old boy, arms raised, being herded from the Warsaw ghetto under the eyes of heavily armed SS soldiers. Others are less familiar, such as the photo of German civilians carving meat out of a dead horse by a desolate roadside in the spring of 1945.

According to the book jacket, the photographs “re-create the atmosphere of Hitler’s Third Reich in a way that words cannot.” Yet the text never refers to the pictures, and even the captions are sometimes misleading, inaccurate or incomplete.

What’s worse, the authors assiduously perpetuate a number of myths that have grown around the Third Reich.

They are simply wrong, for instance, about Nazi attempts to break up the family unit by undermining parental authority. If ever there was a movement that represented what is euphemistically called “family values,” it was the Nazis (always with the proviso that the families in question were “Aryan,” i.e., non-Jewish). They persecuted homosexuals, made divorce difficult (except for childless couples), encouraged large families and believed that a woman’s place indeed was in the home.

The authors are also wrong about the massive numbers of the Gestapo (secret police) that were required to keep the population under strict surveillance. The idea of a popular pro-Nazi consensus runs counter to the conventional image of an innocent people either seduced by Hitler’s demonic powers or terrorized into submission by Nazi thugs. Yet recent research has shown that widespread surveillance was possible only because of the willingness of so many ordinary Germans to inform on one another.

Perhaps most telling, the authors - like many others - misquote resistance leader Pastor Martin Niemller’s famous saying: “First the Nazis went after the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did not object. Then they went after the Catholics, but I was not a Catholic, so I did not object. Then they went after the trade-unionists, but I was not a trade-unionist, so I did not object. Then they came after me, and there was no one left to object.”

Niemller actually listed Nazi victims as communists, Social Democrats, trade-unionists and Jews; he did not mention Catholics, because the Nazis never persecuted Catholics as Catholics. It would have been monumentally counterproductive to have done so in a country in which a third of the population was, and still is, Catholic.

Why the widespread distortion of Niemller’s motto? It’s no doubt a result of the Cold War. After Germany’s fall, it was hard to find a German citizen who did not claim to have opposed Nazism. Anti-Nazism, in fact, became a kind of badge of honor. But that honor was not extended to communists nor to the left, the most determined and consistent opponents of Nazism from the start.

To be fair, Hughes and Mann do devote several paragraphs to the communist resistance and its brutal suppression by the Nazis. But while they dwell on the mistreatment of German civilians and prisoners of war by the Soviets in 1945, they never mention that at least 20 million Soviet civilians were killed in the war or that more than 3 million Soviet prisoners of war were deliberately starved to death in German camps.

Not surprisingly, the authors seem more knowledgeable about the war years than on the Third Reich before 1939. But even when they are in their element - military history - their account is often unreliable. That is in part because they quote heavily from the memoirs of German generals, most of which have long been exposed as self-serving apologias.

In summary, Hughes and Mann have given us an uncritical history that offers only superficial analysis, repeats many common misconceptions and makes few intellectual demands.

None of this, however, should reduce the voyeuristic appeal of the book to those who revel in “Hitleriana,” the carnage of war or the sordid details of the Nazi regime. Indeed, these qualities will probably enhance the book’s commercial success, which seems to have been the whole point of the exercise in the first place.