BIRTH | Dorothy Thompson, 1893

Dorothy Thompson,
Time Cover, June 1939

July 9, 2020—This day in 1893 was born journalist Dorothy Celene Thompson,   in Lancaster, New York. Time magazine poll ranked her as one of the two most important woman in the United States, along with Eleanor Roosevelt. She married novelist Sinclair Lewis.

A foreign correspondent for the New York Evening Post in the 1920s, she later became its bureau chief in Berlin. She so angered Adolf Hitler with her reporting on the Nazis, that he personally expelled her. 

Her syndicated column, On the Record, appeared three times a week in as many as 170 papers, and she also had a popular radio show that was listened to by overseas troops during World War II. She died in 1961.

In early 1944 she wrote a column on, and devoted a radio show to, the idea that soldiers fighting for the Allies needed a vision of the postwar world to motivate them. 

My uncle Willem van Stockum, then a volunteer bomber pilot at the 10 Squadron RAF base in Melbourne, Yorkshire, responded to his sister, Hilda van Stockum. He said that visions of the future do not motivate soldiers. 

What motivates soldiers, Willem said, is outrage at tyranny. 

His letter to my mother on this subject was published as an article, "A Soldier's Creed," in The Horn Book in its Christmas 1944 issue under the authorship of "A Bomber Pilot." It has been widely referenced and quoted. 

Willem van Stockum was shot down over France in June 1944 on his sixth mission, during the week of D-Day, attacking Nazi supply lines before and after the Normandy invasion. He is buried with his crew and that of another plane shot down on the same mission, in France. A book on his life was written by Robert P. Wack, Time Bomber (Boissevain Books, 2014).

Willem van Stockum, RAF. 

I didn’t join the war to improve the Universe; in fact, I am sick and tired of the eternal sermons on the better world we are going to build when this war is over. I hate the disloyalty to the past twenty years. Apparently people think that life in those twenty years, which cover most of my conscious existence, was so terrible that no-one can be expected to fight for it. We must attempt to dazzle people with some brilliant schemes leading, probably, to some horrible Utopia, before we can ask them to fight.
I detest that point of view. I hate the idea of people throwing their lives away for slum-clearance projects or forty-hour weeks or security and exchange commissions. It is a grotesque and horrible thought. There are so many better ways of achieving this than diving into enemy guns. Lives are precious things and are of a different order and entail a different scale of values than social systems, political theories, or art.
“Why are we not given a cause?” some people ask. I do not understand this question. It seems so plain to me. There are millions and millions of people who are shot, persecuted and tortured daily in Europe. The assault on so many of our fellow human beings makes some of us tingle with anger and gives us an urge to do something about it. That, and that alone, makes some of us feel strongly about the war. All the rest is vapid rationalization. All this talk about philosophy, the degeneration of art and literature, the poisoning of Nazi youth, which the Nazi system entails, and which we all rightly condemn, is still not the reason why we fight and why we are willing to risk our lives.
Here, let us say, is a soldier. He asks himself, “Why should I die?” You would tell him: “To preserve our civilization.” When the soldier replies: “To Hell with your civilization; I never thought it so hot,” you take him up wrongly when you sit down and say to yourself: “Well, after all, maybe it wasn’t so hot,” and then brightly tap him on the shoulder and say: “Well, I’ve thought of a better idea. I know this civilization wasn’t so hot, but you go and die anyway and we’ll fix up a really good one after the war.” I say you take him up wrong because his remark: “To Hell with your civilization” doesn’t really mean that he is not seriously concerned about our civilization. He is simply revolted by the idea of dying for ANY civilization. Civilization simply isn’t the kind of thing you ever want to die for. It is something to enjoy and something to help build up because it’s fun, and that is that, and that is all.
When a man jumps into the fire to save his wife he doesn’t justify himself by saying that his wife was so civilized that it was worth the risk! There is only one reason why a man will throw himself into mortal combat and that is because there is nothing else to do and doing nothing is more intolerable than the fear of death. I could stand idly by and see every painting by Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo thrown into a bonfire and feel no more than a deep regret, but throw one small, insignificant Polish urchin on the same bonfire and, by God, I’d pull him out or else. I fight quite simply for that and I cannot see what other reasons there are. At least, I can see there are reasons, but they are not the reasons that motivate me.
During the first two years of the war when I was an instructor at an American University in close contact with American youth and in close contact with the vital isolationist question in the States, I often felt that there was much insincerity, conscious or unconscious, on our, the Interventionist, side of the argument. We had strong views on the danger of isolationism for the United States. We thought, rightly, that for the sake of self-interest and self-preservation the United States should take every step to ensure the defeat of the Nazi criminals. But however sound our arguments, our own motives and intensity of feeling did not spring from those arguments but from an intense passion for common righteousness and decency.
Suppose it could have been proved to us at that time that the participation of the United States in the stamping out of organized murder, rape and torture in Europe could only take place at great cost to the United States, while not doing so would in no way impair her security. Would we not still have prayed that our country might do something? And would we not have been proud to see her do something?
There is an appalling timidity and false shame among intellectuals. The common man in the last war went to fight quite simply as a crusader. I am not talking about politics now, I am not either asserting or denying that England declared war from purely generous and noble considerations, but I am asserting that the common man went and fought with the rape of Belgium foremost in his mind and saw himself as an avenger of wrong.
After the war the common man went quietly back to his home. The intellectuals, however, upon coming back, ashamed of their one lapse of finding themselves in agreement with every Tom, Dick and Harry, must turn around and deride the things they were ready to give their lives for. As they were the only vocal group, the opinion became firmly established that the last war was a grave mistake and that anyone who got killed in it was a sucker.
And now, in this war, these intellectuals are hoist with their own petard. They lack the nerve and honesty to represent the American doughboy to himself for what he is. They do not give him the one picture in his mind which would stimulate his imagination and which would make him see beyond the fatigues, the mud, the boredom and the fear. The picture is there for anyone to paint who has a gift for words. It is a simple picture and a true picture and no one who has ever sat as a small child and listened with awe to a fairy story can fail to understand. The intellectuals, however, have made fun of the picture and so they won t use It.
But some day an American doughboy in an American tank will come lurching into some small Polish, Czech or French village and it may fall to his lot to shoot the torturers and open the gates of the village jail. And then he will understand.
There is a lot of talk among our intellectuals about our youth. Our youth is supposed to want a change, a new order, a revolution or what not. But it is my conviction that that is emphatically NOT what our youth wants. Have you ever been in a picture house on a Saturday afternoon, when it is filled with children and some old Western movie is ending in a race of time between the hero and the villain? Have you seen the rapt attention, the glowing faces, the clenched fists? What our young men really want is to be able to give that same concentrated attention and emotional participation, this time to reality, and this time as heroes and not as spectators, that they were able to give to unsubstantial shadows, before long words and cliches had killed their imaginations. Killed them so dead that they can no longer see even reality itself imaginatively.
It is up to the intellectuals to rekindle the thing they have tried to destroy. It is as simple as St. George and the Dragon. Why not have the courage to point out that St. George fought the dragon because he wanted to liberate a captive and not because he wanted to lead a better life afterwards? Some day, sometime, my picture of an American doughboy in a Polish village will become true. Wouldn’t it be better for him then to have the cross of St. George on his banner than a long rigmarole about a better world?
As long as our intellectuals and leaders do not have the courage to risk being thought sentimental and out-of-date and are not willing to stress that nations as well as individuals are entitled to their acts of heroism and chivalry, they will never be able to give our youth what it needs.
It is true that every fairy story ends with the words: “and they lived happily ever after.” How irritating a child would be, though, if it interrupted its mother at every sentence to ask: “But, Mummy, will they live happily ever afterwards?” It simply isn’t the point of the fairy story and it isn’t the point of this war.
Presumably we won’t live happily ever after this war. But just as a fairy story helps to increase a child’s awareness and wonder at the world, so this war may make us more aware of one another. Perhaps we shall learn, and perhaps some things will be better organized. I hope so. I believe so. But only if we engage in this war with our hearts as well as our minds.
For goodness’ sake let us stop this empty political theorizing according to which a man would have to have a University degree in social science before he could see what he was fighting for. It is all so simple, really, that a child can understand it.

BIRTH | Marlene Dietrich, Dec 27

Marlene Dietrich

December 27, 2019–This day was born in 1901 the film actress and cabaret singer Marlene (originally named Marie Magdalene) Dietrich, in Berlin.

Her family called her “Lena”. Her father, Louis Otto Dietrich, was a former military officer who became a police lieutenant under the Kaiser. Her widowed mother married her husband’s best friend, Eduard von Losch, who was killed in World War I.

Lena Dietrich and her older sister Liesel were tutored at home in Germany, learning French, English, ballet, violin and piano. They attended the Augusta Victoria School for Girls. Lena also took up playing the mandolin.

When an injury precluded her pursuing a musical career, Dietrich pursued an acting career. continued acting in a diverse range of small roles before American director Josef von Sternberg discovered her in 1929 and put her in his famed film, The Blue Angel (1930), as Lola-Lola, the seductive cabaret singer in a top hat and silk stockings over whom a professor becomes obsessed.

Dietrich was appalled by what was happening in her beloved Germany in the 1930s and applied for U.S. citizenship in 1937. Adolf Hitler approached her and offered her a lavish income to return   to Berlin. She refused and Hitler banned her films and burned all copies of The Blue Angel, except for one he kept for himself.

In the United States, she spent time at the North Shore resort of Asharoken on Long Island (between Northport and Fort Salonga). It is where Antoine de Saint-Exupéry stayed on vacations, self-exiled, during the war years when he was writing The Little Prince. Eugene O'Neill was another artist who stayed there.

She decided to join the U.S. war effort, recording anti-Nazi broadcasts in German and taking part in war-bond drives. She entertained half a million Allied troops across North Africa and Western Europe. The troops loved her. She slept in dugouts and played a musical saw. Of her war efforts, she said, “This is the only important work I’ve ever done.”

WW2 | Sept. 1 – Hitler Invades Poland

September 1, 2017 – This day in 1939 Adolf Hitler invaded Poland. He had been aggressive before without provoking a response from the rest of Europe.

Hitler began his plan with a nonaggression pact with Poland in January 1934.

This pact was contravened five and a half years later – Hitler had just been buying time.  The pact was unpopular with his supporters, who resented the Versailles Treaty's giving former German provinces to Poland. Hitler, however, saw the nonaggression pact as a way to prevent a French-Polish military alliance against Germany before the Wehrmacht had rearmed.

In the second half of the 1930s, France and Britain pursued a policy of appeasement toward Germany. Public opinion (especially in Britain) was sympathetic to revising some territorial provisions of the Versailles treaty, and neither Britain nor France in 1938 was militarily prepared to fight the Nazis.  So Britain and France acquiesced to:

• German rearmament (1935-1937). 
• Remilitarization of the Rhineland (1936).
• Annexation of Austria (the Anschluss, March 1938). 
• Invasion of the Sudetenland and breakup of the Czechoslovak state (March 1939) in violation of Anglo-French guarantees of the integrity of rump Czechoslovakia in what is called the Munich agreement.

The invasion of Czechoslovakia was the last straw. France and Germany responded by guaranteeing the integrity of the Polish state. Hitler's shocking answer to that was   a nonaggression pact with Premier Josef Stalin in August 1939, partitioning Poland between the two powers, giving Germany the western third and enabling Hitler to attack Poland without fear of its defense by the Soviet Union.

One week after the surprise pact with Stalin, at 5:11 a.m., Hitler issued an order for the Wehrmacht to invade Poland, claiming that the Poles were preparing to invade Germany. In fact, the Wehrmacht was massing on the German side of Poland's western border and the Poles were simply moving their army to defend this border.

Britain and France declared war within two days, but it was too late. The German army launched its Blitzkrieg, its "lightning war."  From East Prussia and Germany in the north and Silesia and Slovakia in the south, more than 2,000 German tanks,covered by  more than 1,000 planes, broke through Polish defenses along the border. Within six days they took Krakow and within ten they were outside Warsaw. By early October, Poland had fallen. World War II was on.

HITLER | Aug. 19–Elected President and Führer

Hitler Feigns Respect for President von Hindenburg,
who dies later that day (August 2, 1934).

Already appointed Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler on this day in 1934 is elected President.

Now holding both offices, he no longer had any constraint. Hitler's dictatorship was in place.

How Hitler Became Chancellor

Germany was a strong democracy in the 1920s, when the country was prospering, even though the terms of the Treaty of Versailles were onerous Hitler had some modest success exporting the loss of German face.

The country's democracy was destroyed step by step as Hitler appealed to a public that was demoralized by the loss of the war, the Treaty, and then the Crash of 1929:

• Hitler blamed German labor unions for hurting the economy and won financial backing from business leaders by promising to break them. 
• After the Crash of 1929, he attacked the Weimar Republic for failing to protect the German people from financial panics and high unemployment and promised the public a better deal. 
• In 1930 Hitler's support jumped to six million votes, 8 percent of the German vote, making the Nazi Party Germany's second-largest. 
• In the 1932 contest for President of Germany, an anti-Nazi coalition supported 84-year-old Paul von Hindenburg against Hitler. Although von Hindenburg was reelected, the Nazi share grew more than four-fold, to 37 percent.
• Now afraid of the growth of the Nazis, in January 1933, von Hindenburg–even though he had made clear he despised his opponent–sought to control Hitler by appointing him Chancellor.

How Hitler Became Dictator

Although now Chancellor, the appointed chief executive of Germany, he was not a dictator. He was subject to the elected President, to whom the Germany Army reported. This Having irritated Hitler and he went about eliminating constraints on his actions: 

• In February 1933, the Reichstag building, where the parliament met, suffered a fire. Hitler used this as an opportunity to call for another election. This time, Nazi police under Hermann Göring intimidated Nazi opponents. Even so, the Nazis and their allies won only a bare majority.
• Later in 1933, Hitler consolidated his power through the Enabling Act (Ermächtigungsgesetz). He started arresting and executing political opponents, and even purged the Nazis’ own SA paramilitary organization in a successful effort to win support from the German army. 
• August 2, 1934. Hitler visited President von Hindenburg to pay his respects.  A few hours later, von Hindenburg died. 
• After von Hindenburg's death, Hitler purged the Nazi Brown Shirts, his own storm troopers.
• On August 9, 1934, a plebiscite vote was held on August 19. Intimidation, admiration of job growth under Hitler, and fear of Communists, brought Hitler a 90 percent majority. Hitler decided to unite the chancellorship and presidency under the new title of Führer. He now controlled the army. His dictatorship was solidly in place.

HITLER | Mar 5, 1933–Nazis Win and End Democracy

This post has been updated and superseded and replaced by this one:

http://cityeconomist.blogspot.com/2017/03/hitler-mar-5-1933-germany-elects-nazis.html

This post is maintained to preserve links.

HITLER | Mar. 5, 1933–Germany Elects Nazi Party

This post has been updated and superseded and replaced by this one:

http://cityeconomist.blogspot.com/2017/03/hitler-mar-5-1933-germany-elects-nazis.html

This post is maintained to preserve links.

November 9 - Kristallnacht, the Public Start of Hitler's Holocaust

The morning after Kristallnacht... Hitler's murderous
Holocaust was now without fear and in full view.

Today is the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht (Crystal-night, "the night of broken glass"). In 1938 the Nazis coordinated an attack throughout Germany on Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues - as Garrison Keillor has reminded us in The Writer's Almanac.

My brother Randal Marlin has just issued a second edition of his book on Propaganda, and I was interested to see how the Kristallnacht attacks as outlined by Keillor follow the Propaganda playbook.

1. The attacks were inspired by the murder of a German diplomat by a Jew in Paris. When Hitler heard the news, he decided to use the event to stage a mass uprising in response. (Playbook: Milk events for propaganda purposes.)

2. He and Joseph Goebbels contacted storm troopers throughout Germany and told them to attack Jewish buildings, making the attacks look like spontaneous demonstrations. (Playbook: Stir up public resentment, or fake it.)

3. The police were told not to interfere with the demonstrators, but instead to arrest the Jewish victims! (Playbook: Accuse the victims.)

4. Similarly, firefighters were told only to put out fires in any adjacent non-Jewish properties. (Playbook: Do not protect the victims.)

Everyone cooperated. In all, more than 1,000 synagogues were burned or destroyed. Rioters looted 7,500 Jewish businesses and vandalized Jewish hospitals, homes, schools, and cemeteries. Many of the attackers were neighbors of the victims.

To pile injury on injury:

1. The Nazis confiscated any compensation claims that insurance companies paid to the Jews who lost their property.

2. They imposed a huge collective fine on the Jewish community for the crime of having incited the violence by the murder of the diplomat.

3. They barred Jews from schools and most public places, and forced them to adhere to new curfews.

4. In the days following, thousands of Jews were sent to concentration camps. Kristallnacht was the opening shot of the Holocaust. Before that night, the Nazis killed people secretly. Afterwards, the Nazis persecuted and killed Jews openly, because the propaganda ensured that public opinion would be against anyone who tried to stop them. I contacted my brother for his views on Kristallnacht. He said:

What a terrifying time it must have been to be Jew at that time, recognizing that you had no protection from lawless violence. What needs attention is the original statement of Nazi party principles. They made it quite clear that Jews were not citizens of Germany and were without civic standing regarding voting and other civic rights that we today take for granted. That was back in the early 1920s. The moral for us today is to wake up and see what is happening with respect to erosion of the principle of rule of law, and not to allow it to decay any further.

To document what my brother says about the Nazi party origins, I found a timeline used in schools for teaching about the Holocaust. It shows that the Nazi principles were developed in 1923-25.

• In 1923, the Nazis attempted to take over Munich and failed. In a 24-day trial, Hitler gained the sympathy of the judges and some of the public, and his fellow Nazis were given a light sentence. At this point, the Nazis were a small group on trial, and no one feared them. In prison, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, which laid out the Nazi principles of German pride, and enmity to Jews and Bolsheviks in Germany and worldwide.
• In 1925, Hitler's book was published after he emerged from prison and started reconstituting the Nazi party under his sole leadership.
• In 1928, Hitler's party got 2.6 percent of the vote. 
• In 1929, the worldwide crash occurred, followed by the Great Depression. This threw the German government into confusion and provided an opportunity for Hitler to exploit public distress. 
• In 1930 Hitler's support leaped to 18 percent of the vote.
• In 1932, Hitler got 37 percent. 
• In 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg -- reelected the previous year, but aging and at his wit's end -- appointed Hitler as Chancellor. The Nazis moved in, establishing a police state, step by step. Albert Einstein was in USA, decided not to return to Germany after his German residences were ransacked. 
• In March 1938, Hitler annexed Austria without bloodshed. 
• In October 1938, having threatened Neville Chamberlain's Britain with war, the Western powers looked away as Germany marched into the Sudetenland and carved up Czechoslovakia.
• In November, convinced by now that Western governments were paper tigers, Hitler initiated the Holocaust with Kristallnacht.