Document analysis: Extract from Bernt Engelmann’s autobiographical memoir, In Hitler’s Germany, (1986), pp.1-4
While political violence during the reign of the Third Reich is copiously documented, the intimidation and oppression in the lead up to Nazi capture of power is less well known. Bernt Engelmann’s autobiographical memoir In Hitler’s Germany, written half a century after the event in 1986, serves to fill this lacuna. In the extract in question Engelmann recounts a dramatic event he experienced when he was a school kid growing up in late Weimar Germany. Even eight months before Germany came under the grip of the Third Reich there were troubling early signs of what is in store. Engelmann’s Jewish French teacher (Dr.Levy) was vilified and victimized right before his eyes and for not fault of his. Merely by the fact of his religious faith and by his legitimate act of removing a Swastika flag from the school mast, Dr. Levy would incur the wrath of the Nazi Youth.
Engelmann’s memoir is both instructive and revelatory, for it presents with clarity the roots of Nazi support in the early 1930s when the German Republic was undergoing radical political transformation. But as Engelmann suggests, political success is not a measure of popular support, for even in the incident involving Dr. Levy, the Hitler Youth were only a minority. What the young Nazis lacked in numbers they made up through their overt aggression, giving the illusion that they were a larger (if not the majority) constituency. Scholar Dirk Schumann’s book on the same subject extends Engelmann’s observations. Schumann presents a slightly alternative view, noting how “endemic political violence never directly threatened the existence of the republic and most often took the form of self-limiting “small violence” rooted in small-town traditions of public rebuke that sought to humiliate opponents but not annihilate them” (Schumann as quoted by Kunath 2012). In this manner, Schumann’s analysis concurs with that of William Sheridan Allen, whose classic work The Nazi Seizure of Power (written two years prior to that of Engelmann’s memoir). Allen’s point is that the simmering violence in 1932 was not extensive. The outcomes of violence
“tended most often to be bruises and concussions, not dead bodies. Even the sharpened violence of 1932 resulted in only nine deaths in Saxony, and the Weimar government’s ban on the Nazi SA was effective in Saxony (and throughout Germany)…the Weimar political violence was, in principle, always controllable, if the political will to assert control was present” (Kunath, 2012)