Niklas's blog

An excerpt from Laurence Rees's 'The Nazi Mind'

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Laurence Rees is a great historian, scholar, author, and video producer. He has written a number of extremely valuable books about World War II. His The Holocaust: A New History is one of the most important books that I have read about World War II.

His latest book, The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings From History, is about the mentalities of the Nazis: 'why did they commit the crimes they did? How was it possible that people from a cultured nation perpetrated the worst atrocities in history? What relevance does this terrible past have for us today?', as Rees writes in the start of the book.

The excerpt that I've selected focuses on one particular piece of Nazi propaganda: playing an active role in war was something heroic, something close to God. Their problem was in overcoming what much of the German population had witnessed first-hand with the extremely horrific terrors that came with World War I, the war that first introduced widespread use of automatic rifles and chemical warfare. In other words: how would the Nazis try and spin the truth to their advantage? The result says a lot about lies in our current time.

The following paragraphs are written by Laurence Rees. The paragraphs are pulled from different parts of the first half of the book.


Just as not every German joyously welcomed the war, not everyone who served in the German Army subsequently became a Nazi – far from it. Erich Maria Remarque, for instance, served only a few weeks on the front line in the summer of 1917 before suffering a war-ending shrapnel wound, but the experience was life changing. The novel he wrote years later about the conflict, All Quiet on the Western Front, became a worldwide bestseller. As Remarque saw it, he was part of a generation that had been broken by the war. The novel detailed the experiences of a character called Paul Bäumer, who described how life on the western front turned him and his comrades into creatures who had lost their humanity. The horror of the field hospital, with dead and dying all around, made Bäumer conclude that life was without meaning. Ultimately, he despaired for the future and questioned, after this devastating experience, what the post-war world could possibly offer.

The Nazis loathed All Quiet on the Western Front when it was published in 1929. They despised Remarque’s vision of the pointlessness of suffering. It was as far as one can imagine from the way that the Nazi Party would later demand that Germans view the war. Though Hitler saw life as a ‘cruel struggle’ he still felt there was nobility in dying for your nation, and Remarque’s nihilistic vision was anathema to him.

Early signs that the Nazis were becoming a force in German politics were clear by the spring of 1930. In May, the Prussian Interior Ministry produced a report that revealed how successful the Nazis were at linking the current ‘economic situation’ with the ‘lost war’. The result was that many Germans now believed that only the Nazis offered the ‘radical remedy’ the country needed. The voters’ desperate ‘urge to somehow get out of the catastrophe’ prevented people from seeing ‘through the deceptive economic and political slogans of National Socialism’. The report confirmed that it was ‘those sections of the population who suffer most from the prevailing economic hardship’ who were particularly attracted to the Nazis. These groups included not just ‘the middle class’ and ‘small traders and tradespeople’, but ‘young academics and college students’ as well. The prevalence of these young supporters gave ‘the movement a very special impetus’. Great attention in the report was paid to the power of Nazi propaganda. The scale of the Nazi effort was ‘not remotely matched by any other party or movement’. Nazi speakers were given ‘systematic training’ which allowed them to tailor their speeches directly to individual audiences – helped by the vagueness of the original party programme of 1920 and Hitler’s subsequent refusal to clarify exactly what it meant. Farmers were told their land might be taken from them, and shopkeepers that department stores would destroy their business. The only consistent part of the message was that the Jews were behind all these threats.

Goebbels was delighted to discover that ‘My reputation in Munich [among the Nazi leadership] has grown extremely because of the Remarque matter.’ This was hardly surprising. He had successfully used a small, almost trivial, dispute about the content of a film to express the Nazis’ supposed core values of self-sacrifice and love of Germany – principles which they said underpinned their promise of a Volksgemeinschaft. He also claimed that this was only the beginning: ‘Do we still need to explain in detail that the fight totally and completely goes on, and that we have reason to hope to win it once and for all one day? … Remarque has been eliminated, but the entire German public is still covered in Jewish filth; it is necessary to clean it up.’ Goebbels, without knowing the psychology, understood the power of referring to ‘Jewish filth’. That is because the part of the brain which makes you react to hideous smells is also activated merely by ‘thinking about something morally disgusting’. Thinking ‘of the neighbouring tribe as loathsome cockroaches’, wrote Professor Robert Sapolsky, causes the ‘insula and amygdala’ to activate and is central to how our brains process ‘Us and Them’. The Nazis’ description of Jews as ‘filthy’ or ‘vermin’ had a similarly powerful effect.

But Goebbels’ attack on All Quiet on the Western Front and his attempt to link it to Jewish ‘filth’ did not go entirely his own way. There was a coda to this story, one which demonstrated the monstrous hypocrisy at the heart of Goebbels’ propaganda. On 6 May 1931, Der Angriff published a long article entitled ‘Night at the Front’, a vivid description of life in the trenches. This was intended to debunk Remarque’s portrayal and tell the ‘true’ story of the heroism of German soldiers during the war.

There was just one problem. The Nazis had been duped by a prankster, as the article submitted was – word for word – an extract from All Quiet on the Western Front. The Sozialistische Bildung found the affair ‘priceless’ as it was ‘generally known that the Nazis under the leadership of Dr Goebbels are waging war to the death against Remarque’s book’.

Der Angriff was forced to print a humiliating admission of the mistake: ‘Yesterday, our editorial department fell prey to a Jewish trick. Among the submitted manuscripts, there was an article sent in for free printing by a seeming party comrade: R. Scheinpflug. As it turned out, this little article is an extract from Remarque’s Jewish book: All Quiet on the Western Front. We regret that we were persuaded by this cunning deception to print a part of a book – in principle innocent – that all German-minded people have rejected … This makes clear to everyone what tricks the Jew uses in his fear to harm the NSDAP.’

The fact that there was no evidence that those behind the prank were Jewish didn’t stop Goebbels claiming they were. The accusation only served to illustrate yet again the Nazis’ knee-jerk reaction to anything they hated: the Jews must be responsible. Indeed, to the Nazis the lack of any evidence merely demonstrated how clever the Jews were at covering up their tracks.