We can conquer the world

‘Beginning with Lublin, the Jews in the General Government [Poland] are now being evacuated eastward. The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only about 40 per cent can be used for forced labor.’ This is Joseph Goebbels writing in his diary in 1942, not long after the Nazis had formulated their Final Solution policy. Goebbels committed suicide 80 years ago today, the day after Hitler and his wife (see He loves me so much); but, unlike Hitler, Goebbels went to some lengths to preserve an historical record of his life - 75,000 pages of his diaries.

Goebbels was born in 1897 into a Catholic family at Rheydt, an industrial town in the Ruhr district. From early childhood he suffered a deformation in his right leg and wore a brace and special shoe, which left him with a limp. At the start of World War I he volunteered for military service, but was rejected. He studied at universities in Bonn, Berlin and Heidelberg (where he was awarded a PhD), and then worked as a journalist, and tried to write novels and plays.

Goebbels joined the Nazi party in 1924, and became allied with Gregor Strasser, Nazi organiser in northern Germany. He came to the attention of Hitler, who gave him a private audience in April 1926, and then appointed him a party leader for the region of Berlin. He soon discovered his talent for propaganda, writing tracts such as The Second Revolution and Lenin or Hitler, and launching the Nazi newspaper Der Angriff (The Attack). In 1928, he was elected to the Reichstag (one of only 10 Nazis), and the following year he became the Nazi party propaganda chief. In 1931, he marred Magda Ritschel, and they would have six children. However, Goebbels was an inveterate womaniser, and was known to have had many affairs.

Goebbels played a key role in successive election campaigns, and was instrumental in seeing Hitler elected leader in 1933. Goebbels, himself, was made minister for propaganda and national enlightenment, a position he then held until his death. He worked assiduously to centralise and control all aspects of German and cultural life, not only the press, but the media, the performing arts, literature, etc, purging them of Jews, socialists, homosexuals and liberals. At the same time, he ensured a development of high culture, such as Wagner’s operas, and plenty of light entertainment for the masses. Once war began in September 1939, his influence over domestic policy strengthened, and, increasingly, with Hitler appearing in public less, he became the face and the voice of the Nazi regime. As a dedicated anti-Semite, Goebbels was strongly linked to the Nazi Final Solution policy, and, especially, the deportation of Jews from Berlin.

In the final stages of the war, Hitler, before killing himself, appointed Goebbels Chancellor of Germany, but it was empty gesture, since a day later - on 1 May - Goebbels and his wife killed themselves, having already murdered their six children. Further biographical information on Goebbels can be freely obtained online at Wikipedia, the Jewish Virtual Library, or from the pages of Doctor Goebbels: His Life and Death by Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel available at Googlebooks.

Goebbels began to keep a diary in 1923, shortly before his 27th birthday, while unemployed. Most of his early entries were about a young woman with whom he was having a turbulent relationship (and whom, in fact, had given him the diary). According to biographers, the diary quickly became a kind of therapy for the troubled young man. Apparently, these early diary entries show little interest in politics, and there is no mention of Hitler or the Nazi movement until the following year. i.e. after Goebbels first met Hitler in July 1925.

In 1934, the year after Hitler had become Chancellor and appointed Goebbels a minister, Goebbels published an edited version of his diaries for propaganda purposes: Vom Kaiserhof zur Reichskanzlei. Eine historische Darstellung in Tagebuchblättern (From the Kaiserhof to the Reich Chancellery: A Historical Account from the Pages of a Diary). This was translated into English in 1938 and published by Hurst and Blackett as My Part in Germany’s Fight.

Wikipedia has a full entry on Goebbels’ diaries, and their history. Goebbels filled 20 hand-written volumes until 1941, and then - fully aware of their historical value - had them stored in underground vaults at the Reichsbank in Berlin. Thereafter, he dictated his entries to a stenographer, who typed up corrected versions. In 1944, he ordered all his diaries to be copied for safekeeping, and a special darkroom was created at his apartment for the diaries to be transferred to microfilm, a recent invention. The boxes of glass plates containing the microfilmed diaries were buried at Potsdam; and the original handwritten/ typed diaries were stored in the Reich Chancellery. Goebbels made his last entry on 10 April 1945.

Some of the original diaries survived the aftermath of the war - a complicated story involving ex-President Herbert Hoover and Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent Louis P. Lochner. (For more on this see Andrew Hamilton’s excellent article in Counter-Currents Publishing). These diaries were edited and translated by Lochner and first published in English in 1948 by Doubleday (New York) and Hamish Hamilton (London) in 1948 as The Goebbels Diaries, 1942-1943. Hamilton notes: ‘An instant bestseller upon its release, the book was serialized in newspapers and magazines and became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. The Hoover faction and Doubleday, however, were forced to surrender most of their profits to the Office of Alien Property and destroy 30,000 copies of the book still in stock. The original sheaf of 7,000 transcribed pages was, however, deposited at the Hoover Library at Stanford, where it remains today.’

Further extracts appeared in print over the years. In 1962, came The Early Goebbels Diaries: the journals of Joseph Goebbels from 1923-1926 (edited by Helmut Heiber, translated by Oliver Watson, published by Praeger, New York; Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London). In 1978, came The Goebbels Diaries: the last days as edited Hugh Trevor-Roper (one of the central characters in the Hitler diary debacle - see Dacre’s non-fake diaries) and translated by Richard Barry (published by Putnam, New York; Secker and Warburg, London).

Controversy surrounded the publication in 1982 of The Goebbels Diaries: 1939–1941, as translated and edited by Fred Taylor (Hamish Hamilton, 1982; Putnam, New York). According to New York Magazine, the diary material was bought ‘from an unidentified German source in a shadowy deal in London’, and, ‘while no one is claiming the book is a forgery its story is one of publishing practices that seem, at the very least, sloppy and misleading to readers.’ The article goes on to explain how the diary pages may well have been doctored in an effort to tailor history from a Russian perspective.

Meanwhile, the 1,600 glass plates of microfilm buried at Potsdam had been discovered by the Soviets and shipped to Moscow, where they sat unopened for decades - until discovered by a German historian, Elke Fröhlich, in 1992. Then, over 15 years (1993-2008), Fröhlich and others edited the entire collection on behalf of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, with the support of the National Archives Service of Russia. They were published in a definitive edition of 29 volumes (each one about 500 pages) by K. G. Saur Verlag as Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil I Aufzeichnungen 1923-1941. It has been estimated that despite the various English editions of the Goebbels diaries, only about 10% of the total, now published in German, has actually appeared in English.

A few extracts in English from Goebbels’ diaries can be found online. Most of the following were found on PBS’s website The Man Behind Hitler, but a couple (those from 1942) came from The Nizkor Project website (which has filtered out only those entries concerned with the fate of the Jews.)

4 July 1924
‘We need a firm hand in Germany. Let’s put an end to all the experiments and empty words, and start getting down to serious work. Throw out the Jews, who refuse to become real Germans. Give them a good beating too. Germany is yearning for an individual, a man - as the earth yearns for rain in the summer.’

17 July 1924
‘I’m so despondent about everything. Everything I try goes totally wrong. There’s no escape from this hole here. I feel drained. So far, I still haven’t found a real purpose in life. Sometimes, I’m afraid to get out of bed in the morning. There’s nothing to get up for.’

13 April 1926
‘. . . I learned that Hitler had phoned. He wanted to welcome us, and in fifteen minutes he was there. Tall, healthy and vigorous. I like him. He puts us to shame with his kindness. We met. We asked questions. He gave brilliant replies. I love him. . . I can accept this firebrand as my leader. I bow to his superiority, I acknowledge his political genius!’

16 June 1926
‘Hitler is still the same dear comrade. You can’t help liking him as a person. And he has a stupendous mind. As a speaker he has constructed a wonderful harmony of gesture, facial expression and spoken word. The born motivator! With him, we can conquer the world. Give him his head, and he will shake the corrupt Republic to its foundations.’

26 October 1928
‘I have no friends and no wife. I seem to be going through a major spiritual crisis. I still have the same old problems with my foot, which gives me incessant pain and discomfort. And then there are the rumours, to the effect that I am homosexual. Agitators are trying to break up our movement, and I’m constantly tied up in minor squabbles. It’s enough to make you weep!’

15 September 1930
‘I am shaking with excitement. The first election results. Fantastic. Jubilation everywhere, an incredible success. It’s stunning. The bourgeois parties have been smashed. So far we have 103 seats. That’s a tenfold increase. I would never have expected it. The mood of enthusiasm reminds me of 1914, when war broke out. Things will get pretty hot in the months ahead. The Communists did well, but we are the second-largest party.’

31 January 1933
‘We’ve made it. We’ve set up shop in Wilhelmstrasse. Hitler is chancellor. It’s like a fairy tale come true! He deserved it. Wonderful euphoria. People were going mad below. . . A new beginning! An explosion of popular energy. Bigger and bigger crowds. I spoke on the radio, to every German station. “We are immensely happy,” I said.’

11 May 1933
‘Worked until late at home. In the evening, I gave a speech outside the opera house, in front of the bonfire while the filthy, trashy books were being burned by the students. I was at the top of my form. Huge crowds. Superb summer weather began today.’

20 June 1936
‘Yesterday: Schwanenwerder. We were waiting for Max Schmeling’s fight with Joe Louis. We were on tenterhooks the whole evening with Schmeling’s wife. We told each other stories, laughed and cheered. . . In round twelve, Schmeling knocked out the Negro. Fantastic, a dramatic, thrilling fight. Schmeling fought for Germany and won. The white man prevailed over the black, and the white man was German. I didn’t get to bed until five.’

23 October 1940
‘Churchill has issued an appeal to the people of France: impudent, offensive and bristling with hypocrisy. A revolting, fat beast. I drafted a speech with a sharp, withering response. If we don’t answer them, the English will continue to draw strength from their illusions.’

10 December 1940
‘Yesterday: A glorious day in Berlin. We are two hours late. Very heavy air raid on London. Some 600,000 kilograms. Entire districts of the city engulfed in flames. Only one aircraft lost. A really fine show. London is playing things down, but the American reports are strong and vivid. Nice to hear. The previous day they were talking about a decline in our offensive capability.’

24 June 1941
‘Sixteen hundred feet of newsreel from the start of our Russian campaign. Some of our new weapons are shown - huge monstrosities that smash to pieces everything in their way. The divine judgement of history is being passed on the Soviet Union.’

27 March 1942
‘Beginning with Lublin, the Jews in the General Government [Poland] are now being evacuated eastward. The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only about 40 per cent can be used for forced labor. The former Gauleiter of Vienna, who is to carry this measure through, is doing it with considerable circumspection and according to a method that does not attract too much attention. A judgment is being visited upon the Jews that, while barbaric, is fully deserved by them. The prophesy which the Fuehrer made about them for having brought on a new world war is beginning to come true in a most terrible manner. One must not be sentimental in these matters. If we did not fight the Jews, they would destroy us. It’s a life-and-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus. No other government and no other regime would have the strength for such a global solution of this question. Here, too, the Fuehrer is the undismayed champion of a radical solution necessitated by conditions and therefore inexorable. Fortunately a whole series of possibilities presents itself for us in wartime that would be denied us in peacetime. We shall have to profit by this.

The ghettoes that will be emptied in the cities of the General Government now will be refilled with Jews thrown out of the Reich. This process is to be repeated from time to time. There is nothing funny in it for the Jews, and the fact that Jewry’s representatives in England and America are today organizing and sponsoring the war against Germany must be paid for dearly by its representatives in Europe - and that’s only right.’

13 December 1942
‘The question of Jewish persecution in Europe is being given top news priority by the English and the Americans. . . At bottom, however, I believe both the English and the Americans are happy that we are exterminating the Jewish riff-raff. But the Jews will go on and on and turn the heat on the British-American press. We won’t even discuss this theme publicly, but instead I give orders to start an atrocity campaign against the English on their treatment of Colonials. Efforts are under way to declare Rome an open city, so that it won’t be bombarded. The Pope is studying the question of air raids on Italian cities and seems to be exerting pressure on the English to spare at least certain districts. The declarations issued by the Vatican on this question are extremely clever and cannot but win favor for the Pope, at least in Italy. But the Italians are willing to accept any help offered them in this painful situation. The Italians are extremely lax in the treatment of Jews. They protect the Italian Jews both in Tunis and in occupied France and won’t permit their being drafted for work or compelled to wear the Star of David. This shows once again that Fascism does not really dare to get down to fundamentals, but is very superficial regarding most important problems. The Jewish question is causing us a lot of trouble. Everywhere, even among our allies, the Jews have friends to help them, which is a proof that they are still playing an important role even in the Axis camp. All the more are they shorn of power within Germany itself.’

3 April 1945
‘At the daily briefing conferences the Luftwaffe comes in for the sharpest criticism from the Führer. Day after day Göring has to listen without being in the position to demur at all. Colonel-General Stumpff, for instance, refused to subordinate himself to Kesselring for the new operations planned in the West. The Führer called him sharply to order saying that the relative positions of Kesselring and Stumpff were similar to those of him and Schaub. In the West, of course, it is now and for the immediate future a continuous process of muddling through. We are in the most critical and dangerous phase of this war and one sometimes has the impression that the German people, fighting at the height of the war crisis, has broken out in a sweat impossible for the non-expert to distinguish as the precursor of death or recovery.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 1 May 2015.

Clumsy by being over-sincere

‘If as a diarist he is often clumsy by being over-sincere, as a student he devotes too much effort to transcribing his sources and too little to considering their interrelations.’ This was written by a biographer of the diaries of Franz Xaver von Baader, born 260 years ago today. A German philosopher, theologian, physician, and mining engineer, he was renowned for his contributions to mysticism and Christian theosophy. Although he kept diaries, they are predominantly religious and philosophical in content; moreover, they only seem to have been published in the original German.

Baader was born on 27 March 1765, in Munich, the third son of Franz Peter Baader, the court physician to the Elector of Bavaria. Like his father, he pursued medical studies, at the universities of Ingolstadt and Vienna, briefly practicing medicine before moving to England to study mineralogy and engineering (1792-1796). There, he developed an interest in philosophy and theology. In 1820, he retired from his engineering career, and thereafter published one Fermenta Cognitionis in six parts from 1822 to 1825, in which he combats modern philosophy and recommends the study of Böhme.

In 1826, Baader was appointed professor of philosophy and speculative theology at the newly established University of Munich. ​In 1838, he publicly opposed the interference of the Roman Catholic Church in civil matters and, in consequence, was interdicted from lecturing on the philosophy of religion for three years.

Baader’s personal life was marked by his deep spirituality and intellectual pursuits. He was influenced by the mystical writings of Jacob Böhme and Neoplatonism. His philosophical approach combined elements of mysticism, theosophy, and Catholic theology, distinguishing him from other German philosophers of his era. He died in Munich, unmarried, in 1841. Further information can be found at New Advent, Prabook and Wikipedia.

Baader certainly kept journals - published in the original German as Tag und Studien Bücher. They are predominantly religious and philosophical in content; however, his youth diaries - Jugendtagebücher - are said to offer a more valuable personal perspective. After his death, between 1851 and 1860, his works were collected and edited by a number of his disciples and published in 16 volumes - his diaries are in volume XI. Although I cannot find any extracts from his diaries online, Dennis Osborn Leuer does discuss - in a biographical paper available online at Oxford University Research Archive - Baader’s diaries and their relevance (in the Life and Works of Franz von Baader, 1976)

The Beginnings of Baader’s Naturphilosophie: Religion and Nature in the Tagebücher

‘Baader’s Journal’s of 1786-1793 are primarily, as he declares them to be, private documents of self-development. This is only formally contradicted by their semi-public character: they were seemingly modelled on contemporary confessions such as Lavater’s (published) Geheimes Tagebuch and copies of Baader’s rather studied étalage du moi were sent directly to his religious preceptor, J. M. Sailer. Secondarily, Baader’s journals are notebooks on his studies. If as a diarist he is often clumsy by being over-sincere, as a student he devotes too much effort to transcribing his sources and too little to considering their interrelations. For these reasons, and because of their dual character, the journals at first sight appear shapeless. Having said this much, and in awareness of the lack of coherence even in Baader’s formal writings, his diary would seem an inauspicious place to begin organizing the fragments of his Naturphilosophie into an intelligible structure. But such early writings are normally understood in terms of the author’s characteristic statements, that is, in terms of the ideas which survived. In this perspective, Baader’s journals show not only the varied intellectual ambience of early Romanticism, but, in embryonic growth, the enduring major theme of Naturphilosophie. Stated briefly, that theme was the intuited unity of spirit (Geist) and nature (Natur). Once alleged, it spoke for the corresponding philosophical union of religion (or psychology) and natural science, which became the very task of Naturphilosophie.’

Laws of the world organism

‘Shouldn’t the student of modern subjects learn from geology, physics, chemistry, etc., the laws of the world organism? The perceived unity of the world is the most magnificent event in the study of nature, it is the content of all true philosophy; for even the mind and its development, which philosophy in its narrow sense has considered up until now, is itself a production of nature.’ This is from the diary of Karl August Möbius, an influential German zoologist born two centuries ago today. There are no published diaries kept by Möbius, but an American academic, Lynn K. Nyhart, quotes from the diaries in her celebrated book on the history of natural science in Germany. 

Möbius was born on 7 February 1825 in Eilenburg, Prussia, the only child of Johann Heinrich Möbius, a dancing teacher who died when Karl was just three, and his mother who was a descendant of Martin Luther. He was educated at home until the age of 12-13 when he was sent away to a private training college to prepare for a career in primary school teaching. From 1844 to 1849 he taught at Seesen in the Harz Mountains in Northern Germany. He went to the University of Berlin to study natural sciences under Johannes Muller, then took up teaching again at the Johanneum Grammar School in Hamburg. His continuing studies in the natural sciences gained him a reputation that led to a post at the Hamburg Museum of Natural History. In 1855, Möbius married Helene Meyer, and they had three children. 

In 1863, Möbius cofounded the first German sea water aquarium, in Hamburg. In 1868, shortly after passing his doctoral examination at the University of Halle, he was appointed Professor of Zoology at the University of Kiel. There he devised and opened a zoology institute which would for decades be considered a model for such establishments. Between 1868 and 1870, he was commissioned by the Ministry of Agricultural Affairs in Prussia to conduct research on the Bay of Kiel oyster beds. This led to his groundbreaking work Die Auster und die Austernwirtschaft (The Oyster and Oyster Farming) in 1877. In this, he introduced the concept of ‘biocenosis’ or ‘living community,’ describing the interdependence of species in an ecosystem.

In the mid-1870s, Möbius participated in scientific expeditions, including a journey to Mauritius and the Seychelles in 1874-1875, which resulted in a comprehensive review of the fauna in that area. In 1888, he became the director of the zoological collections of the Natural History Museum of Berlin, and Professor of Systematic and Geographical Zoology at the Kaiser Wilhelm University, also in Berlin, where he taught until he retired in 1905 at the age of 80. He died three years later. More information can be found at Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Kiel University

Although there is no evidence of any published diaries, Möbius did keep a diary from 1844 to 1849 while living in the Harz mountains. This is described and quoted from in Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany by Lynn K. Nyhart (University of Chicago Press, 2009). Some pages can be previewed at Internet Archive.

In the book, Nyhart examines various responses that coalesced into the so-called ‘biological perspective’, including: the transformation of natural history practices; changes in museum displays; developments in classroom education; and the emergence of the modern zoo. In particular, she highlights the contributions of key figures such as Karl Möbius, who articulated the concept of the ‘living community’. The work is praised for being wide-ranging, closely argued, and very readable for it goes beyond just tracing the history of a scientific concept, offering insights into the broader cultural and institutional contexts of late 19th-century Germany

Here is one extract about Möbius and his diary.

‘During his time there, from 1844 to 1849, [Möbius] kept a diary that both recorded his love of nature and afforded him a chance to practice his writing - a form of conscious self-improvement and self-cultivation - as he strove tirelessly to prove himself. In the diary’s pages he alternated rhapsodies over his hikes in the mountains with admonishments to himself to be a better man. As he voraciously read history and nature writing, and studied English and the classical languages in his spare hours, he sought to live up to a standard of virtue that would overcome his resentment of his poverty. “Cannot the privation wrought by poverty and the disdain brought on by underestimation and misjudgment lead the spirit [den Geist] to depend on itself and to drive it to be enough for itself?” he agonized in September 1847. “Thoughts, feelings of inspiration, and pure will: these are the opinions that will break through the final barriers to draw us into the inspiring center of the All, into the deity.”

His communion with nature, which offered him considerable spiritual sustenance, was deepened by reading Humboldt. “Great Humboldt!” he gushed a few months later. “With the purest, most warmhearted enthusiasm you [Du] have penetrated into the unity [Zusammenhang] of the world, and in your Kosmos you have given to your race [deinem Geschlechte] the treasure of your spirit, your great knowledge, in clear, poetic language drenched with the warmth of your heart.” The human race “gazes in amazement at your work and wants to thank you on its knees.” 

Reading Shakespeare and Goethe inspired him to similar heights; their works allowed him to imagine himself “on the throne of the world,” with a view of God’s laws of eternal human nature. From this vantage point, he forgot his individual existence and felt part of a larger, God-given order. One route to this sublimation was science: “Science [die Wissenschaft] is the most beautiful bride. He whom she has once kissed is caught in her magic.” 

These youthful yearnings for connection and unity would persist in his private writing as preoccupations with community and self-abnegation and may be viewed as the first, ill-formed inklings of what would emerge in scientific form years later as his living-community concept.’

Here is a second extract.

‘By 1848 he was reading a pedagogical text called Education toward a Public Spirit (Erziehung zum Gemeingeist), whose author argued that philosophy was to play a very minor role in his proposed reformed “Naturgymnasium.” “Here I must object,” Möbius wrote in his diary “Shouldn’t the student of modern subjects [Realschiiler] learn from geology, physics, chemistry, etc., the laws of the world organism? The perceived unity of the world is the most magnificent event in the study of nature, it is the content of all true philosophy; for even the mind and its development, which philosophy in its narrow sense has considered up until now, is itself a production of nature.” ’

And here is a direct quotation by Nyhart from another diary kept by Möbius apparently between 1861 and 1863.

27 February 1863

‘When the son of a craftsman in a small town has come so far through his own work that he is counted among the more capable teachers and research scholars in a large city, he should act content if he is not granted a wished-for highest scientific position. He may keep working on with the accustomed effort, on the side of his practical profession, so that he never forgets his heritage. It is easy for us to consider ourselves more independent of the whole than we are. But our being follows on all sides from our birth, childhood, and course of development. We only want to be taken by others as we are in the present, and yet they always see, as well, how we got here.’

The worst is yet to come

‘We stand at the turn of the year more hopeless and depressed than ever during these unfortunate four and a half years of the World War. In the past, we still saw the possibility of a favorable conclusion to the serious crisis for humanity; today, this glimmer of light is only tiny, barely perceptible. The war is only over in theory; it rages on in an even more terrible form than before. Let us not deceive ourselves; the worst is yet to come.’ This is from the published diaries of Alfred Hermann Fried, an Austrian pacifist born 160 years ago. He is remembered for cofounding the German peace movement, winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and championing the use of Esperanto.

Fried was born in Vienna into a Hungarian-Jewish family on 11 November 1864. He left school aged 15 and started to work in a bookshop. In 1883 he moved to Berlin, where he opened a printing press. It was there that Fried became a steadfast pacifist and befriended Bertha von Suttner. Together, in 1892, they launched the magazine, Die Waffen nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms!) - which from 1899 became Die Friedenswarte (The Peacekeeper). He co-founded the German peace society, and became known for advocating ‘fundamental pacifism,’ peace as the ultimate solution. He wrote and published countless articles in his magazines calling for peace and harmony among nations.

The Hague Peace Conference of 1899 was a turning point in the development of Fried’s philosophy of pacifism. Thereafter, in his appeals to the German intellectual community, he placed more reliance on economic cooperation and political organisation among nations as bases for peace, and less upon limitation of armaments and schemes for international justice. ‘War is not in itself a condition so much as the symptom of a condition, that of international anarchy’, he said. ‘If we wish to substitute for war the settlement of disputes by justice, we must first substitute for the condition of international anarchy a condition of international order.’

Fried was a prominent member of the Esperanto movement, and in 1903 published an Esperanto textbook. In 1909, he collaborated with Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine of the Central Office of International Associations in the preparation of the Annuaire de la Vie Internationale. In 1911 he received the Nobel Peace Prize together with Tobias Asser. At the outbreak of World War I, he moved to neutral Switzerland, and worked continuously for an end to the conflict. After the war, he returned to Austria to continue writing and advocating international peace. He died in 1921. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Nobel Prize website, and the Jewish Virtual Library.

During the war, Fried kept a diary, one which he later published in four volumes as Mein Kriegs-Tagebuch (My War Journal). The diary is available online at Internet Archive and, thanks to a ZIMD digitisation project, at this dedicated website. A short introduction at the latter states: ‘Bernhard Tuider [from the Austrian National Library], who wrote one of the few well-founded works about [Fried’s] war diaries, was fascinated by their power. 1,600 pages about the World War from a man who, as a journalist at the NZZ in neutral Switzerland, worked through up to 50 international newspapers every day. The war diaries are unique in their quality and can be counted as part of the heritage of the world culture of peace.’ However, as far as I can tell, the diary appears only to be available in the origial German.

In the diary, Fried documents his activities and those of colleagues in the peace movement; expresses dissatisfaction with the peace settlement; and details his journalistic campaign against the Versailles Treaty. As a whole, the diary served as a platform for Fried to argue that the war proved the validity of his pacifistic analysis of world politics. A more detailed look at Fried’s diary can be found in an article by Tuider. Moreover, a list of the original diaries is available at the online archive of California.

The following two extracts have been sourced from the digitised files and then translated by Google.

31 December 1915
‘The hopes for peace that were kindled by the article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung prove to be vain. The proposals are rejected by friend and foe alike. People’s minds are too clouded to be able to see that this is not about the terms of peace at all, but only the beginning of discussions. The tools of reason should only be put into use. That is the main thing.

On the other hand: England, England so proud of its freedoms, is introducing general conscription. This is a step backwards in culture for all, which we owe to this war. And a bad prospect. If England is only now beginning to prepare for a continental war, how long will it last?

In France, the Socialist Congress has passed a resolution in favor of continuing the war until a permanent legal peace is achieved. The resolution was adopted by an enormous majority of 2,736 votes to 76.

These are two events that do not mean peace, but war. The continuation of the war and increased bitterness, increased destruction. Hundreds of thousands of young men are to be sacrificed again. That is the meaning of these two events that conclude the war year of 1915.

Last year I raised the question here whether the terrible war would end on New Year’s Eve this year. ‘For those who can measure the magnitude of the shocks that these five months of war have already brought about, it may seem questionable whether New Year’s Eve 1915 will already descend upon a Europe liberated from war.’ - Questionable. And yet I concluded hopefully with a ‘perhaps.’ It is a solemn seriousness that, after the end of this bloody year, provides the answer to the questioning view of the previous year. And today one dares not look into the future of the new year with the same doubt. Everything that must come is terrible. The slaughter has lasted too long; Europe has been destroyed for too long. Our generation can no longer hope for peace. I conclude my notes for 1915 with a curse on the year that has passed away, on the year that has been stolen from us, with a curse on the insane arrangers of this war.’

31 December 1918
‘A year ago we stood before Brest-Litovsk. Today we stand before Versailles. Is it going to be the same? Is the Entente victors going to repeat the fraud of the German military, who then spoke of a peace without territorial cessions and compensation and then emphasized their ‘power position’ and forced the most shameful peace of conquest? Pichon recently spoke in the French Chamber of the annexation of the Saar region as compensation for the injustice committed against France in 1815. Will they ultimately want to restore the integrity of Troy? The failure of the English elections has strengthened Lloyd George’s power politics. All pacifists and politicians of reconciliation have been defeated. These are elections like the Hottentot elections in Germany in 1912. The new state of the Czechoslovaks was in no way different from Wilhelmine Germany in its early days. The areas of the German-Austrians and Magyars are still being occupied and Czechized. In ultra-German Reichenberg, where the town’s police wore spiked helmets in the Prussian style, the Czech language is being introduced as an official language. The Italians want to hold on to the German territories in Tyrol and are constantly coming into conflict with the South Slavs on the Adriatic. The peace that is about to be concluded and which was originally under the sign of the Wilson program threatens to become a new affirmation of the power principle. There is therefore a danger that it will not be peace again, only a period of truce, interspersed with seeds of conflict that will soon flourish under the expected regime of violence. Is it possible that after this terrible object lesson we are threatened with something like this, that the madness that we thought we had overcome has survived? It is clear that if this is to happen, the efforts of those who want to radically overcome the current situation, who believe that new life can only blossom from the total destruction of this society, will gain strength. The German militarists, in their delusion, were the pioneers and firing guard of Bolshevism. Should the military and the militarily minded politicians of the Entente blindly follow in the footsteps of their Prussian predecessors? - The victory of the principle of force in Versailles would mean the victory of the world revolution in its most radical form. Indeed, it would even leave no other hope that the unbearable pressure of the militarism that will still be maintained after this war will be removed. The people who have the decision to shape the coming peace agreement take on a great responsibility. It depends on them whether the institution of war is eliminated by a rational decision or whether its elimination is achieved through decades of terrible bloodbath in the civil war.

We stand at the turn of the year more hopeless and depressed than ever during these unfortunate four and a half years of the World War. In the past, we still saw the possibility of a favorable conclusion to the serious crisis for humanity; today, this glimmer of light is only tiny, barely perceptible. The war is only over in theory; it rages on in an even more terrible form than before. Let us not deceive ourselves; the worst is yet to come.’

Our civilization’s survival

It is 50 years today since the death of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, an extraordinary American who made his name as an aviation pioneer. However, he became even more of a celebrity when his toddler son was kidnapped and then murdered (the so-called ‘crime-of-the-century’). Subsequently, he inadvertently courted further publicity with his views on Germany, which led some to perceive him as a Nazi sympathiser - a view not dispelled, many years later, by the posthumous publication of a diary he kept during the war years. Long after his death, it was also discovered that apart from having a large family with his wife Anne Morrow, he had kept secret long-term relationships with at least three women, in Germany and Switzerland, each of whom had borne him children.

Lindbergh was born in 1902, the son of Swedish immigrants, his father being a lawyer and congressman, and his mother a chemistry teacher. He began to study engineering at the University of Wisconsin but left, after two years, to fly daredevil stunts at fairs. In 1924, he enlisted in the army, was trained to fly, and then joined the Robertson Aircraft Corporation as a pilot. In 1927, he took up a $25,000 challenge, that had stood since 1919, to fly non-stop from New York to Paris. Several St Louis businessmen helped finance the cost of a plane, with Lindbergh involved in the design. On 20 May he made the famous flight of around 5,600km in under 34 hours. Thereafter, he became a celebrity, and an active campaigner, partly backed by Harry Guggenheim, for the further development of aeronautics.

While in Mexico on a promotion trip, Lindbergh met Anne Spencer Morrow, daughter of the American ambassador. They married in 1929, he taught her to fly, and they made many foreign trips. In 1932, their toddler son, Charles, was kidnapped - causing a media frenzy - and ten weeks later the body was found. It took more than two years for the so-called ‘crime-of-the-century’ to be resolved when, in 1934, Bruno Richard Hauptmann was found responsible for the murder. He was executed in 1936. Since then, though, Hauptmann’s guilt has been much debated, with many books being written on the case, some asserting his innocence, others backing the original judgement.

To escape the press and media attention during these years, the Lindberghs and a second son (four other children were to follow) moved to England. Subsequently, Lindbergh attracted more public attention when he accepted a German medal of honour from Hermann Goering. After returning to the US in 1939, Lindbergh campaigned against US involvement in the European war, and was accused of being a Nazi sympathiser. After Pearl Harbor, though, he sought involvement in the war, and ended up flying about 50 combat missions even though he was a civilian. He also helped develop aviation techniques.

After the War, Lindbergh worked as an adviser for government and industry. His book The Spirit of St Louis, an expanded account of the 1927 flight, won a Pulitzer Prize. In the 1960s, he campaigned on environmental issues. From 1957 until his death on 26 August 1974, Lindbergh maintained a secret affair with Brigitte Hesshaimer, a German hatmaker, who had three children by him, as well as affairs with two other women (one German, one Swiss) who each bore him two children. It would be nearly 30 years after his death before these affairs became public. Further information is available at Wikipedia, Minnesota Historical Society, or the Spirit of St. Louis 2 Project.

In 1937, two years before the war in Europe began, Lindbergh began to write a diary, which he kept up until the war was over in 1945. However, this was not published until 1970 when Harcourt Brace Jovanovich brought out The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh. William Jovanovich, himself, provided a short introduction to the book:

‘The quarter century that has passed since the ending of World War II has dimmed our recollection, which is reason enough for us to be interested in reading a unique record of that terrible time. But the years have also lessened our sense of certitude. The past is always compromised by the present: many of the assurances of long ago, on re-examination, turn into questions and speculations. Both the exercise of memory and the writing of history tend to make it so, however different they are in resource. The historian will attempt to read the whole record of the past so far as he is able, but since he cannot write the whole record, he will select those events and circumstances that accommodate his thesis or his bias or his style or whatever. Those selected items of occurrence become, as Max Weber concluded, the facts of history.

So, too, in writing of the moment, as in a diary or journal, an act of selection takes place. One must decide what was significant in the course of a day before he can keep a reasonably short record of its passing. Yet the journal becomes, in the hands of a serious and candid person, an exceptional means by which events can be depicted literally, which is to say depicted with both accuracy of account and a consistency of view. This one recognises, casting back, in the journals of John Wesley, of Thoreau, and of General Charles (“Chinese”) Gordon, among a few other. It may be seen, now, in the wartime journals of Charles A. Lindbergh, which are here published twenty-five years after the last of the entries was written.’

Jovanovich also included a letter he received from Lindbergh. Jovanovich asked what Lindbergh had concluded on rereading the diaries, and Lindbergh replied: ‘We won the war in a military sense; but in a broader sense it seems to me we lost it, for our Western civilization is less respected and secure than it was before.’  In the letter, Lindbergh also summarised his reasons for writing the journal in the first place, and his reasons for agreeing to publishing it:

‘More than a generation after the war’s end, our occupying armies still must occupy, and the world has not been made safe for democracy and freedom. On the contrary, our own system of democratic government is being challenged by that greatest of dangers to any government: internal dissatisfaction and unrest. It is alarmingly possible that World War II marks the beginning of our Western civilization’s breakdown, as it already marks the breakdown of the greatest empire ever built by man. Certainly our civilization’s survival depends on meeting the challenges that tower before us with unprecedented magnitude in almost every field of modern life. Most of these challenges were, at least, intensified through the waging of World War II. Are we now headed toward a third and still more disastrous war between world nations? Or can we improve human relationships sufficiently to avoid such a holocaust? Since it is inherent in the way of life that issues will continue between men, I believe human relationships can best be improved through clarifying the issues and conditions surrounding them. I hope my journals relating to World War II will help clarify issues and conditions of the past and thereby contribute to understanding issues and conditions of the present and the future.’

The New York Times found Lindbergh’s diary fascinating. Eric Goldman, in his review, wrote: ‘Except in the limited instances where the entries concern highly technical matters, the “Wartime Journals” are fascinating, almost hypnotically so. The prose is always lean, often pungent; on occasions when Lindbergh’s mind or emotions were deeply engaged, it rises to a compelling eloquence.’ However, Goldman also finds much to question about Lindbergh’s beliefs:

‘If readers will surely be held by the volume, many will read on with decidedly mixed feelings. The integrity with which the journals have been published presents again the Charles Lindbergh who outraged millions of Americans in 1939-41. The basic issue involved in World War II, the diary repeatedly stresses, was the preservation of “civilization,” defined as the comforts and attitudes of the “Nordic,” middle-class West, against the forces of “disorder” and “leveling” threatening from within and without. The democracies were losing “character”; the “virility” of Nazi Germany was the barrier against the greatest menace, the Communism of “Asiatic” Russia. Franklin Roosevelt is pictured as a relentless schemer, distrusted by “friend or enemy,” who was quite capable of taking the nation to war out of sheer politics and vainglory. The diary show that Lindbergh had considerable compassion for the German Jews. But much more than his public charge, it attacks the “Jewish influence” in bringing war to the United States, particularly as a result of Jewish “control” of “huge part” of the mass media. A good deal of space is given to describing brutalities by U.S. troops against Japanese soldiers; the atrocities of individual Americans are equated with the official policy of the Third Reich. Not a sentence excoriates Nazism as a general credo or poses it as a menace to civilization in any tenable definition of the word, including Lindbergh’s own. Entry after entry bespeaks a preoccupation, almost an obsession, with the “race problem,” those “northern peoples” versus all others.’

The full volume can be borrowed digitally at Internet Archive. Moreover pages from The Boyhood Diary of Charles Lindbergh 1913-1916, published by Capstone Press in 2001, can be read online at Googlebooks. 

Here, though, are two extracts taken from the The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh.

26 August 1938
‘Left embassy at 10:30 after usual problem of tipping the servants. More difficult here because of exchange problem and the fact that American Embassy help are mostly Italian. [. . .]

Arrived at aerodrome shortly before 11:00. Many Russians and Americans there to see us off. Impossible to keep them from doing this, although it makes extra work for them and delays us in getting started. Took off Moscow 11:15. [. . .]

We flew first to Tula, then to Orel, then to Kharkov, making our first landing at the latter place. After a half hour’s stop at Kharkov, we flew practically direct to Rostov on Don. Our routes are laid out for us by the Russian officials, and we attempt to follow them exactly. I miss the unrestricted routes of the United States. Immediately after taking off from the Moscow aerodrome, we passed over the aircraft factory I visited several days ago. A few minutes later we passed several training fields. [. . .]

We are having high oil temperatures in this hot weather. Sometimes above 90°C. Everything else is all right, except both voltmeter and ammeter are fluctuating excessively. The English mechanics don’t understand this equipment, even though Phillips & Powis are the agents for our Menasco engine. In consequence it is never properly serviced. The English regulations load you down with logbooks, licenses, and other papers, but one good American mechanic is worth all of them, ten times over, including the Air Ministry inspections. I keep up the logs only enough to get by the regulations. They are no value whatsoever from my standpoint, but if I should crash the plane I am sure the authorities would blame it on some omitted entry or a bit of overload, regardless of the actual cause.

The readiness to blame a dead pilot for an accident is nauseating, but it has been the tendency ever since I can remember. What pilot has not been in positions where he was in danger and where perfect judgment would have advised against going? But when a man is caught in such a position he is judged only by his error and seldom given credit for the times he has extricated himself from worse situations. Worst of all, blame is heaped upon him by other pilots, all of whom have been in parallel situations themselves, but without being caught in them. If one took no chances, one would not fly at all. Safety lies in the judgment of the chances one takes. That judgment, in turn, must rest upon one’s outlook on life. Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed. Why should we look for his errors when a brave man dies? Unless we can learn from his experience, there is no need to look for weakness. Rather, we should admire the courage and spirit in his life. What kind of man would live where there is no daring? And is life so dear that we should blame men for dying in adventure? Is there a better way to die?

We had a good opportunity to see the collective farms and coal mines of the Ukraine. The collective farms are unlike anything I have seen elsewhere. They consist of a row of twenty or so houses, strung out along a road, with garden patches of an acre or so behind them, and large fields outside.

Landed Rostov 7:01. There was a group of people to meet us, including the mayor and the head of the local Intourist. Also the head of the flying school we came to see. Colonel Slepnev was there, having flown from Moscow ahead of us. The Russians are doing everything possible for us. I feel embarrassed because it so much. Dislike to cause so much trouble. Colonel Slepnev had only one hour’s sleep last night. We have never seen anything to exceed Russian hospitality. Also, they have been unusually considerate in not crowding our days with too many engagements.’

21 July 1944
‘The Japanese stronghold on the cliffs of Biak is to be attacked again in the morning. Several hundred Japs are still holding out in caves and crevices in an area about 300 yards wide and 1,000 yards long. So far, they have thrown back all of our attacks, and inflicted nearly one hundred casualties on our infantrymen. They have as perfect a natural defensive position as could be devised - sharp coral ridges overlooking and paralleling the coast, filled with deep and interlocking caves and screened from our artillery fire by coral ledges. This area is clearly visible from the top of the coral cliff, ten feet from the back door of the officers quarters where I am staying - a brown ridge surrounded by green jungle on the coast of Biak about three miles across the water from Owi Island.

The intense artillery fire has stripped the trees of leaves and branches so that the outline of the coral ridge itself can be seen silhouetted against the sky. Since I have been on Owi Island, at irregular intervals through the night and day, the sound of our artillery bombarding this Japanese stronghold has floated in across the water. This afternoon, I stood on the cliff outside our quarters (not daring to sit on the ground because of the danger of typhus) and watched the shells bursting on the ridge. For weeks that handful of Japanese soldiers, variously estimated at between 250 and 700 men, has been holding out against overwhelming odds and the heaviest bombardment our well-supplied guns can give them.

If positions were reversed and our troops held out so courageously and well, their defense would be recorded as one of the most glorious examples of tenacity, bravery, and sacrifice in the history of our nation. But, sitting in the security and relative luxury of our quarters, I listen to American Army officers refer to these Japanese soldiers as “yellow sons of bitches.” Their desire is to exterminate the Jap ruthlessly, even cruelly. I have not heard a word of respect or compassion spoken of our enemy since I came here.

It is not the willingness to kill on the part of our soldiers which most concerns me. That is an inherent part of war. It is our lack of respect for even the admirable characteristics of our enemy - for courage, for suffering, for death, for his willingness to die for his beliefs, for his companies and squadrons which go forth, one after another, to annihilation against our superior training and equipment. What is courage for us is fanaticism for him. We hold his examples of atrocity screamingly to the heavens while we cover up our own and condone them as just retribution for his acts. [. . .]

We must bomb them out, those Jap soldiers, because this is war, and if we do not kill them, they will kill us now that we have removed the possibility of surrender. But I would have more respect for the character of our people if we could give them a decent burial instead of kicking in the teeth of corpses, and pushing their bodies into hollows in the ground, scooped out and covered up by bulldozers. After that, we will leave their graves unmarked and say, “That’s the only way to handle the yellow sons of bitches.”

Over to the 35th Fighter Squadron in the evening to give a half hour’s talk to the pilots on fuel economy and the P-38.’

See also Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 26 August 2014.

A veritable torrent of accusation

‘This afternoon, I was brought to a hearing. This was done before a captain wearing the insignia of a former noncom, and the look of a decent Bavarian petit bourgeois (he could have been a clerk behind a post-office counter, or in a busy law office). Still, when I declared that what had brought me here was foul denunciation, the machinations of a low intriguer, these attractive features contorted and he blared at me like a tuba. I waited until all this lung power was exhausted, and then, looking him earnestly in the eyes, ventured that at the moment a defenceless man stood there before him - with emphasis on at the moment. Then there flooded down on my head a veritable torrent of accusation.’ This is from the very last entry in the diary of Friedrich Reck, a German writer born 140 years ago today. He was fiercely opposed to Hitler, and within three months of this diary entry he would be deported to Dachau, and then executed.

Reck was born on 11 August 1884 in Masuria (Maleczewo, Poland), the son of a Prussian politician and landowner. He studied medicine in Innsbruck for a while, and spent a year as a ship’s doctor. He served as an officer in the Prussian Army though was dismissed due to a diagnosis of diabetes. He married Anna Louise Büttner in 1908. They had three daughters and a son (before divorcing in 1930). He graduated in 1911, and moved to Stuttgart to become a journalist and theatre critic for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and then to Pasing near Munich in 1914.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Reck was a novelist, mainly of children’s adventure stories. In 1933, he converted to Catholicism, and in 1935 he married Irmgard von Borcke, with whom he had three more daughters. In 1937, he published a historical novel on the Münster rebellion, Bockelson: History of a Mass Delusion, which is today seen as a critical allegory of Hitler and Nazism. However, his books began to be banned by the Nazis, and many were not published until years after his death. In October 1944, he was arrested, and subsequently released, only to be re-arrested in December and charged with ‘insulting the German currency’. A few weeks later he was transferred to Dachau, and, in February, he was shot dead. Further information is available from Wikipedia.

Today, Reck is best remembered for his journal. It was published for the first time in German in 1947, republished in English translation in 1970, and reissued by New York Review Books in 2013. Diary of a Man in Despair contains thirty-nine dated entries covering the period from May 1936 to October 1944, most of them are several or many pages long. The diary has its own Wikipedia page, and is available to read via a digital loan at Internet Archive. 

Nicolas Lezard in The Guardian has this assessment: ‘Reck can come across as a snob at times, but the prose is so good, and the judgments so astute - when he speculates about the future he is often right - that his position makes sense. His thoughts on Christianity are also worth paying attention to, whether you are religious or not. It is also pleasing to note that there was not a trace of antisemitism in him, and he foresaw that the Nazis’ attitudes to the Jews would one day bring the country to its doom. Meanwhile he dreams up names for Hitler – “the middle-class Antichrist” or “the Machiavelli for chambermaids” - and rails against the Prussian mindset which allowed such a man to thrive. He even castigates the officers behind the July 1944 assassination attempt - despite his wish that it had succeeded - for having hitherto betrayed both the republic and the monarchy, which is an original position. This is one of the most important personal documents to have come out of the war.’

The following extract is taken from the very last entry in the published diary.

14 October 1944
‘All that was entailed, supposedly, was a single night at a hotel, and so I had come with just a small valise. They searched it for weapons: It was not a good beginning. And when I asked for a lawyer, the response was harsh.

Soon I was in a cell, and standing (against regulations) on the plank bed could see out into the perfect autumn day. The right to be out in that perfection had been taken from me, stolen as surely as they have stolen from us those years that were the First World War, and those of the years of inflation of the Twenties, and the Hitler-years - a quarter of a century, the best of a man’s life - robbed by these militarist maniacs.

Across the caserne yard in the officers’ quarters, moving from room to room behind the cheap curtains considered elegant these days was a blond of the new officer breed, very likely yesterday a lavatory attendant into whose hand (the same hand which had just been clearing away various blockages and encumbrances) you slipped two marks. They have come up, these people, as far as we have gone down these last twelve years; obviously, since it is our money which has raised them up. The little schizophrenic who is their leader had nothing and was nothing, but from 1918 those like him in their rage began to puff him up into what he has become. What an Augean stable that will be, the one they leave for us to clean up!

Now they’re marching on the parade-ground. I hear this from morning to night, the latest in military marches, snappy little melodics bellowed by a leader sheep, shouted back by his flock of 250. Shattering, these idiotic songs, these faces, this spiritual castration-by-propaganda. They march and rumble past - here, five men attached to one machine, there, a lumbering behemoth belching clouds of stinking gas with ten aboard, then another new mechanical monster with another five. What do these iron-plated apparitions have to do with soldiers? Better take the regimental insignia off their uniforms, and sew on instead gold-threaded representations of screwdrivers, or oil cans!

I want to be clear: I come from a long line of soldiers. At seventeen, on a horse behind the silver kettle-drums, that is exactly what I felt myself to be - a soldier. But the coming of the machine gun and the four-cylinder engine has raised a question, and that is, does the profession of soldier still exist, any more than that of statesman, or king, or poet or intellectual - supplanted as these have been by surrogates - so that all that’s left among the traditional professions is that of licensed whore. (And even the public whore is close to being regulated out of existence, with the woman being required twice each session, at foreplay and at climax, to shout a politically knowledgeable ‘Heil Hitler!’) As for me, I can see myself ending as a pacifist . . . not because I set that much store by the inherently fragile artifacts of this world; no, because I want to officiate at the funeral of a damnable lie - the lie that the concept of ‘soldier’ can be infinitely further perverted!

This afternoon, I was brought to a hearing. This was done before a captain wearing the insignia of a former noncom, and the look of a decent Bavarian petit bourgeois (he could have been a clerk behind a post-office counter, or in a busy law office). Still, when I declared that what had brought me here was foul denunciation, the machinations of a low intriguer, these attractive features contorted and he blared at me like a tuba. I waited until all this lung power was exhausted, and then, looking him earnestly in the eyes, ventured that at the moment a defenceless man stood there before him - with emphasis on at the moment.

Then there flooded down on my head a veritable torrent of accusation:
- I had falsely stated my rank (to which I responded that in the course of my life I had waded in too much blood to give undue importance to rank).
- That in the course of my earlier admission of wrongdoing, I had made light of the People’s Militia. With my statement before me, I proceeded to show that the very opposite was the case.
- That I had organised a demonstration of women protesting against the removal of crucifixes from public buildings, did not say ‘Heil Hitler’ when I should have, and downplayed the value of the German currency.

I answered with a question: was I being questioned here under military or Party auspices? Also, in the matter of the currency charge, could I get further details?

This was not a fruitful approach. What followed was a torrent of invective that burst over me like burning lava, covering all argument, all protest. I was silent. They took me away.

But I was not to get off so lightly. They called in the major, and when I saw him I knew: only a Higher Power could save me now. He was an apparition, a man-doll, a frightful stumbling puppet smashed by shot and shell and put together with prostheses. Nothing worked naturally, nothing was normal - the man was a mechanical horror. And in the eyes, that sadism. . .’

One vast To-Let sign

‘Discussions of the evening. Carter on the partition of Germany: “Partition her? Why, we’re going to rent her out! This country is going to be one vast To-Let sign! Or maybe, after all the bombings are over, she’ll be a deep enough crater simply to allow the sea to rush in. Then we’ll all take occupation furloughs and go fishing.’ This is from the recently-published diary of Melvin Jonah Lasky, a young American GI on his way to serve in Germany after its defeat in WW2. Lasky, who died 20 years ago today, would remain in Europe, and become a well known anti-communist liberal, particularly noted for editing the influential Encounter magazine.

Lasky was born in 1920 in New York City and schooled at City College (where he wrote for the student newspaper), University of Michigan and Columbia University. He worked for the New Leader in New York becoming editor in 1942. Joining the U.S. Army in 1943, he served as an historian and had the opportunity to visit Nazi concentration camps. After the war, he settled in Berlin, quickly establishing himself as a leading intellectual thinker, editing Der Monat from 1948 to 1958, and recording important political events such as the 1953 uprising in East Germany and the 1956 Hungarian revolution.

Lasky strongly opposed the Communist USSR, and helped found the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which funded magazines and conferences opposed to Communism. He also became an advisor to General Lucius D. Clay, the American governor in post-war Berlin. In 1958, he joined Encounter, an Anglo-American intellectual journal, originally associated with the anti-Stalinist left, and published the works of such writers as Lionel Trilling and Jean-Paul Sartre. In the 1960s, it was revealed that the magazine was partly funded by the CIA, and, though the scandal hurt Lasky’s reputation, he continued to run Encounter until its final issue in 1990. 

Lasky was married twice, to Brigitte Lasky (née Newiger) with whom he had two children, and to German novelist Helga Hegewisch Lasky. He was the author of several books, including Utopia and Revolution (1975), On the Barricades, and Off (1989), and The Language of Journalism (2000). He was awarded the distinguished service medal from Berlin in 1995, and, two years later, was named ‘one of the most important Berliners’ by a commission of German historians. He died on 19 May 2004. Further information is available from Wikipedia, The Guardian, and Encyclopedia.com.

Lasky kept a diary for a single year - 1945 - while serving in one of the first American divisions that entered Germany after the country’s surrender. He began the diary on 22 January 1945 in Fort Totten, New York, while waiting to be shipped to Europe with the US Army, and concluded it in Frankfurt, Germany, in December. However, the diary was largely forgotten about until it surfaced after Lasky’s death: his assistant Marc Svetov, sorting through papers, found it contained in three neatly stacked ring binders. In time, the diary was duly edited by Charlotte A. Lerg, and published by Berghahn Books in 2022 as The Diary of Lt. Melvin J. Lasky: Into Germany at the End of World War II. Some pages can be sampled at Googlebooks.

According to Berghahn: ‘Lasky’s diary provides a captivating eye-witness account colored by ongoing socio-political debates and his personal background studying Trotskyism. [The book] reproduces the diary’s vivid language as Lasky describes the ideological tensions between the East and West, as well as including critical essays on subjects ranging from Lasky’s life as a transatlantic intellectual, the role of war historians, and the diary as a literary genre.’

‘Written on the verge of the most politically active phase of his life,’ Berg and Maren Roth say in their introduction, ‘Lasky’s 1945 diary illustrates formative moments and reveals personal insights into the mindset of a young man who was convinced of his own intellectual potential, but not quite sure yet how best to put it to use. The diary gives a first glimpse of the political and cultural views he would go on to assert. They emerge from his prewar youth and education, his social milieu, and his political conditioning, mostly in New York City, complemented by the experiences he gathered while serving with the US Army.’

Here are several extracts.

22 January 1945, Fort Totten, New York
‘What do I know? What have I learned? So many volumes, so much carefully contrived experience (even rash exposure to events and “life”), and here I remain, desperately unable to live with myself, incapable of ordering my memories and responses, and shaping my ambitions. I spent the day nervously in the reading room of the library here, I must have fingered with a hopeless and frantic hunger a hundred volumes. But there was nothing for me, not a page I could read, not a sentence I really wanted. There was a Walter Pater miscellany, and I glanced at some phrases on Pascal - “the spectacle of the religious history of the human soul.”. . . No, that is what I do not understand! I looked at McGiffert’s study on Christian theology, but “Love” and “God” were empty, without meaning. Oh, if I could only comprehend them, take all the great words seriously, patiently, how deeply convenient it would be! - there would be an end to weakness, faltering heart and mind. “Spirituality,” and all the supporting strength of classic historic traditions, could be my sanctuary. I could be strong again . . . I turned to a volume on history - “the critical consciousness of civilization about its own past.” Yes, yes! But what does all my once precise and finicky awareness of Sumer and Akkad and the Gracchi and Innocent and Peter Waldo and Cromwell mean for me now? Paltry, vague, irrelevant memories. . . I picked up Gide’s Travels, Cohen’s Logic, some things of Maugham, a novel by Wolfe, Melville’s Billy Budd, a tale by Edna Ferber. . . I must be mad, or ill. Why am I torturing myself? I am lost and despairing. Is there nowhere a page for me - a paragraph, a word, to teach me to live with myself, with my boredom, with my alienation, with my mediocrity? For the first time in my life, I think, I am alone and bereft. My old formulas are gone and useless. I do now know how to be happy.’

13 February 1945, Lunéville
‘If the confusion and incompetence of the history-recorders reflects the actual situation of the history-makers then the chaos of the battlefield is reaching new depths. I can’t seem to be able to find anybody who knows what he is doing. Policies are unclarified, procedures are botched, and the method and theory of the historical section absurd. The Colonel took a morning recently to restate functions and objectives. After an hour or so, Mooney asked permission to make a comment. “Sir, that’s all very well and good, but - ” and he hesitated only a moment, “but frankly - I don’t know whether to shit or go blind!” 

Which just about sums it up. As someone remarked today, the historian-in-chief is “an insurance salesman. . . And the only trouble is, we’re not selling insurance!” A few minutes later the Colonel came through. He tossed a few hasty glances at the oddly occupied office. “I think some of you people ought to find out the unit of measure around here,” he said. “It’s hours, not days! Every goddammed thing takes days, days!” And he left. Some time later: “How many pages have you done today?” The number was apparently negligible and inadequate, and he stormed. “Let’s get the output up! For Christ’s sake, if research takes up seventy-five percent of your time, cut research out! Just write, and then everything will be speeding along!” Mooney, Eggers, and Gottlieb (the current “bird-dog” staff) all tell me they were introduced to their units with - “I don’t know anything about this son-of-a-bitch. I don’t know who he is, what he can do. But I’m leaving him here, and see that he’s kept busy. I don’t want him laying around, fucking off!” The poor fate of a combat historian! There they were out in the cold of winter, sleeping with the men in holes and dugouts, worried about the Rundstedt offensive. And then a call would come through. It was the Colonel. “Eggers? Is that you? Come on in! I’ve been searching all over for you. Come on in. . . I want to send you out again.” Notes are accumulating. Nobody has time to prepare any manuscripts. A bird-dog’s life indeed!

“Have you read much of eighteenth-century literature?” Dyer asked this afternoon, turning aside from his records and maps. “Then you know Gibbon, of course. You know the more I go on with all this, the more I find myself writing like Gibbon. I read my own prose, and there it all is, the Ciceronian periods, the great Latin eloquence. Why, this page here - the Sixth Corps assault on Montélimar - why, mutatis mutandis, it might be a brilliant purple passage on the vices of some Roman emperor. . .” He shook his own head in acquiescence and went back to his records and maps.’

14 February 1945, Lunéville
‘A fine sunny afternoon. On the ground the pools of mud have dried into damp soft earth. In the street little pink-cheeked French children are playing, clomping along the cobblestones in their wooden shoes, singing and shouting un, deux, trois, quatre. . . Above, the air is busy with the ceaseless drone of planes. The sun has shown itself, and the land and the people look fair again, and somewhere not far away bombs are tearing apart an enemy.’

20 April 1945
‘Friday. Some fragmentary details of the push across the Rhine from Ludwigshafen seemed to me especially interesting, and at least a momentary flight from the routine fantasies of military gossip and political prejudice. Mannheim was in ruins, and the roads to Heidelberg from the river area and south from Karlsruhe were frantic refugee escape-lines. The city of Heidelberg itself was almost bulging. Peace-time population of eighty-six thousand; and now it held more than one hundred ten thousand. Heidelberg had become the sanctuary of the Rhine. (There were only about two thousand displaced persons, mostly French.) The people, according to all early observers, appeared to be well-fed, and the town was in all respects normal. The shops and the banks were open, the university was intact (guarded now to protect against looters), and except for the railroad yards the whole city with its historic buildings was undamaged. The Neckar was quiet, and some communications had been established, for little rowboats were coming over and back from shore to shore. Several hundred bodies were still lying around, soldiers and civilians killed in the streetfighting of several days before. The burgomaster, and this was a point I had missed in my own rather hasty “reconnaissance,” had been in office since 1929. He was a Nazi party member. His explanation was, of course, that it had been required of him in order to continue in office. And the Army accepted him as such. In the by now terribly familiar pattern the basic intention was to remove him, but he would be of service temporarily, for he was “not sufficiently prominent in the Nazi hierarchy to warrant his immediate displacement!” To be sure, he had refused to submit lists of prominent Nazis and locations of Nazi property. But he could help keep “order” and “administration” for the time being. On these hollow and lazy phrases all purpose is lost. The removal of the Nazis, summarily, unconditionally, could have become the consistent symbol of the end of the old order. In each town, village, county, everything but the memory of Party power could have been eradicated. Instead, spurious reasons of military and official expediency dictate compromises, blurring and distorting the clean break which would have proved constructive and vivifying. Once again victors and victims alike are prisoners of the machinery of evil. And our real deep helplessness suggests itself at least to me in every detail of the conquest and the occupation. Each report is a conspicuous unwitting exercise in the tragic ironies and paradoxes of the War. “All churches were required, under the Nazi regime, to submit copies of sermons to be delivered. Pastors and priests are continuing this practice.” “The local prison was almost destroyed. However, one cell block, containing about eighty cells, has been cleaned up. It is considerably damaged and without windowglass, but it will serve to accommodate about 150 persons.” “Concentration-camp situation reports were made out and the individual inmates’ questionnaires were left to be filled out by the inmates. The camp was being administered by three of the inmates who had imprisoned the German guards and taken over the management when the camp fell into Allied hands. The three were an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Belgian. The prison was running so smoothly that it was determined not to make any changes. . .’’ The Imitation of Art by Life is no idle intellectual fancy, but is literal and terrifying: the whole war begins to unfold as an ingenious adaptation of Franz Kafka!

Discussions of the evening. Carter on the partition of Germany: “Partition her? Why, we’re going to rent her out! This country is going to be one vast To-Let sign! Or maybe, after all the bombings are over, she’ll be a deep enough crater simply to allow the sea to rush in. Then we’ll all take occupation furloughs and go fishing. Every now and then something’ll bite and up we come with a Heidelberger, nice and fat and Aryan, or a Frankfurter. . . Looks as if we’re in for one good deal after another! Imagine! Nothing to do but fish and swim in Mare Nostrum. . .” And Mooney, once again, on Bates Fabrics, bedroom furnishings, and problems of advertising and merchandising ladies-ready-to-wear.’

This won’t break us

‘The day began with the barber telling me that, as of September 19, we will have to wear a badge bearing the word “Jew,” even six-year-old children. This won’t break us either, even though life will be made more difficult.’ This is from the diaries of Dr. Willy Cohn, born 135 years ago today, who was one of many thousands of Jews executed by the Nazis at Ninth Fort in Lithuania. According to the publisher, the diaries show how the process of marginalisation under the Nazis unfolded within the Breslau Jewish community and how difficult it was to understand precisely what was happening, even as people were harassed, beaten, and taken off to concentration camps.

Cohn was born on 12 December 1888 in Breslau, Poland (though then it was part of the German Empire) into a wealthy Jewish merchant family. He studied history at the universities of Breslau and Heidelberg and married Ella Proskauer in 1913. They would have two children, before divorcing in 1922. He served as a soldier on the Western Front during the war, and won an Iron Cross for bravery. After the war, he secured a position as teacher at Breslau’s Johannesgymnasium in 1919, remaining there until 1933. During this time, he wrote several books, including biographies of Karl Marx, Robert Owen and Friedrich Engels. He married Gertrud Rothmann in 1923 with whom he had three children.

After being forced into retirement for ‘political reasons’ in 1933, Cohn became a board member of the Jewish Museum in Breslau, and he lectured at the Jewish Theological Seminary also in Breslau. However, as the persecution of Jews in Germany grew worse, he and his family began to consider emigration. They visited Palestine in 1937, but there seemed no employment prospects especially for Cohn who was not healthy enough for physical labor. By the time they wanted to flee, at the start of the Second World War, it was too late - the Nazi regime had begun its reign of terror, Wikipedia explains, and no longer allowed emigration. The Cohns and two of their children were arrested in November 1941, and deported to German-occupied Lithuania. A few days later, they were shot in Ninth Fort, together with 2000 other Jews from Breslau and Vienna.

Cohn’s life story stands out and is now remembered because of the diaries he kept all his adult life. These were found (along with a 1,000-page memoir in Berlin) in 1945. Excerpts from the diaries, in the original German, were first published in 1975, as was the memoir in 1995. Then, in 2005, the diaries were published in a fully annotated version, as edited by Norbert Conrads. This latter edition was translated into English by Kenneth Kronenberg for publication as No Justice in Germany: The Breslau Diaries, 1933-1941 (Stanford University Press). 

From the publisher’s blurb: ‘With great immediacy, the diaries of Willy Cohn, a Jew and a Social Democrat, show how the process of marginalization under the Nazis unfolded within the vibrant Jewish community of Breslau - until that community was destroyed in 1941. Cohn documents how difficult it was to understand precisely what was happening, even as people were harassed, beaten, and taken off to concentration camps. He chronicles the efforts of the community to maintain some semblance of normal life at the same time as many made plans to emigrate or to get their children out.’

From the translator’s note: ‘Willy Cohn was a complex individual: an Orthodox Jew and a socialist; an ardent Zionist and a staunch German patriot; a democrat but an admirer of Nazi resolve and sometimes even policy; a realist and an idealist often not up to grappling effectively; generous to a fault but also occasionally petty and stubborn. These and other contradictions within his personality, and the wealth of detail that poured from his pen, give us a unique view of a disorienting and frightening time in Germany.’

Here are several extracts.

17 December 1938
‘The first evening of Hanukkah. This morning I worked on my box of manuscripts and threw a few things out. This is the time of year when it makes sense to burn things. Delved into decades well before mv birth, when my father built his beautiful store with iron determination! Life smiled on us German Jews back then.

Went to synagogue, Shabbat afternoon service; first day of Hanukkah. The men’s section was very full, and we all proudly sang the old song of the Maccabees, which has been heard for more than two thousand years and will hopefully be heard for another two thousand. I firmly believe in the future of our people, and in its healthy inner life force. The Jews who pray in our synagogue, and who returned from the Buchenwald camp, all said the Birkat Hagomel, the prayer of deliverance.

Spoke with Tischler, the classifieds representative, and he told me that the Famlienblatt has been liquidated, that Schatzky sold it. How many Jewish livelihoods are now finished as a result; there will be no renewal of Jewish intellectual life in Germany now that all of the major sources of income have been blocked.

Celebrated Hanukkah in the evening with all three daughters. Trudi held Tamara in her arms. It is my most fervent hope that my family will celebrate this day next year in Erez Israel, in freedom. Whether I can still accomplish that, with all the efforts needed to get ready! Tamara will be five months old day after tomorrow! Susannchen knows all of the verses of “Ma’oz Tzur.”

This morning I sent both of my big girls to see Mother. Ruth was able to get half a chicken, and we sent a bar of soap along as well. Unfortunately, I can’t do much; I’m short on money right now myself, and I don’t know how we are going to get through this. I don’t want to ask anyone, either. It is very difficult for a father when he is unable to do what he would like to do, but of course that is also happening to innumerable Jews right now. I think that few of us Jews wall escape this mouse trap. Sometimes, a person must push his thoughts aside and bear in mind all of the good things that he has!’

18 December 1938
‘I don’t think I have yet noted that Curt Proskauer returned home from Buchenwald. His health seems to have been badly affected by it. I called him yesterday.

I went to see Czollak to greet him after his return from Buchenwald. He was in bed because of a nail-bed infection; other than that, thank G’d, he did not look too bad. He is very impractical about his emigration plans. I will help him to the extent I can. Urbach, in Jerusalem, is treating him and Daniel very decently. We have to help each other through these times!’

19 December 1938
‘Unfortunately, Trudi has to make the rounds of the police this morning about Ruth’s passport. First the district station, and then headquarters. She doesn’t want me to do it. The matter of Ruth’s identity card seems to be going smoothly; she will pick up her passport tomorrow. I don’t expect any other problems either. I am always quite anxious whenever one of my children’s emigration approaches. But it is not helpful, and I just have to get through it. We must fight against every sort of failure.’

22 July 1939
‘Yesterday was a horrible day. Terrible upsets, with Trudi as well. Arrangements for additional payments to the Palestine Trust Office so that we can at least take Tamara with us. To the bank, where I spent an hour negotiating; then came Dr. Latte, whom we had selected as our foreign currency advisor. We found a possible way out, namely if we can use the boys’ money that was placed in blocked accounts, we may be able to take Susanne with us. I cannot even imagine separating from the child.

Regarding yesterday, I must add that I was summoned to the Gestapo in the morning in the context of a so-called “street action.” They wanted my families personal information to the extent that they are registered in Breslau, and then he asked, “When are you emigrating?” I told him that my son had applied for me. “How long could that take?” I replied, “A few months.” “You can go home now," he said. The whole matter took a few minutes.’

2 September 1939
‘Thank G'd, the first nightly blackout went without incident. Sat on the balcony. There was a nice breeze, and I could see the darkened city. Toward evening, Trudi returned from shopping with the news that the airport in Warsaw had been bombed, and that Pless, in Polish Upper Silesia, had apparently been leveled. In the morning we will hear what is true and what is not.

I didn’t attend synagogue in the evening, nor did we light the Kiddush candles. Lay awake in bed thinking about Wölfl. We are completely cut off, and our thoughts alone connect us. It is sometimes difficult to turn them off. Emotionally, in fact, I have lost all hope that our emigration to Palestine might succeed. One has to consider the loss of money that would make possible such a transfer. But it makes no sense tearing my hair out about that now; all I can do is live from hour to hour. At this moment, I have no idea how the other powers will respond to the German-Polish war.

From a Jewish perspective, I can say the following about the situation. The Aryan population is surely not well disposed to us, and if Germany suffers failure in Poland, we can almost certainly expect pogrom-like assaults. Today on the street for the first time I heard two older men make an anti-Semitic remark: “The Jews must get out.” It wasn’t aimed at me, but that makes it all the more characteristic.’

6 September 1941
‘Yesterday a lovely and quick letter from Wölfl dated August 20, full of warmth. He asks about each and every one of us; a boy on whom we may rely.’

7 September 1941
‘No newspaper to be had yesterday. Paper is in such short supply that newspapers are quietly sold out. A number of streetcar lines won’t be running in the morning as of this Sunday. There is a shortage of personnel! I think that Germany’s situation continues to be very unfavorable, even though the newspapers report victories each day.’

8 September 1941
‘The day began with the barber telling me that, as of September 19, we will have to wear a badge bearing the word “Jew,” even six-year-old children. This won’t break us either, even though life will be made more difficult. In spite of it all, we will have to try not to lose our nerve. All of these measures show how increasingly bad Germany’s situation is, and how the people’s rage is being vented on the most helpless part of the population! This trumps the Middle Ages! Each violation carries a fine of 500 marks or one month in jail! In addition, travel by Jews has been banned throughout the Reich, and the obligation to report to the Gestapo tightened.

Worked in the Cathedral Archive and did some excerpting for Germania Judaica! Nonetheless, these matters coursed around my mind! Director Engelbert told me that I may continue to work there despite the badge. He is a man of great character, far different from Walter, the archivist, and Mother Huberta. Mother Innocentia is also a person with a large spirit.

9 September 1941
‘Dictated a considerable piece of my memoirs yesterday afternoon; I have now written more than 1,000 pages. I also wrote a lengthy letter to Wölfl! Given current circumstances, it is hard to find the right words. I was exhausted by evening. I went for a walk, but I am very unnerved by the decree about the yellow badge! I read it this morning!’