Table Of ContentCONTENTS
COVER
ABOUT THE BOOK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1 HELPED INTO POWER
Chapter 2 CHAOS AND CONSENT
Chapter 3 THE WRONG WAR
Chapter 4 THE WILD EAST
Chapter 5 HIGH HOPES
Chapter 6 A DIFFERENT KIND OF WAR
Chapter 7 THE TIDE TURNS
Chapter 8 THE ROAD TO TREBLINKA
Chapter 9 REAPING THE WHIRLWIND
PICTURE SECTION
NOTES
NOTES ON EYEWITNESSES
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PICTURE CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
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About the Book
Following the success of Rees’ bestselling Auschwitz, this substantially revised
and updated edition of e Nazis – A Warning om History tells the
powerfully gripping story of the rise and fall of the ird Reich.
During a 16-year period, acclaimed author and documentary-maker Laurence
Rees met and interviewed a large number of former Nazis, and his unique
insights into the Nazi psyche and the Second World War received enormous
praise.
At the heart of the book lies compelling eyewitness accounts of life under
Adolf Hitler, spoken through the words of those who experienced the Nazi
regime at every level of society. An extensive new section on the Nazi/Soviet
war (previously published in Rees’ War of the Century) provides a chilling
insight into Nazi mentality during the most bloody conflict in history.
Described as one of the greatest documentary series of all times e Nazis – A
Warning om History won a host of awards, including a BAFTA and an
International Documentary Award.
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About the Author
Laurence Rees is the writer and producer of the major BBC television
documentary series World War II: Behind Closed Doors, War of the Century,
Horror in the East and Auschwitz: e Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’. He won
the British Book Award for History Book of the Year in 2006 for his
international bestseller Auschwitz: e Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’.
Rees’ career as a writer and filmmaker, focusing on the Nazis and World War
II, stretched back nearly 20 years. His body of work has won him several
awards, including a BAFTA and a Grierson Award. Rees was educated at
Solihull School and Oxford University and is the former Creative Director of
BBC TV History programmes.
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e Nazis
A Warning from History
Laurence Rees
4
For Oliver, Camilla and Benedict
5
If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Jenseits on Gut
und B se
ö
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INTRODUCTION
IT’S ONLY BY looking back that life takes on a pattern. at’s as true of our own
individual lives as it is of the great events of history. I never thought, for
example, when I embarked on Nazis: A Warning om History in the early
1990s that it would be the start of such a long journey. For it was only whilst
making Warning om History that I fully realised the wealth of new historical
material that the fall of the Berlin Wall had just made available in Eastern
Europe. It was that, plus the growing realization that it was almost impossible
to overemphasize the importance of the Hitler/Stalin war in any attempt to
understand the mentality of the Nazis, that led me to move straight onto
another project. I spent several more years writing, producing and directing
War of the Century about the epic struggle between Nazism and Communism.
e pattern of all this work seems clear to me only now, in a way that it
never was at the time, which is why I’m so grateful to BBC Books for reissuing
here, not just the original Nazis: A Warning om History, but for allowing me
to incorporate within it the majority of the War of the Century book. For I
think the material in War of the Century – particularly the chapter ‘A
Different Kind of War’ – vividly demonstrates the practical consequences of
Nazism. Certainly travelling around Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine, and
hearing stories about the Nazi occupation, allowed me personally to gain a
greater insight into the essential nature of Hitler’s world view: a bleak
landscape where pity is outlawed and life is reduced to a Darwinian struggle in
which the weak deserve to suffer because it is their destiny.
Of course there are potential problems in slotting one book inside another.
Some are easy to rectify – the danger of repetition, for example – and I’ve
done my best to re-edit the text to avoid going over the same ground twice.
I’ve also updated the content in places where my thinking has changed since
writing the original words – that’s particularly the case with the section on the
origins of the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’. But there remains the real danger that, by
focusing chiefly on the War in the East and hearing the extensive stories of
Russian veterans, an impression is created that somehow the war in the West
‘didn’t matter’. So I need to emphasize here that nothing could be further
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from my own belief. I grew up on the heroic stories of the sacrifice of British
and American servicemen during World War II. My father flew in the RAF
and my uncle was torpedoed and killed whilst serving on the Atlantic
convoys. It was because I wanted to see the full story of the Western Allies’
fight against Nazism told to the widest possible audience that I devised
television series such as Battle of the Atlantic and D-Day to Berlin, and then
editorially oversaw their construction.
But the book you are holding in your hand is about something different.
What I have tried to do here is to penetrate as deeply as I can the essential
nature of Nazism. It’s not a history of World War II or an account of all the
significant military decisions of the conflict, but an attempt to see how far it is
possible to understand why the Germans and their allies did what they did. It
is in pursuit of that aim – and that aim alone – that I thought it important to
include the material from War of the Century.
As I look back on this work now, I also see another aspect of it that I didn’t
fully recognize at the time. ese books, and the television series that went
with them, were based on approximately 100 unique interviews – many with
former members of the Nazi Party. I had the chance to meet and question
people who adored Hitler, worked for Himmler, fought on the Eastern Front
and committed atrocities whilst members of the SS. is is now an
opportunity that is no longer available to anyone else who comes aer me –
for the simple reason that most of the people we interviewed have since died.
In the heat of the production process, focused as I was on a forthcoming
transmission or publication date, it didn’t really occur to me that we were
making something of value for future generations.
Of course, as the number of survivors diminishes, attitudes to Nazism and
World War II will also change. For my generation the only way of
understanding the world we grew up in was to know what happened during
World War II: a divided Germany, the Cold War, the Soviet domination of
Eastern Europe – the consequences of the conflict were all around us. But for
today’s schoolchildren it is all very different. I remember the daughter of a
friend asking me, when she was seven years old: ‘What came first, Adolf Hitler
or the Battle of Hastings?’ To her generation Nazism is just another bit of
history, part of an enormous jigsaw that has to be fitted in along with the
Romans, the Normans and Henry VIII.
You won’t be surprised to hear, I guess, that I don’t think that the ird
Reich is ‘just another bit of history’. I believe that a study of Nazism still offers
us a level of insight into the human condition that is different from the
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benefits of understanding some other periods of the past. To start with,
obviously, the Nazis walked the earth not so very long ago. ey came from a
civilized country at a time when, in the wake of World War I, a whole series of
positive values and beliefs about democracy and human rights were prevalent
in Europe. ey smashed all that away, having gained power as a result of a
series of elections that demonstrated that a majority of Germans – in voting
for either the Communists or the Nazis – had chosen to vote out democracy.
Given that today there are so many fledgling democracies in the world, it’s a
stark warning.
en there’s something even more significant that I think we ought to take
from this history. I’d expected when I embarked upon this task all these years
ago to meet countless former Nazis who would say, ‘I only committed war
crimes because I was acting under orders.’ However, when a former Nazi
perpetrator was pressed on why he did what he did, his most likely response
was: ‘I thought it was the right thing to do at the time.’ It was a much more
terrifying answer than the trite and self-serving one I’d been expecting. ese
former Nazis believed that their support of Hitler had essentially been a
rational response to the situation around them. ey told of how they had felt
humiliated by the Versailles Treaty at the end of World War I, and then had to
endure the revolutions and hyper-inflation of the immediate post-war years,
followed by the mass unemployment and bankruptcies of the early 1930s.
ey craved a ‘strong man’ who would restore national pride and defeat the
growing threat of Communism.
As the years went by and I met more and more former Nazis, I came also to
believe that there was another dimension to their support for the ird Reich
that wasn’t ‘rational’ at all. Instead, it was emotional and based on faith. e
quasi-religious dimension to Nazism is obvious, of course, and I discuss this at
greater length in the first chapter of the book. But we also have to recognize
that Hitler as an individual provided something for these Germans that other
political leaders didn’t. Hitler scarcely ever mentioned anything so dull as
‘policies’. Instead he offered a leadership couched in visions and dreams. In
doing so he touched something deep within the human psyche. As George
Orwell put it in his famous review of Hitler’s Mein Kampf: ‘human beings
don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth control
and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle
and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags, and loyalty parades’. Many
people also, Orwell might have added, like being told they are ‘superior’ to
others merely by virtue of their birth, and that recent catastrophic events in
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