More frequent were machines built with the double-lightning-bolt SS Siegrune, usually above the No. 3 or 5 key. With sieg meaning “victory,” the runes became ubiquitous in Nazi Germany as a shorthand rallying cry for “victory, victory!” In their more sinister application, the SS runes became the logo for the Schutzstaffel—the notorious paramilitary units most responsible for the wanton slaughter of 6 million Jews across Europe.

In very rare circumstances, a German typewriter would be made with a dedicated swastika key, like this one at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

As strange as it sounds today, German klein (“small” or portable) typewriters were among the most sought-after souvenirs for soldiers fighting in World War II. Think of it: Adjusted for inflation, top-of-the-line portable typewriters cost roughly the same as your MacBook Pro today, and their usable lives were measured not in months or years, but decades and generations. Consequently, thousands of Uranias, Gromas, Erikas, Rheinmetalls, Continentals, Olympias, and other high-quality, precision-made German machines were looted from Nazi military and government offices, businesses, and even from civilian homes, whether their owners were dead or alive. “War trophy” is of course a pleasant euphemism: It denotes a reward for heroism, bravery, and sacrifice, while simultaneously acknowledging that even the good guys steal, pillage, and destroy amid the haze of total war.

instructed continuously aboutthe political necessity of the measures.

spiritual care of the men who participate in thisaction

blotted outthrough the holding of social events in the evenings

The battalion arrived in Bialystok on July 5, and two days laterwas ordered to carry out a "thorough search of the city , , , forBolshevik commissars and Communists," The war diary entry of,the following day makes clear what this meant: "a search of theJewish quarter,"

our special mobileunits of the SS known as Einsatzgruppen were formed andtrained in the late spring of 1941. The core of these units camefrom Heydrich's Security Police (Gestapo and Kripo) as well ashis intelligence apparatus (Security Service, or SD).

After the Nazi regime was established in 1933, a "police army"(Armee der Landespolizei) of 56,000 men was created. Theseunits were stationed in barracks and given full military trainingas part of Germany's covert rearmament.

he male Jews of working agewere to be separated and taken to a work camp. The remainingJews-the women, children, and elderly-were to be shot onthe spot by the battalion.

Unit commanders subsequentlydistributed instructions on “The Art of Writing a Letter,” urgingsoldiers to write “manly, hard and clear letters.” Many impressionswere “best locked deep in the heart because they concern only sol-diers at the front . . . Anyone who complains and bellyaches is notrue soldier.

From the perspective of the regime, lettersfrom the front served to justify the war and to bind together the na-tion in a common purpose. Military officials underscored the im-portance of writing home; letters from the battle front supplied “akind of spiritual vitamin” for the home front and reinforced its “at-titude and nerves.

The cities are administeredby mayors and councilmen drawn from his movement. The govern-ments of the states and the state parliaments are in the hands ofparty members

recisely becauseGermans had begun to think in terms of Feindbilder, or “visions ofthe enemy,” Goebbels regarded exhibitions such as these a “fantas-tic success.”

apoliceman’s “perp book”: “a small selection” of photographs fea-tured photographs of the imprisoned physicians, lawyers, and otherprofessionals whose newly shaven heads created the “eternal sem-blances” by which Jews dissolved into criminals.1

The requirement that Jews add “Sarah” or “Israel” to their legalnames in January 1938 made even more clear the aim of the Nazisto register Jews as a prelude to physical expulsion.

In the context of the Spanish CivilWar, which broke out in July 1936, the Moscow “show trials”against old Bolsheviks in August 1936, and the November 1936anti-Comintern pact between Germany and Japan, the Nazis persis-tently linked Germany’s Jews to the Communist threat.

The acknowledgment that there was a fundamental differencebetween Germans and Jews revived much older superstitions hold-ing that physical contact with Jews was harmful or that Jewish mendefiled German women.

one of the key purposes of popu-lar entertainment in the Third Reich: the creation of a commonlyshared culture to define Germans to one another and mark themoff from others.

s aresult, Victor Klemperer could repeatedly “run into” one of Hitler’sReichstag speeches. “I could not get away from it for an hour. Firstfrom an open shop, then in the bank, then from a shop again.”66Radio as well as film turned Nazism into spectacle.

“Hei hatte sagt, wer non ganz un gar nichwolle, vor dän in Deutschland keine Raum”—“he said there is noroom in Germany for people who simply refuse to take part.”

Beginning on 1 May 1936, laws required state registry of-fices to present all newlyweds with a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf

The Ahnenpass enabled the Nazi regime to enforce the Septem-ber 1935 Nuremberg racial law

Two days after the Day of Potsdam, the Nazis won passageof the Enabling Act. Supported by all the parties except the SocialDemocrats (Communist deputies had been banned), it provided thelegal framework for dictatorship

In this case it was the Nuremberg Laws, which distinguished Ger-man citizens from Jewish noncitizens: “hunting down innocentpeople is expanded a thousand times,” he raged; “hate is sown amillionfold.”

. The Nazis carried out involuntary euthanasia in order“to purge the handicapped from the national gene pool,” but war-time conditions gave the program legitimacy and cover.

However, crime could be reduced by removing the dan-gerous body, either by isolating “asocials” in work camps or bysterilizing genetically “unworthy” individuals. In the Nazi legal sys-tem, genetics replaced milieu as the point of origin of crime

heNazis responded to an intense desire for order in Germany in 1933.Fears of Communist revolutionaries mingled with more generalanxieties about crime and delinquency.

With the massive expansion of the Hitler Youthto include girls as well as boys, more than 765,000 young peoplehad the opportunity to serve in leadership roles. Many advancedin the ranks and received formal training and ideological instruc-tion in national academies such as the Reich Leadership School inPotsdam.

The Ministry of Education authorized the National So-cialist Teachers’ League to organize retraining camps in order to“equip,” as Rust put it, teachers with lesson plans in “heredity andrace”; an estimated 215,000 of Germany’s 300,000 teachers at-tended two-week retreats at fifty-six regional sites and two nationalcenters that mixed athletics, military exercises, and instruction.

Enrollment for four years in theHitler Youth and then six months in the Reich Labor Service wasmade mandatory for boys in 1936 and for girls three years later

Filled with photographs, graphs, and tables, thepropaganda of the Office for Racial Politics made the crucial dis-tinction between quantity and quality—Zahl und Güte—easy tounderstand. Unlike Streicher’s vulgar antisemitic newspaper, DerStürmer, the Neues Volk appeared to be objective, a sobering state-ment of the difficult facts of life

By the middle of 1937 the Office of Racial Politics hadtrained over 2,000 “racial educators,” who on the basis of an eight-week course in Berlin received a special speaker’s certificate enti-tling them to address Germans on population and race policy. Certi-fication was part of the effort to make German racism objective

Repeated references to the “false humanity”and “exaggerated pity” of the liberal era indicated exactly whatwas at stake: the need to prepare Germans to endorse what univer-sal or Christian ethics would regard as criminal activity.

What was necessary, he insisted, was to“recognize yourself” (“Erkenne dich selbst”), which meant identi-fying with the idealized portraits of new Germans and following thetenets of hereditary biology to find a suitable partner for marriage,to marry only for love, and to provide the Volk with healthy chil-dren.

vast network of Gemeinschaftslager or com-munity camps was established across Germany; at one point or an-other, most Germans passed through them. Alongside concentra-tion camps and killing camps, the training camps were fundamentalparts of the Nazi racial project.

In November in Weimar, he promised that “if to-day there are still people in Germany who say: ‘We are not goingjoin your community, but stay just as we always have been,’ then Isay: ‘You will die off, but after you there will a young generationthat doesn’t know anything else!’”

he Germanpopulation was being resorted according to supposed genetic val-ues, a project that required all Germans to reexamine their rela-tives, friends, and neighbors.

A wide rangeof public health-care professionals from doctors to nurses to social-welfare officers were enlisted in the effort to locate undesirables.

In place of the quarrels of party, the contests of inter-est, and the divisions of class, which they believed compromised theability of the nation to act, the Nazis proposed to build a unified ra-cial community guided by modern science. Such an endeavor wouldprovide Germany with the “unity of action” necessary to surviveand prosper in the dangerous conditions of the twentieth century

. It drew up a long list of internaland external dangers that imperiled the nation. At the same time, itrested on extraordinary confidence in the ability of racial policy totransform social life.

cultivate racial solidarity by overcoming social divi-sions, prohibiting racial mixing, and combating degenerative bio-logical trends

until the very end of the Reich in 1945, they handedout hundreds of thousands of copies of the eight-mark “people’sedition” along with pamphlets providing advice on how to main-tain good racial stock and prepare Ahnenpässe, “Germans, HeedYour Health and Your Children’s Health,” “A Handbook for Ger-man Families,” and “Advice for Mothers.”

“glitterwords” such as “normal,” “gene,” and “alien,” passed into ev-eryday speech

Significantly, thestate did not issue racial passports; Germans had to prepare thempersonally. They thus attained for themselves their racial status asAryans.

By 1936 almost all Germans—all who were not Jewish—had begun to prepare for themselves an Ahnenpass, or racial pass-port, which laid the foundation for the racial archives establishedin all German households

As a result, Germans could imagine one another infront of the radio listening to the same program: “Sunday isWunschkonzert,” wrote one soldier to his family back home; “youcertainly will be listening too.”

With the cheerful slices of German life they broadcastand the national audience they pulled together, radio plays recrea-ted the people’s community. It produced the effect of being unteruns, “just us.”

On these occasions, friends and neighbors knew they wouldfind one another in front of the radio and could later share im-pressions—in this sense, Gemeinschaftsempfang, collective recep-tion, had been achieved.

In what it touted as the triumph of “socialism ofthe deed” over “private capitalism” and “economic liberalism,” in1933 the Propaganda Ministry pressed a consortium of radio man-ufacturers to design and produce a Volksempfänger, or “people’sradio,” for the mass market.

The eventfulness of the Day of Potsdam was the reason “all three,father, mother, and Emma” Dürkefälden, had gone to Kaune’s tav-ern, but it was also what they themselves produced by going there

Nazis wanted the Germanpeople to comprehend events on the order of grand history by hear-ing broadcasts on the radio, seeing the reassembly of marchers onfilm, and taking photographs of their own part in the making of thepeople’s community

With banners, flags, marches, and “Heil Hitler!” the Nazis pro-duced a distinctive public choreography and accompanying soundtrack that seemed to affirm the unanimity of the people’s commu-nity.

Radio helped to create the collective voice of thenation.

Thus, for leading opponents of the Nazis, and for the Jews andother minorities that the regime tormented, there seemed to be littlealternative but to abandon Germany altogether. Since most exilesnever returned, Germany’s political and intellectual life continuedto be structured by the Nazis long after their defeat

“its touristic spectaclesencouraged its participants to see a cause-and-effect relationshipbetween their own well being and the Nazi regime’s attempts to re-make Germans into the master race.”

hile“Strength through Joy” vacations were budget affairs, third-classrailway journeys to Thüringen rather than Bavaria, and parsimo-nious meals at second-rate hotels, they offered millions of Ger-mans the opportunity to travel, to see the seaside, or visit theReichshauptstadt—Berlin was one of the favorite “Strengththrough Joy” destinations.

Mem-ories of the Third Reich corresponded in large part to the Nazis’own prewar media representation of “good times” both now and tocome.

Interweaving economic opportunity with the dangers thatmight prevent it, whether it was the threat of air attack, the pres-ence of “asocials,” or the power of Jews, Winter Relief and air-de-fense campaigns made the premises of the people’s community tan-gible and persuasive

Propaganda displays of bombs andbombers, and the destruction they could wreak, revealed the ex-posed, trembling body of the nation, which the Nazis claimed toprotect through a nationwide program of air defense.

Ger-mans wore special badges to show they had donated their marks;the badges functioned so as to make citizens accountable to them-selves. “On Sundays,” Hauser remarked, “when collecting for theWinter-Relief Fund is going on in the streets no one would darewalk abroad without a badge pinned conspicuously to his coat.”

Moreover, the impression thatGermans were assembling behind the Nazis reinforced itself. Moreand more people adjusted to the “new direction” when they sawthat others had done so.

One-potmeals on the first Sunday of every month provided opportunitiesfor party representatives to go from door to door in the evening asthey collected the pfennigs that had been “saved,” and to snoop.

The SA, Hitler Youth, and Reich LaborFront worked the same way, striving to identify a new generationof leaders drawn from all social classes;

National Socialists assaulted the “alternative culture” of work-ing-class socialists in order to coordinate it, but they also attemptedto overcome the very idea of “alternative,” which structured the so-cial divisions typical of Germany’s neighborhoods.

Working-classchoirs had a better chance of survival if they rewrote club statutesto exclude Social Democratic activists from leadership posts.

But thepressure to comply was unmistakable. Dürkefälden’s father-in-lawwas out every night one week in August 1933 because he had toattend meetings or risk losing his garden plot.

The ubiquitous fundraising made it possible for poorer peo-ple like the Dürkefäldens to participate more fully in public life:dinner or snacks were served at party events and entry fees lifted atsport competitions.

In addition, Goebbels tried towin over proletarian celebrities.

plac-ing leading functionaries of the regime in Germany’s factories.

Hitler registered to vote in the working-class Berlin precinct Siemensstadt, and enjoyed a great propagandabonanza when he spoke from the floor of the Siemens factory in anationally broadcast radio address on 10 November 1933.

Evenbefore Hitler spoke (8:00 p.m.), the choreography of May Day hadfastened the links between workers and the nation, between ma-chinists and machine-age dreams, between technical mastery andnational prowess

This is thesignificance of the Day of Potsdam: the images of unity were madeavailable for national consumption. The growth in radio ownershipespecially in 1933 and 1934 indicates how great the desire was topartake in Nazi spectacle, although the fact that radios remainedmuch less common in rural areas

Hitler repeatedly addressed workers as patriotswho had built Germany’s industrial strength and served honorablyin the war, but who had been unjustly oppressed by liberal eco-nomic orthodoxies. He employed a rhetoric of understanding andcompassion that recognized the perspective of the working class.Reviving the Nation • 47

Socialists around the worldhad celebrated May Day as a festival of labor since the 1880s; butin Germany they had failed to get the official recognition the Nazisnow offered. So strong were the hopes for national unity that theGerman Free Trade Unions welcomed the Nazi gesture and encour-aged members to participate in the celebrations.

the stunning media spectacle of thespeeches and celebrations of 1 May also contrasted with 2 May,when stormtroopers sealed off and took over the operations of thesocialist Free Trade Unions and incorporated them into what be-came the German Labor Front, an integral part of the National So-cialist apparatus.

In the national broadcast, selected party members spoke out thescripted reactions of “ordinary citizens,” who, appearing from allwalks of life, expressed support for Hitler.

The strong presence of the police,who tended to sympathize with the National Socialists, restrictedthe mobility of opponents, while Nazi toughs broke into SocialDemocratic or trade union offices and Nazi officials banned so-cialist newspapers.

Held on 21 March 1933 in Potsdam’s Garnisonkirche, whereFrederick the Great lay buried, the Day of Potsdam aligned Hit-ler with revered Prussian traditions, the Hohenzollern dynasty andthe founding of the German Reich some sixty years earlier, andthe heroic sacrifices of the Great War, represented by the “hero ofTannenberg,” President Paul von Hindenburg,

But many other people who know about the dangers still seemstrangely silent. When pressed, they trot out the “this is nothing new”riposte—as if awareness of what could happen is response enough.They tell me, There are universities filled with bioethicists who studythis stuff all day long. They say, All this has been written about before,and by experts. They complain, Your worries and your arguments arealready old hat.

Venkatesh Rao thinks that the Nazi bar analogy is “an example of a bad metaphor contagion effect” and points to a 2010 post of his about warren vs plaza architectures. He believes that Twitter, for example, is a plaza, whereas Substack is a warren: A warren is a social environment where no participant can see beyond their little corner of a larger maze. Warrens emerge through people personalizing and customizing their individual environments with some degree of emergent collaboration. A plaza is an environment where you can easily get to a global/big picture view of the whole thing. Plazas are created by central planners who believe they know what’s best for everyone.

Rich in manuscripts and correspondence for Arendt’s productive years as a writer and lecturer after World War II, the papers are sparse before the mid-1940s because of Arendt’s forced departure from Nazi Germany in 1933 and her escape from occupied France in 1941.

Adolf Eichmann

I take your point, but I wonder if Trump is just kryptonite for a liberal democratic system built on a free press.

Ultimately, Pelosi is right to insist that a case must be made for beginning impeachment proceedings. But it’s her job to make that case, and failure to do so is a failure of omission. And failure to do so in a timely manner that would curtail some of the worst damage potentially produced by the administration is neglect. 

CITY YOU

Wer Gröning im Gerichtssaal erlebt, wer seine Erinnerungen liest, der stößt auf einen Mann voller Widersprüche. Hitler? Ja, unbedingt. Massenmord an den Juden? Wenn es denn sein muss. Den Holocaust leugnen? Niemals. Einen Säugling an den Beinen fassen und ihn mit dem Kopf an einem Lastwagen totschlagen? Unmenschlich! "Man hätte das Kind doch auch erschießen können", sagt Gröning einmal.

Seit Jahren besucht Éva Pusztai-Fahidi ungarische Schulen, manchmal spielt sie dann ein Spiel mit den Jungen und Mädchen: Sie teilt Papier aus und lässt die Schüler alles aufschreiben, wozu sie "mein" sagen. Alle Personen, alle Dinge, die ihnen wichtig sind: mein Papa, meine Mama, mein Handy, mein Fußball. Sie sammelt die Listen ein und zerreißt sie vor den Augen der Kinder in kleine Streifen. "Bis das letzte Eckchen nach unten fällt, dauert es nicht lang: Dann sind alle weg. Schluss. Es gibt sie nicht mehr. Und dann steht man dort und hat nichts und niemanden und lebt und fragt sich: Bin ich noch ein Mensch? Und wofür denn?"