45: Germany in 1935-36

By Daniel James Brown

In September 1935 the Nazi Party staged its seventh annual rally at Nuremberg, themed, with staggering irony, the Rally for Freedom. Again the storm troopers and the Blackshirts came in the hundreds of thousands. Again Leni Riefenstahl -- now thirty-three and firmly entrenched as Hitler's favorite filmmaker -- was there to document the spectacle, though the only footage that would ever emerge was a short film documenting the war games Hitler staged at the rally to dramatize Germany's defiance of the Treaty of Versailles's ban on German rearmament. Years later, after the war, Riefenstahl would speak as little as possible about her participation in the Rally for Freedom. By then it was remembered, not primarily for the war games, but for what happened on the evening of September 15.

The rally reached its climax that night when Adolf Hitler stepped before the German parliament, the Reichstag, to introduce three new laws. The Reichstag had been assembled in Nuremberg for the first time since 1543 in order to pass -- and to make a public spectacle of passing -- a law making the Nazi Party emblem, the swastika, the official flag of Germany. But Hitler now introduced to more laws, and it was these second and third laws for which the 1935 rally would forever be remembered, and from which Riefenstahl would later try to distance herself.

The Reich Citizenship Law defined citizens to be any Germany national 'of German or related blood' who 'proves by his conduct that he is willing and fit to faithfully serve the German people and Reich.' By omission, any national no of 'German or related blood' was thereby relegated to the status of a subject of the state. The effect was to strip German Jews of their citizenship and all associated rights beginning in January 1936. The Blood Law -- formally, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor -- forbade the marriage of Jews and non-Jew; nullified any such marriages made in defiance of the law, even if carried out in a foreign nation; forbade extramarital sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews; forbade Jews from employing female Germans under the age of forty-five in their homes; and forbade Jews from displaying the newly anointed national flag. And that, as it would turn out, was just for starters. In the next few months and years, the Reichstag would add dozens of additional laws restricting every aspect of the lives of German Jews, until, in effect, simply being Jewish was outlawed.

Even before the advent of the Nuremberg Laws, life had become all but intolerable for German Jews. Since the Nazi Party's assumption of power in 1933, Jews had been -- by law, by intimidation, and by outright violence -- excluded from working in the civil service or holding public office; from practicing professions like medicine, law, and journalism; from participating in the stock exchanged; and from entering a wide variety of public and private places. In every German and city, signs proclaiming 'Juden unerwünscht' ('Jews not welcome') had appeared over the entrances to hotels, pharmacies, restaurants, public swimming pools, and shops of all sorts. Jewish owned businesses had been the targets of massive state-sponsored boycotts.

All of this was evident everywhere one went in Germany, even in the post peaceful and pastoral of places.

--

On the morning of March 7 [1936], thirty thousand German troops had rolled into the demilitarized Rhineland, in open defiance of both the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact to which Germany was a signatory. It was by far the most brazen Hitler had yet attempted, his biggest gamble, and a major step toward the catastrophe that was soon to envelop the world. For the next two days, Hitler, Goebbels, and the rest of the Nazi leadership waiting anxiously for the world to react. They knew that Germany did not yet have sufficient military strength to survive a war with either France or Britain, let alone the two of them combined. The next forty-eight hours, Hitler later confessed, were the tensest of his life.

He needn't have worried. In England, foreign secretary Anthony Eden said he 'deeply regretted' the news, and then set about pressuring the French not to overreact. They didn't. They did nothing at all. A relieved Joseph Goebbels sat down and wrote, "The Fuehrer is immensely happy . . . England remains passive, France won't act alone. Italy is disappointed and America is uninterested."

Hitler now understood with absolute clarity the feeble resolve of the powers to his west. However, the reoccupation of the Rhineland had not come without some cost. Though there had been no military reaction, there had been a public relations uproar in many foreign capitals. Increasing numbers of people in Europe and the United States were beginning to talk again about Germany, as they had during the First World War, when it had generally been seen as a nation of 'Huns,' of lawless barbarians. Hitler knew it would be much easier for the West to mobilize against a nation of barbarians than a civilized nation. He needed a PR win -- not at home, where the reoccupation of the Rhineland had been immensely popular -- but in London and Paris and New York.

The Nazi leadership was now convinced that the upcoming Olympic Games, in August, would provide the perfect opportunity for a masquerade. Germany would present herself to the world as an unusually clean, efficient, modern, technologically savvy, cultured, vigorous, reasonable, and hospitable nation. From street sweepers to hoteliers to government clerks, thousands of Germans now went ardently to work to make sure that, come August, the world would see Germany's best face.

In the Ministry of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels set about constructing an alternate reality in the German press, temporarily sanitizing it of anti-Semitic references, spinning out elaborate fictions about Germany's peaceful intentions, promoting Germany in glowing terms as welcoming to all the peoples of the world. In plush new offices at the Geyer printing labs in southern Berlin, Leni Riefenstahl began putting to work the 2.8 million reichsmarks the Nazi government had secretly funneled to her through the Ministry of Propaganda for the purpose of producing her film about the upcoming games: Olympia. The secrecy, dating back to the previous October, was designed to conceal from the International Olympic Committee the political and ideological source of the film's funding. Indeed for the rest of her life Riefenstahl would continue to insist that the film was merely an artistic sport documentary. But in fact, from its genesis Olympia was a political and ideological production.

By deliberately conflating wholesome images of grace and beauty and youthful vigor with the iconography and ideology of the Nazis, Riefenstahl would cunningly portray the new German state as something ideal -- the perfect end product of a highly refined civilization descended directly from the ancient Greeks. The film would not just reflect but in many ways define the still nascent but increasingly twisted Nazi mythos.

The illusion surrounding the Olympic Games Berlin was complete, the deception masterful. Joseph Goebbels had artfully accomplished what all good propagandists must, convincing the world that their version of reality was reasonable and their opponents' version biased. In doing that, Goebbels had not only created a compelling vision of the new Germany but also undercut the Nazis' opponents in the West -- whether they were American Jews in New York City or members of Parliament in London or anxious Parisians -- making all of them seem shrill, hysterical, and misinformed.

Source:

Brown, D. J. (2013). The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. New York: Penguin Books.