Destination: Berlin

At the end, people did what they could to destroy any evidence that they were part of the Third Reich. A lot was just squirreled away and forgotten. In the last decade, as old Nazis have died, their children — exploring old boxes hidden away in attics — have found lots of memorabilia from those times. They donate it to the big state museums, which then store it away. I asked the curator at the great German History Museum in Berlin why there was so little of the excessive pomp and grandeur of the Nazi regime on display. He said that they keep the vast majority of artifacts that might inspire neo-Nazi groups warehoused and out of sight.

Museum visitors can, however, get a glimpse of Germany in the 1930s through exhibits which display the darkest side of the Nazi regime. A poster shows the facial features of people who were part of what was considered “the master race” (and those that didn’t belong). Calipers and hair samples help government officials determine who was of the proper racial stock to be a German citizen. And a huge hall with a dome that would house 180,000 people was envisioned to celebrate a world where the individual is sacrificed for the greatness of the state.

It’s all chilling…and with angry, populist, nativist political movements on the rise in many countries — and with images like those from the deadly white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville in our own country — it’s even more chilling.

Hitler ready to give his first major radio address — a medium he would go on to use very effectively to rule his nation.

Germany is a bit on edge these days, with the rise of white-supremacist groups, neo-Nazi groups, and right wing political parties around Europe, which seem to sanitize the tactics Hitler used to come to power in the early 1930s. In Poland, the nationalist, anti-refugee government has actually taken control of the new WWII museum in Gdańsk because it gives the “wrong” spin to that history (a spin not friendly to its right-wing ideology). And in Hungary and Poland, the electorate is so fiercely split, it’s reminding people of the tense two-political-camps feeling during the 1930s when oftentimes families couldn’t even talk to each other.

My German friends explain that conventional conservative political powers supported Hitler in the early 1930s because they thought he would mobilize a certain political base, but then could be tamed or controlled once in power. They believed many Germans voted for Hitler because they didn’t take his promises seriously and just thought he’d shake things up.

Today in Berlin, there is a small but powerful monument remembering how, after the last free vote in the German parliament, the members of parliament who voted against Hitler were arrested and sent to concentration camps, where they died.

The Memorial to the Politicians Who Opposed Hitler (Mahnmal für die ermordeten Reichstagsabgeordneten)

When asked what Germany is doing to protect its democracy, my friend explained, “Today in Germany, the media always agrees on the facts. Truth still rules. From these facts, people with different politics can then editorialize and debate. This makes it difficult for populist factions to spread their message. Right-wing populist movements in Germany have to get and share their ‘news’ on Facebook because the media doesn’t give them a platform.”