What if German Armaments Minister Fritz Todt dies in 1940?

Between 1933 and 1937, 2.800 teachers of German universities (1/4 of the total) had been fired or forced into retirement.

Just an example of this:



Karl Barth, the most important Protestant theologian since Luther, fired from Bonn University.



Theodor Litt, philosopher y pædagogue from the University of Leipzig.



Theodor Lessing, Jewish writer y philosopher from the University of Hannover, who was later assassinated in exile by the nazis.



Karl Jaspers, great psychologist and existencialist philosopher, fired from the University of Heidelberg.



Wilhelm Röpke, father of social market economy, fired from the University of Marburg.

According to the Civil Service Act of 1937, teachers must be 'the executors of the will of the part-supported State'. And, of course, as public servants, they were purged of Jews in 1933, forced to swear a personal loyalty oath to Hitler in 1937 (though, 960 teachers, leaded by the surgeon Sauerbruch and the philosopher Heidegger, voluntarily did that in autumn 1933) and join the National Socialist Teacher's League.

127.920 women and men applied for college in 1933. Only 58.325 did so in 1939. In scientific careers the number dropped from 20.474 in 1933 to 9.554 in 1939. Thus, not only there were far less new lawyers, medics and engineers, but, thanks to the diminishing of teachers, much less qualified than in 1932.

IG Farben and Junkers, amongst many other firms, complained, in 1938, just as re-armament was escalating and the need of qualified personnel increased dramatically, that old engineers were retiring and few just-graduated ones were coming in and that these were ill-prepared.

But the assassination of culture was complete:

In the 1930s, when Dr. Goebbels centralised all art and every way of expression into the Reich Chamber of Culture so 'every work serves national socialist propaganda', only two acclaimed German authors were allowed to publish:



Ernst Jünger, whose patriotic books on WWI, like Stahlgewittern ('Iron Tempests') pleased the nazis very much.



Ernst Wiechert, one of the most widely-read authors of his time.

However, following Heine's prediction 'Where books are burnt, people will end being burnt', on May 10th 1933, SA stormtroopers, thousands of students, local police and Dr. Goebbels' agents burnt some 20.000 'un-German' books.

The books of Thomas, Klaus and Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Jakob Wassermann, Arnold & Stefan Zweig, Heinrich Heine, Bertolt Brecht, Emil Ludwig, Erich Maria Remarque, Walther Rathenau, Albert Einstein, Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Alfred Kerr and Hugo Preuss (who had written the draft of the Weimar democratic Constitution) were burnt. Along the same, were the books on non-Germans too: Franz Werfel, Jack London, H. G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, Helen Keller, Margaret Sanger, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, André Gide, Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Arthur Schnitlzer, etcetera, etcetera…

Theatre in Germany suffered, but not as much, Max Reinhardt or Bertolt Brecht's plays were, of course, forbidden, and thousands of Jewish actors, producers, directors, decorators… lost their positions; but the socialists Gerhart Hauptmann and George Bernard Shaw (also anti-British) were allowed. Theatres had to stick to Eurypides and Sophocles, Goethe and Schiller, to succeed, because the mediocre plays of Dr. Goebbels or Hans Johst, the president of the Reich Theatre Chamber.

 

Music was quite apolitical, and Germany had more 'own' music than any other country, except for Italy, and many musicians supported the régime for ideological reasons of for the sake of their careers.

However, vanguard 'degenerated' music was vanished:

Like that of Paul Hindemith,



Or Alban Berg,



As well as the 'filthy' music of Jewish musicians:



Gustav Mahler



Felix Mendelssohn (whose statue in the main Platz of his native city, Leipzig, was brought down)



Arnold Schönberg



Jacques Offenbach



Giacomo Meyerbeer

And, even if thanks to Brahms and Schumann, Beethoven and Haydn, Bach and Bruckner, and even Mozart, whose masonic opera The Magic Flute and the operas The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, written by Jewish libretist Lorenzo Daponte, were forbidden; and to magnificent musicians and performers like Carl Orff, Richard Strauss, Karl Böhm, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Walter Giesenking, music in Germany remained first-quality, the massive exodus of composers, singers, artists took away the 200-years of German musical vanguard and transferred it to the United States.

Amongst those composers and conductors who fled Germany were:

Samuel Adler, Kurt Herbert Adler, Adolf Busch, Arthur Schnabel, Jascha Horenstein, István Kertész, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Erich Kleiber, Paul Kletzki, Sir Georg Solti, André Previn, William Steinberg, Max Steiner and even the greatest conductor of the first half of the XX century: Arturo Toscanini.

[ 12. October 2005, 03:24 PM: Message edited by: General der Infanterie Friedrich H ]

 

Also, in 1933 some 6.500 'degenerated', Jewish or 'un-German' paintings were removed from museums (many were destroyed):

Kokoschkas…



Groszes…



Cezannes…



Van Goghs…



Matisses…



Chagalls…



Picassos…



Kandinskis…



All the German expressionsts, the dadaists, futurists, cubists, surrealists… all GONE!

 

Thanks Fried.

That is an impressive amount of information. How can people allow such an idea as socialism to propagate?

 

May I seem a bit pedantic and say that it is national socialism, nazism or German fascism what we're talking about? Socialism can have many, many shapes, authoritarian or not, liberal or not, nationalist or not. It can have some really good expressions and other way too horrible.

 

Here's something more for Big and T. A.: Nazi View on Science.

 

May I seem a bit pedantic and say that it is national socialism, nazism or German fascism what we're talking about? Socialism can have many, many shapes, authoritarian or not, liberal or not, nationalist or not. It can have some really good expressions and other way too horrible. </font>[/QUOTE]It may be my ignorance, but I don't know of any socialist government that succeeds in the long term to provide anything but misery to it's people. They look good in textbooks and sound good to the oppressed, until they find out they just traded their form of oppression.

I am not talking about the socialization of certain parts of government, although I don't personally go for that either, but the whole government. I guess that would mean I am referring to national socialism.

 

Well let us pray that something like the Third Reich never appears again.

 

I was referring to the old Labour Party of Sir Ramsey MacDonald, the German Social Democrat Party, the Socialist Worker's Spanish Party (PSOE), the Democratic Party of the US in the times of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the actual government of Brasil, Chile, Paraguay and Argentina. Social Democracy it is.