Germany is Now Described As ‘country of Dreadful Silence’

The country of dreadful silence where one may not speak of much except harmless things, art galleries, the weather, the beauty of Munich—this is Germany of Nazidom, W. N. Ewer writes in the Daily Herald.

“In public and in semi-public; in trains, in trams, in cafes, in factories, in shops, the great silence reigns,” writes the correspondent. “No one talks, for no one dare talk. Goering’s secret police have strict orders to watch for ‘Miesmacher’—grousers. Nor is it only the secret police.

“Every storm tropper, every party member, has orders too: to listen and to report. Inside the party, inside the ‘SA’ comrade must keep watch on comrade. Goering has his spies in the ranks with orders to keep sharp look-out, even on their leaders.

CRIME OF GRUMBLING

“And it is no joke to be reported for grumbling. At the least it means a brusque warning to keep quiet, but it may easily mean the loss of a job, the wrecking of a business, prison or a concentration camp.

“So, with spies everywhere and the terror of the camps in the background, men sit silent, or talk constrainedly of such topics as cannot possibly give offense.

“The other night I was sitting in a Munich cafe. There came in a small boy, five or six years old, in a brown shirt, selling photographs of Hitler.

” ‘He is too young to be doing that. He should be in bed,’ said I to my neighbor.

“He looked cautiously round, gave me a searching glance. Then in a low voice:

” ‘One may not say such things here. For you it is all right. You are a foreigner. But—’ and then quickly asked how long I had been in Munich, had I seen the picture galleries, did I not think it a beautiful city?

WHAT IS COURAGE

“After a week in Germany, I felt it was courageous for him to say as much as that to a stranger, even to an obvious foreigner.

“Nobody talks because of the fear. Also because there is little enough to talk about. No one knows what is happening.

“The newspapers say nothing. They too are afraid. And they may well be; punishment has followed even an accidental misprint in the report of a minister’s speech, so they are silent.

“They print official announcements, reams of dull propaganda emitted by Goebbels’ department, tiresome ministerial speeches, which never say anything.

“For comment, they will paraphase some tiresome speech and obsequiously remind their readers that what Herr Reichsminister So-and-So says is undoubtedly right; since the Herr Reichsminister has the confidence of the Fuehrer.

“At times one suspects irony.

CAUSES OF GRUMBLING

“One day last week in an unobtrusive paragraph, the Frankfurter Zeitung remarked that, in addition to denouncing grumblers, the government would be wise to remove some of the causes of grumbling.

“The sentence was one gasp by its daring. It needs much courage to write and print such a thing in Germany today.

“So the press is dead, a dull and empty relic of its old self.

” ‘I will,’ said Goebbels when he became Propaganda Minister, ‘play on the press as on a piano.’ The trouble is that he only knows one tune—the Horst Wessel Lied.

“Therefore, just as nobody talks, so nobody reads.

“For five minutes by the clock in the Graf Adolfstrasse in Dusseldorf, I watched two lads selling the Fanfare—the local organ of the Hitler youth movement.

“In five minutes, though they worried everybody, they sold one copy—to me! Then I watched a man selling the ‘grown-up’ Nazi evening paper. In five minutes he sold two. In a Berlin underground carriage, in the rush hour, I counted the readers of newspapers. There were three.

PROPAGANDA EVERYWHERE

“The bookshops and bookstalls are stuffed with Nazi propaganda. But I have never seen anybody buying the dreary stuff, and only once or twice have I seen anybody reading it.

“So it is. The Country of Dreadful Silence, where, about public affairs, nobody cares to talk and nobody cares to read.

“Only, under the surface, the growing rumble of criticism and dissatisfaction.

“The government is alarmed. And its nervousness may lead to a new outbreak of that open violence which seemed to have died down.

FEAR FOR JEWS

“There may be in the next few weeks a new campaign against the Jews. I am not sure. But there are signs of it. It would, some of the leaders think, be a fine distraction—as the coming Thaelmann trial is also designed to be.

” ‘Blame the Jews for everything’ has been a useful enough precept in the past.

“Socially the Jews seem to have, as it were, drawn in their horns, You do not see them, as you used to, in the cafes or smart restaurants. They live at home, and visit each other, or such Aryan friends as are not afraid of being thought ‘pro-Semites.’

“The biggest sufferers are the younger, not yet established, professional men; and the new generation, who can get neither a technical nor a professional training.

NEW MADHOUSE

“To all this there is one exception — the country around Nurnberg. Here personal and economic factors combine unhappily. For a very long time the Franconian peasantry—it is the big hop-growing district — have suffered from exploitation by Jews.

“It is precisely the situation which has been the economic basis of ferocious anti-Semitism farther East.

“And, as a result or by coincidence, it is just here that Julius Streicher, a half-crazy, sadistic Jew-hater and Jew-baiter is the ‘Gauleiter,’ the local party boss, the local autocrat.

“It is in Streicher’s domain that the worst excesses have been. It is in Streicher’s domain that a new explosion is likely to come.

“It may come, or it may not. One cannot be sure. I doubt, though, if it would achieve its purpose. Fewer and fewer Germans believe that the Jews are the source of all their troubles — or even the ‘Marxists.’

“The Jews have been repressed. The Marxists have been suppressed. And yet—

“In public nobody speaks his thoughts. The dreadful silence holds. But the thoughts are there.

“And not all Goebbels’ fulminations, not all Goering’s espionage can stop the quiet spreading f discontent and disaffection.”