Whenever someone comes along and starts giving us the line about “Well, after all, Hitler has succeeded in uniting the German people,” we get riled. And the more they talk about the new courage and hope among the German underdogs, the more riled we get.
When proof comes, it comes in a rush. First, we saw reports from Germany published in British papers. All is not well in the Reich, they insinuate. Anti-Nazi pamphlets manage to find their way between the sheets of German newspapers, which in themselves are so uniformly dull that it may be they are bought for the seditious material that might be found inside. Or else someone looking up a telephone number in a directory outside a ‘phone booth in Hamburg will suddenly come across a sheet of paper with vigorous anti-Nazi material printed on it. Or else, while walking in the streets, Storm Troopers and their subjects suddenly find themselves showered with sheets of the same kind. Sometimes, too, as the London Daily Herald reports, ” ‘seditious’ inscriptions in paint or tar, desperately hard to remove, appear mysteriously on walls and pavements.
And then there are the tiny newspapers containing true accounts of what goes on in Germany, photostated, reduced and then distributed by the thousands together with little magnifying glasses, to enable news-hungry Nazis to read about themselves. New Yorkers who visited an exposition at the New Workers’ School several months ago were able to see copies of the little papers. Some of them are about an inch by an inch and a half in size, reduced from typewritten sheets, the words very small but readable even to the naked eye.
Those were the reports. We didn’t know how deep-rooted this opposition was, and we wanted to be absolutely sure of our ground before we confounded our “Hitler united the German people” friends.
Then three days ago, we found what we were looking for. We were introduced to a German refugee, out of Berlin only two months. We hurried him to a corner and asked him:
“Is there or is there not absolute unity among the Nazified German people today###”
“There is not,” he said.
“Elaborate, please,” we demanded, the flush of victory coloring our rosy cheeks.
He elaborated. And the substance of his observations strictly first hand, mind you-was this:
There can be no doubt that many Germans are in opposition to the Nazi regime. Even though they may not go about attacking Hitler and Hitlerism, six million Communist voters and further millions of Centrist voters do not overnight become more barbaric than any savage in any unexplored hinterland. Beneath the smoke-screen of Nazi propaganda gushing from the chimney-like mouths of Goebbels, Goering, et al., lies an undercurrent of dissatisfaction. Riproaring anti-Semitism is not enough to feed the mouths of the hungry unemployed. The millenium for Germany has not yet arrived, despite the fact that Hitler and his cohorts have been in charge of operations for more than a year.
But it is also true that any open dissatisfaction is quickly squelched. Arrests and sentences to concentration camps for those who speak out against the regime have by now become too numerous to be news.
Still, there is dissatisfaction. And since it is hidden, it finds itself forced into a position more disadvantageous to the Hitlerites than it would otherwise be. The dissatisfaction arises among the Nazis themselves. The Communists, the Centrists, the Catholics, all have been absorbed into the Nazi organization. It is from within that the seed of opposition is sprouting. And because of that, because of the fact that the Nazis have nothing tangible to punish without biting their tails like scorpions surrounded by fire, this opposition is far more serious than even Hitler suspects.
What it will lead to no one knows. The refugee with whom we spoke believed the Nazi regime will eventually be forced more and more to the left, until all the original symptoms of the disease, including anti-Semitism, will disappear. Whether that will happen or not we won’t venture to predict.
But it’s nice to think about.
D. B.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
