Oh, aren’t dreadful things happening! Papa and Mama are sick about the awful violence. Did anything happen near you during the Krystall-nacht riots? A friend of Mama’s in Niedersdorf lost a cousin. Can you imagine, Matthew—killed! Papa has been weighed down over it like I’ve never seen him. I know he’s thinking and praying, but he’s not saying too much about what he’s thinking yet.

I am worried too.

Sabina

PART IV: The Mystery of the Dungeon-1939

PART IV

The Mystery of the Dungeon—1939

39 Approach to Conflict

39

Approach to Conflict

In the vacuum created by the collapse of Germany after the First World War and the economic collapse of the Great Depression, the staunch German people turned to a madman to reestablish their hopes, to rebuild their economy, and, at the most fundamental level, to nourish and recultivate the wounded Celtic pride that had been so bitterly stung after the war.

He achieved all these ends by a gradual, then a headlong and unrestrained, restoration of Germany’s military might, along with a crazed preaching of Teutonic, Aryan supremacy over all other races and nations of the world. In so doing he found millions of willing and eager ears.

Adolf Hitler joined the fledgling national socialist movement in 1919, just months after its founding, quickly rising in its ranks by his forceful pro-Aryan oratory. Throughout the 1920s the fringe political movement grew, with Hitler more and more in command, and by the collapse of 1929 it was poised to make a run at history.

The Nazis fielded but miniscule contingents in the national elections of the late twenties, looked upon by the general population as a lunatic political party that might as well have been comprised of escaped inmates from some asylum. But they succeeded in electing 107 of their Brownshirts to the Reichstag in 1930, over their previous twelve. Suddenly all was changed.

By 1932, with a growing dissatisfaction of the masses toward the leadership of the crumbling Weimar Republic, and with a sense that the emerging nationalism of a new generation of Germans was ready to forcefully, even violently, reassert itself behind him, Hitler prepared himself for the destiny he knew was his.

In January of 1933, President Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler—leader of the Nazis, by now the strongest party in Germany—chancellor of the Reich. A year and a half later Hindenburg was dead. Hitler called for a special election, which he won by a landslide, and by the end of 1934 he was chancellor and president and Der Führer (or leader) over all of Germany.

Quickly he began a secret program of massive rearmament. In addition the Nazi leader called for a great “cleansing” of impure elements throughout all of German life and society, led and carried out by the secretive elite SS and SA organizations, which, over the years, would come to dominate all of life in Germany. The Nazi police state had begun.