The Clergy. The Judiciary. The Military.

Caption reads: When a nation is abandoned by all good gods, it must make new idols for itself.**

Towards the end of 1999, Dr. Erich Schmorell sent me a little package containing Susanne Hirzel’s memoirs, Vom Ja Zum Nein. By that time, it was common knowledge that Hans Hirzel and his sister Susanne had taken a hard right swing politically. They had joined the Republikaner party, at the time, the closest thing to a neo-Nazi party allowed under German law.

The Hirzel siblings were firmly entrenched in the “Germany First” movement — anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant. Hans Hirzel was nominated as presidential candidate for that far-right wing party in 1994. As he accepted the nomination and spoke on behalf of the Republikaner, he recanted his White Rose work to the point of claiming he and Susanne had never been involved.

One of my German friends was an associate in the law firm where Roland Hirzel was partner. They had the radio on in the conference room where they worked on a case. Hans Hirzel’s speech recanting White Rose work happened to be broadcast as they worked. He said Roland turned white as a sheet and said, “How could he!”

Hans Hirzel and his sister Susanne apparently thought that this anti-Muslim ideology supported Israel and philo-Semitism.

At the same time that the Hirzels held this political view, Ignatz Bubis — chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany from 1992-1999 — regularly spoke out on behalf of Muslims living in Germany. He defended their rights alongside the rights of Germany’s Jewish community, knowing that once prejudice based on religion or ethnicity took root, the slippery slope moved fast. When Bubis died in August 1999, the Muslim community in Germany mourned his death alongside their Jewish friends.

I read Susanne Hirzel’s book based solely on Erich Schmorell’s recommendation. And I was glad I did.

Although her memoirs were published in 1998, it seems clear that she wrote it before her conversion to hard-right politics. Because her recollections of life in Nazi Germany were thought-provoking and haunting.

The first unforgettable passage covers the illogic of post-Kristallnacht rhetoric. Susanne wrote, “A little undisguised barbarism could not dampen the enthusiasm of the masses for the Führer. Everywhere you heard, ‘If only the Führer knew.’ Though it did not seem to occur to anyone how great the contradiction when at public events, the Party would say, ‘Führer, we thank you.’”

Out of many people whose White Rose work has been documented by means of their letters, diaries, and memoirs, Susanne is the only person who wrote about Kristallnacht. Even Anneliese Knoop-Graf either destroyed or censored Graf family documents (and those of her brother Willi Graf) for Kristallnacht, when Jews made up 30% of their neighborhood in Saarbrücken. And the long-awaited publication of Schmorell and Probst letters likewise skipped right over Kristallnacht.

Susanne did not dodge that date. She wrote about their conversations around the dinner table, her father’s anger. She detailed results of her postwar research as she learned that Jews fleeing Germany — fleeing Ulm — had to pay a “refugee tax” to leave and a “refugee tax” when they resettled. (Armin Ziegler found similar records for Jenny Grimminger’s family post-Kristallnacht.) Susanne told of the destruction of the synagogue in Ulm. Its ashes could not be overlooked. She recalled wondering how long it would be before Nazis burned down churches.

She also said that she could not bring herself to read aligned newspapers. By 1938, the lone holdout in Ulm had been shut down by the Nazis in 1937. Susanne admitted that while she wasn’t reading propaganda, she could not help but see Jewish stores and homes that had been demolished and eventually reopened as “Aryan” businesses or with “Aryan” residents. She remembers wondering how Jewish families who stayed were supposed to live.

And yet, everywhere she heard — simultaneously — if only the Führer knew, and Führer, we thank you. The lack of rational thought disturbed her in light of German “barbarism.”

The second topic covered by Susanne Hirzel strikes me as more profound and worthy of deeper deliberation.

Susanne identified three German institutions that could have done something about Hitler’s tyranny before it was too late. She noted the critical junctures when those institutions lost their ability to resist. The three institutions? The clergy. The judiciary. The military.

The clergy.

Why did both Churches [Catholic and Lutheran] keep silent as Jews were excluded and defamed? Were their bishops at odds with one another? The subsequent deaths assumed basic Jew-baiting. If for example bishops and pastors had all protested together on the same day, right during that first year of Hitler’s reign, it would have been completely effective. In the beginning, surveillance [of the people] was not unassailable [lit. watertight]. Also, people were still conscious of Hitler’s words from February [1933], in which he essentially stated that Christianity formed the basis for his government.

On the other hand, perhaps such a unified protest of the bishops would have taken place if thousands of angry Christians had stormed the doors of the parsonages. The political developments against Jews, and their fate, would have been postponed or delayed, and today Christians would be able to remember the imprisoned members of their community with honor.

Two things to keep in mind as Susanne Hirzel damns the clergy for their inaction.

First, her father Ernst Hirzel was a Lutheran pastor. It’s apparent from her memoirs that they had a complicated relationship. She admired him, his strength (despite being partially disabled from World War I), his ability to put together a sermon quickly, almost on the fly. Susanne had an almost adversarial relationship with her mother. It was Susanne’s father who allowed her to study at the boy’s Gymnasium, Susanne’s father who supported her at university.

Yet she seems to have resented his prioritization of parish over family. In 1944/45 as Allied planes rained bombs on Ulm, her father left her — a 22-year-old working 60-hour weeks at a factory — in charge of her four youngest siblings. He tended to the church structure and assumed she could get the little children to safety on her own. (Her mother had already left Ulm.) As she related those scenes, she sounded bitter.

Second, Susanne was also extraordinarily proud of her father’s courage. As far as it went. Rev. Ernst Hirzel had been among the earliest signers of the Niemöller-Bonhoeffer Confession, that is, at the time when 7000 Lutheran pastors signed. When the NSDAP threatened signers with a 50% pay cut, her father was among the 700 who signed anyway.

Susanne recalled that after he signed, refusing to align with the official German Lutheran Church, she and her five younger siblings worried that they would not have enough to eat. A legitimate concern, since Rev. Hirzel pastored a fairly new, not affluent church in the working class part of Ulm. Martin-Luther-Kirche did not even have enough in its budget to pay for a parsonage, so the Hirzels lived in a large ramshackle house with a big yard — behind the train station.

To set his childrens’ minds at ease, Rev. Hirzel bought a 100-pound bag of oatmeal and a 100-pound bag of sugar and placed them in the upstairs workroom. It was a visible reminder that come what may, they would not starve. They would always have breakfast!

Rev. Hirzel seems also to have been a leader of the Bekennende Kirche in Ulm. In 1935, the pastors of the “Confessing Church” across Germany read a manifesto from their pulpits, railing against the “mythology of racism” and new paganism. When the local NSDAP leader heard that pastors in Ulm planned to read this manifesto as well, he threatened them with either a fine or jail time if they read it as scheduled.

Pastor Hirzel considered both options. He announced that he and his fellow pastors would take the jail time, because that meant that as long as they were in jail, there would be no Lutheran funerals from the offending churches. Pastors in Ulm, including Rev. Hirzel, read it from the pulpit. The NSDAP leader backed down and ‘graciously’ forgave the fine. From that time on, Mrs. Hirzel worried that physical harm would come to them.

Susanne, on the other hand, did not worry. She was proud of her father for his stance. That would not be the last time Rev. Hirzel would buck the Nazis with his sermons.

And yet.

Against that backdrop, Rev. Hirzel was also a diehard nationalist. When he thought his strong-willed children may be considering something the least bit out of line with Nazi policy, Romans 13 would pop up. Or he would remind them of the horrors of the Versailles Treaty and the Weimar Republic. Pastor Hirzel told his children that it was healthy to consider the viewpoint of one’s opponents, and that it was better to wait out wrongdoers instead of engaging them in combat.

Mixed messages. Susanne did not forget.

She identified 1933 as the last time that churches in Germany had enough credibility to mount effective resistance against Hitler’s regime. After 1933, churches had ceded their integrity and were no longer in a position to stop Hitler in his tracks. And yes, both churches. (Keep in mind that even now, there is no real separation of church and state in Germany. Catechism is taught in public schools. In 1933, there was even less separation of church and state.)

Susanne pointed to the lack of protest from either the Catholic or the Lutheran church in 1940-1941 as the T-4 program (Aktion T4) was initiated and carried out. Bishop Galen of Münster preached three sermons in July and August 1941 against the euthanization of the mentally ill and “useless eaters,” which included people with multiple sclerosis. Those sermons were widely distributed. Note that the NSDAP did not reprimand Galen, much less imprison him. What would have happened if between 1933-1941, every priest and pastor had followed suit?

Susanne believed that by 1940/41, it was too late for effective protest from the churches, because their alignment was set in stone. They had no moral authority. She also plainly stated that the T-4 program did not end because of Galen’s sermons. Rather, the NSDAP had reached its quota of 70,000. T-4 was a dry run for the extermination of Europe’s Jews.

She wrote, “I regard the entire euthanasia operation as a precursor of the later mass extermination of Jews that began about a year later in Auschwitz, which no one knew at the time. I can only believe that they wanted to see if they could successfully camouflage the true nature of an operation and judge how people would react should they indeed find out.”

No, Susanne recognized that when “thousands of angry Christians” did not storm the doors of parsonages and churches, pastors and priests went along with alignment. They believed Hitler’s promise in February 1933 that he would ensure Germany return to its Christian roots, that the NSDAP would represent Christianity. There was no turning back.

The judiciary.

Susanne Hirzel identified several missed opportunities for the German bar association that led to the destruction of that body of jurists. The initial failure occurred when too few protested the Law to Redress the Distress of People and Nation, better known as the Enabling Act, passed on March 24, 1933. Note that Hitler did not unilaterally breathe life into this Act. The German parliament passed it as a piece of official legislation. It was time-limited to four years, but it was enforced for twelve.

It is worth noting that the Enabling Act followed an Alien & Sedition Act on March 20, 1933 that hardly ever is mentioned in histories about the Third Reich. The March 20 law expanded the definition of treason to include even offhand remarks that were deemed derogatory of Germany or its leaders.

Hitler enticed centrists and Bavarian Catholics to vote in favor of the law by reiterating and strengthening his support for both the Catholic and Lutheran churches. He made these promises openly and in public forum, dripping with enough sincerity that bishops and laity alike believed he must be honest about his plans.

And the German bar association did not protest.

A few people did in fact comprehend Hitler’s long-term strategy, though it was still early in the game. These “wise men” did the things that could have kept Hitler in check; sadly, their numbers were small. Golo Mann reported that the first few weeks of Hitler’s regime, the courts took proper legal action against the atrocities committed by the SS and SA. They released persons who had been falsely imprisoned and reinstated banned newspapers.

Hitler needed the Enabling Act so he could put an end to the good verdicts these judges rendered. And so that he alone could write the laws that governed the land. No checks and balances here. Executive, legislative, and judiciary branches of government were now embodied in a single person: Adolf Hitler.

Both the legislature and the judiciary enabled what followed.

The second opportunity missed by the German judiciary occurred during the Röhm-Putsch or the Night of Long Knives. Hitler and the aligned press billed it as preventive, claiming that Ernst Röhm was instigating an uprising against him, a coup attempt. In reality, it was a purge of those whom Hitler perceived to be his “enemies.” One would think that Hitler’s “enemies” were those dreaded Communists and Socialists who had voted against him.

Instead, the purge targeted former allies, especially the Sturmabteilung or SA, that had been under Röhm’s command. When Hitler had needed thugs to carry out his wishes, it had been Röhm and his SA men who did exactly that.

Except now, in phase two of Hitler’s tyranny, he wished to present a kinder, gentler face. Those thugs were now obstacles. To be purged. Along with their leader and anyone else on his enemies list. Besides, Röhm took the “socialist” part of NSDAP too seriously and was talking about wealth distribution.

Susanne recorded her memory of this event as follows:

Though I was not yet thirteen years old, and my next-oldest brothers were 11 and 9, we did talk about the day’s events around the dinner table (the exception and not the rule to do so). “Murder among the heads of State,” that’s what people said about it, completely horrified. For the first time, extremism and inhumanity had shown themselves. On top of it all, Hindenburg praised Hitler for his actions.

Father said, “If it really was an attempted putsch by Röhm, then that’s how such things are usually handled.” However, no one actually knew just what had happened, because the press covered it all up.

This so-called Röhm-Putsch was a particularly severe crime carried out by Hitler, and the first mass murder. One would have thought that even if individual prosecuting attorneys would not, that at least the bar associations would have objected in a united fashion. Not a single individual’s life would have been jeopardized by so doing. However, it is true that these bar associations had long since been “aligned” – so nothing could happen. The sense of right and wrong had long since been extinguished, replaced by general fear and legal uncertainty, which is an important factor in the wielding of power.

Hitler declared afterwards in the Reichstag, “In this hour, I was responsible for the fate of the German nation and acted as the Supreme Judge on behalf of the German people.” In such a manner, one more constitutional right was removed and an outrage portrayed as justice. The Un-Constitutional state had become obvious.

So now, Hitler had assumed the role of the Chief Justice.

And it was a crime, no doubt about that. Those statutes from the Weimar constitution had not been changed. Murder was still murder. In 1934, Germans still lived with “due process” as part of their self-evident rights.

When the judiciary took no action, centuries of German law were obliterated. No longer could a citizen (much less Jewish Germans, or Roma-Sinti, whose citizenship had been revoked) expect due process. They could be murdered by the government, with no consequences to the murderer. Even when that murderer was Hitler himself, as it was with the execution of Ernst Röhm.

Susanne’s observation — the sense of right and wrong had long since been extinguished, replaced by general fear and legal uncertainty, which is an important factor in the wielding of power — is bone-chilling in its simplicity.

Despite alignment of the judiciary in 1933-1934, Susanne saw the T-4 program as the final straw for any hope of German justice. There was nothing in the German constitution, even revised as it had been by Adolf Hitler, that granted the government the right to murder those who were mentally ill or physically disabled. Prosecutors and judges had one more opportunity to overcome the vastness of the injustice. And they chose not to do so.

She saw that as the judiciary’s final surrender to Hitler’s tyranny, as their failure to protect the rule of law. The sense of right and wrong had long been extinguished.

The military.

Germany’s top military brass ceded power to Adolf Hitler the moment they swore their oath of loyalty to him, instead of to their country. Approximately six weeks after the Röhm-Putsch at the end of June 1934, a little over three weeks after Hindenburg’s death on August 2, 1934, Hitler held a plebiscite to officially hold the titles of Chancellor and President. The election may have been a farce, but the NSDAP did not treat it as such. Election Day was transformed into a celebration. 90% of Germans voted Yes.

After the vote was counted, Hitler decreed that from henceforth, the army should no longer swear its oath of loyalty to Germany. Instead, new recruits would pledge allegiance to Adolf Hitler himself. A solemn nationwide ceremony ensued that August, during which current members of the armed forces repeated the covenant.

Since the Röhm-Putsch had consolidated supremacy with Adolf Hitler and his top men (Goebbels, Göring, and Himmler) — to the benefit of their SS, Gestapo, and Reichswehr — most military men were happy to swear this oath to Hitler instead of to Germany. The military had long despised the SA. Very few had the foresight to understand that what Hitler had done to the SA, he could do to the army.

Prof. Kurt Huber, a National Socialist who simply hated Hitler, was correct when he advised Hans Scholl that they would not be able to overthrow Hitler’s regime without support from the military. Huber was wrong, however, when he supposed that the Reichswehr as an institution would take a stand against the Führer.

Susanne’s thoughts on this topic pose questions and what-ifs worth thinking about.

First: What exactly should we hope for? Was it possible to love your country and nevertheless wish for its downfall? In no European country at the time was such a thought even feasible. Often we young people, still in our homeland, would speak to one another in reckless openness, angry at the high-ranking generals who had to know that prolonging the End would require senseless losses. They were at the top of the power pyramid. They were the only ones who had the possibility to step in and exercise power. Only for them would it make sense to talk about the possibilities that success could bring. We felt like we were in an infinite waiting room, often also a depressed apathy.

I heard nothing about the private and military attempts at resistance, nothing about the contemplations of every possible kind of group, nothing about those executed for their resistance activities. And would it have encouraged me, cheered me up, to know these things, if I learned that they were unsuccessful?

Many people tried to keep all the positive things Hitler had accomplished in mind. But even these people felt the unreality and the lies couched in the “German language of unity” that had long ago befouled even the good. And there were others, enslaved by their own arrogance, who held to the high-sounding tones of Party and radio announcers. One could sense the departure from our own culture. Proverbs like this one arose:

“Das Volk der Dichter und Denker, ein Volk der Richter und Henker.” [The people of poets and thinkers, a people of judges and hangmen.]

We young students knew that our eyes had been blinded and that we could see, as it were, through narrow slits. In our everyday life, we experienced intellectual and spiritual bondage and disillusionment, the oppression of mankind by intimidation of their souls. There was no freedom of thought, but rather only being led by the nose and conforming due to justified fear.

We saw the growing brutalization, the arrogance and aggressive nature of public cry-babies, the defamation and expulsion of Jews, the loathsome racial doctrines. All of this made us think about resistance. …

Many people also thought, “All right, there’s war now. Everything else must wait. Once we return home and the war has ended, everything will be different. We can hound that boy to the devil!” That’s how our father thought. What an illusion! The military alone exercised any power and with power, the ability to change things. And there had been several unsuccessful attempts at a coup. …

I asked Rudi Daur [another Confessing Church Lutheran pastor, friend of her father, and Susanne’s landlord in Stuttgart]: “What do you think about distributing leaflets that are intended to shake people up and tell them the truth?”

He replied: “People will not allow themselves to be changed because of leaflets, and the military machine will not allow itself to be stopped by leaflets. As a pastor, I can call people to think about things, to gain new insights, and I can afford practical aid. But even I can do no more. I must wait for the Americans.”

Susanne’s words about the military are as complicated as those regarding the clergy. Ernst Hirzel was a highly-decorated soldier from World War I, and his wife had been wounded serving as a nurse during that same war. They would not have minded had their boys been military heroes.

The Hirzel boys, on the other hand, understood the immorality of Hitler’s regime. Hans Hirzel tried to join the military to prove he was tough (he was in danger of being classified as a useless eater), and Peter Hirzel served on the Russian front. But both strongly disagreed with their father’s rah-rah nationalism. They “got” the disconnect. Ernst Hirzel could not see it.

“What exactly should we hope for? Was it possible to love your country and nevertheless wish for its downfall? In no European country at the time was such a thought even feasible.” Again, the simplicity of Susanne’s words is powerful.

During his interrogations on February 26, 1943, Alexander Schmorell signed his death warrant when he stated, “I confess to treason, but deny that I acted treasonously.”

And after the war, Otl Aicher wrote, “Consciously, on purpose, with a clear head. In their eyes, I am a traitor. Yet my self-confidence is strong enough that I can say, I am not the traitor, the State is.”

Susanne also identified two more actors that could have made a difference, that could have stopped Hitler’s tyranny had they refused to align. Neither was an institution in the same sense as the clergy, the judiciary, and the military. But they are worth mentioning.

First, the news media. Almost from the beginning, the German press voluntarily aligned. They printed the news that Hitler wanted printed. Radio broadcasters similarly aired only programs that met with Hitler’s approval. Germany lost that valuable Fourth Estate, the press. After 1937 when independent presses were fully abolished, the only way to learn what was really happening? Foreign broadcasts. Radio Beromünster. The BBC. Voice of America. In fact, VOA was founded in 1942 to counter the propaganda that flooded German airwaves.

So many Germans listened to foreign broadcasts that Hitler soon made it a felony to do so. Almost all White Rose indictments refer to “listening to foreign broadcasts” as one of the crimes for which the individual is being indicted.

Finally, Susanne held up a very large mirror and asks: Where was the rest of the world? You knew, you knew, you knew! And you did nothing.

It is hard to believe that Stauffenberg was able to gather 200 like-minded people around himself despite constant surveillance, and get them to agree on a plan of action. There are so few people known today who were actively involved in the various resistance movements. Will we forget the ones whose names are not familiar to us, simply because they were listed as traitors and because they were unsuccessful, their resistance bore no fruit, or because their “differences” are now held up as an accusation? Their accomplishments, though they may have been in vain, should be highly treasured today. We should all know about them.

Because you have to ask the question: Who among the nations, who among the international organizations, was able to stop the mass murder of Jews?

These days, when I have plenty of time on my hands, I have been able to discover that Kurt Gerstein was not the only person who talked about crimes being perpetrated at the concentration camps. There were at least three others who had managed to escape from Auschwitz: Vrba, Wetzler, and Jerzy Tabeau. I got this information from Werner Maser. He talks about many other things, which I will briefly list here:

Pope Pius XII consistently refused to condemn the mass murder of the Jews.
British officials refused to believe the reports they were given. They considered them to be exaggerated. Great Britain said that it was not prepared to accept large numbers of Jews.
The International Red Cross was not prepared to extend its protection to Jews in concentration camps.
Five million [sic] American citizens refused to act in a manner that is hard to understand. Young Jewish activists fought to get the House of Representatives to allow more than 150,000 emigrants to enter the country (the quota at the time).
At this point, the Soviet Union was still capable of preventing the extermination of Polish Jews.

That mirror is uncomfortable, to say the least. American Methodists supported Hitler. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, he was a vegetarian. When Bishop Melle of the German Methodist Church went on his fundraising tour in the USA in 1936-1937, he collected a boatload of cash for the NSDAP from American Methodists who appreciated Hitler’s “morality.” For more information, check out Dr. Roland Blaich’s work on the Methodist church during the Holocaust. New York Times also reported positively on Melle’s fundraising efforts.

Susanne Hirzel’s larger point is well-taken. There are certain institutions that form the bedrock of free societies. When those institutions fail, there is little hope that resistance to tyranny will succeed.

Each of those institutions will eventually reach a point of no return, after which they have surrendered too much, too soon. Coming back from those pivots is next to impossible.

To successfully resist tyranny, The People must demand that their communities of faith, their judiciary, and their military stand up for justice. If we do not demand courage from well-organized associations, we will be too weak to resist on our own.

In Susanne’s words, “if thousands of angry Christians had stormed the doors of the parsonages…”

Let thousands of angry Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, Buddhists storm the doors of their communities of faith.

Let thousands of angry judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, contract lawyers, immigration specialists storm the steps of the Supreme Court.

Let thousands of angry privates, sergeants, and lieutenants storm the Pentagon (or at minimum show up en masse in their CO’s office).

Perhaps then, and only then, can we prevent the descent from being a people of poets and thinkers, to — a people of judges and hangmen.

Susanne Hirzel was an interesting, talented, and brilliant woman. In her old age as she repudiated the ideology that she paid dearly for in 1943. It’s therefore become less fashionable to write positively about her and her brother.

I believe that we should not forget the good she and her brother Hans Hirzel did, and what they lost, because they stood up for what was right. Even if they screwed up in their dotage.

My heart broke for Susanne when she wrote that her mother so abhorred her “treason” that when her prison sentence ended, her mother treated her like a household servant and not like a daughter. I cannot imagine…

**Top image: The political cartoon from 1931 was drawn by “Th. Th. Heine” or Thomas Theodor Heine, birth name David Theodor Heine. Heine was Jewish and was barely able to get out of Germany alive in 1933. His political cartoons had been well-known for their biting satire, and along with fellow satirists Frank Wedekind and Ludwig Thoma, Heine had spent time in prison for his work.

This particular cartoon depicts Franz Seraph Tausend on the far left, an alchemist (yes, really) who supported the NSDAP in its early years. Not too long after this cartoon, he was arrested for fraud. Tausend died in prison.

Hitler needs no explanation.

Josef Weiβenberg was a “reglious reformer,” read, charlatan.

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Image credit: Top image--Public domain.

The above information is fully footnoted in our White Rose histories. Please purchase them for access to that material! To order digital version of White Rose History, Volume I: Coming Together (January 1933-April 30, 1942), click here. To order digital version of White Rose History, Volume II, click here. WRH1 is © 2002, 2003, 2007 by Denise Elaine Heap. WRH2 is © 2002, 2007 by Denise Elaine Heap.

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