Forgetting: Nazism, Front Fighters and Destruction, 1929–45

Abstract

As a movement that had emerged from war and defeat, the National Socialists had always placed great weight on the war experience. The conflict was at the centre of much of the movement's ideology, from Hitler's own personification of himself as a simple front soldier through to the Nazis' heroising of the war dead. In contrast to conservative narratives of the war, which tended to be based on romantic notions of personal sacrifice for the nation, the Nazis bestowed a far more aggressive and militarist meaning on the conflict. For them, the violent qualities of mechanised warfare pointed towards the rebirth of the nation along racial lines. There was little place for the German-Jewish soldiers in this conception of the front-line experience. In September 1930, in the midst of the Great Depression, the National Socialists achieved a major electoral breakthrough, increasing their share of the national vote from 2.6% to 18.3%. The influence that the Nazis gained by this victory gradually enabled them to refashion Germany's memory culture according to their own set of beliefs. Hitler's appointment as Reich chancellor in January 1933 reinforced the trajectory. However, the more inclusive conservative narratives of the war never fully faded, and this continuity ensured that German Jews retained some presence in public memorial activities and annual rituals of remembrance, until the Nazis' anti-Semitic persecution intensified in the mid-1930s. By the end of that decade, as the Nazis' Jewish policies turned to genocide, the most visible sign of German Jews' wartime service was to be found not in the veterans themselves, but on war graves and memorials that remained in place throughout Germany.