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CHAPTER 15 Fourteen Years of Democracy IV: Then Came the Collapse All of us who believed in a German democracy and approved of the republic are guilty for our blindness. Men and women alike, we lived our narrow lives ful‹lling the obligations of our particular ‹eld of work. We did not see the traitors in our midst. None of my friends and fellow workers, nobody among the ruling parties, thought the Nazis anything more than an unimportant party without in›uence, led by a group of gangsters who incited each other to murder—criminals the government should put behind bars. At best we thought of them as unruly people who, after the war, were incapable of returning to an orderly life with routine duties, a life without adventure and excitement. None of my friends would have believed that some day, not too far off, they would threaten the civilized world. The only ones who knew were the plotters themselves, who made the plans for overthrowing the regime, and they hid in the dark and did not show their true face. The facts and events that brought about the collapse are so well known that only for completeness’ sake I will brie›y allude to them. In 1929 something happened in the United States. It was called a “depression ,” and it was a great calamity. Many rich people lost much of their wealth, a few lost all of it, and the people called the “underprivileged” became the “unemployed.” The depression traveled across the Atlantic by the same route which thousands of wealthy Americans had taken on luxury liners for many summers in search of pleasure, the same route which middle-class Americans had taken on tourist liners to study or to educate themselves in European countries. When it arrived in Germany on top of successive periods of priva159 tion and suffering from war, defeat, “peace treaties,” and in›ation, it was called by a stronger name, “the crisis.” It became more than a calamity; it became a disaster. What could be done about it? How could we, the individual citizens, help the standing army of unemployed, most of whom had been industrious people? There was the unemployment insurance, in which we had taken such pride, but it provided only for those who had been working before the crisis came and for a limited period; after that, they had to go on relief. It did not apply to the young generation, who graduated from school and had to proceed to idleness. For years they felt they were not needed, and they never learned that bread should be the fruit of toil—that its ingredients are not produced in relief agencies. Other industrial countries weathered the storm; we attempted to do the same. Many small groups, private welfare agencies, public-spirited men and women, among them teachers and students of my school and academy, experimented with schemes for a voluntary labor service, and some municipalities made efforts to establish work relief. We were convinced that the unemployed needed more than money to buy food and to ‹ll their bellies, that they needed something to ‹ll their days, keep their hands busy and their minds alert. Most of all, they needed some belief in themselves and in the future to give meaning to their existence. I wrote an article in 1932 for one of the liberal daily papers. It was returned. They considered it too radical for their readers. The Berliner Tageblatt, with Theodor Wolff as chief editor, accepted it.1 I quote from it, for it suggests exactly what the Nazis did a few years later. It appeared with the title “There would be work if . . .” I said it was an economic fallacy to assume that unemployment was caused by overproduction or that modern technology had made labor super›uous. I gave ‹gures on the families living in overcrowded rooms and on those who did not have a bed for each person. I spoke of the children who had only one shirt and were obliged to remain in bed while it was being washed, who had only one pair of shoes and could not let them dry after rain. As long as these were the living conditions of the masses, I maintained, no hand need be idle. There was not too much produce, but too little planning and rationality. “There are more than ‹ve million who want work and are unemployed . They are insuf‹ciently supported by the other twenty million, most...

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