Life under an authoritarian dictatorship has been on my mind ever since Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine. Russia is now more isolated from the rest of the world than at any time since the Brezhnev era, and the Putin regime has become increasingly repressive and Margarita Simonyan’s propaganda machine increasingly strident and intense.
This happened around the same time that I read A Village in the Third Reich, a truly fascinating and disturbing account of the Bavarian resort village of Oberstdorf under twelve years of Nazi totalitarianism. Based on government documents, residents’ letters and diaries, and reports from the local newspaper - which condemned antisemitism before Hitler took power, and published instructions on how to boycott Jewish shops afterward - the book illustrates how nearly every aspect of daily life in this typical German town was affected by the rise of the Third Reich.
It’s been overshadowed by other legislation which awarded absolute power to Hitler, but authors Julia Boyd and Angelika Patel argue that a law called the “Equalisation Act” allowed the Nazis to control pretty much everything, even the local alpine ski club:
While the Empowerment Act proved a terrifying piece of legislation for so many individual Germans, it was the Equalisation Act that was to have the most immediate effect on towns and villages throughout the country. Put in a nutshell, this act set out to ensure that every aspect of German life – social, political and cultural – conform to Nazi ideology and policy. It was the means by which Nazi tentacles would reach into every last corner of society. No organisation was to be exempt, no matter how trivial or unimportant. For a village like Oberstdorf it was a devastating piece of legislation, potentially sweeping away generations of tradition and subtle social contact. Furthermore, it was to be put in place at great speed.
The old cliche is that authoritarianism engulfs society gradually, like the (false) analogy of the frog in a pot of water slowly brought to a boil. But these are the Nazis we’re talking about. They wasted no time putting their jackbooted foot down.
Since the transition to Nazi control, the atmosphere in the village had changed profoundly. Shop windows that had once displayed quilts now flaunted swastikas and brown shirts. Even stores selling art supplies advertised their brushes and paints under the label ‘The New Era’.
The education system was so subsumed to Nazi ideology that one teacher confessed to a friend that he’d choose imprisonment in a concentration camp to teaching students such garbage, except that his family members would also be punished.
Even churches were forced to incorporate the swastika and Nazi rhetoric into their services, resulting in a schism between German Christians who went along with this and those who bravely resisted. (As I’ve long said, I don’t think religion makes people do bad things so much as people make religion do bad things.)
The Nazi regime didn’t go out of its way to advertise what was happening in the camps and euthanasia clinics, but the word got around nonetheless.
The message enshrined in the well-known rhyme ‘Lieber Gott, mach’ mich stumm, dass ich nicht nach Dachau kumm!’ (‘Dear God make me dumb, so I won’t to Dachau come!’), was one that everyone needed to heed before voicing any opinion.
Of course the Third Reich is most infamous for its discrimination against the Jews, which ultimately led to mass murder and genocide on an industrial scale. Oberstdorf had a negligible Jewish population, but one resident did covertly provide assistance to Jews.
It was the mayor. The Nazi mayor.
In every dictatorship, people rush to join the ruling party for any number of reasons - legitimate belief in its ideology, the make connections and get ahead in society, or to try changing the system from the inside. Mayor Ludwig Fink - seriously, his surname is considered an insult in English, and it’s the kind of thing the studio would tell you to tone down a bit if you used it for a Nazi character in your screenplay - is an unlikely hero of the book, using his position to shield his people from the worst excesses committed by his political party:
We have already seen how Fink helped Sister Biunda and her nuns and how he protected the Jews and other persecuted individuals under his jurisdiction; how he not only helped to ensure that the elderly Emil Schnell was adequately provisioned, but had also warned him of his imminent deportation. The delicacy of his position as a moderate Nazi mayor is illustrated by an anecdote that recounts how during the war he publicly reprimanded a woman for criticising the regime but then privately advised her just to be careful not to say such things to him when others were present. In addition, Fink was widely respected for not ducking the miserable task of informing families of the deaths of their men in person (his own son Erich was killed in France in August 1944). His refusal to resist the French as ordered by the SS was entirely consistent with his eleven year record as mayor. Carl Zuckmayer described him as the ‘unknown man wearing the mask of evil’ who had protected his Jewish mother.
“Moderate Nazi” is the ultimate contradiction in terms, and there is no indication that Fink was trying to destroy the whole system from within. But there’s nothing new about totalitarian minions sparing their friends and neighbors from the worst excesses. One aim of the Nazis’ antisemitic propaganda was to convince even their devoted followers that their own Jewish doctor or accountant or classmate wasn’t one of “the decent ones.”
If we agree that some Nazis were worse than average - the sadistic Oskar Dirlewanger and his SS Brigade of rapists and murderers come to mind - it stands to reason that others might have been less evil. After the war, the German government and occupation authorities split Nazi officials and collaborators into five different categories, from those who played a minimal role in Hitler’s terror to those who carried out the worst offences. Fink was ultimately categorized as a mere “follower” and released from custody.
Other villagers - many of them social outcasts who leapt at the chance to lord it over their colleagues - went all in on supporting the Nazis, some actively resisted, but most just kept their heads down and tried to carry on as usual, without attracting too much attention. Everyone imagines they’d be brave resisters had fate placed them in Nazi Germany (and there are some dark corners of the internet where people fantasize about wearing the SS runes) but history suggests the great majority of us would simply go along to get along.
Indeed, contrary to poll results showing overwhelming support for Putin and his war, there is some evidence suggesting Russians aren’t as enthusiastic in private:
Six weeks into the war, amid the drumbeat of disinformation, state-run polling agency results have pointed to a surge of support for Putin.
Evidence of such a surge, however, also showed up last week in a survey by one of Russia’s most reputable independent pollsters, the Levada Center. For people looking for a sign of Russian weariness with Putin, Levada’s poll was not it.
But among academics, social scientists, and close watchers of Russian social trends, the Levada poll showed signs of something else: a Russian reluctance -- or even fear -- of speaking frankly and honestly to pollsters.
In a report published on April 6, researchers affiliated with the London School of Economics examined “preference falsification” in Russian public opinion surveys: whether respondents were hiding their true feelings on political questions; in this case, those related to approval for Putin, for the government, or for the conduct of the war.
[…]
In their experiment, the researchers used an online Russian-designed sociological tool called Toloka to recruit 3,000 adults and devised a list of questions asking respondents whether they supported one or more of four social policies: same-sex marriage, abortion restrictions, the war in Ukraine, and cash welfare payments for poor Russians.
Respondents aren’t asked to say which policies they support, merely how many of the four items they support.
In this survey, which was conducted on April 4 and which sociologists broadly call a “list experiment,” half of the respondents were given a three-item list, with the question of the Ukraine war omitted; the other half was given a four-item list that included the Ukraine war question.
The researchers also asked respondents a straightforward, yes-or-no question: “Do you support the war?”
The results showed that when Russians were directly asked the question “Do you support the war?” 68 percent said they did. When using the list experiment, however, support for the war dropped to 53 percent.
“Do Russians tell the full truth when asked about their support for the war?” the researchers wrote. “Based on our experiment, we can safely conclude that they do not.
“Russians, at least those in our sample, clearly hide their true attitudes towards the war,” they said.
In Oberstdorf, support for Hitler and the Nazis declined as the numbers of dead and wounded increased. There’s a reason Putin has been frantically trying to shield his subjects from what’s happening in Ukraine.