The German people accuse

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The German People Accuses is a book by Maximilian Scheer , which appeared anonymously in 1936 while in exile in Paris and presents an overview of the violations of the law, murders, executions, concentration camps and harmonization measures of the early Nazi regime . Bruno and Nico , presumably Erich Birkenhauer and Bruno Meisel , two communist emigrants from Germany , acted as co-authors . The subtitle of the book was Hitler's war against the peace fighters in Germany. A book of facts . The French first edition appeared in 1937 with a foreword by Romain Rolland, also in Paris, the second edition was printed in 1938.

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“This book is an indictment. It exposes the tyranny against the German people, traces the methods of bloody oppression, depicts a people behind barbed wire, proves the legalization of terror, publishes horror statistics, outlines the resistance of the people. […] The indictment is brought in 1936 from the Paris exile of the author Maximilian Scheer, who […] published this […] with unnamed helpers. For the first 40 months after Adolf Hitler's so-called seizure of power, from January 1933 to the beginning of 1936, facts are documented that expose National Socialist Germany as an unleashed gang of murderers. What is particularly depressing is the fact that most of the carefully and systematically compiled facts come from sources that were publicly available in Germany. You just had to be able to read and see. "

- Peter-Alexis Albrecht : Unleashed murderer gang, Deutschlandradio Kultur , July 15, 2012

History of origin

The book was a commission. Scheer was commissioned by Editions du Carrefour in Paris VI in the summer of 1936 to complete the work within four weeks. The book was financed with funds from the Communist International , whose representative Willi Münzenberg supported the publisher's founder, the Swiss Pierre G. Lévy , with the publication. On the part of the publisher, an employee with the code name Bruno was added to the main author . For security reasons, Scheer only knew his first name. Later Nico joined the Thälmann Committee and fought for the release of the KPD party leader from Moabit prison . The 2012 reprint names Erich Birkenhauer and Bruno Meisel as alleged co-authors , Dorothée Bores only mentions “Bruno [Frei?]”.

The three authors mainly use the German Freedom Library on Boulevard Arago, which was founded in 1934 by Alfred Kantorowicz on the first anniversary of the first book burning in the Third Reich as a library of burned books and which also included a number of German daily newspapers and magazines. Most of the authors used facts and statements that had already been published, especially those from the Third Reich . Scheer looking back in 1964: “I worked every day until late at night. Bruno helped with a few chapters. But we didn't make it. Nico from the Thalmann Committee took on a lot. The book was ready in six weeks. "

In order to protect the authors, the book was published anonymously. Nevertheless, in 1940 the Nazi judiciary passed a death sentence against the main author Maximilian Scheer, which of course could not be carried out because Scheer and his family had already fled to Lisbon, from where he could emigrate to New York under a false name. Birkenhauer, on the other hand, did not survive the dramatic years. He was ordered to Moscow, there first in 1939 to twelve years in a labor camp, but finally sentenced to death in 1941 and executed. Nothing certain is known about the further fate of Bruno Meisel.

The first edition was reviewed by Klaus Mann and Ludwig Renn , among others .

The book

The first edition of the book was divided into six chapters “The Tyranny Against the German People” , “The Methods of Bloody Oppression” , “The Legalization of Terror” , “A Statistics of Horror” , “Why and for Whom?” And “The Resistance of a people ” . In the 2012 reprint, the chapter “A people behind barbed wire” was added. In the author's brief foreword it says, among other things: “This book aims to serve peace. [...] May the appeal of the German people not go unheard! If he is heard, the German people and the world can avert the danger of millions of deaths in a new war. ”The appendix contains the camp and disciplinary regulations of the Esterwegen concentration camp , with an overview map of the concentration camps, prisons and prisons in Germany - "which went into the thousands."

The tyranny against the German people

The first chapter is divided into three sections. The first section (21–38) describes the path to the Total State , the Gleichschaltung and the war intentions of the Nazi regime , and it begins with two quotations: “We are not and do not want to be the land of Goethe and Einstein. Precisely not that. "And:" Power and personal ambition called Mr. Adolf Hitler to the post ... He twisted all facts ... Do not be misled, Hitler is a demagogue and relies only on his speaking skills, he believes that he is misleading the German people and to talk you into special things that are anything but the truth. ”This characterization came from Julius Streicher and Anton Drexler , who knew the“ Führer ”very well and very early on. In the first section, the authors describe the victims of the prewar , more than 200,000 political prisoners in prisons and concentration camps, and under the subtitle The Pack Unleashed , how the SA and SS attacked communists and socialists. It also describes how the KPD and SPD were robbed of their party newspapers, how pacifist organizations were banned or forced to “dissolve themselves” and how the unions were smashed. The central topic is how Hitler did not win a majority in the Reichstag elections of March 5, 1933 , but by collecting first the 81 KPD mandates and finally also the 120 SPD mandates, as well as by winning or arresting ten bourgeois mandates even got a two-thirds majority. This section also describes how Jews were “harassed”, Protestants “persecuted”, Catholics “terrorized” and the bourgeois parties “smashed” by the Nazis.

In the second section (39-49) the "operation as barracks" and the elimination of the right to form a coalition , freedom of movement and judicial protection are traced, furthermore the compulsion to denounce in work books, the drop in wages and the increase in the cost of living, how the middle class is "ruined" and the farmer was "cheated", as around 13 million had to live in dire straits and what the redistributed funds were used for: The millions are used for armament .

The third section (51-87) lists around a thousand scientists on 17 pages who were expelled from universities and academic institutions by the Nazis for racist, political or homophobic reasons, and on 4 pages those 151 bourgeois newspapers and magazines published between May 1933 and May 1936 had to be discontinued.

... begins with Hitler's declaration "the question of regaining German power" reads: "How do we create the spirit that enables a people to carry arms." Mein Kampf, 395 The authors: "This question has been answered in the Third Reich." 51). In eleven sub-chapters, they describe how, in the first three and a half years of the Nazi regime, the education of young people and science served the war, how '' the civil servant apparatus was made ready for war '', how literature, the press and radio were put into the '' service of the Preparations for War ''. [TEXT] They also describe in two tables and a graph the "gigantic extent" to which the Third Reich has strengthened radio stations and built up a global shortwave network. All with one goal: '' Hitler over Europe ''. The Frankfurter Zeitung of June 18, 1933 quoted Goebbels: Hitler's declaration of war on the democratic state is only the beginning. At the end of the development there will be a National Socialist Europe! The third chapter (89-109) describes '' Die Almmacht der Gestapo '', whose core force is around 50,000 strong, sifted out from the The chapter ends with the sub-chapter Under the Hitler government, German men and women were and are en masse without trial imprisoned, mistreated and murdered in concentration camps. It says: “The concentration camps of the Third Reich [...] are hells of torture, concentrated sadism, courts of madness and death. Historical scandals such as the Dreyfus affair, the murder of Jean Jaurés, the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti are exceeded a thousand times over by the shame and cruelty of the German concentration camps. "(109)


The legalization of terror

Chapter 4 describes on 53 pages the abolition of the rule of law by the Nazi regime, the harmonization of the judiciary , the tightening of criminal law , the overturning of the Roman principle of Nulla poena sine lege , the anchoring of the Führer principle and the healthy popular feeling in law and jurisprudence.

[...]

Pages 196 to 203 deal with the profession of lawyers , who are now "not defenders of the accused, but organs of the court", with the exclusion of Jewish and politically unpopular lawyers, with the murder of eleven lawyers and with disapproving actions by National Socialist lawyers Defendants whom they were supposed to defend.

Statistics of horror

On pages 221 to 324, the authors attempt to correct “concealment”, “obfuscation” and “falsification of statistics” by the National Socialists and to work out the most comprehensive possible finding of the reign of terror of the NS regime up to the summer of 1936:

  • 225,000 political or religious convictions to 600,000 years of penitentiary or prison during the Hitler government.
  • This does not take into account pre-trial detention, so-called protective custody and concentration camps.
  • At least 135,000 political prisoners as of the end of May 1936.
  • Around a million arrests for political, religious or racial reasons.
  • Between 120,000 and 130,000 German citizens driven into exile.
  • 133 expatriations and revocation of 25,000 naturalizations from previous years.

The French editions

In February 1937 the French edition of the book was published - in a black cover with white letters - also in the Edition du Carrefour , Paris VI. It was entitled “Le peuple allemand accuse” and the new subtitle “Appel à la conscience du monde” [Appeal to the world's conscience]. In the foreword Romain Rolland wrote of the book: “You will be able to convince yourself that the subjugation of Germany, that the crucifixion of its best people, is the first step towards the realization of the extensive plans of domination and subjugation of the world by the Third Reich . ”Immediately after its appearance, Parisian publications such as L'Humanité , L'Ère nouvelle or Les Annales politiques et littéraires approved the book and praised“ this comprehensive exposure of the appalling record of the German regime of horror ”. The first edition was quickly sold out thanks to union efforts to get the book, and a second edition followed in 1938.

In 2009, published by the Association des Amis de la Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Déportation , the first French new edition since 1938 was published, in order to give the following generation access to the facts through distribution in schools and libraries preserve and counteract the tendency to play down this part of the darkest German history ”.

Reprint from 2012

The daughter of the main author, Katharina Schlieper , acted as the editor of the first German new edition of the book after the end of the Nazi regime. It was published in 2012 by Laika-Verlag and named the authors on the inside front page for the first time. It is not a reprint in the classic sense, as the book has been repositioned and a number of articles have been added. At the beginning of the book, an extended article by Lionel Richard from Le Monde diplomatique (May 2010), a foreword by the editor and the foreword of the French original edition by Romain Rolland in German translation have been added. At the end of the book, Nikolaus Brauns ' articles became propaganda as a calling. The red manager Willi Münzenberg and biographical information on Maximilian Scheer added. In her foreword, the editor, who works full-time as a systemic family therapist , wished "to be mindful of all nuances of exclusion, arbitrariness and other neo-fascist attitudes in the present and future, in view of the terror of a time whose consequences are still not a thing of the past."

Quote

“The writing and editing of the book affected me so deeply that it became impossible for me to read or see any other written or filmed work of similar material.

One burns in hell. The old superstition got new meaning for me. "

- Maximilian Scheer : That's how it was in Paris in 1964

expenditure

  • The German people accuse: Hitler's war against the peace fighters in Germany. A book of facts. Éditions du Carrefour, Paris 1936. (first edition)
  • Le peuple allemand accuse - Appel à la conscience du monde. French-language original edition, foreword by Romain Rolland , Éditions du Carrefour, Paris, February 1937. Second edition 1938 by the same publisher.
  • Reprint of the French edition, Paris 2009.
  • The German people accuse: Hitler's war against the peace fighters in Germany. A book of facts. Edited by Katharina Schlieper, foreword by Romain Rolland (the French edition 1937) and Lionel Richard, Laika-Verlag, Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-942281-20-1 .

Meetings

Web links

  • Arts in exile , facsimiles from four pages of the first edition and overview map of the concentration camps, penitentiaries and prisons in Germany

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dorothée Bores: The German Liberty Library in Paris 1934 to 1939. In: Archive for the history of the book , Volume 66, Berlin, Boston 2011, 64
  2. ↑ Literature initiative : La Bibliothèque de la liberté , accessed on March 3, 2015
  3. ^ Scheer: It was like that in Paris. Berlin 1964.
  4. ^ Lionel Richard: Everything was known as early as 1933 ... , Foreword in the 2012 reprint, page 11
  5. ↑ Ursel Hochmuth describes in her book Nobody and nothing is forgotten. Biograms and letters from Hamburg resistance fighters 1933-45 a communist named Bruno Meisel from Hamburg. Presumably he was sentenced to death as a resistance fighter on October 13, 1944 by the Nazi judiciary and beheaded a month later in Brandenburg-Görden. See Bruno Meisel * 1883 . However, since it was a butcher and not an intellectual, personal identity is unlikely.
  6. ↑ Here and in the following the reprint of 2012 is quoted, page 19
  7. ↑ Peter-Alexis Albrecht : Unleashed Mörderbande , Deutschlandradio Kultur , July 15, 2012
  8. ↑ Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger , May 7, 1933
  9. ↑ Flyer, Nuremberg, summer 1921
  10. ^ Romain Roland: Foreword to the French original edition, quoted in based on the German reprint from 2012, page 17
  11. ↑ Lionel Richard in his foreword to the German-language reprint from 2012, page 10f
  12. ↑ Katharina Schlieper in her foreword to the German-language reprint from 2012, page 13
  13. ↑ Reprint, page 15