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Jeffrey Gaab: Review of Eric Kurlander's Living With Hitler: Liberal Democrats in the Third Reich (Yale, 2009)

[Jeffrey Gaab is Professor of History and chairperson of the Technology Studies

January 30, 1933 did not mark the end of political discourse in Germany. Eric Kurlander in Living with Hitler: Liberal Democrats in the Third Reich illuminates how, liberal democrats at least, continued to publish and debate their political ideas throughout Hitler’s twelve year reign. As long as they did not oppose the regime too vigorously (which they did not), Kurlander, Associate Professor of History at Stetson University, demonstrates that liberal democrats even enjoyed a remarkable amount of personal and professional freedom in Hitler’s Germany.

Liberal democrats, members of the German Democratic Party (DDP), acquiesced in the accession of Hitler and the NSDAP to power. Exhausted by years of weak and ineffective Weimar governments, Kurlander observes that liberal democrats embraced Hitler’s government because it shared many of the same goals of the D.D.P.’s “Naumannite philosophy,” including Friedrich Naumann’s advocacy of a “national-social” form of German government. In fact, liberal democrats supported a German dominated Central Europe (Mitteleuropa) and common economic market.

Liberal Democrats, and most Germans, hated and despised the Versailles Treaty imposed on Germany in 1919, and they supported Hitler’s efforts to revise it. As Kurlander points out, “German parity in armaments, regaining the Saarland from France, re-militarizing the Rhineland, achieving union with Austria, revising the eastern borders with Poland, and recovering German minorities abroad” were all goals espoused by the DDP throughout the Weimar Republic. Even before 1933, they advocated “restoring German sovereignty over Danzig and the Polish corridor.” Thus, Kurlander writes, Democrats shared an “ideological continuum” with the National Socialists. At least in foreign affairs, Hitler’s plans did not seem all that distasteful to them.

Unfortunately, they also seemed to share an ideological continuum with Nazi racial and Jewish policies. Kurlander observes that the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty caused many democrats to “fall back on a more chauvinist and irredentist vision of Mitteleuropa, a ‘Greater Germany’ that sought the (re) incorporation of Europe’s ethnic Germans, with little regard for their Slavic or Baltic neighbors.” Their attitude to the Nazi’s anti-Semitic Jewish policy, at least up to 1938 and the pogroms of Kristallnacht, seem surprisingly casual. Democrats, writes Kurlander, believed the 1935 Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Germany’s Jews, “would make it possible for the German people to be able to seek a tolerable relationship with the Jewish people.” He observes that Democrats believed that the “Jewish Question” would be settled by Jewish assimilation into German culture and life. For Democrats, the Nuremberg Laws simply “stabilized the situation.” They, and many Germans, did not realize until it was too late, that the Hitler regime did not want a “tolerable relationship with the Jewish people”; they wanted them gone—and dead.

Kurlander also shows how Democrats strove to help their Jewish colleagues on an individual basis as the regime’s noose slowly closed around them. However, it was only in 1938 and Kristallnacht that some Democrats began to understand the brutal nature of the regime. Among these few was the future president of the Federal Republic of Germany, Theodor Heuss. Even then however, outright opposition to the regime remained “disorganized.” Moreover, Kurlander points out, “most Democrats failed to propose a conceptual alternative to the Nazi ‘Jewish Question.’ ”

Even Democrat feminist activists (to which Kurlander devotes a very informative chapter) found positive aspects in Nazi racial doctrines and policies toward women. For example, the Nazis granted women more rights when seeking a divorce and generally liberalized divorce law, promised more assistance for unwed mothers, and greater maternity leave. Yet, as Kurlander points out, the regime’s goal was more “Aryan children,” not greater freedom for women.

And then came Stalingrad. By 1943 it was clear that Nazi racial policy and foreign policy differed substantially from anything Naumann had proposed or Democrats had ever envisioned. More vicious and nihilistic than anything they could have imagined, Democrats realized too late that the regime they had “engaged” was leading Germany to total ruin and Europe to utter destruction. Some then joined the active resistance or cooperated with the conspirators in the July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. Still, as Kurlander rightly points out, most of those executed after the July 20th assassination attempt were conservative aristocrats or socialists. “Where were the liberals?” he asks.

By then, most liberal democrats had retreated into inner exile and began to conceptualize a Germany after Adolf Hitler. Did Democrats advocate the extermination of whole races of people and the ethnic cleansing of central and eastern Europe? Certainly not. But Kurlander makes clear that Democrats believed they could realize many of their long-held political objectives in the National Socialist regime. He also demonstrates that this was clearly a Faustian bargain that liberal democrats realized only too late.

Confronted with overwhelming evidence of atrocities, and the total destruction of Germany and Europe, Democrats began to rethink their long held Mitteleuropa philosophy. After Stalingrad, but especially after the total capitulation of the nation in May 1945, Democrats (West Germany’s future political elites) began to espouse a “post-nationalist, pan-European peace” that would include a Germany that “accepted the commonalities in all peoples”. Democrats transformed their Naumannite “national social” philosophy from a German dominated central Europe, into a paradigm for a European dominated Germany. Thus, the underlying philosophy of the post-war Federal Republic was born. Kurlander writes that “Naumann’s malleable concepts now came to define a liberal vision of European community.”

Eric Kurlander’s Living with Hitler illuminates the ideological transformation that middle class Democrats experienced as a result of their political engagement with the Third Reich. This transformation was crucial to the survival of democracy in Germany after 1945.

Extremely well written, and very well documented, Eric Kurlander has provided us with not just another book about political parties in Hitler’s Germany. Rather, Living with Hitler also provides us with yet another perspective on how democracy thrived in post-war Germany against seemingly overwhelming odds.