How can a model housewife be seduced by Adolf Hitler? Why does a diligent schoolteacher denounce her brother to the Nazis? Was it not hiding an unspeakable family secret which should prevent your fascination with Third Reich?
Luise Solmitz was born in Hamburg in 1889 and wrote a 700-page annual diary that became a fundamental document in the history of Germany in the first half of the 20th century. It serves to understand the rise of Nazism, but also the doubts that the regime of hitler among citizens.
She herself would end up denying the Third Reich, survive the Second World War and join the short list of women of the Nazismwhich could be headed by filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, author of The triumph of the willand Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, leader of the National Socialist Women’s League and female incarnation of Nazi ideology.
The diaries had such unintelligible handwriting that in the 1960s the Center for the Study of the History of National Socialism sent a stenographer to his house to dictate them. The excerpts that have survived contain omissions and corrections to soften his initial sympathy for Nazism.
The story of Luise Solmitz, a unique character of the Third Reich which could represent the German middle class that allowed itself to be dragged by the Führer into horror, has been recovered by the British historian Richard J. Evans in his latest book, Hitler’s people (Criticism), which portrays the men and women who perpetrated the Third Reich.
Enthralled by Hitler’s speech in Hamburg
Her parents ran a business whose profits allowed them to send her to boarding schools in England and France. A middle-class family with a worldly daughter, although her father instilled in her a conservative, nationalist and anti-Semitic ideology. His brother Werner, on the other hand, was a left-wing liberal.
She worked as a teacher and married the military engineer Friedrich Solmitz —her maiden name was Stephan—, who after fighting in the First World War would give him a daughter, Gisela. Since he did not want to get married, Luise married another man, until Friedrich recognized the baby and they were united again, this time legally.
In reality, her hesitant husband had avoided marriage because he was Jewish and did not want the girl to bear the stigma. A decorated officer after the war, where he was injured in a plane crash, he was also a conservative who moved in right-wing nationalist environments. She would soon embrace Nazism.
Although he denounced the street violence of the Nazisin 1932 he was seduced by Hitler’s speech when he heard it in Hamburg. He defended national pride and felt “drunk with enthusiasm” When he participated in a torchlight parade a year later, the ranks of brownshirts were tight, shouting “Weimar sucks!”
However, they were also thirsty for Jewish blood and cried “Die, Judah!” writes Luise Solmitz, who came with her daughter so that “she could feel for once what the Homeland means.” Hitler was the leader to follow and his brother Werner, spokesman for the German Democratic Party during the Weimar Republica threat that had to be reported.
She accepted Hitler’s versions of the Reichstag fire and the Night of the Long Knives, willing to compromise with all Nazi decisions to safeguard the country from socialists and traitors, although she questioned the violence against the Jews when she learned of her husband’s ancestry.
Nazism and the new Germany
More than a Nazi, because she never became a member of the party, she was Hitler’s: the “power of her language”, her “greatness”, the “strength” of “a man who fears nothing, compromises with nothing, does not stop before any obstacle or difficulty,” he made clear in his diary after the annexation of Austria, where he invoked a new Germany united.
Meanwhile, while proselytizing as a block guard for the Reich Air Protection League, her husband excluded Jews while complaining to the Nazi Party about the Third Reich’s constant demands for a certificate of Aryan ancestry. Friedrich was truly clueless.
And his wife? Pay attention to the entry in his diary: “The majority of people, or many people, continue to reject Jewry, like myself; they do not have any relationship with that side, nor do they want one. I have never had any relationship with them. I do not know to any Jew.” Except her husband, whose mother and brother had converted to Christianity.
Classified as a “privileged mixed marriage” with a “first degree mixed-race” daughter, Friedrich lost citizenship rights and was excluded from the Steel Helmets and the Nazi War Officers’ Association. They were also prohibited from raising the National Socialist flag in their home, a trifle compared to the treatment meted out to Gisela.
Their daughter could not study a university degree, nor join the League of German Girls, nor marry a compatriot who was not Jewish… They even sent a letter of protest to Hitler, but it was of little use. What’s more, after Kristallnacht, the Gestapo He went to arrest him with the intention of transferring him to a concentration camp.
He was saved by the medals for bravery from the First World War, but he suffered from the laws enacted against the Jewsalthough he managed to avoid paying fines. The couple could not avoid being disowned by their friends and had to give up having an Aryan maid. Despite everything, in 1938 he wanted to enlist as a volunteer in the Army.
The wife of a Jew who despised the Nazis
Why did Luise stop feeling intoxicated by the Third Reich? Did social rejection and the loss of privileges—which led her to feel like “a delinquent or a degenerate”—weighed more than ideological demotivation? In reality, the family could: the fear of a total war, of aerial bombardments, of the deportation of their daughter…
Although the couple did not sympathize with the Jewish community (“a people with whom we have never had anything to do”), Luise records in her diary the persecution suffered by the Hebrew people, including the deportations to the ghettos. On November 24, 1942 he writes: “We have become the playthings of a dark and malicious power.” Too late?
With the city punished by Allied aviation, he begins to become disenchanted, although in the diary he is cautious about his disbelief in Hitler: “The inescapable fate of most conquerors is self-destruction.” It would not take long, however, to become harsher with the Fuehreralthough blood would have to be involved.
Gisela has married a Belgian who works as a volunteer in a factory and has gone to live with him in his country, leaving her son Richard in the care of grandparents. Luise has feared for the future of her husband and daughter, but she is not willing to put her grandson’s life at risk. “I hope Hitler dies suffering!” he says every time a bomb falls.
When the dictator commits suicide in his bunker, his speech has completely changed compared to the previous decade, as has the vision of Hitler, clumsy and incompetent, “the most despicable failure in universal history.” He national socialismaccording to her, “has managed to bring together all the crimes and depravities of all the centuries.”
“Never has a people supported such a bad cause with such extreme enthusiasm, never has a people driven itself so much towards self-destruction,” writes Luise, who has burned the Nazi flag that she had previously been prohibited from flying, although it does not show in his daily feeling of guilt, he hardly had any empathy for the Jewish victims.
the historian Richard J. Evans explains that Luise’s shift from admiration to contempt for Hitler was “the journey from the typical values of the Protestant middle class to a more individualized political position,” which was also influenced by personal factors. In their case, discrimination for being a “privileged mixed marriage.”
But, above all, the fear of losing Richard, which the author of People of Hitlerr associates it with “her gender as a woman” and her role as mother and grandmother. “It is about concern for the grandson and the fear – almost unbearable – that the baby’s life could end when it had barely begun, all because of Hitler’s insane insistence on starting a war that Germany could not win.”
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