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“The ghosts of the dead have begun their work, and already the effects are felt in the systematic demoralisation of the Nazi ruling structure.”—Friedrich Reck, Diary of a Man in Despair
Those of you who read these pages are aware that my prep for our upcoming meeting with Dr. Marci Shore’s lecture on Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil led me to read Diary of a Man in Despair by Friedrich Reck. Arendt calls Reck’s diary “one of the most important documents of the Hitler period.” And I simply cannot put the book down.
I plan a full report in coming weeks, but the journalist mantra — “news delayed is news denied” — runs deep into my bones and yes, history reaches right into the present moment and delivers us news. As Shore taught me long ago, history doesn’t tell you what is going to happen, but it can offer suggestions.
What follows are excerpts from 1943 entries from Reck’s diary.
He opens his diary entry from August 1943 with a visit to his doctor, who is mourning the death of his stepson, who had written leaflets distributed by Hans and Sophie Scholl, the brother and sister who helped found a non-violent resistance movement to the Nazis, exposing them as mass murderers. The three youths had been guillotined in February.
Reck writes:
The ghosts of the dead have begun their work, and already the effects are felt in the systematic demoralisation of the Nazi ruling structure
For weeks now, the lower echelons of hierarchy, district officials, township leaders, and bastions of the regime generally have been making gestures, meant to be noticed, of disillusionment with the Nazis. Their general demeanour is now supposed to convey disgust, so that everybody may know their dissatisfaction, their unhappiness about the present state of things. Now, in the post office, for instance, the clerk is liable to fling official notices contemptuously to one side, muttering that he has ‘had enough of this swindle’.
The secret behind this transformation? All these gentlemen have in recent days received a letter from a certain ‘revolutionary executive’, informing them that they will be held responsible for their official actions; that previous denunciations and similar crimes have been duly recorded against them, and that the continuation of such activities will further worsen the consequences for them. By great good luck, I got hold of one of these missives:
“We possess documentary evidence regarding your activities since 1933, and you will be held responsible for them following the collapse of Hitlerism. The Executive Committee hereby informs you that you will henceforth remain under the most intensive observation. If there should occur a single further instance of activity on behalf of the present regime, or if any additional reports are confirmed of harm done to political opponents, the sentence of death which has been pronounced against you for future execution will be extended to include your entire family. Execution will be by hanging on the day of overthrow of the regime.”
It had its effect. These letters were in some incomprehensible way sent registered mail from widely separated places, so that those sent to Bavaria originated in Insterburg, while the letters mailed to East Prussia evidently came from Baden or Württemberg.
In any case, the effect was salutary. The minor satraps have simply stopped functioning, schoolteachers are once again to be seen in church, the women’s leader has quieted down, and the local ‘Party bastion’ gets ill with unfailing punctuality when called upon to hold a meeting…
Incidentally, the couriers who carried these letters halfway across Germany risked their lives on every trip.—Friedrich Reck, Diary of a Man in Despair, August 1943
Plotting a Post-Nazi Future
Reck revealed that he knew a Resistance leader, as he continued the diary entry:
The day before yesterday, W., who is the leader of this organisation of students, artists, and intellectuals, came to my house: a man deeply embittered by the death of his soldier son; sixty-three years old, with the elasticity of one in his thirties, and a face so haggard it is the very picture of death. And so I have been enrolled in a phalanx whose members’ lives are from now on balanced on a razor’s edge.
We talked through the whole of a midsummer night and well into the bright morning—about future propagandising, about the English radio broadcasts (unfortunately so often misinformed about the trend of German public opinion), about points to be added to our program in future.
He writes how they spoke of the future, of eliminating “Berlin and Prussia as political centres of gravity”; of creating an organization “immediately upon the overthrow of the Nazis” that could denazify Germany; “destruction of all war industry established in Bavaria since 1933”; “immediate indictment for high treason for all those who have joined in dividing the spoils of the Hitler regime, with the very first trials to be of the von Papens, Meissners, Neuraths, Hindenburgs, Schröters, and their like”; “immediate indictment of all the generals responsible for the continuance of the war.”
‘Are We Bad Germans?’
He writes that it’s “not a bad beginning; not entirely devoid of hyperbole, certainly, and yet not without its germs of ideas as to how to end the mistakes of the last eighty years.”
He then asks: “Are we bad Germans because we deliberate these things? This depends on which Germany you mean.”
He wrote how it is important to prepare fixes in advance for a post-Nazi future.
‘Unmistakably Insane’
And in a previous entry from March 1943, he documented the bravery of the Scholls’ at their tribunal (while noting Hitler’s frivolous focus on Nazi music):
Their bearing before the tribunal—that of the girl, especially—was inspiring. They flung their contempt of the court, the Party, and that insane, would-be great man, Hitler, into the faces of their judges, and at the end, did something which carries the icy breath of the Eternal about it for us who survive. For, with their last words, they repeated the warning once given by the condemned Knights of the Temple to their judges, that those who were persecuting them and those who stood behind them would ‘within a year be called to judgement before the throne of God’. The curse pronounced by the Templars was realised to the extent that before a year was past both Pope Clemens V and King Philip IV of France were dead. It remains to be seen what will happen here in the course of the next year…
But the Scholls departed from this life quietly, and gravely and with wonderful dignity gave their young blood. On their gravestones let these words be carved, and let this entire people, which has lived in deepest degradation these last ten years, blush when it reads them: ‘Cogi non potest quisquis mori scit’—He who knows how to die can never be enslaved.
We will all of us, someday, have to make a pilgrimage to their graves, and stand before them, ashamed.
This is the story of these two children of our race: the latest, and God willing, the first Germans of a great rebirth of the spirit.
But Herr Hitler is occupied elsewhere at the moment; Herr Hitler is concerned, now while our cathedrals and national monuments are being turned into dust, with the teaching of counterpoint and the rules of harmony—Herr Hitler is laying the foundations of National Socialist music. And recently, Herr Göring was seen entering a party he was giving for his cronies wearing a fur coat that reached to his ankles, girdled by a red morocco belt studded with stolen diamonds, and with red morocco boots on his feet. I am sure he looked grand—this field marshal who never commanded in battle. But there is a precedent here in history: that unlucky Roman, Caligula, also appeared before his gaping subjects in red morocco boots, shortly before he became unmistakably insane.—Friedrich Reck, Diary of a Man in Despair, March 1943
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