Nazi Germany

Nazi Wokeness

Speer was an idealistic 28-year-old architect who in 1933 became a favorite of Adolf Hitler's and during World War II became minister for the economy and accomplished wonders of organization, increasing German arms output so much that he may have lengthened war significantly via his competence. It's noteworthy that what first brought him to Hitler's attention was not his architecture (which was really too modernist for Hitler), but that he had renovated Dr. Goebbel's house in an unbelievably short time through brilliant scheduling of subcontractors. From Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich, page 65:

I must have had the feeling that it was no affair of mine when I heard the people around me declaring an open season on Jews, Freemasons, Social Democrats, or Jehovah's Witnesses. I thought I was not implicated if I myself did not take part.

The ordinary party member was being taught that grand policy was much too complex for him to judge it. Consequently, one felt one was being represented, never called upon to take personal responsibility. The whole structure of the system was aimed at preventing conflicts of conscience from even arising. The result was the total sterility of all conversations and discussions among these like-minded persons. It was boring for people to confirm one another in their uniform opinions.

Worse still was the restriction of responsibility to one's own field. That was explicitly demanded. Everyone kept to his own group--- of architects, physicians, jurists, technicians, soldiers, or farmers. The professional organizations to which everyone had to belong were called chambers (Physicians' Chamber, Art Chamber), and this term aptly described the way people were immured in isolated, closed-off, areas of life. The longer Hitler's system lasted, the more people's minds moved within such isolated chambers. If this arrangement had gone on for a number of generations, it would have caused the whole system to wither, I think, for we would have arrived at a kind of caste society. The disparity between this and the Volksgemeinschaft (community of the people) proclaimed in 1933 always astonished me. For this had the effect of stamping out the promised integration, or at any rate of greatly hindering it. What eventually developed was a society of totally isolated individuals.

The Reichstag Fire of 1933

Hett, Bahar, and Kugel agree that van der Lubbe alone could not have caused a blaze of the dimensions of the Reichstag fire in the less than twenty minutes at his disposal and with the modest tools he used. All three rely heavily on the reports of experts on the setting of fires, both from 1933 and also since the 1970s. All present strong circumstantial evidence that an S.A. unit trained in the use of flammable liquids prepared the chamber for van der Lubbe by dousing the chairs, tables, and curtains with a chemical accelerant. And all three suggest that Tobias wrongly dismissed the evidence presented by Gisevius, whose 1946 memoirs linked the S.A. to the fire. Part of the significance of Hett’s book lies in his careful reexamination and confirmation of many of Bahar and Kugel’s findings.

"This Story Is about Something Fundamental": Nazi Criminals, History, Memory, and the Reichstag Fire, Benjamin Carter Hett, Central European History , JUNE 2015, Vol. 48, No. 2 (JUNE 2015), pp. 199-224

https://www.jstor.org/stable/43965146.