Activity 7: Creating Peer Pressure

 
Rees asked Karl Boehm-Tettelbach, a Nazi army officer who served in Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia during the war, how German people could respect Hitler and what he was doing for Germany when Jews were being forced to lose their jobs and leave the country.  Boehm-Tettelbach replied:

“That never came up.  Everybody thought the same, that you were in a big team and you didn’t separate from the group.  You were infected.  That explains it a little bit.”
 

“No, no…When the masses were shouting ‘Heil’, what could the individual person do?  You went along.  We went along.  We were the followers.  That’s how it was.  We were the followers.”
 

“I can’t remember anything except that I saw in the crowd a well-dressed woman, you can’t say the uneducated proletariat, and she was holding up a little girl, a blonde lovely girl with these curls, so that the girl could see better how a 20 or 22 year old man (a Nazi Storm Trooper) kicked an old Jew who fell down because he wasn’t allowed to kneel.  He had to scrub and just bend down sort of, and he fell and he kicked him.  And they all laughed and she laughed as well – it was wonderful entertainment – and that shook me.”
 

 
Frau Louise Solmitz, a Hamburg school teacher, gives her impression of one of Hitler’s mass rallies in 1932 at which there were 120,000 people:

“Then he [Hitler] went. – How many look up to him with touching faith!  As their helper, their saviour, their deliverer from unbearable distress – to him who rescues the Prussian prince, the scholar, the clergyman, the farmer, the worker, the unemployed, who rescues them from the parties back into the nation.”