To Die for Germany, Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon by Jay W. Baird

To Die for Germany, Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon by Jay W. Baird

It is easy for us today to remember the leadership of the Third Reich as almost comical characters; Hitler with his funny mustache, Goring, the fat man who wore make up and overdressed in gaudy uniforms with rings on his pudgy fingers, Goebbels with his deformed foot, etc.  It is easy to dismiss them until we remember that they were responsible for some of the greatest crimes in human history.  They led a nation that had been known for its science, philosophy, literature and music and turned it into a vast killing machine that had to be put down like a mad dog.  How was that transformation possible?  How could millions of ordinary people participate in such terrible crimes?

Many Germans prior to the rise of the Third Reich had believed in the heroic ideology.  This heroic ideology was more closely linked to death than to life, for it sang the praises of the heroic struggle (the concept that it did not matter what was the cause of the struggle, the victory was in the very being in a struggle).  This concept of heroic ideology was fueled further not by victory, but rather by the defeat of Germany in 1918.  The defeated people’s needed heroes and the golden youth who died so willingly at Langemarck served as example for the next generation to follow as they listened to the tales spun by their fathers and politicians on the Right.  Those tales were diametrically opposed to the tales of the fathers and politicians of the Left; on one hand, tales of sacrifice and nobility to the Volk, of glorious death on the other, tales of commonality and equality.  Both sides fought with every brutal tool at hand, in the streets, apartment buildings, schools and workplaces.

Every cause needs heroes and martyrs.  This excellent book tells the story of some of those idealists and martyrs, fools and knaves, young men, some poorly educated, some artists, poets, some academics who fought in their own way for the National Socialist birth and who often gave their own lives.  When they did, they were all but deified in pageants that could enflame the soul of other individuals who were ashamed of the defeat of their nation, at their own poverty, and dreamt of a new, purer, revengeful Germany.  In many cases, the ideology of National Socialism was not understood, or if the individuals had read it, they chose to only believe in those parts that would help them move forward in the world.  Their deaths were used to create a variable Parthenon of heroes who inspired by their deaths, a new generation which was willing to continue in a world view which included a heroic ideology.  After the war, after the defeat, their graves, those monuments to their idealism, foolishness and gullibility were destroyed by the victorious Allies.  Their ashes or bones scattered, all that remained of their ideology were the graves of the millions who through no fault of their own had to participate in their dreams and the actions they helped to create.