The Lone Assassin by Helmut Ortner

Author:Helmut Ortner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2019-01-23T16:00:00+00:00

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On June 22, 1933, the Nazis, newly in power, had issued a decree to combat the so-called “defeatist attitude,” making the mere expression of dissatisfaction a punishable offense as a form of “Marxist agitation.” In the years that followed, the National Socialists carried out all the necessary steps to become a Führer state: The party’s organizational schema divided the country into thirty-two regions, which were further divided into districts, local branches, cells, and blocks. Hitler had once said, What is the point of socializing factories and such things? We are socializing the people With his party organizations, he had after a short time achieved his goal of making an individual life in Germany almost impossible. First you were a Pimp (a member of the Jungvolk, the ten- to fourteen-year-old subsection of the Hitler Youth), then you joined the Hitler Youth, and then you entered the SA or SS or went directly into the Nazi Party. As a driver, you were in the National Socialist Motor Corps; as a young girl, you were in the League of German Girls. No sports association, no hiking group, no amateur theater could escape the reach of Gleichschaltung.

Königsbronn was no exception. The traditional village fairs had long been supplanted by the Nazi holiday calendar. On January 30, swastika flags fluttered in the village streets, as the Reich Flag Law prescribed. With an abundance of rallies, commemorations, and parades, the local party branches ensured that the image of the Führer appeared virtually ubiquitous.

Nor could the National Socialists complain about a lack of popularity in the provinces. To be sure, it had not been necessary, as it had been in the cities after the Nazis came to power, to declare a temporary cap on new members due to the huge rush; effective May 1, 1933, the party’s regional leadership had been instructed to accept new party members only into the Hitler Youth, the SA, and the SS. Though the rush in the eastern Swabian Alps had not been quite as intense, members flocked to the new national movement in droves there as well. As early as February 25, 1934, Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess, on the radio from Königsplatz in Munich amid the roar of cannons, had administered an oath to almost a million party members: Adolf Hitler is Germany, and Germany is Adolf Hitler. He who pledges an oath to Hitler pledges an oath to Germany

Along with their counterparts all over the Reich, party members in Königsbronn listened with awe to the mass pledge. Here, too, the local party branch had begun to co-opt the cultural life and all the clubs and societies into the new national movement. Eugen Rau’s private dance group, the local hiking club, and the leftist political parties, whose share of the vote in this region had always been markedly above the national average before the National Socialists took power—these organizations ceased to exist.

Königsbronn, too, had become a “German village”—a village in exemplary conformity with the deceptive propaganda image of the new regime.

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