So, when Hitler reversed all of that, it was hailed as a triumph by many Germans. The Germans had taken several steps, from rearming the Rhineland, to the Anschluss (the annexation of Austria), to the occupation of the Sudetenland (and all of Czechoslovakia), to the takeover of Poland. With the victories in 1940, it seemed that this man, Hitler, was a miracle worker for many Germans. He seemed almost unbeatable, untouchable. He had restored that German sense of pride in their nation. If the Olympic Games of 1936 in Berlin had seemed to showcase the potential for the "new Germany", then the victories in 1940 seemed to be the fulfillment of that promise.
Germany would go on to take over even more lands to the East, but these were quickly tempered by the fact that (a) Germany would soon struggle in a nightmarish Eastern Front war with the Soviets, which it would eventually lose, and (b) the United States entered the war later in 1941, giving the Germans a dreaded sense of deja vu that many did not want to think about.
The truth was that the peak for Hitler and Nazi Germany came in 1940, and specifically, in the spring of 1940, with some stunning (and far too easy) military successes on the field. Many were indeed beginning to believe in Hitler's "Thousand Year Reich".
Just five years later, the arrival of spring saw the crumbling of that empire. Germany had recently seemed to rule over Europe, for all intents and purposes. But invading armies from both the East and the West were closing in, finishing the stranglehold on Nazi Germany, and the capital of the empire lay in rubble. In late April of 1945, Adolf Hitler shot himself (although it was officially announced that Hitler had fallen bravely in battle). Within days, the Germans gave the Allied forces what they had been demanding all along - unconditional surrender.
It was a stunning reversal, and it had all happened remarkably quickly. What only five years earlier had seemed unparalleled successes for the new Germany - a Germany that suddenly had appeared invincible - now marked unparalleled failures. The country was ruined, and the Nazi regime in disgrace like no other in history. The evidence of crimes were everywhere, and the sense of guilt associated with Germans at that time has not fully gone away. Hitler, who had been seen as a genius and the savior of Germany, was now seen as a human monster unlike any other figure in history. His regime has unofficially been considered the lowest and most criminal in history, with such an extent of horrors that it was responsible for, the likes of which had never been seen before, or since (and that is saying something, given the history of the world). The "Thousand Year Reich" had, mercifully, lasted only twelve years. Not even a decade and a half, although the memory of it might last well beyond a thousand years. Everything about those times and those years was demonized, and Nazism, which had officially ruled the land (and much of Europe) for years, was now officially illegal.
World War II, and the European part of it that Germany mostly dictated, was one of the most remarkable and surreal chapters in history, and it occurred at a time when technology was able to capture these events like never before. We see images of those times (mostly in black and white), and see the pictures of mass party rallies and goose-stepping soldiers, and German armies winning early victories, and Hitler standing triumphant. We also see images of the war in the East, and the reversal of German fortunes, the battering that Germany was taking to the East and to the West, the bombings, and the rubble and poverty that Germany was reduced to.
No wonder it continues to fascinate, even after so many decades have passed.
This date in particular marks some significant landmarks in Nazi history. It was on this date in 1937 that Germany leveled a Guernica (in Spain) during the Spanish Civil War (the glimpse of the bigger war that would quickly follow). On this date in 1940, Himmler ordered the establishment of Auschwitz Concentration Camp. A year later, Germans occupied Athens. A year after that, Belgian Jews were forced to wear the Star of David. And, of course, three years later, the final days of fighting in Europe, with Nazi Germany kicking it's death throes. Austria had been conquered, and the Second Republic of Austria established on this date in 1945. Benito Mussolini was taken prisoner on the same day, and American forces entered Genua. On the same day, the official Nazi party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, ceased publication. And Berlin was being bombarded, the Soviets already in the city, the inevitability of the takeover, and the end of the European war culminating with the final defeat of Nazi Germany, evident to all.
Below are two articles that talk about this subject. The first is about the continued fascination of Germans to the Nazi era in Germany. The second is about Margaret Woelk, Hitler's taster. The entire articles are available here, and the links to the websites they can be found at are located on the bottom of each article:
Germans fascinated by Nazi era eight decades later
By Gareth Jones of Reuters (4/26/13)
BERLIN (Reuters) - An exhibition chronicling the Nazi party's rise to power draws tens of thousands of visitors. Millions of TV viewers tune in to watch a drama about the Third Reich. A satirical novel in which Hitler pops up in modern Berlin becomes an overnight bestseller.
German interest in the darkest chapter of their history seems stronger than it has ever been as the country marks several key anniversaries this year linked to the Nazi era.
On TV talk shows, in newspapers and online, people endlessly debate the Nazi era - from what their own grandparents did and saw, to how the regime's legacy constrains German peacekeepers on overseas missions today, or why unemployed Greek and Spanish protesters lampoon Chancellor Angela Merkel as a new Hitler.
Next month, Germans will also be painfully reminded that the Nazis can still pose a threat today, when a young woman allegedly inspired by Hitler's ideology goes on trial over a spate of racist murders committed since 2000.
"The interest (in the Nazis) is especially visible just now because of the anniversaries," said historian Arnd Bauerkaemper.
January marked 80 years since Hitler became chancellor, May will see the 80th anniversary of the Nazis' symbolic burning of books they considered "un-German" and November the 75th anniversary of the 'Kristallnacht' pogrom against German Jews.
Adding urgency to the commemorations is the realization that the war generation is dying off and young people interested in what happened often have to seek information from other sources.
"Like the undead the demons keep coming back to life from the darkness of abstract history," said the Spiegel weekly in one of its numerous recent articles on the Nazi era.
"It's never over," was the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung's headline on an interview with Nico Hofmann, producer of a three-part TV drama about five young Germans in 1941-45, "Unsere Muetter, unsere Vaeter" (Our Mothers, Our Fathers). The film drew more than seven million viewers when it aired in March.
GETTING PERSONAL
Hofmann said he produced the series partly for his own father, who volunteered to join Hitler's army aged 18.
The focus on individual stories is typical of the current interest in the 1930s and 1940s, said Bauerkaemper.
"This personalized drama really struck a chord, especially among young people who asked themselves how they would have coped if they had been alive at that terrible time," he said.
The TV series does not shy away from depicting the cruelty of the war or German guilt - prompting Bild to ask: "Were German soldiers really so brutal?" It also drew criticism from Russia and Poland, showing how sensitivity lingers seven decades on.
The Polish ambassador complained it showed Polish resistance fighters as anti-Semites. About a fifth of Poland's population, including most of its Jews, perished under Nazi occupation.
With his novel "Er ist wieder da" (He is Back), Timur Vermes taps into the perennial fascination with the personality of Adolf Hitler. It has sold more than 400,000 copies, is being translated into other languages and is being made into a movie.
The striking cover compresses the title into the shape of Hitler's trademark square moustache and the book sells for 19.33 euros ($25.14), a cheeky reference to the year the Nazis came to power.
In the novel, Hitler wakes up in 2011 to become a celebrity on German-Turkish TV and launch a new political career campaigning against speeding and dog muck on the pavements.
"I want to show that Hitler would have a chance to succeed today just as he did back then but in another way," Vermes said, lambasting what he called German complacency about the Nazis.
"DIVERSITY DESTROYED"
All year Berlin is staging exhibitions, plays, films, readings and other events under the rubric 'Diversity Destroyed' to commemorate the rich artistic and intellectual life of Weimar Germany destroyed by Hitler, and to provide glimpses into the life of ordinary people.
An exhibition in the German Historical Museum uses posters, newsreel, jazz, eyewitness accounts and artifacts from Nazi SS boots and pistols to ration cards to recreate the drama, horror and hopes of the time. Curator Simone Erpel said over 40,000 people visited the exhibition in its first three months.
"This strong interest in the Nazis is not new, of course, but what is relatively new is the level of official backing for such exhibitions," she said."It has become part of our common political culture to face the Nazi past. It is now very politically correct to remember the various victims, the Jews, the Roma, homosexuals, physically and mentally handicapped people and others," Erpel said.
Information stands in the city recount episodes from the era and the stories of opponents of the regime like Albert Einstein, Marlene Dietrich and writers Thomas Mann and Bertold Brecht.
"The diversity of cosmopolitan Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s was destroyed by the National Socialists in a short period of time," said Berlin's openly gay mayor Klaus Wowereit.
"That we can claim today to have regained such a degree of diversity is not a foregone conclusion. It is an achievement on the part of our city that we must actively seek to preserve."
(Reporting by Gareth Jones, editing by Stephen Brown and Paul Casciato)
http://news.yahoo.com/germans-fascinated-nazi-era-eight-decades-later-104844726.html
Hitler's Food Taster Tells of Poisoning Fears
They were feasts of sublime asparagus — laced with fear. And for more than half a century, Margot Woelk kept her secret hidden from the world, even from her husband. Then, a few months after her 95th birthday, she revealed the truth about her wartime role: Adolf Hitler's food taster.
Woelk, then in her mid-twenties, spent two and a half years as one of 15 young women who sampled Hitler's food to make sure it wasn't poisoned before it was served to the Nazi leader in his "Wolf's Lair," the heavily guarded command center in what is now Poland, where he spent much of his time in the final years of World War II.
"He was a vegetarian. He never ate any meat during the entire time I was there," Woelk said of the Nazi leader. "And Hitler was so paranoid that the British would poison him — that's why he had 15 girls taste the food before he ate it himself."
With many Germans contending with food shortages and a bland diet as the war dragged on, sampling Hitler's food had its advantages.
"The food was delicious, only the best vegetables, asparagus, bell peppers, everything you can imagine. And always with a side of rice or pasta," she recalled. "But this constant fear — we knew of all those poisoning rumors and could never enjoy the food. Every day we feared it was going to be our last meal."
The petite widow's story is a tale of the horror, pain and dislocation endured by people of all sides who survived World War II.
Only now in the sunset of her life has she been willing to relate her experiences, which she had buried because of shame and the fear of prosecution for having worked with the Nazis, although she insists she was never a party member. She told her story as she flipped through a photo album with pictures of her as a young woman, in the same Berlin apartment where she was born in 1917.
Woelk first revealed her secret to a local Berlin reporter a few months ago. Since then interest in her life story has been overwhelming. School teachers wrote and asked her for photos and autographs to bring history alive for their students. Several researchers from a museum visited to ask for details about her life as Hitler's taster.
Woelk says her association with Hitler began after she fled Berlin to escape Allied air attacks. With her husband gone and serving in the German army, she moved in with relatives about 435 miles (700 kilometers) to the east in Rastenburg, then part of Germany; now it is Ketrzyn, in what became Poland after the war.
There she was drafted into civilian service and assigned for the next two and a half years as a food taster and kitchen bookkeeper at the Wolf's Lair complex, located a few miles (kilometers) outside the town. Hitler was secretive, even in the relative safety of his headquarters, that she never saw him in person — only his German shepherd Blondie and his SS guards, who chatted with the women.
Hitler's security fears were not unfounded. On July 20, 1944, a trusted colonel detonated a bomb in the Wolf's Lair in an attempt to kill Hitler. He survived, but nearly 5,000 people were executed following the assassination attempt, including the bomber.
"We were sitting on wooden benches when we heard and felt an incredible big bang," she said of the 1944 bombing. "We fell off the benches, and I heard someone shouting 'Hitler is dead!' But he wasn't. "
Following the blast, tension rose around the headquarters. Woelk said the Nazis ordered her to leave her relatives' home and move into an abandoned school closer to the compound.
With the Soviet army on the offensive and the war going badly for Germany, one of her SS friends advised her to leave the Wolf's Lair.
She said she returned by train to Berlin and went into hiding.
Woelk said the other women on the food tasting team decided to remain in Rastenburg since their families were all there and it was their home.
"Later, I found out that the Russians shot all of the 14 other girls," she said. It was after Soviet troops overran the headquarters in January 1945.
When she returned to Berlin, she found a city facing complete destruction. Round-the-clock bombing by U.S. and British planes was grinding the city center to rubble.
On April 20, 1945, Soviet artillery began shelling the outskirts of Berlin and ground forces pushed through toward the heart of the capital against strong resistance by die-hard SS and Hitler Youth fighters.
After about two weeks of heavy fighting, the city surrendered on May 2 — after Hitler, who had abandoned the Wolf's Lair about five months before, had committed suicide. His successor surrendered a week later, ending the war in Europe.
For many Berlin civilians — their homes destroyed, family members missing or dead and food almost gone — the horror did not end with capitulation.
"The Russians then came to Berlin and got me, too," Woelk said. "They took me to a doctor's apartment and raped me for 14 consecutive days. That's why I could never have children. They destroyed everything."
Like millions of Germans and other Europeans, Woelk began rebuilding her life and trying to forget as best she could her bitter memories and the shame of her association with a criminal regime that had destroyed much of Europe.
She worked in a variety of jobs, mostly as a secretary or administrative assistant. Her husband returned from the war but died 23 years ago, she said.
With the frailty of advanced age and the lack of an elevator in her building, she has not left her apartment for the past eight years. Nurses visit several times a day, and a niece stops by frequently, she said.
Now at the end of her life, she feels the need to purge the memories by talking about her story.
"For decades, I tried to shake off those memories," she said. "But they always came back to haunt me at night."
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/hitlers-food-taster-tells-poisoning-fears-19050473
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