Nazi Germany and the Daleks

Some may find it surprising that Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator was released in 1940. In the film that Chaplin also directed, he plays the parts of a Jewish barber suffering from memory loss and Adenoid Hynkel, the great dictator, who is very friendly with Benzino  Naplaoni. Hynkel and the barber manage to swap roles.    

The film became Chaplin's greatest financial success.

Hynkel's speech at the end could fill us all with hope, even today. However, even though he sends a positive message, his tone is similar to Hitler's at the Nuremberg rallies.

This was also Chaplin's first film with dialogue. 

My character becomes dissatisfied with just making fun of Hitler. She realises they must show his evil side as well. So, she exaggerates the near hysteria that is both Chaplin's speech and in Hitler's ones at the rallies. She begins to sound like a Dalek. The early Daleks' sink plungers were used almost like a Nazi salute. They use that same hysterical voice as Hitler  and Chaplin in their 'Exterminate. Exterminate.' Gabriela uses this in her scene.

Terry Nation, the first writer of the BBC science fiction series Doctor Who, based the Daleks on the Nazis. Nation died twenty-five years ago and grew up in the shadow of World War II.

The Daleks share many qualities with the Nazis, including their claim to be the master race and therefore all who get in their way must be exterminated.

I was a small child in the early 1950s and Doctor Who was first broadcast in my first year at secondary school. The Daleks filled me with the same horror as the swastika and the Nazi flag.

I can’t remember how I know about the latter. And we should remember that the swastika was originally a symbol for prosperity and good luck.

Even as a small child I recognised this as absolute evil. That black hooked cross against startling white and vivid red backgrounds. It was almost as if I could remember the horror of all that that represented even though I hadn't lived though those times. Was I accessing other people's memories? Had someone told me something about it and though I’d forgotten that actual conversation the emotional memory remained?

Such is our reaction to the Daleks, and indeed sirens which resemble the air raid and even that all clear ones.  Were they designed to instil fear or is that a learnt response now?

The Nazis, Hitler and the Daleks have become the 20th century equivalent of the bogey man. Are we, though taking enough heed of any 21^st century recurring patterns?         

      

 

Our Wartime Street by Fiz Osborne and Katie Kear

 

This is picture book and as do all good picture books this has more of the story in the pictures: a train platform full of evacuees, London covered in smoke and broken buildings, details of wartime clothing. Each picture invites a talking point.

The author is pragmatic and non-judgemental in her story-telling. She tells simply of how the war came about.

There is a particularly interesting double spread about the RAF throughout the world.

The Battle of Britain is observed by a cat.

There is information about four different types of air raid shelter

We are also given information about civilian life: evacuation, war-time food, clothing and schooling.

Women's war-time work is also discussed.

The end of the war is presented briefly.

The Holocaust is only mentioned in the context of liberation.    

This is an engaging book with a light touch  but it nevertheless invites some interesting discussion. 

Find your copy here  

Note, this is an affiliate link and a small portion of what you pay, at no extra cost to you,  may go to Bridge House Publishing.   

Caricatures of Hitler

 

I'm going steadily ahead with Schellberg 7. Protagonist Gabriela knows she must resist and rebel.

In the background there has been the burning of books – and she works in the publishing industry yet has been protected from the consequences of this. The White Rose movement will appear quite soon.

Gabriela has to find her own way of resisting.

She's abandoned her swing-loving friends- the Schlurfs - and now she is being reacquainted with them. She has a flatmate who draws cartoons – specifically satirical cartoons of Hitler.

In my research I have found plenty of cartoons satirising Hitler but many of them were made long after he was dead.  I have to get into the mind-set of a woman who would dare to do that at the time that he was still alive and very much revered. That has given me the wonderful character Heidi Viebeck.

Naturally there are many pro-Hitler cartoons drawn at the time and plenty of anti-Semitic ones too.

These cartoons that Heidi draws will lead later to Gabriela's niece taking part in satirical plays about Hitler.

All of this is really interesting research as is creating an underground venue for where the plays can take place.  

 

             

More about the Schlurfs

 

These really did represent a reaction against the value of the Nazi party and the rise of the Hitter Youth and the BDM (Bund Deutscher Mädchen. The word 'Schlurf' actually later became part of the name of a Hollywood film, Heil Schlurf, released in 1991. It wasn't a great success but did shed a little light on this time and caused a minor reappearance of Swing music in Germany.

Swing became popular in Germany in the 1920s.  It represented the roaring twenties though Germany also had to cope with hyperinflation at that time. It seemed odd that jazz was used as background music in the BBC film of John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas; the Nazis didn’t like jazz. Or perhaps that was precisely why it was used.

However, jazz and swing were never completely banned. The Nazis realised that it was good for moral and even produced their own version of jazz with Charlie and His Orchestra. However this was mainly a satirical band that adapted the lyrics from popular jazz pieces in a way that made fun of them.  

Many of the swing fans welcomed Jewish youths into their clubs and this did not sit well with the authorities.   

Several managed to import jazz and swing records from the USA but those caught doing that were rewarded with beatings and hard labour. On 18 August 1941 over 300 members of the Schwingjugend were arrested and subjected to police brutality. By 2 January 1942 Heineich Himmler ordered Reinhardt Heydrich to clamp down on the swing movement and submit participants to several years in a concentration camp. By 1941 20,000 young people were taking part in swing events.  

The Nazis saw jazz and swing as 'Negermusik' – it was indeed mainly supplied by Black musicians. The Nazis saw Black people as part of an inferior race.  

The Problem(s) with Hitler

 

My character Gabriela in Schellberg 7 is about to start satirising Hitler.  What has she got to go on?

He was born in Austria, not Germany.

It is likely that there was Jewish blood in his ancestors.

His father was cruel in his strictness.

He didn’t do well at school.

He lost four of his siblings in childhood.

He scratched a living in Vienna before the Great War.  

He wrote a book that many of us would like to ban but we’re not going to get into banning books like the Nazis did.

He had a criminal record and had spent some time in jail before coming to power.

He was a failed artist: he failed to get into the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts – twice.   

His mother died of breast cancer when she was just forty-seven and he was eighteen.

He was a despatch runner during the Great War.  

He was wounded and gassed in the Great War.

He was awarded the Iron Cross for his participation in the Great War.

He was a very good speaker.

He was a vegetarian – good for him – it was particularly hard to be one in those days.

He admired the Italian fascists.

He actually supported the working class – as long as its members were Aryan.

He gave people hope as they struggled with the Depression – bad throughout Europe but particularly keen in Germany – the Germans were already suffering because of the harsh requirement of the Versailles Treaty.

He offered hope through road-building, employment and encouraging the Hitler Youth and associated organisations.

He believed that the Germans, and indeed the British, were the master race.  

He was xenophobic.

He used the 1936 Olympics for propaganda

He saw Hindenburg as a doddery old man – no good for the German people and easy to overcome.

Politics and making German great again gave a purpose to his life.

He liked to escape to his retreat at Berchtesgaden and play with his dogs when he should have been thinking about military tactics.    

   

Attitudes to Homosexuality between World War and World War II

 

I’m at a very dramatic stage of Schellberg 7,  though I haven’t yet got a proper title for it but I’m labelling it ‘Gabriela’, because it’s Gabriela’s’ story. In later chapters it also becomes Anika’s story.

Gabriela is at last told the truth about her birth and is let into the secret that her father has been keeping from her for some time.

There are parallels between her story and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice: there is death, and unrequited homosexual love and there is the same contrast between pragmatism and romance. Her own story though also includes two unwanted pregnancies.  

She is about to find out about homosexuals being ‘rehabilitated’. Attitudes to homosexuality will also become even more important as the story progresses through the 1930s and 1940s.

Gabriela is by now comfortable with lesbian love.  Two of her best friends are a lesbian couple and they have been instrumental in introducing her to the Bohemian life she enjoys in Schwabing, the artist part of Munich. This is also a sort of foreshadowing to the Nazi era where lesbianism was better tolerated than homosexuals.

Paragraph 175 of the criminal code, established in 1871, forbade sexual relationships between men. However, although lesbianism was forbidden it wasn’t illegal. No criminal code made is so.  Were the German as puzzled as our own Queen Victoria about how women could have sex? It may also partly be explained by the fact that lesbians seemed less of a threat as women on the whole didn’t hold  high-ranking positions in  society

Life became difficult for men as the Nazi regime took hold: they were expected to admire the strength and physique of other men and away from home and at war what might happen? Both women and men on both sides of the war became closer. There would often be an emotional link that could spill over into sexuality.   

In the 1920 and 1930s both gay men and women had been tolerated despite Paragraph 175. The clamp down on homosexual men was in part a reaction to some of the ‘decadence’ of that period.  This is a decadence in which our protagonist will take part shortly. This will ultimately lead to her niece, Anika, taking part in a satirical cabaret in an underground theatre.           

Find a copy of Death in Venice here.   

Note, this is an affiliate link and a small portion of what you pay, at no extra cost to you,  may go to Bridge House Publishing.