MELITA MASCHMANN
A German Teenager's Response to the Nazi Takeover in January 1933
(1963)
Melita Maschmann, daughter of a middle-class family, was a teenager in
January 1933 when Hitler came to power. Her memoir, first published in
German in 1963, is composed as a letter to a childhood friend, a Jew. In
it Maschmann attempts to explain why she was attracted to the Third
Reich. In this excerpt, she describes Hitler's extraordinary appeal to
young people as he assumed the office of chancellor in January 1933.
There must be many answers to the question-what caused young people to become National
Socialists at that time. For people at a certain stage of adolescence the antagonism between
the generations, taken in conjunction with Hitler's seizure of power, probably often played a
part m it. For me it turned the scale. I wanted to follow a different road from the conservative
one prescribed for me by family tradition. In my parents mouths the word “social” or “socialist”
had a scornful ring. They used them when they waxed indignant over the hunchback
dressmaker’s desire to play an active part in politics. On January 30, 1933, she [the dressmaker]
announced that a time was now at hand when the servants would no longer have to eat off the
kitchen table. My mother always treated her servants correctly but it would have seemed
absurd to her to share their company at table.
No catch word has ever fascinated me quite as much as that of the “National Community”
(Volksgemeinschaft). I heard it first from the lips of this crippled and care-worn dressmaker and,
spoken on the evening of January 30, it acquired a magical glow the manner of my first
encounter with it fixed next meeting for me: I felt it could only be brought into being by
declaring war on the class prejudices of the social stratum from which I came and that it must,
above all, give protection and justice to the weak. What held my allegiance to this idealistic
fantasy was the hope that a state of affairs could be created in which people of all classes
would live together like brothers and sisters.
On the evening of January 30 my parents took us children, my twin brother and myself, into the
centre of the city. There we witnessed the torchlight procession with which the National
Socialists celebrated their victory. Some of the uncanny feel of that night remains with me even
today. The crashing tread of the feet, the sombre pomp of the red and black flags, the flickering
light from the torches on the faces and the songs with melodies that were at once aggressive
and sentimental. For hours the columns marched by. Again and again amongst them we saw
groups of boys and girls scarcely older than ourselves. What was I, who was only allowed to
stand on the pavement and watch, feeling at my back the icy blast which emanated from my
parents' reserve? Hardly more than a chance spectator, a child who was still given schoolgirl
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stories for Christmas. And yet I longed to hurl myself into this current, to be submerged and
borne along by it. ...
. . . The boys and girls in the marching columns did count. Like the adults, they carried banners
on which the names of their dead were written.
At one point somebody suddenly leaped from the ranks of the marchers and struck a man who
had been standing only a few paces away from us. Perhaps he had made a hostile remark. I saw
him fall to
the ground with blood streaming down his face and I heard him cry out. Our parents hurriedly
drew us away from the scuffle, but they had not been able to stop us seeing the man bleeding.
The image of him haunted me for days.
The horror it inspired in me was almost imperceptibly spiced with an intoxicating joy. "For the
flag we are ready to die," the torch-bearers had sung. It was not a matter of clothing or food or
school essays, but of life and death. For whom? For me as well? I do not know if I asked myself
this question at that moment, but I know I was overcome with a burning desire to belong to
these people for whom it was a matter of life and death.
Whenever I probe the reasons which drew me to join the Hitler Youth, I always come up against
this one: I wanted to escape from my childish, narrow life and I wanted to attach myself to
something that was great and fundamental. This longing I shared with countless others of my
contemporaries ....
I believed the National Socialists when they promised to do away with unemployment and with
it the poverty of six million people. I believed them when they said they would reunite the
German nation, which had split into more than forty political parties, and overcome the
consequences of the dictated peace of Versailles. And if my faith could only be based on hope
in January 1933, it seemed soon enough to have deeds to point to.
From Melita Maschmann, Account Rendered: A Dossier on My Former Self, trans. Geoffrey Strachan
(London: Abelard-Schuman, 1964), 10-12, 16.
