Nazi Family Values: "The architects of the Third Reich thought of themselves as artists and intellectuals"
The architects of the Third Reich thought of themselves as artists and intellectuals, determined to secure “freedom for the healthy.”
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One can now turn to specific examples from the albums of such “artists” to see what they had in mind when Goebbels spoke of eliminating “the diseased” and creating “freedom for the healthy.” At the end, the reader should have a good idea of just what a “healthy” official of the Third Reich was, and what values he espoused among his family of fellow Nazis.
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Throughout his two albums, for example, Himmler is shown in variety of uniforms, all of which were custom tailored according to his designs. It was Himmler the “artist” or costume designer who added details and flourishes to these uniforms. In a work of popular history, Sydney D. Kirkpatrick describes Himmler the couturier at work on an SS line of uniforms.
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And yet for all the oddities of their personal lives, there is the side of the Nazis that seems normal. Many Nazi officials came from the educated middle class of German society, and in his comments on the trial of Einsatzgruppen members in Nuremberg after the war, the British historian Gerald Reitlinger (author of The SS, Alibi of a Nation, a superb study of the SS) observed of the defendants that “the only common denominator was that nearly all had been to a university and the majority had achieved the doctorate so dear to the German middle class.” The idea of Nazi intellectuals may be troubling to some, but as has long been known, intellectuals rose to power in the systems of both fascism (meaning both Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy) and the Leninist-Stalinist version of communism. Hitler and Stalin required the talents of writers, organizers, and, yes, artists to accomplish their ends.
Be sure to look at the pictures; disturbing throughout, not because they are obviously abnormal but because they are horribly normal: Nazi Family Values | Hoover Institution. I suppose the lesson here is that they thought they were the good guys. If you are an educated, erudite, academic intellectual, you think you're one of the good guys. It's not necessarily so.