Even so, there was a wider web of connections: Hitler’s genocidal war of expansion had brought both the United States and the USSR into Central Europe, and the ensuing clash between ideologically opposed superpowers in the Cold War made its mark across the rest of the century. 9, 1989, was entirely different, the date pure coincidence. If the previous dates had been, in some sense, intrinsically connected through the echoes of November, 1918, then the sequence of challenges to communist rule in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the breaching of the Berlin Wall on Nov. Elser was subsequently arrested and held in concentration camps before being put to death shortly before Hitler’s suicide in April, 1945.Īnd Nov. All initially went according to plan, but the night was foggy, and Hitler cut short his speech and returned early to Berlin by overnight train rather than by plane when the bomb detonated, Hitler had already left the hall and escaped becoming one of the dead and wounded. 8, 1939, a lone Swabian carpenter by the name of Georg Elser carried out a meticulously planned attempt on Hitler’s life, planting a time bomb in a carefully hollowed-out pillar of the beer hall where Hitler was due to speak on the regular anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch. Hulton Archive/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesĪ few Germans nevertheless did stand up to Nazism. The Fasanenstrasse Synagogue in Berlin after it was set on fire by a Nazi mob during the Kristallnacht riots in November, 1938. The myth that ordinary Germans “knew nothing about it,” effectively reducing Nazi inhumanity to the gas chambers of wartime extermination camps, was simply a cover-up for the failure to intervene actively, when there might still have been time to change the course of history. In November, 1938, Nazi violence was visible to all. Over the following days, some 30,000 adult male Jews were marched off to concentration camps, and German Jews – already reduced to second-class subjects – were further robbed of their property, livelihood and freedom. 9 was again significant in 1938 when, during the annual Nazi commemoration of this putsch, the go-ahead was given for a nationwide pogrom against Germany’s Jews – a night of state-sponsored violence in which Jews were humiliated, beaten up and murdered, synagogues were set on fire, sacred objects desecrated, Jewish stores ransacked and homes smashed up a night that became known colloquially as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. The Nazi putsch was rapidly suppressed, but the event and ensuing trial gave Hitler national publicity, as well as the leisure time to write Mein Kampf during the relatively comfortable months of detention that followed. This was the day in 1918 when revolution brought about the abdication of the Kaiser and the proclamation of a republic and the day in 1923 when Adolf Hitler, leader of the fledgling and still insignificant NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the Nazi Party), launched the Beer Hall Putsch, intended as a “March on Berlin” – inspired by Benito Mussolini’s successful March on Rome, which had inaugurated Fascist rule in Italy the previous year. In Germany, anniversaries cluster particularly around Nov. The plethora of anniversaries around this November weekend highlight the issues. 10, 1938 photo from the AP Archive, showing Nazis-destroyed Jewish shops along Kurfuerstendamm street in Berlin, is placed at the same location 80 years later. But sadness about the human impact of warfare does not necessarily lead to pacifism commemorating soldiers as martyrs and celebrating veterans suggests a continuing commitment to legitimizing violence in service of a noble cause.Ī Nov. 11 remind us of the fields in which so much blood was spilled, so many young lives lost. Why do we mark historical anniversaries? Even when the ceremonies are routinized, the meanings can vary massively. 11, for instance, commemorates the end of hostilities in the First World War – originally Armistice Day, it is now Remembrance Day in Canada and other Commonwealth countries and Veterans Day in the United States. Her most recent book is Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice, which is a finalist for the Cundill History Prize.Īround this weekend we mark several anniversaries. Mary Fulbrook is a professor of German history at University College London.
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