How the Nazis Campaigned for Restoring the Death Penalty to Win Elections
How the Nazis Campaigned for Restoring the Death Penalty In Germany to Win Elections--
--by Lance Rosen September of 1989
---"Brutality is respected...The People need wholesome fear, they want to fear something. They want something to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive. Haven't you seen everywhere that after the Beer Hall battles, those who have been beaten are the first to join the Party as new members? Why babble about brutality and get indignant about tortures? They need something that will give them a thrill of Horror."---
----Adolf Hitler to Goering on his Oratorical Methods, 1927
note* I wrote this Article 31 years ago. I am transcribing it here, with a few edits, to share and circulate in light of the Supreme Court Decision yesterday, July 14, which allowed the execution of Daniel Lewis Lee in Terre Haute Indiana, the first Federal Execution in 17 years. Lee had a credible claim of innocence, and there is still question as to whether he received due process.
It is easy to indulge our anger at people who commit heinous crimes, to both demand and celebrate them being "put down like dogs", especially in times of economic desperation and instability such as we have now. It is important to understand that there are three issues involved which need to be addressed.
First, has justice been done, and was the convicted murderer given a fair trial and verdict.?
Second, it is important to consider the current political context, in which the President is a fascist "law and order" would-be dictator who has consistently undermined the rule of law himself, and that the SCOTUS decision was rendered by a court packed with Trump nominees, Right-wing ideologues, and members of William Barr's "Federalist Society", who profess their admiration for Nazi Germany's pre-eminent jurist and legal suthority, law professor Carl Schmitt.
And lastly, is the fact that this policy, this issue, has raised its head in the past. In the US, there is the history of lynchings against African-Americans, which continued well into the 20th Century, as well as the practice of "southern justice", ie; railroad convictions in rigged trials. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund was founded and led by future SCOTUS Justice Thurgood Marshall to address this inequity. Not coincidentally, the single greatest number of executions in the United States over a 10 year period was the 1930's, during the Great Depression.
A Federal anti-Lynching Law was introduced this year which was obstructed by right- wing Confederate Libertarian Rand Paul, which reminds us that this ugly mentality has still not been extirpated. Public executions drew out 20,000 people in Owensburg Kentucky for a spectacle of grand entertainment early in the 20th Century, only being outlawed in 1927.
More to the point, is that the growing demand for capital punishment is a marker for the devolution of a society which is embracing fascist ideologues and "Old Testament" religious cultists who are demanding blood, revenge, and a sacrificial scapegoat to execute, because it gives them a thrill of self-righteous and pious self-sanctification. It upholds their belief that they are better, more virtuous, and "chosen". Those people who cheer for the execution of another, guilty or innocent, are living vicariously as the would be executioner, who would love to pull the switch themselves and have the power to take a life, in the tradition of that "Old Testament" God of retribution and vengence. It is Confederate, it is a manifestation of the worst of the evangelical cults taking over our government, and it has its most clear precedent in Nazi Germany, as this piece will inform you to some degree.--LFR
additional note* some of the descriptions in this article are of graphic violence
As has been documented, Germany, The Weimar Republic, was left devastated in the aftermath of WW I, with hyperinflation of the German Mark to astronomical levels, rampant street fighting by left and right-wing militias, and the spread of a counterculture reflecting the "Jazz Age", including drugs, and various forms of esoteric art and religion, which were considered by most Germans to be a communist invasion, in opposition to German classical culture, as typified by Schiller, Mozart, and Beethoven.
What most don't know, is that it was accompanied by a horrific crimewave, including an outbreak of ghastly serial killings which horrified the public, and helped set the stage for Hitler's rise to power.
HItler was evil and diabolical, and understood that the most efficient way to crush political liberty and impose a police state, was to insure that its future victims desire that it be so, to demand a "strong man" come in and restore order, to end the chaos. This is the context for the so-called "capital punishment" debate in Weimar Germany.
It was during the period of 1925-33 that the Germans were inundated day after day with sensationalized media accounts (not unlike our tabloids of today) of a series of killing sprees, which generated much public hysteria.
The first of these was the case of Karl Denke, a small shopkeeper, and local official in his Lutheran Church, who had been a highly respected member of his community. It was revealed that he had murdered at least thirty people, and then processed their remains into a commodity which he sold as "smoked pork" to his friends and neighbors. Denke was arrested and later hanged, but one can imagine the lynch mob mentality, driven by revulsion, that emerged from this at the time. Remember that Germans were hungry due to shortages after the War, the unfair treaty, and hyperinflation.
There was a similar case in Berlin, involving one Carl Grossman, a door-to-door salesman and former butcher, who murdered 23 young peasant women over a several year period. He likewise was arrested and soon thereafter hanged himself in Jail. In his confession, the only remorse he expressed was that he would miss his pet bird, which he loved more than people, which of course, was played up by the media and enraged the People all the more.
In 1929, movie maker Fritz Lang produced and directed a film which further inflamed the public passions, entitled "M", which starred a young Peter Lorre, chronicling the life of a famous child murderer from Dusseldorf, named Kuerten. (Lang was anti-Nazi, and did not deliberately play into later Nazi campaigns--LFR)
There was another highly publicized case in which a playwright named Blume killed a number of mailmen with a razor blade, and stole money from their special delivery letters. Just a few months before he was arrested, he wrote and staged a play which was a melodrama entitled, "The Curse of Retribution", documenting the murders committed by a serial killer of Mailmen with a razor blade, which documented every detail of the murders. The play was performed at Dresden's Neustadter Theater, betraying himself and leading to his arrest.
The most publicized and gruesome of these cases involved a petty criminal and thief named Georg Harmann, who was, according to author Otto Friedrich, a police agent and informant against other criminals. While he was on the police payroll, he kidnapped, raped, and killed 33 peasant children, mostly boys. He would lure them home with a ham sandwich and a Beer, sexually assault them, then tear their throats out with his teeth. He would then dismember their bodies, and sell them on the black market as potted meat, Pork or Veal to his hungry neighbors. He was caught because he would sell the children's used clothes to friends, and one woman recognized and traced the jacket of her missing child. According to records, Harmann confessed to the crimes, but stated he had no recollection of the murders, that he would get very enraged, black out, and later wake up with a dead person in his room.
Harmann's trial caused a national uproar, not unlike that of American serial killer Ted Bundy. There were several attempts to lynch him by the public after the arrest. A local professor of psychiatry named Lessing examined Harmann and pronounced him insane, and therefore not responsible for his crimes. The court barred all psychiatric evidence, convicted him and sentenced him to death.
It was here that the issue of capital punishment emerged as the hottest political issue of the day. Remember that he was on the police payroll, so the question of official corruption overlay the murders themselves.
According to Author Arthur Koestler, then Assistant Editor of the "Berliner Zeitung am Mittag" there had been tremendous resistance to expanding the use of the Death Penalty,
"owing to the strong current against capital punishment in the liberal strata of the public, and no executions had been carried out in Germany for years. Now, the Harmann affair became a test case. The managing director informed us that Harmann was a disgusting character, and that to ask for commutation of his sentence would antagonize public opinion, which we could not afford to do in these times. Already, most of the editors felt so insecure about their posts, that no protest was voiced. I remember that I mumbled something about few murderers being attractive characters...and my muttering was passed over in polite and complete silence. Thus, was abandoned, within an hour, a campaign which we had been waging with fervent conviction over the years. It was one in merely a series of capitulations, but all the more striking as it had no direct bearing on political issues. We capitulated before the rapidly increasing brutalization of the masses".
What followed was, in a certain way, predictable, when the Nazis "got out in front" of the Death Penalty issue in local elections, deploying the Stormtroopers onto street corners with the ironic slogan, "Harmann should Die, Death Penalty for Mass Murderers"! The irony of the Nazis running a single issue populist campaign on this issue should not be lost on us today.
Clearly, Hitler had in mind the day when he would use the law against his political enemies, and wanted to break down the resistance of the population to the schemes for barbarism and murder he had in mind, so long as he could choose the appropriate scapegoats.
Harmann was executed in 1931, and as the date of execution came near, the school children of Berlin took to singing a song about him.
"Warte, warte nur ein Weilchen
Bald kommt Harmann auch zu dir,
Mit dem kleinen Hachelbeilchen,
Macht er Poekelfleisch aus dir.
Wait, wait, just a little while,
And soon Harmann will come to you,
With his little Hatchet,
He'll make smoked meat of you.
The Election of September 14, 1930, saw the Nazis increase their seats in the Reichstag from 12 to 107, and their vote total from 800,000 to 6.5 million. Ultimately it was the Great Depression and significant foreign interference in German affairs which fueled the break out of the Nazis electoral base. But, the appeal to law and order which the Nazis led with in their street organizing for the Death Penalty gave them credibility and appeal, and Hitler sold himself as the "law and order candidate", the "strongman" whose Party would restore order. This is an important thing to remember today, as you see people celebrating the execution of Ted Bundy with Champagne and T-Shirts, and watch TV shows about unsolved crimes, vigilante crime fighters, etc. There are even discussions now about broadcasting executions live for the public to entertained. Why now, and what is it they are trying to sell the American people?
"We must go right to the end in our misfortune; we need a chastisement compared to which the four years of War are nothing...A dictatorship, resembling that of Napoleon will be regarded universally as a salvation. But then, blood must flow, the more the better"
----Oswald Spengler
"We will come to Power...legally within the rules of the Constitution...and then the November 1918 Revolution will be avenged, and heads will roll"
-----Adolf HItler, testifying at his own trial for the Munich Putsch, 1924
**Source, "Before the Deluge", by Otto Friedrich
--by Lance Rosen September of 1989
---"Brutality is respected...The People need wholesome fear, they want to fear something. They want something to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive. Haven't you seen everywhere that after the Beer Hall battles, those who have been beaten are the first to join the Party as new members? Why babble about brutality and get indignant about tortures? They need something that will give them a thrill of Horror."---
----Adolf Hitler to Goering on his Oratorical Methods, 1927
note* I wrote this Article 31 years ago. I am transcribing it here, with a few edits, to share and circulate in light of the Supreme Court Decision yesterday, July 14, which allowed the execution of Daniel Lewis Lee in Terre Haute Indiana, the first Federal Execution in 17 years. Lee had a credible claim of innocence, and there is still question as to whether he received due process.
It is easy to indulge our anger at people who commit heinous crimes, to both demand and celebrate them being "put down like dogs", especially in times of economic desperation and instability such as we have now. It is important to understand that there are three issues involved which need to be addressed.
First, has justice been done, and was the convicted murderer given a fair trial and verdict.?
Second, it is important to consider the current political context, in which the President is a fascist "law and order" would-be dictator who has consistently undermined the rule of law himself, and that the SCOTUS decision was rendered by a court packed with Trump nominees, Right-wing ideologues, and members of William Barr's "Federalist Society", who profess their admiration for Nazi Germany's pre-eminent jurist and legal suthority, law professor Carl Schmitt.
And lastly, is the fact that this policy, this issue, has raised its head in the past. In the US, there is the history of lynchings against African-Americans, which continued well into the 20th Century, as well as the practice of "southern justice", ie; railroad convictions in rigged trials. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund was founded and led by future SCOTUS Justice Thurgood Marshall to address this inequity. Not coincidentally, the single greatest number of executions in the United States over a 10 year period was the 1930's, during the Great Depression.
A Federal anti-Lynching Law was introduced this year which was obstructed by right- wing Confederate Libertarian Rand Paul, which reminds us that this ugly mentality has still not been extirpated. Public executions drew out 20,000 people in Owensburg Kentucky for a spectacle of grand entertainment early in the 20th Century, only being outlawed in 1927.
More to the point, is that the growing demand for capital punishment is a marker for the devolution of a society which is embracing fascist ideologues and "Old Testament" religious cultists who are demanding blood, revenge, and a sacrificial scapegoat to execute, because it gives them a thrill of self-righteous and pious self-sanctification. It upholds their belief that they are better, more virtuous, and "chosen". Those people who cheer for the execution of another, guilty or innocent, are living vicariously as the would be executioner, who would love to pull the switch themselves and have the power to take a life, in the tradition of that "Old Testament" God of retribution and vengence. It is Confederate, it is a manifestation of the worst of the evangelical cults taking over our government, and it has its most clear precedent in Nazi Germany, as this piece will inform you to some degree.--LFR
additional note* some of the descriptions in this article are of graphic violence
As has been documented, Germany, The Weimar Republic, was left devastated in the aftermath of WW I, with hyperinflation of the German Mark to astronomical levels, rampant street fighting by left and right-wing militias, and the spread of a counterculture reflecting the "Jazz Age", including drugs, and various forms of esoteric art and religion, which were considered by most Germans to be a communist invasion, in opposition to German classical culture, as typified by Schiller, Mozart, and Beethoven.
What most don't know, is that it was accompanied by a horrific crimewave, including an outbreak of ghastly serial killings which horrified the public, and helped set the stage for Hitler's rise to power.
HItler was evil and diabolical, and understood that the most efficient way to crush political liberty and impose a police state, was to insure that its future victims desire that it be so, to demand a "strong man" come in and restore order, to end the chaos. This is the context for the so-called "capital punishment" debate in Weimar Germany.
It was during the period of 1925-33 that the Germans were inundated day after day with sensationalized media accounts (not unlike our tabloids of today) of a series of killing sprees, which generated much public hysteria.
The first of these was the case of Karl Denke, a small shopkeeper, and local official in his Lutheran Church, who had been a highly respected member of his community. It was revealed that he had murdered at least thirty people, and then processed their remains into a commodity which he sold as "smoked pork" to his friends and neighbors. Denke was arrested and later hanged, but one can imagine the lynch mob mentality, driven by revulsion, that emerged from this at the time. Remember that Germans were hungry due to shortages after the War, the unfair treaty, and hyperinflation.
There was a similar case in Berlin, involving one Carl Grossman, a door-to-door salesman and former butcher, who murdered 23 young peasant women over a several year period. He likewise was arrested and soon thereafter hanged himself in Jail. In his confession, the only remorse he expressed was that he would miss his pet bird, which he loved more than people, which of course, was played up by the media and enraged the People all the more.
In 1929, movie maker Fritz Lang produced and directed a film which further inflamed the public passions, entitled "M", which starred a young Peter Lorre, chronicling the life of a famous child murderer from Dusseldorf, named Kuerten. (Lang was anti-Nazi, and did not deliberately play into later Nazi campaigns--LFR)
There was another highly publicized case in which a playwright named Blume killed a number of mailmen with a razor blade, and stole money from their special delivery letters. Just a few months before he was arrested, he wrote and staged a play which was a melodrama entitled, "The Curse of Retribution", documenting the murders committed by a serial killer of Mailmen with a razor blade, which documented every detail of the murders. The play was performed at Dresden's Neustadter Theater, betraying himself and leading to his arrest.
The most publicized and gruesome of these cases involved a petty criminal and thief named Georg Harmann, who was, according to author Otto Friedrich, a police agent and informant against other criminals. While he was on the police payroll, he kidnapped, raped, and killed 33 peasant children, mostly boys. He would lure them home with a ham sandwich and a Beer, sexually assault them, then tear their throats out with his teeth. He would then dismember their bodies, and sell them on the black market as potted meat, Pork or Veal to his hungry neighbors. He was caught because he would sell the children's used clothes to friends, and one woman recognized and traced the jacket of her missing child. According to records, Harmann confessed to the crimes, but stated he had no recollection of the murders, that he would get very enraged, black out, and later wake up with a dead person in his room.
Harmann's trial caused a national uproar, not unlike that of American serial killer Ted Bundy. There were several attempts to lynch him by the public after the arrest. A local professor of psychiatry named Lessing examined Harmann and pronounced him insane, and therefore not responsible for his crimes. The court barred all psychiatric evidence, convicted him and sentenced him to death.
It was here that the issue of capital punishment emerged as the hottest political issue of the day. Remember that he was on the police payroll, so the question of official corruption overlay the murders themselves.
According to Author Arthur Koestler, then Assistant Editor of the "Berliner Zeitung am Mittag" there had been tremendous resistance to expanding the use of the Death Penalty,
"owing to the strong current against capital punishment in the liberal strata of the public, and no executions had been carried out in Germany for years. Now, the Harmann affair became a test case. The managing director informed us that Harmann was a disgusting character, and that to ask for commutation of his sentence would antagonize public opinion, which we could not afford to do in these times. Already, most of the editors felt so insecure about their posts, that no protest was voiced. I remember that I mumbled something about few murderers being attractive characters...and my muttering was passed over in polite and complete silence. Thus, was abandoned, within an hour, a campaign which we had been waging with fervent conviction over the years. It was one in merely a series of capitulations, but all the more striking as it had no direct bearing on political issues. We capitulated before the rapidly increasing brutalization of the masses".
What followed was, in a certain way, predictable, when the Nazis "got out in front" of the Death Penalty issue in local elections, deploying the Stormtroopers onto street corners with the ironic slogan, "Harmann should Die, Death Penalty for Mass Murderers"! The irony of the Nazis running a single issue populist campaign on this issue should not be lost on us today.
Clearly, Hitler had in mind the day when he would use the law against his political enemies, and wanted to break down the resistance of the population to the schemes for barbarism and murder he had in mind, so long as he could choose the appropriate scapegoats.
Harmann was executed in 1931, and as the date of execution came near, the school children of Berlin took to singing a song about him.
"Warte, warte nur ein Weilchen
Bald kommt Harmann auch zu dir,
Mit dem kleinen Hachelbeilchen,
Macht er Poekelfleisch aus dir.
Wait, wait, just a little while,
And soon Harmann will come to you,
With his little Hatchet,
He'll make smoked meat of you.
The Election of September 14, 1930, saw the Nazis increase their seats in the Reichstag from 12 to 107, and their vote total from 800,000 to 6.5 million. Ultimately it was the Great Depression and significant foreign interference in German affairs which fueled the break out of the Nazis electoral base. But, the appeal to law and order which the Nazis led with in their street organizing for the Death Penalty gave them credibility and appeal, and Hitler sold himself as the "law and order candidate", the "strongman" whose Party would restore order. This is an important thing to remember today, as you see people celebrating the execution of Ted Bundy with Champagne and T-Shirts, and watch TV shows about unsolved crimes, vigilante crime fighters, etc. There are even discussions now about broadcasting executions live for the public to entertained. Why now, and what is it they are trying to sell the American people?
"We must go right to the end in our misfortune; we need a chastisement compared to which the four years of War are nothing...A dictatorship, resembling that of Napoleon will be regarded universally as a salvation. But then, blood must flow, the more the better"
----Oswald Spengler
"We will come to Power...legally within the rules of the Constitution...and then the November 1918 Revolution will be avenged, and heads will roll"
-----Adolf HItler, testifying at his own trial for the Munich Putsch, 1924
**Source, "Before the Deluge", by Otto Friedrich
