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Book Review by Ida Nasatir
People Under Hitler by
Wallace Deuel
November 18, 1949—Ida Nasatir book review—People
Under Hitler by Wallace
Deuel—Southwestern Jewish Press, page
3 : Wallace Deuel, a Gentile, is a brilliant
newspaper correspondent. He went to Berlin in 1934 when he was 29 years old.
While there he tried to pierce the mystery of that world. Endowed with almost
dogged patience, he was inquisitive, intelligent, scholarly. Also he had great
integrity. As a journalist Deuel was a fiend for facts, for detail, for
documentation. His book, People Under Hitler, is packed with them. He
doesn't ask you to take his word for anything. He gives you chapter and verse,
the name of the law, the text, the exact number of victims. His book attempts to
answer two of the most fateful questions of our era: "What was there in the
lives of the German people, and all the others, that made the Nazi revolution
and the second war possible? What did the revolution and the war, in turn, do to
the people it embraced? The first 135 pages trace the rise of National
Socialism. There is an unusual chapter entitled "The Germans: Are they
Human?" This is Deuel's characterization of the German: "These , then
are the Germans: Big, heavy powerful; with unusual capacities for hard work and
for enduring privation and pain; on the whole unlovely, ponderous rather than
graceful of manner and movement and not seldom gross, and even coarse; a people
suffering from a sense of inner insecurity and lack of a sense of form and
proportion of balance and control, and constantly striving to compensate for
these deficiencies by seeking for authority and discipline to impose order and
system." William Shirer, author of Berlin Diary, has called this the
"best characterization of the German that any American has yet
achieved." Deuel is often struck by the fantastic importance of small
things in men. He feels, for instance, that "Adolf Hitler had a
mustache like Charlie Chaplin—that was one of the fateful facts of modern
times. People thought he was funny. They laughed at him. And while they were
laughing, Hitler destroyed them and their whole world around them. There was
nothing funny about Adolf Hitler—nothing at all. But thanks in large measure
to his comedian's mustache, millions of human beings found this out too
late." Deuel sees very clearly what a few Germans, even men like
Fritz Thyssen saw too late, namely that Hitler had set out to overthrow
all of Western civilization. In a remarkable epilogue he develops this belief.
The athor tells in great detail how the Nazi dictatorship regulated the life of
every German from before birth until after death; of how, for instance, it
decided whom you may marry, whether you may have children, what names you must
give them, how many pockets you may have in your trousers, how your daughter may
wear her hair, how your son may fly his kite, and what funny-paper, if any, you
may read. There was NO privacy either in life or death. Even the tombstones were
coordinated. Though not a pleasant tale, it is tremendously important to
read it. Particularly it is so in this new "atomic age." It is
well to recall that Hitler knew enough to know that you have to offer a
disillusioned world some faith. He conconcted a false one. The lost
millions snatched at it.