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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.