Hitler’s complete control even penetrated personal, daily life in Berlin. By forcing citizens to say “Heil Hitler” instead of the traditional “Guten Morgen”, he exercised his complete control and thrust the Nazi party onto those opposers. Some member of the capital city especially challenged these guidelines with small victories. There is a recollection from a…

While I admit that I have skipped around to different chapters this reading, I have to say that “Enemies of the State” has been the most interesting of what we’ve read so far – information-wise. First of all, the anti-Nazi nature of Berlin was demonstrated in full within its various resistance movements . From silently refusing  to…

Nazism appeared to offer Germans a bright future. The Nazis wanted to harness as much emerging technology as possible. One example of this is the radio. Although not directly innovated by the Germans, they were able to utilize the “new” technology and made it popular with ordinary citizens. The Germans were able to politically exploit…

In Chapter 12 of Berlin at War, Moorhouse touches upon the differences in burials between those taking place at Berlin’s Invaliden cemetery and those taking place at Weissensee. Invaliden became a burial ground for prominent members of the military, whereas Weissensee “became a last refuge for the desperate” (262). In Invaliden, angels and eagles predominated….

As WWII progressed, so too did the death toll. Whereas in normal times all families would be able to place death notices in the local paper, with the increase in demand for notices, it became more difficult to obtain a mention. At the beginning of the war, the wording of the notices was chosen by…

I find it absolutely incredible the number of groups that opposed the Nazi Party during their rise to power in the 1930s and during the Second World War of the 1940s. Protests were especially strong in the German capital, where Hitler failed to capture a third of the votes in any single election. Berlin at…

Ich zeige dich an, junger Mann! (“I’ll have you arrested, you impudent young man!”) Even if the Nazis couldn’t control, know, and watch over everything, they still wanted to. So, they asked the general population in Berlin and large metropolitan areas to help them out. Any suspicious activity was to be reported if seen. For…

We’re all used to almost international programs on our TVs. But what type of broadcasts were available to those with the resources to purchase a personal radio or go to a bar or restaurant with a radio when the technology was just emerging in Germany? Certainly not programs with as international a scope. In Germany,…

It’s funny and sad how the V-Men and the Gestapo treated Germans in contrast to the prejudice the system had against other ethnicities. The story in which a young woman was let off for singing an offensive song reminds me of a recent happening in which an underage white girl at a music festival was…