From the Nazis to the Stasi, how ordinary citizens live through extraordinary times

0:00You've watched the news and think, whoa, this seems unprecedented. Unprecedented. It's unprecedented. This has never happened before. This is unprecedented. I'm Matt Bevan, and my show, if you're listening, is about finding times that what's happening now has happened before and figuring out what we can learn from it. Learning from history, I mean, who could imagine? New episodes every Tuesday and Thursday on ABC Listen, or wherever you get your podcasts. ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music, and more. In the zero we live in, the old-fashioned police state is making something of a comeback. We're seeing democratic nations sliding into authoritarian rule and in the worst cases, that means one party rule, a smothering of free speech, and even perhaps a secret police acting in service of the regime. But do you ever wonder what would happen if you were living

1:00in such a place? And you noticed people being pulled from the streets, being disappeared. What do you think you would do about it, particularly if no one else was saying or doing anything? Would you even want to know about it that perhaps find it safer to pretend it just wasn't happening? Katja Hoyer is a UK-based historian. She was born in the last days of the old regime of East Germany, the GDR, and she was four years old when the Berlin Wall came down. Katja grew up in the 1990s after Germany reunified and learning about the Nazi era was a big part of her education. But Katja left school feeling somewhat unsatisfied about what she'd been taught about the period when the Nazis rose to power. She knew all about the big political moments, but not so much about the lives of ordinary people and how they responded to the dramatic changes unfolding all around them.

2:01So Katja, the historian, has traced the daily lives of local residents in a single town as it transformed into a Nazi stronghold. Katja's book is called Vimer, Life on the Edge of Catastrophe. Hello Katja. Hello. Tell me about the part of East Germany where your parents were born in. So they were both from different parts of what was going on. Once East Germany, my dad was from a state called Thuringia, which is the southernmost state within East Germany, and my mum was from Saxony, from actually from a part that is in the triangle between what was Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany, so right by the Eastern border. How did they meet? They met because my dad had joined the Air Force of East Germany in both station, quite close nearby to where my mum lived. And so they both went to the same choir of all things.

3:04This is one of the things I write about, you know, when I write about East Germany, that actually people forget that there was kind of a normal life as well with hobbies and people having jobs and kind of just going about their daily lives in that way. Yeah, and they both went and sang in the same choir, which is where they met. And interestingly, my dad and my granddad, so my mum's dad wasn't particularly impressed when my mum first rocks up with this young, uniformed man, and they had to kind of meet in secret for a while until he accepted that the relationship was going steady and there wasn't much that you could do about that. The authorities went all that keen on the relationship either. It came under some scrutiny. Why was that? Yeah, so when you're in the army at the time, it was still came like out of a long tradition with the Prussian army before that, where you had to, if you were a member of the armed forces, you had to ask them for permission to marry in case the marriage would bring the forces into disrepute. So they felt they had to say over private matters,

4:04such as relationships too. And my dad was effectively told that this wasn't a relationship that would bring in many bonus points when it came to his career options because my mum had relatives in West Germany and that was seen, especially in the Air Force, of course, with the opportunities that you'd potentially have to either flee the country yourself or help others to do so. He was called in by the Stasi on a regular basis when my mum's relatives would visit their relatives in West Germany each time. There was suspicion. And so they told him when they got engaged, that he should maybe rethink his relationship if he wanted any sort of career options open to him rather than them being capped. And did that have real career consequences for him as a result for having a wife with family in West Germany? Yeah, I mean, he didn't rise very far within the armed forces. So they wouldn't have let him up as far as to where he would have had

5:06access to say sensitive information or even the means to help others escape. So for example, despite being in the Air Force, he was never actually allowed to fly. He had to work as ground personnel. So they did try and make sure because they mistrust that everybody fundamentally that you wouldn't have any opportunities to potentially help others leave the country. Can we have an experience you'd had in the early 1980s when he was driving a Berlin on a track with some other training officers? Tell me what happened that night. Yes, so this was something that really stuck with him for his entire life, I think. So he was a young officer of a crew still under training and I think it's 1982. And they were supposed to train for the big annual parade that happened once a year in East Berlin where usually foreign dignitaries would come, say from the Soviet Union, for instance. And they were practicing that at night on the street in Berlin and they'd been told again and again

6:06that everything had to be absolutely perfect. The world was watching and they were quite nervous about it. And so when they were transported into Berlin for this kind of dry run a few nights earlier, he just made a silly joke, you know, because they were all nervous along the lines of, well, if this doesn't go exactly as planned, we may as well shoot ourselves. So he was saying something like that just as they kind of throw away comments. And by the time they arrived in Berlin, they were already too non-uniformed, rather sinister looking people, they're waiting for him. And they were taking him back to base. And he was incarcerated for that joke in solitary confinement for 10 days. And I was quite surprised when my dad died three years ago and I inherited a kind of cardboard box with all of his belongings in it. I had no idea what was in it or even if this box existed. It had lots of photographs and letters and other kind of things that eat clearly kept throughout this life.

7:09And the actual certificate of his release from prison was still in there. So I presume that this really meant something to him, the humiliation, the unfairness of it all. And the idea that, you know, the state was kind of constantly listening into you. What was all that about, Kaj, because that's not really an anti-state joke he was making in any case. It was pretty innocuous. How on earth did the authorities become aware of this? How come there was a couple of secret policemen, Stasi members, waiting to arrest him? How were they informed? Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. We were just hard to reconstruct and know how that came about. The only thing I can think of is that somebody, you know, on the actual transport truck over heard the conversation and was reporting it immediately as they, as they went, I mean, this is the thing that lots of people say about living in East Germany as this constant surveillance. You were never entirely sure who was actually grasping up on you. It could be your colleague, your neighbor. They had lots of so-called informal informants. So these were ordinary citizens who were spying

8:12on behalf of the Stasi on their fellow citizens. So it could have been anybody. And I think what happened was that they just took that joke seriously. They actually assumed that he'd kind of made threat to kill himself and all was encouraging others to do so. I learned later after I've written my book where this episode features another kind of person who was there that night in Berlin, got back to me and said, oh, now I finally know what happened in 1982. Because whilst he was in a different unit, they'd all had their ammunition taken away from them and had to practice with empty rifles that night. And nobody was actually told why or what had actually happened. But God, these men are going to kill themselves. It was like that. You were serious? Wow. Yeah, I mean, this is one of the features that many, many former 2D artists were subscribed as that the regime was kind of absolutely devoid of any sense of humor, well, like, hard-fittingness, there was constant tension, constant suspicion against its own people, which I think made this whole thing so, you know, so impressive.

9:16Is that something about the strangely schizoid nature of life in the old GDR? I've been to that great East Germany museum that's in Berlin at the moment. And you can see how life could be really rich in the old GDR. It requires, as you say, that a lot of activities were cultural institutions, there were films being made. But at any moments, the state could reach out and just snatch you like that momentarily. There seemed to be that kind of strange tension between normality and weirdness. Yeah, and lots of people describe that as the kind of dual life. So they knew what to say in public, what to say at home, that these were kind of two different spheres. You were even told this as a small child. If you lived with parents who were, say, quite opposed to the state, then they would quite often tell you from a very young age, you can't say what's being said at the dinner table in your school or with your friends because somebody might report you. But at the same time, I mean, I described this in my GDR book, as well, at the same time, I would say the vast majority

10:17of people, probably about 80% or so, simply got on with their lives and had rich and varied lives in the GDR and this sort of state thing hung there in the background and people were aware of it. But I said this to my dad as well, you know, how could you just live your life like that? And he said, you don't get it. We grew up with this. This was normal to us. And you kind of just find ways of living with it and living around it. Tell me about the town you grew up in, Kutcher, in East Germany. Yeah, so I was born in a town called Wilhelm Peachstadt, Gumm, at the time, so it was named after the first and only president the GDR I'd ever had because he was also born in that town. And it's right on the Polish border. It's one of those towns and cities that were divided by the New German borders after the Second World War. So there was a Polish part on the other side and I was born on the East German side. That's because my dad was stationed nearby. And then after the incident, I just described where he was sort of made himself suspicious,

11:19let's put it like that. They decided to move him later on to a town called Strasbourg, which is just East of Berlin. That's because the headquarters of the Air Force were in Strasbourg and they felt they could keep a better eye on him basically there. So we were moved there and then that's where I grew up, which today is just imaginable as part of the commuter belt of Berlin really is quite a nice sort of leafy area today in with the direct train line at going into Berlin. What was the family apartment like? It was very close to the base and therefore lots of people who lived there in this, on this estate that I grew up on were also involved with the Air Force one way or another. So usually one of the family members were there, which is why we were allocated those flats. It's basically if you imagine those typical kind of communist blocks, it's a small old version of that. So it only had three stories rather than being a tower block

12:22and we stood at coal heating, which quite often when I talk to people in the UK about my childhood, I find that it's remarkable or remarkably similar to the childhoods of people who are about 40 years older than I am. So yeah, it's like I have... So that means like I have the basement to get coal out of the basement in a bucket, that kind of thing? Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's what I've got quite, actually quite fun childhood memories off because it was a bit of a ritual that my dad and I had that we would go down then and get the coal or there was always excitement when the coal man came with the shoot to put the coal into the basement. Because we still, you know, as you mentioned, I was very young when the Berlin Wall fell, but we still lived in that flat way into the late 1990s. So it's something that I've got quite strong memories of. So that's fast forward now to 1989 and this is just a month or so before the Berlin Wall came down. This is October the 7th, 1989, you're four years old. Why was this an important day for the East German state and how did your parents plan to spend the day with you?

13:24Yeah, so this was the annual anniversary of the GDR's foundation on the 7th of October, 1949. And so this was celebrated as the so-called day of the Republic each year, which is where those parades happened that I described earlier. So this was what my dad was practicing for in 1982. In 1989, it was the special one because it was the 40 year anniversary of the GDR. Nobody knew that it would be its last anniversary, of course, so this was celebrated in a huge fashion with Mikhail Gorbachev coming from the Soviet Union and various other kind of high dignitaries and attendants. But it was also a public holiday. So many families just took the opportunity to have a day off and go on outings, and that's exactly what we did. And it was unseasonably warm as well. So it was a good kind of just opportunity to get out. And what we did was that we went into Berlin and went up on the TV tower, because that was quite the tourist.

14:27Sighting still is actually with a kind of rotating visitor platform at the top where you could sit in a fancy restaurant and see the whole of Berlin, including, of course, West Berlin. So I remember this quite clearly because it was so exciting. I was kind of standing up there as a four-year-old, holding my hands to the railing and trying to look down as far as I could. And then suddenly I saw lots of people that were gathering at the bottom of the TV tower. And I remember saying to my dad something like, oh, look, it's like we're on an ant hill in the middle of it. And there's all these little people that look like tiny little ants walking about. And he completely ignored me because he was buying drinks at the bar for me and for my mum behind me. And then he responded finally when I said something like, oh, look, there's lots of police cars. And that, of course, got his attention and he turned around and looked down and saw that this wasn't just police cars, but those were actually arms police, military police.

15:28And he realized that they were there because there was a large protest gathering on Alexander Pludz, which is the square beneath the TV tower. And it turned out that there were basically lots of young people protesting against the day of the Republic itself and against the GDR. And they were using the opportunity, of course, to really make a point. But there was no way of knowing how the authorities would respond because they'd dangled this threat of what they called a Chinese solution, meaning Tiam Anand Square. The massacre had happened that same year. And so there was this constant threat that they could actually shoot on the protesters. And my dad obviously had no idea what would happen whether this would escalate. So he grabbed me and my mum and we went back in the elevator and down and back into our trebant car and drove back home to Star Trek to watch the whole thing unfold on the news rather than live. And I think I remember despite being quite young

16:30because it was this weird moment of adults not knowing what was going on when normally as a four-year-old, you're used to the idea that you ask a question and people have got all the answers to them. And in this case, it was just kind of this odd mix of anxiety, excitement, uncertainty in the air. So I think that's why I've kind of preserved the snapshot, I suppose, of this memory in my mind. Now, this October 89, I'm getting my history in my head here, this was the season of miracles in Europe. I think Poland and Hungary had democratized or become multi-party states. At that point already, and there was a feeling of what would happen now in East Germany and in Czechoslovakia. And then just over a month later, we get to the 9th of November 89. The building wall comes down. People are dancing on the wall, champagne corks are popping everywhere. And how quickly did your family get it cross the now fallen wall to visit the West? Yeah, so this is something that people always imagine everybody rushed over immediately, but the wall fell on a Thursday night and Germans being Germans, they went,

17:31they go, work on Friday. So the big wave came up that weekend when people could travel over for the very first time. It took a little while longer for us because my dad was in uniform and anybody who kind of worked for the state would talk about longer for the regime to realize that they couldn't hold them back either. So we went, I think, as a couple of weeks later, to West Berlin as most people in our region did because it was the easiest way to get to the West. And you got 100 marks in West German money as kind of welcome money, which many people have found later had quite ambivalent feelings about because they obviously, people had jobs, they felt that they were earning an income, they didn't need handouts. And the idea of standing there queuing for what looked like benefits money was a bit sort of undignified for lots of people. But nonetheless, there was also the excitement of buying kind of Western things that people had craved for a long time. So when I did interviews for my books,

18:32everybody that I spoke to still remembered what they thought as their first kind of West German thing. So people were talking about like Mars bars and just really quite small and inocuous things. And my mum bought me a toy, which she still has today, which is like a bath toy, like a plastic ball with butterflies in it that you could kind of dunk under in the bath and it would come popping back up. And it was just a little kind of consumerist of things like this that made people quite happy. Also vaguely remember that they were loads of fruit sellers because there was this thing obviously that in the GDI, you couldn't get kind of exotic fruit, like bananas and pineapples and things. So they were all of these West Berlin sellers being quite cany and knowing that people were gonna come over and get these things that they'd been craving for a long time and people were holding out like keyweas and fruit and other things too. Within about a year or so, the old German Democratic Republic East Germany was sort of dismantled

19:33and the provinces were incorporated into West Germany, which became the federal Republic of Germany. What did that mean for your parents? And did they consider moving to the West at that point? No, we didn't move. And actually this was quite a prospect that my family were trying to avoid. So my dad, there was a brief option that hung in the air whether you could have joined the Bundeswehr, the West German army. But they were really keen to avoid that, especially those kind of middle ranking people. Like my dad, he was a captain in the military and they were really quite keen to just get them out because they were seen as kind of being indoctrinated by the state. So the option would have been to stay in the army potentially, but then they could have moved them anywhere all across Germany. The idea of changing your entire world view as in who's your friend, who's your enemy, NATO is suddenly no longer threat but your part of it. Learning commands in English rather than Russian. It's a huge transformation for people in the military

20:34in particular. So loads of them decided that they just couldn't or wouldn't make that jump. And also, as I say, we're regarded with suspicion anyway. My sister was actually born in 1990. So my parents had a new born baby at home and me as a small child. So they were in no position really to upsticks and go somewhere else at this particular point. In their lives, they were glad that they had a flat and my mum was a teacher so she could carry on teaching but had to train again, which was also a complete Nina nightmare when you think about it, having two small kids at home. And then at the same time, she had to go at the weekends and go back to university and study again because the degrees weren't kind of acknowledged by the West German system. So this was quite a tumultuous time. And I think my generation and people who were quite young and children at the time, we kind of grew up fairly independently in a way because your parents were so busy and teachers and neighbors and everybody else were so busy trying to rearrange their own lives

21:37that you just formed the extremely strong friendship groups and try to get through that way because nobody else was having much time or emotional capacity to deal with children at the same time. And that was something that I remember quite strongly. Not as a bad thing, necessarily. We did have extremely tight kind of friendship groups but it was just a completely different way of growing up. Germany developed into a bit of a two-speed economy. How did the change affect your town? What happened in the 90s to your town as you were now suddenly part of the new reunified Germany? Yes, the first thing was that there was a massive building when there was lots of Western investment because there was so much state money being poured into developing the East in total about two trillion. I think now euros actually were so huge amounts of money were being invested into East Germany. So you had all these strange kind of theme parks and restaurants and shopping centers

22:38and just lots of projects that were never gonna last come up and they quite often then were kind of abandoned again in the late 90s. So you also had a lot of sort of half finished things everywhere and overall there was massive unemployment. There was massive deindustrialization when the economy was privatized. There was a lot of kind of symbolic sales of things for one mark to Western investors who were just dismantled entire factories and take what they could to the West. So there was at times up to 20% unemployment in East Germany and this was really at time that made lots of young people feel like they couldn't stay there. When I went to Berlin for the first time in 1987 I was in my early 20s and I went to the German History Museum that was then in the Reichstag Building in West Berlin and I was all there. The whole history of the war was really openly told there. I was really impressed by all that. And then when I went through to East Berlin

23:38I went to the History Museum there which was incredibly strange because all of East Berlin was like a showcase including the TV tower you mentioned there, a showcase of East German communism. And when it came to the Second World War it was really brief. It just went, there was some bit of unpleasantness around 1933 to 1945 thanks to monopoly capitalists in the West. And then after that we had a revolution which they certainly did not and everything has been great since then. Did that change once there was reunification? Was there a more honest accounting for the Nazi past in your part of the world once Germany had re-unified? Well history in the GDR wouldn't say didn't confront it. I mean they did have for instance the Buchingwald concentration camp which was the largest on German soil that was set up as a museum and actually as the national memorial in East Germany. And but the focus was always on the supposed heroics and the suffering of the socialist and communist resistance

24:40against Nazism and that was sort of the tale that they told and that they focused on. But yes, the Nazi era was certainly dealt with in a very different way, but I wouldn't say in a small way it was this kind of ideal being an anti-fascist state was really intrinsic to GDR ideology and many older people I spoke to for my books still used that kind of language. And then after the Berlin War fell and the curriculum was adapted it certainly remained quite central but in a slightly different way in that we were taught this the Nazi history three times at school over the many years and with the idea always being to learn lessons from it and to come away with a view of if something like this were to happen again, how can we prevent it? So we learned about this from every angle I would say apart from what the actual people thought and did and this is what kind of caused me to look into this in some more detail once I'd grown up and become a historian.

25:40Yeah, you're right that in school you were given the reader by Bernard Pashlinke to read which was bestselling international novel of a young man's affair with an older woman who had been in office with the air says, what do you remember of that and how the students in your class reacted to reading the reader? Yeah, I found that quite interesting because that was in German literature actually rather than in history and I was in a higher tier for that so we were supposed to be kind of the brightest German literature kind of, you know, enthusiast in that class. So you would have thought that people put a bit of thought into reading that and yet I found myself kind of sitting there amongst my peers and they were all saying how abhorrent this was what this woman did and how could you have joined the SS and I would never have done such a thing. And you sit there and you look around and you think, how would you know that? I mean statistically we're in a room full of Germans of a kind of reasonably educated background and that was exactly the class that in all the kind of group of people that in their droves

26:43when supported the Nazis, they were at the very least tolerated their role and kind of got on with their lives and accepting that they were in power. So statistically speaking most of us in the room would probably belong to a group who made the very least of become a bystander during that time and yet that thought didn't even occur to anybody. I mean although those kids in your class would have had parents forced into complicity if one former or another with the old East German regime which was based on informing to the cigarette police as your father was informed on as well. Sounds like they missed the point of Shlinks book about how easily people can be brought into complicity with such regimes. Yeah exactly but I think it's also an uncomfortable thought. The idea that you might not be the in the minority of people who are always kind of resisting no matter what the personal risk when in fact most historical examples show that the majority of people, the vast majority of people somehow get on with their lives one way or another and they exist on a fairly nuanced

27:45and complicated spectrum somewhere between kind of complicity and rebellion. Most people find a way of finding their place on that and getting on with their lives and their most circumstances and that I think are very, very uncomfortable and perhaps even painful thought to allow into your mind that you may not be on the side of the angels in any historical situation. Of course we have no way of knowing what sorts of people we would have been back then because you're obviously shaped by the circumstances that you grew up in yourself. But there's got to be an element there where you've got to allow a moment of doubt into your kind of conscience as well. But I think that's a difficult thing to do when you're a teenager and you grow up in a Germany that feels it's thoroughly reckoned with its own past and done a good job at achieving that. Yeah, it's something I think about all the time to be honest, Kutcher. I think about that a lot, particularly the way things are going these days. Do you think about it when it comes to your own self

28:45about how you might? And like you said, we don't really know but there's something you wonder about about how you might have responded under those circumstances. Yeah, I mean, I do all the time as you say not least because of that background in East Germany. So there was a given that I was born in 1985. I've often had this thought, you know, what the fight been born in 1965 or in 1945 and you would have lived through East Germany growing up thinking of that as normal as my dad was trying to impress on me and finding a way of sort of living with it. Or would I have been amongst the minority of people trying to get out or trying to form some sort of resistance? I have no idea. And on top of that, when I do historical research, I also write a lot about German current affairs for different media. So quite often I'll be sitting at my desk writing about something that happened in say 1926 and I'm sitting here in 2026 and finding that some of the patterns I actually, you know, there for us to watch today.

29:46And that of course makes you think, especially as a historian, all the time about situations that you may have found yourself in and been born in a different place or at a different time. One town in Germany in the 1930s in the interwar years accommodated itself from being the home of interwar German democracy into being a stronghold of the Nazi party. Why did you want to narrow the focus so tightly like that, Katja? Well, when I learned about Nazi history at school and I said we did those three times, I still came away thinking afterwards. I don't understand what you want me to do if something like that were to happen again. So, you know, if you learn about high politics and the economic crisis, North of the other things, that's all very relevant and interesting, but I'm unlikely to be the president of Germany or I don't know the leader of a large bank. I don't know, never say never Katja, don't, don't.

30:47No. I'm working on it. OK, good. Yeah, so, you know, you're kind of sitting there as a 17, 18-year-old schoolgirl wondering what exactly you were supposed to take from this and what you would actually be supposed to do. And that was still not entirely clear to me. And I think it is a difficult thing to understand because we have a way of, you know, the broad stretch of history when we look back into the past. And that makes it quite abstract and often quite difficult to understand. So what I wanted to do is really go through this time again between the two world wars between 1919 and 1939 and look at the lives of people, of specific people in a specific place so that you can trace what they did and how they decided to do what they did throughout that entire time. So save your, I don't know, a teacher in 1919. You didn't become a teacher explicitly to be teaching race science or racial hygiene a few years later. So the question is, what do you do in 1933,

31:49435 or whatever, when you're being told to do that? You'll say a doctor and you're suddenly being asked to view on whether a child should live or die because of a disability that they may have been born with. So these kinds of things really, I think, become far more tangible and understandable if you break it down to one particular place and one particular group of people. And that's what I set out to do. So you've chosen Vimer, which is right bank smack in the middle of Germany in the region of Thuringia where your dad was from. What makes Vimer as a town? So culturally important to Germany. Well, it was where the, where the Republic was founded after the First World War, which is why we still talk about it as the Vimer Republic. So Berlin State, the capital, but it was very, very unsafe after the First World War because of communist uprisings being squashed then and it was just very violent and revolutionary and so they wanted somewhere quiet

32:51and Vimer sprang to mind. But Vimer was also a very culturally central place to Germany and still is because that's where a lot of its cultural stars over the centuries had their base. So people like you and Wolfgang from Guerto or Friedrich Schiller, the two most important poets, I would say in the German language, perhaps akin to Shakespeare, I would say, in the status that they have within German literature. Then you have composers like List and Bach who lived there for years. The philosopher Nietzsche died in Vimer. So you have plenty of really kind of strong culture or backdrop there and this is also what made it appeal so much in 1919 when it was about finding a place to found a new Germany because effectively Germany was keen to try and prove to itself that it was no longer the Prussian dominated militaristic aggressive power but actually there was a different Germany

33:53the civilized one that the spirit of Vimer was the phrase that people used at the time in 1919 to say that this is a new Germany infused with the cultural and musical and literary legacy of that town. You found the diaries of a man who was living in Vimer in the interwar years called Kall Weirich. What was Kall Weirich's life like in Vimer in 1919 when the First World War had come to an end and a new German democracy was established in Vimer. He was a book bind up by trade and came to Vimer in 1914 just before the outbreak of the First World War where he acquired a bookshop or like a stationary shop right in the center of Vimer in the old town just a stone's throw away from the theater in Vimer where the republic would be founded a few years later. So he really has got a kind of ringside seat to history I would say in that regard.

34:53And what makes him special as a historical source is that he kept the diary a very detailed diary because he was so obsessed with books himself and so these are all kind of neatly bound leather volumes of a life and he lived a very long life too when in 1885 and then lived through all the way to the 1970s and so this is an incredibly rich and detailed historical source. And the fact that he was born in 1885 of course rang particularly a particular bell with me because he was exactly kind of a hundred years older than the nine was but being born in 1985. So when I saw that Kall was doing something in 1926 you know and I'm sitting here in 2026 I know exactly how old Kall was at that moment in time so it was a very personal journey and a very tangible one me to follow. But the really big thing is that he was an ordinary guy keeping an extremely detailed diary which is something that normally only people who think of themselves that's very important

35:54to people like generals keep diaries or kind of literary figures whilst he did that as an ordinary shopkeeper. So why does this town become so important to Adolf Hitler's Nazi party? Well they kind of are intrigued with the same thing that made Vimas so appealing in 1919 this idea of it being the cultural capital of Germany. So whoever captures it feels that they have hold of culture in Germany and where it leads to that that appeals to the Nazis as much as it does to to Democrats. There's even I've even found socialist gatherings in Vimas that everybody wants to be there in the mid 1920s and kind of control or shape German culture from there and this is one thing that appeals to them. The other is that Hitler is actually imprisoned in 19... after his putscher term was Kuhatem der 1923s in prison and the Nazi party is banned nationwide in Germany as a result of that.

36:55And so when he comes out of prison it's still banned in most states all across Germany and the very first state to open and relegalyse the Nazi party again is Thuringia which Vimas the capital of. And so when he comes out of prison local Nazis in Thuringia say to Hitler, well look you might want to come to Vimas to maybe relocate even the Nazi party at quarters to it since in Bavaria where Munich is the party is still banned and you can't actively campaign. And that's why Hitler appears for the first time in Vimas 1925 and looks around and actually realizes that it's quite a good place to relaunch the Nazi movement from and he also personally likes it. It's a very middle-class town very because of this cultural legacy kind of very bourgeois, very safe, very conservative. And so when he's there you can kind of go walking in the parks or sit in the cafes and have a chat with the actresses at the theater and he just feels safe.

37:56It doesn't have a kind of politicized working class that's not in high numbers. And so that's why it's the two reasons that he keeps coming back to it over 40 times and the time that I was looking at. So it becomes quite a central place for the Nazis to relaunch their movement from. You're going through Karl Vajruc's diaries. What point in his diaries? What point does he become aware of Edoff Hitler? Or at least that mentioning Hitler in his diary? Yeah, I mean this is what makes him so interesting is that he's quite an apolitical figure. I mean even in 1919 when this kind of big convention happens in Vajemah I, Ever German Parliament meets in Vajemah to draft the new constitution and it's virtually a two-minute walk away. And at the opening of that parliament I was looking in a stary to see what he made of it and actually his neighbor died on the same day and that's really more important to him than the this convention. And so he doesn't write anything about it. He kind of just goes, oh my poor neighbor died. He was a good man and writes it at the kind of obituary.

38:58And so it's interesting to watch at what point does he become aware of the Nazis because they spend so much time in Vajemah and Hitler becomes kind of a local celebrity far earlier. I would say than people nationally kind of follow his doings. I think this gets to an interesting point about human beings because I think people like you and I are, we're weirdos in a sense that we follow history and politics very, very closely. Most people don't, do they? I mean, that's just a fact of life. Most people don't follow politics. They get bored to tears with it by and large or they just dainon or whatever. It can't sound like he's one of those people, a regular guy. Yeah, he is. And he watches, you know, he reads the newspapers and things and every now and then. So for instance, when there's a moment in the mid-1920s when President Hintonburg comes to, who was elected in 1925, comes to Vajemah on a big visit and there's kind of big parades and everything. He gets quite excited about that and he so writes, you know, Hintonburg is in town and he clearly attends the gatherings and things. But that's because it's a huge,

39:59you know, occasion when in the time when we don't have TV or anything like that, yeah, it's a moment where you can see the President which you wouldn't ordinarily be able to do. So those things make it into the diary, but Hitler doesn't. And so in 1933, Hitler becomes the chancellor. As an interesting moment where Karl decides to buy a radio for his family at Christmas 1932. So just before it like comes into power and you think it's going to be good for his child to have, like, you know, kind of educational radio programs and music and things like that. But it also of course means that when Hitler sees his power in early in 1933 in January, that he also listens to the takeover. And at that point, he writes in a diary, something like, and now we're putting all of our hopes into this new young chancellor called a Hitler. But you can see even the language that he uses there is still very stupid. He's still, you know, almost like he's had to look up the name

40:59against make sure he gets it right the way that he's writing it in his diary. But at the same time, he is very hopeful that this would mean and into the economic misery that they've all been experiencing. And Karl nearly loses his shop and the flat above it, where he lives with his young family to the Great Depression. And because he can't carry on paying his mortgage off. So he's extremely worried as our most other people in Germany. And it seems to be putting his hopes momentarily at least in Hitler to solve that. Now, Karl is a Christian, a church going Christian. What is he thinking as he sees the Nazis take more power than when they bring in the enabling act and people are being arrested and what's going on around him and Jewish people are starting to be persecuted for the first time. Does he have a kind of a moral reaction to what he's seeing around him? Not initially because it was seen as a as an anti communist move when the first concentration camps appear in 1933 and actually the very first

42:01one is just outside of fireminer on an airfield called Nora. So people know that this is happening and that people are being arrested without cause or without any warrant. And he actually writes in a story of sort of communist trouble and somebody is sorting it out now. And that's how a lot of Germans felt. There was a real fear of communism. We mustn't forget that the communist revolution, the October revolution was not that long in the past in 1917. So people have got these images of being kind of murdered in their beds by by communists. So having their property taken away from them. And that's not a justification, but I think it's an explanation by so many middle class people banged on hit that the kind of sort of this crisis out. But he does begin to worry when this persecution against the Jews is ramped up. So particularly in the in 1938 when the so called Christian and the November pogroms happen. And this is the first outright act of kind of state organized

43:03state orchestrated violence against Jews. And he does write in the story that he thinks there's an act of blasphemy against God himself. It's as a question I would say possibly the strongest moral condemnation that he can reach for. So he's very uneasy about that. And as many other Germans, historians have now looked into this more and found out that many other people were also deeply disturbed by the violence and felt that this would one day come back on their motorhound kind of Germany. And that's exactly how Carl responds. Well, but it's interesting that you can still find a way of being with this or he stays in Vimer and need to seven the book and world concentration camp is being set up on the outskirts town, literally within walking distance on a hill where where Carl often goes for his Sunday hiking expeditions. And he walks very close to that concentration camp even mentions it in a story every now and then as something that you know, so kind of navigate quite literally because they're

44:05shutting off various of the hiking paths that he normally takes, you know, to have that concentration camp there. And he knows certainly from 1938 onwards that lots and lots of thousands of Jews are being brought there as well because they arrive at the Vimer train station and everybody can see how they're beaten onto lorries and being taken up onto the at-especial to the to the concentration camp. And is he writing about that in his diary about seeing such things? He doesn't write about that specifically but plenty of other people did. So I found lots of evidence where people were saying for instance they were sitting in a cafe somewhere nearby near the train station and then a friend would come running and say the next the next Jew transport is arriving at 11 you might want to come down and see this and then people you know go to go open to see what was going on and you find all sorts of responses some people are frightened by it and think that the idea of you know the the German state doing something like this is horrendous. Other people agree with it and think that you know especially because they are

45:08resting very wealthy Jewish men in 1938 to try and extract their property from them. So a lot of people sit there and say finally they get what you know what they deserve. You have children coming to just see the they see as a kind of frightening and exciting spectacle. So Vimer has known that this is happening. Karl writes explicitly as I say about this November program in 1938 but not so much about the daily transgressions of the regime. That's partially I think because Vimer doesn't have very many Jews. There's only 100 Jewish people in Vimer of a population of about 35,000 and a lot of them are highly assimilated Jews who are married often to non Jews and therefore to a degree protected but nonetheless only of those 100 Jews only three are still alive and in Vimer at the end of the war. So this is something that the Vimer has find it relatively easy to to turn a blind eye to because it affects

46:09such a small minority within their town. So there's a spectrum of reactions here. It sounds like there's people who are horrified by it but not really willing to say anything. And there are people who think it's a good idea and there are people who just don't want to know and standing there in the background I suppose is the Gestapo watching everyone to see how they're reacting and if anyone says anything about what's going on here. After book and vault was liberated by the Allied soldiers in 1945, Carl was taken to see book and vault concentration camp. What were the circumstances of him going into book and vault concentration camp to see what was left behind after it was liberated? The Americans when they liberate Vimer they find book and vault and all sub camps in the forest surrounding the town and they're absolutely horrified by what they find. I mean, they knew about concentration camps from area footage and from others that they'd liberated but then when they're confronted with

47:09the actual horror of it, I now I'm self saw one of the so the Allied commander saw one of the the sub camps of Bourbon World Order of and he decided that nobody would believe them if they told them of piles of bodies of medical experiments of evidence of torture of all the horrific things that had happened there. And so he decided that not only should this be documented so most of the footage that we associate with the Holocaust comes out of this decision because they then photographed and filmed the camps. But also that ordinary Germans should see what they'd kind of tolerated in their country or even facilitated. And because Bourbon World is so close to Vimer the decision is made that 1000 people from Vimer should be marched up the hill and to see it and Carlos one of them and he writes in a story that when he saw these horrific scenes there that his heart filled with quote disgust and shame at our German downfall. And I

48:10think that tells you a lot about the way that that he responded to this because this word our this collective word that he uses there implies that he sees himself as part of the people who'd facilitated this. But equally as a very collective thought as kind of the idea that the Germans as a whole did it rather than Carlos specifically. And this is this is the question that's why I opened the book with that scene because I think that is exactly the question that he never asked himself and couldn't ask himself I think most Germans kind of just decided that if they confronted the history at all after the war that it was a collective thing and what could they have done individually. I think it falls to us now as historians and as later generations to look back and and work out what exactly every individual's responsibility is in history and how they should act within their own circumstances. What do you think he meant by downfall like a moral downfall? Yeah, I think so. I mean there's a lot of people in Germany when

49:12you look at people's kind of diaries and letters from the time felt the same way they felt that their country had hit rock bottom both morally but also economically they'd been bombed by my was badly bombed as well. So this you know physical ruin all around people symbolized in a way where where Germany had got to at the stage and there's definitely a moral component there. And this very very quickly with most people turns into a degree of self pity. So their focus especially in these horrendous post war years they and months they focus on their own survival. You see this with Karl as well as how it's how it's been bombed. They've got one room that is still sort of semi intact the others are all open to the side basically to the elements. So he focuses on that and on finding food and on surviving basically and that allowed many Germans to then later on come out of this with a sense of something bad happened to us here our country has fallen in the sense that you know we're now at rock bottom and so that that

50:14quickly turns I would say with Karl it's interesting though because when as I say lived well into the 1970s and stayed actually in place in his house. So he lived in East Germany and he goes to that museum I was talking about earlier and talking about a lot and he writes about it and writes our kind of horrific is what he sees then and how he looks at the exhibitions in there so I don't think he shies away from confronting this history as such but and I think this goes back to my own school education as well there is a German way of dealing with this which was this admirable that you do it in such detail it tends to be a collective thing this memory culture it's about Germany and what Germans have done rather than what individual people have done and that in a way I think allows us and I would include myself in that to keep that history a little bit at arms length and decide that this is something that happened to the Germans as a whole rather than one's own parents great you know grandparents

51:16are great grandparents. You said that when you were being given the history of Nazi Germany as a school kid in a reunified Germany that you were given all this detail but wasn't really clear what you were supposed to do with it. What do you think you are supposed to do with it now having looked into this do you I mean is there anything you can. As this help you answer that question of what am I to do me with this history because I don't I don't think this is just a German problem this is a human human beings do terrible things to each other do you have any any thoughts on that and any kind of sense of or a larger or a broader sense of human nature that's come out of your exploration into how this little town of Vyma dealt with the horror going on around them. Well in the book I refrain from making any kind of commentary on that or suggesting something to the reader because I think otherwise before back into the exact same trap if I make collective you know draw a collective

52:17lesson from that and again this means something very different to say a brick layer compared to a politician or an artist or dentist what you should do in your daily life so I'm opening this huge like human tabloid for people to hopefully recognize situations or people that may seem familiar in pattern to to their own lives or to their own decision making processes and if there was one universal lesson from this I would say that people like Carl there you know people who are relatively a political and he also becomes quite a solution with the Nazis later on. What how they managed to live in a town that prided itself in its culture and yet allowed a concentration camp on its doorstep to exist was by I think with drawing themselves mentally from what was going on so there was a degree of let's escape from this whole situation whenever it becomes a bit too much so Carl for example goes hiking every single Sunday at the one day that he's got off and

53:19he says himself that this is a way for him to cope with what's going on his own blows of fate that he suffers but also more widely the political situation also say for example when the Nazis are remodeling by my in that own image and really kind of ripping the town up and putting great big Nazi buildings in the middle of this quaint old town on the day that there are the kind of foundation stone ceremonies he actually decides to leave very early on trade and takes his family out of why my only comes back in the evening when when everything has gone because he doesn't want to see it and I think that's the answer to how many of us deal with these situations so even today when we see something horrific on TV a war somewhere people being bombed or stuff that is happening not just isn't right I think we have a tendency to say well what can I do you know and if it all becomes too much or too emotionally taxing we go and watch a TV series instead or read a book or you know how many of us say

54:19at Christmas let's not talk about politics tonight let's keep this out of our little bubble here in the shelter ourselves from what's going on and I think that's a very human instinct as the way of coping with these things but it also allows a vacuum or room for bad actors to step into and take things away from people who are already radio to talk about music and all of us speaking with you thank you for sharing these stories from people living right out on the very edge of human experience thank you so much thank you for having me cut your hoi as book is Vimer life on the edge of catastrophe today's conversation with cut your hoi was made on the lands of the radical people producer was Jennifer leak executive producer is Nicola Harrison I'm Richard Fidel thanks for listening