I Loved My Grandmother. But She Was a Nazi.
They joined the Nazi Party to be youth leaders in an agricultural education program called the Landjahr, or “year on the land,” in which teenagers got agricultural training. My grandmother always maintained that she had joined the Nazis as an “idealist” drawn to the vision of rebuilding Germany, returning to a simpler time and, perversely, promoting equality.
In the Landjahr, sons and daughters of factory workers would live and work side by side with sons and daughters of aristocrats and wealthy industrialists. She liked the idea of returning to “traditional” German life
.. the Landjahr program was part of Hitler’s larger “Blut und Boden” (“blood and soil”) vision of making Germany a racially pure, agrarian society. The “racially pure” part was not something my grandmother ever mentioned.
.. “But didn’t you hear what Hitler was saying?”
.. “He said a lot of things — I didn’t listen to all of them.”
.. In the late 1930s there was talk of sending Jews to Madagascar and to “settlements” in the east.
.. In 1939, Nazi operatives donned Polish Army uniforms and staged a takeover of a German radio station at Gleiwitz that Hitler then held up as an act of provocation by the Poles.
.. “Didn’t you ever listen to the foreign news reports?”
“Allied propaganda” was my grandmother’s answer.
.. My grandmother heard what she wanted from a leader who promised simple answers to complicated questions.