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interview // german // 2:28 Min // 18.06.2008
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Fascism was a subject, because of the experiences that we picked up from the immigrants. In our youth group we occasionally invited immigrants from Austria and Germany so they could tell us their story. And we already knew before the high finance and the generals pushed the power towards the Nazi leading clique: Hitler means war. That means we not only grew into the anti-fascist fight, but as well into the fight for peace. That was the same question to us: the anti-fascist fight and the fight for peace. That obviously assumed that we threw light on it. After my youth consecration, when I left school, I took part in my first Marxist seminar. That obviously went further and there, young people, who were interested, learned all the basics of what they needed to know, if they wanted to become a functionary of the labour movement. So they were not only practical experiences that were being reflected, but we also had seminars where we learned to deal with the political opponent. For example, it was obligatory for a functionary of the socialist youth to have read Hitler’s book ‚Mein Kampf’. So we could tell the Nazi officials, who didn’t know as well as we did, what the real aims were. They did not believe that Hitler wanted war. We kept hearing again and again: „They will not be so stupid to go against the whole world on their own.” But we were able to quote from ‚Mein Kampf’ that the annexation of new living space in the east was one main issue of the Nazis’ fight. If we were able to bring the better arguments into discussions with the Nazis, in the companies, in the schools or wherever, it would have an effect on the undecided. But still the Nazis became stronger and stronger; for one, because of the social problems and for two, because the imperial German broadcasting service had an immense influence. Many Germans did not speak Czech, but you could hear the broadcast stations Königs Wusterhausen and Seesen, the two Nazi stations, very well; and this influence, in which social problems were misleadingly passed off as national problems, were surely effective. - Especially when the mass-unemployment affected the German areas.
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