*The Gebenslebens of Braunschweig**

**The Gebenslebens of Braunschweig**

Friedrich Karl Gebensleben was the City Planning Officer in Braunschweig, Germany. Born in 1871, Karl had trained as an engineer and worked for the German railway system in Berlin before taking up his post in 1915. He was obviously a man of integrity who was trusted by his colleagues, and by the early 1930s he was combining his administrative post with the office of deputy mayor of the city.

His wife Elisabeth, born in 1883, came from a prosperous farming background, as did her husband. The couple were pillars of Braunschweig society, frequented concerts and patronized the theater, and were to be seen together at all major public celebrations, receptions and similar events.

Their daughter Irmgard, born in 1906, had married a Dutchman, and her presence in Holland was the occasion for most of the family's letter writing. Their son Eberhard, born in 1910m studied law at a series of universities, as was normal at the time, including Berlin and Heidelberg, and aimed to take up work in the Reich civil service as a career.

This was a solid, conventional, bourgeois family. But in the early 1930s it was clearly in a deep state of anxiety, plagued above all by fears of a Communist or socialist revolution. Elisabeth Gebensleben expressed a widely held view when she wrote to her daughter on 20 July 1932 that Germany was in mortal peril from the Communists, aided and abetted by the Social Democrats. The country was swarming with Russian agents, she thought, and the violence on the streets was the beginning of a planned destabilization of the country. Thus any measures to ward off the threat were justified.

Well before the Nazi seizure of power, Elisabeth had become an admirer of Hitler and his movement. "This readiness to make sacrifices, this burning patriotism and this idealism!" she exclaimed in 1932 on witnessing a Nazi Party demonstration. "And at the same time such tight discipline and control!" Not surprisingly, she was full of enthusiasm for the coalition government headed by Hitler and appointed on 30 January 1933 -- in the nick of time, she thought, as she witnessed a Communist demonstration against the appointment.

The mass, brutal violence meted out by the Nazis to their opponents in the following months did not, therefore, cause her any sleepless nights. "This ruthless, decisive action by the national government," she wrote on 10 March 1933, "may put some people off, but first there surely has to be a root-and-branch purge and clear-out, otherwise it won't be possible to start reconstruction."

The "purge" included the Social Democratic mayor of Braunschweig, Ernst Bohme, who had been elected in 1929 at the age of thirty-seven. On 13 March 1933 Nazi stormtroopers burst into a council session and hauled him roughly out onto the street. Within a few days he had been forced under duress to sign a paper resigning all his offices in the town. A band of SS men took him to the offices of the local Social Democratic newspaper, stripped him naked, threw him onto a table and beat him unconscious, after which they threw a bucket of water over him, dressed him again as he was, paraded him through the streets and put him in the town gaol, from which he was eventually released some time later, to return to private life.

As deputy mayor, Karl took over temporarily and without demur as the city's new mayor. Although he was upset by the dramatic and unexpected scene he had witnessed in the council chamber, Karl nevertheless took strong exception to newspaper reports that he had wept as the mayor was carried off to his fate. Though he had worked closely with Bohme, his probity as a civil servant would not have allowed him such an unrestrained show of emotion. Elisabeth, though she disapproved of Bohme's ignominious sendoff, consoled herself with the thought that in the Revolution of 1918 the conservative mayor of the time had himself been humiliated by the "Reds."

Like other conservatives, the Gebenslebens were reassured by the obeisance to tradition paid in the opening ceremony of the Reichstag at Potsdam on 21 March. They dusted off their black-white-red imperial flag and hung it out in triumph, while Karl took part in a celebratory march through the streets of Braunschweig. Anything the Gebenslebens disliked, especially acts of violence committed by the stormtroopers and SS, they dismissed as the work of Communist infiltrators. They believe implicitly the trump-up charges of embezzlement brought by the Nazis against trade union officials and others.

As Elisabeth reported to her daughter regarding Hitler's speeches over the radio, what shone through in her words was a strongly reawakened national pride; Germany now had a Chancellor to whom the whole world paid attention. A staunch protestant, she joined the German Christians and listened excitedly as her pastor compared Hitler to Martin Luther.

The family's illusions were as significant as their enthusiasms. Karl applauded the "strict discipline" introduced into public life and the economy by "the leadership principle, which alone has validity" and the "co-ordination down to the tiniest institutions," but thought that in time a moderate opposition along English lines would be permitted to exist. Towards the end of May, the Gebenslebens finally joined the Nazi Party, not out of self-preservation, but out of a positive sense of commitment to the new Germany.

Karl persuaded himself that there would be a time of efficiency and coherence in administration, but it never quite worked out that way. There were other illusions, too, in the family's attitude to the regime's posture towards the Jews. Antisemitism initially played little part in their support of Nazism; when Elisabeth saw the shattered display windows of Jewish-owned shops in the town in mid-March 1933, she ascribed this to "provocateurs . . . who, as has been ascertained, have smuggled themselves into the NDSAP in order to discredit the nationalist movement at home and abroad . . . Communists and fellow travelers." If any Nazis were involved, it was clear that Hitler disapproved, she thought.

She found antisemitic speeches by Goebbels and Goering "terrible" and was alarmed by the Nazi's disruption of Fritz Busch's work as a conductor in Leipzig -- she thought it was because he was Jewish, but he was not. Such attacks on Jewish artists were "catastrophic," she wrote and added "There are rogues amongst the Jews too, but one mustn't forget all the great men among the Jews, who have achieved such an enormous amount in the fields of art and science."

Yet she was soon taking a different view, following the boycott of Jewish shops on 1 April 1933 and the accompanying massive propaganda. "The era in which we are now living will only be judged fairly by posterity," she wrote. "It's world history we're experiencing. But world history rolls over the fate of the individual, and that makes this epoch, which is so pure and elevated in its aim, so difficult, because side-by-side with the joy we are experiencing, there is also sympathy with the fate of the individual."

She considered the boycott justified in view of the "smear campaign against Germany" that the regime claimed was being mounted by Marxists and Jews abroad. All stories of antisemitic atrocities in Germany were "pure invention," she wrote her daughter, following the injunction by Goebbels to take this line with personal contacts outside of Germany. Her country had been robbed of the "possibility of life" by the Treaty of Versailles and "Germany is protecting itself with the weapons it has."

In her letters to her daughter, Elisabeth clearly demonstrated how far she had taken Nazi propaganda on board in the space of a mere few weeks, perhaps because it was built on prejudices already latent in her mind. Karl, meanwhile, saw the Third Reich replacing disorder with order.

When disorder seemed to raise its head once more at the end of June 1934, in the shape of Ernst Rohm and the brownshirts, Elisabeth breathed a sigh of relief as Hitler acted and expressed no doubts to her daughter regarding the rightness of the murders committed at Hitler's behest. "One feels absolutely insignificant in the face of the greatness, the truthfulness and the openness of such a man," wrote Elisabeth.

Nazi Germany for the Gebenslebens provided the stability they had longed for, a kind of return to normality after the upheavals of the Weimar years. In comparison with this, small doubts about the way in which it had been done seemed insignificant, hardly worth bothering about. The defeat of Communism, the overcoming of political crisis, the restoration of national pride were what the Gebenslebens wanted. Everything else they ignored, explained away, or, more insidiously, gradually took on board as the propaganda apparatus of the Third Reich incessantly hammered its messages home to the population.

We study history in order to learn from the past. The history of the Third Reich is a warning to us, so be warned. The conformity of middle-class families like the Gebenslebens was bought at the price of illusions that were to be rudely shattered after 1939. Karl and Elisabeth did not live to see this happen; Karl died on 1 February 1936 -- the day he retired from the civil service -- and Elisabeth followed him on 23 December 1937. Their son Eberhard was drafted into the army by 1939.