World War Two · Season 9 · Episode 19

How to Make Dissent Disappear - Q3 1937

Saturday, June 13 · 18 min

In 1937, Nazi Germany moved from controlling politics to controlling thought itself. Churches, artists, workers, and dissenters all came under attack. Berlin, September 1937. From the outside, Germany can seem strangely quiet while the rest of the world slides deeper into war, civil conflict, and authoritarianism. But inside the Reich, the Nazi state is tightening its grip on the last spaces where dissent can still exist. This quarter, the Gestapo arrests Pastor Martin Niemöller and intensifies the attack on the Confessing Church. The regime opens the House of German Art in Munich, then stages the infamous “Degenerate Art” exhibition to mock, vilify, and destroy modernist culture. The SS establishes Buchenwald near Weimar, forcing prisoners to build their own prison. Meanwhile, Göring’s new state industrial empire and the Nuremberg “Rally of Work” reveal a society being reorganized for war.