Join the Party?

Six years after the seizure of power, the NSDAP blankets German society. Joining the party is not compulsory, but it has become, in many trades, a near-mandatory step for one's career: civil servants, teachers, jurists and managers feel a diffuse pressure to take out a membership card. The party, which had around two million members in 1933, claims nearly 5.3 million in 1939.

For a German without strong ideological conviction, membership poses a daily matter of conscience. It opens doors, protects, integrates — but it also commits one to serving a regime whose violence one senses, and makes the member a cog in the system.

You are a German, an ordinary professional, unenthusiastic but mindful of your future. Should you join the party to get ahead and shield yourself from suspicion? Abstain on principle, at the cost of a stalled career and awkward visibility? Or play for time, multiplying pledges of loyalty without taking the step of formal membership? The choice, seemingly banal, traces the share of compromise of millions of ordinary citizens.