Account Rendered: A Dossier On My Former Self is an unforgettable memoir by Melita Maschmann, a former Hitler Youth member

I’m not sure I believe in the concept of “essential reading,” but if I did, this is what I’d pick. After reading it, I truly had an understanding of how ordinary, intelligent, well-meaning people could end up dedicating themselves to an evil cause, and Maschmann manages to show that without excusing her own actions.

Honestly, the power of the book is hard to boil down to descriptions, so I’m going to provide three of the passages that stood out to me the most. Maschmann originally wrote the book as a letter to a Jewish schoolfriend, who is the “you” being addressed here:

I had learned from my parents’ example that one could have anti-semitic opinions without this interfering in one’s personal relations with individual Jews. There may appear to be a vestige of tolerance in this attitude, but it is really just this confusion which I blame for the fact that I later contrived to dedicate body and soul to an inhuman political system, without this giving me doubts about my own individual decency.

In preaching that all the misery of the nations was due to the Jews or that the Jewish spirit was seditious and Jewish blood was corrupting, I was not compelled to think of you or old Herr Lewy or Rosel Cohn: I thought only of the bogeyman, ‘the Jew’. And when I heard that the Jews were being driven from their professions and homes and imprisoned in ghettos, the points switched automatically in my mind to steer me round the thought that such a fate could also overtake you or old Lewy. It was only the Jew who was being persecuted and ‘made harmless’.

…

Now, when I sometimes talk about those days to people who were on the other side of the barricades before 1945, I can always feel their resentment as soon as I mention, for example, the tremendous amount achieved in the intensive and discriminating musical education of young people in those days. I can understand this resistance very well. It would be much simpler if it could now be said that in the Hitler Youth they only bellowed bloodthirsty horror songs and played military marches. But this was not the case and the position is similar in other fields.

…

How painful for us to have to realize after the event that the great outpouring of positive human qualities we had voluntarily put at the service of our ‘idea’ had finally been canalized into a mean ditch which devalued them. When we strove to be unselfish, humble, industrious, friendly and ready to help others, all this was only with regard to our own people. We only wanted to behave in a brotherly fashion towards our own compatriots. You know that I became a National Socialist because the idea of the National Community inspired me. What I had never realized was the number of Germans who were not considered worthy to belong to this community. I will speak of the German Jews in another context, but there were also those pious people who wished to obey God rather than men, all our fellow citizens who suffered from hereditary diseases, the mentally sick, the Marxists, the pacifists, the artists whose consciences forbade them to create ‘healthy art’.

For years after the end of the war I derived a feeling of self righteousness from the knowledge that I had become a National Socialist because I wanted to help the socially underprivileged members of our nation — that is, from an impulse of love. The fact that you, for example, were not allowed to belong to the National Community I overlooked for as long as I could. Only in 1950 or 1951, in the course of conversation with a Japanese Christian, did I suddenly grasp how narrow this love had been — a kind of primitive family selfishness. What good are kindness, self sacrifice, energy and a sense of responsibility, if they are so jealously guarded that only one’s brothers and sisters may benefit from them? Not much more than the instinctive reactions which keep a herd of wild animals together.