You have to wonder what the men of the South Staffs, the 1st Airborne Division and their Polish comrades would make of Museum Arnhem’s current exhibition. No colourful banners announce it outside the galleries. No posters adorn the walls in town. Discretion rules: you have to know to go. Inside, however, half-a-dozen rooms gather the German state-approved art of 1933-45 into an exhibition entitled Art in the Third Reich: Seduction and Distraction. Conceived by the museum’s director of modern art, Jelle Bouwhuis, with co-curator Almar Seinen and an international scholarly team, the Arnhem show covers the spectrum of regime-friendly painting and sculpture that Adolf Hitler and the Nazi leadership not only endorsed and promoted but in many cases bought. Bouwhuis makes it clear that “We do not ‘simply’ show the work, we contextualise it,” to explain “how art and… the whole art world in Germany could function as propaganda for Nazism”.

Amid this welter of craggy warriors, apple-cheeked peasants, chocolate-box landscapes and cheesily curvaceous nudes, the suffering and slaughter inflicted by the Reich — not least around this very building — seem a million miles away. The curators have shunned overt propaganda images: no worshipful portraits of the Führer himself (although he does feature in a couple of monumental canvases), let alone antisemitic caricatures or sub-human Slavs. Rather, the rooms take us on a journey through the fantasy Third Reich of cheerful land-workers, grandiose infrastructure projects, pristine German scenery, Völkish mythology, and mighty deeds in combat with the foe. I went expecting, or fearing, a grotesque assemblage of bombastic kitsch, and with lingering doubts about whether such an exhibition has a place in a public gallery — even now, especially here.

Well, kitsch there is aplenty. But Arnhem’s tour of National Socialism’s politicised aesthetics also posed a more profound question about how creative powers survive, or shrivel, under any oppressive orthodoxy. Was this a show too far? Thanks to the sober intelligence of its curation, not at all. The Dutch still take free debate and enquiry in earnest. It’s hard to imagine that any UK gallery or museum could present such a treasury of taboo items today without a career-threatening storm of fury and denunciation. And for years the toxic associations of this material meant that post-war museums kept it firmly out of sight. US forces seized around 8,000 works of art from Germany after the war, but later returned all but a few hundred deemed inflammatory — such as idealised celebrations of Hitler. Much of this repatriated booty now resides at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, the chief lender for the Arnhem show. Until very recently, few institutions have cared to borrow it.

Instead, they have historically trained a spotlight not on the work the Nazis loved, but that they loathed — and banned. Seized from artists, collectors and galleries, the so-called “Degenerate Art” of Cubism, Expressionism, Surrealism and related modernist trends filled a notorious regime-sponsored show of 1937 in Munich, which later toured Germany. Two million visitors came to gawp and sneer (although many might have secretly enjoyed what they saw). Starting with the Los Angeles County Museum in 1991, contemporary curators have since tried to reconstruct the “Entartete Kunst” displays, but with the poles of judgment neatly reversed. Works by Klee, Mondrian, Chagall, Ernst, Kandinsky and a host of others, ridiculed and censured under the Reich as savage, decadent and barbarous, came to figure as sacred icons of 20th-century creativity. The Nazi curse blessed these artists’ future prospects in both the critical and commercial marketplaces.

To post-war art lovers in Europe and North America, abstraction and other non-figurative styles now mean freedom, individuality, the defiance of dictatorship. In contrast, the neo-classical, representational or simply traditional modes of painting that dominate the rooms at Arnhem found themselves branded with the taint of tyranny. Even before the Second World War, the advocacy of such taste-makers as Alfred Barr — director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art — for “decadent” artists persecuted under the Reich had helped to shift the dial. When President Roosevelt opened the new MoMA building in 1939, he proclaimed that if you “Crush individuality in society… you crush art as well.”

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Non-realist styles now bask in the glow not just of cultural progress but political virtue as well. The Cold War entrenched this orthodoxy, as US Abstract Expressionism became an anti-Soviet propaganda weapon for the CIA. Much of Western academia still obediently reproduces it. Yet figurative painting thrived in many places over the postwar decades without any sign of contamination by either Nazi or Soviet ideology. One glance at the British scene, with representational giants as different as Lucian Freud, David Hockney and Paula Rego, underlines the absurdity of the Modernist dogma that made, say, any lifelike portrait into a “reactionary” act. That is theology, not criticism.

The artists displayed at Museum Arnhem, who all showed and sold in Germany during the period between 1933 and 1945, had no choice but to work in a broadly realist manner. Not just abstraction but the subjective visions of the Expressionists spelled subversion (with a Jewish, Bolshevik or “Negro” character) to the arbiters and enforcers of the Reich. Now, technical proficiency should serve traditionalist topics — country life, family scenes, classical nudes, martial glory, Germanic and Nordic myths and histories — to celebrate the mission of the nation and its Führer. For artists who worked in the approved idioms and were untainted by Jewish ancestry, active Left-wing loyalties or a known attachment to “decadent” styles, the rewards might prove lavish. Conformity could pay handsomely.

Official art under the Nazis was big business. Most of the Arnhem pieces featured in one of the eight Great German Art exhibitions held at the pharaonic new “House of German Art” in Munich from 1937 to 1944. At its height, in 1942, it attracted 847,000 visitors, and 2,500 out of around 14,000 registered artists in Germany exhibited there. The Great German Art jamborees also functioned as selling shows, with the Nazi top brass among the top buyers. Hitler himself acquired scores of works, such as the chillingly monumental symbolic nudes of Adolf Ziegler’s “The Four Elements”, which greets visitors at Arnhem. The Führer spent an estimated 6.9 million Reichsmarks on his art shopping.

Bouwhuis reports that the sheer scope of the sector surprised him: “It was a real hype, with huge financial investments especially from the government, a thriving art scene and many opportunities for artists.” And the breadth of Nazi patronage opened a lucrative career path to some truly terrible lickspittle hacks. I hope never again to inspect anything by, say, Leopold Schmutzler, whose trio of joyful accordion-playing maidens in “Return from the Fields” recall the similar bucolic schmaltz of “Socialist Realism” in Stalin’s USSR. As for those plentiful Nazi nudes, churned out in bulk by Nazi court painters such as Ivo Saliger and Oskar Martin-Amorbach, their skin tones glow with a peculiar brand of semi-pornographic deathliness. Beefy but ghastly, these eugenic pin-ups lead the viewer on — and lead us, it somehow feels, straight into the grave. A few, though, have become simply risible. The musclebound labourers of Albrecht Kettler’s “Organisation Todt” now look like a National Socialist bid to out-hunk gay porn of the “Tom of Finland” kind.

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But to tour the Arnhem galleries in order to scoff at one gross Aryan fantasy after another would merely turn the Nazis’ own “Degenerate Art” polemic on its head. What will haunt the visitor is the evidence of the able, even gifted, painters who went on working in officially blessed styles under a totalitarian regime. Did compromise and caution vitiate their talents, or might they keep a guttering flame of integrity alight? Bouwhuis suggests that artists who kept out of trouble under the Reich had more options than their Soviet counterparts, with a competitive market and “relatively open-minded” censors in the Reichskulturkammer guild that artists had to join to work.

“This situation”, he explains, “fostered creativity and even a certain deviance, or at least a surprising variation of styles and subjects”. Some of these artists had Modernist and Left-wing hinterlands; several went on to enjoy garlanded post-Nazi careers. Subjugation to the 12-year Reich proved to be an interlude on a journey that started and finished in very different places, aesthetic and political. At least 64 painters and sculptors who had work suppressed in the Nazi purge of “degenerate” art managed to exhibit in the Great German Art shows. In 1937, sculptor Rudolf Belling enjoyed the curious distinction of having works on show in Munich in the “Degenerate Art” sin-bin and the Great German Art hall of fame at the same time. In the studio, the clear dividing-lines in ideologists’ heads might often blur.

Heinrich Ehmsen, for instance, had been a Communist and Modernist with allies in Moscow; he served time in a concentration camp for “cultural Bolshevism”. Yet he later joined a Wehrmacht “propaganda company”: his painting of German troops near Kharkhiv in Ukraine eschews heroics in favour of sombre, almost-abstract, colour bands. On the opposite wall, in contrast, Hans Sterbik’s “Winter War in Poland” transforms a brutal campaign of aggression into a cosy Christmas-card scene. Even under the Reich, artists could choose to admit, or exclude, a measure of truth in their state-endorsed work.

Formalism, and a fascination with the morphology of landscapes, buildings and figures, might have been outlawed in theory. Given the correct topic, it might still sneak back in practice. Erich Mercker, a painterly cheerleader for Hitler’s big-ticket public-works projects, celebrates the futuristic geometries of an Autobahn bridge under construction at Rohrbachbrücke. After the war, he would commemorate the industrial might of firms such as Volkswagen and Bayer. Third Reich art shares this techno-optimism with similar depictions of concrete-and-steel modernity elsewhere — not least in the United States. Faith in the mechanical mastery of nature cut across ideological boundaries.

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Not even battlefield scenes inevitably airbrushed military reality out of the picture. Carl Busch’s “Stalingrad”, with its free and fluid brushwork as a German unit makes its last desperate stand in the snow, may depict a heroic defeat — but a defeat nonetheless. Most remarkable at Arnhem are a selection of pieces that somehow paint the artist’s detachment, or even scepticism about the Nazi propaganda industry, into the picture. Several artists here emerged from the cool, crisp and satirical Neue Sachlichkeit — “New Objectivity” — movement of the Weimar Republic. In some cases that piercing, sardonic gaze survives into the Reich: most powerfully, in Adolf Wissel’s “Peasant Family from Kalenberg”. This “ideal” farming clan sits glacially, and spookily, around the family table like actors waiting for a horror film to roll. Rigid and hostile, they seem on the brink of a bloodbath.

As for the uniformed gurning grotesques clustered behind the figure of Hitler in Emil Scheibe’s “The Führer visits the Front”, they are latter-day descendants of Hieronymus Bosch’s human gargoyles. Who would ever have read this piece as a tribute to the victories of the Master Race? In Albert Janesch’s epic “Rhine Crossing at Breisach”, it’s the individually painted faces of the captured French POWs that catch the eye and mind, not the robotic ranks of the German conquerors streaming over the bridge. In front of the defeated French troops, most sympathetically observed of all, stands a West African — likely a Senegalese infantryman.

So, in the city of the “bridge too far”, art in the Third Reich often turns out to be the art created under the yoke of the Third Reich. Several of these painters found freedom of a limited kind as they practised a sort of “inner emigration” while outwardly conforming to the stifling norms enforced by the state. Jelle Bouwhuis reminds me, though, that all these works, however independent or even critical, served a machine of myths and lies within “a pernicious regime that was responsible for some 40 million deaths”. Even the covert dissidents and sly naysayers in their own way fed the Nazi beast. “Ethics and aesthetics”, Bouwhuis insists, “are inextricably attached”. At least Museum Arnhem has given visitors a chance to see, to think, and to judge for themselves. Would that British curators had the audacity to step so far outside their current comfort zones.

‘Art in the Third Reich: Seduction and Distraction’ continues at Museum Arnhem until 24 March 2024: museumarnhem.nl

And even if Eichmann had pretended, what then? It would have made no difference. Once a Jew, always a Jew. Saul, by becoming Paul, had merely transmuted all that was most baneful about the Jewish conspiracy against the Nordic race into a more infectious, and therefore more lethal, form. Hitler, who traced the glories of ancient Greece and Rome to Völkerwanderung from the northern reaches of Europe, also attributed the downfall of classic civilisation to the virus introduced by Paul into the bloodstream of the Roman Empire. Its devastating effects had been evident ever since. Lethal variants had evolved. In January 1942, even as war was raging in the snows of Russia, Hitler placed Operation Barbarossa in the context of 2,000 years of history:

“The Jew who fraudulently introduced Christianity into the ancient world — in order to ruin it — re-opened the same breach in modern times, this time taking as his pretext the social question. It’s the same sleight-of-hand as before. Just as Saul was changed into St. Paul, Mardochai became Karl Marx.”

Two particularly toxic evils, both of them derived from Christian teachings, threatened the Nordic race with ruin. First, there was the insistence that the weak, the sick, the persecuted merited compassion. So infuriating did Hitler find the objections of church leaders to the Reich’s on-going sterilisation of mental and physical defectives that already, by 1937, he had begun to envisage the elimination of Christianity once and for all. Clearly, there was no prospect of the Germans fulfilling their racial destiny while they were cancerous still with compassion. Hitler’s own preference — one that he was quick to put into practice the moment Germany went to war — was for a mass programme of euthanasia. This, a policy that was sanctioned both by ancient example and by the most cutting-edge scientific thinking, could never satisfactorily be carried out by a people who persisted in seeing it as evil.

Yet it was their own folly, their own blindness, that constituted the authentic evil. The Christian morality they clung to had resulted in any number of grotesque excrescences: alcoholics breeding promiscuously while upstanding national comrades struggled to put food on the table for their families; mentally ill patients enjoying clean sheets while healthy children were obliged to sleep three or four to a bed; cripples having money and attention lavished on them that should properly be devoted to the fit. Idiocies such as these were precisely what National Socialism existed to terminate. For the Germans to continue in their opposition to policies so transparently vital for their own racial health was insanity. The churches had had their day. “Harping on and on that God died on the cross out of pity for the weak, the sick, and the sinners, they then demand that the genetically diseased be kept alive in the name of a doctrine of pity that goes against nature, and of a misconceived notion of humanity.” The strong — as science had conclusively demonstrated — had both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak.

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They also had a duty to trample down the second doctrine with which Christianity had poisoned the world. In 1942, an SS pamphlet quoted a line from Paul’s letter to the Galatians to illustrate just what it was that they had been summoned to fight against. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” Here, the pamphlet warned, was a universalism that had dimmed the claims of blood, that had privileged the inferior races over the superior, and that over the course of the centuries had served to geld the Nordic race. A doctrine as pernicious in its effects as this could only have come from one source.

Of course Jews were not Greeks, and of course they could not be permitted to live alongside other, healthier races — of whom the healthiest was the Nordic. “Apes massacre all fringe elements as alien to their community. What is valid for monkeys must be all the more valid for humans.” Hitler knew that there was nothing particular about man. He was as subject to the struggle for life, and to the need to preserve the purity of his race, as any other species. To put this into practice was not evil. The truest evil was to do as Christians did: to oppose the ways of the world.

The Nazis, of course, did not succeed in their attempt to redefine for Europeans the parameters of morality. Their Reich did not last a thousand years. Their programmes of euthanasia and genocide are not commemorated today as models of enlightened statecraft, crafted in accordance with ancient wisdom and modern science. Quite the opposite. Today, across the Western world, the Nazis serve as the very archetypes of evil. The old supernatural cosmography that for centuries structured how people in Christendom understood the dimensions of hell may no longer possess the currency it once did; but the concept of hell itself still endures. It has become difficult, since the liberation of the death camps, to imagine it as anything other than a muddy cesspool, surrounded by barbed wire, crematoria silhouetted against a wintry sky. A belief in the satanic as Christians had long construed it, as a literal demonic force, may have faded in the West; but not the conviction that evil is to be identified with a single, sulphurously charismatic figure. Who needs the Devil when there is Adolf Hitler?

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Who indeed needs Jesus? It is no coincidence, perhaps, that the more Nazism has come to shadow the imaginings of people in the West, the less they have gone to church. Other regimes in European history have aspired, as Hitler did, to eradicate the hold of Christianity; but only Hitler aimed to eradicate, not just the institutional forms of the religion, but the doctrines of charity for the weak and sick, and the universalism, that lay at the heart of its traditional teachings.

This is why, 80 years on from the Second World War, the Führer retains his starring role in contemporary demonology. Communist dictators may have been no less murderous than fascist ones; but they — because communism was the expression of a concern for the oppressed masses — rarely seem as diabolical. Today, when we ask ourselves “what would Hitler have done?”, and do the opposite, we are as obedient to the weathering effects of Christian morality as our forebears were when they wondered “what would Jesus have done,” and sought to do the same.

Nietzsche, declaring in a famous parable that God was dead, declared as well that in the great cave that had once been Christendom His shadow still fell, an immense and frightful shadow. It is there in our readiness to use “fascist” as the ultimate insult; to sanctify those who suffer oppression; to regard racism as a sin beyond compare: a shadow that continues to define for us, even in this godless age, the meaning of evil.

Defying Hitler: A Memoir tells the tale of one man’s struggle against the surging tide of savage nationalism in 1930s Germany. “This is the story of a duel,” the book starts. “It is a duel between two very unequal adversaries: an exceedingly powerful, formidable and ruthless state and an insignificant, unknown individual.” The author’s real name was Raimund Pretzel, but he adopted the pseudonym Sebastian Haffner when he left Germany for Britain, in 1938, where he went on to become a respected journalist. This work charts what he describes as his efforts to preserve “his integrity, his private life and his personal honour”.

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Such is the potency of the book, that when I mentioned it to the musician Brian Eno recently, he told me he was buying copies for all his friends. “This book has had a bigger impact on me than almost anything else I have ever read because it showed how easy the slide into totalitarianism can be,” he later texted me. The Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman remembered earlier this year how a Tory MP had praised the book to him when they met. “It struck me as significant that we had both been reading about the 1930s to try and make sense of 2019,” wrote Rachman.

The reason is simple. Defying Hitler details with impressive honesty how a civilised nation ended up backing the most barbaric modern regime in Europe. We all know, of course, the outcome of those disturbing events in Germany. And yes, it would be foolish to argue that today’s surge of populism in Western democracies bears direct comparison with the rise of Nazi fascism that led to industrialised death camps. Yet ours is again a time of turmoil and bewildering uncertainty, as despairing citizens turn against democracy, politics shifts to extremes, demagogues patrol the political stages, nationalism rises once more and fake news corrodes free societies. It leaves many people fearful for the future, many public figures unsure how to react.

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As Haffner writes, the first country occupied by the Nazis “was not Austria or Czechoslovakia” but Germany — and his book helps explain how his nation hurtled into the abyss. It begins with a seven-year-old boy in 1914, unhappy at seeing his summer holiday curtailed by outbreak of war; but who then follows the campaign like a sport, with its statistics on ships sunk, prisoners seized and miles advanced.

Four years later, like Corporal Adolf Hitler, he was left distraught by defeat, feeling an unsettling sense of loss. Then come the Weimar Republic years of economic chaos, hyper-inflation and political violence as the Nazi shadow grows. Moderates were left politically homeless in a fight for supremacy between far-Left and far-Right.

It is revealing to see how rapidly the Nazis went from being figures of fun to running the country. After the election of September 1930, “a ridiculous splinter party became the second largest faction” in parliament. But Hitler was still seen as a joke, a repulsive character delighting in incendiary threats — although Haffner notes “the strange befuddlement and numbness of his opponents”. In January 1933, when Hitler became chancellor, “the general opinion was that it was not the Nazis who had won but the bourgeois parties of the Right who had ‘captured’ the Nazis and held all the key positions”. People believed the system would constrain their excesses.

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The power of this work, however, comes not from telling a familiar historical story, but from the author’s personal vignettes as “a typical example of the German educated bourgeois” living “against an arrestingly dramatic backdrop”. His father, a dignified civil servant, suffers with economic struggles. Haffner attends a louche ball which is broken up by snarling police. He hides in doorways to avoid having to salute Nazi parades. In one scene, he is kissing and caressing a Jewish girlfriend in the Grunewald woods, when a group of teenagers passes by and “cheerfully” tells them to perish. A friend’s partner, a Left-wing doctor, disappears. People accept their telephones should be tapped and letters read amid scaremongering about enemies of the state. Judges become “people’s judges” with powers to ignore law, but are subject to instant dismissal.

Some join the Nazis through fear, others jump on the bandwagon or are “intoxicated” by the idea of unity. Haffner works as a legal clerk. Half his small group of friends studying for final exams become Nazis, with one threatening to shop him to the Gestapo after a row; the others go into exile. A Jewish judge presides over his court, but colleagues start to treat him “with a certain tasteful delicacy, like one does suffering from a serious disease”.

As he works in the library, brownshirts burst in, beat up a Jewish barrister and order out “non-Ayrans”. One thug comes up to Haffner and asks if he is Ayran. He replies yes instantly, blushing as he realises he has capitulated to their bigotry. “A moment too late I felt the shame, the defeat,” he writes poingnantly. “I had failed my very first test. I could have slapped myself.”

Later, in 1933, he must attend a Nazi indoctrination camp to continue his fledgling legal career, where they march, sing songs and wear Swastika armbands. As he plays chess under a giant portrait of Hitler, the radio announces the Reichstag has been dissolved and only one party will contest an election. “This still astonished me, in spite of all I had experienced. I was happy that now the Nazis had obviously gone too far.” Instead the evening ends with a massed chorus of the national anthem, right arms outstretched for three minutes. “We all sang or pretended to do so, each one of us the Gestapo of the others.”

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Such candour gives this book its immense punch. The author, like so many other Germans, lacked the courage of resistance when confronted by swaggering hate. He assumed the norms of civilisation would expose the absurdities of the Nazis, then constrain the excesses of extremists who openly targeted their fellow citizens. Instead, space for dissent was throttled as democracy evolved into dictatorship. Decent people clung on to their careers and their families, retreating in the face of horror or oblivious to the suffering of others. As you turn the pages, they beg a difficult question: how would you respond in such a situation?

On one level, this fine book is a fierce warning about the dangers of nationalism — what Haffner called the “deadliest enemy” to his country,  and something which is seeping back across our continent. He calls this poisonous creed “a dangerous mental illness wherever it appears, capable of distorting the character of a nation and making it ugly, just as vanity and egoism distort the character of a person”. He concludes that any German placing value in humanity and openness had no option but to leave the country they loved. “One came to feel that any foreign country would seem more like home than Adolf Hitler’s ‘Reich’.”

Haffner’s book takes us into the heart of emerging horror and exposes why so many decent people averted their gaze from evil, leading to the destruction of German democracy followed by genocide and war. It offers the reader a real-time sense of witnessing the rise of the Nazis. He wonders at each step into darkness about the reality of the dangers, the best response to their threat and the strength of his state. His story seems so remote, so unreal, so removed from our own lives. Yet echoes from this era can be heard in these uncertain times.