Transcript Charles Dick - Carla Kaplan

Segment One: Charles Dick on Unknown Enemy: The Hidden Nazi Force That Built the Third Reich
FR: Charles Dick, welcome to Writer's Voice.
CHARLES DICK (CD):
Well, thank you for asking me, Francesca.
FR:
This book, Unknown Enemy, is a fascinating investigation of a little known but crucially important aspect of World War II, and that was Organisation Todt.
It's named after Fritz Todt, but also a very, very key person involved was Albert Speer. So important to Hitler's plans, and yet very few people know about this organisation or the people in it.
You describe OT, Organisation Todt, as the hidden backbone of Hitler's empire. What exactly was it? And how did it evolve from a construction agency into a machinery of enslavement and death?
CD:
What it was, was a very powerful Nazi force, as you were describing, and it carried out brutal and murderous operations across German-occupied Europe during World War II.
It was also a key overseer of the Third Reich's vast slave labour programme. But unlike the SS, the OT had managed to skim pretty much under the radar of war crimes prosecutors and the world at large.
And this was mainly because the SS and Germany's surviving political and military leaders were the focus of attention in the dock at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. The world had seen the horrors of the concentration camps, which the SS controlled, and the Allies were looking for justice to be seen to be done fast with the evidence to hand.
And the OT, therefore, remained mainly in the shadows. And since then, only bits of the OT story have appeared. As you were saying, it has been hidden. And it was either told, it has either been told in the margins of wide-ranging works or in studies restricted to particular camps or countries.
And books on the OT by apologists for the Nazis have also sown confusion. So the OT's true role had been obscured, but Unknown Enemy tells the complete story of the OT's colossal building projects across much of an entire continent, and gives a strong voice to survivors of OT violence for the first time.
I think the biggest eye-openers for me when I started my research were the extent of the OT's reach across Europe and how its murderous treatment of slave laborers often matched that of the SS and how much power it wielded, basking in Hitler's favor.
Wherever I looked in archives around Europe, evidence emerged of the OT's tentacles extending across the continent. And once you start out on the trail of your research, it keeps gaining momentum.
FR:
And it began with the famed Autobahn, a place that I've traveled on gleefully at 100 miles an hour with no worry of being stopped because at that time there was no speed limit.
Tell us about how it began with this and who Fritz Todt was.
CD:
As you say, the Autobahn and the motorways, well, in the Germany of today, they're almost synonymous with Germany—the motorways, the Germans streaking up and down in their BMWs and Porsches. And that's the sort of popular image.
Well, Fritz Todt was the man who built the first ones, and Organisation Todt was first formed in 1938. But there was a sort of essential background to this.
And this backstory began after Hitler came to power in 1933. It revolved around two men whom Hitler entrusted with key elements of his dreams of empire: the engineer Fritz Todt and a much younger rising star who you've mentioned, the architect Albert Speer.
Within months of becoming Chancellor, Hitler entrusted Todt with building this national autobahn network. These motorways were destined to radiate out into conquered territory.
And the Nazi leader then gave Speer the job of rebuilding Berlin as a new imperial capital fit for the Third Reich, to be renamed Germania. These two men, Todt and Speer, circled very closely in Hitler's orbit, and the huge specialist construction forces that they both amassed would in time fuse together under the banner of Organisation Todt.
But the first time the German public heard about Organisation Todt was when Hitler announced its name in September 1938 at a Nazi rally in Nuremberg. And this was a strikingly unconventional way of revealing the creation of a powerful Nazi institution which would carry out mammoth construction projects for the Third Reich and oversee millions of slave labourers from German-occupied Europe together with the SS and the Wehrmacht and German industrial firms.
There was no official decree which proclaimed the OT's founding and it existed for almost five years before its functions were set out in 1943 in German law. Hitler placed the OT directly under him just as he made Todt report solely to him as head of the motorways, leading to a significant concentration of power.
And one eminent German historian described the OT under Todt's direction as one of the Third Reich's most important special organisations, comparing it to a state within a state like the SS.
And when Hitler first told the nation about the OT, Todt's large force of engineers and construction specialists were busy building massive fortifications known as the West Wall. They'd mostly transferred to this new job from building the motorways.
Hitler had ordered Todt to take over the West Wall from the army, furious that they were working too slowly. Having annexed Austria and preparing a grab for Czechoslovakia, he wanted Todt to complete the West Wall as rapidly and efficiently as the Autobahn.
And once again, Todt justified Hitler's faith in him, and his ability to fulfill his Führer's demands in the right way and at the right time would become a pattern in his career as Germany advanced along the road to war.
FR:
Yet Todt died before the end of the war in a plane crash. There's been speculation that he was actually assassinated, but you say there's no proof of that.
Talk about the transition after Todt's death to the control under Albert Speer and tell us a little bit more about Speer himself.
CD:
Todt's death—perhaps I'd better explain why people thought he was assassinated—because in fact, Todt had confronted Hitler after war broke out in 1939 with the invasion of Poland.
Todt had confronted Hitler and told him, after the Soviet invasion in mid-1941—Todt was a convinced Nazi and utterly loyal to his Führer—but as 1941 wore on, and after the initial great successes in the invasion of the Soviet Union, the German advance stalled and he had become certain that Germany couldn't prevail.
He'd seen himself what German soldiers had to endure on the Eastern Front. The engines and guns of Soviet tanks withstood the bitter Russian winter, but German tanks failed to start and weapons froze. Red Army troops were well equipped with winter clothing; German soldiers were thinly clad, some even wrapped in blankets.
And it was clear also that Germany could never match the huge potential for armaments production of the USA if it entered the war.
So on the 29th of November 1941, Todt delivered his most emphatic statement to Hitler on the hopelessness of the war, declaring at the Reich Chancellery, “This war can no longer be won by military means.” And when Hitler asked him what was the alternative, Todt replied that the conflict should be ended politically—but Hitler refused.
Just over a week later, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the USA entered the war. So although Todt failed to persuade Hitler of the futility of the war, he was successful in winning him over on his reforms to increase armaments production. And these were to be one of his last achievements serving under his Führer.
As you say, he died in the plane crash on the 8th of February 1942. There was immediate speculation, because of his pessimism about the war, that he had been assassinated. But all the same, there was no hard evidence of an assassination plot against him by the SS or anyone else. Despite intensive investigations, precisely why the crash occurred has never been conclusively explained.
And then, as you've outlined, Hitler lost no time in appointing Speer, who happened also to be in Hitler's field headquarters in Rastenburg where the crash occurred. Hitler appointed him as Todt's successor.
So there was a terrific transition between Todt and Speer, but they were quite different characters. And when Speer took over—just to answer your question about how Speer's time in charge of the OT differed—less than a week after Todt's death, he spoke to staff in the courtyard of the armaments ministry, and he pledged to continue Todt's work, asking for their trust and cooperation.
Speer was able to deliver the goods on time, which was something also Todt did, but some of Speer's rivals were not able to do.
FR:
You know, I want to ask you about—we have an engineer in Todt, we have an architect in Speer. How did the engineers, architects, builders, the professionals, ordinary professionals, become participants in mass murder?
And maybe as a lead-up to that, talk a little bit about the approach of the OT to its laborers and the kind of death rate—huge death rate—among them?
CD:
Oh, absolutely. Well, the death rate was very high. The OT and the SS, together with the Wehrmacht and industry, oversaw the Nazi slave labor system.
That system caused the deaths of an estimated 2.7 million foreign workers out of 13.5 million in the Greater Reich. And this was only part of the story, since these figures excluded huge areas like Nazi-occupied Soviet territory, where the OT had up to 800,000 slave laborers.
Where figures for the OT and SS camps can be compared, the number of deaths among prisoners is roughly the same. All the evidence shows that the OT did not need the notoriously brutal SS to encourage them to practice lethal violence.
In camp networks at Mühldorf and Kaufering in Bavaria, where Hitler commissioned the OT to build so-called bomb-proof underground factories to produce Me-262 jet fighter planes, about half the prisoners—more than 19,000—died.
Some survivors of camps around Europe considered violence practiced by the OT staff to be as great or even more brutal than the SS. And the OT not only shot, beat, or worked prisoners to death, but killed many more by failing to provide sufficient food and medical care and shelter.
It was exhaustion, hunger, exposure, and disease which were the biggest killers in the labor camps, as opposed to the death camps, rather than the shootings by SS guards.
And the pitiful conditions in the camps are, of course, graphically portrayed in Unknown Enemy, my book, in accounts by survivors of camps set up for OT projects.
FR:
And so, Charles Dick, then that question: how did these ordinary people become participants in mass murder?
I mean, that's a hard question to answer, but I'm sure it's one that you've devoted a lot of thinking to.
CD:
Oh, certainly. And I think that even though the OT has attracted nowhere near the level of the SS's global notoriety—and its full story is still emerging—historians have investigated how and why ordinary men in a German reserve police battalion turned into hardened killers carrying out mass shootings of Jews in Poland.
Yet the OT was perhaps the most eligible group of ordinary men at the heart of the Nazi regime. These were neither soldiers nor policemen, let alone units of SD death squads. Their basic job was not to kill an enemy or implement Nazi racist policy resulting in genocide of six million Jews. They were builders and engineers performing the everyday work of construction.
So how did they become Hitler's slave drivers? This is your question, really. Why did they kill prisoners through shootings, beatings, or murderous hard labour and neglect?
Well, the answer is perhaps partly OT engineers’ professional pride—to finish a top-priority job, no matter what the human cost—as well as the torrent of Nazi racist ideas dehumanising Jews, Soviet prisoners of war and other slave labourers. If you're told as an OT engineer that your prisoners are subhuman, you're more likely to consider them dispensable and work them to death.
Now, Unknown Enemy is a new piece in the jigsaw in our attempt to answer questions raised by any study of the Nazi era. It analyses the actions of ordinary people—in this case, German engineers and construction experts serving under Hitler's regime—and concentrates on the Nazi slave labour system.
Each interlocking institution helped make the horror of Nazi genocide and murderous slave labour possible, showing how evil can spread among those living under a dictatorship.
Now, the Nazi era has been deeply studied because it sets such a terrifying benchmark of horror. In turbulent times, when we fear for the future, we search for lessons from history right from the time Hitler imposed his dictatorship. And up to the present day, what happened under Nazism has been repeatedly held as a warning.
Writing in the mid-1930s, the Nobel prize-winning author Sinclair Lewis evoked a parallel with events in Nazi Germany by imagining a similarly violent authoritarian regime in the United States. He called his novel It Can't Happen Here, clearly inviting his readers to conclude that it could.
And in the America of today, this novel is again being mentioned by political commentators. Well, the novelist's imagination is one thing, but historical facts are another.
And all the same, two concentration camp survivors, Primo Levi and David Rousset, experienced unimaginable horror and both came to the same conclusion. They expressed the opinion that events such as occurred under Nazism could happen again.
Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz, issued a warning in one of his post-war memoirs. Speaking for all survivors, he wrote, “It happened once and it can happen again. This is the heart of what we have to say.”
And Rousset, the French writer and concentration camp survivor, believed the crimes of the Nazi camps could be repeated in another form. And if Levi and Rousset are right, what can we learn from history to try to prevent it?
FR:
And, you know, we just have the case, as we're speaking now, of political leaders of the young Republicans were revealed as having chats in which they expressed admiration for Hitler and talked about the need to repeat what Hitler did—gassing Jews, getting rid of Black people and misogyny about women.
So it is very pertinent to our times now.
And just to give us a sense of some of the stories that you uncovered of the treatment: in reading your book, you know, there was the general practice of using highly skilled slave labor on a project and then killing them afterwards.
What are some of the stories of the survivors that you uncovered that you'd like to share?
CD:
Well, Unknown Enemy gives a very strong voice to survivors of OT violence. So in this book and in this podcast, I wanted to— as you're inviting me to do now—allow prisoners to tell some of the story of their ordeals in their own words.
I've chosen just a handful out of the myriad camps around Europe, so it's only a snapshot. Now, the prisoners’ accounts are harrowing stories of desperate situations.
The first example of a camp that I've chosen was on the notorious Transit Road 4, the DG4 road through Ukraine towards the Caucasus oil fields. About 25,000 Jews and tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war died building it.
Among the prisoners were Jewish artist Arnold Dagani and his wife Anisara. They were rounded up in 1942 to help build the road and loaded onto OT trucks before being taken to Michalovka camp.
Arnold described in a diary, published after the war, how disease, hunger and shootings took their toll in Michalovka. He said surviving prisoners had to force themselves to carry on even after family members died. There was no time for grieving.
The road-building firms abandoned the prisoners, pleading to survive to the murderers—the Lithuanian guards and village henchmen. For the Organisation Todt, it was only important that the road building went ahead smoothly.
It was Arnold's skill as an artist that paved the way to freedom for him and Anisara. Arnold had frequently been required by OT staff to paint their portraits, and while these assignments posed no danger for him, he risked his life by secretly sketching scenes of daily life in Michalovka and writing notes for his diary.
He hid his artwork in a tin cylinder made for him by a fellow prisoner. If these and his shorthand notes had been discovered, he would have been shot.
In June 1943, Arnold had his big break—being given a special artistic assignment outside Michalovka camp. He was sent to Gysin and instructed to create a mosaic in the form of the imperial eagle of Hitler's Third Reich.
Arnold and Anisara escaped from Gysin in July 1943, helped by a Jewish shoemaker called Abrasha. They made their way back across the Bug River with the help of a local guide, holding their possessions—including Arnold's precious sketches, paintings and diary notes—precariously held in sacks above their heads as they waded across a shallow part of the river.
The Daganis had escaped just in time. Michalovka camp was abandoned later that year and the remaining inmates transferred to another labor camp, Tarasivka, where they were murdered.
In Unknown Enemy, some of Dagani's artwork is included, and one of them is a haunting image of a woman in a headscarf whose features and scarf are traced with the handwritten names of murdered inmates of Michalovka.
The next camp I wanted to choose was Alderney, one of the Channel Islands, which Hitler saw as a huge propaganda prize, being the only British soil he managed to capture.
Foreign workers generally experienced milder treatment under the OT in West Europe than in the East, but prisoners were treated exceptionally brutally on Alderney, where both the OT and SS operated for a time.
One Jewish survivor, Albert Eblagon, was held at one of four main camps operating from July 1942 on Alderney. Foreign workers told of routine violence by OT staff in camps on the island, which, although not French territory, came under the OT's administrative structure in occupied France.
Eblagon described the start of his ordeal in a post-war interview: “We arrived at night and disembarked on the 15th of August 1943 at three o'clock in the morning. In the darkness, we were forced to run the two kilometers to the camp, while the German guards continuously stabbed into our backs with their bayonets, while also kicking us all the time. There were many men among us who were over 70 years of age, but nobody was spared. Hard physical work for 12 and 14 hours a day, every day, building the fortifications. Every day there were beatings and people's bones were broken—their arms or their legs. People died from overwork. We were starved and worked to death. So many died from total exhaustion.”
Eblagon was held in Nordeney camp on Alderney. The other three camps were Helgoland and Borkum and Silt, the last of which the OT handed over to an SS building brigade when it arrived in March 1943. OT and SS treatment of prisoners appeared equally lethal in these camps. Between 1,000 and 3,000 labourers are estimated to have died on all the Channel Islands.
The next example of a camp that I've chosen—just the handful— is one of many OT operations exploiting Jewish women. The OT was ruthless in its exploitation of women to perform extreme hard labour, especially in the last year of the war when there was a shortage of workers.
Tasks included road building, digging trenches, and building underground factories. Thousands of Jewish women toiled in atrocious conditions in camps in the core of the Reich, in occupied Poland, in Ukraine, and in Vaksvaara concentration camp in Estonia.
Survivor accounts by these women contain harrowing stories. They risked being raped by guards, and pregnant women were sent, as a rule, to a death camp, being considered unfit to work.
Death rates in women's camps dedicated to OT projects were typically three or four times as high as in other women's camps, reflecting the physical toll of construction work.
Now, Miriam Isisk, a 23-year-old Polish Jew held in the Nazi concentration camp of Stutthof in August 1944, thought anywhere would be better than the hell she was already experiencing. So she tried to get herself and her mother onto a labor transport.
“My mother wasn't young anymore,” she said in post-war testimony, “and I feared she wouldn't pass the selection. So I started doing what I could to take some years off her. I blackened her hair and brows with a bit of coal I found, painted her cheeks with red paper. After all this, my mother somehow luckily managed to pass the selection.”
She and her mother Frida were taken to a camp in an OT complex where they had to dig anti-tank ditches. Tragically, all the hopes that Miriam cherished after succeeding to get her mother picked for the transport from Stutthof were dashed. Although Miriam survived, her mother died two months before the end of the war.
And then the final example is about a Jewish boy selected by OT staff from Auschwitz to join a labour transport in the final year of the war.
Ari Pinsker was just 13 years old when uniformed OT personnel went to Auschwitz in 1944 and took him with other prisoners to the Dachau subcamp of Kaufering, where an underground aircraft factory was being built on Hitler's orders.
When a railway spur to the camp was needed, he had to stand on tiptoe so his shoulder just touched the heavy metal rail being carried by a line of other prisoners, so as not to get a punishment beating by guards.
Other tasks were carrying 50-kilo cement sacks. And Ari tried to protect himself during the bitter winter.
“Sometimes, I played tricks because I already had no strength left,” he said in a post-war interview. “I took an empty sack, filled it with other sacks and put it on my back and went along like that several times to give myself a rest. I pretended to be lugging a sack because the guards were not too close to us. Also, there were not SS people, but people from the Organisation Todt, and they were harsher than the SS people. They dealt fatal blows. They were Hitler's faithful right to the end.”
The Kaufering complex was where Ari and his brother toiled until the end of the war, but the subterranean factory was never completed. Ari's story is important because it describes conditions in one of the most brutal camps where the OT exercised a high degree of control and helps illustrate how the OT operated in the final throes of the war.
FR:
Those are searing accounts.
So finally, tell us what happened to Speer and why you think this history did remain so unknown. I know you said before, you know, they concentrated on military people. And yet, you know, Speer was not unknown himself, and he seemed to have escaped the same kind of fate as his fellow perpetrators.
CD:
Yes, absolutely. I think part of it—his escape—was due to his studied and careful defence at Nuremberg.
Albert Speer was the OT's most prominent war criminal. What happened to him was that he ended up in front of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. But scarcely more than a dozen other members of the OT came to trial after the Second World War.
Despite Soviet demands that Speer should hang, he was sentenced instead to 20 years in Spandau Prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The U.S. judge Francis Biddle initially favoured the death sentence for Speer, but he changed his mind after British and French judges argued against it.
So Speer escaped a death sentence, but research since the Nuremberg trials has revealed more crucial evidence incriminating him. The evidence against Speer included documents proving that his evictions of tens of thousands of Jews from Berlin resulted in them being murdered.
The evictions were to make way for his Germania plans. A loyal aide in the Nazi era had buried the incriminating documents in his garden, but unearthed them after the war when he felt Speer had betrayed their shared beliefs under Nazism.
Then more evidence emerged to debunk Speer's denial of any involvement in Auschwitz, which he maintained steadfastly right up to his death in 1981. Historians have discovered documents confirming Speer not only knew about Auschwitz, but approved its extension and asked Himmler for slave labourers from it.
Recent revelations about Todt, more than 80 years after his death, continue to throw new light on his control of the OT. The evidence relates to his brutal exploitation of Jews while building his motorways out into Nazi-occupied Europe and constructing Hitler's “Werewolf” field headquarters in Ukraine.
Documents show that Todt instructed that hundreds of skilled Jewish labourers be used to build the Führer's elaborate Werewolf complex, who were then murdered by the SS as a security risk after working on the top-secret site. His actions effectively link him personally to the Holocaust. Some 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war were also killed after working at Werewolf.
It is striking that some key figures at OT headquarters and most OT task group leaders—some of whom had powers extending over several countries—never faced trial. The OT as an institution has not been called to account in the same way as German industrial giants like IG Farben and Krupp were at Nuremberg.
The comparison is noteworthy because major OT operations, many ordered personally by Hitler, ranged across all of Europe and the Reich itself.
An example of a leading OT engineer who avoided prosecution was Speer's deputy Franz Xaver Dorsch, who set up his own firm of consulting engineers in 1950. The Dorsch Gruppe continued to bear his name after his death in 1986 and grew to employ more than 7,000 staff with projects in more than 50 countries.
The shockwaves of Germany's surrender in 1945 had less impact on the country's engineers than on comparable professions. The author of one study wrote that, as victor of the defeat, “the German engineer could almost carry on life in his profession as if the 8th of May 1945 had never been.”
FR:
Well, this is why it's so important that this unknown history has become now known through your book, Charles Dick—Unknown Enemy: The Hidden Nazi Force That Built the Third Reich.
I want to thank you very much for this illuminating conversation. It's a fascinating history that unfortunately continues to have relevance—in fact, increasing relevance—in our world today.
CD:
Thank you, Francesca. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Segment Two: Carla Kaplan on Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford
FR:
Carla Kaplan, welcome back to Writer's Voice.
CARLA KAPLAN (CK):
Thank you so much. It's so much fun to be back.
FR:
The last time we spoke with you, it was about your wonderful book Miss Anne in Harlem.
CK:
Absolutely. And that book sort of in a funny way led to this. It was a group biography of women who made a very unusual choice in the 1920s and ’30s to try to be part of the Black Harlem Renaissance.
They were all white, and I covered six women in the book, most of whom were not known to readers before they experienced the book. The one who was most famous was Nancy Cunard. Some of the women were a little bit notorious.
One of the women in the book was Charlotte Osgood Mason, who was the very dictatorial philanthropist who was a patron of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Also in the book was Fannie Hurst and Annie Nathan Meyer and Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, who was married to the most important and famous Black journalist of Harlem, and a woman who actually in her writing passed for Black. Her name was Lillian Wood.
And in a funny way, they led to this book because while they each were filled with good intentions and they really thought they were doing something important, they were mostly failed allies. And I really wanted to tell a story of somebody who was a more successful ally, and that's Jessica Mitford.
She achieved success relatively late in life with her breakout book, the exposé The American Way of Death. She had an aristocratic upbringing—so not the kind of upbringing you would expect for somebody who was such a radical activist, and I say that as a good thing.
Tell us a little bit about her family. She was the daughter of a baron and baroness and was one of six sisters. So tell us about the, quote, “mad Mitfords.”
FR (follow-up prompt embedded):
And I just have to say you are so right that part of what makes Jessica Mitford fascinating is the really complete extent to which she was not raised to be a muckraker.
CK:
She was raised in an aristocratic, eccentric, very, very insular family. She was raised to be beautiful, to marry well, to enjoy her privileges, and to perpetuate the upper class.
And alone amongst her family, she always had a very keen sense of fairness. Even as a very young child, the British class system made no sense to her. She couldn't understand why so few people had so much when so many people had so very little.
And her own family's comfort and privileges and wealth just never made sense to her. She was raised by a family that owned thousands and thousands and thousands of acres of prime British land and property. They owned the village in which they lived. Everyone who lived in that village worked for the family.
They were not particularly cash-rich as a family. And it also didn't really matter because they had so much property and so many people working for them that the six Mitford girls, as they were called, were brought up in a very cosseted way. They hardly interacted with anybody who wasn't a relative.
They were very much thrown back on one another, and they invented a kind of whole world of secret languages and private games, and they teased and they played and they read.
Part of what was extraordinary about the six Mitford girls is they were all—yes, beautiful—but more importantly, brilliant, creative, filled with energy, filled with ambition, and they had absolutely no outlet for any of that.
So there was one brother, Tom, who of course had all kinds of outlets for business or social service or travel or whatever he chose to go into. He was unfortunately killed in the war in Burma.
But the six women were just raised to marry and they had no outlets, and each of them reached up into the air and invented a future for themselves. And because they were so determined and brilliant, many of them achieved those futures.
Unfortunately, the choices they reached up into the air and pulled down out of thin air were often terrible choices—absolutely unworthy of their talents. In a couple cases they were decent choices.
The oldest, Nancy, wanted to become a writer and she became a famous novelist. Her books Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love were two of the most popular books of her day.
But the second sister, the most beautiful of them all, named Diana, walked away from a very proper traditional marriage to the heir to the British Guinness fortune of Guinness beer to take up with a man named Oswald Mosley. And Mosley was the head of the British Union of Fascists, the British Fascist Party.
He was married. He was having an extensive affair with his wife's sister. And Diana walked away from her marriage to take up with Mosley. She was a lifelong fascist and a lifelong apologist for Nazism.
Another one of the sisters became besotted with Adolf Hitler. She went to Germany and she stalked him where he had lunch every day for months until he paid attention to her. And she became his intimate. There's a lot of debate about how we understand the nature of that intimacy.
When Germany and England declared war, Unity shot herself in the head. And she actually survived. She lived eight years with very diminished capacities. So this was a very complicated group of women.
And Jessica Mitford, the second youngest, reached up into the air and she said she wanted to be a socialist, and she wanted to work for justice and for people's rights.
Her youngest sister, Debo, said she wanted to be a duchess. She became the Duchess of Devonshire, the Chatelaine of Chatsworth House, one of the grandest estates in all of England.
And alone among all of them, Jessica Mitford wanted to make a difference in the world, and she wanted to do something that mattered. And she ran away when she was 19. She ran away with her second cousin, who she married during their escape. They fought in the Spanish Civil War and they made their way to the United States, where they were determined to join the Communist Party.
I mean, she just—she was absolutely extraordinary.
FR:
Yes, and you paint a wonderful picture of her.
In your prelude, you demonstrate her troublemaker nature with a story about her refusal—and we're calling her Jessica, but she was called Deca her life.
CK:
Yes, it was the only name by which she was ever known.
FR:
You demonstrate Deca's troublemaker nature with a story about her refusal to cut something out of her book The American Way of Death when she was talking with her editors.
Tell us that story.
CK:
So Deca ran away when she was 19, made her way to the United States. Her first husband was killed. She spent some years working for the Office of Price Administration during the war, many years as what she called a “foot soldier in the Communist Party.”
But she always wanted to be a writer, and she didn't break into writing until midlife. She wrote a memoir, which didn't do terribly well in the United States, but then she embarked on her real blockbuster book, which, as you mentioned, was The American Way of Death, published in 1963.
When she was working on that book in the 1960s, absolutely determined to expose what she called “the grisly practice of the dismal traders” and the way undertakers preyed on poor people, she had a section of the book that was very important to her on embalming. She walked the reader through, detail by detail, step by step, the ridiculous things that went on during the course of embalming a dead body.
And her editors said to her, “This is disgusting. You have to cut this gruesome material.” At the time, she was a one-book author; she had already spent the advance she'd received for The American Way of Death.
Her editors insisted, “If you don't cut this disgusting chapter, we are going to cancel the contract.” And I really think most early-career writers would have caved to that kind of pressure and those threats.
And Jessica Mitford didn't. She felt that that grisly chapter was important to get the reader on her side. And she told the editors, “If you pull the book, I'll mimeograph it on my dining room table.”
And they pulled the book. And luckily enough, another great editor, who happened to be Bob Gottlieb—one of the most legendary editors in the history of American publishing—grabbed the book. She was able to bring it out with Simon & Schuster, which she always referred to as “Simon's shoe store.”
But she didn't know that Gottlieb was going to grab the book. She didn't know that Simon's shoe store was going to get behind it. For all she knew, she was ending her own writing career out of conviction.
But that's who she was. If she believed in something, she was unbending—and this is very important to me—always willing to pay the price of her convictions. So if her convictions ran a personal risk, it never stopped her.
And in the case of her blockbuster successful book, which made her career, she was willing to put that whole future on the line.
FR:
And what impact did that book have on, you know, the practice of death in this country?
CK:
It had an absolutely massive impact, changed all kinds of federal laws about disclosure of pricing—what undertakers could and couldn't do. It led to all sorts of changes in burial practice that people still benefit from today.
Undertakers at the time, in the late 1950s and ’60s, were claiming that embalming was necessary by law and that embalming was important to the public health. Neither were true.
She exposed all of that and had the laws changed so that they couldn't lie about that. The book had such a profound effect that it influenced the funeral for John F. Kennedy after his assassination.
He was initially put in one of these airtight, sealed metal caskets that were supposed to preserve the body. They actually had the opposite effect, as Jessica Mitford did show in gruesome detail.
And the family, who had read the book and were influenced by it, said, “No, we want a simple wooden casket for the president.” And it was because of Jessica Mitford.
Her impact was enormous on funeral practices, but it was larger than that. At the time she brought out The American Way of Death, the way of writing that we now call muckraking—which is investigative journalism, exposure of corruption and people who exploit the poor—had become somewhat moribund as a genre.
It had been immensely popular at the turn of the previous century. It became immensely popular again—but when she wrote American Way of Death, it was not a popular genre.
And combined with Rachel Carson, who published Silent Spring in the very same year, 1963, Jessica Mitford was responsible for bringing back muckraking as we know it. So her impact was really enormous.
FR:
If you've just joined Writer's Voice, we're talking with Carla Kaplan about her biography of Jessica Mitford, Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford.
And then, actually, she prefigured another time when she made a refusal—not with a book, but with signing a loyalty oath for a position that was, you know, actually quite lucrative.
I mean, she's offered $11,000 a month—or a semester, a semester—to teach at a college. So tell us about that story.
CK:
Yes, and in typical Jessica Mitford fashion, even though the stakes were quite high, she really turned it into a very funny episode, because she always believed in combining humor with serious purpose.
She called this episode you're referring to “the fingerprint flap.” She had been invited to be a distinguished professor. This meant the world to her, because what people need to know about Jessica Mitford's background is: as a young British aristocrat born in 1917, as a woman, she was completely denied any education of any kind.
As she grew up as a child, desperate to go to school—and she begged to go to school constantly—her parents wouldn't allow it, because they didn't want their aristocratic daughters mixing with the common folk. They didn't think education was necessary for a marriage career.
So Jessica Mitford had no education of any kind. And here she was invited to be a visiting professor. It was, for her, such a feather in her cap. She was completely tickled and thrilled. And the money, as you say, was very good—this was very, very good money at the time.
But when she got there, the university required her to sign a loyalty oath, which had never been in her contract. And she refused. They told her that if she didn't sign the loyalty oath, they would cancel her class.
So she just kept showing up for the class. Then they told all the students that they wouldn't get credit for the class—and they kept going to the class anyway.
Jessica Mitford finally had to take the university to court. In court, the judge asked the university representatives, “Did the lady do her job?” And the university representative said, “Yes, but—” and the judge said, “No buts. If the lady did her job, pay the lady her money.”
And she finally got her money. Eventually, the poor students got credit. She was an immensely popular teacher. She played up the fact that she was self-educated. She was very funny.
She loved a microphone—a microphone was one of Jessica Mitford's lifetime favorite things. She came to life in front of the microphone with a wonderful funny voice and an incredibly flexible face. The students just adored her.
FR:
That's a lovely story.
So as you mentioned, her husband was killed—it was during the war. He went down. It took quite a long time for her to accept the fact that he had died because she had hoped that he had been taken prisoner of war.
She met and married her second husband, Bob Treuhaft. And as you said, they both became involved with the Communist Party.
So talk about their work with the Communist Party. It was an intensely political and collaborative life that she conducted with—was it Troyhaft? Is that how you pronounce his name?
CK:
Treuhaft. It's pronounced “Troy-haft,” but it's spelled Treuhaft.
He was, in many ways, a perfect partner for her because, like her, he was a man of very serious purpose. He became known as one of the people's lawyers of the Bay Area, defending the student movement, defending the Black Panthers, defending many, many, many people in Oakland against police brutality cases, taking up cases of redlining.
He was a wonderful social justice advocate as a lawyer and, like her, was deeply committed to social change—also hysterically funny and always playful, so in that way they were very well-suited.
They joined the Communist Party at a time when, if you were an American progressive who cared about not just economic and labor justice but who cared deeply about American racism and racial justice, it was the Communist Party that was out in front of doing the most important race organizing and fighting for racial justice at the time.
The Communist Party was early in advocating for women's rights—they called it “the woman question.” They were not completely consistent on gender politics and mostly terrible on sexual politics.
But as Jessica Mitford and Bob Treuhaft said, if you cared about a range of issues—if you had what we would now call an intersectional perspective—they said the Communist Party, and I'm quoting them now, “was the only game in town,” that that was the party that was doing the serious work.
And this was a point at which the party was not vilified and stereotyped in the way it is today. They became very active in the party. Jessica Mitford described herself as a “foot soldier,” and it was in the Communist Party that her great skills as a writer and an organizer could be recognized.
It was largely through the Communist Party that she began to understand what a good investigator she was, what a good writer she was. She did a great deal of writing short pieces for the Communist Party, most of which never carried any kind of a byline.
She became a famous fundraiser. She was actually famous throughout California because her antics as a fundraiser were so extraordinary. She would stop at nothing—she was shameless about parting people from their money.
She thought money was a pretty funny thing to care about, and she was a dedicated fundraiser who had these hysterically funny parties that everybody wanted to go to—a Mitford fundraiser. She did a great deal of good.
She was mostly involved in civil rights work in Oakland during a time when Oakland, California was really the home—the birthplace—of what soon was going to become the Black militant movement in the United States.
And Jessica Mitford worked as often the lone white person in all-Black civil rights organizations. Instead of hiding her accent or pretending to be anything other than who she was, she just played up her background and managed to fit in completely in Black militant circles as a former British aristocrat.
It was kind of an extraordinary time in her life, and I think it taught her a lot about staying true to herself but moving outside of her own background.
FR:
We're talking with Carla Kaplan about her biography of Jessica Mitford, Troublemaker.
And she also went to the South with her husband during the Freedom Rides. In fact, she witnessed the mob beating of John Lewis as well as other violence. So this was a big deal.
Talk about how this impacted her.
CK:
It was a very big deal. And as you say, it was understood as a dangerous thing to do. For many civil rights activists, the danger they undertook was understood, often by them, as part of their commitment to what we now call allyship—that they were putting themselves on the line for what was right.
Deca happened to be in Montgomery. When the buses came into Montgomery, the riders—Lewis included—were pulled off the buses and beaten nearly to death. She threw herself into the middle of that mob.
There was a famous evening where all of the supportive community in Montgomery and the bus riders gathered overnight in a church with Martin Luther King and other activists. They were surrounded by a white mob that was threatening to set the church on fire, that tried to set the church on fire.
Everybody who had gathered in that church was at great risk all night long of death. The local police and the sheriff essentially did nothing. They allowed the mob to operate. The National Guard wasn't called out until dawn.
Jessica Mitford and everybody in that Montgomery church escaped with their lives. In the morning, Jessica Mitford discovered that the car she had borrowed from her friends Virginia and Clifford Durr was the car the white mob had turned upside down and set afire.
So she had to buy her friends a new car. But I think it was incredibly important to her to understand the ways in which allies had to take personal risks. She also came away from that night in the church deeply moved by the personal discipline she saw.
Everybody who was trapped in that church overnight was terrified, and everybody was deeply uncomfortable. The upstairs of the church, the temperature may have hit as high as about 110, 115.
They couldn't open the windows because the mob was trying to throw Molotov cocktails and stink bombs and other things into the church. So they were in this closed space in the heat. If one person had broken ranks that night, everybody might have died.
She was deeply moved by the solidarity and the unity of purpose she witnessed. It became, for her, a kind of signature lesson in being loyal and politically consistent. She was somebody who was very politically consistent, and some of that consistency she learned from that night.
FR:
If you've just joined Writer's Voice, we're talking with Carla Kaplan about her biography of Jessica Mitford, Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford.
Now, she ended up leaving—she and Bob ended up leaving the Communist Party in 1958. And true to her nature, she did not shrink from unveiling some of the less savory parts of the party, problems within.
You know, why did she leave? And what did that leaving do in terms of being able to possibly really free her to become the writer and the noted person that she became?
CK:
I'm so glad you're asking me about this, because I will share with you that that section of the book was, for me, one of the most difficult.
I had family members who were involved in the party, some of whom left, and people I knew and knew of, some of whom left immediately after the horrible Khrushchev revelations of Stalin's atrocities, and some who didn't leave immediately.
It is the case that most American communists, when the revelations came out of Stalin's almost unspeakable atrocities, left the party almost immediately—they left overnight.
In fact, Jessica Mitford and her husband Bob Treuhaft did not leave overnight. They stayed on with the party for months after that, and that was a minority thing to do.
As I understand why Jessica Mitford didn't leave overnight, I understand it as a testament to her loyalty—not to the party at that point, and not to any kind of central organization of the Communist Party, but rather to the individuals she had recruited into the party.
She had brought people into an organization which she now understood to have been corrupt and dishonest and to have betrayed the people who worked for it. She could have cut and run—and personally, she wanted to cut and run; anybody who had been involved really wanted to cut and run—but she didn't do that. That would have been the easy thing to do.
She felt responsible to the people she had recruited, and until she could figure out what was a responsible way to handle the volunteers she had brought into the party, she didn't leave.
Then she did leave a number of months later, after she felt she had handled things in a responsible way. It was a very, very sad thing for her to have to give up, because for her the party represented collaboration and community and a shared commitment to social-justice goals with many people across the world—and that mattered to her enormously.
Jessica Mitford was actually a very tribal person. She had grown up in this group of sisters who were so tribal they were famous—they were called “a savage little tribe” by their neighbors.
She loved working with and playing with other people, and she never lost her love of that. The Communist Party, if you were an active member as she was, was your whole world. These were the people to whom your children went for daycare. These were the people you went on vacations with. These were the people you did political work with. These were the people you went out drinking with.
It gave you an incredibly close-knit community, and that mattered to her more than almost anybody. When she gave up the party, she had to give that up, and she had to find another way to make a difference politically. For her, that became writing.
FR:
Now, let's talk a little bit about her attitude towards feminism, because it was a bit complex. She often mocked aspects like consciousness-raising.
And I can kind of understand, because I was mocking aspects of feminism myself back in the day, until I went to a consciousness-raising session in 1970 and realized that, wow, there were a whole lot of other women who felt exactly the way I did.
And yet her career, of course, defied conventional gender roles. So how do you assess her impact on and contribution to that period of time of feminism?
CK:
It's such a great question, because Jessica Mitford was in every way that mattered a really exemplary feminist. She was somebody who lived a very independent life, who was extremely successful, extremely active.
She had one of the early truly feminist marriages. Her husband Bob did all the cooking and all the house cleaning and all the shopping. She sort of—A, she was terrible at it, and B, she couldn't be bothered. She had other things to do. So her lawyer husband was the domestic person in her household.
In almost every way we could look at, she was a very important feminist. And yet, all her life, she eschewed the label of feminism.
Partly because, as somebody who had years and years in the Communist Party, her focus was class rather than gender. For many people who had been communists or socialists, that was true; labor issues and class issues seemed more important to them than gender issues.
She was slow to change her mind on that—but she did change her mind. Her final book was about the ways in which women were completely ignored by the American medical system. It was called The American Way of Birth, and it was about the terrible effects of gender stereotypes and gender oppression on American women's health, particularly on childbearing.
So she did eventually begin to take feminist issues very seriously. But Jessica Mitford—and this is where you really see how she carried her aristocratic background into her left-wing and radical politics—thought any interest in one's own emotions, in one's own feelings, was indulgent, a waste of time, silly, and not something she was interested in.
She called it “grubbing about.” So to her, consciousness-raising looked like grubbing about in one's personal feelings instead of caring about other people.
As the feminist movement began to operate under the principle “the personal is political” and began to operate with Audre Lorde's incredible insights into the power of emotion to diagnose social ills and social inequality, Jessica Mitford really held on to her position that attending to feelings was grubbing about.
It was hard for her to recognize the politics of the personal until very, very late in her life. I think that's worth understanding. I think it's worth understanding how the politics of the personal—which became so profoundly influential, and certainly changed my life—did not speak to everybody who had an interest in gender justice, and it didn't speak to her at all.
FR:
Yeah, and that is understandable, given where she was coming from. It was a really revolutionary idea, and one that I think could only have been brought forth by that young generation, that post-war generation, of which she was not a part.
CK:
That's right. And it did leave behind a generation of women who came into the left wing in other ways, both through civil rights and through socialism and communism.
Jessica Mitford's story does give us another perspective on the history of American feminism by helping us understand other ways in which the principles of the movement didn't speak to everybody, but spoke powerfully to some.
Because Jessica Mitford had very close friends to whom the politics of the personal spoke very deeply. One of her three lifelong best friends was Maya Angelou. She and Angelou used to argue about this all the time, because that did speak to Angelou, who did identify as a feminist.
I think, eventually, Mitford did wrap her mind around that, but her story allows us to tell a different story of radical feminism in America.
FR:
And what a great story it is that you tell in this book, Carla Kaplan, in Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford.
It's just been great to talk with you about this.
CK:
Thank you so much for having me back on. I remember from 10 years ago, you asked the best questions then and you ask the best questions now.
FR:
Oh, that's a great compliment. Thank you so much.