Our Secret by Susan Griffin

Perhaps no other event in modern history has left us so perplexed and dumbfounded than the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany, an entire population was simply robbed of their existence. In “Our Secret,” Susan Griffin tries to explain what could possibly lead an individual to execute such inhumane acts to a large group of people. She delves into Heinrich Himmler’s life and investigates all the events leading up to him joining the Nazi party. In“Panopticism,” Michel Foucault argues that modern society has been shaped by disciplinary mechanisms deriving from the plague as well as Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a structure with a tower in the middle meant for surveillance. Susan Griffin tries to explain what happened in Germany through Himmler’s childhood while Foucault better explains these events by describing how society as a whole operates.
Griffin spends a good portion of “Our Secret” writing about Himmler’s childhood. It is through his family’s history and child-rearing practices that she hopes to find answers. When Himmler is just ten years old he is told by his father that “his childhood is over now” (236). Himmler has to take himself seriously now and obey his father’s watchful eye. Everything Heinrich does from that point on is directly meant to influence his future and who he will become. This is a choice the society he is born into makes for him, he has no choice. Gebhard, Himmler’s father, is extremely overbearing and controlling of Himmler. Like many Germans of the time, he follows the advice of German child-rearing experts: “Crush the will. . .Establish dominance. Permit no disobedience. Suppress everything in the child” (237). German parents are taught that children “should be permeated by the impossibility from lock...

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...o fulfill his purpose in life made him an easy target and simple to influence. Heinrich found the structure and purpose society told him he needed by “following Hitler with an unwavering loyalty” (250).
Griffin believes that each individual is shaped by forces beyond their control, beginning in their childhood, and it is these particular events that shape and mold people into the person they later become. Hitler’s Nazi Germany can be explained partly because of child-rearing practices common during that time. While Griffin is not wrong, the events leading up to the Holocaust can be traced way further back than an individual like Himmler’s childhood. The events and attitudes in Nazi Germany take on a high resemblance and seem to be a product of the disciplinary mechanisms established by the plague. Germany was just another part of the Panopticon Foucault describes.