Ravenclaw House

Reading Journal 1

One of the elements necessary for a book to be deemed fantasy literature is a secondary world. However, for a book to be considered good fantasy literature that secondary world must be relatable in the struggles the characters are presented with. The secondary world of the Harry Potter series presents us with a vast and complex world that suffers from injustice, intolerance, and violence much like our own. The struggle between good and evil is present and we see a villain that looks remarkably like one from our own world. But just how similar is Voldemort to Hitler? Within the chapter “Was Voldemort a Nazi? Death Eater Ideology and National Socialism” Nancy Reagin explores this idea and shows that the biggest similarity did not fall in the Hitler-Voldemort comparison, but in the ideas propagated by their supporters.

Hitler and Voldemort were two very different men. Though they spouted the same ideas of ethnic cleansing and racial superiority, their means of achieving this was undoubtedly different. Hitler was a very charismatic man and an affluent speaker. He used this to legally obtain power, then shifted laws to be able to accomplish the unspeakable. The legality of what Hitler did is one of the reasons his success is so chilling. “Voldemort came to power using quite different means than did Hitler and, once in control, he seems to have been most concerned with safeguarding his own personal power and immortality” (132). Voldemort took power by force. He let his cronies infiltrate ministry positions, then bullied his way to power by threat of death to those who opposed him. He did not go into the spotlight like Hitler. He preferred the shadows. His lack of legal means to obtain power left him in a far different position than Hitler, where the law eventually came to his side, but was not originally with him.

The similarities between the reigns of these two infamous men come mostly from the ideologies they and their supporters believed in. They were supporters of Eugenics backed racial dominance. In the eyes of the Nazis, Jews were the lesser race and in order to get to the perfect (Aryan) race, they had to stop the mixing of Jews with Germans. Similarly, the Death Eaters thought that Muggles (those without magical abilities) were lesser and inhuman. In order to keep the wizarding world safe and in power, they felt that pureblooded wizards should never mix with muggles, and those who obtained magic without wizarding ancestry were the worst of them all.

How could they tell who was what? They looked at blood status. That is, they went back in your family tree a few generations to see how pure an individual’s blood was and determine their blood status. Anyone in the wizarding world with muggle blood was seen as inferior, and anyone with purely muggle blood was seen as having stolen their magic from a witch or wizard. To the Nazis, anyone with Jewish blood back to their grandparents were seen as unwanted because their blood was impure and irredeemable.

To keep the blood status checked, both the Nazis and the Death Eaters set up groups in charge of keeping track of this information. “Ultimately, the task of investigating the ancestry of every person in Germany proved so large that the Nazi government established the Kinship Research Office to collect records and issue so-called Aryan Passes…” (139). The task was one that took much research and the finding of birth certificates and marriage licensing. However, the wizarding world probably had it a little easier on keeping the status checked. With it being much smaller in population than Germany, there were less people to go through, and “…because in such a small population, those who had ‘unusual’ (not traditional wizarding) names must have stuck out (139). In this way they were able to execute their plans to create a pure bloodline in both worlds.

Though Hitler and Voldemort may not have been similar in their rise to power, or in what they wanted from their powerful positions, their supporters held the same views and pushed for the dominance over what they viewed as a lesser form of human. This realism of historical evil between the world of Harry Potter and our own allowed the readers to connect with the story and realize who the “bad guys” are. It added a complexity to this secondary world, and ultimately allowed the reader to fully engage with the series.