The Rise and Fall
of The Third Reich
By William L.Shirer
Chapter 3
of The Third Reich
By William L.Shirer
Chapter 3
VERSAILLES, WEIMAR
AND
THE BEER HALL
PUTSCH
To most men in the victorious Allied lands of the West, the proclamation of
the Republic in Berlin on November 9, 1918, had appeared to mark the dawn
of a new day for the German people and their nation. Woodrow Wilson, in the
exchange of notes which led to the armistice, had pressed for the abolition of
the Hohenzollern militarist autocracy, and the Germans had seemingly obliged
him, although reluctantly. The Kaiser had been forced to abdicate and to flee;
the monarchy was dissolved, all the dynasties in Germany were quickly done
away with, and republican government was proclaimed.
But proclaimed by accident! On the afternoon of November 9, the so-called
Majority Social Democrats under the leadership of Friedrich Ebert and Philipp
Scheidemann met in the Reichstag in Berlin following the resignation of the
Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden. They were sorely puzzled as to what to do.
Prince Max had just announced the abdication of the Kaiser. Ebert, a saddler
by trade, thought that one of Wilhelm’s sons – anyone except the dissolute
Crown Prince – might succeed him, for he favored a constitutional monarchy
on the British pattern. Ebert, though he led the Socialists, abhorred social
revolution. ”I hate it like sin,” he had once declared.
But revolution was in the air in Berlin. The capital was paralyzed by a general strike. Down the broad Unter den Linden, a few blocks from the Reichstag,
the Spartacists, led by the Left Socialists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht,
were preparing from their citadel in the Kaiser’s palace to proclaim a soviet republic. When word of this reached the Socialists in the Reichstag they were
consternated. Something had to be done at once to forestall the Spartacists.
Scheidemann thought of something. Without consulting his comrades he dashed
to the window overlooking the Koenigsplatz, where a great throng had gathered,
stuck his head out and on his own, as if the idea had just popped into his head,
proclaimed the Republic! The saddle maker Ebert was furious. He had hoped,
somehow, to save the Hohenzollern monarchy.
Thus was the German Republic born, as if by a fluke. If the Socialists
themselves were not staunch republicans it could hardly be expected that the conservatives would be. But the latter had abdicated their responsibility. They
and the Army leaders, Ludendorff and Hindenburg, had pushed political power
into the hands of the reluctant Social Democrats. In doing so they managed also
to place on the shoulders of these democratic working-class leaders apparent
responsibility for signing the surrender and ultimately the peace treaty, thus
laying on them the blame for Germany’s defeat and for whatever suffering a
lost war and a dictated peace might bring upon the German people. This was
a shabby trick, one which the merest child would be expected to see through,
but in Germany it worked. It doomed the Republic from the start.
Perhaps it need not have. In November 1918 the Social Democrats, holding
absolute power, might have quickly laid the foundation for a lasting democratic
Republic. But to have done so they would have had to suppress permanently,
or at least curb permanently, the forces which had propped up the Hohenzollern
Empire and which would not loyally accept a democratic Germany: the feudal
Junker landlords and other upper castes, the magnates who ruled over the great
industrial cartels, the roving condottieri of the free corps, the ranking officials of
the imperial civil service and, above all, the military caste and the members of
the General Staff. They would have had to break up many of the great estates,
which were wasteful and uneconomic, and the industrial monopolies and cartels,
and clean out the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the police, the universities and the
Army of all who would not loyally and honestly serve the new democratic regime.
This the Social Democrats, who were mostly well-meaning trade-unionists
with the same habit of bowing to old, established authority which was ingrained
in Germans of other classes, could not bring themselves to do. Instead they began by abdicating their authority to the force which had always been dominant
in modern Germany, the Army. For though it had been defeated on the battlefield the Army still had hopes of maintaining itself at home and of defeating
the revolution. To achieve these ends it moved swiftly and boldly.
On the night of November 9, 1918, a few hours after the Republic had been
”proclaimed,” a telephone rang in the study of Ebert in the Reich Chancellery
in Berlin. It was a very special telephone, for it was linked with Supreme Headquarters at Spa by a private and secret line. Ebert was alone. He picked up
the telephone. ”Groener speaking,” a voice said. The former saddle maker,
still bewildered by the day’s events which had suddenly thrust into his unwilling hands whatever political power remained in a crumbling Germany, was
impressed. General Wilhelm Groener was the successor of Ludendorff as First
Quartermaster General. Earlier on that very day at Spa it was he who, when
Field Marshal von Hindenburg faltered, had bluntly informed the Kaiser that
he no longer commanded the loyalty of his troops and must go – a brave act for
which the military caste never forgave him. Ebert and Groener had developed
a bond of mutual respect since 1916, when the General, then in charge of war
production, had worked closely with the Socialist leader. Early in November –
a few days before – they had conferred in Berlin on how to save the monarchy
and the Fatherland.
Now at the Fatherland’s lowest moment a secret telephone line brought them
together. Then and there the Socialist leader and the second-in-command of
the German Army made a pact which, though it would not be publicly known
for many years, was to determine the nation’s fate. Ebert agreed to put down
anarchy and Bolshevism and maintain the Army in all its tradition. Groener
thereupon pledged the support of the Army in helping the new government establish itself and carry out its aims.
”Will the Field Marshal (Hindenburg) retain the command?” Ebert asked.
General Groener replied that he would.
”Convey to the Field Marshal the thanks of the government,” Ebert
replied.89
The German Army was saved, but the Republic, on the very day of its birth,
was lost. The generals, with the honorable exception of Groener himself and
but few others, would never serve it loyally. In the end, led by Hindenburg, they
betrayed it to the Nazis.
At the moment, to be sure, the specter of what had just happened in Russia
haunted the minds of Ebert and his fellow Socialists. They did not want to
become the German Kerensky's. They did not want to be supplanted by the
Bolshevists. Everywhere in Germany the Soldiers’ and Workers’ Councils were
springing up and assuming power, as they had done in Russia. It was these
groups which on November 10 elected a Council of People’s Representatives,
with Ebert at its head, to govern Germany for the time being. In December the
first Soviet Congress of Germany met in Berlin. Composed of delegates from
the Soldiers’ and Workers’ Councils throughout the country, it demanded the
dismissal of Hindenburg, the abolition of the Regular Army and the substitution
of a civil guard whose officers would be elected by the men and which would be
under the supreme authority of the Council.
This was too much for Hindenburg and Groener. They declined to recognize
the authority of the Soviet Congress. Ebert himself did nothing to carry out
its demands. But the Army, fighting for its life, demanded more positive action
from the government it had agreed to support. Two days before Christmas the
People’s Marine Division, now under the control of the Communist Spartacists,
occupied the Wilhelmstrasse, broke into the Chancellery and cut its telephone
wires. The secret line to Army headquarters, however, continued to function and
over it Ebert appealed for help. The Army promised liberation by the Potsdam
garrison, but before it could arrive the mutinous sailors retired to their quarters
in the stables of the imperial palace, which the Spartacists still held.
The Spartacists, with Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the two most
effective agitators in Germany, at their head, continued to push for a soviet
republic. Their armed power in Berlin was mounting. On Christmas Eve the
Marine Division had easily repulsed an attempt by regular troops from Potsdam
to dislodge it from the imperial stables. Hindenburg and Groener pressed Ebert
to honor the pact between them and suppress the Bolshevists. This the Socialist
leader was only too glad to do. Two days after Christmas he appointed Gustav
Noske as Minister of National Defense, and from this appointment events proceeded with a logic which all who knew the new Minister might have expected.
Noske was a master butcher by trade who had worked his way up in the
trade-union movement and the Social Democratic Party, becoming a member
of the Reichstag in 1906, where he became recognized as the party’s expert
on military affairs. He also became recognized as a strong nationalist and as
a strong man. Prince Max of Baden had picked him to put down the naval
mutiny at Kiel in the first days of November and he had put it down. A stocky,
square-jawed man of great physical strength and energy, though of abbreviated
intelligence – typical, his enemies said, of his trade – Noske announced on his
appointment as Defense Minister that ”someone must be the bloodhound.”
Early in January 1919 he struck. Between January 10 and 17 – ’Bloody Week,” as it was called in Berlin for a time – regular and free-corps troops under
the direction of Noske and the command of General von Luttwitz∗
crushed the
Spartacists. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were captured and murdered
by officers of the Guard Cavalry Division.
∗A year later General Freiherr Walther von Luettwitz, a reactionary officer of the old
school, would show how loyal he was to the Republic in general and to Noske in particular
when he led free-corps troops in the capture of Berlin in support of the Kapp putsch. Ebert,
Noske and the other members of the government were forced to flee at five in the morning of
March 13, 1920. General von Seeckt, Chief of Staff of the Army and nominally subordinate to
Noske, the Minister of Defense, had refused to allow the Army to defend the Republic against
Luettwitz and Kapp. ”This night has shown the bankruptcy of all my policy,” Noske cried
out. ”My faith in the Officer Corps is shattered. You have all deserted me.” (Quoted by
Wheeler-Bennett in The Nemesis of.Power, p. 77.)
As soon as the fighting in Berlin was over, elections were held throughout
Germany for the National Assembly, which was to draw up the new constitution.
The voting, which took place on January 19, 1919, revealed that the middle
and upper classes had regained some of their courage in the little more than
two months which had elapsed since the ”revolution.” The Social Democrats
(the Majority and Independent Socialists), who had governed alone because no
other group would share the burden, received 13,800,000 votes out of 30,000,000
cast and won 185 out of 421 seats in the Assembly, but this was considerably
less than a majority. Obviously the new Germany was not going to be built by
the working class alone. Two middle-class parties, the Center, representing the
political movement of the Roman Catholic Church, and the Democratic Party,
born of a fusion in December of the old Progressive Party and the left wing of the
National Liberals, polled 11,500,000 votes between them and obtained 166 seats
in the Assembly. Both parties professed support for a moderate, democratic
Republic, though there was considerable sentiment for an eventual restoration
of the monarchy.
The Conservatives, some of whose leaders had gone into hiding in November
and others who, like Count von Westarp, had appealed to Ebert for protection, showed that though reduced in numbers they were far from extinguished.
Rechristened the German National People’s Party, they polled over three million votes and elected 44 deputies; their right-wing allies, the National Liberals,
who had changed their name to the German People’s Party, received nearly a
million and a half votes and won 19 seats. Though decidedly in the minority,
the two conservative parties had won enough seats in the Assembly to be vocal.
Indeed, no sooner had the Assembly met in Weimar on February 6, 1919, than
the leaders of these two groups sprang up to defend the name of Kaiser Wilhelm
II and the way he and his generals had conducted the war. Gustav Stresemann,
the head of the People’s Party, had not yet experienced what later seemed to
many to be a change of heart and mind. In 1919 he was still known as the
man who had been the Supreme Command’s mouthpiece in the Reichstag –
”Ludendorff's young man,” as he was called – a violent supporter of the policy
of annexation, a fanatic for unrestricted submarine warfare.
The constitution which emerged from the Assembly after six months of debate – it was passed on July 31, 1919, and ratified by the President on August
31 – was, on paper, the most liberal and democratic document of its kind the
twentieth century had seen, mechanically well-nigh perfect, full of ingenious and
admirable devices which seemed to guarantee the working of an almost flawless
democracy. The idea of cabinet government was borrowed from England and France, of a strong popular President from the United States, of the referendum
from Switzerland. An elaborate and complicated system of proportional representation and voting by lists was established in order to prevent the wasting of
votes and give small minorities a right to be represented in Parliament. ∗
∗There were flaws, to be sure, and in the end some of them proved disastrous. The system
of proportional representation and voting by list may have prevented the wasting of votes,
but it also resulted in the multiplication of small splinter parties which eventually made a
stable majority in the Reichstag impossible and led to frequent changes in government. In
the national elections of 1930 some twenty-eight parties were listed.
The Republic might have been given greater stability had some of the ideas of Professor
Hugo Preuss, the principal drafter of the constitution, not been rejected. He proposed at
Weimar that Germany be made into a centralized state and that Prussia and the other single
states be dissolved and transformed into provinces. But the Assembly turned his proposals
down.
Finally, Article 48 of the constitution conferred upon the President dictatorial powers during an emergency. The use made of this clause by Chancellors Bruening, von Papen and von
Schleicher under President Hindenburg enabled them to govern without approval of the Reichstag and thus, even before the advent of Hitler, brought an end to democratic parliamentary
government in Germany
The wording of the Weimar Constitution was sweet and eloquent to the
ear of any democratically minded man. The people were declared sovereign:
”Political power emanates from the people.” Men and women were given the
vote at the age of twenty. ”All Germans are equal before the law . . . Personal
liberty is inviolable . . . Every German has a right . . . to express his opinion
freely . . . All Germans have the right to form associations or societies . . . All
inhabitants of the Reich enjoy complete liberty of belief and conscience . . . ”
No man in the world would be more free than a German, no government more
democratic and liberal than his. On paper, at least.
THE SHADOW OF VERSAILLES
Before the drafting of the Weimar Constitution was finished an inevitable
event occurred which cast a spell of doom over it and the Republic which it
was to establish. This was the drawing up of the Treaty of Versailles. During
the first chaotic and riotous days of the peace and even after the deliberations
of the National Assembly got under way in Weimar the German people seemed
to give little thought to the consequences of their defeat. Or if they did, they
appeared to be smugly confident that having, as the Allies urged, got rid of the
Hohenzollerns, squelched the Bolshevists and set about forming a democratic,
republican government, they were entitled to a just peace based not on their
having lost the war but on President Wilson’s celebrated Fourteen Points.
German memories did not appear to stretch back as far as one year, to
March 3, 1918, when the then victorious German Supreme Command had imposed on a defeated Russia at Brest Litovsk a peace treaty which to a British
historian, writing two decades after the passions of war had cooled, was a ”humiliation without precedent or equal in modern history,”90 It deprived Russia
of a territory nearly as large as Austria-Hungary and Turkey combined, with
56,000,000 inhabitants, or 32 per cent of her whole population; a third of her
railway mileage, 73 per cent of her total iron ore, 89 per cent of her total coal
production; and more than 5,000 factories and industrial plants. Moreover,
Russia was obliged to pay Germany an indemnity of six billion marks.
The day of reckoning arrived for the Germans in the late spring of 1919. The
terms of the Versailles Treaty, laid down by the Allies without negotiation with
Germany, were published in Berlin on May 7. They came as a staggering blow
to a people who had insisted on deluding themselves to the last moment. Angry
mass meetings were organized throughout the country to protest against the
treaty and to demand that Germany refuse to sign it. Scheidemann, who had
become Chancellor during the Weimar Assembly, cried, ”May the hand wither
that signs this treaty!” On May 8 Ebert, who had become Provisional President,
and the government publicly branded the terms as ”unrealizable and unbearable.” The next day the German delegation at Versailles wrote the unbending
Clemenceau that such a treaty was ”intolerable for any nation.” What was so
intolerable about it? It restored Alsace-Lorraine to France, a parcel of territory to Belgium, a similar parcel in Schleswig to Denmark – after a plebiscite
– which Bismarck had taken from the Danes in the previous century after defeating them in war. It gave back to the Poles the lands, some of them only
after a plebiscite, which the Germans had taken during the partition of Poland.
This was one of the stipulations which infuriated the Germans the most, not
only because they resented separating East Prussia from the Fatherland by a
corridor which gave Poland access to the sea, but because they despised the
Poles, whom they considered an inferior race. Scarcely less infuriating to the
Germans was that the treaty forced them to accept responsibility for starting
the war and demanded that they turn over to the Allies Kaiser Wilhelm II and
some eight hundred other ”war criminals.”
Reparations were to be fixed later, but a first payment of five billion dollars
in gold marks was to be paid between 1919 and 1921, and certain deliveries
in kind, coal, ships, lumber, cattle, etc. – were to be made in lieu of cash
reparations.
But what hurt most was that Versailles virtually disarmed Germany ∗ and
thus, for the time being anyway, barred the way to German hegemony in Europe.
And yet the hated Treaty of Versailles, unlike that which Germany had imposed
on Russia, left the Reich geographically and economically largely intact and
preserved her political unity and her potential strength as a great nation.
∗It restricted the Army to 100,000 long-term volunteers and prohibited it from having
planes or tanks. The General Staff was also outlawed. The Navy was reduced to little more
than a token force and forbidden to build submarines or vessels over 10,000 tons.
The provisional government at Weimar, with the exception of Erzberger,
who urged acceptance of the treaty on the grounds that its terms could be
easily evaded, was strongly against accepting the Versailles Diktat, as it was
now being called. Behind the government stood the overwhelming majority of
citizens, from right to left.
And the Army? If the treaty were rejected, could the Army resist an inevitable Allied attack from the west? Ebert put it up to the Supreme Command, which had now moved its headquarters to Kolberg in Pomerania. On
June 17 Field Marshal von Hindenburg, prodded by General Groener, who saw
that German military resistance would be futile, replied:
In the event of a resumption of hostilities we can reconquer the
province of Posen [in Poland] and defend our frontiers in the east.
In the west, however, we can scarcely count upon being able to
withstand a serious offensive on the part of the enemy in view of the numerical superiority of the Entente and their ability to outflank us
on both wings.
The success of the operation as a whole is therefore very doubtful,
but as a soldier I cannot help feeling that it were better to perish
honorably than accept a disgraceful peace.
The concluding words of the revered Commander in Chief were in the best
German military tradition but their sincerity may be judged by knowledge of the
fact which the German people were unaware of – that Hindenburg had agreed
with Groener that to try to resist the Allies now would not only be hopeless
but might result in the destruction of the cherished officer corps of the Army
and indeed of Germany itself.
The Allies were now demanding a definite answer from Germany. On June
16, the day previous to Hindenburg’s written answer to Ebert, they had given
the Germans an ultimatum: Either the treaty must be accepted by June 24
or the armistice agreement would be terminated and the Allied powers would
”take such steps as they think necessary to enforce their terms.”
Once again Ebert appealed to Groener. If the Supreme Command thought
there was the slightest possibility of successful military resistance to the Allies,
Ebert promised to try to secure the rejection of the treaty by the Assembly. But
he must have an answer immediately. The last day of the ultimatum, June 24,
had arrived. The cabinet was meeting at 4:30 P.M. to make its final decision.
Once more Hindenburg and Groener conferred. ”You know as well as I do that
armed resistance is impossible,” the aging, worn Field Marshal said. But once
again, as at Spa on November 9, 1918, when he could not bring himself to tell
the Kaiser the final truth and left the unpleasant duty to Groener, he declined
to tell the truth to the Provisional President of the Republic. ”You can give
the answer to the President as well as I can,” he said to Groener.91 And again
the courageous General took the final responsibility which belonged to the Field
Marshal, though he must have known that it would eventually make doubly sure
his being made a scapegoat for the officer corps. He telephoned the Supreme
Command’s view to the President.
Relieved at having the Army’s leaders take the responsibility – a fact that
was soon forgotten in Germany – the National Assembly approved the signing
of the peace treaty by a large majority and its decision was communicated to
Clemenceau a bare nineteen minutes before the Allied ultimatum ran out. Four
days later, on June 28, 1919, the treaty of peace was signed in the Hall of Mirrors
in the Palace of Versailles.
A HOUSE DIVIDED
From that day on Germany became a house divided.
The conservatives would accept neither the treaty of peace nor the Republic
which had ratified it. Nor, in the long run, would the Army – General Groener
excepted – though it had sworn to support the new democratic regime and
had itself made the final decision to sign at Versailles. Despite the November
”revolution,” the conservatives still held the economic power. They owned the
industries, the large estates and most of the country’s capital. Their wealth could be used, and was, to subsidize political parties and a political press that
would strive from now on to undermine the Republic.
The Army began to circumvent the military restrictions of the peace treaty
before the ink on it was scarcely dry. And thanks to the timidity and shortsightedness of the Socialist leaders, the officer corps managed not only to maintain
the Army in its old Prussian traditions, as we have seen but to become the
real center of political power in the new Germany. The Army did not, until
the last days of the short-lived Republic, stake its fortunes on any one political movement. But under General Hans von Seeckt, the brilliant creator of
the 100,000-man Reichswehr, the Army, small as it was in numbers, became
a state within a state, exerting an increasing influence on the nation’s foreign
and domestic policies until a point was reached where the Republic’s continued
existence depended on the will of the officer corps.
As a state within a state it maintained its independence of the national government. Under the Weimar Constitution the Army could have been subordinated to the cabinet and Parliament, as the military establishments of the other
Western democracies were. But it was not. Nor was the officer corps purged
of its monarchist, antirepublican frame of mind. A few Socialist leaders such
as Scheidemann and Grzesinski urged ”democratizing” the armed forces. They
saw the danger of handing the Army back to the officers of the old authoritarian,
imperialist tradition. But they were successfully opposed not only by the generals but by their fellow Socialists, led by the Minister of Defense, Noske. This
proletarian minister of the Republic openly boasted that he wanted to revive
”the proud soldier memories of the World War.” The failure of the duly elected
government to build a new Army that would be faithful to its own democratic
spirit and subordinate to the cabinet and the Reichstag was a fatal mistake for
the Republic, as time would tell.
The failure to clean out ’the judiciary was another. The administrators of
the law became one of the centers of the counterrevolution, perverting justice
for reactionary political ends. ”It is impossible to escape the conclusion,” the
historian Franz L. Neumann declared, ”that political justice is the blackest
page in the life of the German Republic.”92 After the Kapp putsch in 1920
the government charged 705 persons with high treason; only one, the police
president of Berlin, received a sentence – five years of ”honorary confinement.”
When the state of Prussia withdrew his pension the Supreme Court ordered it
restored. A German court in December 1926 awarded General von Luettwitz,
the military leader of the Kapp putsch, back payment of his pension to cover
the period when he was a rebel against the government and also the five years
that he was a fugitive from justice in Hungary.
Yet hundreds of German liberals were sentenced to long prison terms on
charges of treason because they revealed or denounced in the press or by speech
the Army’s constant violations of the Versailles Treaty. The treason laws were
ruthlessly applied to the supporters of the Republic; those on the Right who
tried to overthrow it, as Adolf Hitler was soon to learn, got off either free or with
the lightest of sentences. Even the assassins, if they were of the Right and their
victims democrats, were leniently treated by the courts or, as often happened,
helped to escape from the custody of the courts by Army officers and right-wing
extremists.
And so the mild Socialists, aided by the democrats and the Catholic Centrists, were left to carry on the Republic, which tottered from its birth. They bore the hatred, the abuse and sometimes the bullets of their opponents, who
grew in number and in resolve. ”In the heart of the people,” cried Oswald Spengler, who had skyrocketed to fame with his book The Decline of the West, ”the
Weimar Constitution is already doomed.” Down in Bavaria the young firebrand
Adolf Hitler grasped the strength of the new nationalist, anti-democratic, anti-republican tide. He began to ride it. He was greatly aided by the course of
events, two in particular: the fall of the mark and the French occupation of the
Ruhr. The mark, as we have seen, had begun to slide in 1921, when it dropped
to 75 to the dollar; the next year it fell to 400 and by the beginning of 1923 to
7,000. Already in the fall of 1922 the German government had asked the Allies
to grant a moratorium on reparation payments. This the French government of
Poincare had bluntly refused. When Germany defaulted in deliveries of timber,
the hardheaded French Premier, who had been the wartime President of France,
ordered French troops to occupy the Ruhr. The industrial heart of Germany,
which, after the loss of Upper Silesia to Poland, furnished the Reich with four
fifths of its coal and steel production, was cut off from the rest of the country.
This paralyzing blow to Germany’s economy united the people momentarily
as they had not been united since 1914. The workers of the Ruhr declared a general strike and received financial support from the government in Berlin, which
called for a campaign of passive resistance. With the help of the Army, sabotage and guerrilla warfare were organized. The French countered with arrests,
deportations and even death sentences. But not a wheel in the Ruhr turned.
The strangulation of Germany’s economy hastened the final plunge of the
mark. On the occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923, it fell to 18,000 to the
dollar; by July 1 it had dropped to 160,000; by August 1 to a million. By
November, when Hitler thought his hour had struck, it took four billion marks
to buy a dollar, and thereafter the figures became trillions. German currency
had become utterly worthless. Purchasing power of salaries and wages was
reduced to zero. The life savings of the middle classes and the working classes
were wiped out. But something even more important was destroyed: the faith
of the people in the economic structure of German society. What good were
the standards and practices of such a society, which encouraged savings and
investment and solemnly promised a safe return from them and then defaulted?
Was this not a fraud upon the people?
And was not the democratic Republic, which had surrendered to the enemy
and accepted the burden of reparations, to blame for the disaster? Unfortunately for its survival, the Republic did bear a responsibility. The inflation
could have been halted by merely balancing the budget – a difficult but not
impossible feat. Adequate taxation might have achieved this, but the new government did not dare to tax adequately. After all, the cost of the war – 164
billion marks – had been met not even in part by direct taxation but 93 billions
of it by war loans, 29 billions out of Treasury bills and the rest by increasing the
issue of paper money. Instead of drastically raising taxes on those who could
pay, the republican government actually reduced them in 1921.
From then on, goaded by the big industrialists and landlords, who stood to
gain though the masses of the people were financially ruined, the government
deliberately let the mark tumble in order to free the State of its public debts,
to escape from paying reparations and to sabotage the French in the Ruhr.
Moreover, the destruction of the currency enabled German heavy industry to
wipe out its indebtedness by refunding its obligations in worthless marks. The General Staff, disguised as the ”Truppenamt” (Office of Troops) to evade the
peace treaty which supposedly had outlawed it, took notice that the fall of the
mark wiped out the war debts and thus left Germany financially unencumbered
for a new war.
The masses of the people, however, did not realize how much the industrial
tycoons, the Army and the State were benefiting from the ruin of the currency.
All they knew was that a large bank account could not buy a straggly bunch of
carrots, a half peck of potatoes, a few ounces of sugar, a pound of flour. They
knew that as individuals they were bankrupt. And they knew hunger when it
gnawed at them, as it did daily. In their misery and hopelessness they made
the Republic the scapegoat for all that had happened.
Such times were heaven-sent for Adolf Hitler.
REVOLT IN BAVARIA
”The government calmly goes on printing these scraps of paper because, if
it stopped, that would be the end of the government,” he cried. ”Because once
the printing presses stopped – and that is the prerequisite for the stabilization
of the mark – the swindle would at once be brought to light . . . Believe me, our
misery will increase. The scoundrel will get by. The reason: because the State
itself has become the biggest swindler and crook. A robbers’ state! . . . If the
horrified people notice that they can starve on billions, they must arrive at this
conclusion: we will no longer submit to a State which is built on the swindling
idea of the majority. We want a dictatorship . . . ”93
No doubt the hardships and uncertainties of the wanton inflation were driving millions of Germans toward that conclusion and Hitler was ready to lead
them on. In fact, he had begun to believe that the chaotic conditions of 1923 had
created an opportunity to overthrow the Republic which might not recur. But
certain difficulties lay in his way if he were himself to lead the counterrevolution,
and he was not much interested in it unless he was.
In the first place, the Nazi Party, though it was growing daily in numbers,
was far from being even the most important political movement in Bavaria, and
outside that state it was unknown. How could such a small party overthrow the
Republic? Hitler, who was not easily discouraged by odds against him, thought
he saw a way. He might unite under his leadership all the anti-republican, nationalist forces in Bavaria. Then with the support of the Bavarian government,
the armed leagues and the Reichswehr stationed in Bavaria, he might lead a
march on Berlin – as Mussolini had marched on Rome the year before – and
bring the Weimar Republic down. Obviously Mussolini’s easy success had given
him food for thought.
The French occupation of the Ruhr, though it brought a renewal of German
hatred for the traditional enemy and thus revived the spirit of nationalism,
complicated Hitler’s task. It began to unify the German people behind the
republican government in Berlin which had chosen to defy France. This was the
last thing Hitler wanted. His aim was to do away with the Republic. France
could be taken care of after Germany had had its nationalist revolution and
established a dictatorship. Against a strong current of public opinion Hitler
dared to take an unpopular line: ”No – not down with France, but down with the traitors of the Fatherland, down with the November criminals! That must
be our slogan.”94
All through the first months of 1923 Hitler dedicated himself to making the
slogan effective. In February, due largely to the organizational talents of Roehm,
four of the armed ”patriotic leagues” of Bavaria joined with the Nazis to form the
so-called Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Vaterlaendischen Kampfverbaende (Working
Union of the Fatherland Fighting Leagues) under the political leadership of
Hitler. In September an even stronger group was established under the name
of the Deutscher Kampfbund (German Fighting Union), with Hitler one of a
triumvirate of leaders. This organization sprang from a great mass meeting
held at Nuremberg on September 2 to celebrate the anniversary of the German
defeat of France at Sedan in 1870. Most of the fascist-minded groups in southern
Germany were represented and Hitler received something of an ovation after a
violent speech against the national government. The objectives of the new
Kampfbund were openly stated: overthrow of the Republic and the tearing up
of the Treaty of Versailles.
At the Nuremberg meeting Hitler had stood in the reviewing stand next to
General Ludendorff during a parade of the demonstrators. This was not by accident. For some time the young Nazi chief had been cultivating the war hero,
who had lent his famous name to the makers of the Kapp putsch in Berlin and
who, since he continued to encourage counterrevolution from the Right, might
be tempted to back an action which was beginning to germinate in Hitler’s
mind. The old General had no political sense; living now outside Munich, he
did not disguise his contempt for Bavarians, for Crown Prince Rupprecht, the
Bavarian pretender, and for the Catholic Church in this most Catholic of all
states in Germany. All this Hitler knew, but it suited his purposes. He did
not want Ludendorff as the political leader of the nationalist counterrevolution,
a role which it was known the war hero was ambitious to assume. Hitler insisted on that role for himself. But Ludendorff's name, his renown in the officer
corps and among the conservatives throughout Germany would be an asset to
a provincial politician still largely unknown outside Bavaria. Hitler began to
include Ludendorff in his plans.
In the fall of 1923 the German Republic and the state of Bavaria reached
a point of crisis. On September 26, Gustav Stresemann, the Chancellor, announced the end of passive resistance in the Ruhr and the resumption of German
reparation payments. This former mouthpiece of Hindenburg and Ludendorff,
a staunch conservative and, at heart, a monarchist, had come to the conclusion
that if Germany were to be saved, united and made strong again it must, at
least for the time being, accept the Republic, come to terms with the Allies and
obtain a period of tranquillity in which to regain its economic strength. To drift
any further would only end in civil war and perhaps in the final destruction of
the nation.
The abandonment of resistance to the French in the Ruhr and the resumption
of the burden of reparations touched off an outburst of anger and hysteria among
the German nationalists, and the Communists, who also had been growing in
strength, joined them in bitter denunciation of the Republic. Stresemann was
faced with serious revolt from both extreme Right and extreme Left. He had
anticipated it by having President Ebert declare a state of emergency on the
very day he announced the change of policy on the Ruhr and reparations. From
September 26, 1923, until February 1924, executive power in Germany under the Emergency Act was placed in the hands of the Minister of Defense, Otto
Gessler, and of the Commander of the Army, General von Seeckt. In reality this
made the General and his Army virtual dictators of the Reich.
Bavaria was in no mood to accept such a solution. The Bavarian cabinet
of Eugen von Knilling proclaimed its own state of emergency on September 26
and named the right-wing monarchist and former premier Gustav von Kahr
as State Commissioner with dictatorial powers. In Berlin it was feared that
Bavaria might secede from the Reich, restore the Wittelsbach monarchy and
perhaps form a South German union with Austria. A meeting of the cabinet
was hastily summoned by President Ebert, and General von Seeckt was invited
to attend. Ebert wanted to know where the Army stood. Seeckt bluntly told
him. ”The Army, Mr. President, stands behind me.”95
The icy words pronounced by the monocled, poker-faced Prussian Commander in Chief did not, as might have been expected, dismay the German President
or his Chancellor. They had already recognized the Army’s position as a state
within the State and subject only to itself. Three years before, as we have seen,
when the Kapp forces had occupied Berlin and a similar appeal had been made
to Seeckt, the Army had stood not behind the Republic but behind the General.
The only question now, in 1923, was where Seeckt stood.
Fortunately for the Republic he now chose to stand behind it, not because
he believed in republican, democratic principles but because he saw that for the
moment the support of the existing regime was necessary for the preservation of
the Army, itself threatened by revolt in Bavaria and in the north, and for saving
Germany from a disastrous civil war. Seeckt knew that some of the leading officers of the Army division in Munich were siding with the Bavarian separatists.
He knew of a conspiracy of the ”Black Reichswehr” under Major Buchrucker, a
former General Staff officer, to occupy Berlin and turn the republican government out. He now moved with cool precision and absolute determination, to set
the Army right and end the threat of civil war.
On the night of September 30, 1923, ”Black Reichswehr” troops under the
command of Major Buchrucker seized three forts to the east of Berlin. Seeckt
ordered regular forces to besiege them, and after two days Buchrucker surrendered. He was tried for high treason and actually sentenced to ten years of
fortress detention. The ”Black Reichswehr,” which had been set up by Seeckt
himself under the cover name of Arbeitskommandos (Labor Commandos) to
provide secret reinforcements for the 100,000-man Reichswehr, was dissolved. ∗
∗The ”Black Reichswehr” troops, numbering roughly twenty thousand, were stationed
on the eastern frontier to help guard it against the Poles in the turbulent days of 1920-
23. The illicit organization became notorious for its revival of the horrors of the medieval
Femegerichte – secret courts – which dealt arbitrary death sentences against Germans who
revealed the activities of the ”Black Reichswehr” to the Allied Control Commission. Several
of these brutal murders reached the courts. At one trial the German Defense Minister, Otto
Gessler, who had succeeded Noske, denied any knowledge of the organization and insisted that
it did not exist. But when one of his questioners protested against such innocence Gessler
cried, ”He who speaks of the ’Black Reichswehr’ commits an act of high treason!”
Seeckt next turned his attention to the threats of Communist uprisings in
Saxony, Thuringia, Hamburg and the Ruhr. In suppressing the Left the loyalty
of the Army could be taken for granted. In Saxony the Socialist-Communist
government was arrested by the local Reichswehr commander and a Reich Commissioner appointed to rule. In Hamburg and in the other areas the Communists
were quickly and severely squelched. It now seemed to Berlin that the relatively easy suppression of the Bolshevists had robbed the conspirators in Bavaria of
the pretext that they were really acting to save the Republic from Communism,
and that they would now recognize the authority of the national government.
But it did not turn out that way.
Bavaria remained defiant of Berlin. It was now under the dictatorial control
of a triumvirate: Kahr, the State Commissioner, General Otto von Lossow, commander of the Reichswehr in Bavaria, and Colonel Hans von Seisser, the head of
the state police. Kahr refused to recognize that President Ebert’s proclamation
of a state of emergency in Germany had any application in Bavaria. He declined
to carry out any orders from Berlin. When the national government demanded
the suppression of Hitler’s newspaper, the Voelkischer Beobachter, because of
its vitriolic attacks on the Republic in general and on Seeckt, Stresemann and
Gessler in particular, Kahr contemptuously refused.
A second order from Berlin to arrest three notorious leaders of some of the
armed bands in Bavaria, Captain Heiss, Captain Ehrhardt (the ”hero” of the
Kapp putsch) and Lieutenant Rossbach (a friend of Roehm), was also ignored
by Kahr. Seeckt, his patience strained, ordered General von Lossow to suppress
the Nazi newspaper and arrest the three free-corps men. The General, himself
a Bavarian and a confused and weak officer who had been taken in by Hitler’s
eloquence and Kahr’s persuasiveness, hesitated to obey. On October 24 Seeckt
sacked him and appointed General Kress von Kressenstein in his place. Kahr,
however, would not take this kind of dictation from Berlin. He declared that
Lossow would retain the command of the Reichswehr in Bavaria and defying not
only Seeckt but the constitution, forced the officers and the men of the Army
to take a special oath of allegiance to the Bavarian government.
This, to Berlin, was not only political but military rebellion, and General
von Seeckt was now determined to put down both.96
He issued a plain warning to the Bavarian triumvirate and to Hitler and
the armed leagues that any rebellion on their part would be opposed by force.
But for the Nazi leader it was too late to draw back. His rabid followers were
demanding action. Lieutenant Wilhelm Brueckner, one of his S.A. commanders,
urged him to strike at once. ”The day is coming,” he warned, ”when I won’t be
able to hold the men back. If nothing happens now, they’ll run away from us.”
Hitler realized too that if Stresemann gained much more time and began to
succeed in his endeavor to restore tranquillity in the country, his own opportunity would be lost. He pleaded with Kahr and Lossow to march on Berlin before
Berlin marched on Munich. And his suspicion grew that either the triumvirate
was losing heart or that it was planning a separatist coup without him for the
purpose of detaching Bavaria from the Reich. To this, Hitler, with his fanatical
ideas for a strong, nationalist, unified Reich, was unalterably opposed.
Kahr, Lossow and Seisser were beginning to lose heart after Seeckt’s warning. They were not interested in a futile gesture that might destroy them. On
November 6 they informed the Kampfbund, of which Hitler was the leading
political figure, that they would not be hurried into precipitate action and that
they alone would decide when and how to act. This was a signal to Hitler that
he must seize the initiative himself. He did not possess the backing to carry
out a putsch alone. He would have to have the support of the Bavarian state,
the Army and the police – this was a lesson he had learned in his beggarly
Vienna days. Somehow he would have to put Kahr, Lossow and Seisser in a
position where they would have to act with him and from which there would be no turning back. Boldness, even recklessness, was called for, and that Hitler
now proved he had. He decided to kidnap the triumvirate and force them to
use their power at his bidding.
The idea had first been proposed to Hitler by two refugees from Russia,
Rosenberg and Scheubner-Richter. The latter, who had ennobled himself with
his wife’s name and called himself Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, was a
dubious character who, like Rosenberg, had spent most of his life in the Russian
Baltic provinces and after the war made his way with other refugees from the
Soviet Union to Munich, where he joined the Nazi Party and became one of
Hitler’s close confidants.
On November 4, Germany’s Memorial Day (Totengedenktag) would be observed by a military parade in the heart of Munich, and it had been announced in
the press that not only the popular Crown Prince Rupprecht but Kahr, Lossow
and Seisser would take the salute of the troops from a stand in a narrow street
leading from the Feldherrnhalle. Scheubner-Richter and Rosenberg proposed to
Hitler that a few hundred storm troopers, transported by trucks, should converge on the little street before the parading troops arrived and seal it off with
machine guns. Hitler would then mount the tribune, proclaim the revolution
and at pistol point prevail upon the notables to join it and help him lead it.
The plan appealed to Hitler and he enthusiastically endorsed it. But, on the
appointed day, when Rosenberg arrived early on the scene for purposes of reconnaissance he discovered to his dismay that the narrow street was fully protected
by a large body of well-armed police. The plot, indeed the ”revolution,” had to
be abandoned.
Actually it was merely postponed. A second plan was concocted, one that could not be balked by the presence of a band of strategically located police. On the night of November 10-11, the S.A. and the other armed bands of the Kampfbund would be concentrated on the Froettmaninger Heath, just north of Munich, and on the morning of the eleventh, the anniversary of the hated, shameful armistice, would march into the city, seize strategic points, proclaim the national revolution and present the hesitant Kahr, Lossow and Seisser with a fait accompli.
At this point a not very important public announcement induced Hitler to drop that plan and improvise a new one. A brief notice appeared in the press that, at the request of some business organizations in Munich, Kahr would address a meeting at the Burgerbraukeller, a large beer hall on the southeastern outskirts of the city. The date was November 8, in the evening. The subject of the Commissioner’s speech, the notice said, would be the program of the Bavarian government. General von Lossow, Colonel von Seisser and other notables would be present.
Two considerations led Hitler to a rash decision. The first was that he suspected Kahr might use the meeting to announce the proclamation of Bavarian independence and the restoration of the Wittelsbachs to the Bavarian throne. All day long on November 8 Hitler tried in vain to see Kahr, who put him off until the ninth. This only increased the Nazi leader’s suspicions. He must forestall Kahr. Also, and this was the second consideration, the Burgerbraukeller meeting provided the opportunity which had been missed on November 4: the chance to rope in all three members of the triumvirate and at the point of a pistol force them to join the Nazis in carrying out the revolution. Hitler decided to act at once. Plans for the November 10 mobilization were called off; the storm troops were hastily alerted for duty at the big beer hall.
”The National Revolution has begun!” Hitler shouted. "This building is occupied by six hundred heavily armed men. No one may leave the hall. Unless there is immediate quiet I shall have a machine gun posted in the gallery. The Bavarian and Reich governments have been removed and a provisional national government formed. The barracks of the Reichswehr and police are occupied. The Army and the police are marching on the city under the swastika banner.”
This last was false; it was pure bluff. But in the confusion no one knew for sure. Hitler’s revolver was real. It had gone off. The storm troopers with their rifles and machine guns were real. Hitler now ordered Kahr, Lossow and Seisser to follow him to a nearby private room off stage. Prodded by storm troopers, the three highest officials of Bavaria did Hitler’s bidding while the crowd looked on in amazement.
But with growing resentment too. Many businessmen still regarded Hitler as something of an upstart. One of them shouted to the police, ”Don’t be cowards as in 1918. Shoot!” But the police, with their own chiefs so docile and the S.A. taking over the hall, did not budge. Hitler had arranged for a Nazi spy at police headquarters, Wilhelm Frick, to telephone the police on duty at the beer hall not to interfere but merely to report. The crowd began to grow so sullen that Goering felt it necessary to step to the rostrum and quiet them. ”There is nothing to fear,” he cried. ”We have the friendliest intentions. For that matter, you’ve no cause to grumble, you’ve got your beer!” And he informed them that in the next room a new government was being formed.
It was, at the point of Adolf Hitler’s revolver. Once he had herded his prisoners into the adjoining room, Hitler told them, ”No one leaves this room alive without my permission,” He then informed them they would all have key jobs either in the Bavarian government or in the Reich government which he was forming with Ludendorff. With Ludendorff? Earlier in the evening Hitler had dispatched Scheubner-Richter to Ludwigs Hoehe to fetch the renowned General, who knew nothing of the Nazi conspiracy, to the beerhouse at once.
The three prisoners at first refused even to speak to Hitler. He continued to harangue them. Each of them must join him in proclaiming the revolution and the new governments; each must take the post he, Hitler, assigned them, or "he has no right to exist.” Kahr was to be the Regent of Bavaria; Lossow, Minister of the National Army; Seisser, Minister of the Reich Police. None of the three was impressed at the prospect of such high office. They did not answer.
Their continued silence unnerved Hitler. Finally he waved his gun at them. ”I have four shots in my pistol! Three for my collaborators, if they abandon me. The last bullet for myself!” Pointing the weapon to his forehead, he cried, ”If I am not victorious by tomorrow afternoon, I shall be a dead man!”
Kahr was not a very bright individual but he had physical courage. ”Herr Hitler,” he answered, ”you can have me shot or shoot me yourself. Whether I die or not is no matter.”
Seisser also spoke up. He reproached Hitler for breaking his word of honor not to make a putsch against the police.
”Yes, I did,” Hitler replied. ”Forgive me, but I had to for the sake of the Fatherland.”
General von Lossow disdainfully maintained silence. But when Kahr started to whisper to him, Hitler snapped, ”Halt! No talking without my permission!”
He was getting nowhere with his own talk. Not one of the three men who held the power of the Bavarian state in their hands had agreed to join him, even at pistol point. The putsch wasn’t going according to plan. Then Hitler acted on a sudden impulse. Without a further word, he dashed back into the hall, mounted the tribune, faced the sullen crowd and announced that the members of the triumvirate in the next room had joined him in forming a new national government.
”The Bavarian Ministry,” he shouted, "is removed . . . The government of the November criminals and the Reich President are declared to be removed. A new national government will be named this very day here in Munich. A German National Army will be formed immediately . . . I propose that, until accounts have been finally settled with the November criminals, the direction of policy in the National Government be taken over by me. Ludendorff will take over the leadership of the German National Army . . . The task of the provisional German National Government is to organize the march on that sinful Babel, Berlin, and save the German people . . . Tomorrow will find either a National Government in Germany or us dead!”
Not for the first time and certainly not for the last, Hitler had told a masterful lie, and it worked. When the gathering heard that Kahr, General von Lossow and Police Chief von Seisser had joined Hitler its mood abruptly changed. There were loud cheers, and the sound of them impressed the three men still locked up in the little side room.
Scheubner-Richter now produced General Ludendorff, as if out of a hat. The war hero was furious with Hitler for pulling such a complete surprise on him, and when, once closeted in the side room, he learned that the former corporal and not he was to be the dictator of Germany his resentment was compounded. He spoke scarcely a word to the brash young man. But Hitler did not mind so long as Ludendorff lent his famous name to the desperate undertaking and won over the three recalcitrant Bavarian leaders who thus far had failed to respond to his own exhortations and threats. This Ludendorff proceeded to do. It was now a question of a great national cause, he said, and he advised the gentlemen to co-operate. Awed by the attention of the generalissimo, the trio appeared to give in, though later Lossow denied that he had agreed to place himself under Ludendorff’s command. For a few minutes Kahr fussed over the question of restoring the Wittelsbach monarchy, which was so dear to him. Finally he said he would co-operate as the ”King’s deputy.” Ludendorff’s timely arrival had saved Hitler. Overjoyed at this lucky break, he led the others back to the platform, where each made a brief speech and swore loyalty to each other and to the new regime. The crowd leaped on chairs and tables in a delirium of enthusiasm. Hitler beamed with joy. ”He had a childlike, frank expression of happiness that I shall never forget,” an eminent historian who was present later declared.97 Again mounting the rostrum, Hitler spoke his final word to the gathering:
I want now to fulfill the vow which I made to myself five years ago when I was a blind cripple in the military hospital: to know neither rest nor peace until the November criminals had been overthrown, until on the ruins of the wretched Germany of today there should have arisen once more a Germany of power and greatness, of freedom and splendor.
This meeting began to break up. At the exits Hess, aided by storm troopers, detained a number of Bavarian cabinet members and other notables who were trying to slip out with the throng. Hitler kept his eye on Kahr, Lossow and Seisser. Then news came of a clash between storm troopers of one of the fighting leagues, the Bund Oberland, and regular troops at the Army Engineers’ barracks. Hitler decided to drive to the scene and settle the matter personally, leaving the beer hall in charge of Ludendorff.
This turned out to be a fatal error. Lossow was the first to slip away.
He informed Ludendorff he must hurry to his office at Army headquarters to give the necessary orders. When Scheubner-Richter objected, Ludendorff rejoined stiffly, ”I forbid you to doubt the word of a German officer.” Kahr and Seisser vanished too,
Hitler, in high spirits, returned to the Burgerbrau to find that the birds had flown the coop. This was the first blow of the evening and it stunned him. He had confidently expected to find his ”ministers” busy at their new tasks while Ludendorff and Lossow worked out plans for the march on Berlin. But almost nothing was being done. Not even Munich was being occupied by the revolutionary forces. Roehm, at the head of a detachment of storm troopers from another fighting league, the Reichskriegsflagge, had seized Army headquarters at the War Ministry in the Schoenfeld Strasse but no other strategic centers were occupied, not even the telegraph office, over whose wires news of the coup went out to Berlin and orders came back, from General von Seeckt to the Army in Bavaria, to suppress the putsch.
Though there were some defections among the junior officers and some of the troops, whose sympathies were with Hitler and Roehm, the higher officers, led by General von Danner, commander of the Munich garrison, not only were prepared to carry out Seeckt’s command but were bitterly resentful of the treatment meted out to General von Lossow. In the Army’s code a civilian who pointed a revolver at a general deserved to be smitten by an officer’s side arms. From headquarters at the 19th Infantry barracks, where Lossow had joined Danner, messages went out to outlying garrisons to rush reinforcements to the city. By dawn Regular Army troops had drawn a cordon around Roehm’s forces in the War Ministry.
Before this action Hitler and Ludendorff joined Roehm at the ministry for a time, to take stock of the situation. Roehm was shocked to find that no one besides himself had taken military action and occupied the key centers. Hitler tried desperately to re-establish contact with Lossow, Kahr and Seisser. Messengers were dispatched to the 19th Infantry barracks in the name of Ludendorff but they did not return. Poehner, the former Munich police chief and now one of Hitler’s supporters, was sent with Major Huehnlein and a band of the S.A. troopers to occupy police headquarters. They were promptly arrested there.
And what of Gustav von Kahr, the head of the Bavarian government? After leaving the Burgerbraukeller he had quickly recovered his senses and his courage. Not wishing to take any more chances on being made a prisoner of Hitler and his rowdies, Kahr moved the government to Regensburg. But not before he had ordered placards posted throughout Munich carrying the following proclamation:
The deception and perfidy of ambitious comrades have converted a demonstration in the interests of national reawakening into a scene of disgusting violence. The declarations extorted from myself, General von Lossow and Colonel Seisser at the point of the revolver are null and void. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, as well as the fighting leagues Oberland and Reichskriegsflagge, are dissolved.
The triumph which earlier in the evening had seemed to Hitler so near and
so easily won was rapidly fading with the night. The basis for a successful
political revolution on which he had always insisted – the support of existing
institutions such as the Army, the police, the political group in power – was now
crumbling. Not even Ludendorff’s magic name, it was now clear, had won over
the armed forces of the state. Hitler suggested that perhaps the situation could
be retrieved if he and the General withdrew to the countryside near Rosenheim
and rallied the peasants behind the armed bands for an assault on Munich, but
Ludendorff promptly rejected the idea.
Or perhaps there was another way out which at least would avert disaster. On first hearing of the putsch, Crown Prince Rupprecht, a bitter personal enemy of Ludendorff, had issued a brief statement calling for its prompt suppression. Now Hitler decided to appeal to the Prince to intercede with Lossow and Kahr and obtain an honorable, peaceful settlement. A Lieutenant Neunzert, a friend of Hitler and of Rupprecht, was hurried off at dawn to the Wittelsbach castle near Berchtesgaden on the delicate mission. Unable to find an automobile, he had to wait for a train and did not arrive at his destination until noon, at which hour events were taking a turn not foreseen by Hitler nor dreamt of as possible by Ludendorff.
Hitler had planned a putsch, not a civil war. Despite his feverish state of excitement he was in sufficient control of himself to realize that he lacked the strength to overcome the police and the Army. He had wanted to make a revolution with the armed forces, not against them. Bloodthirsty though he had been in his recent speeches and during the hours he held the Bavarian triumvirs at gunpoint, he shrank from the idea of men united in their hatred of the Republic shedding the blood of each other.
So did Ludendorff. He would, as he had told his wife, string up President Ebert ”and Co.” and gladly watch them dangle from the gallows. But he did not wish to kill policemen and soldiers who, in Munich at least, believed with him in the national counterrevolution.
To the wavering young Nazi leader Ludendorff now proposed a plan of his own that might still bring them victory and yet avoid bloodshed. German soldiers, even German police – who were mostly ex-soldiers – would never dare, he was sure, to fire on the legendary commander who had led them to great victories on both the Eastern and the Western fronts. He and Hitler would march with their followers to the center of the city and take it over. Not only would the police and the Army not dare to oppose him, he was certain; they would join him and fight under his orders. Though somewhat skeptical, Hitler agreed. There seemed no other way out. The Crown Prince, he noted, had not replied to his plea for mediation.
Toward eleven o’clock on the morning of November 9, the anniversary of the proclamation of the German Republic, Hitler and Ludendorff led a column of some three thousand storm troopers out of the gardens of the Buergerbraukeller and headed for the center of Munich. Beside them in the front rank marched Goering, commander of the S.A., Scheubner-Richter, Rosenberg, Ulrich Graf, Hitler’s bodyguard, and half a dozen other Nazi officials and leaders of the Kampfbund. A swastika flag and a banner of the Bund Oberland were unfurled at the head of the column. Not far behind the first ranks a truck chugged along, loaded with machine guns and machine gunners. The storm troopers carried carbines, slung over their shoulders, some with fixed bayonets. Hitler brandished his revolver. Not a very formidable armed force, but Ludendorff, who had commanded millions of Germany’s finest troops, apparently thought it sufficient for his purposes.
A few hundred yards north of the beer cellar the rebels met their first obstacle. On the Ludwig Bridge, which leads over the River Isar toward the center of the city, stood a detachment of armed police barring the route. Goering sprang forward and, addressing the police commander, threatened to shoot a number of hostages he said he had in the rear of his column if the police fired on his men. During the night Hess and others had rounded up a number of hostages, including two cabinet members, for just such a contingency. Whether Goering was bluffing or not, the police commander apparently believed he was not and let the column file over the bridge unmolested.
At the Marienplatz the Nazi column encountered a large crowd which was listening to an exhortation of Julius Streicher, the Jew-baiter from Nuremberg, who had rushed to Munich at the first news of the putsch. Not wishing to be left out of the revolution, he cut short his speech and joined the rebels, jumping into step immediately behind Hitler.
Shortly after noon the marchers neared their objective, the War Ministry, where Roehm and his storm troopers were surrounded by soldiers of the Reichswehr. Neither besiegers nor besieged had yet fired a shot. Roehm and his men were all ex-soldiers and they had many wartime comrades on the other side of the barbed wire. Neither side had any heart for killing.
To reach the War Ministry and free Roehm, Hitler and Ludendorff now led their column through the narrow Residenzstrasse, which, just beyond the Feldherrnhalle, opens out into the spacious Odeonsplatz. At the end of the gully like street a detachment of police about one hundred strong, armed with carbines, blocked the way. They were in a strategic spot and this time they did not give way.
But once again the Nazis tried to talk their way through. One of them, the faithful bodyguard Ulrich Graf, stepped forward and cried out to the police officer in charge, ”Don’t shoot! His Excellency Ludendorff is coming!” Even at this crucial, perilous moment, a German revolutionary, even an old amateur wrestler and professional bouncer, remembered to give a gentleman his proper title. Hitler added another cry. ”Surrender! Surrender!” he called out. But the unknown police officer did not surrender. Apparently Ludendorff’s name had no magic sound for him; this was the police,’ not the Army.
Which side fired first was never established. Each put the blame on the other. One onlooker later testified that Hitler fired the first shot with his revolver. Another thought that Streicher did, and more than one Nazi later told this author that it was this deed which, more than any other, endeared him so long to Hitler.∗
∗Some years later, in approving Streicher’s appointment as Nazi leader for Franconia over the opposition of many party comrades, Hitler declared, ”Perhaps there are one or two who don’t like the shape of Comrade Streicher’s nose. But when he lay beside me that day on the pavement by the Feldherrnhalle, I vowed to myself never to forsake him so long as he did not forsake me,” (Heiden, Hitler: A Biography, p. 157.)
At any rate a shot was fired and in the next instant a volley of shots rang out from both sides, spelling in that instant the doom of Hitler’s hopes. Scheubner Richter fell, mortally wounded. Goering went down with a serious wound in his thigh. Within sixty seconds the firing stopped, but the street was already littered with fallen bodies – sixteen Nazis and three police dead or dying, many more wounded and the rest, including Hitler, clutching the pavement to save their lives.
There was one exception, and had his example been followed, the day might have had a different ending. Ludendorff did not fling himself to the ground. Standing erect and proud in the best soldierly tradition, with his adjutant, Major Streck, at his side, he marched calmly on between the muzzles of the police rifles until he reached the Odeonsplatz. He must have seemed a lonely and bizarre figure. Not one Nazi followed him. Not even the supreme leader, Adolf Hitler.
The future Chancellor of the Third Reich was the first to scamper to safety. He had locked his left arm with the right arm of Scheubner-Richter (a curious but perhaps revealing gesture) as the column approached the police cordon, and when the latter fell he pulled Hitler down to the pavement with him. Perhaps Hitler thought he had been wounded; he suffered sharp pains which, it was found later, came from a dislocated shoulder. But the fact remains that according to the testimony of one of his own Nazi followers in the column, the physician Dr. Walther Schulz, which was supported by several other witnesses, Hitler ”was the first to get up and turn back,” leaving his dead and wounded comrades lying in the street. He was hustled into a waiting motorcar and spirited off to the country home of the Hanfstaengls at Uffing, where Putzi’s wife and sister nursed him and where, two days later, he was arrested.
Ludendorff was arrested on the spot. He was contemptuous of the rebels who had not had the courage to march on with him, and so bitter against the Army for not coming over to his side that he declared henceforth he would not recognize a German officer nor ever again wear an officer’s uniform. The wounded Goering was given first aid by the Jewish proprietor of a nearby bank into which he had been carried and then smuggled across the frontier into Austria by his wife and taken to a hospital in Innsbruck. Hess also fled to Austria. Roehm surrendered at the War Ministry two hours after the collapse before the Feldherrnhalle. Within a few days all the rebel leaders except Goering and Hess were rounded up and jailed. The Nazi putsch had ended in a fiasco. The party was dissolved. National Socialism, to all appearances, was dead. Its dictatorial leader, who had run away at the first hail of bullets, seemed utterly discredited, his meteoric political career at an end.
Although Ludendorff was easily the most famous of the ten prisoners in the dock, Hitler at once grabbed the limelight for himself. From beginning to end he dominated the courtroom. Franz Guertner, the Bavarian Minister of Justice and an old friend and protector of the Nazi leader, had seen to it that the judiciary would be complacent and lenient. Hitler was allowed to interrupt as often as he pleased, cross-examine witnesses at will and speak on his own behalf at any time and at any length – his opening statement consumed four hours, but it was only the first of many long harangues.[yep,no theater in those days...DC]
He did not intend to make the mistake of those who, when tried for complicity in the Kapp putsch, had pleaded, as he later said, that ”they knew nothing, had intended nothing, wished nothing. That was what destroyed the bourgeois world – that they had not the courage to stand by their act . . . to step before the judge and say, 'Yes, that was what we wanted to do; we wanted to destroy the State.’ ”
Now before the judges and the representatives of the world press in Munich, Hitler proclaimed proudly, ”I alone bear the responsibility. But I am not a criminal because of that. If today I stand here as a revolutionary, it is as a revolutionary against the revolution. There is no such thing as high treason against the traitors of 1918.”
If there were, then the three men who headed the government, the Army and the police in Bavaria and who had conspired with him against the national government were equally guilty and should be in the dock beside him instead of in the witness stand as his chief accusers. Shrewdly he turned the tables on the uneasy, guilt-ridden triumvirs:
One thing was certain, Lossow, Kahr and Seisser had the same goal that we had – to get rid of the Reich government . . . If our enterprise was actually high treason, then during the whole period Lossow, Kahr and Seisser must have been committing high treason along with us, for during all these weeks we talked of nothing but the aims of which we now stand accused.
The three men could scarcely deny this, for it was true. Kahr and Seisser were no match for Hitler’s barbs. Only General von Lossow defended himself defiantly. ”I was no unemployed komitadji” he reminded the court. ”I occupied a high position in the State.” And the General poured all the scorn of an old Army officer on his former corporal, this unemployed upstart, whose overpowering ambition had led him to try to dictate to the Army and the State. How far this unscrupulous demagogue had come, he exclaimed, from the days, not so far distant, when he had been willing to be merely ”the drummer” in a patriotic movement!
A drummer merely? Hitler knew how to answer that:
How petty are the thoughts of small men! Believe me, I do not regard the acquisition of a minister’s portfolio as a thing worth striving for. I do not hold it worthy of a great man to endeavor to go down in history just by becoming a minister. One might be in danger of being buried beside other ministers. My aim from the first was a thousand times higher than becoming a minister. I wanted to become the destroyer of Marxism. I am going to achieve this task, and if I do, the title of Minister will be an absurdity so far as I am concerned.
He invoked the example of Wagner.
When I stood for the first time at the grave of Richard Wagner my heart overflowed with pride in a man who had forbidden any such inscription as ”Here lies Privy Councilor, Music Director, His Excellency Baron Richard von Wagner.” I was proud that this man and so many others in German history were content to give their names to history without titles. It was not from modesty that I wanted to be a drummer in those days. That was the highest aspiration – the rest is nothing.
He had been accused of wanting to jump from drummer to dictator. He would not deny it. Fate had decreed it.
The man who is born to be a dictator is not compelled. He wills it. He is not driven forward, but drives himself. There is nothing immodest about this. Is it immodest for a worker to drive himself toward heavy labor? Is it presumptuous of a man with the high forehead of a thinker to ponder through the nights till he gives the world an invention? The man who feels called upon to govern a people has no right to say, ”If you want me or summon me, I will co-operate.” No! It is his duty to step forward.
Though he might be in the dock facing a long prison sentence for high treason against his country, his confidence in himself, in the call to ”govern a people,” was undiminished. While in prison awaiting trial, he had already analyzed the reasons for the failure of the putsch and had vowed that he would not commit the same mistakes in the future. Recalling his thoughts thirteen years later after he had achieved his goal, he told his old followers, assembled at the Burgerbraukeller to celebrate the anniversary of the putsch, ”I can calmly say that it was the rashest decision of my life. When I think back on it today, I grow dizzy . . . If today you saw one of our squads from the year 1923 marching by, you would ask, ’What workhouse have they escaped from?’ . . . But fate meant well with us. It did not permit an action to succeed which, if it had succeeded, would in the end have inevitably crashed as a result of the movement’s inner immaturity in those days and its deficient organizational and intellectual foundation . . . We recognized that it is not enough to overthrow the old State, but that the new State must previously have been built up and be ready to one’s hand . . . In 1933 it was no longer a question of overthrowing a State by an act of violence; meanwhile the new State had been built up and all that remained to do was to destroy the last remnants of the old State – and that took but a few hours.”
How to build the new Nazi State was already in his mind as he fenced with the judges and his prosecutors during the trial. For one thing, he would have to have the German Army with him, not against him, the next time. In his closing address he played on the idea of reconciliation with the armed forces. There was no word of reproach for the Army.
I believe that the hour will come when the masses, who today stand in the street with our swastika banner, will unite with those who fired upon them . . . When I learned that it was the Green police which fired, I was happy that it was not the Reichswehr which had stained the record; the Reichswehr stands as untarnished as before. One day the hour will come when the Reichswehr will stand at our side, officers and men.
It was an accurate prediction, but here the presiding judge intervened. ”Herr Hitler, you say that the Green police was stained. That I cannot permit.”
The accused paid not the slightest attention to the admonition. In a peroration that held the audience in the courtroom spellbound Hitler spoke his final words:
The army we have formed is growing from day to day . . . I nourish the proud hope that one day the hour will come when these rough companies will grow to battalions, the battalions to regiments, the regiments to divisions, that the old cockade will be taken from the mud, that the old flags will wave again, that there will be a reconciliation at the last great divine judgment which we are prepared to face.
He turned his burning eyes directly on the judges.
For it is not you, gentlemen, who pass judgment on us. That judgment is spoken by the eternal court of history. What judgment you will hand down I know. But that court will not ask us, ”Did you commit high treason or did you not?” That court will judge us, the Quartermaster General of the old Army [Ludendorff], his officers and soldiers, as Germans who wanted only the good of their own people and Fatherland, who wanted to fight and die. You may pronounce us guilty a thousand times over, but the goddess of the eternal court of history will smile and tear to tatters the brief of the state prosecutor and the sentence of this court. For she acquits us.98
The sentences, if not the verdicts, of the actual judges were, as Konrad Heiden wrote, not so far from the judgment of history. Ludendorff was acquitted. Hitler and the other accused were found guilty. But in the face of the law – Article 81 of the German Penal Code – which declared that ”whosoever attempts to alter by force the Constitution of the German Reich or of any German state shall be punished by lifelong imprisonment,” Hitler was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in the old fortress of Landsberg. Even then the lay judges protested the severity of the sentence, but they were assured by the presiding judge that the prisoner would be eligible for parole after he had served six months. Efforts of the police to get Hitler deported as a foreigner – he still held Austrian citizenship – came to nothing. The sentences were imposed on April 1, 1924. A little less than nine months later, on December 20, Hitler was released from prison, free to resume his fight to overthrow the democratic state. The consequences of committing high treason, if you were a man of the extreme Right, were not unduly heavy, despite the law, and a good many anti-republicans took notice of it.
The putsch, even though it was a fiasco, made Hitler a national figure and, in the eyes of many, a patriot and a hero. Nazi propaganda soon transformed it into one of the great legends of the movement. Each year, even after he came to power, even after World War II broke out, Hitler returned on the evening of November 8 to the beer hall in Munich to address his Old Guard comrades – the alte Kaempfer, as they were called – who had followed the leader to what seemed then such a grotesque disaster. In 1935 Hitler, the Chancellor, had the bodies of the sixteen Nazis who had fallen in the brief encounter dug up and placed in vaults in the Feldherrnhalle, which became a national shrine. Of them Hitler said, in dedicating the memorial, ”They now pass into German immortality. Here they stand for Germany and keep guard over our people. Here they lie as true witnesses to our movement.” He did not add, and no German seemed to recall, that they were also the men whom Hitler had abandoned to their dying when he had picked himself up from the pavement and ran away.
That summer of 1924 in the old fortress at Landsberg, high above the River Lech, Adolf Hitler, who was treated as an honored guest, with a room of his own and a splendid view, cleared out the visitors who flocked to pay him homage and bring him gifts, summoned the faithful Rudolf Hess, who had finally returned to Munich and received a sentence, and began to dictate to him chapter after chapter of a book.∗
∗Before the arrival of Hess, Emil Maurice, an ex-convict, a watchmaker and the first commander of the Nazi ”strong-arm” squads, took some preliminary dictation,
∗”It is useless,” he wrote at the end of the second volume, ”to reopen wounds that seem scarcely healed; . . . useless to speak of guilt regarding men who in the bottom of their hearts, perhaps, were all devoted to their nation with equal love, and who only missed or failed to understand the common road.” For a man so vindictive as Hitler, this showed unexpected tolerance of those who had crushed his rebellion and jailed him; or, in view of what happened later to Kahr and others who crossed him, it was perhaps more a display of will power – an ability to restrain himself momentarily for tactical reasons. At any rate, he refrained from recrimination.
The first volume was published in the autumn of 1925. A work of some four hundred pages, it was priced at twelve marks (three dollars), about twice the price of most books brought out in Germany at that time. It did not by any means become an immediate best seller. Amann boasted that it sold 23,000 copies the first year and that sales continued upward – a claim that was received with skepticism in anti-Nazi circles.
Thanks to the Allied seizure in 1945 of the royalty statements of the Eher Verlag, the Nazi publishing firm, the facts about the actual sale of Mein Kampf can now be disclosed. In 1925 the book sold 9,473 copies, and thereafter for three years the sales decreased annually. They slumped to 6,913 in 1926, to 5,607 in 1927 and to a mere 3,015 in 1928, counting both volumes. They were up a little – to 7,664 – in 1929, rose with the fortunes of the Nazi Party in 1930, when an inexpensive one-volume edition at eight marks appeared, to 54,086, dropped slightly to 50,808 the following year and jumped to 90,351 in 1932.
Hitler’s royalties – his chief source of income from 1925 on – were considerable when averaged over those first seven years. But they were nothing compared to those received in 1933, the year he became Chancellor. In his first year of office Mein Kampf sold a million copies, and Hitler’s income from the royalties, which had been increased from 10 to 15 per cent after January 1, 1933, was over one million marks (some $300,000), making him the most prosperous author in Germany and for the first time a millionaire.∗ Except for the Bible, no other book sold as well during the Nazi regime, when few family households felt secure without a copy on the table. It was almost obligatory – and certainly politic – to present a copy to a bride and groom at their wedding, and nearly every school child received one on graduation from whatever school. By 1940, the year after World War II broke out, six million copies of the Nazi bible had been sold in Germany.99
∗Like most writers, Hitler had his difficulties with the income tax collector – at least, as we shall see, until he became the dictator of Germany
Not every German who bought a copy of Mein Kampf necessarily read it. I have heard many a Nazi stalwart complain that it was hard going and not a few admit – in private – that they were never able to get through to the end of its 782 turgid pages. But it might be argued that had more non-Nazi Germans read it before 1933 and had the foreign statesmen of the world perused it carefully while there still was time, both Germany and the world might have been saved from catastrophe. For whatever other accusations can be made against Adolf Hitler, no one can accuse him of not putting down in writing exactly the kind of Germany he intended to make if he ever came to power and the kind of world he meant to create by armed German conquest. The blueprint of the Third Reich and, what is more, of the barbaric New Order which Hitler inflicted on conquered Europe in the triumphant years between 1939 and 1945 is set down in all its appalling crudity at great length and in detail between the covers of this revealing book.
As we have seen, Hitler’s basic ideas were formed in his early twenties in Vienna, and we have his own word for it that he learned little afterward and altered nothing in his thinking. When he left Austria for Germany in 1913 at the age of twenty-four, he was full of a burning passion for German nationalism, a hatred for democracy, Marxism and the Jews and a certainty that Providence had chosen the Aryans, especially the Germans, to be the master race.
In Mein Kampf he expanded his views and applied them specifically to the problem of not only restoring a defeated and chaotic Germany to a place in the sun greater than it had ever had before but making a new kind of state, one which would be based on race and would include all Germans then living outside the Reich’s frontiers, and in which would be established the absolute dictatorship of the Leader – himself – with an array of smaller leaders taking orders from above and giving them to those below. Thus the book contains, first, an outline of the future German state and of the means by which it can one day become ”lord of the earth,” as the author puts it on the very last page; and, second, a point of view, a conception of life, or, to use Hitler’s favorite German word, a Weltanschauung. That this view of life would strike a normal mind of the twentieth century as a grotesque hodgepodge concocted by a half-baked, uneducated neurotic goes without saying. What makes it important is that it was embraced so fanatically by so many millions of Germans and that if it led, as it did, to their ultimate ruin it also led to the ruin of so many millions of innocent, decent human beings inside and especially outside Germany.
Now, how was the new Reich to regain her position as a world power and then go on to world mastery? Hitler pondered the question in the first volume, written mostly when he was in prison in 1924, returning to it at greater length in Volume Two, which was finished in 1926.
In the first place, there must be a reckoning with France, ”the inexorable mortal enemy of the German people.” The French aim, he said, would always be to achieve a ”dismembered and shattered Germany . . . a hodgepodge of little states.” This was so self-evident, Hitler added, that ”. . . if I were a Frenchman . . . I could not and would not act any differently from Clemenceau,” Therefore, there must be ”a final active reckoning with France . . . a last decisive struggle . . . only then will we be able to end the eternal and essentially so fruitless struggle between ourselves and France; presupposing, of course, that Germany actually regards the destruction of France as only a means which will afterward enable her finally to give our people the expansion made possible elsewhere.”100
Expansion elsewhere? Where? In this manner Hitler leads to the core of his ideas on German foreign policy which he was to attempt so faithfully to carry out when he became ruler of the Reich. Germany, he said bluntly, must expand in the East – largely at the expense of Russia.
In the first volume of Mein Kampf Hitler discoursed at length on this problem of Lebensraum – living space – a subject which obsessed him to his dying breath. The Hohenzollern Empire, he declared, had been mistaken in seeking colonies in Africa. ”Territorial policy cannot be fulfilled in the Cameroons but today almost exclusively in Europe.” But the soil of Europe was already occupied. True, Hitler recognized, ”but nature has not reserved this soil for the future possession of any particular nation or race; on the contrary, this soil exists for the people which possesses the force to take it.” What if the present possessors object? ”Then the law of self-preservation goes into effect; and what is refused to amicable methods, it is up to the fist to take,”101
Acquisition of new soil, Hitler continued, in explaining the blindness of German prewar foreign policy, ”was possible only in the East . . . If land was desired in Europe, it could be obtained by and large only at the expense of Russia, and this meant that the new Reich must again set itself on the march along the road of the Teutonic Knights of old, to obtain by the German sword sod for the German plow and daily bread for the nation.”102
As if he had not made himself entirely clear in the initial volume, Hitler returned to the subject in the second one.
Only an adequate large space on this earth assures a nation of freedom of existence . . . Without consideration of ”traditions” and prejudices the National Socialist movement, must find the courage to gather our people and their strength for an advance along the road that will lead this people from its present restricted living space to new land and soil . . . The National Socialist movement must strive to eliminate the disproportion between our population and our area – viewing this latter as a source of food as well as a basis for power politics . . . We must hold unflinchingly to our aim . . . to secure for the German people the land and soil to which they are entitled . . . 103
How much land are the German people entitled to? The bourgeoisie, says Hitler scornfully, ”which does not possess a single creative political idea for the future,” had been clamoring for the restoration of the 1914 German frontiers.
The demand for restoration of the frontiers of 1914 is a political absurdity of such proportions and consequences as to make it seem a crime. Quite aside from the fact that the Reich’s frontiers in 1914 were anything but logical. For in reality they were neither complete in the sense of embracing the people of German nationality nor sensible with regard to geo-military expediency. They were not the result of a considered political action, but momentary frontiers in a political struggle that was by no means concluded . . . With equal right and in many cases with more right, some other sample year of German history could be picked out, and the restoration of the conditions at that time declared to be the aim in foreign affairs.104
Hitler’s ”sample year” would go back some six centuries, to when the Germans were driving the Slavs back in the East. The push eastward must be resumed. "Today we count eighty million Germans in Europe! This foreign policy will be acknowledged as correct only if, after scarcely a hundred years, there are two hundred and fifty million Germans on this continent.”105 And all of them within the borders of the new and expanded Reich.
Some other peoples, obviously, will have to make way for so many Germans. What other peoples?
And so we National Socialists . . . take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze toward the land in the East.
If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal harder states,106
Fate, Hitler remarks, was kind to Germany in this respect. It had handed over Russia to Bolshevism, which, he says, really meant handing over Russia to the Jews. ”The giant empire in the East,” he exults, ”is ripe for collapse. And the end of Jewish rule in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state.” So the great steppes to the East, Hitler implies, could be taken over easily on Russia’s collapse without much cost in blood to the Germans.
Can anyone contend that the blueprint here is not clear and precise? France will be destroyed, but that is secondary to the German drive eastward. First the immediate lands to the East inhabited predominantly by Germans will be taken. And what are these? Obviously Austria, the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia and the western part of Poland, including Danzig. After that, Russia herself. Why was the world so surprised, then, when Chancellor Hitler, a bare few years later, set out to achieve these very ends?
On the nature of the future Nazi State, Hitler’s ideas in Mein Kampf are less concise. He made it clear enough that there would be no ”democratic nonsense” and that the Third Reich would be ruled by the Fuhrerprinzip, the leadership principle – that is, that it would be a dictatorship. There is almost nothing about economics in the book. The subject bored Hitler and he never bothered to try to learn something about it beyond toying with the crackpot ideas of Gottfried Feder, the crank who was against ”interest slavery.” [The author is showing his colors,defending usury D.C]
What interested Hitler was political power; economics could somehow take care of itself.
The state has nothing at all to do with any definite economic conception or development . . . The state is a racial organism and not an economic organization . . . The inner strength of a state coincides only in the rarest cases with so-called economic prosperity; the latter, in innumerable cases, seems to indicate the state’s approaching decline . . . Prussia demonstrates with marvelous sharpness that not material qualities but ideal virtues alone make possible the formation of a state. Only under their protection can economic life flourish. Always when in Germany there was an upsurge of political power the economic conditions began to improve; but always when economics became the sole content of our people’s life, stifling the ideal virtues, the state collapsed and in a short time drew economic life with it . . . Never yet has a state been founded by peaceful economic means . . . 107
Therefore, as Hitler said in a speech in Munich in 1923, ”no economic policy is possible without a sword, no industrialization without power.” Beyond that vague, crude philosophy and a passing reference in Mein Kampf to ”economic chambers,” ”chambers of estates” and a ”central economic parliament” which ”would keep the national economy functioning,” Hitler refrains from any expression of opinion on the economic foundation of the Third Reich.
And though the very name of the Nazi Party proclaimed it as ”socialist,” Hitler was even more vague on the kind of ”socialism” he envisaged for the new Germany. This is not surprising in view of a definition of a ”socialist” which he gave in a speech on July 28, 1922:
Whoever is prepared to make the national cause his own to such an extent that he knows no higher ideal than the welfare of his nation; whoever has understood our great national anthem, ”Deutschland ueber Alles,” to mean that nothing in the wide world surpasses in his eyes this Germany, people and land – that man is a Socialist.108
Considerable editorial advice and even pruning on the part of at least three helpers could not prevent Hitler from meandering from one subject to another in Mein Kampf. Rudolf Hess, who took most of the dictation first at Landsberg prison and later at Haus Wachenfeld near Berchtesgaden, did his best to tidy up the manuscript, but he was no man to stand up to the Leader. More successful in this respect was Father Bernhard Stempfle, a former member of the Hieronymite order and an anti-Semitic journalist of some notoriety in Bavaria. This strange priest, of whom more will be heard in this history, corrected some of Hitler’s bad grammar, straightened out what prose he could and crossed out a few passages which he convinced the author were politically objectionable. The third adviser was Josef Czerny, of Czech origin, who worked on the Nazi newspaper, Voelkischer Beobachter, and whose anti-Jewish poetry endeared him to Hitler. Czerny was instrumental in revising the first volume of Mein Kampf for its second printing, in which certain embarrassing words and sentences were eliminated or changed; and he went over carefully the proofs of Volume Two.
Nevertheless, most of the meanderings remained. Hitler insisted on airing his thoughts at random on almost every conceivable subject, including culture, education, the theater, the movies, the comics, art, literature, history, sex, marriage, prostitution and syphilis. Indeed, on the subject of syphilis, Hitler devotes ten turgid pages, declaring it is ”the task of the nation – not just one more task,” to eradicate it. To combat this dread disease Hitler demands that all the propaganda resources of the nation be mobilized. ”Everything,” he says, ”depends on the solution of this question.” The problem of syphilis and prostitution must also be attacked, he states, by facilitating earlier marriages, and he gives a foretaste of the eugenics of the Third Reich by insisting that ”marriage cannot be an end in itself, but must serve the one higher goal: the increase and preservation of the species and the race. This alone is its meaning and its task.”109
And so with this mention of the preservation of the species and of the race in Mein Kampf we come to the second principal consideration: Hitler’s Weltanschauung, his view of life, which some historians, especially in England, have seen as a crude form of Darwinism but which in reality, as we shall see, has its roots deep in German history and thought. Like Darwin but also like a whole array of German philosophers, historians, kings, generals and statesmen, Hitler saw all life as an eternal struggle and the world as a jungle where the fittest survived and the strongest ruled – a ”world where one creature feeds on the other and where the death of the weaker implies the life of the stronger.”
Mein Kampf is studded with such pronouncements: ”In the end only the urge for self-preservation can conquer . . . Mankind has grown great in eternal struggle, and only in eternal peace does it perish . . . Nature . . . puts living creatures on this globe and watches the free play of forces. She then confers the master’s right on her favorite child, the strongest in courage and industry . . . The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel . . . ” For Hitler the preservation of culture ”is bound up with the rigid law of necessity and the right to victory of the best and strongest in the world. Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight, in this world of eternal struggle, do not deserve to live. Even if this were hard – that is how it is!”110 And who is ”nature’s favorite child, the strongest in courage and industry” on whom Providence has conferred ”the master’s right”? The Aryan. Here in Mein Kampf we come to the kernel of the Nazi idea of race superiority, of the conception of the master race, on which the Third Reich and Hitler’s New Order in Europe were based. [The original gangster of the group of legends in their own minds DC]
All the human culture, all the results of art, science and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan. This very fact admits of the not unfounded inference that he alone was the founder of all higher humanity, therefore representing the prototype of all that we understand by the word ”man.” He is the Prometheus of mankind from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has sprung at all times, forever kindling anew that fire of knowledge which illumined the night of silent mysteries and thus caused man to climb the path to mastery over the other beings of this earth . . . It was he who laid the foundations and erected the walls of every great structure in human culture.111
And how did the Aryan accomplish so much and become so supreme? Hitler’s answer is: By trampling over others. Like so many German thinkers of the nineteenth century, Hitler fairly revels in a sadism (and its opposite, masochism) which foreign students of the German spirit have always found so difficult to comprehend.
Thus, for the formation of higher cultures the existence of lower human types was one of the most essential preconditions . . . It is certain that the first culture of humanity was based less on the tamed animal than on the use of lower human beings. Only after the enslavement of subject races did the same fate strike beasts. For first the conquered warrior drew the plow – and only after him the horse. Hence it is no accident that the first cultures arose in places where the Aryan, in his encounters with lower peoples, subjugated them and bent them to his will . . . As long as he ruthlessly upheld the master attitude, not only did he remain master, but also the preserver and increaser of culture.112
Then something happened which Hitler took as a warning to the Germans.
As soon as the subjected people began to raise themselves up and approach the level of their conqueror, a phase of which probably was the use of his language, the barriers between master and servant broke down.
But even worse than sharing the master’s language was something else.
The Aryan gave up the purity of his blood and, therefore, lost his sojourn in the paradise which he had made for himself. He became submerged in a racial mixture and gradually lost his cultural creativeness.
To the young Nazi leader this was the cardinal error.
Blood mixture and the resultant drop in the racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures; for men do not perish as a result of lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is continued only in pure blood. All who are not of good race in this world are chaff.113
Chaff were the Jews and the Slavs, and in time, when he became dictator and conqueror, Hitler would forbid the marriage of a German with any member of these races, though a fourth-grade schoolmarm could have told him that there was a great deal of Slavic blood in the Germans, especially in those who dwelt in the eastern provinces. In carrying out his racial ideas, it must again be admitted, Hitler was as good as his word. In the New Order which he began to impose on the Slavs in the East during the war, the Czechs, the Poles, the Russians were – and were to remain, if the grotesque New Order had endured – the hewers of wood and the drawers of water for their German masters.
It was an easy step for a man as ignorant of history and anthropology as Hitler to make of the Germans the modern Aryans – and thus the master race. To Hitler the Germans are ”the highest species of humanity on this earth” and will remain so if they ”occupy themselves not merely with the breeding of dogs, horses and cats but also with care for the purity of their own blood.”114”
Hitler’s obsession with race leads to his advocacy of the ”folkish” state. Exactly what kind of state that was – or was intended to be – I never clearly understood despite many re-readings of Mein Kampf and listening to dozens of addresses on the subject by the Fuehrer himself, though more than once I heard the dictator declare that it was the central point of his whole thinking. The German word Volk cannot be translated accurately into English. Usually it is rendered as ”nation” or ”people,” but in German there is a deeper and somewhat different meaning that connotes a primitive, tribal community based on blood and soil. In Mein Kampf Hitler has a difficult time trying to define the folkish state, announcing, for example, on page 379 that he will clarify ”the ’folkish’ concept” only to shy away from any clarification and wander off on other subjects for several pages. Finally he has a go at it:
In opposition to [the bourgeois and the Marxist-Jewish worlds], the folkish philosophy finds the importance of mankind in its basic racial elements. In the state it sees only – a means to an end and construes its end as the preservation of the racial existence of man. Thus, it by no means believes in an equality of races, but along with their difference it recognizes their higher or lesser value and feels itself obligated to promote the victory of the better and stronger, and demand the subordination of the inferior and weaker in accordance with the eternal will that dominates this universe. Thus, in principle, it serves the basic aristocratic idea of nature and believes in the validity of this law down to the last individual. It sees not only the different value of the races, but also the different value of individuals. From the mass it extracts the importance of the individual personality and thus . . . it has an organizing effect. It believes in the necessity of an idealization of humanity, in which alone it sees the premise for the existence of humanity. But it cannot grant the right to existence even to an ethical idea if this idea represents a danger for the racial life of the bearers of a higher ethics; for in a bastardized and niggerized world all the concepts of the humanly beautiful and sublime, as well as all ideas of an idealized future of our humanity, would be lost forever . . .
And so the folkish philosophy of life corresponds to the innermost will of nature, since it restores that free play of forces which must lead to a continuous mutual higher breeding, until at last the best of humanity, having achieved possession of this earth, will have a free path for activity in domains which will lie partly above it and partly outside it.
We all sense that in the distant future humanity must be faced by problems which only a highest race, become master people and supported by the means and possibilities of an entire globe, will be equipped to overcome.115
”Thus,” Hitler declares a little farther on, ”the highest purpose of a folkish state is concern for the preservation of those original racial elements which bestow culture and create the beauty and dignity of a higher mankind.”116 This again leads him to a matter of eugenics:
The folkish state . . . must set race in the center of all life. It must take care to keep it pure . . . It must see to it that only the healthy beget children; that there is only one disgrace: despite one’s own sickness and deficiencies, to bring children into the world; and one highest honor: to renounce doing so. And conversely it must be considered reprehensible to withhold healthy children from the nation. Here the [folkish] state must act as guardian of a millennial future in the face of which the wishes and the selfishness of the individual must appear as nothing and submit . . . A folkish state must therefore begin by raising marriage from the level of a continuous defilement of the race and give it the consecration of an institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape.117 [His delusion was strong,from my point of view,and with the advantage of hindsight,Hitler to me is and was the biggest useful idiot of the 20th Century DC]
Hitler’s fantastic conception of the folkish state leads to a good many other wordy considerations which, if heeded, he says, will bring the Germans the mastery of the earth – German domination has become an obsession with him. At one point he argues that the failure to keep the Germanic race simon-pure ”has robbed us of world domination. If the German people had possessed that herd unity which other peoples enjoyed, the German Reich today would doubtless be mistress of the globe.”118 Since a folkish state must be based on race, ”the German Reich must embrace all Germans” – this is a key point in his argument, and one he did not forget nor fail to act upon when he came to power.
Since the folkish state is to be based ”on the aristocratic idea of nature” it follows that democracy is out of the question and must be replaced by the Fuhrerprinzip. The authoritarianism of the Prussian Army is to be adopted by the Third Reich: ”authority of every leader downward and responsibility upward.”
There must be no majority decisions, but only responsible persons . . . Surely every man will have advisers by his side, but the decision will be made by one man.” . . . only he alone may possess the authority and the right to command . . . It will not be possible to dispense with Parliament. But their councilors will then actually give counsel . . . In no chamber does a vote ever take place. They are working institutions and not voting machines. This principle – absolute responsibility unconditionally combined with absolute authority – will gradually breed an elite of leaders such as today, in this era of irresponsible parliamentarianism, is utterly inconceivable.119
Such were the ideas of Adolf Hitler, set down in all their appalling crudeness as he sat in Landsberg prison gazing out at a flowering orchard above the River Lech,∗ or later, in 1925-26, as he reclined on the balcony of a comfortable inn at Berchtesgaden and looked out across the towering Alps toward his native Austria, dictating a torrent of words to his faithful Rudolf Hess and dreaming of the Third Reich which he would build on the shoddy foundations we have seen, and which he would rule with an iron hand. That one day he would build it and rule it he had no doubts whatsoever, for he was possessed of that burning sense of mission peculiar to so many geniuses who have sprouted, seemingly, from nowhere and from nothing throughout the ages. He would unify a chosen people who had never before been politically one. He would purify their race. He would make them strong. He would make them lords of the earth.
∗”Without my imprisonment,” Hitler remarked long afterward, ”Mein Kampf would never have been written. That period gave me the chance of deepening various notions for which I then had only an instinctive feeling . . . It’s from this time, too, that my conviction dates – a thing that many of my supporters never understood – that we could no longer win power by force. The state had had time to consolidate itself, and it had the weapons.” (Hitler’s Secret Conversations, p. 235.) The remark was made to some of his cronies at headquarters on the Russian front on the night of February 3-4, 1942.
A crude Darwinism? A sadistic fancy? An irresponsible egoism? A megalomania? It was all of these in part. But it was something more. For the mind and the passion of Hitler – all the aberrations that possessed his feverish brain – had roots that lay deep in German experience and thought. Nazism and the Third Reich, in fact, were but a logical continuation of German history.
But the onetime Vienna vagabond, however littered his mind, knew enough history to realize that there had been German failures in the past, failures that must be set against the successes of France and Britain. He never forgot that by the end of the Middle Ages, which had seen Britain and France emerge as unified nations, Germany remained a crazy patchwork of some three hundred individual states. It was this lack of national development which largely determined the course of German history from the end of the Middle Ages to midway in the nineteenth century and made it so different from that of the other great nations of Western Europe.
To the lack of political and dynastic unity was added, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the disaster of religious differences which followed the Reformation. There is not space in this book to recount adequately the immense influence that Martin Luther, the Saxon peasant who became an Augustinian monk and launched the German Reformation, had on the Germans and their subsequent history. But it may be said, in passing, that this towering but erratic genius, this savage anti-Semite and hater of Rome, who combined in his tempestuous character so many of the best and the worst qualities of the German – the coarseness, the boisterousness, the fanaticism, the intolerance, the violence, but also the honesty, the simplicity, the self-scrutiny, the passion for learning and for music and for poetry and for righteousness in the eyes of God – left a mark on the life of the Germans, for both good and bad, more indelible, more fateful, than was wrought by any other single individual before or since. Through his sermons and his magnificent translation of the Bible, Luther created the modern German language, aroused in the people not only a new Protestant vision of Christianity but a fervent German nationalism and taught them, at least in religion, the supremacy of the individual conscience. But tragically for them, Luther’s siding with the princes in the peasant risings, which he had largely inspired, and his passion for political autocracy ensured a mindless and provincial political absolutism which reduced the vast majority of the German people to poverty, to a horrible torpor and a demeaning subservience. Even worse perhaps, it helped to perpetuate and indeed to sharpen the hopeless divisions not only between classes but also between the various dynastic and political groupings of the German people. It doomed for centuries the possibility of the unification of Germany.
The Thirty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which ended it, brought the final catastrophe to Germany, a blow so devastating that the country has never fully recovered from it. This was the last of Europe’s great religious wars, but before it was over it had degenerated from a Protestant-Catholic conflict into a confused dynastic struggle between the Catholic Austrian Hapsburgs on the one side and the Catholic French Bourbons and the Swedish Protestant monarchy on the other. In the savage fighting, Germany itself was laid waste, the towns and countryside were devastated and ravished, the people decimated. It has been estimated that one third of the German people perished in this barbarous war.
The Peace of Westphalia was almost as disastrous to the future of Germany as the war had been. The German princes, who had sided with France and Sweden, were confirmed as absolute rulers of their little domains, some 350 of them, the Emperor remaining merely as a figurehead so far as the German lands were concerned. The surge of reform and enlightenment which had swept Germany at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries was smothered. In that period the great free cities had enjoyed virtual independence; feudalism was gone in them, the arts and commerce thrived. Even in the countryside the German peasant had secured liberties far greater than those enjoyed in England and France. Indeed, at the beginning of the sixteenth century Germany could be said to be one of the fountains of European civilization.
Now, after the Peace of Westphalia, it was reduced to the barbarism of Muscovy. Serfdom was reimposed, even introduced in areas where it had been unknown. The towns lost their self-government. The peasants, the laborers, even the middle-class burghers, were exploited to the limit by the princes, who held them down in a degrading state of servitude. The pursuit of learning and the arts all but ceased. The greedy rulers had no feeling for German nationalism and patriotism and stamped out any manifestations of them in their subjects. Civilization came to a standstill in Germany. The Reich, as one historian has put it, ”was artificially stabilized at a medieval level of confusion and weakness.”120
Germany never recovered from this setback. Acceptance of autocracy, of blind obedience to the petty tyrants who ruled as princes, became ingrained in the German mind. The idea of democracy, of rule by parliament, which made such rapid headway in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which exploded in France in 1789, did not sprout in Germany. This political backwardness of the Germans, divided as they were into so many petty states and isolated in them from the surging currents of European thought and development, set Germany apart from and behind the other countries of the West. There was no natural growth of a nation. This has to be borne in mind if one is to comprehend the disastrous road this people subsequently took and the warped state of mind which settled over it. In the end the German nation was forged by naked force and held together by naked aggression.
Beyond the Elbe to the east lay Prussia. As the nineteenth century waned, this century which had seen the sorry failure of the confused and timid liberals at Frankfurt in 1848-49 to create a somewhat democratic, unified Germany, Prussia took over the German destiny. For centuries this Germanic state had lain outside the main stream of German historical development and culture. It seemed almost as if it were a freak of history. Prussia had begun as the remote frontier state of Brandenburg on the sandy wastes east of the Elbe which, beginning with the eleventh century, had been slowly conquered from the Slavs. Under Brandenburg’s ruling princes, the Hohenzollerns, who were little more than military adventurers, the Slavs, mostly Poles, were gradually pushed back along the Baltic. Those who resisted were either exterminated or made landless serfs. The imperial law of the German Empire forbade the princes from assuming royal titles, but in 1701 the Emperor acquiesced in the Elector Frederick III’s being crowned King in Prussia at Koenigsberg.
By this time Prussia had pulled itself up by its own bootstraps to be one of the ranking military powers of Europe. It had none of the resources of the others. Its land was barren and bereft of minerals. The population was small. There were no large towns, no industry and little culture. Even the nobility was poor, and the landless peasants lived like cattle. Yet by a supreme act of will and a genius for organization the Hohenzollerns managed to create a Spartan military state whose well-drilled Army won one victory after another and whose Machiavellian diplomacy of temporary alliances with whatever power seemed the strongest brought constant additions to its territory.
There thus arose quite artificially a state born of no popular force nor even of an idea except that of conquest, and held together by the absolute power of the ruler, by a narrow-minded bureaucracy which did his bidding and by a ruthlessly disciplined army. Two thirds and sometimes as much as five sixths of the annual state revenue was expended on the Army, which became, under the King, the state itself. ”Prussia,” remarked Mirabeau, ”is not a state with an army, but an army with a state.” And the state, which was run with the efficiency and soullessness of a factory, became all; the people were little more than cogs in the machinery. Individuals were taught not only by the kings and the drill sergeants but by the philosophers that their role in life was one of obedience, work, sacrifice and duty. Even Kant preached that duty demands the suppression of human feeling, and the Prussian poet Willibald Alexis gloried in the enslavement of the people under the Hohenzollerns. To Lessing, who did not like it, ”Prussia was the most slavish country of Europe.”
The Junkers, who were to play such a vital role in modern Germany, were also a unique product of Prussia. They were, as they said, a master race. It was they who occupied the land conquered from the Slavs and who farmed it on large estates worked by these Slavs, who became landless serfs quite different from those in the West. There was an essential difference between the agrarian system in Prussia and that of western Germany and Western Europe. In the latter, the nobles, who owned most of the land, received rents or feudal dues from the peasants, who though often kept in a state of serfdom had certain rights and privileges and could, and did, gradually acquire their own land and civic freedom. In the West, the peasants formed a solid part of the community; the landlords, for all their drawbacks, developed in their leisure a cultivation which led to, among other things, a civilized quality of life that could be seen in the refinement of manners, of thought and of the arts.
The Prussian Junker was not a man of leisure. He worked hard at managing his large estate, much as a factory manager does today. His landless laborers were treated as virtual slaves. On his large properties he was the absolute lord. There were no large towns nor any substantial middle class, as there were in the West, whose civilizing influence might rub against him. In contrast to the cultivated grand seigneur in the West, the Junker developed into a rude, domineering, arrogant type of man, without cultivation or culture, aggressive, conceited, ruthless, narrow-minded and given to a petty profit-seeking that some German historians noted in the private life of Otto von Bismarck, the most successful of the Junkers.[This is interesting,anyone who reads Gustavus Myers 'History of the Great Americans Fortunes' cannot help seeing this same Junker like mindset in the great land grab here in America,particularly in New York and Penn. DC]
It was this political genius, this apostle of ”blood and iron,” who between 1866 and 1871 brought an end to a divided Germany which had existed for nearly a thousand years and, by force, replaced it with Greater Prussia, or what might be called Prussian Germany. Bismarck’s unique creation is the Germany we have known in our time, a problem child of Europe and the world for nearly a century, a nation of gifted, vigorous people in which first this remarkable man and then Kaiser Wilhelm II and finally Hitler, aided by a military caste and by many a strange intellectual, succeeded in inculcating a lust for power and domination, a passion for unbridled militarism, a contempt for democracy and individual freedom and a longing for authority, for authoritarianism. Under such a spell, this nation rose to great heights, fell and rose again, until it was seemingly destroyed with the end of Hitler in the spring of 1945 – it is perhaps too early to speak of that with any certainty.
”The great questions of the day,” Bismarck declared on becoming Prime Minister of Prussia in 1862, ”will not be settled by resolutions and majority votes – that was the mistake of the men of 1848 and 1849 – but by blood and iron.” That was exactly the way he proceeded to settle them, though it must be said that he added a touch of diplomatic finesse, often of the most deceitful kind. Bismarck’s aim was to destroy liberalism, bolster the power of conservatism that is, of the Junkers, the Army and the crown – and make Prussia, as against Austria, the dominant power not only among the Germans but, if possible, in Europe as well. ”Germany looks not to Prussia’s liberalism,” he told the deputies in the Prussian parliament, ”but to her force.”
Bismarck first built up the Prussian Army and when the parliament refused to vote the additional credits he merely raised them on his own and finally dissolved the chamber. With a strengthened Army he then struck in three successive wars. The first, against Denmark in 1864, brought the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein under German rule. The second, against Austria in 1866, had far-reaching consequences. Austria, which for centuries had been first among the German states, was finally excluded from German affairs. It was not allowed to join the North German Confederation which Bismarck now proceeded to establish.
”In 1866,” the eminent German political scientist Wilhelm Roepke once wrote, ”Germany ceased to exist.” Prussia annexed outright all the German states north of the Main which had fought against her, except Saxony; these included Hanover, Hesse, Nassau, Frankfurt and the Elbe duchies. All the other states north of the Main were forced into the North German Confederation. Prussia, which now stretched from the Rhine to Koenigsberg, completely dominated it, and within five years, with the defeat of Napoleon III’s France, the southern German states, with the considerable kingdom of Bavaria in the lead, would be drawn into Prussian Germany.121
Bismarck’s crowning achievement, the creation of the Second Reich, came on January 18, 1871, when King Wilhelm I of Prussia was proclaimed Emperor of Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Germany had been unified by Prussian armed force. It was now the greatest power on the Continent; its only rival in Europe was England.
Yet there was a fatal flaw. The German Empire, as Treitschke said, was in reality but an extension of Prussia. ”Prussia,” he emphasized, ”is the dominant factor . . . The will of the Empire can be nothing but the will of the Prussian state.” This was true, and it was to have disastrous consequences for the Germans themselves. From 1871 to 1933 and indeed to Hitler’s end in 1945, the course of German history as a consequence was to run, with the exception of the interim of the Weimar Republic, in a straight line and with utter logic.
Despite the democratic facade put up by the establishment of the Reichstag, whose members were elected by universal manhood suffrage, the German Empire was in reality a militarist autocracy ruled by the King of Prussia, who was also Emperor. The Reichstag possessed few powers; it was little more than a debating society where the representatives of the people let off steam or bargained for shoddy benefits for the classes they represented. The throne had the power – by divine right. As late as 1910 Wilhelm II could proclaim that the royal crown had been ”granted by God’s Grace alone and not by parliaments, popular assemblies and popular decision . . . Considering myself an instrument of the Lord,” he added, ”I go my way.”
He was not impeded by Parliament. The Chancellor he appointed was responsible to him, not to the Reichstag. The assembly could not overthrow a Chancellor nor keep him in office. That was the prerogative of the monarch. Thus, in contrast to the development in other countries in the West, the idea of democracy, of the people sovereign, of the supremacy of parliament, never got a foothold in Germany, even after the twentieth century began. To be sure, the Social Democrats, after years of persecution by Bismarck and the Emperor, had become the largest single political party in the Reichstag by 1912. They loudly demanded the establishment of a parliamentary democracy. But they were ineffective. And, though the largest party, they were still a minority. The middle classes, grown prosperous by the belated but staggering development of the industrial revolution and dazzled by the success of Bismarck’s policy of force and war, had traded for material gain any aspirations for political freedom they may have had.∗ They accepted the Hohenzollern autocracy. They gladly knuckled under to the Junker bureaucracy and they fervently embraced Prussian militarism. Germany’s star had risen and they – almost all the people – were eager to do what their masters asked to keep it high. At the very end, Hitler, the Austrian, was one of them. To him Bismarck’s Second Reich, despite its mistakes and its ”terrifying forces of decay” was a work of splendor in which the Germans at last had come into their own.
∗In a sense the German working class made a similar trade. To combat socialism Bismarck put through between 1883 and 1889 a program for social security far beyond anything known in other countries. It included compulsory insurance for workers against old age, sickness, accident and incapacity, and though organized by the State it was financed by employers and employees. It cannot be said that it stopped the rise of the Social Democrats or the trade unions, but it did have a profound influence on the working class in that it gradually made them value security over political freedom and caused them to see in the State, however conservative, a benefactor and a protector. Hitler, as we shall see, took full advantage of this state of mind. In this, as in other matters, he learned much from Bismarck. ”I studied Bismarck’s socialist legislation,” Hitler remarks in Mein Kampf (p. 155), ”in its intention, struggle and success.”
Was not Germany above all other countries a marvelous example of an empire which had risen from foundations of a policy purely of power? Prussia, the germ cell of the Empire, came into being through resplendent heroism and not through financial operations or commercial deals, and the Reich itself in turn was only the glorious reward of aggressive political leadership and the death defying courage of its soldiers .
The very founding of the [Second] Reich seemed gilded by the magic of an event which uplifted the entire nation. After a series of incomparable victories, a Reich was born for the sons and grandsons – a reward for immortal heroism . . . This Reich, which did not owe its existence to the trickery of parliamentary fractions, towered above the measure of other states by the very exalted manner of its founding; for not in the cackling of a parliamentary battle of words but in the thunder and rumbling of the front surrounding Paris was the solemn act performed: a proclamation of our will, declaring that the Germans, princes and people, were resolved in the future to constitute a Reich and once again to raise the imperial crown to symbolic heights . . . No deserters and slackers were the founders of the Bismarckian state, but the regiments at the front.
This unique birth and baptism of fire in themselves surrounded the Reich with a halo of historic glory such as only the oldest states , and they but seldom could boast.
And what an ascent now began!
Freedom on the outside provided daily bread within. The nation became rich in numbers and earthly goods. The honor of the state, and with it that, of the whole people, was protected and shielded by an army which could point most visibly to the difference from the former German Union,122
That was the Germany which Hitler resolved to restore. In Mein Kampf he discourses at great length on what he believes are the reasons for its fall: its tolerance of Jews and Marxists, the crass materialism and selfishness of the middle class, the nefarious influence of the ”cringers and lickspittles” around the Hohenzollern throne, the ”catastrophic German alliance policy” which linked Germany to the degenerate Hapsburgs and the untrustworthy Italians instead of with England, and the lack of a fundamental ”social” and racial policy. These were failures which, he promised, National Socialism would correct.
We have seen what they were as they thrashed about in Hitler’s mind: the glorification of war and conquest and the absolute power of the authoritarian state; the belief in the Aryans, or Germans, as the master race, and the hatred of Jews and Slavs; the contempt for democracy and humanism. They are not original with Hitler – though the means of applying them later proved to be. They emanate from that odd assortment of erudite but unbalanced philosophers, historians and teachers who captured the German mind during the century before Hitler with consequences so disastrous, as it turned out, not only for the Germans but for a large portion of mankind.
There had been among the Germans, to be sure, some of the most elevated minds and spirits of the Western world – Leibnitz, Kant, Herder, Humboldt, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Bach and Beethoven – and they had made unique contributions to the civilization of the West. But the German culture which became dominant in the nineteenth century and which coincided with the rise of Prussian Germany, continuing from Bismarck through Hitler, rests primarily on Fichte and Hegel, to begin with, and then on Treitschke, Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, and a host of lesser lights not the least of whom, strangely enough, were a bizarre Frenchman and an eccentric Englishman. They succeeded in establishing a spiritual break with the West; the breach has not been healed to this day.
In 1807, following Prussia’s humiliating defeat by Napoleon at Jena, Johann Gottlieb Fichte began his famous ”Addresses to the German Nation” from the podium of the University of Berlin, where he held the chair of philosophy. They stirred and rallied a divided, defeated people and their resounding echoes could still be heard in the Third Reich. Fichte’s teaching was heady wine for a frustrated folk. To him the Latins, especially the French, and the Jews are the decadent races. Only the Germans possess the possibility of regeneration. Their language is the purest, the most original. Under them a new era in history would blossom. It would reflect the order of the cosmos. It would be led by a small elite which would be free of any moral restraints of a ”private” nature.These are some of the ideas we have seen Hitler putting down in Mein Kampf. On Fichte’s death in 1814, he was succeeded by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel at the University of Berlin. This is the subtle and penetrating mind whose dialectics inspired Marx and Lenin and thus contributed to the founding of Communism and whose ringing glorification of the State as supreme in human life paved the way for the Second and Third Reich's of Bismarck and Hitler. To Hegel the State is all, or almost all. Among other things, he says, it is the highest revelation of the ”world spirit”; it is the ”moral universe”; it is ”the actuality of the ethical idea . . . ethical mind . . . knowing and thinking itself”; the State ”has the supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the State . . . for the right of the world spirit is above all special privileges . . . ”
And the happiness of the individual on earth? Hegel replies that ”world history is no empire of happiness. The periods of happiness,” he declares, ”are the empty pages of history because they are the periods of agreement, without conflict.” War is the great purifier. In Hegel’s view, it makes for ”the ethical health of peoples corrupted by a long peace, as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the result of a prolonged calm.”
No traditional conception of morals and ethics must disturb either the supreme State or the ”heroes” who lead it. ”World history occupies a higher ground . . . Moral claims which are irrelevant must not be brought into collision with world-historical deeds and their accomplishments. The litany of private virtues – modesty, humility, philanthropy and forbearance – must not be raised against them . . . So mighty a form [the State] must trample down many an innocent flower – crush to pieces many an object in its path.” [Just as nuts as Hitler DC]
Hegel foresees such a State for Germany when she has recovered her God given genius. He predicts that ”Germany’s hour” will come and that its mission will be to regenerate the world. As one reads Hegel one realizes how much inspiration Hitler, like Marx, drew from him, even if it was at second hand. Above all else, Hegel in his theory of ”heroes,” those great agents who are fated by a mysterious Providence to carry out ”the will of the world spirit,” seems to have inspired Hitler, as we shall see at the end of this chapter, with his own overpowering sense of mission. [Providence? more like a demon DC]
Heinrich von Treitschke came later to the University of Berlin. From 1874 until his death in 1896 he was a professor of history there and a popular one, his lectures being attended by large and enthusiastic gatherings which included not only students but General Staff officers and officials of the Junker bureaucracy. His influence on German thought in the last quarter of the century was enormous and it continued through Wilhelm II’s day and indeed Hitler’s. Though he was a Saxon, he became the great Prussianizer; he was more Prussian than the Prussians. Like Hegel he glorifies the State and conceives of it as supreme, but his attitude is more brutish: the people, the subjects, are to be little more than slaves in the nation. ”It does not matter what you think,” he exclaims, ”so long as you obey.”
And Treitschke outdoes Hegel in proclaiming war as the highest expression of man. To him ”martial glory is the basis of all the political virtues; in the rich treasure of Germany’s glories the Prussian military glory is a jewel as precious as the masterpieces of our poets and thinkers.” He holds that ”to play blindly with peace . . . has become the shame of the thought and morality of our age.”
War is not only a practical necessity, it is also a theoretical necessity,an exigency of logic. The concept of the State implies the concept of war, for the essence of the State is power . . . "That war should ever be banished from the world is a hope not only absurd, but profoundly immoral. It would involve the atrophy of many of the essential and sublime forces of the human soul . . . A people which become attached to the chimerical hope of perpetual peace finishes irremediably by decaying in its proud isolation . . . ”
Nietzsche, like Goethe, held no high opinion of the German people, ∗ and in other ways, too, the outpourings of this megalomaniacal genius differ from those of the chauvinistic German thinkers of the nineteenth century. Indeed, he regarded most German philosophers, including Fichte and Hegel, as ”unconscious swindlers.” He poked fun at the ”Tartuffery of old Kant.” The Germans, he wrote in Ecce Homo, ”have no conception how vile they are,” and he came to the conclusion that ”wheresoever Germany penetrated, she ruins culture.” He thought that Christians, as much as Jews, were responsible for the ”slave morality” prevalent in the world; he was never an anti-Semite. He was sometimes fearful of Prussia’s future, and in his last years, before insanity closed down his mind, he even toyed with the idea of European union and world government.
∗”I have often felt,” Goethe once said, ”a bitter sorrow at the thought of the German people, which is so estimable in the individual and so wretched in the generality. A comparison of the German people with other peoples arouses a painful feeling, which I try to overcome in every possible way.” (Conversation with H. Luden on December 13, 1813, in Goethes Gespraeche, Auswahl Biedermann; quoted by Wilhelm Roepke in The Solution of the German Problem, p. 131.)
Yet I think no one who lived in the Third Reich could have failed to be impressed by Nietzsche’s influence on it. His books might be full, as Santayana said, of ”genial imbecility” and ”boyish blasphemies.” Yet Nazi scribblers never tired of extolling him. Hitler often visited the Nietzsche museum in Weimar and publicized his veneration for the philosopher by posing for photographs of himself staring in rapture at the bust of the great man.
There was some ground for this appropriation of Nietzsche as one of the originators of the Nazi Weltanschauung. Had not the philosopher thundered against democracy and parliaments, preached the will to power, praised war and proclaimed the coming of the master race and the superman – and in the most telling aphorisms? A Nazi could proudly quote him on almost every conceivable subject, and did. On Christianity: ”the one great curse, the one enormous and innermost perversion . . . I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind . . . This Christianity is no more than the typical teaching of the Socialists.” On the State, power and the jungle world of man: ”Society has never regarded virtue as anything else than as a means to strength, power and order. The State is unmorality organized . . . the will to war, to conquest and revenge . . . Society is not entitled to exist for its own sake but only as a substructure and scaffolding, by means of which a select race of beings may elevate themselves to their higher duties . . . There is no such thing as the right to live, the right to work, or the right to be happy: in this respect man is no different from the meanest worm.” † And he exalted the superman as the beast of prey, ”the magnificent blond brute, avidly rampant for spoil and victory.”
†Women, whom Nietzsche never had, he consigned to a distinctly inferior status, as did the Nazis, who decreed that their place was in the kitchen and their chief role in life to beget children for German warriors. Nietzsche put the idea this way: ”Man shall be trained for war and woman for the procreation of the warrior. AH else is folly.” He went further. In Thus Spake Zarathustra he exclaims: ”Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip!” – which prompted Bertrand Russell to quip, ”Nine women out of ten would have got the whip away from him, and he knew it, so he kept away from women . . . ”
And war? Here Nietzsche took the view of most of the other nineteenth century German thinkers. In the thundering Old Testament language in which Thus Spake Zarathustra is written, the philosopher cries out: ”Ye shall love peace as a means to new war, and the short peace more than the long. You I advise not to work, but to fight. You I advise not to peace but to victory . . . Ye say it is the good cause which halloweth even war? I say unto you: it is the good war which halloweth every cause. War and courage have done more great things than charity.”
Finally there was Nietzsche’s prophecy of the coming elite who would rule the world and from whom the superman would spring. In The Will to Power he exclaims: ”A daring and ruler race is building itself up . . . The aim should be to prepare a transvaluation of values for a particularly strong kind of man, most highly gifted in intellect and will. This man and the elite around him will become the ”lords of the earth.”
Such rantings from one of Germany’s most original minds must have struck a responsive chord in Hitler’s littered mind. At any rate he appropriated them for his own – not only the thoughts but the philosopher’s penchant for grotesque exaggeration, and often his very words. ”Lords of the Earth” is a familiar expression in Mein Kampf. That in the end Hitler considered himself the superman of Nietzsche’s prophecy can not be doubted.
”Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner,” Hitler used to say.∗ This may have been based on a partial misconception of the great composer, for though Richard Wagner harbored a fanatical hatred, as Hitler did, for the Jews, who he was convinced were out to dominate the world with their money, and though he scorned parliaments and democracy and the materialism and mediocrity of the bourgeoisie, he also fervently hoped that the Germans, ”with their special gifts,” would ”become not rulers, but enablers of the world.”
∗My own recollection is confirmed by Otto Tolischus in his They Wanted War, p. 11. It was not his political writings, however, but his towering operas, recalling so vividly the world of German antiquity with its heroic myths, its fighting pagan gods and heroes, its demons and dragons, its blood feuds and primitive tribal codes, its sense of destiny, of the splendor of love and life and the nobility of death, which inspired the myths of modern Germany and gave it a Germanic Weltanschauung which Hitler and the Nazis, with some justification, took over as their own.
From his earliest days Hitler worshiped Wagner, and even as his life neared a close, in the damp and dreary bunker at Army headquarters on the Russian front, with his world and his dreams beginning to crack and crumble, he loved to reminisce about all the times he had heard the great Wagnerian works, of what they had meant to him and of the inspiration he had derived from the Bayreuth Festival and from his countless visits to Haus Wahnfried, the composer’s home, where Siegfried Wagner, the composer’s son, still lived with his English-born wife, Winifred, who for a while was one of his revered friends.
”What joy each of Wagner’s works has given me!” Hitler exclaims on the evening of January 24-25,1942, soon after the first disastrous German defeats in Russia, as he discourses to his generals and party cronies, Himmler among them, in the depths of the underground shelter of Wolfsschanze at Rastenburg in East Prussia. Outside there is snow and an arctic cold, the elements which he so hated and feared and which had contributed to the first German military setback of the war. But in the warmth of the bunker his thoughts on this night, at least, are on one of the great inspirations of his life. ”I remember,” he says, ”my emotion the first time I entered Wahnfried. To say I was moved is an understatement! At my worst moments, they never ceased to sustain me, even Siegfried Wagner. I was on Christian-name terms with them. I loved them all, and I also love Wahnfried . . . The ten days of the Bayreuth season were always one of the blessed seasons of my existence. And I rejoice at the idea that one day I shall be able to resume the pilgrimage! . . . On the day following the end of the Bayreuth Festival . . . I’m gripped by a great sadness – as when one strips the Christmas tree of its ornaments.”123
Though Hitler reiterated in his monologue that winter evening that to him Tristan und Isolde was ”Wagner’s masterpiece,” it is the stupendous Nibelungen Ring, a series of four operas which was inspired by the great German epic myth, Nibelungenlied, and on which the composer worked for the better part of twenty-five years, that gave Germany and especially the Third Reich so much of its primitive Germanic mythos. Often a people’s myths are the highest and truest expression of its spirit and culture, and nowhere is this more true than in Germany. Schelling even argued that ”a nation comes into existence with its mythology . . . The unity of its thinking, which means a collective philosophy, [is] presented in its mythology; therefore its mythology contains the fate of the nation.” And Max Mell, a contemporary poet, who wrote a modern version of the Song of the Nibelungs, declared, ”Today only little has remained of the Greek gods that humanism wanted to implant so deeply into our culture . . . But Siegfried and Kriemhild were always in the people’s soul!”
Siegfried and Kriemhild, Brunhild and Hagen – these are the ancient heroes and heroines with whom so many modern Germans liked to identify themselves. With them, and with the world of the barbaric, pagan Nibelungs – an irrational, heroic, mystic world, beset by treachery, overwhelmed by violence, drowned in blood, and culminating in the Gotterdammerung, the twilight of the gods, as Valhalla, set on fire by Wotan after all his vicissitudes, goes up in flames in an orgy of self-willed annihilation which has always fascinated the German mind and answered some terrible longing in the German soul. These heroes, this primitive, demonic world, were always, in Mell’s words, ”in the people’s soul.” In that German soul could be felt the struggle between the spirit of civilization and the spirit of the Nibelungs, and in the time with which this history is concerned the latter seemed to gain the upper hand. It is not at all surprising that Hitler tried to emulate Wotan when in 1945 he willed the destruction of Germany so that it might go down in flames with him.
Wagner, a man of staggering genius, an artist of incredible magnitude, stood for much more than has been set down here. The conflict in the Ring operas often revolves around the theme of greed for gold, which the composer equated with the ”tragedy of modern capitalism,” and which he saw, with horror, wiping out the old virtues which had come down from an earlier day. Despite all his pagan heroes he did not entirely despair of Christianity, as Nietzsche did. And he had great compassion for the erring, warring human race. But Hitler was not entirely wrong in saying that to understand Nazism one must first know Wagner.
Wagner had known, and been influenced by, first Schopenhauer and then Nietzsche, though the latter quarreled with him because he thought his operas, especially Parsifal, showed too much Christian renunciation. In the course of his long and stormy life, Wagner came into contact with two other men, one a Frenchman, the other an Englishman, who are important to this history not so much for the impression they made on him, though in one case it was considerable, as for their effect on the German mind, which they helped to direct toward the coming of the Third Reich.
These individuals were Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a French diplomat and man of letters, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, one of the strangest Englishmen who ever lived.
Neither man, be it said at once, was a mountebank. Both were men of immense erudition, deep culture and wide experience of travel. Yet both concocted racial doctrines so spurious that no people, not even their own, took them seriously with the single exception of the Germans. To the Nazis their questionable theories became gospel. It is probably no exaggeration to say, as I have heard more than one follower of Hitler say, that Chamberlain was the spiritual founder of the Third Reich. This singular Englishman, who came to see in the Germans the master race, the hope of the future, worshiped Richard Wagner, one of whose daughters he eventually married; he venerated first Wilhelm II and finally Hitler and was the mentor of both. At the end of a fantastic life he could hail the Austrian corporal – and this long before Hitler came to power or had any prospect of it – as a being sent by God to lead the German people out of the wilderness. Hitler, not unnaturally, regarded Chamberlain as a prophet, as indeed he turned out to be.
What was it in the teaching of these two men that inoculated the Germans with a madness on the question of race and German destiny?
Gobineau’s chief contribution was a four-volume work which was published in Paris between 1853 and 1855, entitled Essai sur L’Inegalite des Races Humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races). Ironically enough, this French aristocrat, after serving as an officer in the Royal Guard, had started his public career as chef de cabinet to Alexis de Tocqueville when the distinguished author of Democracy in America served a brief term of office in 1848. He had then gone to Hanover and Frankfurt as a diplomat and it was from his contact with the Germans, rather than with De Tocqueville, that he derived his theories on racial inequalities, though he once confessed that he wrote the volumes partly to prove the superiority of his own aristocratic ancestry.
To Gobineau, as he stated in his dedication of the work to the King of Hanover, the key to history and civilization was race. ”The racial question dominates all the other problems of history . . . the inequality of races suffices to explain the whole unfolding of the destiny of peoples.” There were three principal races, white, yellow and black, and the white was the superior. ”History,” he contended, ”shows that all civilization flows from the white race, that no civilization can exist without the co-operation of this race.” The jewel of the white race was the Aryan, ”this illustrious human family, the noblest among the white race,” whose origins he traced back to Central Asia. Unfortunately, Gobineau says, the contemporary Aryan suffered from intermixture with inferior races, as one could see in the southern Europe of his time. However, in the northwest, above a line running roughly along the Seine and east to Switzerland, the Aryans, though far from simon-pure, still survived as a superior race. This took in some of the French, all of the English and the Irish, the people of the Low Countries and the Rhine and Hanover, and the Scandinavians. Gobineau seemingly excluded the bulk of the Germans, who lived to the east and southeast of his line – a fact which the Nazis glossed over when they embraced his teachings.
Still, to Gobineau’s mind the Germans, or at least the West Germans, were probably the best of all the Aryans, and this discovery the Nazis did not gloss over. Wherever they went, the Germans, he found, brought improvement. This was true even in the Roman Empire. The so-called barbaric German tribes who conquered the Romans and broke up their empire did a distinct service to civilization, for the Romans, by the time of the fourth century, were little better than degenerate mongrels, while the Germans were relatively pure Aryans. ”The Aryan German,” he declared, ”is a powerful creature . . . Everything he thinks, says and does is thus of major importance.”
Gobineau’s ideas were quickly taken up in Germany. Wagner, whom the Frenchman met in 1876 toward the close of his life (he died in 1882) espoused them with enthusiasm, and soon Gobineau societies sprang up all over Germany.∗
∗Though not in France.
This son of an English admiral, nephew of a British field marshal, Sir Neville Chamberlain, and of two British generals, and eventually son-in-law of Richard Wagner, was born at Portsmouth in 1855. He was destined for the British Army or Navy, but his delicate health made such a calling out of the question and he was educated in France and Geneva, where French became his first language. Between the ages of fifteen and nineteen fate brought him into touch with two Germans and thereafter he was drawn irresistibly toward Germany, of which he ultimately became a citizen and one of the foremost thinkers and in whose language he wrote all of his many books, several of which had an almost blinding influence on Wilhelm II, Adolf Hitler and countless lesser Germans.
In 1870, when he was fifteen, Chamberlain landed in the hands of a remarkable tutor, Otto Kuntze, a Prussian of the Prussians, who for four years imprinted on his receptive mind and sensitive soul the glories of militant, conquering Prussia and also – apparently unmindful of the contrasts – of such artists and poets as Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller and Wagner. At nineteen Chamberlain fell madly in love with Anna Horst, also a Prussian, ten years his senior and, like him, highly neurotic. In 1882, at the age of twenty-seven, he journeyed from Geneva, where he had beer, immersed for three years in studies of philosophy, natural history, physics, chemistry and medicine, to Bayreuth. There he met Wagner who, as he says, became the sun of his life, and Cosima, the composer’s wife, to whom he would remain passionately and slavishly devoted all the rest of his days. From 1885, when he went with Anna Horst, who had become his wife, to live for four years in Dresden, he became a German in thought and in language, moving on to Vienna in 1889 for a decade and finally in 1909 to Bayreuth, where he dwelt until his death in 1927. He divorced his idolized Prussian wife in 1905, when she was sixty and even more mentally and physically ill than he (the separation was so painful that he said it almost drove him mad) and three years later he married Eva Wagner and settled down near Wahnfried, where he could be near his wife’s mother, the revered, strong-willed Cosima.
Hypersensitive and neurotic and subject to frequent nervous breakdowns, Chamberlain was given to seeing demons who, by his own account, drove him on relentlessly to seek new fields of study and get on with his prodigious writings. One vision after another forced him to change from biology to botany to the fine arts, to music, to philosophy, to biography to history. Once, in 1896, when he was returning from Italy, the presence of a demon became so forceful that he got off the train at Gardone, shut himself up in a hotel room for eight days and, abandoning some work on music that he had contemplated, wrote feverishly on a biological thesis until he had the germ of the theme that would dominate all of his later works: race and history.
Whatever its blemishes, his mind had a vast sweep ranging over the fields of literature, music, biology, botany, religion, history and politics. There was, as Jean Real 124 has pointed out, a profound unity of inspiration in all his published works and they had a remarkable coherence. Since he felt himself goaded on by demons, his books (on Wagner, Goethe, Kant, Christianity and race) were written in the grip of a terrible fever, a veritable trance, a state of self-induced intoxication, so that, as he says in his autobiography, Lebenswege, he was often unable to recognize them as his own work, because they surpassed his expectations. Minds more balanced than his have subsequently demolished his theories of race and much of his history, and to such a French scholar of Germanism as Edmond Vermeil Chamberlain’s ideas were essentially ”shoddy.” Yet to the anti-Nazi German biographer of Hitler, Konrad Heiden, who deplored the influence of his racial teachings, Chamberlain ”was one of the most astonishing talents in the history of the German mind, a mine of knowledge and profound ideas.”
The book which most profoundly influenced that mind, which sent Wilhelm II into ecstasies and provided the Nazis with their racial aberrations, was Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts) a work of some twelve hundred pages which Chamberlain, again possessed of one of his ”demons,” wrote in nineteen months between April 1, 1897, and October 31, 1898, in Vienna, and which was published in 1899.
As with Gobineau, whom he admired, Chamberlain found the key to history, indeed the basis of civilization, to be race. To explain the nineteenth century, that is, the contemporary world, one had to consider first what it had been bequeathed from ancient times. Three things, said Chamberlain: Greek philosophy and art, Roman law and the personality of Christ. There were also three legatees: the Jews and the Germans, the ”two pure races,” and the half-breed Latins of the Mediterranean – ”a chaos of peoples,” he called them. The Germans alone deserved such a splendid heritage. They had, it is true, come into history late, not until the thirteenth century. But even before that, in destroying the Roman Empire, they had proved their worth, ”It is not true,” he says, ”that the Teutonic barbarian conjured up the so-called ’Night of the Middle Ages’; this night followed rather upon the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the raceless chaos of humanity which the dying Roman Empire had nurtured; but for the Teuton, everlasting night would have settled upon the world.” At the time he was writing he saw in the Teuton the only hope of the world.
Chamberlain included among the ”Teutons” the Celts and the Slavs, though the Teutons were the most important element. However, he is quite woolly in his definitions and at one point declares that ”whoever behaves as a Teuton is a Teuton whatever his racial origin.” Perhaps here he was thinking of his own non German origin. Whatever he was, the Teuton, according to Chamberlain, was ”the soul of our culture. The importance of each nation as a living power today is dependent upon the proportion of genuinely Teutonic blood in its population . . . True history begins at the moment when the Teuton, with his masterful hand, lays his grip upon the legacy of antiquity.”
And the Jews? The longest chapter in Foundations is devoted to them. As we have seen, Chamberlain claimed that the Jews and the Teutons were the only pure races left in the West. And in this chapter he condemns ”stupid and revolting anti-Semitism.” The Jews, he says, are not ”inferior” to the Teuton, merely ”different.” They have their own grandeur; they realize the ”sacred duty” of man to guard the purity of race. And yet as he proceeds to analyze the Jews, Chamberlain slips into the very vulgar anti-Semitism which he condemns in others and which leads, in the end, to the obscenities of Julius Streicher’s caricatures of the Jews in Der Stuermer in Hitler’s time. Indeed a good deal of the ”philosophical” basis of Nazi anti-Semitism stems from this chapter. [yeah,no confusion in his mind DC]
The preposterousness of Chamberlain’s views is quickly evident. He has declared that the personality of Christ is one of the three great bequests of antiquity to modern civilization. He then sets out to ”prove” that Jesus was not a Jew. His Galilean origins, his inability to utter correctly the Aramaic gutturals, are to Chamberlain ”clear signs” that Jesus had ”a large proportion of non-Semitic blood.” He then makes a typically fiat statement: ”Whoever claimed that Jesus was a Jew was either being stupid or telling a lie . . . Jesus was not a Jew.” [Like I said,sharp as a tack...DC]
What was he then? Chamberlain answers: Probably an Aryan! If not entirely by blood, then unmistakably by reason of his moral and religious teaching, so opposed to the ”materialism and abstract formalism” of the Jewish religion. It was natural then – or at least it was to Chamberlain – that Christ should become ”the God of the young Indo-European peoples overflowing with life,” and above all the God of the Teuton, because ”no other people was so well equipped as the Teutonic to hear this divine voice.”
There follows what purports to be a detailed history of the Jewish race from the time of the mixture of the Semite or Bedouin of the desert with the roundheaded Hittite, who had a ”Jewish nose,” and finally with the Amorites, who were Aryans. Unfortunately the Aryan mixture – the Amorites, he says, were tall, blond, magnificent – came too late to really improve the ”corrupt” Hebrew strain. From then on the Englishman, contradicting his whole theory of the purity of the Jewish race, finds the Jews becoming a ”negative” race, ”a bastardy,” so that the Aryans were justified in ”denying” Israel. In fact, he condemns the Aryans for giving the Jews ”a halo of false glory.” He then finds the Jews ”lamentably lacking in true religion.”
Finally, for Chamberlain the way of salvation lies in the Teutons and their culture, and of the Teutons the Germans are the highest-endowed, for they have inherited the best qualities of the Greeks and the Indo-Aryans. This gives them the right to be masters of the world. ”God builds today upon the Germans alone,” he wrote in another place. ”This is the knowledge, the certain truth, that has filled my soul for years.”
Publication of Foundations of the Nineteenth Century created something of a sensation and brought this strange Englishman sudden fame in Germany. Despite its frequent eloquence and its distinguished style – for Chamberlain was a dedicated artist – the book was not easy reading. But it was soon taken up by the upper classes, who seem to have found in it just what they wanted to believe. Within ten years it had gone through eight editions and sold 60,000 copies and by the time of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 it had reached a sale of 100,000. It flourished again in the Nazi time and I remember an announcement of its twenty-fourth edition in 1938, by which time it had sold more than a quarter of a million copies.
Among its first and most enthusiastic readers was Kaiser Wilhelm II. He invited Chamberlain to his palace at Potsdam and on their very first meeting a friendship was formed that lasted to the end of the author’s life in 1927. An extensive correspondence between the two followed. Some of the forty three letters which Chamberlain addressed to the Emperor (Wilhelm answered twenty-three of them) were lengthy essays which the ruler used in several of his bombastic speeches and statements. ”It was God who sent your book to the German people, and you personally to me,” the Kaiser wrote in one of his first letters. Chamberlain’s obsequiousness, his exaggerated flattery, in these letters can be nauseating. ”Your Majesty and your subjects,” he wrote, ”have been born in a holy shrine,” and he informed Wilhelm that he had placed his portrait in his study opposite one of Christ by Leonardo so that while he worked he often paced up and down between the countenance of his Savior and his sovereign.
His servility did not prevent Chamberlain from continually proffering advice to the headstrong, flamboyant monarch. In 1908 the popular opposition to Wilhelm had reached such a climax that the Reichstag censored him for his disastrous intervention in foreign affairs. But Chamberlain advised the Emperor that public opinion was made by idiots and traitors and not to mind it, whereupon Wilhelm replied that the two of them would stand together – ”You wield your pen; I my tongue (and) my broad sword.”
And always the Englishman reminded the Emperor of Germany’s mission and its destiny. ”Once Germany has achieved the power,” he wrote after the outbreak of the First World War, ” – and we may confidently expect her to achieve it – she must immediately begin to carry out a scientific policy of genius. Augustus undertook a systematic transformation of the world, and Germany must do the same . . . Equipped with offensive and defensive weapons, organized as firmly and flawlessly as the Army, superior to all in art, science, technology, industry, commerce, finance, in every field, in short; teacher, helmsman, and pioneer of the world, every man at his post, every man giving his utmost for the holy cause – thus Germany . . . will conquer the world by inner superiority.” For preaching such a glorious mission for his adopted country (he became a naturalized German citizen in 1916, halfway through the war) Chamberlain received from the Kaiser the Iron Cross.
But it was on the Third Reich, which did not arrive until six years after his death but whose coming he foresaw, that this Englishman’s influence was the greatest. His racial theories and his burning sense of the destiny of the Germans and Germany were taken over by the Nazis, who acclaimed him as one of their prophets. During the Hitler regime books, pamphlets and articles poured from the presses extolling the ”spiritual founder” of National Socialist Germany. Rosenberg, as one of Hitler’s mentors, often tried to impart his enthusiasm for the English philosopher to the Fuehrer. It is likely that Hitler first learned of Chamberlain’s writings before he left Vienna, for they were popular among the Pan-German and anti-Semitic groups whose literature he devoured so avidly in those early days. Probably too he read some of Chamberlain’s chauvinistic articles during the war. In Mein Kampf he expresses the regret that Chamberlain’s observations were not more heeded during the Second Reich.
Chamberlain was one of the first intellectuals in Germany to see a great future for Hitler – and new opportunities for the Germans if they followed him. Hitler had met him in Bayreuth in 1923, and though ill, half paralyzed, and disillusioned by Germany’s defeat and the fall of the Hohenzollern Empire – the collapse of all his hopes and prophecies! – Chamberlain was swept off his feet by the eloquent young Austrian. ”You have mighty things to do,”he wrote Hitler on the following day, . . . "My faith in Germanism had not wavered an instant, though my hope – I confess – was at a low ebb. With one stroke you have transformed the state of my soul. That in the hour of her deepest need Germany gives birth to a Hitler proves her vitality; as do the influences that emanate from him; for these two things – personality and influence – belong together . . . May God protect you!”
This was at a time when Adolf Hitler, with his Charlie Chaplin mustache, his rowdy manners and his violent, outlandish extremism, was still considered a joke by most Germans. He had few followers then. But the hypnotic magnetism of his personality worked like a charm on the aging, ill philosopher and renewed his faith in the people he had chosen to join and exalt. Chamberlain became a member of the budding Nazi Party and so far as his health would permit began to write for its obscure publications. One of his articles, published in 1924, hailed Hitler, who was then in jail, as destined by God to lead the German people. Destiny had beckoned Wilhelm 11, but he had failed; now there was Adolf Hitler. This remarkable Englishman’s seventieth birthday, on September 5, 1925, was celebrated with five columns of encomiums in the Nazi Voelkischer Beobachter, which hailed his Foundations as the ”gospel of the Nazi movement,” and he went to his grave sixteen months later – on January 11, 1927 – with high hope that all he had preached and prophesied would yet come true under the divine guidance of this new German Messiah.
Aside from a prince representing Wilhelm II, who could not return to German soil, Hitler was the only public figure at Chamberlain’s funeral. In reporting the death of the Englishman the Voelkischer Beobachter said that the German people had lost ”one of the great armorers whose weapons have not yet found in our day their fullest use.” Not the half-paralyzed old man, dying, not even Hitler, nor anyone else in Germany, could have foreseen in that bleak January month of 1927, when the fortunes of the Nazi Party were at their lowest ebb, how soon, how very soon, those weapons which the transplanted Englishman had forged would be put to their fullest use, and with what fearful consequences.125
Yet Adolf Hitler had a mystical sense of his personal mission on earth in those days, and even before. ”From millions of men . . . one man must step forward,” he wrote in Mein Kampf (the italics are his), ”who with apodictic force will form granite principles from the wavering idea-world of the broad masses and take up the struggle for their sole correctness, until from the shifting waves of a free thought-world there will arise a brazen cliff of solid unity in faith and will.”126
He left no doubt in the minds of readers that he already considered himself that one man. Mein Kampf is sprinkled with little essays on the role of the genius who is picked by Providence to lead a great people, even though they may not at first understand him or recognize his worth, out of their troubles to further greatness. The reader is aware that Hitler is referring to himself and his present situation. He is not yet recognized by the world for what he is sure he is, but that has always been the fate of geniuses – in the beginning. ”It nearly always takes some stimulus to bring the genius on the scene,” he remarks. ”The world then resists and does not want to believe that the type, which apparently is identical with it, is suddenly a very different being; a process which is repeated with every eminent son of man . . . The spark of a genius,” he declares, ”exists in the brain of the truly creative man from the hour of his birth. True genius is always inborn and never cultivated, let alone learned.”127
Specifically, he thought, the great men who shaped history were a blend of the practical politician and the thinker. ”At long intervals in human history it may occasionally happen that the politician is wedded to the theoretician. The more profound this fusion, the greater are the obstacles opposing the work of the politician. He no longer works for necessities which will be understood by the first good shopkeeper, but for aims which only the fewest comprehend. Therefore his life is torn between love and hate. The protest of the present, which does not understand him, struggles with the recognition of posterity – for which he also works. For the greater a man’s works are for the future, the less the present can comprehend them; the harder his fight . . . ”128
These lines were written in 1924, when few understood what this man, then in prison and discredited by the failure of his comic-opera putsch, had in mind to do. But Hitler had no doubts himself. Whether he actually read Hegel or not is a matter of dispute. But it is clear from his writings and speeches that he had some acquaintance with the philosopher’s ideas, if only through discussions with his early mentors Rosenberg, Eckart and Hess. One way or another Hegel’s famous lectures at the University of Berlin must have caught his attention, as did numerous dictums of Nietzsche. We have seen briefly that Hegel developed a theory of ”heroes” which had great appeal to the German mind. In one of the Berlin lectures he discussed how the ”will of the world spirit” is carried out by ”world-historical individuals.”
They may be called Heroes, inasmuch as they have derived their purposes and their vocation, not from the calm regular course of things, sanctioned by the existing order; but from a concealed fount, from that inner Spirit, still hidden beneath the surface, which impinges on the outer world as on a shell and bursts it into pieces. Such were Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon. They were practical, political men. But at the same time they were thinking men, who had an insight into the requirements of the time – what was ripe for development. This was the very Truth for their age, for their world . . . It was theirs to know this nascent principle, the necessary, directly sequent step in progress, which their world was to take; to make this their aim, and to expend their energy in promoting it. World-historical men – the Heroes of an epoch – must therefore be recognized as its clear-sighted ones; their deeds, their words are the best of their time.129
Note the similarities between this and the above quotation from Mein Kampf. The fusion of the politician and the thinker – that is what produces a hero, a ”world-historical figure,” an Alexander, a Caesar, a Napoleon. If there was in him, as Hitler had now come to believe, the same fusion, might he not aspire to their ranks?
In Hitler’s utterances there runs the theme that the supreme leader is above the morals of ordinary man. Hegel and Nietzsche thought so too. We have seen Hegel’s argument that ”the private virtues” and ”irrelevant moral claims” must not stand in the way of the great rulers, nor must one be squeamish if the heroes, in fulfilling their destiny, trample or ”crush to pieces” many an innocent flower. Nietzsche, with his grotesque exaggeration, goes much further.
The strong men, the masters, regain the pure conscience of a beast of prey; monsters filled with joy, they can return from a fearful succession of murder, arson, rape and torture with the same joy in their hearts, the same contentment in their souls as if they had indulged in some student’s rag . . . When a man is capable of commanding, when he is by nature a ”Master,” when he is violent in act and gesture, of what importance are treaties to him? . . . To judge morality properly, it must be replaced by two concepts borrowed from zoology: the taming of a beast and the breeding of a specific species.130
Such teachings, carried to their extremity by Nietzsche and applauded by a host of lesser Germans, seem to have exerted a strong appeal on Hitler.∗ A genius with a mission was above the law; he could not be bound by ”bourgeois” morals. Thus, when his time for action came, Hitler could justify the most ruthless and cold-blooded deeds, the suppression of personal freedom, the brutal practice of slave labor, the depravities of the concentration camp, the massacre of his own followers in June 1934, the killing of war prisoners and the mass slaughter of the Jews.
When Hitler emerged from Landsberg prison five days before Christmas, 1924, he found a situation which would have led almost any other man to retire from public life. The Nazi Party and its press were banned; the former leaders were feuding and falling away. He himself was forbidden to speak in public. What was worse, he faced deportation to his native Austria; the Bavarian state police had strongly recommended it in a report to the Ministry of the Interior. Even many of his old comrades agreed with the general opinion that Hitler was finished, that now he would fade away into oblivion as had so many other provincial politicians who had enjoyed a brief moment of notoriety during the strife-ridden years when it seemed that the Republic would totter.†
tAs late as 1929, Professor M. A. Gerothwohl, the editor of Lord D’Abernon’s diaries,wrote a footnote to the ambassador’s account of the Beer Hall Putsch in which, after mentionof Hitler’s being sentenced to prison, he added: ”He was finally released after six months andbound over for the rest of his sentence, thereafter fading into oblivion.” Lord D’Abernon wasthe British ambassador in Berlin from 1920 to 1926 and worked with great skill to strengthenthe Weimar Republic.
But the Republic had weathered the storms. It was beginning to thrive. While Hitler was in prison a financial wizard by the name of Dr. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht had been called in to stabilize the currency, and he had succeeded. The ruinous inflation was over. The burden of reparations was eased by the Dawes Plan. Capital began to flow in from America. The economy was rapidly recovering. Stresemann was succeeding in his policy of reconciliation with the Allies. The French were getting out of the Ruhr. A security pact was being discussed which would pave the way for a general European settlement (Locarno) and bring Germany into the League of Nations. For the first time since the defeat, after six years of tension, turmoil and depression, the German people were beginning to have a normal life. Two weeks before Hitler was released from Landsberg, the Social Democrats – the ”November criminals,” as he called them – had increased their vote by 30 per cent (to nearly eight million) in a general election in which they had championed the Republic. The Nazis, in league with northern racial groups under the name of the National Socialist German Freedom movement, had seen their vote fall from nearly two million in May 1924 to less than a million in December. Nazism appeared to be a dying cause. It had mushroomed on the country’s misfortunes; now that the nation’s outlook was suddenly bright it was rapidly withering away. Or so most Germans and foreign observers believed.
But not Adolf Hitler. He was not easily discouraged. And he knew how to wait. As he picked up the threads of his life in the little two-room apartment on the top floor of 41 Thierschstrasse in Munich during the winter months of 1925 and then, when summer came, in various inns on the Obersalzberg above Berchtesgaden, the contemplation of the misfortunes of the immediate past and the eclipse of the present, served only to strengthen his resolve. Behind the prison gates he had had time to range over in his mind not only his own past and its triumphs and mistakes, but the tumultuous past of his German people and its triumphs and errors. He saw both more clearly now. And there was born in him anew a burning sense of mission – for himself and for Germany – from which all doubts were excluded. In this exalted spirit he finished dictating the torrent of words that would go into Volume One of Mein Kampf and went on immediately to Volume Two. The blueprint of what the Almighty had called upon him to do in this cataclysmic world and the philosophy, the Weltanschauung, that would sustain it were set down in cold print for all to ponder. That philosophy, however demented, had roots, as we have seen deep in German life. The blueprint may have seemed preposterous to most twentieth-century minds, even in Germany. But it too possessed a certain logic. It held forth a vision. It offered, though few saw this at the time, a continuation of German history. It pointed the way toward a glorious German destiny.
next
Book Two:
TRIUMPH AND CONSOLIDATION
Actually it was merely postponed. A second plan was concocted, one that could not be balked by the presence of a band of strategically located police. On the night of November 10-11, the S.A. and the other armed bands of the Kampfbund would be concentrated on the Froettmaninger Heath, just north of Munich, and on the morning of the eleventh, the anniversary of the hated, shameful armistice, would march into the city, seize strategic points, proclaim the national revolution and present the hesitant Kahr, Lossow and Seisser with a fait accompli.
At this point a not very important public announcement induced Hitler to drop that plan and improvise a new one. A brief notice appeared in the press that, at the request of some business organizations in Munich, Kahr would address a meeting at the Burgerbraukeller, a large beer hall on the southeastern outskirts of the city. The date was November 8, in the evening. The subject of the Commissioner’s speech, the notice said, would be the program of the Bavarian government. General von Lossow, Colonel von Seisser and other notables would be present.
Two considerations led Hitler to a rash decision. The first was that he suspected Kahr might use the meeting to announce the proclamation of Bavarian independence and the restoration of the Wittelsbachs to the Bavarian throne. All day long on November 8 Hitler tried in vain to see Kahr, who put him off until the ninth. This only increased the Nazi leader’s suspicions. He must forestall Kahr. Also, and this was the second consideration, the Burgerbraukeller meeting provided the opportunity which had been missed on November 4: the chance to rope in all three members of the triumvirate and at the point of a pistol force them to join the Nazis in carrying out the revolution. Hitler decided to act at once. Plans for the November 10 mobilization were called off; the storm troops were hastily alerted for duty at the big beer hall.
THE BEER HALL PUTSCH
About a quarter to nine on the evening of November 8, 1923, after Kahr had
been speaking for half an hour to some three thousand thirsty burghers, seated
at rough hewn tables and quaffing their beer out of stone mugs in the Bavarian
fashion, S.A. troops surrounded the Burgerbraukeller and Hitler pushed forward into the hall. While some of his men were mounting a machine gun in the
entrance, Hitler jumped up on a table and to attract attention fired a revolver
shot toward the ceiling. Kahr paused in his discourse. The audience turned
around to see what was the cause of the disturbance. Hitler, with the help of
Hess and of Ulrich Graf, the former butcher, amateur wrestler and brawler and
now the leader’s bodyguard, made his way to the platform. A police major
tried to stop him, but Hitler pointed his pistol at him and pushed on. Kahr,
according to one eyewitness, had now become ”pale and confused.” He stepped
back from the rostrum and Hitler took his place. ”The National Revolution has begun!” Hitler shouted. "This building is occupied by six hundred heavily armed men. No one may leave the hall. Unless there is immediate quiet I shall have a machine gun posted in the gallery. The Bavarian and Reich governments have been removed and a provisional national government formed. The barracks of the Reichswehr and police are occupied. The Army and the police are marching on the city under the swastika banner.”
This last was false; it was pure bluff. But in the confusion no one knew for sure. Hitler’s revolver was real. It had gone off. The storm troopers with their rifles and machine guns were real. Hitler now ordered Kahr, Lossow and Seisser to follow him to a nearby private room off stage. Prodded by storm troopers, the three highest officials of Bavaria did Hitler’s bidding while the crowd looked on in amazement.
But with growing resentment too. Many businessmen still regarded Hitler as something of an upstart. One of them shouted to the police, ”Don’t be cowards as in 1918. Shoot!” But the police, with their own chiefs so docile and the S.A. taking over the hall, did not budge. Hitler had arranged for a Nazi spy at police headquarters, Wilhelm Frick, to telephone the police on duty at the beer hall not to interfere but merely to report. The crowd began to grow so sullen that Goering felt it necessary to step to the rostrum and quiet them. ”There is nothing to fear,” he cried. ”We have the friendliest intentions. For that matter, you’ve no cause to grumble, you’ve got your beer!” And he informed them that in the next room a new government was being formed.
It was, at the point of Adolf Hitler’s revolver. Once he had herded his prisoners into the adjoining room, Hitler told them, ”No one leaves this room alive without my permission,” He then informed them they would all have key jobs either in the Bavarian government or in the Reich government which he was forming with Ludendorff. With Ludendorff? Earlier in the evening Hitler had dispatched Scheubner-Richter to Ludwigs Hoehe to fetch the renowned General, who knew nothing of the Nazi conspiracy, to the beerhouse at once.
The three prisoners at first refused even to speak to Hitler. He continued to harangue them. Each of them must join him in proclaiming the revolution and the new governments; each must take the post he, Hitler, assigned them, or "he has no right to exist.” Kahr was to be the Regent of Bavaria; Lossow, Minister of the National Army; Seisser, Minister of the Reich Police. None of the three was impressed at the prospect of such high office. They did not answer.
Their continued silence unnerved Hitler. Finally he waved his gun at them. ”I have four shots in my pistol! Three for my collaborators, if they abandon me. The last bullet for myself!” Pointing the weapon to his forehead, he cried, ”If I am not victorious by tomorrow afternoon, I shall be a dead man!”
Kahr was not a very bright individual but he had physical courage. ”Herr Hitler,” he answered, ”you can have me shot or shoot me yourself. Whether I die or not is no matter.”
Seisser also spoke up. He reproached Hitler for breaking his word of honor not to make a putsch against the police.
”Yes, I did,” Hitler replied. ”Forgive me, but I had to for the sake of the Fatherland.”
General von Lossow disdainfully maintained silence. But when Kahr started to whisper to him, Hitler snapped, ”Halt! No talking without my permission!”
He was getting nowhere with his own talk. Not one of the three men who held the power of the Bavarian state in their hands had agreed to join him, even at pistol point. The putsch wasn’t going according to plan. Then Hitler acted on a sudden impulse. Without a further word, he dashed back into the hall, mounted the tribune, faced the sullen crowd and announced that the members of the triumvirate in the next room had joined him in forming a new national government.
”The Bavarian Ministry,” he shouted, "is removed . . . The government of the November criminals and the Reich President are declared to be removed. A new national government will be named this very day here in Munich. A German National Army will be formed immediately . . . I propose that, until accounts have been finally settled with the November criminals, the direction of policy in the National Government be taken over by me. Ludendorff will take over the leadership of the German National Army . . . The task of the provisional German National Government is to organize the march on that sinful Babel, Berlin, and save the German people . . . Tomorrow will find either a National Government in Germany or us dead!”
Not for the first time and certainly not for the last, Hitler had told a masterful lie, and it worked. When the gathering heard that Kahr, General von Lossow and Police Chief von Seisser had joined Hitler its mood abruptly changed. There were loud cheers, and the sound of them impressed the three men still locked up in the little side room.
Scheubner-Richter now produced General Ludendorff, as if out of a hat. The war hero was furious with Hitler for pulling such a complete surprise on him, and when, once closeted in the side room, he learned that the former corporal and not he was to be the dictator of Germany his resentment was compounded. He spoke scarcely a word to the brash young man. But Hitler did not mind so long as Ludendorff lent his famous name to the desperate undertaking and won over the three recalcitrant Bavarian leaders who thus far had failed to respond to his own exhortations and threats. This Ludendorff proceeded to do. It was now a question of a great national cause, he said, and he advised the gentlemen to co-operate. Awed by the attention of the generalissimo, the trio appeared to give in, though later Lossow denied that he had agreed to place himself under Ludendorff’s command. For a few minutes Kahr fussed over the question of restoring the Wittelsbach monarchy, which was so dear to him. Finally he said he would co-operate as the ”King’s deputy.” Ludendorff’s timely arrival had saved Hitler. Overjoyed at this lucky break, he led the others back to the platform, where each made a brief speech and swore loyalty to each other and to the new regime. The crowd leaped on chairs and tables in a delirium of enthusiasm. Hitler beamed with joy. ”He had a childlike, frank expression of happiness that I shall never forget,” an eminent historian who was present later declared.97 Again mounting the rostrum, Hitler spoke his final word to the gathering:
I want now to fulfill the vow which I made to myself five years ago when I was a blind cripple in the military hospital: to know neither rest nor peace until the November criminals had been overthrown, until on the ruins of the wretched Germany of today there should have arisen once more a Germany of power and greatness, of freedom and splendor.
This meeting began to break up. At the exits Hess, aided by storm troopers, detained a number of Bavarian cabinet members and other notables who were trying to slip out with the throng. Hitler kept his eye on Kahr, Lossow and Seisser. Then news came of a clash between storm troopers of one of the fighting leagues, the Bund Oberland, and regular troops at the Army Engineers’ barracks. Hitler decided to drive to the scene and settle the matter personally, leaving the beer hall in charge of Ludendorff.
This turned out to be a fatal error. Lossow was the first to slip away.
He informed Ludendorff he must hurry to his office at Army headquarters to give the necessary orders. When Scheubner-Richter objected, Ludendorff rejoined stiffly, ”I forbid you to doubt the word of a German officer.” Kahr and Seisser vanished too,
Hitler, in high spirits, returned to the Burgerbrau to find that the birds had flown the coop. This was the first blow of the evening and it stunned him. He had confidently expected to find his ”ministers” busy at their new tasks while Ludendorff and Lossow worked out plans for the march on Berlin. But almost nothing was being done. Not even Munich was being occupied by the revolutionary forces. Roehm, at the head of a detachment of storm troopers from another fighting league, the Reichskriegsflagge, had seized Army headquarters at the War Ministry in the Schoenfeld Strasse but no other strategic centers were occupied, not even the telegraph office, over whose wires news of the coup went out to Berlin and orders came back, from General von Seeckt to the Army in Bavaria, to suppress the putsch.
Though there were some defections among the junior officers and some of the troops, whose sympathies were with Hitler and Roehm, the higher officers, led by General von Danner, commander of the Munich garrison, not only were prepared to carry out Seeckt’s command but were bitterly resentful of the treatment meted out to General von Lossow. In the Army’s code a civilian who pointed a revolver at a general deserved to be smitten by an officer’s side arms. From headquarters at the 19th Infantry barracks, where Lossow had joined Danner, messages went out to outlying garrisons to rush reinforcements to the city. By dawn Regular Army troops had drawn a cordon around Roehm’s forces in the War Ministry.
Before this action Hitler and Ludendorff joined Roehm at the ministry for a time, to take stock of the situation. Roehm was shocked to find that no one besides himself had taken military action and occupied the key centers. Hitler tried desperately to re-establish contact with Lossow, Kahr and Seisser. Messengers were dispatched to the 19th Infantry barracks in the name of Ludendorff but they did not return. Poehner, the former Munich police chief and now one of Hitler’s supporters, was sent with Major Huehnlein and a band of the S.A. troopers to occupy police headquarters. They were promptly arrested there.
And what of Gustav von Kahr, the head of the Bavarian government? After leaving the Burgerbraukeller he had quickly recovered his senses and his courage. Not wishing to take any more chances on being made a prisoner of Hitler and his rowdies, Kahr moved the government to Regensburg. But not before he had ordered placards posted throughout Munich carrying the following proclamation:
The deception and perfidy of ambitious comrades have converted a demonstration in the interests of national reawakening into a scene of disgusting violence. The declarations extorted from myself, General von Lossow and Colonel Seisser at the point of the revolver are null and void. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, as well as the fighting leagues Oberland and Reichskriegsflagge, are dissolved.
VON KAHR
General State Commissioner
Or perhaps there was another way out which at least would avert disaster. On first hearing of the putsch, Crown Prince Rupprecht, a bitter personal enemy of Ludendorff, had issued a brief statement calling for its prompt suppression. Now Hitler decided to appeal to the Prince to intercede with Lossow and Kahr and obtain an honorable, peaceful settlement. A Lieutenant Neunzert, a friend of Hitler and of Rupprecht, was hurried off at dawn to the Wittelsbach castle near Berchtesgaden on the delicate mission. Unable to find an automobile, he had to wait for a train and did not arrive at his destination until noon, at which hour events were taking a turn not foreseen by Hitler nor dreamt of as possible by Ludendorff.
Hitler had planned a putsch, not a civil war. Despite his feverish state of excitement he was in sufficient control of himself to realize that he lacked the strength to overcome the police and the Army. He had wanted to make a revolution with the armed forces, not against them. Bloodthirsty though he had been in his recent speeches and during the hours he held the Bavarian triumvirs at gunpoint, he shrank from the idea of men united in their hatred of the Republic shedding the blood of each other.
So did Ludendorff. He would, as he had told his wife, string up President Ebert ”and Co.” and gladly watch them dangle from the gallows. But he did not wish to kill policemen and soldiers who, in Munich at least, believed with him in the national counterrevolution.
To the wavering young Nazi leader Ludendorff now proposed a plan of his own that might still bring them victory and yet avoid bloodshed. German soldiers, even German police – who were mostly ex-soldiers – would never dare, he was sure, to fire on the legendary commander who had led them to great victories on both the Eastern and the Western fronts. He and Hitler would march with their followers to the center of the city and take it over. Not only would the police and the Army not dare to oppose him, he was certain; they would join him and fight under his orders. Though somewhat skeptical, Hitler agreed. There seemed no other way out. The Crown Prince, he noted, had not replied to his plea for mediation.
Toward eleven o’clock on the morning of November 9, the anniversary of the proclamation of the German Republic, Hitler and Ludendorff led a column of some three thousand storm troopers out of the gardens of the Buergerbraukeller and headed for the center of Munich. Beside them in the front rank marched Goering, commander of the S.A., Scheubner-Richter, Rosenberg, Ulrich Graf, Hitler’s bodyguard, and half a dozen other Nazi officials and leaders of the Kampfbund. A swastika flag and a banner of the Bund Oberland were unfurled at the head of the column. Not far behind the first ranks a truck chugged along, loaded with machine guns and machine gunners. The storm troopers carried carbines, slung over their shoulders, some with fixed bayonets. Hitler brandished his revolver. Not a very formidable armed force, but Ludendorff, who had commanded millions of Germany’s finest troops, apparently thought it sufficient for his purposes.
A few hundred yards north of the beer cellar the rebels met their first obstacle. On the Ludwig Bridge, which leads over the River Isar toward the center of the city, stood a detachment of armed police barring the route. Goering sprang forward and, addressing the police commander, threatened to shoot a number of hostages he said he had in the rear of his column if the police fired on his men. During the night Hess and others had rounded up a number of hostages, including two cabinet members, for just such a contingency. Whether Goering was bluffing or not, the police commander apparently believed he was not and let the column file over the bridge unmolested.
At the Marienplatz the Nazi column encountered a large crowd which was listening to an exhortation of Julius Streicher, the Jew-baiter from Nuremberg, who had rushed to Munich at the first news of the putsch. Not wishing to be left out of the revolution, he cut short his speech and joined the rebels, jumping into step immediately behind Hitler.
Shortly after noon the marchers neared their objective, the War Ministry, where Roehm and his storm troopers were surrounded by soldiers of the Reichswehr. Neither besiegers nor besieged had yet fired a shot. Roehm and his men were all ex-soldiers and they had many wartime comrades on the other side of the barbed wire. Neither side had any heart for killing.
To reach the War Ministry and free Roehm, Hitler and Ludendorff now led their column through the narrow Residenzstrasse, which, just beyond the Feldherrnhalle, opens out into the spacious Odeonsplatz. At the end of the gully like street a detachment of police about one hundred strong, armed with carbines, blocked the way. They were in a strategic spot and this time they did not give way.
But once again the Nazis tried to talk their way through. One of them, the faithful bodyguard Ulrich Graf, stepped forward and cried out to the police officer in charge, ”Don’t shoot! His Excellency Ludendorff is coming!” Even at this crucial, perilous moment, a German revolutionary, even an old amateur wrestler and professional bouncer, remembered to give a gentleman his proper title. Hitler added another cry. ”Surrender! Surrender!” he called out. But the unknown police officer did not surrender. Apparently Ludendorff’s name had no magic sound for him; this was the police,’ not the Army.
Which side fired first was never established. Each put the blame on the other. One onlooker later testified that Hitler fired the first shot with his revolver. Another thought that Streicher did, and more than one Nazi later told this author that it was this deed which, more than any other, endeared him so long to Hitler.∗
∗Some years later, in approving Streicher’s appointment as Nazi leader for Franconia over the opposition of many party comrades, Hitler declared, ”Perhaps there are one or two who don’t like the shape of Comrade Streicher’s nose. But when he lay beside me that day on the pavement by the Feldherrnhalle, I vowed to myself never to forsake him so long as he did not forsake me,” (Heiden, Hitler: A Biography, p. 157.)
At any rate a shot was fired and in the next instant a volley of shots rang out from both sides, spelling in that instant the doom of Hitler’s hopes. Scheubner Richter fell, mortally wounded. Goering went down with a serious wound in his thigh. Within sixty seconds the firing stopped, but the street was already littered with fallen bodies – sixteen Nazis and three police dead or dying, many more wounded and the rest, including Hitler, clutching the pavement to save their lives.
There was one exception, and had his example been followed, the day might have had a different ending. Ludendorff did not fling himself to the ground. Standing erect and proud in the best soldierly tradition, with his adjutant, Major Streck, at his side, he marched calmly on between the muzzles of the police rifles until he reached the Odeonsplatz. He must have seemed a lonely and bizarre figure. Not one Nazi followed him. Not even the supreme leader, Adolf Hitler.
The future Chancellor of the Third Reich was the first to scamper to safety. He had locked his left arm with the right arm of Scheubner-Richter (a curious but perhaps revealing gesture) as the column approached the police cordon, and when the latter fell he pulled Hitler down to the pavement with him. Perhaps Hitler thought he had been wounded; he suffered sharp pains which, it was found later, came from a dislocated shoulder. But the fact remains that according to the testimony of one of his own Nazi followers in the column, the physician Dr. Walther Schulz, which was supported by several other witnesses, Hitler ”was the first to get up and turn back,” leaving his dead and wounded comrades lying in the street. He was hustled into a waiting motorcar and spirited off to the country home of the Hanfstaengls at Uffing, where Putzi’s wife and sister nursed him and where, two days later, he was arrested.
Ludendorff was arrested on the spot. He was contemptuous of the rebels who had not had the courage to march on with him, and so bitter against the Army for not coming over to his side that he declared henceforth he would not recognize a German officer nor ever again wear an officer’s uniform. The wounded Goering was given first aid by the Jewish proprietor of a nearby bank into which he had been carried and then smuggled across the frontier into Austria by his wife and taken to a hospital in Innsbruck. Hess also fled to Austria. Roehm surrendered at the War Ministry two hours after the collapse before the Feldherrnhalle. Within a few days all the rebel leaders except Goering and Hess were rounded up and jailed. The Nazi putsch had ended in a fiasco. The party was dissolved. National Socialism, to all appearances, was dead. Its dictatorial leader, who had run away at the first hail of bullets, seemed utterly discredited, his meteoric political career at an end.
TRIAL FOR TREASON
As things turned out, that career was merely interrupted, and not for long.
Hitler was shrewd enough to see that his trial, far from finishing him, would
provide a new platform from which he could not only discredit the compromised
authorities who had arrested him but – and this was more important – for the
first time make his name known far beyond the confines of Bavaria and indeed
of Germany itself. He was well aware that correspondents of the world press as
well as of the leading German newspapers were flocking to Munich to cover the
trial, which began on February 26, 1924, before a special court sitting in the old
Infantry School in the Blutenburgstrasse. By the time it had ended twenty-four
days later Hitler had transformed defeat into triumph, made Kahr, Lossow and
Seisser share his guilt in the public mind to their ruin, impressed the German
people with his eloquence and the fervor of his nationalism, and emblazoned his
name on the front pages of the world. [The Charlie Manson of his day DC]Although Ludendorff was easily the most famous of the ten prisoners in the dock, Hitler at once grabbed the limelight for himself. From beginning to end he dominated the courtroom. Franz Guertner, the Bavarian Minister of Justice and an old friend and protector of the Nazi leader, had seen to it that the judiciary would be complacent and lenient. Hitler was allowed to interrupt as often as he pleased, cross-examine witnesses at will and speak on his own behalf at any time and at any length – his opening statement consumed four hours, but it was only the first of many long harangues.[yep,no theater in those days...DC]
He did not intend to make the mistake of those who, when tried for complicity in the Kapp putsch, had pleaded, as he later said, that ”they knew nothing, had intended nothing, wished nothing. That was what destroyed the bourgeois world – that they had not the courage to stand by their act . . . to step before the judge and say, 'Yes, that was what we wanted to do; we wanted to destroy the State.’ ”
Now before the judges and the representatives of the world press in Munich, Hitler proclaimed proudly, ”I alone bear the responsibility. But I am not a criminal because of that. If today I stand here as a revolutionary, it is as a revolutionary against the revolution. There is no such thing as high treason against the traitors of 1918.”
If there were, then the three men who headed the government, the Army and the police in Bavaria and who had conspired with him against the national government were equally guilty and should be in the dock beside him instead of in the witness stand as his chief accusers. Shrewdly he turned the tables on the uneasy, guilt-ridden triumvirs:
One thing was certain, Lossow, Kahr and Seisser had the same goal that we had – to get rid of the Reich government . . . If our enterprise was actually high treason, then during the whole period Lossow, Kahr and Seisser must have been committing high treason along with us, for during all these weeks we talked of nothing but the aims of which we now stand accused.
The three men could scarcely deny this, for it was true. Kahr and Seisser were no match for Hitler’s barbs. Only General von Lossow defended himself defiantly. ”I was no unemployed komitadji” he reminded the court. ”I occupied a high position in the State.” And the General poured all the scorn of an old Army officer on his former corporal, this unemployed upstart, whose overpowering ambition had led him to try to dictate to the Army and the State. How far this unscrupulous demagogue had come, he exclaimed, from the days, not so far distant, when he had been willing to be merely ”the drummer” in a patriotic movement!
A drummer merely? Hitler knew how to answer that:
How petty are the thoughts of small men! Believe me, I do not regard the acquisition of a minister’s portfolio as a thing worth striving for. I do not hold it worthy of a great man to endeavor to go down in history just by becoming a minister. One might be in danger of being buried beside other ministers. My aim from the first was a thousand times higher than becoming a minister. I wanted to become the destroyer of Marxism. I am going to achieve this task, and if I do, the title of Minister will be an absurdity so far as I am concerned.
He invoked the example of Wagner.
When I stood for the first time at the grave of Richard Wagner my heart overflowed with pride in a man who had forbidden any such inscription as ”Here lies Privy Councilor, Music Director, His Excellency Baron Richard von Wagner.” I was proud that this man and so many others in German history were content to give their names to history without titles. It was not from modesty that I wanted to be a drummer in those days. That was the highest aspiration – the rest is nothing.
He had been accused of wanting to jump from drummer to dictator. He would not deny it. Fate had decreed it.
The man who is born to be a dictator is not compelled. He wills it. He is not driven forward, but drives himself. There is nothing immodest about this. Is it immodest for a worker to drive himself toward heavy labor? Is it presumptuous of a man with the high forehead of a thinker to ponder through the nights till he gives the world an invention? The man who feels called upon to govern a people has no right to say, ”If you want me or summon me, I will co-operate.” No! It is his duty to step forward.
Though he might be in the dock facing a long prison sentence for high treason against his country, his confidence in himself, in the call to ”govern a people,” was undiminished. While in prison awaiting trial, he had already analyzed the reasons for the failure of the putsch and had vowed that he would not commit the same mistakes in the future. Recalling his thoughts thirteen years later after he had achieved his goal, he told his old followers, assembled at the Burgerbraukeller to celebrate the anniversary of the putsch, ”I can calmly say that it was the rashest decision of my life. When I think back on it today, I grow dizzy . . . If today you saw one of our squads from the year 1923 marching by, you would ask, ’What workhouse have they escaped from?’ . . . But fate meant well with us. It did not permit an action to succeed which, if it had succeeded, would in the end have inevitably crashed as a result of the movement’s inner immaturity in those days and its deficient organizational and intellectual foundation . . . We recognized that it is not enough to overthrow the old State, but that the new State must previously have been built up and be ready to one’s hand . . . In 1933 it was no longer a question of overthrowing a State by an act of violence; meanwhile the new State had been built up and all that remained to do was to destroy the last remnants of the old State – and that took but a few hours.”
How to build the new Nazi State was already in his mind as he fenced with the judges and his prosecutors during the trial. For one thing, he would have to have the German Army with him, not against him, the next time. In his closing address he played on the idea of reconciliation with the armed forces. There was no word of reproach for the Army.
I believe that the hour will come when the masses, who today stand in the street with our swastika banner, will unite with those who fired upon them . . . When I learned that it was the Green police which fired, I was happy that it was not the Reichswehr which had stained the record; the Reichswehr stands as untarnished as before. One day the hour will come when the Reichswehr will stand at our side, officers and men.
It was an accurate prediction, but here the presiding judge intervened. ”Herr Hitler, you say that the Green police was stained. That I cannot permit.”
The accused paid not the slightest attention to the admonition. In a peroration that held the audience in the courtroom spellbound Hitler spoke his final words:
The army we have formed is growing from day to day . . . I nourish the proud hope that one day the hour will come when these rough companies will grow to battalions, the battalions to regiments, the regiments to divisions, that the old cockade will be taken from the mud, that the old flags will wave again, that there will be a reconciliation at the last great divine judgment which we are prepared to face.
He turned his burning eyes directly on the judges.
For it is not you, gentlemen, who pass judgment on us. That judgment is spoken by the eternal court of history. What judgment you will hand down I know. But that court will not ask us, ”Did you commit high treason or did you not?” That court will judge us, the Quartermaster General of the old Army [Ludendorff], his officers and soldiers, as Germans who wanted only the good of their own people and Fatherland, who wanted to fight and die. You may pronounce us guilty a thousand times over, but the goddess of the eternal court of history will smile and tear to tatters the brief of the state prosecutor and the sentence of this court. For she acquits us.98
The sentences, if not the verdicts, of the actual judges were, as Konrad Heiden wrote, not so far from the judgment of history. Ludendorff was acquitted. Hitler and the other accused were found guilty. But in the face of the law – Article 81 of the German Penal Code – which declared that ”whosoever attempts to alter by force the Constitution of the German Reich or of any German state shall be punished by lifelong imprisonment,” Hitler was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in the old fortress of Landsberg. Even then the lay judges protested the severity of the sentence, but they were assured by the presiding judge that the prisoner would be eligible for parole after he had served six months. Efforts of the police to get Hitler deported as a foreigner – he still held Austrian citizenship – came to nothing. The sentences were imposed on April 1, 1924. A little less than nine months later, on December 20, Hitler was released from prison, free to resume his fight to overthrow the democratic state. The consequences of committing high treason, if you were a man of the extreme Right, were not unduly heavy, despite the law, and a good many anti-republicans took notice of it.
The putsch, even though it was a fiasco, made Hitler a national figure and, in the eyes of many, a patriot and a hero. Nazi propaganda soon transformed it into one of the great legends of the movement. Each year, even after he came to power, even after World War II broke out, Hitler returned on the evening of November 8 to the beer hall in Munich to address his Old Guard comrades – the alte Kaempfer, as they were called – who had followed the leader to what seemed then such a grotesque disaster. In 1935 Hitler, the Chancellor, had the bodies of the sixteen Nazis who had fallen in the brief encounter dug up and placed in vaults in the Feldherrnhalle, which became a national shrine. Of them Hitler said, in dedicating the memorial, ”They now pass into German immortality. Here they stand for Germany and keep guard over our people. Here they lie as true witnesses to our movement.” He did not add, and no German seemed to recall, that they were also the men whom Hitler had abandoned to their dying when he had picked himself up from the pavement and ran away.
That summer of 1924 in the old fortress at Landsberg, high above the River Lech, Adolf Hitler, who was treated as an honored guest, with a room of his own and a splendid view, cleared out the visitors who flocked to pay him homage and bring him gifts, summoned the faithful Rudolf Hess, who had finally returned to Munich and received a sentence, and began to dictate to him chapter after chapter of a book.∗
∗Before the arrival of Hess, Emil Maurice, an ex-convict, a watchmaker and the first commander of the Nazi ”strong-arm” squads, took some preliminary dictation,
Chapter 4
THE MIND OF HITLER
AND THE
ROOTS OF
THE THIRD REICH
Hitler wanted to call his book ”Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies,
Stupidity and Cowardice,” but Max Amann, the hard-headed manager of the
Nazi publishing business, who was to bring it out, rebelled against such a ponderous – and unsalable – title and shortened it to My Struggle (Mein Kampf ).
Amann was sorely disappointed in the contents. He had hoped, first, for a racy
personal story in which Hitler would recount his rise from an unknown ”worker”
in Vienna to world renown. As we have seen, there was little autobiography in
the book. The Nazi business manager had also counted on an inside story of the
Beer Hall Putsch, the drama and double-dealing of which, he was sure, would
make good reading. But Hitler was too shrewd at this point, when the party
fortunes were at their lowest ebb, to rake over old coals.∗ There is scarcely a
word of the unsuccessful putsch in Mein Kampf. ∗”It is useless,” he wrote at the end of the second volume, ”to reopen wounds that seem scarcely healed; . . . useless to speak of guilt regarding men who in the bottom of their hearts, perhaps, were all devoted to their nation with equal love, and who only missed or failed to understand the common road.” For a man so vindictive as Hitler, this showed unexpected tolerance of those who had crushed his rebellion and jailed him; or, in view of what happened later to Kahr and others who crossed him, it was perhaps more a display of will power – an ability to restrain himself momentarily for tactical reasons. At any rate, he refrained from recrimination.
The first volume was published in the autumn of 1925. A work of some four hundred pages, it was priced at twelve marks (three dollars), about twice the price of most books brought out in Germany at that time. It did not by any means become an immediate best seller. Amann boasted that it sold 23,000 copies the first year and that sales continued upward – a claim that was received with skepticism in anti-Nazi circles.
Thanks to the Allied seizure in 1945 of the royalty statements of the Eher Verlag, the Nazi publishing firm, the facts about the actual sale of Mein Kampf can now be disclosed. In 1925 the book sold 9,473 copies, and thereafter for three years the sales decreased annually. They slumped to 6,913 in 1926, to 5,607 in 1927 and to a mere 3,015 in 1928, counting both volumes. They were up a little – to 7,664 – in 1929, rose with the fortunes of the Nazi Party in 1930, when an inexpensive one-volume edition at eight marks appeared, to 54,086, dropped slightly to 50,808 the following year and jumped to 90,351 in 1932.
Hitler’s royalties – his chief source of income from 1925 on – were considerable when averaged over those first seven years. But they were nothing compared to those received in 1933, the year he became Chancellor. In his first year of office Mein Kampf sold a million copies, and Hitler’s income from the royalties, which had been increased from 10 to 15 per cent after January 1, 1933, was over one million marks (some $300,000), making him the most prosperous author in Germany and for the first time a millionaire.∗ Except for the Bible, no other book sold as well during the Nazi regime, when few family households felt secure without a copy on the table. It was almost obligatory – and certainly politic – to present a copy to a bride and groom at their wedding, and nearly every school child received one on graduation from whatever school. By 1940, the year after World War II broke out, six million copies of the Nazi bible had been sold in Germany.99
∗Like most writers, Hitler had his difficulties with the income tax collector – at least, as we shall see, until he became the dictator of Germany
Not every German who bought a copy of Mein Kampf necessarily read it. I have heard many a Nazi stalwart complain that it was hard going and not a few admit – in private – that they were never able to get through to the end of its 782 turgid pages. But it might be argued that had more non-Nazi Germans read it before 1933 and had the foreign statesmen of the world perused it carefully while there still was time, both Germany and the world might have been saved from catastrophe. For whatever other accusations can be made against Adolf Hitler, no one can accuse him of not putting down in writing exactly the kind of Germany he intended to make if he ever came to power and the kind of world he meant to create by armed German conquest. The blueprint of the Third Reich and, what is more, of the barbaric New Order which Hitler inflicted on conquered Europe in the triumphant years between 1939 and 1945 is set down in all its appalling crudity at great length and in detail between the covers of this revealing book.
As we have seen, Hitler’s basic ideas were formed in his early twenties in Vienna, and we have his own word for it that he learned little afterward and altered nothing in his thinking. When he left Austria for Germany in 1913 at the age of twenty-four, he was full of a burning passion for German nationalism, a hatred for democracy, Marxism and the Jews and a certainty that Providence had chosen the Aryans, especially the Germans, to be the master race.
In Mein Kampf he expanded his views and applied them specifically to the problem of not only restoring a defeated and chaotic Germany to a place in the sun greater than it had ever had before but making a new kind of state, one which would be based on race and would include all Germans then living outside the Reich’s frontiers, and in which would be established the absolute dictatorship of the Leader – himself – with an array of smaller leaders taking orders from above and giving them to those below. Thus the book contains, first, an outline of the future German state and of the means by which it can one day become ”lord of the earth,” as the author puts it on the very last page; and, second, a point of view, a conception of life, or, to use Hitler’s favorite German word, a Weltanschauung. That this view of life would strike a normal mind of the twentieth century as a grotesque hodgepodge concocted by a half-baked, uneducated neurotic goes without saying. What makes it important is that it was embraced so fanatically by so many millions of Germans and that if it led, as it did, to their ultimate ruin it also led to the ruin of so many millions of innocent, decent human beings inside and especially outside Germany.
Now, how was the new Reich to regain her position as a world power and then go on to world mastery? Hitler pondered the question in the first volume, written mostly when he was in prison in 1924, returning to it at greater length in Volume Two, which was finished in 1926.
In the first place, there must be a reckoning with France, ”the inexorable mortal enemy of the German people.” The French aim, he said, would always be to achieve a ”dismembered and shattered Germany . . . a hodgepodge of little states.” This was so self-evident, Hitler added, that ”. . . if I were a Frenchman . . . I could not and would not act any differently from Clemenceau,” Therefore, there must be ”a final active reckoning with France . . . a last decisive struggle . . . only then will we be able to end the eternal and essentially so fruitless struggle between ourselves and France; presupposing, of course, that Germany actually regards the destruction of France as only a means which will afterward enable her finally to give our people the expansion made possible elsewhere.”100
Expansion elsewhere? Where? In this manner Hitler leads to the core of his ideas on German foreign policy which he was to attempt so faithfully to carry out when he became ruler of the Reich. Germany, he said bluntly, must expand in the East – largely at the expense of Russia.
In the first volume of Mein Kampf Hitler discoursed at length on this problem of Lebensraum – living space – a subject which obsessed him to his dying breath. The Hohenzollern Empire, he declared, had been mistaken in seeking colonies in Africa. ”Territorial policy cannot be fulfilled in the Cameroons but today almost exclusively in Europe.” But the soil of Europe was already occupied. True, Hitler recognized, ”but nature has not reserved this soil for the future possession of any particular nation or race; on the contrary, this soil exists for the people which possesses the force to take it.” What if the present possessors object? ”Then the law of self-preservation goes into effect; and what is refused to amicable methods, it is up to the fist to take,”101
Acquisition of new soil, Hitler continued, in explaining the blindness of German prewar foreign policy, ”was possible only in the East . . . If land was desired in Europe, it could be obtained by and large only at the expense of Russia, and this meant that the new Reich must again set itself on the march along the road of the Teutonic Knights of old, to obtain by the German sword sod for the German plow and daily bread for the nation.”102
As if he had not made himself entirely clear in the initial volume, Hitler returned to the subject in the second one.
Only an adequate large space on this earth assures a nation of freedom of existence . . . Without consideration of ”traditions” and prejudices the National Socialist movement, must find the courage to gather our people and their strength for an advance along the road that will lead this people from its present restricted living space to new land and soil . . . The National Socialist movement must strive to eliminate the disproportion between our population and our area – viewing this latter as a source of food as well as a basis for power politics . . . We must hold unflinchingly to our aim . . . to secure for the German people the land and soil to which they are entitled . . . 103
How much land are the German people entitled to? The bourgeoisie, says Hitler scornfully, ”which does not possess a single creative political idea for the future,” had been clamoring for the restoration of the 1914 German frontiers.
The demand for restoration of the frontiers of 1914 is a political absurdity of such proportions and consequences as to make it seem a crime. Quite aside from the fact that the Reich’s frontiers in 1914 were anything but logical. For in reality they were neither complete in the sense of embracing the people of German nationality nor sensible with regard to geo-military expediency. They were not the result of a considered political action, but momentary frontiers in a political struggle that was by no means concluded . . . With equal right and in many cases with more right, some other sample year of German history could be picked out, and the restoration of the conditions at that time declared to be the aim in foreign affairs.104
Hitler’s ”sample year” would go back some six centuries, to when the Germans were driving the Slavs back in the East. The push eastward must be resumed. "Today we count eighty million Germans in Europe! This foreign policy will be acknowledged as correct only if, after scarcely a hundred years, there are two hundred and fifty million Germans on this continent.”105 And all of them within the borders of the new and expanded Reich.
Some other peoples, obviously, will have to make way for so many Germans. What other peoples?
And so we National Socialists . . . take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze toward the land in the East.
If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal harder states,106
Fate, Hitler remarks, was kind to Germany in this respect. It had handed over Russia to Bolshevism, which, he says, really meant handing over Russia to the Jews. ”The giant empire in the East,” he exults, ”is ripe for collapse. And the end of Jewish rule in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state.” So the great steppes to the East, Hitler implies, could be taken over easily on Russia’s collapse without much cost in blood to the Germans.
Can anyone contend that the blueprint here is not clear and precise? France will be destroyed, but that is secondary to the German drive eastward. First the immediate lands to the East inhabited predominantly by Germans will be taken. And what are these? Obviously Austria, the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia and the western part of Poland, including Danzig. After that, Russia herself. Why was the world so surprised, then, when Chancellor Hitler, a bare few years later, set out to achieve these very ends?
On the nature of the future Nazi State, Hitler’s ideas in Mein Kampf are less concise. He made it clear enough that there would be no ”democratic nonsense” and that the Third Reich would be ruled by the Fuhrerprinzip, the leadership principle – that is, that it would be a dictatorship. There is almost nothing about economics in the book. The subject bored Hitler and he never bothered to try to learn something about it beyond toying with the crackpot ideas of Gottfried Feder, the crank who was against ”interest slavery.” [The author is showing his colors,defending usury D.C]
What interested Hitler was political power; economics could somehow take care of itself.
The state has nothing at all to do with any definite economic conception or development . . . The state is a racial organism and not an economic organization . . . The inner strength of a state coincides only in the rarest cases with so-called economic prosperity; the latter, in innumerable cases, seems to indicate the state’s approaching decline . . . Prussia demonstrates with marvelous sharpness that not material qualities but ideal virtues alone make possible the formation of a state. Only under their protection can economic life flourish. Always when in Germany there was an upsurge of political power the economic conditions began to improve; but always when economics became the sole content of our people’s life, stifling the ideal virtues, the state collapsed and in a short time drew economic life with it . . . Never yet has a state been founded by peaceful economic means . . . 107
Therefore, as Hitler said in a speech in Munich in 1923, ”no economic policy is possible without a sword, no industrialization without power.” Beyond that vague, crude philosophy and a passing reference in Mein Kampf to ”economic chambers,” ”chambers of estates” and a ”central economic parliament” which ”would keep the national economy functioning,” Hitler refrains from any expression of opinion on the economic foundation of the Third Reich.
And though the very name of the Nazi Party proclaimed it as ”socialist,” Hitler was even more vague on the kind of ”socialism” he envisaged for the new Germany. This is not surprising in view of a definition of a ”socialist” which he gave in a speech on July 28, 1922:
Whoever is prepared to make the national cause his own to such an extent that he knows no higher ideal than the welfare of his nation; whoever has understood our great national anthem, ”Deutschland ueber Alles,” to mean that nothing in the wide world surpasses in his eyes this Germany, people and land – that man is a Socialist.108
Considerable editorial advice and even pruning on the part of at least three helpers could not prevent Hitler from meandering from one subject to another in Mein Kampf. Rudolf Hess, who took most of the dictation first at Landsberg prison and later at Haus Wachenfeld near Berchtesgaden, did his best to tidy up the manuscript, but he was no man to stand up to the Leader. More successful in this respect was Father Bernhard Stempfle, a former member of the Hieronymite order and an anti-Semitic journalist of some notoriety in Bavaria. This strange priest, of whom more will be heard in this history, corrected some of Hitler’s bad grammar, straightened out what prose he could and crossed out a few passages which he convinced the author were politically objectionable. The third adviser was Josef Czerny, of Czech origin, who worked on the Nazi newspaper, Voelkischer Beobachter, and whose anti-Jewish poetry endeared him to Hitler. Czerny was instrumental in revising the first volume of Mein Kampf for its second printing, in which certain embarrassing words and sentences were eliminated or changed; and he went over carefully the proofs of Volume Two.
Nevertheless, most of the meanderings remained. Hitler insisted on airing his thoughts at random on almost every conceivable subject, including culture, education, the theater, the movies, the comics, art, literature, history, sex, marriage, prostitution and syphilis. Indeed, on the subject of syphilis, Hitler devotes ten turgid pages, declaring it is ”the task of the nation – not just one more task,” to eradicate it. To combat this dread disease Hitler demands that all the propaganda resources of the nation be mobilized. ”Everything,” he says, ”depends on the solution of this question.” The problem of syphilis and prostitution must also be attacked, he states, by facilitating earlier marriages, and he gives a foretaste of the eugenics of the Third Reich by insisting that ”marriage cannot be an end in itself, but must serve the one higher goal: the increase and preservation of the species and the race. This alone is its meaning and its task.”109
And so with this mention of the preservation of the species and of the race in Mein Kampf we come to the second principal consideration: Hitler’s Weltanschauung, his view of life, which some historians, especially in England, have seen as a crude form of Darwinism but which in reality, as we shall see, has its roots deep in German history and thought. Like Darwin but also like a whole array of German philosophers, historians, kings, generals and statesmen, Hitler saw all life as an eternal struggle and the world as a jungle where the fittest survived and the strongest ruled – a ”world where one creature feeds on the other and where the death of the weaker implies the life of the stronger.”
Mein Kampf is studded with such pronouncements: ”In the end only the urge for self-preservation can conquer . . . Mankind has grown great in eternal struggle, and only in eternal peace does it perish . . . Nature . . . puts living creatures on this globe and watches the free play of forces. She then confers the master’s right on her favorite child, the strongest in courage and industry . . . The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel . . . ” For Hitler the preservation of culture ”is bound up with the rigid law of necessity and the right to victory of the best and strongest in the world. Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight, in this world of eternal struggle, do not deserve to live. Even if this were hard – that is how it is!”110 And who is ”nature’s favorite child, the strongest in courage and industry” on whom Providence has conferred ”the master’s right”? The Aryan. Here in Mein Kampf we come to the kernel of the Nazi idea of race superiority, of the conception of the master race, on which the Third Reich and Hitler’s New Order in Europe were based. [The original gangster of the group of legends in their own minds DC]
All the human culture, all the results of art, science and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan. This very fact admits of the not unfounded inference that he alone was the founder of all higher humanity, therefore representing the prototype of all that we understand by the word ”man.” He is the Prometheus of mankind from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has sprung at all times, forever kindling anew that fire of knowledge which illumined the night of silent mysteries and thus caused man to climb the path to mastery over the other beings of this earth . . . It was he who laid the foundations and erected the walls of every great structure in human culture.111
And how did the Aryan accomplish so much and become so supreme? Hitler’s answer is: By trampling over others. Like so many German thinkers of the nineteenth century, Hitler fairly revels in a sadism (and its opposite, masochism) which foreign students of the German spirit have always found so difficult to comprehend.
Thus, for the formation of higher cultures the existence of lower human types was one of the most essential preconditions . . . It is certain that the first culture of humanity was based less on the tamed animal than on the use of lower human beings. Only after the enslavement of subject races did the same fate strike beasts. For first the conquered warrior drew the plow – and only after him the horse. Hence it is no accident that the first cultures arose in places where the Aryan, in his encounters with lower peoples, subjugated them and bent them to his will . . . As long as he ruthlessly upheld the master attitude, not only did he remain master, but also the preserver and increaser of culture.112
Then something happened which Hitler took as a warning to the Germans.
As soon as the subjected people began to raise themselves up and approach the level of their conqueror, a phase of which probably was the use of his language, the barriers between master and servant broke down.
But even worse than sharing the master’s language was something else.
The Aryan gave up the purity of his blood and, therefore, lost his sojourn in the paradise which he had made for himself. He became submerged in a racial mixture and gradually lost his cultural creativeness.
To the young Nazi leader this was the cardinal error.
Blood mixture and the resultant drop in the racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures; for men do not perish as a result of lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is continued only in pure blood. All who are not of good race in this world are chaff.113
Chaff were the Jews and the Slavs, and in time, when he became dictator and conqueror, Hitler would forbid the marriage of a German with any member of these races, though a fourth-grade schoolmarm could have told him that there was a great deal of Slavic blood in the Germans, especially in those who dwelt in the eastern provinces. In carrying out his racial ideas, it must again be admitted, Hitler was as good as his word. In the New Order which he began to impose on the Slavs in the East during the war, the Czechs, the Poles, the Russians were – and were to remain, if the grotesque New Order had endured – the hewers of wood and the drawers of water for their German masters.
It was an easy step for a man as ignorant of history and anthropology as Hitler to make of the Germans the modern Aryans – and thus the master race. To Hitler the Germans are ”the highest species of humanity on this earth” and will remain so if they ”occupy themselves not merely with the breeding of dogs, horses and cats but also with care for the purity of their own blood.”114”
Hitler’s obsession with race leads to his advocacy of the ”folkish” state. Exactly what kind of state that was – or was intended to be – I never clearly understood despite many re-readings of Mein Kampf and listening to dozens of addresses on the subject by the Fuehrer himself, though more than once I heard the dictator declare that it was the central point of his whole thinking. The German word Volk cannot be translated accurately into English. Usually it is rendered as ”nation” or ”people,” but in German there is a deeper and somewhat different meaning that connotes a primitive, tribal community based on blood and soil. In Mein Kampf Hitler has a difficult time trying to define the folkish state, announcing, for example, on page 379 that he will clarify ”the ’folkish’ concept” only to shy away from any clarification and wander off on other subjects for several pages. Finally he has a go at it:
In opposition to [the bourgeois and the Marxist-Jewish worlds], the folkish philosophy finds the importance of mankind in its basic racial elements. In the state it sees only – a means to an end and construes its end as the preservation of the racial existence of man. Thus, it by no means believes in an equality of races, but along with their difference it recognizes their higher or lesser value and feels itself obligated to promote the victory of the better and stronger, and demand the subordination of the inferior and weaker in accordance with the eternal will that dominates this universe. Thus, in principle, it serves the basic aristocratic idea of nature and believes in the validity of this law down to the last individual. It sees not only the different value of the races, but also the different value of individuals. From the mass it extracts the importance of the individual personality and thus . . . it has an organizing effect. It believes in the necessity of an idealization of humanity, in which alone it sees the premise for the existence of humanity. But it cannot grant the right to existence even to an ethical idea if this idea represents a danger for the racial life of the bearers of a higher ethics; for in a bastardized and niggerized world all the concepts of the humanly beautiful and sublime, as well as all ideas of an idealized future of our humanity, would be lost forever . . .
And so the folkish philosophy of life corresponds to the innermost will of nature, since it restores that free play of forces which must lead to a continuous mutual higher breeding, until at last the best of humanity, having achieved possession of this earth, will have a free path for activity in domains which will lie partly above it and partly outside it.
We all sense that in the distant future humanity must be faced by problems which only a highest race, become master people and supported by the means and possibilities of an entire globe, will be equipped to overcome.115
”Thus,” Hitler declares a little farther on, ”the highest purpose of a folkish state is concern for the preservation of those original racial elements which bestow culture and create the beauty and dignity of a higher mankind.”116 This again leads him to a matter of eugenics:
The folkish state . . . must set race in the center of all life. It must take care to keep it pure . . . It must see to it that only the healthy beget children; that there is only one disgrace: despite one’s own sickness and deficiencies, to bring children into the world; and one highest honor: to renounce doing so. And conversely it must be considered reprehensible to withhold healthy children from the nation. Here the [folkish] state must act as guardian of a millennial future in the face of which the wishes and the selfishness of the individual must appear as nothing and submit . . . A folkish state must therefore begin by raising marriage from the level of a continuous defilement of the race and give it the consecration of an institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape.117 [His delusion was strong,from my point of view,and with the advantage of hindsight,Hitler to me is and was the biggest useful idiot of the 20th Century DC]
Hitler’s fantastic conception of the folkish state leads to a good many other wordy considerations which, if heeded, he says, will bring the Germans the mastery of the earth – German domination has become an obsession with him. At one point he argues that the failure to keep the Germanic race simon-pure ”has robbed us of world domination. If the German people had possessed that herd unity which other peoples enjoyed, the German Reich today would doubtless be mistress of the globe.”118 Since a folkish state must be based on race, ”the German Reich must embrace all Germans” – this is a key point in his argument, and one he did not forget nor fail to act upon when he came to power.
Since the folkish state is to be based ”on the aristocratic idea of nature” it follows that democracy is out of the question and must be replaced by the Fuhrerprinzip. The authoritarianism of the Prussian Army is to be adopted by the Third Reich: ”authority of every leader downward and responsibility upward.”
There must be no majority decisions, but only responsible persons . . . Surely every man will have advisers by his side, but the decision will be made by one man.” . . . only he alone may possess the authority and the right to command . . . It will not be possible to dispense with Parliament. But their councilors will then actually give counsel . . . In no chamber does a vote ever take place. They are working institutions and not voting machines. This principle – absolute responsibility unconditionally combined with absolute authority – will gradually breed an elite of leaders such as today, in this era of irresponsible parliamentarianism, is utterly inconceivable.119
Such were the ideas of Adolf Hitler, set down in all their appalling crudeness as he sat in Landsberg prison gazing out at a flowering orchard above the River Lech,∗ or later, in 1925-26, as he reclined on the balcony of a comfortable inn at Berchtesgaden and looked out across the towering Alps toward his native Austria, dictating a torrent of words to his faithful Rudolf Hess and dreaming of the Third Reich which he would build on the shoddy foundations we have seen, and which he would rule with an iron hand. That one day he would build it and rule it he had no doubts whatsoever, for he was possessed of that burning sense of mission peculiar to so many geniuses who have sprouted, seemingly, from nowhere and from nothing throughout the ages. He would unify a chosen people who had never before been politically one. He would purify their race. He would make them strong. He would make them lords of the earth.
∗”Without my imprisonment,” Hitler remarked long afterward, ”Mein Kampf would never have been written. That period gave me the chance of deepening various notions for which I then had only an instinctive feeling . . . It’s from this time, too, that my conviction dates – a thing that many of my supporters never understood – that we could no longer win power by force. The state had had time to consolidate itself, and it had the weapons.” (Hitler’s Secret Conversations, p. 235.) The remark was made to some of his cronies at headquarters on the Russian front on the night of February 3-4, 1942.
A crude Darwinism? A sadistic fancy? An irresponsible egoism? A megalomania? It was all of these in part. But it was something more. For the mind and the passion of Hitler – all the aberrations that possessed his feverish brain – had roots that lay deep in German experience and thought. Nazism and the Third Reich, in fact, were but a logical continuation of German history.
4
THE HISTORICAL ROOTS
THE HISTORICAL ROOTS
OF THE THIRD REICH
In the delirious days of the annual rallies of the Nazi Party at Nuremberg
at the beginning of September, I used to be accosted by a swarm of hawkers
selling a picture postcard on which were shown the portraits of Frederick the
Great, Bismarck, Hindenburg and Hitler. The inscription read: ”What the
King conquered, the Prince formed, the Field Marshal defended, the Soldier
saved and unified.” Thus Hitler, the soldier, was portrayed not only as the
savior and unifier of Germany but as the successor of these celebrated figures
who had made the country great. The implication of the continuity of German
history, culminating in Hitler’s rule, was not lost upon the multitude. The very
expression ”the Third Reich” also served to strengthen this concept. The First
Reich had been the medieval Holy Roman Empire; the Second Reich had been
that which was formed by Bismarck in 1871 after Prussia’s defeat of France.
Both had added glory to the German name. The Weimar Republic, as Nazi
propaganda had it, had dragged that fair name in the mud. The Third Reich
restored it, just as Hitler had promised. Hitler’s Germany, then, was depicted
as a logical development from all that had gone before – or at least of all that
had been glorious. [nothing Holy about either Roman Empire, not Nero's or Frederick's DC]But the onetime Vienna vagabond, however littered his mind, knew enough history to realize that there had been German failures in the past, failures that must be set against the successes of France and Britain. He never forgot that by the end of the Middle Ages, which had seen Britain and France emerge as unified nations, Germany remained a crazy patchwork of some three hundred individual states. It was this lack of national development which largely determined the course of German history from the end of the Middle Ages to midway in the nineteenth century and made it so different from that of the other great nations of Western Europe.
To the lack of political and dynastic unity was added, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the disaster of religious differences which followed the Reformation. There is not space in this book to recount adequately the immense influence that Martin Luther, the Saxon peasant who became an Augustinian monk and launched the German Reformation, had on the Germans and their subsequent history. But it may be said, in passing, that this towering but erratic genius, this savage anti-Semite and hater of Rome, who combined in his tempestuous character so many of the best and the worst qualities of the German – the coarseness, the boisterousness, the fanaticism, the intolerance, the violence, but also the honesty, the simplicity, the self-scrutiny, the passion for learning and for music and for poetry and for righteousness in the eyes of God – left a mark on the life of the Germans, for both good and bad, more indelible, more fateful, than was wrought by any other single individual before or since. Through his sermons and his magnificent translation of the Bible, Luther created the modern German language, aroused in the people not only a new Protestant vision of Christianity but a fervent German nationalism and taught them, at least in religion, the supremacy of the individual conscience. But tragically for them, Luther’s siding with the princes in the peasant risings, which he had largely inspired, and his passion for political autocracy ensured a mindless and provincial political absolutism which reduced the vast majority of the German people to poverty, to a horrible torpor and a demeaning subservience. Even worse perhaps, it helped to perpetuate and indeed to sharpen the hopeless divisions not only between classes but also between the various dynastic and political groupings of the German people. It doomed for centuries the possibility of the unification of Germany.
The Thirty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which ended it, brought the final catastrophe to Germany, a blow so devastating that the country has never fully recovered from it. This was the last of Europe’s great religious wars, but before it was over it had degenerated from a Protestant-Catholic conflict into a confused dynastic struggle between the Catholic Austrian Hapsburgs on the one side and the Catholic French Bourbons and the Swedish Protestant monarchy on the other. In the savage fighting, Germany itself was laid waste, the towns and countryside were devastated and ravished, the people decimated. It has been estimated that one third of the German people perished in this barbarous war.
The Peace of Westphalia was almost as disastrous to the future of Germany as the war had been. The German princes, who had sided with France and Sweden, were confirmed as absolute rulers of their little domains, some 350 of them, the Emperor remaining merely as a figurehead so far as the German lands were concerned. The surge of reform and enlightenment which had swept Germany at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries was smothered. In that period the great free cities had enjoyed virtual independence; feudalism was gone in them, the arts and commerce thrived. Even in the countryside the German peasant had secured liberties far greater than those enjoyed in England and France. Indeed, at the beginning of the sixteenth century Germany could be said to be one of the fountains of European civilization.
Now, after the Peace of Westphalia, it was reduced to the barbarism of Muscovy. Serfdom was reimposed, even introduced in areas where it had been unknown. The towns lost their self-government. The peasants, the laborers, even the middle-class burghers, were exploited to the limit by the princes, who held them down in a degrading state of servitude. The pursuit of learning and the arts all but ceased. The greedy rulers had no feeling for German nationalism and patriotism and stamped out any manifestations of them in their subjects. Civilization came to a standstill in Germany. The Reich, as one historian has put it, ”was artificially stabilized at a medieval level of confusion and weakness.”120
Germany never recovered from this setback. Acceptance of autocracy, of blind obedience to the petty tyrants who ruled as princes, became ingrained in the German mind. The idea of democracy, of rule by parliament, which made such rapid headway in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which exploded in France in 1789, did not sprout in Germany. This political backwardness of the Germans, divided as they were into so many petty states and isolated in them from the surging currents of European thought and development, set Germany apart from and behind the other countries of the West. There was no natural growth of a nation. This has to be borne in mind if one is to comprehend the disastrous road this people subsequently took and the warped state of mind which settled over it. In the end the German nation was forged by naked force and held together by naked aggression.
Beyond the Elbe to the east lay Prussia. As the nineteenth century waned, this century which had seen the sorry failure of the confused and timid liberals at Frankfurt in 1848-49 to create a somewhat democratic, unified Germany, Prussia took over the German destiny. For centuries this Germanic state had lain outside the main stream of German historical development and culture. It seemed almost as if it were a freak of history. Prussia had begun as the remote frontier state of Brandenburg on the sandy wastes east of the Elbe which, beginning with the eleventh century, had been slowly conquered from the Slavs. Under Brandenburg’s ruling princes, the Hohenzollerns, who were little more than military adventurers, the Slavs, mostly Poles, were gradually pushed back along the Baltic. Those who resisted were either exterminated or made landless serfs. The imperial law of the German Empire forbade the princes from assuming royal titles, but in 1701 the Emperor acquiesced in the Elector Frederick III’s being crowned King in Prussia at Koenigsberg.
By this time Prussia had pulled itself up by its own bootstraps to be one of the ranking military powers of Europe. It had none of the resources of the others. Its land was barren and bereft of minerals. The population was small. There were no large towns, no industry and little culture. Even the nobility was poor, and the landless peasants lived like cattle. Yet by a supreme act of will and a genius for organization the Hohenzollerns managed to create a Spartan military state whose well-drilled Army won one victory after another and whose Machiavellian diplomacy of temporary alliances with whatever power seemed the strongest brought constant additions to its territory.
There thus arose quite artificially a state born of no popular force nor even of an idea except that of conquest, and held together by the absolute power of the ruler, by a narrow-minded bureaucracy which did his bidding and by a ruthlessly disciplined army. Two thirds and sometimes as much as five sixths of the annual state revenue was expended on the Army, which became, under the King, the state itself. ”Prussia,” remarked Mirabeau, ”is not a state with an army, but an army with a state.” And the state, which was run with the efficiency and soullessness of a factory, became all; the people were little more than cogs in the machinery. Individuals were taught not only by the kings and the drill sergeants but by the philosophers that their role in life was one of obedience, work, sacrifice and duty. Even Kant preached that duty demands the suppression of human feeling, and the Prussian poet Willibald Alexis gloried in the enslavement of the people under the Hohenzollerns. To Lessing, who did not like it, ”Prussia was the most slavish country of Europe.”
The Junkers, who were to play such a vital role in modern Germany, were also a unique product of Prussia. They were, as they said, a master race. It was they who occupied the land conquered from the Slavs and who farmed it on large estates worked by these Slavs, who became landless serfs quite different from those in the West. There was an essential difference between the agrarian system in Prussia and that of western Germany and Western Europe. In the latter, the nobles, who owned most of the land, received rents or feudal dues from the peasants, who though often kept in a state of serfdom had certain rights and privileges and could, and did, gradually acquire their own land and civic freedom. In the West, the peasants formed a solid part of the community; the landlords, for all their drawbacks, developed in their leisure a cultivation which led to, among other things, a civilized quality of life that could be seen in the refinement of manners, of thought and of the arts.
The Prussian Junker was not a man of leisure. He worked hard at managing his large estate, much as a factory manager does today. His landless laborers were treated as virtual slaves. On his large properties he was the absolute lord. There were no large towns nor any substantial middle class, as there were in the West, whose civilizing influence might rub against him. In contrast to the cultivated grand seigneur in the West, the Junker developed into a rude, domineering, arrogant type of man, without cultivation or culture, aggressive, conceited, ruthless, narrow-minded and given to a petty profit-seeking that some German historians noted in the private life of Otto von Bismarck, the most successful of the Junkers.[This is interesting,anyone who reads Gustavus Myers 'History of the Great Americans Fortunes' cannot help seeing this same Junker like mindset in the great land grab here in America,particularly in New York and Penn. DC]
It was this political genius, this apostle of ”blood and iron,” who between 1866 and 1871 brought an end to a divided Germany which had existed for nearly a thousand years and, by force, replaced it with Greater Prussia, or what might be called Prussian Germany. Bismarck’s unique creation is the Germany we have known in our time, a problem child of Europe and the world for nearly a century, a nation of gifted, vigorous people in which first this remarkable man and then Kaiser Wilhelm II and finally Hitler, aided by a military caste and by many a strange intellectual, succeeded in inculcating a lust for power and domination, a passion for unbridled militarism, a contempt for democracy and individual freedom and a longing for authority, for authoritarianism. Under such a spell, this nation rose to great heights, fell and rose again, until it was seemingly destroyed with the end of Hitler in the spring of 1945 – it is perhaps too early to speak of that with any certainty.
”The great questions of the day,” Bismarck declared on becoming Prime Minister of Prussia in 1862, ”will not be settled by resolutions and majority votes – that was the mistake of the men of 1848 and 1849 – but by blood and iron.” That was exactly the way he proceeded to settle them, though it must be said that he added a touch of diplomatic finesse, often of the most deceitful kind. Bismarck’s aim was to destroy liberalism, bolster the power of conservatism that is, of the Junkers, the Army and the crown – and make Prussia, as against Austria, the dominant power not only among the Germans but, if possible, in Europe as well. ”Germany looks not to Prussia’s liberalism,” he told the deputies in the Prussian parliament, ”but to her force.”
Bismarck first built up the Prussian Army and when the parliament refused to vote the additional credits he merely raised them on his own and finally dissolved the chamber. With a strengthened Army he then struck in three successive wars. The first, against Denmark in 1864, brought the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein under German rule. The second, against Austria in 1866, had far-reaching consequences. Austria, which for centuries had been first among the German states, was finally excluded from German affairs. It was not allowed to join the North German Confederation which Bismarck now proceeded to establish.
”In 1866,” the eminent German political scientist Wilhelm Roepke once wrote, ”Germany ceased to exist.” Prussia annexed outright all the German states north of the Main which had fought against her, except Saxony; these included Hanover, Hesse, Nassau, Frankfurt and the Elbe duchies. All the other states north of the Main were forced into the North German Confederation. Prussia, which now stretched from the Rhine to Koenigsberg, completely dominated it, and within five years, with the defeat of Napoleon III’s France, the southern German states, with the considerable kingdom of Bavaria in the lead, would be drawn into Prussian Germany.121
Bismarck’s crowning achievement, the creation of the Second Reich, came on January 18, 1871, when King Wilhelm I of Prussia was proclaimed Emperor of Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Germany had been unified by Prussian armed force. It was now the greatest power on the Continent; its only rival in Europe was England.
Yet there was a fatal flaw. The German Empire, as Treitschke said, was in reality but an extension of Prussia. ”Prussia,” he emphasized, ”is the dominant factor . . . The will of the Empire can be nothing but the will of the Prussian state.” This was true, and it was to have disastrous consequences for the Germans themselves. From 1871 to 1933 and indeed to Hitler’s end in 1945, the course of German history as a consequence was to run, with the exception of the interim of the Weimar Republic, in a straight line and with utter logic.
Despite the democratic facade put up by the establishment of the Reichstag, whose members were elected by universal manhood suffrage, the German Empire was in reality a militarist autocracy ruled by the King of Prussia, who was also Emperor. The Reichstag possessed few powers; it was little more than a debating society where the representatives of the people let off steam or bargained for shoddy benefits for the classes they represented. The throne had the power – by divine right. As late as 1910 Wilhelm II could proclaim that the royal crown had been ”granted by God’s Grace alone and not by parliaments, popular assemblies and popular decision . . . Considering myself an instrument of the Lord,” he added, ”I go my way.”
He was not impeded by Parliament. The Chancellor he appointed was responsible to him, not to the Reichstag. The assembly could not overthrow a Chancellor nor keep him in office. That was the prerogative of the monarch. Thus, in contrast to the development in other countries in the West, the idea of democracy, of the people sovereign, of the supremacy of parliament, never got a foothold in Germany, even after the twentieth century began. To be sure, the Social Democrats, after years of persecution by Bismarck and the Emperor, had become the largest single political party in the Reichstag by 1912. They loudly demanded the establishment of a parliamentary democracy. But they were ineffective. And, though the largest party, they were still a minority. The middle classes, grown prosperous by the belated but staggering development of the industrial revolution and dazzled by the success of Bismarck’s policy of force and war, had traded for material gain any aspirations for political freedom they may have had.∗ They accepted the Hohenzollern autocracy. They gladly knuckled under to the Junker bureaucracy and they fervently embraced Prussian militarism. Germany’s star had risen and they – almost all the people – were eager to do what their masters asked to keep it high. At the very end, Hitler, the Austrian, was one of them. To him Bismarck’s Second Reich, despite its mistakes and its ”terrifying forces of decay” was a work of splendor in which the Germans at last had come into their own.
∗In a sense the German working class made a similar trade. To combat socialism Bismarck put through between 1883 and 1889 a program for social security far beyond anything known in other countries. It included compulsory insurance for workers against old age, sickness, accident and incapacity, and though organized by the State it was financed by employers and employees. It cannot be said that it stopped the rise of the Social Democrats or the trade unions, but it did have a profound influence on the working class in that it gradually made them value security over political freedom and caused them to see in the State, however conservative, a benefactor and a protector. Hitler, as we shall see, took full advantage of this state of mind. In this, as in other matters, he learned much from Bismarck. ”I studied Bismarck’s socialist legislation,” Hitler remarks in Mein Kampf (p. 155), ”in its intention, struggle and success.”
Was not Germany above all other countries a marvelous example of an empire which had risen from foundations of a policy purely of power? Prussia, the germ cell of the Empire, came into being through resplendent heroism and not through financial operations or commercial deals, and the Reich itself in turn was only the glorious reward of aggressive political leadership and the death defying courage of its soldiers .
The very founding of the [Second] Reich seemed gilded by the magic of an event which uplifted the entire nation. After a series of incomparable victories, a Reich was born for the sons and grandsons – a reward for immortal heroism . . . This Reich, which did not owe its existence to the trickery of parliamentary fractions, towered above the measure of other states by the very exalted manner of its founding; for not in the cackling of a parliamentary battle of words but in the thunder and rumbling of the front surrounding Paris was the solemn act performed: a proclamation of our will, declaring that the Germans, princes and people, were resolved in the future to constitute a Reich and once again to raise the imperial crown to symbolic heights . . . No deserters and slackers were the founders of the Bismarckian state, but the regiments at the front.
This unique birth and baptism of fire in themselves surrounded the Reich with a halo of historic glory such as only the oldest states , and they but seldom could boast.
And what an ascent now began!
Freedom on the outside provided daily bread within. The nation became rich in numbers and earthly goods. The honor of the state, and with it that, of the whole people, was protected and shielded by an army which could point most visibly to the difference from the former German Union,122
That was the Germany which Hitler resolved to restore. In Mein Kampf he discourses at great length on what he believes are the reasons for its fall: its tolerance of Jews and Marxists, the crass materialism and selfishness of the middle class, the nefarious influence of the ”cringers and lickspittles” around the Hohenzollern throne, the ”catastrophic German alliance policy” which linked Germany to the degenerate Hapsburgs and the untrustworthy Italians instead of with England, and the lack of a fundamental ”social” and racial policy. These were failures which, he promised, National Socialism would correct.
THE INTELLECTUAL ROOTS
OF THE THIRD REICH
But aside from history, where did Hitler get his ideas? Though his opponents
inside and outside Germany were too busy, or too stupid, to take much notice
of it until it was too late, he had somehow absorbed, as had so many Germans,
a weird mixture of the irresponsible, megalomaniacal ideas which erupted from
German thinkers during the nineteenth century. Hitler, who often got them at
second hand through such a muddled pseudo philosopher as Alfred Rosenberg
or through his drunken poet friend Dietrich Eckart, embraced them with all the
feverish enthusiasm of a neophyte. What was worse, he resolved to put them
into practice if the opportunity should ever arise. We have seen what they were as they thrashed about in Hitler’s mind: the glorification of war and conquest and the absolute power of the authoritarian state; the belief in the Aryans, or Germans, as the master race, and the hatred of Jews and Slavs; the contempt for democracy and humanism. They are not original with Hitler – though the means of applying them later proved to be. They emanate from that odd assortment of erudite but unbalanced philosophers, historians and teachers who captured the German mind during the century before Hitler with consequences so disastrous, as it turned out, not only for the Germans but for a large portion of mankind.
There had been among the Germans, to be sure, some of the most elevated minds and spirits of the Western world – Leibnitz, Kant, Herder, Humboldt, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Bach and Beethoven – and they had made unique contributions to the civilization of the West. But the German culture which became dominant in the nineteenth century and which coincided with the rise of Prussian Germany, continuing from Bismarck through Hitler, rests primarily on Fichte and Hegel, to begin with, and then on Treitschke, Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, and a host of lesser lights not the least of whom, strangely enough, were a bizarre Frenchman and an eccentric Englishman. They succeeded in establishing a spiritual break with the West; the breach has not been healed to this day.
In 1807, following Prussia’s humiliating defeat by Napoleon at Jena, Johann Gottlieb Fichte began his famous ”Addresses to the German Nation” from the podium of the University of Berlin, where he held the chair of philosophy. They stirred and rallied a divided, defeated people and their resounding echoes could still be heard in the Third Reich. Fichte’s teaching was heady wine for a frustrated folk. To him the Latins, especially the French, and the Jews are the decadent races. Only the Germans possess the possibility of regeneration. Their language is the purest, the most original. Under them a new era in history would blossom. It would reflect the order of the cosmos. It would be led by a small elite which would be free of any moral restraints of a ”private” nature.These are some of the ideas we have seen Hitler putting down in Mein Kampf. On Fichte’s death in 1814, he was succeeded by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel at the University of Berlin. This is the subtle and penetrating mind whose dialectics inspired Marx and Lenin and thus contributed to the founding of Communism and whose ringing glorification of the State as supreme in human life paved the way for the Second and Third Reich's of Bismarck and Hitler. To Hegel the State is all, or almost all. Among other things, he says, it is the highest revelation of the ”world spirit”; it is the ”moral universe”; it is ”the actuality of the ethical idea . . . ethical mind . . . knowing and thinking itself”; the State ”has the supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the State . . . for the right of the world spirit is above all special privileges . . . ”
And the happiness of the individual on earth? Hegel replies that ”world history is no empire of happiness. The periods of happiness,” he declares, ”are the empty pages of history because they are the periods of agreement, without conflict.” War is the great purifier. In Hegel’s view, it makes for ”the ethical health of peoples corrupted by a long peace, as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the result of a prolonged calm.”
No traditional conception of morals and ethics must disturb either the supreme State or the ”heroes” who lead it. ”World history occupies a higher ground . . . Moral claims which are irrelevant must not be brought into collision with world-historical deeds and their accomplishments. The litany of private virtues – modesty, humility, philanthropy and forbearance – must not be raised against them . . . So mighty a form [the State] must trample down many an innocent flower – crush to pieces many an object in its path.” [Just as nuts as Hitler DC]
Hegel foresees such a State for Germany when she has recovered her God given genius. He predicts that ”Germany’s hour” will come and that its mission will be to regenerate the world. As one reads Hegel one realizes how much inspiration Hitler, like Marx, drew from him, even if it was at second hand. Above all else, Hegel in his theory of ”heroes,” those great agents who are fated by a mysterious Providence to carry out ”the will of the world spirit,” seems to have inspired Hitler, as we shall see at the end of this chapter, with his own overpowering sense of mission. [Providence? more like a demon DC]
Heinrich von Treitschke came later to the University of Berlin. From 1874 until his death in 1896 he was a professor of history there and a popular one, his lectures being attended by large and enthusiastic gatherings which included not only students but General Staff officers and officials of the Junker bureaucracy. His influence on German thought in the last quarter of the century was enormous and it continued through Wilhelm II’s day and indeed Hitler’s. Though he was a Saxon, he became the great Prussianizer; he was more Prussian than the Prussians. Like Hegel he glorifies the State and conceives of it as supreme, but his attitude is more brutish: the people, the subjects, are to be little more than slaves in the nation. ”It does not matter what you think,” he exclaims, ”so long as you obey.”
And Treitschke outdoes Hegel in proclaiming war as the highest expression of man. To him ”martial glory is the basis of all the political virtues; in the rich treasure of Germany’s glories the Prussian military glory is a jewel as precious as the masterpieces of our poets and thinkers.” He holds that ”to play blindly with peace . . . has become the shame of the thought and morality of our age.”
War is not only a practical necessity, it is also a theoretical necessity,an exigency of logic. The concept of the State implies the concept of war, for the essence of the State is power . . . "That war should ever be banished from the world is a hope not only absurd, but profoundly immoral. It would involve the atrophy of many of the essential and sublime forces of the human soul . . . A people which become attached to the chimerical hope of perpetual peace finishes irremediably by decaying in its proud isolation . . . ”
Nietzsche, like Goethe, held no high opinion of the German people, ∗ and in other ways, too, the outpourings of this megalomaniacal genius differ from those of the chauvinistic German thinkers of the nineteenth century. Indeed, he regarded most German philosophers, including Fichte and Hegel, as ”unconscious swindlers.” He poked fun at the ”Tartuffery of old Kant.” The Germans, he wrote in Ecce Homo, ”have no conception how vile they are,” and he came to the conclusion that ”wheresoever Germany penetrated, she ruins culture.” He thought that Christians, as much as Jews, were responsible for the ”slave morality” prevalent in the world; he was never an anti-Semite. He was sometimes fearful of Prussia’s future, and in his last years, before insanity closed down his mind, he even toyed with the idea of European union and world government.
∗”I have often felt,” Goethe once said, ”a bitter sorrow at the thought of the German people, which is so estimable in the individual and so wretched in the generality. A comparison of the German people with other peoples arouses a painful feeling, which I try to overcome in every possible way.” (Conversation with H. Luden on December 13, 1813, in Goethes Gespraeche, Auswahl Biedermann; quoted by Wilhelm Roepke in The Solution of the German Problem, p. 131.)
Yet I think no one who lived in the Third Reich could have failed to be impressed by Nietzsche’s influence on it. His books might be full, as Santayana said, of ”genial imbecility” and ”boyish blasphemies.” Yet Nazi scribblers never tired of extolling him. Hitler often visited the Nietzsche museum in Weimar and publicized his veneration for the philosopher by posing for photographs of himself staring in rapture at the bust of the great man.
There was some ground for this appropriation of Nietzsche as one of the originators of the Nazi Weltanschauung. Had not the philosopher thundered against democracy and parliaments, preached the will to power, praised war and proclaimed the coming of the master race and the superman – and in the most telling aphorisms? A Nazi could proudly quote him on almost every conceivable subject, and did. On Christianity: ”the one great curse, the one enormous and innermost perversion . . . I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind . . . This Christianity is no more than the typical teaching of the Socialists.” On the State, power and the jungle world of man: ”Society has never regarded virtue as anything else than as a means to strength, power and order. The State is unmorality organized . . . the will to war, to conquest and revenge . . . Society is not entitled to exist for its own sake but only as a substructure and scaffolding, by means of which a select race of beings may elevate themselves to their higher duties . . . There is no such thing as the right to live, the right to work, or the right to be happy: in this respect man is no different from the meanest worm.” † And he exalted the superman as the beast of prey, ”the magnificent blond brute, avidly rampant for spoil and victory.”
†Women, whom Nietzsche never had, he consigned to a distinctly inferior status, as did the Nazis, who decreed that their place was in the kitchen and their chief role in life to beget children for German warriors. Nietzsche put the idea this way: ”Man shall be trained for war and woman for the procreation of the warrior. AH else is folly.” He went further. In Thus Spake Zarathustra he exclaims: ”Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip!” – which prompted Bertrand Russell to quip, ”Nine women out of ten would have got the whip away from him, and he knew it, so he kept away from women . . . ”
And war? Here Nietzsche took the view of most of the other nineteenth century German thinkers. In the thundering Old Testament language in which Thus Spake Zarathustra is written, the philosopher cries out: ”Ye shall love peace as a means to new war, and the short peace more than the long. You I advise not to work, but to fight. You I advise not to peace but to victory . . . Ye say it is the good cause which halloweth even war? I say unto you: it is the good war which halloweth every cause. War and courage have done more great things than charity.”
Finally there was Nietzsche’s prophecy of the coming elite who would rule the world and from whom the superman would spring. In The Will to Power he exclaims: ”A daring and ruler race is building itself up . . . The aim should be to prepare a transvaluation of values for a particularly strong kind of man, most highly gifted in intellect and will. This man and the elite around him will become the ”lords of the earth.”
Such rantings from one of Germany’s most original minds must have struck a responsive chord in Hitler’s littered mind. At any rate he appropriated them for his own – not only the thoughts but the philosopher’s penchant for grotesque exaggeration, and often his very words. ”Lords of the Earth” is a familiar expression in Mein Kampf. That in the end Hitler considered himself the superman of Nietzsche’s prophecy can not be doubted.
”Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner,” Hitler used to say.∗ This may have been based on a partial misconception of the great composer, for though Richard Wagner harbored a fanatical hatred, as Hitler did, for the Jews, who he was convinced were out to dominate the world with their money, and though he scorned parliaments and democracy and the materialism and mediocrity of the bourgeoisie, he also fervently hoped that the Germans, ”with their special gifts,” would ”become not rulers, but enablers of the world.”
∗My own recollection is confirmed by Otto Tolischus in his They Wanted War, p. 11. It was not his political writings, however, but his towering operas, recalling so vividly the world of German antiquity with its heroic myths, its fighting pagan gods and heroes, its demons and dragons, its blood feuds and primitive tribal codes, its sense of destiny, of the splendor of love and life and the nobility of death, which inspired the myths of modern Germany and gave it a Germanic Weltanschauung which Hitler and the Nazis, with some justification, took over as their own.
From his earliest days Hitler worshiped Wagner, and even as his life neared a close, in the damp and dreary bunker at Army headquarters on the Russian front, with his world and his dreams beginning to crack and crumble, he loved to reminisce about all the times he had heard the great Wagnerian works, of what they had meant to him and of the inspiration he had derived from the Bayreuth Festival and from his countless visits to Haus Wahnfried, the composer’s home, where Siegfried Wagner, the composer’s son, still lived with his English-born wife, Winifred, who for a while was one of his revered friends.
”What joy each of Wagner’s works has given me!” Hitler exclaims on the evening of January 24-25,1942, soon after the first disastrous German defeats in Russia, as he discourses to his generals and party cronies, Himmler among them, in the depths of the underground shelter of Wolfsschanze at Rastenburg in East Prussia. Outside there is snow and an arctic cold, the elements which he so hated and feared and which had contributed to the first German military setback of the war. But in the warmth of the bunker his thoughts on this night, at least, are on one of the great inspirations of his life. ”I remember,” he says, ”my emotion the first time I entered Wahnfried. To say I was moved is an understatement! At my worst moments, they never ceased to sustain me, even Siegfried Wagner. I was on Christian-name terms with them. I loved them all, and I also love Wahnfried . . . The ten days of the Bayreuth season were always one of the blessed seasons of my existence. And I rejoice at the idea that one day I shall be able to resume the pilgrimage! . . . On the day following the end of the Bayreuth Festival . . . I’m gripped by a great sadness – as when one strips the Christmas tree of its ornaments.”123
Though Hitler reiterated in his monologue that winter evening that to him Tristan und Isolde was ”Wagner’s masterpiece,” it is the stupendous Nibelungen Ring, a series of four operas which was inspired by the great German epic myth, Nibelungenlied, and on which the composer worked for the better part of twenty-five years, that gave Germany and especially the Third Reich so much of its primitive Germanic mythos. Often a people’s myths are the highest and truest expression of its spirit and culture, and nowhere is this more true than in Germany. Schelling even argued that ”a nation comes into existence with its mythology . . . The unity of its thinking, which means a collective philosophy, [is] presented in its mythology; therefore its mythology contains the fate of the nation.” And Max Mell, a contemporary poet, who wrote a modern version of the Song of the Nibelungs, declared, ”Today only little has remained of the Greek gods that humanism wanted to implant so deeply into our culture . . . But Siegfried and Kriemhild were always in the people’s soul!”
Siegfried and Kriemhild, Brunhild and Hagen – these are the ancient heroes and heroines with whom so many modern Germans liked to identify themselves. With them, and with the world of the barbaric, pagan Nibelungs – an irrational, heroic, mystic world, beset by treachery, overwhelmed by violence, drowned in blood, and culminating in the Gotterdammerung, the twilight of the gods, as Valhalla, set on fire by Wotan after all his vicissitudes, goes up in flames in an orgy of self-willed annihilation which has always fascinated the German mind and answered some terrible longing in the German soul. These heroes, this primitive, demonic world, were always, in Mell’s words, ”in the people’s soul.” In that German soul could be felt the struggle between the spirit of civilization and the spirit of the Nibelungs, and in the time with which this history is concerned the latter seemed to gain the upper hand. It is not at all surprising that Hitler tried to emulate Wotan when in 1945 he willed the destruction of Germany so that it might go down in flames with him.
Wagner, a man of staggering genius, an artist of incredible magnitude, stood for much more than has been set down here. The conflict in the Ring operas often revolves around the theme of greed for gold, which the composer equated with the ”tragedy of modern capitalism,” and which he saw, with horror, wiping out the old virtues which had come down from an earlier day. Despite all his pagan heroes he did not entirely despair of Christianity, as Nietzsche did. And he had great compassion for the erring, warring human race. But Hitler was not entirely wrong in saying that to understand Nazism one must first know Wagner.
Wagner had known, and been influenced by, first Schopenhauer and then Nietzsche, though the latter quarreled with him because he thought his operas, especially Parsifal, showed too much Christian renunciation. In the course of his long and stormy life, Wagner came into contact with two other men, one a Frenchman, the other an Englishman, who are important to this history not so much for the impression they made on him, though in one case it was considerable, as for their effect on the German mind, which they helped to direct toward the coming of the Third Reich.
These individuals were Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a French diplomat and man of letters, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, one of the strangest Englishmen who ever lived.
Neither man, be it said at once, was a mountebank. Both were men of immense erudition, deep culture and wide experience of travel. Yet both concocted racial doctrines so spurious that no people, not even their own, took them seriously with the single exception of the Germans. To the Nazis their questionable theories became gospel. It is probably no exaggeration to say, as I have heard more than one follower of Hitler say, that Chamberlain was the spiritual founder of the Third Reich. This singular Englishman, who came to see in the Germans the master race, the hope of the future, worshiped Richard Wagner, one of whose daughters he eventually married; he venerated first Wilhelm II and finally Hitler and was the mentor of both. At the end of a fantastic life he could hail the Austrian corporal – and this long before Hitler came to power or had any prospect of it – as a being sent by God to lead the German people out of the wilderness. Hitler, not unnaturally, regarded Chamberlain as a prophet, as indeed he turned out to be.
What was it in the teaching of these two men that inoculated the Germans with a madness on the question of race and German destiny?
Gobineau’s chief contribution was a four-volume work which was published in Paris between 1853 and 1855, entitled Essai sur L’Inegalite des Races Humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races). Ironically enough, this French aristocrat, after serving as an officer in the Royal Guard, had started his public career as chef de cabinet to Alexis de Tocqueville when the distinguished author of Democracy in America served a brief term of office in 1848. He had then gone to Hanover and Frankfurt as a diplomat and it was from his contact with the Germans, rather than with De Tocqueville, that he derived his theories on racial inequalities, though he once confessed that he wrote the volumes partly to prove the superiority of his own aristocratic ancestry.
To Gobineau, as he stated in his dedication of the work to the King of Hanover, the key to history and civilization was race. ”The racial question dominates all the other problems of history . . . the inequality of races suffices to explain the whole unfolding of the destiny of peoples.” There were three principal races, white, yellow and black, and the white was the superior. ”History,” he contended, ”shows that all civilization flows from the white race, that no civilization can exist without the co-operation of this race.” The jewel of the white race was the Aryan, ”this illustrious human family, the noblest among the white race,” whose origins he traced back to Central Asia. Unfortunately, Gobineau says, the contemporary Aryan suffered from intermixture with inferior races, as one could see in the southern Europe of his time. However, in the northwest, above a line running roughly along the Seine and east to Switzerland, the Aryans, though far from simon-pure, still survived as a superior race. This took in some of the French, all of the English and the Irish, the people of the Low Countries and the Rhine and Hanover, and the Scandinavians. Gobineau seemingly excluded the bulk of the Germans, who lived to the east and southeast of his line – a fact which the Nazis glossed over when they embraced his teachings.
Still, to Gobineau’s mind the Germans, or at least the West Germans, were probably the best of all the Aryans, and this discovery the Nazis did not gloss over. Wherever they went, the Germans, he found, brought improvement. This was true even in the Roman Empire. The so-called barbaric German tribes who conquered the Romans and broke up their empire did a distinct service to civilization, for the Romans, by the time of the fourth century, were little better than degenerate mongrels, while the Germans were relatively pure Aryans. ”The Aryan German,” he declared, ”is a powerful creature . . . Everything he thinks, says and does is thus of major importance.”
Gobineau’s ideas were quickly taken up in Germany. Wagner, whom the Frenchman met in 1876 toward the close of his life (he died in 1882) espoused them with enthusiasm, and soon Gobineau societies sprang up all over Germany.∗
∗Though not in France.
THE STRANGE LIFE AND WORKS
OF H. S. CHAMBERLAIN
Among the zealous members of the Gobineau Society in Germany was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose life and works constitute one of the most fascinating ironies in the inexorable course of history which led to the rise and fall
of the Third Reich. This son of an English admiral, nephew of a British field marshal, Sir Neville Chamberlain, and of two British generals, and eventually son-in-law of Richard Wagner, was born at Portsmouth in 1855. He was destined for the British Army or Navy, but his delicate health made such a calling out of the question and he was educated in France and Geneva, where French became his first language. Between the ages of fifteen and nineteen fate brought him into touch with two Germans and thereafter he was drawn irresistibly toward Germany, of which he ultimately became a citizen and one of the foremost thinkers and in whose language he wrote all of his many books, several of which had an almost blinding influence on Wilhelm II, Adolf Hitler and countless lesser Germans.
In 1870, when he was fifteen, Chamberlain landed in the hands of a remarkable tutor, Otto Kuntze, a Prussian of the Prussians, who for four years imprinted on his receptive mind and sensitive soul the glories of militant, conquering Prussia and also – apparently unmindful of the contrasts – of such artists and poets as Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller and Wagner. At nineteen Chamberlain fell madly in love with Anna Horst, also a Prussian, ten years his senior and, like him, highly neurotic. In 1882, at the age of twenty-seven, he journeyed from Geneva, where he had beer, immersed for three years in studies of philosophy, natural history, physics, chemistry and medicine, to Bayreuth. There he met Wagner who, as he says, became the sun of his life, and Cosima, the composer’s wife, to whom he would remain passionately and slavishly devoted all the rest of his days. From 1885, when he went with Anna Horst, who had become his wife, to live for four years in Dresden, he became a German in thought and in language, moving on to Vienna in 1889 for a decade and finally in 1909 to Bayreuth, where he dwelt until his death in 1927. He divorced his idolized Prussian wife in 1905, when she was sixty and even more mentally and physically ill than he (the separation was so painful that he said it almost drove him mad) and three years later he married Eva Wagner and settled down near Wahnfried, where he could be near his wife’s mother, the revered, strong-willed Cosima.
Hypersensitive and neurotic and subject to frequent nervous breakdowns, Chamberlain was given to seeing demons who, by his own account, drove him on relentlessly to seek new fields of study and get on with his prodigious writings. One vision after another forced him to change from biology to botany to the fine arts, to music, to philosophy, to biography to history. Once, in 1896, when he was returning from Italy, the presence of a demon became so forceful that he got off the train at Gardone, shut himself up in a hotel room for eight days and, abandoning some work on music that he had contemplated, wrote feverishly on a biological thesis until he had the germ of the theme that would dominate all of his later works: race and history.
Whatever its blemishes, his mind had a vast sweep ranging over the fields of literature, music, biology, botany, religion, history and politics. There was, as Jean Real 124 has pointed out, a profound unity of inspiration in all his published works and they had a remarkable coherence. Since he felt himself goaded on by demons, his books (on Wagner, Goethe, Kant, Christianity and race) were written in the grip of a terrible fever, a veritable trance, a state of self-induced intoxication, so that, as he says in his autobiography, Lebenswege, he was often unable to recognize them as his own work, because they surpassed his expectations. Minds more balanced than his have subsequently demolished his theories of race and much of his history, and to such a French scholar of Germanism as Edmond Vermeil Chamberlain’s ideas were essentially ”shoddy.” Yet to the anti-Nazi German biographer of Hitler, Konrad Heiden, who deplored the influence of his racial teachings, Chamberlain ”was one of the most astonishing talents in the history of the German mind, a mine of knowledge and profound ideas.”
The book which most profoundly influenced that mind, which sent Wilhelm II into ecstasies and provided the Nazis with their racial aberrations, was Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts) a work of some twelve hundred pages which Chamberlain, again possessed of one of his ”demons,” wrote in nineteen months between April 1, 1897, and October 31, 1898, in Vienna, and which was published in 1899.
As with Gobineau, whom he admired, Chamberlain found the key to history, indeed the basis of civilization, to be race. To explain the nineteenth century, that is, the contemporary world, one had to consider first what it had been bequeathed from ancient times. Three things, said Chamberlain: Greek philosophy and art, Roman law and the personality of Christ. There were also three legatees: the Jews and the Germans, the ”two pure races,” and the half-breed Latins of the Mediterranean – ”a chaos of peoples,” he called them. The Germans alone deserved such a splendid heritage. They had, it is true, come into history late, not until the thirteenth century. But even before that, in destroying the Roman Empire, they had proved their worth, ”It is not true,” he says, ”that the Teutonic barbarian conjured up the so-called ’Night of the Middle Ages’; this night followed rather upon the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the raceless chaos of humanity which the dying Roman Empire had nurtured; but for the Teuton, everlasting night would have settled upon the world.” At the time he was writing he saw in the Teuton the only hope of the world.
Chamberlain included among the ”Teutons” the Celts and the Slavs, though the Teutons were the most important element. However, he is quite woolly in his definitions and at one point declares that ”whoever behaves as a Teuton is a Teuton whatever his racial origin.” Perhaps here he was thinking of his own non German origin. Whatever he was, the Teuton, according to Chamberlain, was ”the soul of our culture. The importance of each nation as a living power today is dependent upon the proportion of genuinely Teutonic blood in its population . . . True history begins at the moment when the Teuton, with his masterful hand, lays his grip upon the legacy of antiquity.”
And the Jews? The longest chapter in Foundations is devoted to them. As we have seen, Chamberlain claimed that the Jews and the Teutons were the only pure races left in the West. And in this chapter he condemns ”stupid and revolting anti-Semitism.” The Jews, he says, are not ”inferior” to the Teuton, merely ”different.” They have their own grandeur; they realize the ”sacred duty” of man to guard the purity of race. And yet as he proceeds to analyze the Jews, Chamberlain slips into the very vulgar anti-Semitism which he condemns in others and which leads, in the end, to the obscenities of Julius Streicher’s caricatures of the Jews in Der Stuermer in Hitler’s time. Indeed a good deal of the ”philosophical” basis of Nazi anti-Semitism stems from this chapter. [yeah,no confusion in his mind DC]
The preposterousness of Chamberlain’s views is quickly evident. He has declared that the personality of Christ is one of the three great bequests of antiquity to modern civilization. He then sets out to ”prove” that Jesus was not a Jew. His Galilean origins, his inability to utter correctly the Aramaic gutturals, are to Chamberlain ”clear signs” that Jesus had ”a large proportion of non-Semitic blood.” He then makes a typically fiat statement: ”Whoever claimed that Jesus was a Jew was either being stupid or telling a lie . . . Jesus was not a Jew.” [Like I said,sharp as a tack...DC]
What was he then? Chamberlain answers: Probably an Aryan! If not entirely by blood, then unmistakably by reason of his moral and religious teaching, so opposed to the ”materialism and abstract formalism” of the Jewish religion. It was natural then – or at least it was to Chamberlain – that Christ should become ”the God of the young Indo-European peoples overflowing with life,” and above all the God of the Teuton, because ”no other people was so well equipped as the Teutonic to hear this divine voice.”
There follows what purports to be a detailed history of the Jewish race from the time of the mixture of the Semite or Bedouin of the desert with the roundheaded Hittite, who had a ”Jewish nose,” and finally with the Amorites, who were Aryans. Unfortunately the Aryan mixture – the Amorites, he says, were tall, blond, magnificent – came too late to really improve the ”corrupt” Hebrew strain. From then on the Englishman, contradicting his whole theory of the purity of the Jewish race, finds the Jews becoming a ”negative” race, ”a bastardy,” so that the Aryans were justified in ”denying” Israel. In fact, he condemns the Aryans for giving the Jews ”a halo of false glory.” He then finds the Jews ”lamentably lacking in true religion.”
Finally, for Chamberlain the way of salvation lies in the Teutons and their culture, and of the Teutons the Germans are the highest-endowed, for they have inherited the best qualities of the Greeks and the Indo-Aryans. This gives them the right to be masters of the world. ”God builds today upon the Germans alone,” he wrote in another place. ”This is the knowledge, the certain truth, that has filled my soul for years.”
Publication of Foundations of the Nineteenth Century created something of a sensation and brought this strange Englishman sudden fame in Germany. Despite its frequent eloquence and its distinguished style – for Chamberlain was a dedicated artist – the book was not easy reading. But it was soon taken up by the upper classes, who seem to have found in it just what they wanted to believe. Within ten years it had gone through eight editions and sold 60,000 copies and by the time of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 it had reached a sale of 100,000. It flourished again in the Nazi time and I remember an announcement of its twenty-fourth edition in 1938, by which time it had sold more than a quarter of a million copies.
Among its first and most enthusiastic readers was Kaiser Wilhelm II. He invited Chamberlain to his palace at Potsdam and on their very first meeting a friendship was formed that lasted to the end of the author’s life in 1927. An extensive correspondence between the two followed. Some of the forty three letters which Chamberlain addressed to the Emperor (Wilhelm answered twenty-three of them) were lengthy essays which the ruler used in several of his bombastic speeches and statements. ”It was God who sent your book to the German people, and you personally to me,” the Kaiser wrote in one of his first letters. Chamberlain’s obsequiousness, his exaggerated flattery, in these letters can be nauseating. ”Your Majesty and your subjects,” he wrote, ”have been born in a holy shrine,” and he informed Wilhelm that he had placed his portrait in his study opposite one of Christ by Leonardo so that while he worked he often paced up and down between the countenance of his Savior and his sovereign.
His servility did not prevent Chamberlain from continually proffering advice to the headstrong, flamboyant monarch. In 1908 the popular opposition to Wilhelm had reached such a climax that the Reichstag censored him for his disastrous intervention in foreign affairs. But Chamberlain advised the Emperor that public opinion was made by idiots and traitors and not to mind it, whereupon Wilhelm replied that the two of them would stand together – ”You wield your pen; I my tongue (and) my broad sword.”
And always the Englishman reminded the Emperor of Germany’s mission and its destiny. ”Once Germany has achieved the power,” he wrote after the outbreak of the First World War, ” – and we may confidently expect her to achieve it – she must immediately begin to carry out a scientific policy of genius. Augustus undertook a systematic transformation of the world, and Germany must do the same . . . Equipped with offensive and defensive weapons, organized as firmly and flawlessly as the Army, superior to all in art, science, technology, industry, commerce, finance, in every field, in short; teacher, helmsman, and pioneer of the world, every man at his post, every man giving his utmost for the holy cause – thus Germany . . . will conquer the world by inner superiority.” For preaching such a glorious mission for his adopted country (he became a naturalized German citizen in 1916, halfway through the war) Chamberlain received from the Kaiser the Iron Cross.
But it was on the Third Reich, which did not arrive until six years after his death but whose coming he foresaw, that this Englishman’s influence was the greatest. His racial theories and his burning sense of the destiny of the Germans and Germany were taken over by the Nazis, who acclaimed him as one of their prophets. During the Hitler regime books, pamphlets and articles poured from the presses extolling the ”spiritual founder” of National Socialist Germany. Rosenberg, as one of Hitler’s mentors, often tried to impart his enthusiasm for the English philosopher to the Fuehrer. It is likely that Hitler first learned of Chamberlain’s writings before he left Vienna, for they were popular among the Pan-German and anti-Semitic groups whose literature he devoured so avidly in those early days. Probably too he read some of Chamberlain’s chauvinistic articles during the war. In Mein Kampf he expresses the regret that Chamberlain’s observations were not more heeded during the Second Reich.
Chamberlain was one of the first intellectuals in Germany to see a great future for Hitler – and new opportunities for the Germans if they followed him. Hitler had met him in Bayreuth in 1923, and though ill, half paralyzed, and disillusioned by Germany’s defeat and the fall of the Hohenzollern Empire – the collapse of all his hopes and prophecies! – Chamberlain was swept off his feet by the eloquent young Austrian. ”You have mighty things to do,”he wrote Hitler on the following day, . . . "My faith in Germanism had not wavered an instant, though my hope – I confess – was at a low ebb. With one stroke you have transformed the state of my soul. That in the hour of her deepest need Germany gives birth to a Hitler proves her vitality; as do the influences that emanate from him; for these two things – personality and influence – belong together . . . May God protect you!”
This was at a time when Adolf Hitler, with his Charlie Chaplin mustache, his rowdy manners and his violent, outlandish extremism, was still considered a joke by most Germans. He had few followers then. But the hypnotic magnetism of his personality worked like a charm on the aging, ill philosopher and renewed his faith in the people he had chosen to join and exalt. Chamberlain became a member of the budding Nazi Party and so far as his health would permit began to write for its obscure publications. One of his articles, published in 1924, hailed Hitler, who was then in jail, as destined by God to lead the German people. Destiny had beckoned Wilhelm 11, but he had failed; now there was Adolf Hitler. This remarkable Englishman’s seventieth birthday, on September 5, 1925, was celebrated with five columns of encomiums in the Nazi Voelkischer Beobachter, which hailed his Foundations as the ”gospel of the Nazi movement,” and he went to his grave sixteen months later – on January 11, 1927 – with high hope that all he had preached and prophesied would yet come true under the divine guidance of this new German Messiah.
Aside from a prince representing Wilhelm II, who could not return to German soil, Hitler was the only public figure at Chamberlain’s funeral. In reporting the death of the Englishman the Voelkischer Beobachter said that the German people had lost ”one of the great armorers whose weapons have not yet found in our day their fullest use.” Not the half-paralyzed old man, dying, not even Hitler, nor anyone else in Germany, could have foreseen in that bleak January month of 1927, when the fortunes of the Nazi Party were at their lowest ebb, how soon, how very soon, those weapons which the transplanted Englishman had forged would be put to their fullest use, and with what fearful consequences.125
Yet Adolf Hitler had a mystical sense of his personal mission on earth in those days, and even before. ”From millions of men . . . one man must step forward,” he wrote in Mein Kampf (the italics are his), ”who with apodictic force will form granite principles from the wavering idea-world of the broad masses and take up the struggle for their sole correctness, until from the shifting waves of a free thought-world there will arise a brazen cliff of solid unity in faith and will.”126
He left no doubt in the minds of readers that he already considered himself that one man. Mein Kampf is sprinkled with little essays on the role of the genius who is picked by Providence to lead a great people, even though they may not at first understand him or recognize his worth, out of their troubles to further greatness. The reader is aware that Hitler is referring to himself and his present situation. He is not yet recognized by the world for what he is sure he is, but that has always been the fate of geniuses – in the beginning. ”It nearly always takes some stimulus to bring the genius on the scene,” he remarks. ”The world then resists and does not want to believe that the type, which apparently is identical with it, is suddenly a very different being; a process which is repeated with every eminent son of man . . . The spark of a genius,” he declares, ”exists in the brain of the truly creative man from the hour of his birth. True genius is always inborn and never cultivated, let alone learned.”127
Specifically, he thought, the great men who shaped history were a blend of the practical politician and the thinker. ”At long intervals in human history it may occasionally happen that the politician is wedded to the theoretician. The more profound this fusion, the greater are the obstacles opposing the work of the politician. He no longer works for necessities which will be understood by the first good shopkeeper, but for aims which only the fewest comprehend. Therefore his life is torn between love and hate. The protest of the present, which does not understand him, struggles with the recognition of posterity – for which he also works. For the greater a man’s works are for the future, the less the present can comprehend them; the harder his fight . . . ”128
These lines were written in 1924, when few understood what this man, then in prison and discredited by the failure of his comic-opera putsch, had in mind to do. But Hitler had no doubts himself. Whether he actually read Hegel or not is a matter of dispute. But it is clear from his writings and speeches that he had some acquaintance with the philosopher’s ideas, if only through discussions with his early mentors Rosenberg, Eckart and Hess. One way or another Hegel’s famous lectures at the University of Berlin must have caught his attention, as did numerous dictums of Nietzsche. We have seen briefly that Hegel developed a theory of ”heroes” which had great appeal to the German mind. In one of the Berlin lectures he discussed how the ”will of the world spirit” is carried out by ”world-historical individuals.”
They may be called Heroes, inasmuch as they have derived their purposes and their vocation, not from the calm regular course of things, sanctioned by the existing order; but from a concealed fount, from that inner Spirit, still hidden beneath the surface, which impinges on the outer world as on a shell and bursts it into pieces. Such were Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon. They were practical, political men. But at the same time they were thinking men, who had an insight into the requirements of the time – what was ripe for development. This was the very Truth for their age, for their world . . . It was theirs to know this nascent principle, the necessary, directly sequent step in progress, which their world was to take; to make this their aim, and to expend their energy in promoting it. World-historical men – the Heroes of an epoch – must therefore be recognized as its clear-sighted ones; their deeds, their words are the best of their time.129
Note the similarities between this and the above quotation from Mein Kampf. The fusion of the politician and the thinker – that is what produces a hero, a ”world-historical figure,” an Alexander, a Caesar, a Napoleon. If there was in him, as Hitler had now come to believe, the same fusion, might he not aspire to their ranks?
In Hitler’s utterances there runs the theme that the supreme leader is above the morals of ordinary man. Hegel and Nietzsche thought so too. We have seen Hegel’s argument that ”the private virtues” and ”irrelevant moral claims” must not stand in the way of the great rulers, nor must one be squeamish if the heroes, in fulfilling their destiny, trample or ”crush to pieces” many an innocent flower. Nietzsche, with his grotesque exaggeration, goes much further.
The strong men, the masters, regain the pure conscience of a beast of prey; monsters filled with joy, they can return from a fearful succession of murder, arson, rape and torture with the same joy in their hearts, the same contentment in their souls as if they had indulged in some student’s rag . . . When a man is capable of commanding, when he is by nature a ”Master,” when he is violent in act and gesture, of what importance are treaties to him? . . . To judge morality properly, it must be replaced by two concepts borrowed from zoology: the taming of a beast and the breeding of a specific species.130
Such teachings, carried to their extremity by Nietzsche and applauded by a host of lesser Germans, seem to have exerted a strong appeal on Hitler.∗ A genius with a mission was above the law; he could not be bound by ”bourgeois” morals. Thus, when his time for action came, Hitler could justify the most ruthless and cold-blooded deeds, the suppression of personal freedom, the brutal practice of slave labor, the depravities of the concentration camp, the massacre of his own followers in June 1934, the killing of war prisoners and the mass slaughter of the Jews.
When Hitler emerged from Landsberg prison five days before Christmas, 1924, he found a situation which would have led almost any other man to retire from public life. The Nazi Party and its press were banned; the former leaders were feuding and falling away. He himself was forbidden to speak in public. What was worse, he faced deportation to his native Austria; the Bavarian state police had strongly recommended it in a report to the Ministry of the Interior. Even many of his old comrades agreed with the general opinion that Hitler was finished, that now he would fade away into oblivion as had so many other provincial politicians who had enjoyed a brief moment of notoriety during the strife-ridden years when it seemed that the Republic would totter.†
tAs late as 1929, Professor M. A. Gerothwohl, the editor of Lord D’Abernon’s diaries,wrote a footnote to the ambassador’s account of the Beer Hall Putsch in which, after mentionof Hitler’s being sentenced to prison, he added: ”He was finally released after six months andbound over for the rest of his sentence, thereafter fading into oblivion.” Lord D’Abernon wasthe British ambassador in Berlin from 1920 to 1926 and worked with great skill to strengthenthe Weimar Republic.
But the Republic had weathered the storms. It was beginning to thrive. While Hitler was in prison a financial wizard by the name of Dr. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht had been called in to stabilize the currency, and he had succeeded. The ruinous inflation was over. The burden of reparations was eased by the Dawes Plan. Capital began to flow in from America. The economy was rapidly recovering. Stresemann was succeeding in his policy of reconciliation with the Allies. The French were getting out of the Ruhr. A security pact was being discussed which would pave the way for a general European settlement (Locarno) and bring Germany into the League of Nations. For the first time since the defeat, after six years of tension, turmoil and depression, the German people were beginning to have a normal life. Two weeks before Hitler was released from Landsberg, the Social Democrats – the ”November criminals,” as he called them – had increased their vote by 30 per cent (to nearly eight million) in a general election in which they had championed the Republic. The Nazis, in league with northern racial groups under the name of the National Socialist German Freedom movement, had seen their vote fall from nearly two million in May 1924 to less than a million in December. Nazism appeared to be a dying cause. It had mushroomed on the country’s misfortunes; now that the nation’s outlook was suddenly bright it was rapidly withering away. Or so most Germans and foreign observers believed.
But not Adolf Hitler. He was not easily discouraged. And he knew how to wait. As he picked up the threads of his life in the little two-room apartment on the top floor of 41 Thierschstrasse in Munich during the winter months of 1925 and then, when summer came, in various inns on the Obersalzberg above Berchtesgaden, the contemplation of the misfortunes of the immediate past and the eclipse of the present, served only to strengthen his resolve. Behind the prison gates he had had time to range over in his mind not only his own past and its triumphs and mistakes, but the tumultuous past of his German people and its triumphs and errors. He saw both more clearly now. And there was born in him anew a burning sense of mission – for himself and for Germany – from which all doubts were excluded. In this exalted spirit he finished dictating the torrent of words that would go into Volume One of Mein Kampf and went on immediately to Volume Two. The blueprint of what the Almighty had called upon him to do in this cataclysmic world and the philosophy, the Weltanschauung, that would sustain it were set down in cold print for all to ponder. That philosophy, however demented, had roots, as we have seen deep in German life. The blueprint may have seemed preposterous to most twentieth-century minds, even in Germany. But it too possessed a certain logic. It held forth a vision. It offered, though few saw this at the time, a continuation of German history. It pointed the way toward a glorious German destiny.
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Book Two:
TRIUMPH AND CONSOLIDATION
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