HITLER WAS THE victim of his own ideas. His rigid will never bent, even when reality physically overwhelmed him. In the struggle with his enemies he was the first to collapse. He lived entirely in a delusory structure of excessive nationalism, never budged from it as long as he was alive, and even in death offered defiance to reality. There was no room at all in his mind for any thought of the German people’s continuing to live without him and the “blessing of his hand.” Hitler had the arrogance to tell the Germans that if they did not withstand the trial of this war and come out victorious, they no longer deserved to live upon this earth. He asked the impossible of them, and when they did not meet his standards he said they had no right to life. He who all his life had deified his nation took no part in the dire fate that he had brought upon it.
His death represented the egocentric antipode to that altruism he so often stressed when he declared that he wanted to do “everything for his people and nothing for himself.” When his dream of rule went down to dust, Hitler showed that he was not ready to sacrifice himself for the future of his people; on the contrary, he had sacrificed the people to his own hunger for power and the selfishness of his ungoverned imagination.
In theory Hitler had built up an ideal Leader State. But in practice he created utter chaos in the leadership of the state. Before the eyes of his adherents he held up the mirage of a classless Leader State such as Plato had celebrated in his “Laws” as the highest possible form of the state. The Father of Philosophy described such a system as one which automatically brought forth out of the people the wise men to be their leaders, to whom the masses would voluntarily subordinate themselves. After two thousand years of human evolution and political experience the time seemed ripe to Hitler, and the people ready, to bring an experiment of this sort to fruition.
Hitler established his “folk-community” in Germany. At the same time he created a class of leaders who had, he said, risen by natural selection out of the political struggle on the domestic scene. He equipped these leaders with “authority over those below and responsibility to those above.” On top of the heap he himself sat enthroned as absolute Leader responsible to no one. According to Hitler’s planned “Constitution” the Leader was to be advised by a Senate appointed by himself. This Senate would then choose the Führer’s eventual successor.
This “classless race-and-leader state” had been brought into being by revolution. Hitler wanted to ensure its continuance by setting up a functioning, permanent system for the selection of leaders. For this purpose, all barriers of privilege were to be removed; the potential leaders seeking to rise above the broad masses of the people were not to be hampered by birth or economic condition. Competence alone was to be the qualification for leadership in this new state. The best youths of the nation were to be constantly recruited out of the people, were to join the leadership and grow into the pulsating life of the nation. Thus the state would be assured of both stability and progress. It would advance to the highest possible point of evolution. This system of perpetual renewal, of creative forces developing out of the society’s own rhythm, was to constitute the best and most modern form of state, the most beneficial to the commonweal and at the same time the most just for each individual.
That was the “idea.” In theory it was alluring and attracted many fine minds. But what was it like in practice?
In the twelve years of his rule Hitler created in the political leadership of Germany the greatest confusion that has ever existed in a civilized state. Instead of developing the hierarchy of leaders who were to stand at his side, checking his work, giving advice, and adjusting conflicts, he concentrated the leadership more and more exclusively within his own person. He permitted no other gods besides himself. The cult of personality he fostered was directed solely toward himself. He wanted no suggestions; he wanted only execution of his orders.
For centuries the conduct of government has been based upon the tried and tested principle of independent chiefs of different departments. But Hitler, wherever possible, eliminated this system and set up a series of dependent secretariats without authority. He did not appoint competent persons with independent responsibilities to important posts, persons who would then have borne their full share of the burden in the conduct of war and peace. Instead he set up mere executive arms who had to go to him for their exact instructions, who could do no more than carry out his orders.
For example, throughout the war Hitler never had the aid and support of a war minister or a commander-in-chief of the armed forces. In February 1938 he had dismissed the war minister and assumed those functions. In his place he appointed a chief of the OKW who was directly attached to himself. For the same reason he personally took over, in December 1941, the post of supreme commander of the army, although he certainly could not handle all the details of the commander’s tasks. In August 1942 he transferred the leading post in the Army Personnel Office to one of his own adjutants. In this way he held the reins of the entire personnel organization of the army. Similarily, in May 1941 the administration of the Party was taken out of the hands of the independently responsible “Deputy of the Führer.” Thereafter party affairs were handled bureaucratically by the “head of the Party Secretariat” (Bormann) who acted directly on Hitler’s orders.
The strangest aspect of this leadership policy was the fact that in wartime the Reich had, to all practical purposes, no chief of government. As commander of the armed forces Hitler was unable to keep up with his duties as chancellor. He patently had no intention of submitting to Cabinet decisions. As I have already mentioned, throughout the war he did not call a single meeting of the Cabinet; his ministers therefore served no political functions whatsoever. He repeatedly stated that he was deliberately keeping himself free of all such “hampering” influences. The chancellor’s business was conducted for him on a civilservice level by his “Chief of the Reich Chancellery” (Lammers), to whom he assigned the rank of minister in order to facilitate his dealings with the members of the Cabinet. Hitler permitted a degree of independence only to the chiefs of those departments whose operations he did not feel he knew enough about. Among these were the air force (Göring) and the navy (Raeder-Dönitz). He also allowed a certain freedom to the men of whom he felt absolutely sure, men who were completely devoted to him, like Goebbels (Propaganda), Ribbentrop (Foreign Policy), and Himmler (Police).
With his overwhelming need to dominate, Hitler could not permit the development of any other personality besides his. Instead of drawing to himself men of high character, rich experience, and breadth of vision, he gave such persons a wide berth and made sure they had no chance to influence him. A miser unwilling to share his power, he consistently, cunningly, and stubbornly isolated himself from the influence of all those whom he suspected of even the shadow of opposition to his will and his plans. Far from being the prisoner of his advisers, Hitler was rather the jealous guardian of his own rule. He surrounded his own autocratic dominion with impenetrable armor.
In addition, he systematically undermined the authority of all higher political organs in order to increase the absoluteness of his own power. He destroyed all clarity in the administration of government and established an utterly opaque network of overlapping authorities. It was almost a rule with Hitler to set up dual appointments and conflicting agencies.
By making Göring head of the Four Year Plan Authority he gave him control of the entire German planned economy. But then, at the same time, he kept in office a rival minister of the economy (Schacht-Funk) whose functions were practically the same. Later on he added to these a minister for war production (Todt-Speer) who, incidentally, was engaged in a permanent feud with the OKW over problems of armament.
So long as Neurath was foreign minister Hitler handled his most important and most secret foreign affairs through the “Plenipotentiary of the Reich for Disarmament Questions” (Ribbentrop). When the latter became minister of foreign affairs, Neurath was appointed president of the nonexistent Privy Council. But in addition to the Foreign Office there was a “Foreign Policy Office” (Rosenberg) and a “Foreign Organization of the National Socialist Party” (Bohle). No one could possibly unravel their various jurisdictions in foreign affairs.
One day at Hitler’s headquarters Ribbentrop persuaded the Führer to commit to him in writing the conduct of all propaganda intended for foreign consumption. Propaganda Minister Goebbels knew nothing at all about this. The morning of the following day movers, sent by the Foreign Office, appeared at Goebbels’s various offices in Berlin to remove all the physical apparatus used for foreign propaganda. Goebbels’s men barricaded themselves in their rooms, and the propaganda minister himself promptly telephoned to Hitler for help. Hitler, who had actually signed the order to Ribbentrop, ordered Goebbels to come at once by plane. When Goebbels arrived, he told him to sit down with Ribbentrop in a compartment of his special train and not to leave it until they had ironed out their dispute. Three hours later both men emerged redfaced and informed Hitler—as might have been expected—that they could not agree. Furious, Hitler withdrew and dictated a compromise which largely revoked his previous written order. In practice, however, Ribbentrop never adhered to this latter decision. Holding a facsimile of the first, rescinded order, down to the end of the war he continued to challenge the Propaganda Ministry’s jurisdiction in all German missions abroad. Moreover, Ribbentrop had the obsession that all German authorities that had anything at all to do with foreign countries belonged under the Foreign Office. This fixed idea involved him in jurisdictional disputes with virtually all the ministries and Oberste Reichsbehörden, those “Supreme Reich Authorities” which existed side by side with the ministries. He even battled with the High Command of the Armed Forces. Hitler knew all about these squabbles. He frequently commented mockingly upon Ribbentrop’s morbid ambitions, but in spite of all the complaints about the impossible situation he never intervened.
In 1933 Hitler assigned all press policy to the propaganda minister and appointed Goebbels Chief of the German Press Organization. But this did not stop him from installing a “Reich Head for the Press” (Amann, president of the Reich Press Chamber) under Goebbels and a “Reich Press Chief” (Dietrich). My official high-sounding title was “Press Chief of the Reich Government,” but the title did not carry with it corresponding powers. My work was largely publicity and keeping Hitler informed on press matters. Since the Press Division of the Foreign Office dealt with foreign correspondents, and since the OKW during the war also claimed a considerable portion of the functions of the press officials, the jurisdictional disputes in this field were unending.
In the sphere of culture Goebbels and Rosenberg quarreled incessantly; in art Göring and Goebbels were rivals; in the control of German writers Goebbels, Rosenberg, and Bouhler tilted against one another.
In the Party organization Ley and Bormann had the same radius of activities; in Party education Rosenberg and Ley were in competition.
In the armed forces the interests of army, Waffen-SS (SSIN-ARMS), and air force field divisions were inextricably confused and incompatible. Hitler had arbitrarily set up these organizations side by side.
Hitler divided the Reich Communications Ministry into Railroad and Post Office departments, thereby creating an inexhaustible source of disputes.
In the sphere of justice he had a Minister of Justice and a Head of the German Legal Front (Gürtner and Frank) who feuded with one another.
He had a Labor Minister (Seldte), a Leader of the German Labor Front (Ley), and a Commissioner General for Manpower (Sauckel). In general education the field was divided between Rust (Minister of Education), Wächtler (National Socialist Teachers’ League), and, Axmann (Reich Youth Leader). Even in public health there were similar obscurities and crossing jurisdictions.
This is but a small sample of the utterly wild confusion of leadership. Everywhere in the Reich and in the occupied territories Hitler established the same conditions: dual appointments, special commissioners, a horde of officials with overlapping jurisdictions. I recall the pungent comment of Minister of Economy Funk in 1943, when he arranged a press release regarding a clarification of jurisdiction which Hitler had supposedly ordered. With biting irony he said to me over the telephone: “Consider what that means! Consider that for the first time in the history of the Third Reich we really have clear lines of jurisdiction and a distribution of spheres of operation!”
It was not negligence, not excessive tolerance and consideration which prompted Hitler, ordinarily so ready to cut across complexities, to create a tangle of struggles for position and conflicts of authority among the top men of the National Socialist State. There was a method in the madness. In this way Hitler had at his disposal two or three “chiefs” in every field, each with an extensive apparatus. He could ensure the execution of his plans by playing one man off against the other or showing preference to one rather than another. His method systematically disorganized the objective authority of the higher departments of government—so that he could push the authority of his own will to the point of despotic tyranny.
A further situation resulted from these jurisdictional squabbles. Each of the disputants naturally strove not only to maintain his own sphere of authority, but to enlarge it at the expense of the spheres of rivals. The scene was thus cluttered with numerous staffs and offices, each dependent upon a different chief, each employing large numbers of persons whose sole activity was to straighten out internal jurisdictional conflicts. A large number of persons were thus engaged in totally nonproductive work. The apparatus of government and Party, which has always been the breeding ground of human weaknesses, swelled beyond all proportion.
How fearfully such conditions destroyed that vital intangible, the confidence of the people in their government! It is depressing to consider how these internal conflicts paralyzed energies, hampered performances, and drained the strength of the nation during the war.
Such was Hitler’s “brilliant idea” of the Leader State in practice. His megalomania and his lack of talent for leadership killed the idea; it was buried in the sober facts of daily life, bruised and broken by the harshness of reality. Like so many great ideas in the history of mankind it failed miserably in the realm of actuality because of human weakness and inadequacy.
Was the idea in itself invalid, even without these weaknesses? That is a question that must also be answered. Undoubtedly there are Germans who will say that it is an ideal to be striven for irrespective of failures—an ideal which must be striven for even though it may never be fully realized. There is no doubt that even the best idea needs more time for its fulfillment than Hitler, in his hysterical haste, gave it, or than the war gave to the German people. But on the other hand there are sociological aspects of the idea that make it appear highly questionable.
The principle of “selection of leaders” by “achievement,” by eliminating privilege and establishing complete equality of opportunity in the struggle for existence, proves to be, if we study the matter more deeply, an ideological concept based upon unrealistic premises. Almost all the privileges of modern life, in those nations recognizing private property, are of economic origin. Education, culture, choice of occupation, the opportunity to set up in business—all these are dependent upon capital. The man who has capital, whether inherited or obtained on credit, always has greater chances for advancement than those who must enter the labor market or the business world without financial backing. Hitler promised categorically to eliminate all privilege, but he did not add that the equality of opportunity cannot be achieved without solving the problems of capital, rent, and interest, and without eliminating the inheritance of property. Had he said anything about that, his fantastic conclusion would have been exposed for what it was.
Hitler accepted private property and the role of capital in modern economic life because he recognized these as the economic foundation of our culture. He opposed capitalism as an “abuse” of capital, but did not attack capitalism in principle. Although “smashing interest-slavery” was one of the points in his program, in practical government he recognized that he could not solve the problem of interest and would not be able to eliminate interest without undermining his own political existence and that of his state. Communism, too, has failed to do away with property, inheritance, and interest in any fully consistent manner, although Communism has rendered these negligible by lowering the entire standard of living. And it has paid for carrying out its economic theories by renouncing a cultural life, without which the peoples of Europe and of the Western Hemisphere would find life poor indeed.
Suppose we think Hitler’s idea through to the end. We then see that in a modern civilized state based upon private property the principle of selection of leaders by achievement can be realized only in one way. The state would have to set up a special credit system providing for the support of all the talented and ambitious young people of the nation. Financial aid would be given without tangible security, solely on the basis of ability. These young people would then be free to choose the profession in which they could develop their potentialities to the fullest.
But such government planning would probably produce more dangers, more bureaucracy, more jealousies and difficulties than its advantages warranted. Some of the slumbering talents for leadership among the people might be developed. But the nation as a whole would find itself paying more tuition than could ever be repaid. A significant light is thrown upon what we could expect to happen when we consider the confusion which prevailed in the leadership schools of the Third Reich: the Ordensburgen (training schools for National Socialist Party leaders, usually housed in castles), the Adolf Hitler Schools, the National Political Educational Institutions (preparatory schools for civil service careers), and the Training Academies. These schools were entirely lacking in clear principles, experience, and traditions.
Hitler’s view was that life and natural selection were the best of schools. But life has in fact taught us otherwise. The idea of rationalizing and developing according to plan the genius of a nation, the idea of selecting the fittest as automatically as a magnet attracts iron filings, will remain utopian so long as the inhabitants of this earth are human beings, so long as endless variety in all the forms of existence constitutes the worth of life.
For who are the best and most competent persons in a nation? What qualities determine their success? By what standards are they to be judged? Are they the tough and the unfeeling, the cunning and unscrupulous, those who know best how to use their elbows? Or are they the wise and gifted, inwardly decent and outwardly retiring, who are energetic but not noisy? Will such prove in the end more capable, fitter than the others? Hitler took it for granted that those who are physically the toughest and psychically the rashest were necessarily strongest. But later his strong men proved to be weak, his selection of the fittest a selection of the wrong persons. His standards were both false and disastrous.
Hitler carried this theory of leadership so far that he wanted to rationalize the thinking of the German people. He conceived of his state as establishing a kind of highly developed division of labor. Only the top leaders needed to think, so to speak; the others were merely to believe. In his arrogant manner he despised those whom he thought too smart to be strong. Of the masses he remarked: the less intellect and the fewer intellectuals among them, the stronger would be their faith and the greater their force.
Hitler flattered the people, flaunting his socialistic intentions before them. There is no denying that he achieved great things in the sphere of public welfare. But he also awakened exaggerated hopes for a still more intensive socialistic program without ever being able to fulfill those hopes by peaceful means. And similarly, he made capitalism serve the ends of his power politics without feeling any twinges of his socialistic conscience. It was one of his unfortunate character traits that he subordinated all his ideas to the ambition for power which so completely dominated him.