On the Way to the Führer State

I did not become Chancellor in order to act otherwise than I have preached for fourteen long years.

Adolf Hitler, November 1, 1933

 

There was no pause, no sign of failing grip, in the transition from the first to the second phase of seizing power. The smashing of the democratic constitutional and parliamentary state was barely concluded in the summer of 1933 when its metal began to be smelted into the monolith of the totalitarian Führer state. “We have the power. Today nobody can offer us any resistance. But now we must educate German man for this new State. A gigantic project lies ahead.” Thus Hitler outlined the tasks of the future to the SA on July 9.

For Hitler was never interested in establishing a mere tyranny. Sheer greed for power will not suffice as explanation for his personality and energy. Unquestionably, power, the virtually unrestricted use of it, with no necessity to account to anyone—that kind of power meant a great deal to him. But he was at no time satisfied with it alone. The restlessness with which he conquered, extended, and applied that power, and finally used it up, is evidence of how little he was born to be a mere tyrant. He was fixated upon his mission of defending Europe and the Aryan race from deadly menace, and to this end he wanted to create an empire that would last. The study of history, particularly the history of his own age, had taught him that material instruments of power alone would not suffice to guarantee duration. Rather, only a great “revolution comparable to the Russian Revolution” could develop the tremendous dynamism such a goal required.

As always, he thought of this task also chiefly in terms of psychology and propaganda. Never had he felt so dependent upon the masses as he did at this time, and he watched their reactions with anxious concern. He feared their fickleness, not only as the child of a democratic age but because of his personal craving for approval and acclamation. “I am not a dictator and never will be a dictator,” he declared, and added rather contemptuously: “As a dictator any clown can govern.” He had, he admitted, eliminated the principle of democratic voting, but that by no means meant that he was free; strictly speaking, no such thing as arbitrary rule existed, only various ways of expressing the “general will.” He solemnly assured his listeners: “National Socialism is the true realization of democracy, which has degenerated under parliamentarianism. . . . We have cast aside outmoded institutions precisely because they no longer served to keep in fruitful contact with the totality of the nation, because they led to idle chatter, to impudent cheating.” Goebbels was saying the same thing when he remarked that in the age of political masses, government could not function “by states of emergency and nine-o’clock curfews.” Either the people would have to be given an ideal, an object for their imaginations and their loyalties, or they would go their own ways. The scholars of the period spoke of “democratic Caesarism.”

In keeping with this view, the psychological mobilization of the country was not left to chance or whim, certainly not to the operations of dissent. It was the product of consistent, totalitarian penetration of all social structures by means of a close-knit system of supervision, regimentation, and guidance. The object was to “belabor people as long as necessary, until they succumb to us.” That meant penetrating the private realm as well as every social area: “We must develop organizations in which an individual’s entire life can take place. Then every activity and every need of every individual will be regulated by the collectivity represented by the party. There is no longer any arbitrary will, there are no longer any free realms in which the individual belongs to himself. . . . The time of personal happiness is over.”

But the whole of national existence could not be reshaped overnight. Part of Hitler’s keen tactical sense was a sure feeling for tempo. More than once during the hectic early summer of 1933 he worried that control of events might slip away from him: “More revolutions have succeeded in the first onslaught than successful ones have been checked and brought to a halt,” he told his followers during this period in one of those speeches exhorting them to patience.¹³ Unlike them, he was not carried away by the headiness of success. He was prepared at any time to subordinate the emotions of the moment to his further power aims. Thus he vigorously opposed efforts to push on with further seizures of the government apparatus after those first months. His instinct told him to go slow. The departmental chiefs of the shadow government that the party had developed during the years of waiting had to cool their heels a while longer. Only Goebbels, Darre, and to an extent Himmler enjoyed the fruits of victory during this second phase. Rosenberg, for example, whose ambition had been the Foreign Office, was disappointed. So was Ernst Röhm.

Hitler’s refusal to turn the government over to the party was based on two considerations. By showing constraint, he would create the sense that he was engaged in healing the nation’s wounds and thus entrench himself deeper. With the coolness of the modern revolutionary, whose nature differs fundamentally from that of the fervent barricade builders of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Hitler repeatedly warned his followers in the summer of 1933 “to be prepared for many years and to calculate in very long spans of time.” If in doctrinaire haste they went “looking around to see whether there was anything else to revolutionize,” they would gain nothing, he told them; rather, they must be “prudent and cautious.”¹⁴

On the other hand, he had begun to regard the government as an instrument with which to keep the party, whose leader he was, in check. The technology of power was involved. Just as he had always encouraged competing institutions and rival subleaders within the party so that he might stand above their dissensions and bickerings and maintain his omnipotence all the more unchallenged, so he now employed the various executive offices of the government as counters in an even more baffling and Machiavellian game by which he strengthened his control. In the course of time he even increased the number of such offices. Two, and after Hindenburg’s death three secretariats were at his sole disposal: the Reich secretariat (Reichskanzlei) under Dr. Hans Lammers, the Führer’s secretariat under Hess and Bormann, and, finally, the presidential secretariat under State Secretary Meissner, a holdover from the days of Ebert and Hindenburg. Foreign policy, education, the press, art, the economy, were battlegrounds fought over by three or four competing departments, and this guerrilla warfare over territory, the din of which continued down to the last days of the regime, permeated even the lowest branches of the bureaucracy. One official complained about contradictory instructions and conflicts over areas of authority when he was only trying to organize a proper celebration of the solstice. In 1942 there existed fifty-eight Supreme Reich boards as well as a plethora of extragovemmental bureaus whose orders criss-crossed, who wrestled over precedence, insisting on authority they might or might not have. With some justice the Third Reich can be called authoritarian anarchy. Cabinet ministers, commissioners, special emissaries, officials of party affiliates, administrators, governors, many of them with assignments kept deliberately vague, formed an inextricable knot of interlocking authorities, which Hitler alone, with virtually a Hapsburgian grasp of puppet mastery, could supervise, balance, and dominate.

This bureaucratic chaos was also one of the reasons the regime was so extremely bound up with the person of Hitler, so that to the end there were no struggles over ideological questions, only over the Führer’s favor. Such squabbles, it must be granted, were as fierce as any conflict over orthodoxies. While it is generally thought that authoritarian systems manifest decisiveness and energy in execution, in fact they are far more rife with chaos than other forms of governmental organization. The to-do about “order” was largely meant to conceal the deliberate confusion. During the war the SS leader Walter Schellenberg complained about the practice of issuing commands twice over and about pointlessly competing bureaus. Hitler defended such duplications in the pseudoscientific terms he loved so well: “People must be allowed friction with one another; friction produces warmth, and warmth is energy.” But what Hitler had really discovered was that such friction was useful for consuming energy which might otherwise be a threat to him. When, after 1938, he abolished cabinet meetings, it may have been because there was too much comradely spirit at such sessions. Once State Secretary Dr. Lammers wanted to invite his fellow ministers to an evening of social drinking. Hitler forbade such conviviality. His style of leadership has aptly been described as “institutionalized Darwinism,” and the widespread view of his greater efficiency has been called the selfdelusion of all authoritarian systems.

 

The fact that Hitler did not simply turn the government over to the party as part of the loot of victory caused great dissatisfaction among his followers. For, in spite of all the ideological motives, the material impetus that underlay the movement remained of the greatest importance. Six or more million unemployed represented a source of tremendous revolutionary energy: they longed for work, hungered for booty, and hoped for rapid careers. The Nazi victory had carried only a thin stratum of functionaries into the legislatures and the town halls, and washed others up to the desks of dismissed officials. Now the empty-handed, still nourishing the anticapitalistic moods of preceding years, were pressing into the larger and more profitable fields of trade and industry. “Old Fighters”—those who had early joined the Nazi party—wanted to become managers, presidents of chambers of commerce, directors, or simply, by force or blackmail, partners. Their robust conquistadorial ambitions gave a revolutionary complexion to events that otherwise might have passed unnoticed. Kurt W. Luedecke has reported how one of these power-hungry and job-greedy party functionaries, on entering the office he had just taken over, called out happily: “Hi there, Luedecke! Terrific! I’m a big shot!” At the other end of this social spectrum is the desperate outburst reported by Hermann Rauschning on the part of a party member who feared he would miss his chance: “I don’t want to fall back down. Maybe you can bide your time. You’re not sitting in any fire. But I’ve been unemployed, do you hear! Before I go through that again I’ll turn criminal. I’m staying on top, no matter what. We won’t climb up twice.”¹⁵

Hitler was conscious of the need to tame these radical, uncontrolled energies. His three major speeches at the beginning of July were an attempt to apply the brakes to revolutionary élan, much as he had done in March, on the occasion of the “SA revolt.” Everything depended, he said, on “channeling the released current of revolution into the secure bed of evoluton.”¹⁶ Yet he also needed to give the current greater impetus. For a freezing of existing conditions was equally dangerous. Things could too easily come to a standstill because of exaggerated anxiety about revolution or simply because of the unwieldiness of a party of millions suffocating from the constant influx of new members. Thus, while Hitler was still calling on his followers to maintain discipline, he was also worrying about the tendency toward “bourgeoisization.” An influx of 1,500,000 new members within three months had made the 850,000 “old comrades” a minority. At this point Hitler ordered a halt to admissions. For show, he had certain members expelled, with a good deal of fanfare, for having permitted themselves unauthorized raids on chambers of commerce and industrial concerns. To set an example, some were sent to concentration camps.

Among his intimates he defended the desire for personal gain as a revolutionary motive force and spoke of “justified corruption.” Bourgeois circles were criticizing him for trying former officials for corruption while his own men were lining their pockets, he said. “I have answered these simpletons,” he thundered, “could they tell me how I am to meet the legitimate wishes of my party comrades for some kind of compensation for their inhuman years of struggle. I asked them whether they would prefer me to turn the streets over to my SA. I could still do that, I said. I wouldn’t mind. And I said it would be healthier for the whole nation if there were a real bloody revolution lasting for a few weeks. Out of consideration for them and their bourgeois comfort I’d refrained from doing that, I said. But I could always make up for lost time!. . . If we make Germany great, we have a right to think of ourselves also.”

With this dual goal of keeping the revolution in flux and simultaneously stabilizing it, of reining it in and giving it its head, Hitler was again following his tried and tested maxims on the nature of power. “I can lead the masses only if I can wrench them out of their apathy,” he declared. “Only the fanaticized masses are malleable. Masses that are apathetic, dull, are the greatest danger for any society.”

This effort to awaken the masses “so that they may be made the instrument of my policy,” now moved entirely into the foreground. The whipped-up fear of Communism at the time of the Reichstag fire, the parades, receptions, collections, the new semantic coinages, the leader cult, in short, the whole clever mixture of trickery and terrorism was meant to prime the nation to think and feel according to a single pattern laid down by the government. Significantly, as soon as this experiment seemed to be succeeding, the long repressed ideological fixations emerged once again. With a sharpness reminiscent of the earlier years of struggle, the figure of the Jew—as the principle of evil and ever-present menace—once again took center stage.

As early as March, 1933, SA units, acting on orders, committed the first anti-Semitic excesses. So strong was the outcry from abroad that Goebbels and Julius Streicher urged Hitler to muzzle criticism by openly increasing the pressure. They would have liked Hitler to allow his followers to stage a carnival of terror against all Jewish firms, against Jewish employers, lawyers, and officials. Hitler did not assent to this, but he gave instructions for a one-day boycott. On Saturday, April 1, armed SA squads stood guard at the doors of Jewish businesses and offices, calling out to visitors or customers not to enter. Posters urging boycott were pasted to the shop windows: “Germans, do not buy at the Jew’s!” Others contained a terse: “Juden raus!” But at this point the nation’s often ridiculed sense of order turned against the regime. The action seemed highhanded and rather shameful, and the hoped-for effect was not achieved. The populace, a later report on the mood in western Germany stated, “is rather inclined to pity the Jews. . . Sales figures of Jewish firms, especially in the countryside, have in no way declined.”¹⁷

The boycott was therefore not resumed. In a speech redolent of disappointment, Streicher hinted that the regime had retreated under the pressure of world Jewry. Goebbels, however, for the fraction of a second opened the door just enough to permit a glance into the future when he announced that there would be a new blow, such a one “as to annihilate German Jewry. . . . Let no one doubt our resolution.” Legal measures, the first of which was issued a few days after the unsuccessful boycott, banished Jews from public life in a quieter fashion, forcing them out of their social and, soon afterward, out of their business positions.

“The wonder of German unification,” as the regime phrased it in its jargon of self-praise, involved the constant effort to separate the true nation from the unwanted nation of Marxists and Jews. But even more important was the need to win the nation’s applause. The failure of the boycott had taught Hitler that the public could not be swung so easily on this question. But if April 1 had proved a negative experience in community feeling, May 1, which celebrated the workers, and October 1, the day of the farmers, were each a stupendous success.

French Ambassador André François-Poncet has described the concluding ceremonies on May Day evening at Tempelhof Field in Berlin:

 

At dusk the streets of Berlin were packed with wide columns of men headed for the rally, marching behind banners, with fife and drum units and regimental bands in attendance.

Stands had been set up at one end of the field for the guests of the government, among them the diplomatic corps, compulsory spectators, bidden to be awed into respect and admiration. A forest of glittering banners provided a background for the spectacle: a grandstand, bristling with microphones, cut forward like a prow looming over a sea of human heads. Downstage, Reichswehr units stood at attention with one million civilians assembled behind them; the policing of this stupendous rally was effected by SA and SS troopers. The Nazi leaders appeared in turn as the crowd cheered. Then came Bavarian peasants, miners and fishermen from other parts of Germany, all in professional garb, then delegates from Austria and the Saar and Danzig, the last being guests of honor of the Reich. An atmosphere of good humor and general glee pervaded the assembly, there was never the slightest indication of constraint. . . .

At eight o’clock the crowds backed up as Hitler made his appearance, standing in his car, his arm outstretched, his face stern and drawn. A protracted clamor of powerful acclaim greeted his passage. Night was now fallen; floodlights were turned on, set at spacious gaps, their gentle bluish light allowing for dark interjacent spaces. The perspective of this human sea stretched out to infinity, moving and palpitant, extraordinary when at once sighted in the light and divined in the darkness.

After some introductory remarks by Goebbels, Hitler took the stand. All floodlights were turned off save such as might envelop the Führer in so dazzling a nimbus that he seemed to be looming upon that magical prow over the human tide below. The crowd lapsed into a religious silence as Hitler prepared to speak.¹⁸

 

The foreign guests in the stands were not the only ones who carried away from the nocturnal parade of uniforms, from the play of light and the throb of the music, from the flags and the fireworks, the impression of a “really beautiful, a wonderful festival.” They were not alone in discovering an “air of reconciliation and unity throughout the Third Reich.” Such events made an even greater impression on the Germans. By the morning of May 1, 1,500,000 persons of all classes had lined up for the parade in Berlin: workers, government officials, managers, craftsmen, professors, film stars, clerks. This was the very array Hitler had conjured up the night before when he promised the end of all class differences and proclaimed the people’s community of all “workers of the hand and the head.” His rallying cry, to be sure, fell into a preacherly tone that approached travesty: “We want to be active, to work and make brotherly peace with one another, to struggle together, so that some day the hour will come when we can step before Him and will have the right to ask Him: Lord, You see, we have changed; the German nation is no longer the nation of dishonor, of shame, of self-laceration, of timidity and little faith; no, Lord, the German nation has once more grown strong in spirit, strong in will, strong in persistence, strong in enduring all sacrifices. Lord, we will not swerve from You; now bless our struggle.”

These religious exhortations and indeed the whole liturgical character of the demonstrations did not fail to take effect and restored to many Germans their lost sense of belonging and their feeling of collective camaraderie. The combination of religious service and popular amusement was, precisely because of its apparently unpolitical stamp, of the widest possible appeal. Thus we would be aiming very wide of the mark—which the regime invites because of the monstrous features it later acquired—if we divided the people of the spring of 1933 into victors and vanquished. Rather, as the historian Golo Mann has trenchantly observed, many persons felt at once triumph and uncertainty, fear and shame.¹⁹ They partook both of victory and defeat. Engulfed by the hypnotic power of mass festivals, they thought they felt the touch of history itself. Memories of the long-ago days of August, 1914, flooded back, and again they experienced the intoxication of national brotherhood.

Later, those months would live on in the nation’s memory as an almost incomprehensible jumble of euphoria, jingoism, a sense of rebirth, of transformation, though without a national explanation for such feelings. Hitler had the ability, in ways that are hard to analyze, to engender a kind of historical ecstasy. He had many instant conversions to his credit, particularly at this period. Yet his May 1 speech contained neither a concrete program for providing employment nor the expected statement of the principles of nationalist socialism and economic reconstruction. Nevertheless, his words reverberated with a sense of historical momentousness. The concomitant acts of terrorism were psychologically in accord with this mood. For the terror gave the events the quality of extreme, fateful seriousness. Many people felt the scruples that beset them as petty compared with the scale of the historical event.

The prevailing feeling was expressed by one of the prominent intellectuals of the time, who wrote that labor, freed from the curse of proletarian misery, had at last been made the basis of a new sense of community and that “part of the rights of man has been newly proclaimed.”²⁰ But only a day later the surprise action against the unions exposed the other face of Hitler’s familiar dual tactics. Similarly, on May 10, while the regime under “artist-statesman Adolf Hitler” was still talking in terms of a new Augustan age, there was a brutal gesture of open hostility to intellect: the burning of the books. With SA and SS bands playing “patriotic melodies,” preceded by torchlight parades and so-called fire sermons, nearly 20,000 specimens of “un-German writings” were burned in the public squares of university cities.

The take-over was thus accomplished by a combination of intoxicants and pressures. This compound had a special potency; after twelve years of the parliamentary interregnum people felt again that there was a firm hand at the helm of state. Here, in a new form, was the time-honored political style of the Hohenzollern authoritarian state. The new regime was taking off from there.

Initially, the measures for establishing psychological domination over the nation were often hit-and-miss. But they were soon developed into a system and given an administrative framework. In the covert struggle for power over this arm of the government, victory went to Joseph Goebbels. His Propaganda Ministry, divided into seven departments (propaganda, radio, press, film, theater, music, and fine arts), soon took charge of the entire intellectual and cultural realm. It saw to the establishment of the Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer), which in turn had seven separate divisions and embraced all persons engaged in artistic or publicist activities. Architects and art dealers, painters, stage designers, lighting technicians and newsstand operators—one and all, Goebbels declared with cynical candor, would be rescued by the new state from their “feeling of desolate emptiness.” These cultural organizations were meant both to politicize and supervise their members. Nonadmittance or expulsion meant that a person was debarred from his profession or occupation. Soon the police were following up a host of denunciations, tracking down the works of outlawed artists, or checking to make certain that the blacklist was not being violated. In December, 1933, a total of more than a thousand books and complete works of some writers, had been banned by no fewer than twenty-one bureaus, some of them in competition with one another. By the next year more than 4,000 publications had been forbidden. The revolution bowed before nothing, Goebbels declared in one of his “fundamental speeches” on culture; what mattered was “that in place of the individual person and his deification we now have the racial nation and its deification. The racial nation is the center of things. . . . The artist undeniably has the right to call himself non-political in a period when politics consists of nothing but shouting matches between parliamentary parties. But at this moment when politics is writing a national drama, when a world is being overthrown—in such a moment the artist cannot say: ‘That doesn’t concern me.’ It concerns him a great deal.” In his capacity as Reich propaganda chief of the NSDAP, Goebbels simultaneously spread a dense network of propaganda offices over the country—forty-one in all. A few years later these were raised to the status of federal bureaus.

By the spring of 1933 Gleischschaltung of radio broadcasting was largely completed; both staff and subject matter had been “co-ordinated.” The press followed. There had been approximately 3,000 newspapers in Germany. A large number of these, chiefly local papers, were eliminated by economic pressure backed by all the powers of the state. Others were confiscated. Only a few of the major newspapers, whose prestige might make them useful tools, were allowed to survive. Some of these, such as the Frankfurter Zeitung, continued on into the war years. But drastic restrictions were placed upon them even in the initial phase of the seizure of power. A shower of instructions and “language rules,” usually handed down at the daily Reich press conference, established political regimentation and banished freedom of the press to whatever small space it could find between the lines. At the same time, however, Goebbels looked kindly upon all differences in form and style. In general he tried to conceal the governmental monopoly of opinion by stressing journalistic variety. He put it in a pithy slogan: the press, like culture in general, was to be “monoform in will, polyform in the outward trappings of that will.”

If we survey the whole scene, we must grant that in the cultural realm as well, “co-ordination” proceeded without a protest, without a sign of effective opposition. Only the Protestant Church was able to resist the open seizure of power in its ranks, although at the price of fission. The Catholic bishops had hitherto attacked Nazism in a series of strongly militant statements and had officially condemned it. But their will to resist was undermined by the negotiations for a concordat, already begun during the Weimar years and eagerly resumed by Hitler. Nazi promises and sham concessions knocked the ground from under their feet. Belatedly, they would find their way back to opposition, but by then they did not see clearly how to proceed. In the universities, too, what feeble resistance came to the fore was soon subdued by the tried-and-true combination of “spontaneous expressions of the people’s will” from below followed by an administrative act from above.

The point has often been made that the corps of high-ranking military officers or big business proved to be the weakest spot in the country’s defenses against Nazism. But that thesis becomes somewhat questionable when we consider how swiftly and easily the regime succeeded in overwhelming the intellectuals, the professors, the artists and writers, the universities and academies. There were only scattered acts of rebellion here and there. During the early months, when the regime was courting recognition and decorative names, testimonials of loyalty rained down upon it unrequested. As early as the beginning of March, and again in May, several hundred university teachers of all political persuasions publicly declared their adherence to Hitler and the new regime. A “pledge of loyalty by German writers to the People’s Chancellor Adolf Hitler” was signed by such distinguished names as Rudolf Binding, Walter von Molo, and Joseph Ponten; another such document bore the names of noted people like Ferdinand Sauerbruch, the great surgeon, and Martin Heidegger, the philosopher. Alongside these lists of signatures, there was a great deal of applause from individuals. Gerhart Hauptmann, the Nobel prize winner, whom Goebbels had mocked for years as a “unionized Goethe,” published an article titled “I Say Yes!” It turned out later that the editors had added the title—which nevertheless accurately summed up the content. Hans Friedrich Blunck, president of the Reichsschrifttumskammer, the writers’ organization, described the attitude appropriate to the new era with the formula: “Humility before God, honor to the Reich, flowering of the arts.” The critic Ernst Bertram composed a “fire song” for the book burning, in which the works of his friend Thomas Mann were consumed:

 

Reject what confuses you
Outlaw what seduces you,
What did not spring from a pure will,
Into the flames with what threatens you!

 

Even Theodor W. Adorno noticed in the composition of a poetry cycle by Baldur von Schirach “the strongest conceivable effects” of the “romantic realism” proclaimed by Goebbels.

Meanwhile, in the early weeks of the regime, 250 notable writers and professors left the country. Many others were harassed, relieved of their posts, or otherwise made aware of their vulnerability. Soon the spokesmen for a regime with cultural ambitions had to acknowledge that the first “summer of art” in Germany looked more like a battlefield than a field of ripening grain. The Minister of the Interior announced the expatriation of writers and scholars, one after another, among them Lion Feuchtwanger, Alfred Kerr, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Theodor Plievier, Anna Seghers, and Albert Einstein. But those who remained were not averse to taking the evacuated seats in the academies and at banquets, insensitive to the tragedies of the expelled and the outlawed.

Those who were asked placed themselves at the regime’s disposal: the composer Richard Strauss, the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, the actors Werner Krauss and Gustaf Gründgens. Such actions surely cannot always be ascribed to weakness or opportunism. A great many were sucked in by the emotional surge of the national rising, wanting to take their place in the ranks and “co-ordinate” themselves. Others felt it their mission to strengthen the affirmative forces within the “great idealistic popular movement” called National Socialism. They meant to take those honest but primitive Nazi ruffians under their wings, to sublimate those unthinking energies, to refine the “well-meant but still clumsy ideas of Adolf Hitler, the ‘man of the people,’ ” and in this way “show the National Socialists what really is contained within their dim strivings and thus make possible a ‘better’ National Socialism.”²¹ This was the hope, so frequently found in revolutionary eras, of averting something worse—oddly coupled with the notion that under the banner of the new fraternity idealism could be introduced into “dirty politics.” Cowardice and conformism were certainly present and widespread; but in such intellectual illusions can be found the specifically German continuity within Nazism.

But we would still have only a partial understanding of the phenomenon if we failed to consider the dominant feeling of the age. The eternally unsettled question of how the blatantly anti-intellectual Hitler movement could have enjoyed such success among writers, professors, and intellectuals in general may to some extent be answered in terms of the antiintellectual tendency of the age. Even Max Scheler, the philosopher, gave a certain sanction to the irrationalist movements of the period—although he indicated that he did not subscribe to the modish denigration of the intellect. In a lecture toward the end of the twenties he spoke of a “systematic instinctual revolt in men of the new epoch. . . against the exaggerated intellectuality of our fathers” and called it a “healing process.” The victory of the Hitler movement was widely seen as the political form of this healing process. Certainly Nazism embodied, in political terms, all those pseudoreligious tendencies to escapism, that hatred of civilization, and revulsion against the intellect with which the period was rife. This will explain why Nazism exerted a seductive influence upon many intellectuals who, isolated within their disciplines, longed for fraternization with the masses, for sharing in the vitality of the common people, for mental torpor and historical effectiveness. Again, this mood was an all-European phenomenon. Not only Edgar Jung, the nationalist-conservative writer, affirmed his “respect for the primitivity of a popular movement, for the militant vitality of victorious gauleiters and storm troop leaders. . .”; Paul Valéry, too, found it “charming that the Nazis despise the intellect so much.”²² We can find the whole catalogue of motivations—the illusions, the hopes, the self-delusions—spelled out in the famous letter the poet Gottfried Benn sent to Klaus Mann in exile:

 

On purely personal grounds I declare myself for the new State, because it is my Volk that is making its way now. Who am I to exclude myself; do I know anything better? No! Within the limits of my powers I can try to guide the Volk to where I would like to see it; but if I should not succeed, still it would remain my Volk. Volk is a great deal! My intellectual and economic existence, my language, my life, my human relationships, the entire sum of my brain, I owe primarily to this Volk. My ancestors came from it; my children return to it. And since I grew up in the country, and among farm animals, I also still remember what native grounds stand for. Big cities, industrialism, intellectualism—these are all shadows that the age has cast upon my thoughts, all powers of the century, which I have confronted in my writing. There are moments in which this whole tormented life falls away and nothing exists but the plains, expanses, seasons, soil, simple words: Volk.²³

 

Such statements reveal how irrelevant it was to charge Nazism with ideological poverty. Compared with the ideational systems of the Left, it might seem to offer no more than collective warmth: crowds, heated faces, shouts of approval, marches, arms raised in salute. But that was precisely what made it attractive to a body of intellectuals who had long been in existential despair. They had emerged from the many theoretical disputes of the age with the one insight that one could “no longer approach things with ideas.” It was the very craving to escape from ideas, concepts, and systems into some uncomplicated sense of belonging that provided Nazism with so many deserters from other causes.

Nazism tried to satisfy this craving by inventing a multitude of new social arenas; one of Hitler’s fundamental insights, acquired in the loneliness of his youth, was that people wanted to belong. It would be a mistake to see nothing but coercion in the multitudinous organizations of the party, the politicized professional associations, the chambers, bureaus and leagues that proliferated throughout the country. Rather, the practice of taking every individual into the fold according to his age, his function, and even his preferences in leisure or entertainment, of leaving people nothing but sleep as their private domain, as Robert Ley remarked on occasion—this practice sprang from a widespread craving for social participation. Hitler was not exaggerating when he asserted, as he regularly did, that he had asked his followers for nothing but sacrifices. In fact he had rediscovered the old truism that most people have a need for fitting into an organized whole, that there is joy in fulfilling a function, and that for the majority of the German people, the demand for selfless service frequently had a far greater appeal than the intellectuals’ demand of freedom for the individual.

Hitler succeeded in converting all the diffuse impulses awakened during that first spring after his coming to power into purposeful social energies—that was one of his most remarkable achievements. Challenging the individual to total disinterested effort, he kindled enthusiasm in people nerve-wracked by unemployment, misery, and hunger. He was able to proclaim convincingly: “It is glorious to live in an age that confronts its people with great tasks.” He went to unprecedented lengths in travel and speechmaking. By an endless succession of cornerstone layings and ground-breaking ceremonies, he created a mood of general mobilization. In hundreds of let’s-get-to-work speeches he initiated labor campaigns which, in the military jargon of the regime, soon developed into labor battles and were triumphantly concluded by a series of victories or by breakthroughs on the agricultural front. The metaphor of warfare that made such formulas effective also sparked a readiness for sacrifice. And all sorts of slogans furthered the mood, though sometimes these slogans verged on the preposterous, as for example: “The German woman is knitting again!”

Like the festivals and parades, these stylistic devices aimed at making the regime popular by concretizing it. Hitler had a remarkable knack for translating into simple images the abstract character of modern political and social functional relationships. Of course, the masses had lost their political autonomy; their rights had been reduced or abolished. But those liberties of the past had hardly profited them—they remembered them with nothing but contempt—whereas Hitler’s unrelenting image projection, his eagerness for public display, engendered in the masses a clear feeling that they were participating in the operations of government. After years of gloom it seemed to many people that their work was once again becoming meaningful. The most menial jobs were being raised to praiseworthy importance. As Hitler put it, it was an honor “to clean the streets as a citizen of this Reich.” Remarkably enough, he seemed to succeed in generating this state of mind.

This capacity for awakening initiative and self-confidence was all the more amazing in view of the fact that Hitler had no specific program. At the cabinet meeting of March 15 he for the first time admitted his dilemma, saying that it was necessary to employ demonstrations, pomp, and a show of activity “to divert attention to the purely political affairs, because the economic decisions will have to be postponed for a while.” And as late as September at the groundbreaking ceremony for the first section of the Frankfurt-Heidelberg autobahn he let slip the revealing statement that it was now essential “by grand, monumental works to set the German economy in motion again at some point.” As Hermann Rauschning saw it, Hitler took power with virtually no other guideline than his total confidence in his own ability to deal with things on the primitive but effective maxim: give an order and it will get done, more or less roughly, perhaps, but for a while something will be moving, and meanwhile we’ll look around for the next step.

As things stood, however, this conception proved to be a kind of magic, since it overcame the prevailing feeling of discouragement. Although there was no visible improvement in material conditions until 1934, from almost the very first day Hitler’s approach generated an enormous “suggestion of consolidation.” At the same time, it assured Hitler considerable room for maneuvering, which enabled him to adjust his plans to changing requirements. The style of his rule has rightly been called “permanent improvisation.” Even while he insisted on the unalterability of the party program, he was filled with that lively instinct of the born tactician not to commit himself. Thus he forbade the press in the first few months to publish unauthorized quotations from Mein Kampf. Even republication of one of the twenty-five points of the party program was banned on the grounds that henceforth what mattered would not be programs but practical work. As a pamphlet of the period put it: “The new Chancellor has so far refused, quite understandably from his standpoint, to set forth a program in detail. (‘Party Comrade No. 1 did not answer,’ the Berlin joke has it.)” One of the early party functionaries believes that Hitler at no time had a clearly formulated goal, let alone a strategy for attaining his ends. And indeed it does seem as if he had only visions, and an unusual capacity for taking in at a glance changing situations, and rapidly and forcefully seizing the opportunities they offered. The grandiose phantasmagorias, floating in eschatological mists of cosmic dooms and racial twilights, were just as much his element as tenacious, cunning, cold-bloodedly staged rapid-fire events—he was a curious combination of visionary and tactician. But the realm in between, that of soundly planned, patiently practiced politics, the realm of human history, was and remained alien to him.

There could be no doubt, from his actions, that programs did not concern him. He forced the “reactionary” Hugenberg out of the cabinet, even as he compelled Gottfried Feder, now State Secretary in the Ministry of Economics, to modify to the verge of recantation the great idea of his life, his “breaking the bondage of interest.” Hitler now dismissed Feder’s idea, which had long ago flashed through him like an illumination, as one of a group of “officially approved fantasies.” The small shopkeepers, the original members of the party, were already looking over the department stores to find the spots where, according to Point 16 of the party program, they would set up their sales booths in the near future. As late as July, 1933, Rudolf Hess was still allowed to state that the attitude of the party on the question of the department stores was “unchanged in principle.” In reality Hitler had discarded that point in the program for good and all.

What had happened to Feder happened to many other old fighters in the party ranks, who. as ideological lone wolves, found themselves more and more openly ridiculed and excluded from the positions of power. As the party embracing all the discontented and resentful, during the period of its rise, the NSDAP had attracted many mini-utopians: people obsessed with an idea, a conception of a new order. They had imagined that their desire for reform was most emphatically represented by the dynamic Hitler party. Now, however, that there was a chance of these ideas being realized, the unreality and in many cases the ludicrous quality of many of these notions came to light, while others held no interest for Hitler, since they offered no promise for increasing his power. The idea of the corporate state, constitutional reforms, rearrangement of the relationships between the states and the Reich, the idea of Germanic law, nationalization of the trusts, land reform, or the idea of the state’s feudal tenure of the means of production—nothing ever came of these save for a few isolated projects no one ever followed up. Moreover, the ideas were often so contradictory that their spokesmen turned fiercely upon one another, whereupon Hitler again could leave everything suspended. Complaints about “lack of organization” left him unmoved. This lack allowed his will free scope and made it the real law of the regime.

But although the energies that National Socialism had unleashed were incapable of tracing more than the beginnings of a new order, they were nevertheless strong enough to undermine the old conditions. Even in this early phase the peculiar weakness of the regime was revealed. To be sure, it had with uncanny accuracy exposed the anachronistic structures and empty claims of the old order. But it was never able to legitimize its destructive ingenuity by a constructive sequel; in the larger historical context it assumed solely functions of clearance. It could not even develop rational, purposeful forms in which to clothe its power-political aims; even in establishing the totalitarian state it hardly went beyond initial steps. It was behemoth rather than leviathan, as Franz Neumann put it; a non-state, a manipulated chaos, not the terroristic coercive state that still is a state. Everything was improvised with one purpose or another in view. That was true for the great campaign of conquest that dominated Hitler’s imagination so powerfully that it overrode everything else. Certainly, he had no interest in ordering the social and political structures and arranging for their continuance beyond his own life. If he thought and spoke in terms of a millennium, this was vague literary phraseology. Consequently, the Third Reich developed into a peculiarly unfinished makeshift, a field of rubble patterned on contradictory sketches. Façades left over from the past covered newly laid foundations, among which jutted pieces of wall started and abandoned, fragments destroyed or torn down. What alone imposed meaning and consistency upon it all was Hitler’s monstrous will to power.

Socialistic notions still survived in the Nazi party, isolated leftovers from the Strasser phase. Hitler’s attitude toward these doctrines is interesting, for here again we see how all his decisions were governed by the power factor. As leader of a movement which had profited from the bourgeoisie’s dread of revolution, he had to avoid all activities that might move the regime anywhere close to the traditional concept of revolution. In particular, he must avoid the appearance of nationalization or an overplanned economy. But since this was what he really intended, he used the slogan of “national socialism” to proclaim unconditional co-operation by everyone, on all levels, with the state. And since all authority ultimately issued from him, this meant nothing less than the abolition of all private economic life under the fiction of its continuance. As compensation for the state’s intrusion into their affairs, the businessmen received imposed labor peace, guaranteed markets, and in the course of time a good many vague hopes of a tremendous expansion of the national economic base. The whole idea was conceived, however, for short-term benefits: it was Hitler’s way of providing himself with henchmen. Among his intimates he justified this course with some cynicism and acuteness: he had not the slightest intention, he declared, of killing off the propertied class, as had been done in Russia. Rather, he would force it in, every conceivable way to use its abilities to build the economy. Businessmen, that much was sure, would be glad if their lives and property were spared, and in this way they would become true dependents. Why should he change this advantageous relationship when to do so would only mean he would afterward have to thresh everything out with Old Fighters and overzealous party comrades who would be forever reminding him of all they had done for the party? Formal title to means of production was only a question of detail, was it not? How much landed property or how many factories people owned did not matter when they had consented to a master they could no longer overthrow. “The decisive factor is that the State through the party controls them whether they are owners or workers. Do you understand, all this no longer means anything. Our socialism reaches much deeper. It does not change the external order of things, but it orders solely the relationship of man to the State. . . . Then what does property and income count for? Why should we need to socialize the banks and the factories? We are socializing the people.”²⁴

Hitler’s pragmatism was remarkably effective in overcoming mass unemployment. He did not doubt that both the fate of the regime and his personal prestige hung on this question. It was all important that the condition of the suffering population be significantly improved. He had been walking the high wire propagandistically for so long that there was no way to make good his promises except by some such miracle. Moreover, it was also the only way he could pacify the Old Fighters who were grumbling at his many compromises and adjustments, which in their view amounted to a “betrayal of the revolution.”

Hitler grasped the psychological aspect of the Depression as none of the Weimar politicians had done. Undoubtedly, the gradual recovery of the world economy also came to his aid. But more important, at least as far as the tempo was concerned, was his perception that gloom, apathy, and slump sprang from deep-seated, pessimistic doubts regarding the world order and that the masses required stimulus just as much as did the economy. His many comments friendly to business and his consistent efforts to keep the economy out of the revolutionary turmoil of the early phase were primarily aimed at generating a mood of confidence. Most of the measures initiated during the early months were introduced less for their economic rationale than for the sake of making a vigorous gesture. In a number of cases Hitler fell back on older plans, such as the “program for the immediate provision of work,” which belonged to the Schleicher regime. Other projects that were now spectacularly launched also came out of the Weimar files; democratic red tape, timidity about decisions, or the resignation prevalent during the Weimar years had kept them dormant. For example, the autobahn project, so closely linked with the regime’s reputation from the very outset, had been under discussion for years but had never been begun.

When Dr. Hans Luther, president of the Reichsbank, clung to his deflationary tight-credit policy and refused to make large sums available for providing work, Hitler forced him to resign. To the anger of many of his followers, he replaced Luther by the “notorious capitalist” Hjalmar Schacht. With his eagerness for results and his absence of scruples, Hitler cranked up production by a variety of impressive measures. In his May 1 speech he appealed to the “entire German people,” declaring that “every individual. . . every entrepreneur, every homeowner, every businessman,” had the obligation to provide for work in a sustained community effort. The government, for its part, would take action by means of a program Hitler described as “gigantic”—one of his favorite words. “We will clear all obstacles and begin the task grandly,” he promised. Government contracts for housing projects and roads together with a system of public and private stimuli to investment, loans, tax concessions and subsidies, promoted an upswing in the economy. And along with it all went more and more words, slogans, proclamations. They contributed to the success of the effort and gave surprising significance to Hitler’s epigram: “Great liars are also great wizards.”

The establishment and extension of the initially voluntary Labor Service was also part of the psychology of generating confidence. The Labor Service was useful, to be sure, as a catchment basin for unemployed youth. But in addition it gave vivid expression to the regime’s constructive optimism. Reclaiming swamps and wetlands, reforestation, building autobahns and regulating streams became visible and inspiring signs of accomplishment and faith in the future. At the same time, the organization served to overcome class barriers—especially after it became compulsory in 1935—and to improve the status of manual laborers.

All these factors operated together, and by 1934 a shortage of technicians was noted, although there were still 3 million unemployed. Two years later full employment was attained.

The initial upswing also opened the way for considerable effective action in the realm of social politics. To be sure, strikes were banned and a single state-controlled union was created, the German Labor Front. But for fear of seeming reactionary, the regime attempted to cover up such manifestations of authoritarianism by ostentatious prolabor activities. Thus vast institutions were created to organize the people, to provide them with vacation travel, sports festivals, art shows, dances, and training courses. These organizations—Kraft durch Freude (“Strength Through Joy”) and Schönheit der Arbeit (“Beauty of Work”)—served their purpose, and at the same time superintended and placated the masses.

There was labor opposition, to be sure. Some lists giving the results of factory elections held in April, 1935, have been discovered; these reveal that in some plants at this time no more than 30 per cent to 40 per cent of the personnel voted for the Nazi unity list, and thus for the new order. But in 1932 the NSBO,. the Nazi factory organization, received on the average only 4 per cent of the votes. Even such a leftist historian as Arthur Rosenberg had to admit that Nazism realized certain unfulfilled demands of the democratic revolution. In the long run, at any rate, the regime’s stubborn, wide-ranging wooing of the workers had its effect, especially since many of them saw the difference between present and past “less in lost rights than in regained employment.”²⁵

Employment was indeed the key factor for the success of the Third Reich’s rigorous social policies. The loss of freedom and of social autonomy, the strict supervision, the distinctly smaller share of labor in the growing national product—all this did not greatly bother the workers. Ideological slogans persuaded them even less than the bourgeoisie. What really mattered was the feeling of restored social security after traumatic years of anxiety and gloom. This feeling dissolved the initially widespread tendencies toward opposition. It roused the determination to produce and helped enormously to create that image of social contentment to which the new rulers could proudly point: class struggle was not only tabooed and banned; it had also been largely abandoned. The regime insisted that it was not the rule of one social class above all others, and by granting everyone opportunities to rise, it in fact demonstrated class neutrality. What class consciousness remained was stamped out by the political pressures to which businessmen, blue- and white-collar workers, and farmers were subjected.

 

These measures did indeed break through the old, petrified social structures. They tangibly improved the material condition of much of the population. Yet no really new sociopolitical concepts can be detected underlying these programs. Hitler’s only ideas were concerned with the seizure of power; he had no vision of the new state or the new society. Fundamentally he did not want change; he wanted only to put his hand on the wheel. Just as the party had served him as an instrument for conquering Germany, Germany was now to serve him as an instrument “for pushing open the gate to lasting domination of the world.” Hitler’s domestic policy must be seen as an adjunct to his foreign policy.

In addition to his use of the available social energies, he employed the dynamism of nationalistic motivation to mobilize the masses. The onetime victors in the World War had already conceded German equality in principle, but in reality she had remained the pariah nation. France, above all, deeply disturbed by Hitler’s accession to power, was unrelenting, whereas England showed some discomfort at the contradictions into which she was being forced by her former ally. During the first year and a half of his rule Hitler exploited France’s fears, England’s scruples, and Germany’s indignation in a masterful manner. He succeeded in overturning the entire European system of alliances, in uniting Germany, and in preparing the ground for his Lebensraum policy.

The initial situation was by no means favorable to his ambitions. The terroristic aspects of his coming to power, the beatings and killings, above all, the persecution of a single segment of society solely because of their origin, ran counter to all civilized views of political conduct and produced a grim image of what was going on in Germany. There was the famous Maundy Thursday debate in the House of Commons, when Sir Austen Chamberlain, the former Foreign Secretary, declared that this was not the time to consider any further revision of the Versailles Treaty. He spoke of brutality, racial arrogance, and the policy of the iron heel. The slogan “Hitler means war,” so long dismissed as a piece of refugee hysteria, suddenly seemed credible. There were anti-German outbreaks here and there in Europe, and the Polish ambassador went so far as to ask whether France was. prepared to wage a preventive war in order to eliminate the Hitler regime. In the summer of 1933 Germany was almost totally isolated in the sphere of foreign policy.

Given these circumstances, Hitler found it advisable to make placating gestures and to stress continuity with the moderate Weimar policy. Although he despised the personnel of the Foreign Office and occasionally spoke of “those Santa Clauses in the Wilhelmstrasse,” he left both the bureaucracy and the diplomatic corps almost untouched. For at least six years, he told one of his followers, he must maintain a kind of truce with the European powers; all the saber rattling of nationalistic circles was a mistake, he said.²⁶ Typical of his strategy was his grand “peace speech” of May 17, 1933, although he mingled his sincere-sounding offers of reconciliation with some strong words against the persisting distinction between victors and defeated and even threatened to withdraw from the Disarmament Conference and from the League of Nations altogether if the victors continued to deny equal rights to Germany. But in the present situation he could easily assume the role of an advocate of reason and fairness by taking the European powers at their word, invoking their own slogans of “self-determination” and a “just peace.” So great was the general gratification at Hitler’s moderation that no one detected the warning contained within his speech. Along with the London Times many influential voices throughout the world supported Hitler’s demand that Germany be treated on a footing of equality with the other powers. President Roosevelt was actually delighted with Hitler’s tone.²⁷

The most visible success of this policy was the Four Power Pact between England, France, Germany, and Italy that was drawn up in the summer of 1933. Although never ratified, it signified a kind of moral acceptance of Germany into the society of great powers. But Germany’s first partner in international negotiations was the Soviet Union, which hastened to renew the Berlin Treaty that had expired in 1931. Russia was followed closely by the Vatican, which in July concluded the arrangements for a concordat with the Reich. But even though things were going well, in the autumn Hitler swung the rudder around with an abruptness that seemed to spring from a blind emotion and managed thereby to perceptibly improve his whole position.

His field of operations was the Disarmament Conference in Geneva, which had been meeting since the beginning of 1932. Because of her military weakness, Germany exerted a particularly strong moral sway at this conference. The principle of equality compelled the other powers either to disarm or to accept the rearmament of Germany. In speech after speech, statement after statement, Hitler could stress Germany’s readiness to disarm; the more France’s anxieties came to the fore, the more simple-heartedly and persuasively Hitler could argue. France was watching events in Germany with deep uneasiness; she found these developments far more telling than Hitler’s bland assurances, even though her persistent distrust—which blocked all negotiations—cast her in a bad light internationally. But by pointing to the system of repression inside the Reich, to the increasing militarization, the constant marching, the flags, uniforms and parades, the organizational vocabulary with its “storm troops,” “brigades” and “headquarters guards,” and the battle songs in which the whole human race trembled before a Germany that owned the world, France at last managed to bring the other powers around. The equality conceded to Germany in principle was made dependent on a four-year period of probation, so that the others could observe whether their former enemy was sincerely ready for reconciliation and had abandoned all revanchist notions.

Hitler reacted by flaring up. On October 14, shortly after British Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon had presented the Allies’ new views, Hitler announced his intention to quit the Disarmament Conference. Along with this, he proclaimed Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations. His state of mind is indicated by his orders to the army—revealed at the Nuremberg Trials—to resist with armed force if an attempt were made to apply sanctions.²⁸

This first coup, with which Hitler took the regime’s foreign policy into his own hands, created stupefaction. It is true that he had not made the decision on his own—as has been widely thought. He was supported strongly by Foreign Minister von Neurath, who had previously advocated a deliberate sharpening of Germany’s foreign policy. But the emotional posturing, the tone of grand indignation, unquestionably derived from Hitler himself. And it was also he who posed the alternatives as “withdrawal or dishonor.” In a radio address delivered on the evening of October 14 he applied to foreign affairs the dual tactics which had proved of such value to him in domestic affairs: he masked his belligerence by a torrent of words and show of amicability. He called France “our ancient but glorious opponent” and stated that “anyone who can conceive of a war between our two countries is mad.”

These tactics paralyzed the European powers, who in any case were hardly disposed to take decisive counteraction. None of their spokesmen had any idea what to do. Hitler was contemptuously tossing back in their faces the “honor” for which the Weimar regime had so long and patiently sued. His brashness stunned them. But some hid their surprise and embarrassment by congratulating the others on being rid of an inconvenient partner in negotiations. A few demanded military intervention; in the lobbies at Geneva angry exclamations of “C’est la guerre!” could be heard. But this was not meant to be taken seriously. Yet amid the tumult it seemed to dawn on people for the first time that this man was demanding of old Europe an admission of bankruptcy. Moreover, it was becoming apparent that he had delivered a fatal blow to a wounded League of Nations already undermined by fear, mistrust, and selfishness. At the same time, the idea of disarmament was killed off. If it is true, as has been remarked, that Hitler’s conquest of power was actually a declaration of war upon the system of peace instituted at Versailles,²⁹ then the declaration was made on that October 14, 1933. But no one acknowledged it. General annoyance with the protracted Geneva palaver, with paradoxes and hypocrisies, was expressed above all in the British press. The conservative Morning Post declared that it would shed no tears over the League of Nations and the Disarmament Conference; the proper feeling was relief that such “a humbug” had come to an end. When the newsreel in a London theater showed Hitler, the audience applauded.³⁰

Fearing that the easy success of the surprise tactics would go to Hitler’s head, Hermann Rauschning, coming from Geneva, called on him at the Berlin chancellery. He found Hitler “in the best of spirits; he was all keyed-up and eager to take action.” With a contemptuous gesture he waved away what Rauschning had to say about the indignation at Geneva and the call for military sanctions. “You say they want war?” he asked. “They have no thought of it. . . . A sad crew is assembled there. They don’t act, they only protest. And they’ll always think of things too late. . . . These people will not stop Germany’s rise.”

For a time, Rauschning’s report continues, Hitler paced back and forth in silence. He seemed to be aware that for the first time since January 30 he had entered a risky zone, which he must now cross, and that his forceful act could have the direst consequences for the country. Without looking up, Hitler justified his decision in a kind of monologue. In doing so he offered Rauschning a remarkable insight into the structure of his decision making:

 

I had to do that. A grand liberating act that everyone could understand was essential. I had to pull the German people out of this whole clinging network of dependencies, empty phrases and false ideas. I had to restore our freedom of action. I am not concerned here with the politics of the day. For the moment the difficulties may have mounted. So be it—that will be balanced out by the trust the German people will place in me as a result. It would have made no sense to us to go on debating the subject, as the Weimar parties did for ten long years. . . . [The people] want to see something being done, not the same fraud being continued. What was needed was not what the brooding intellect thinks is useful, but the dramatic act which demonstrates a resolute will to make a new beginning. Whether it was done wisely or not, the people at any rate understand only such acts, not the futile bargaining that leads to nothing. The people are sick of being led around by the nose.³¹

 

Shortly afterward it became apparent that he had reasoned rightly. For Hitler characteristically linked withdrawal from the League of Nations with another step that went considerably beyond the original pretext. He decided to hold a plebiscite on the issue, the first such plebiscite of his regime, and one staged with an enormous display of propaganda. This in turn was combined with new elections. For the Reichstag that had been elected on March 5 was to some extent still anachronistically divided on the pattern that had prevailed under the Weimar Republic.

The outcome of the voting could not be in doubt. Feelings of humiliation harbored for years, deep-seated resentment over the tricks by which Germany had been kept under since Versailles—all such emotions now broke forth, and even critics of the regime, who would soon be going over to active resistance, hailed Hitler’s gesture. As the British ambassador reported to London, all Germans were united in the desire to avenge themselves upon the League of Nations for its manifold failures. Since Hitler had intertwined his policies as a whole with the resolution to withdraw from the League by framing his plebiscite question in general terms, there was no way for the voter to express approval of his position on the League of Nations and at the same time condemn his domestic policies. Thus the plebiscite was one of the most effective chess moves in the process of consolidating his power within Germany.

Hitler himself opened the campaign on October 24 with a major speech in the Berlin Sportpalast. He announced that the plebiscite was to take place on November 12, one day after the fifteenth anniversary of the 1918 Armistice. Once more facing an electoral challenge, Hitler worked himself up into a trancelike paroxysm. “For my part I declare,” he cried out to the masses, “that I would sooner die than sign anything that in my most sacred conviction is not tolerable for the German people.” He also asserted that “if ever I should be mistaken in this matter or if the people should ever believe that they can no longer support my actions. . . I wish them to have me executed. I will quietly await the blow!” As always, when he felt slighted, he ranted demagogically about the injustice that had been done to him. Speaking to the workers of the Siemens-Schuckert Works, dressed in boots, military trousers, and dark civilian jacket, standing on an enormous derrick, he stated:

 

We are gladly willing to co-operate in any international agreement. But we will do so only as equals. I have never, in private life, forced myself upon any distinguished company that did not want to have me or did not regard me as an equal. I don’t need such people, and the German nation has just as much character. We are not taking part in anything as shoeshine boys, as inferiors. No, either we have equal rights or the world will no longer see us at any conferences.

 

Once again, as in earlier years, a frantic “poster war” was launched. “We want honor and equality!” In Berlin, Munich, and Frankfurt a procession of crippled veterans in wheelchairs was mounted. The veterans held signs: “Germany’s Dead Demand Your Vote!” Considerable use was made of quotations from the wartime British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, who asserted that right was on Germany’s side and that England would not have put up with such a humiliation for any length of time.³² A wave of gigantic marches, protest festivals, and mass appeals once again rolled over the country. A few days before the election the nation was asked to observe two minutes of total silence in remembrance of its dead heroes. Hitler declared that the military tone of life in Germany was not for the sake of demonstrating against France “but to exemplify the political decisionmaking that is necessary for the conquest of Communism. . . . When the rest of the world barricades itself in indestructible fortresses, builds vast fleets of airplanes, constructs giant tanks, makes enormous cannon, it can scarcely talk about a menace when German National Socialists march entirely weaponless in columns of four and thus provide a visible expression of the German racial community and effective protection for it. . . . Germany has a right to security no less than other nations.”

All the resentments of the people were expressed in the results of the plebiscite—but it also showed the effects of an intensification of propaganda. Ninety-five per cent of the voters approved the government’s decision to withdraw from the League. And although this result was manipulated and accompanied by terroristic electioneering practices the outcome still more or less corresponded to public mood. In the simultaneous Reichstag election 39 million of the 45 million eligibles gave their vote to the Nazi “unity” candidates. The day was exuberantly hailed as “the miracle of the birth of the German nation.”

 

During his coming to power Hitler had proved the value of a series of surprise actions on the domestic front; now he applied the same tactics to foreign affairs. The dismay at his break with Geneva was not yet over, and there was still indignation at his arrogant attempt to turn the democratic principle of the plebiscite against the democracies themselves, when he again seized the initiative. His purpose now was to arrange a dialogue on a new and more favorable plane with the powers he had just offended. In a memorandum issued in mid-December he rejected the idea of disarmament but declared himself willing to accept a general limitation of armaments to defensive weapons, provided Germany was allowed to raise a conscript army of 300,000 men.

This was the first of those offers, placed with such remarkable feeling for the situation, which for years prefaced each of his foreign-policy coups right up to the outbreak of the war. For the British the terms were just barely acceptable as a basis for negotiations, for the French unacceptable, just as Hitler had calculated in each case. And while the two Allies took council endlessly—the consultations protracted by French distrust—on how far each was willing to go in making concessions, Hitler could exploit their differences, and the fact that no binding agreements had yet been arranged, to push forward his own plans.

Again, about a month later—on January 26, 1934—a new move of Hitler’s abruptly changed the picture: he concluded a ten-year nonaggression pact with Poland. To understand the startling effect of this move, we must call to mind the traditionally tense relations between Germany and Poland and the fund of old resentment between the two countries. Some of the bitterest points of the Versailles Treaty had been those concerned with territorial losses to the new Polish state, the creation of the Polish Corridor, which cut off East Prussia from the rest of the Reich, and the establishment of the Free City of Danzig. These areas became bones of contention between the two countries and the focuses of constant menaces. The Germans had been greatly disturbed by Polish border violations and injustices during the early years of the Weimar Republic, partly because they had pointed up Germany’s general impotence, partly because of the offense to the old German sense of being able to lord it over the Slavic vassals. As France’s ally, moreover, Poland fed the Germans’ encirclement complex. Weimar foreign policy, including that of Gustav Stresemann, had stubbornly resisted any suggestions that Germany guarantee Poland’s possession of her existing territory.

These anti-Polish feelings dominated the traditionally pro-Russian diplomatic and military circles and the old Prussian landowning class as well. Yet Hitler brushed them aside with hardly a qualm. On the other side Marshal Piłsudski displayed equal resolution: faced with France’s halfhearted and nervous policy, he restructured Poland’s entire pattern of alliances. Essentially he was acting on the premise that Hitler, as a South German, a Catholic and a “Hapsburger,” could disassociate himself from the political traditions that Poland feared.

Here Hitler once more gave the lie to the popular view of him as an emotional politician, the victim of his whims and manias. Unquestionably he shared the national German enmity toward Poland. But he did not allow this to affect his policy. Although he had not yet defined what place Poland would occupy within his general concept of a vast eastward expansion, it may be assumed that there was no room for an independent Polish ministate within the framework of Hitler’s continental visions. As recently as April, 1933, Hitler had made it plain to Ambassador François-Poncet that no one could expect Germany to accept in the long run the present state of her eastern border. But as long as Poland was independent, militarily strong, and protected by alliances, he acted on the basis of the situation he could not change and coolly tried to turn it to his advantage. “Germans and Poles will have to learn to accept the fact of each other’s existence,” he stated in his anniversary report to the Reichstag on January 30, 1934. “Hence it is more sensible to regulate this state of affairs which the last thousand years have not been able to remove, and the next thousand years will not be able to remove either, in such a way that the highest possible profit will accrue from it for both nations.”

The profit Hitler derived from the treaty did in fact prove to be enormous. In Germany itself the pact was scarcely popular; but to the outside world Hitler could repeatedly adduce it as evidence of his conciliatory temper even with regard to notorious enemies. British Ambassador Sir Eric Phipps commented in a report to London that the German Chancellor had now proved that he was a statesman by sacrificing some of his popularity to a rational foreign policy.³³ At the same time, Hitler had succeeded, by his Polish alliance, in discrediting the system of the League of Nations, which in all the preceding years had not managed to dampen the Polish-German tinderbox. Things had been left, as Hitler convincingly complained, so that the “tensions gradually. . . assumed the character of a hereditary political taint on both sides.” And now, seemingly without effort, in the course of a few bilateral conversations, he eliminated the problem.

Finally, the pact proved that the barriers which had been erected around Germany were not nearly as stout as had been assumed. “With Poland, one of the strongest pillars of the Treaty of Versailles falls,” General von Seeckt had once said, expressing one of the tenets of the Weimar Republic’s foreign policy—and obviously suggesting that the problem could be solved by military action. Hitler was now demonstrating that imaginative political methods could achieve great effects. For the alliance not only freed Germany from the Franco-Polish threat on two fronts; it also knocked a sizable piece out of the system of collective guarantees of peace and left that system permanently irreparable. The Geneva experiment had, fundamentally speaking, already failed; Hitler had destroyed it with his first assault. Moreover, he had maneuvered France into the role of international troublemaker. The Foreign Ministers of the Weimar Republic had worn themselves out trying to wring concessions from an all-powerful and unyielding France. Hitler had simply turned his back on her temporarily. Henceforth he could devote himself to those bilateral negotiations, alliances, and intrigues that were central to his strategy of international relations. For he could win only if he confronted isolated opponents, never a united front. The game he had so skillfully staged in the domestic arena was now beginning again on the international plane. Already his fellow players were pressing forward. The first of them, in February, 1934, was the British Keeper of the Privy Seal, Anthony Eden.

 

The unpredictability of Hitler’s manner must be counted among his prime tricks as a negotiator. Just as Hugenberg, Schleicher, Papen, and a vast entourage had once done, Eden, Sir John Simon, André François-Poncet, and Benito Mussolini thought they would be meeting a moody, limited, booted party boss who, to be sure, possessed a certain demagogic talent. The fellow who had obviously had to overcome his insignificance and borrow character for himself from a mustache, a forelock, and a uniform, who in an ordinary business suit looked rather like an imitation of the man he pretended to be, was for some time the favorite butt of European humor. He was pictured as a kind of “Gandhi in Prussian boots” or a feeble-minded Charlie Chaplin seated on a much too high chancellor’s throne—at any rate “to the highest degree exotic,” as a British observer, Arnold Toynbee, wrote ironically, “one of these political ‘mad mullahs,’ non-smokers, non-drinkers of alcohol, non-eaters of meat, non-riders on horseback, and non-practisers of blood-sports in their cranky private lives.”³⁴ Negotiators and visitors who came to Hitler with such preconceptions were therefore all the more surprised. For years he astonished them by a schooled statesmanlike manner which he could easily put on and for which they were totally unprepared. Eden was amazed at Hitler’s smart, almost elegant appearance, and wondered at finding him controlled and friendly. He listened readily to all objections, Eden wrote, and was by no means the melodramatic actor he had been described as being. Hitler knew what he was talking about, Eden commented in retrospect, and respect still rings in his remark that the German Chancellor had had complete command of the subject under discussion and had not once found it necessary to consult his experts even on questions of detail. Sir John Simon remarked to von Neurath on a later occasion that Hitler was “excellent and very convincing” in conversation, and that before meeting him he had had a completely false picture of him. Hitler also surprised his interlocutors by his quickwittedness. When the British Foreign Minister hinted that the English liked people to abide by treaties, Hitler showed ironic surprise and replied: “That was not always the case. In 1813 the German Army was prohibited by treaty. Yet I do not recollect that at Waterloo Wellington said to Blucher: Your Army is illegal. Kindly leave the field.”

When Hitler met Mussolini in Venice in June, 1934, he contrived to combine “dignity with friendliness and candor” in his manner, according to a diplomatic eyewitness, and left a “strong impression” behind among the initially skeptical Italians. Arnold Toynbee was surprised to hear him discourse on Germany’s guardian role in the East; his remarks, moreover, made excellent sense. In his relations with foreign visitors Hitler showed himself quick-witted, well prepared, often charming; and as Fran?ois-Poncet noted after one meeting with him, he also contrived to give the impression of “fullest sincerity.”³⁵

Like the Germans who had once come to gape at Hitler as if he were an acrobat in a circus, the foreigners came in growing numbers, and in so doing extended the aura of greatness and admiration that surrounded him. They listened all too eagerly to his words about the people’s longing for order and work, to his assurances of his love of peace, which he was fond of connecting with his personal experiences as a soldier at the front. The foreigners showed understanding for his sensitive sense of honor. It was already beginning to be customary, especially within Germany itself, to distinguish between the fanatical partisan politician of the past and the responsible realist of the present. For the first time since the days of the Kaiser a majority of the German people had the feeling that they could identify with their own government without feelings of pity, anxiety, or shame. Papen, who otherwise was certainly no spokesman for the general mood, was probably expressing a widely held view when he paid tribute, at a cabinet meeting of November 14, 1933, to the “genius of the Chancellor.”

Meanwhile, the decibel level of propaganda was stepped up, and more was made of Hitler as the leader and savior than ever. On the morning of May 1 Goebbels prolonged his introductory speech until the sun, which had been battling with the clouds, began to break through and Hitler could step before the masses in a blaze of light. Such clever symbolism conferred upon the image of the Führer the sacredness of a supernatural principle. And the concept of the “leader” was made to permeate the entire social system down to the very smallest units. The rector was described as the “leader of the university,” the businessman as the “factory leader.” Everyone was fitted into some leader-follower relationship, and all these relationships culminated in the archleader Hitler. An ecstatic Thuringian churchwarden went so far as to declare: “Christ has come to us through Adolf Hitler.”

The personality and the destiny of the great, lonely, chosen man, who had turned away the country’s miseries or taken them upon himself, became the subject of a multitude of Führer poems, Führer films, Führer pictures, or Führer dramas. In Richard Euringer’s Thingspiel,^* Deutsche Passion (German Passion), performed with great success in the summer of 1933 and subsequently hailed as the model of National Socialist drama, Hitler appeared as a resurrected Unknown Soldier, a crown of thorns made of barbed wire upon his head, entering a world of profiteers, stockholders, intellectuals, and proletarians—the representatives of the “November Republic.” He has come because, in the words of the play, which continually sounds Christian motifs, he “had mercy on the people.” When the mob wants to scourge and crucify him, he checks them by a miracle and leads the nation “to warfare and workfare” (zu Gewehr und Gewerk). He reconciles the living with the war dead in the great people’s community of the Third Reich. Then “a glory breaks” from his wounds and he ascends into heaven with the words: “It is finished!” The stage directions for the final scene read: “Organ tone from the skies. Nostalgia. Sacral. Rhythmically and harmoniously mingled with the secular marching song.”

Closely akin to such literary rubbish was the broad and polluted stream of kitsch culture. Everyone jumped in, trying to cash in on the mood of the moment. A brand of canned herring was called “Good Adolf.” Coin banks were made in the form of SA caps. Pictures of Hitler appeared on ties, handkerchiefs, hand mirrors, and the swastika decorated ash trays and beer mugs. Some Nazi officials warned that the Führer’s picture was being exploited and profaned by a money-grubbing band of pseudoartists.

It is clear that the excessive tributes had their effect upon Hitler himself. He was aware that the whole thing was artificially manufactured in line with his program: “The masses need an idol,” he declared. Nevertheless, the lineaments of the “leader-pope” began coming to the fore again, after having been suppressed somewhat just after the seizure of power. Now, however, this kind of leadership was extended from the party to the entire nation. As early as February 25, 1934, Rudolf Hess, speaking at the Königsplatz in Munich amid the roar of cannon and addressing by radio nearly a million political bosses, leaders of the Hitler Youth and the Labor Service, had made them take the oath: “Adolf Hitler is Germany and Germany is Adolf Hitler. He who pledges himself to Hitler pledges himself to Germany.”

Reinforced by his band of disciples, Hitler became more and more at home with this equation, which meanwhile was being given a theoretical foundation in an extensive literature on political science. Sample: “The new and decisive aspect of the Führer Constitution is that it goes beyond the democratic distinction between rulers and ruled to create a unity in which the Leader and the following have merged.” All selfish interests and all social antagonisms were abolished within him; a total unity of the German people corresponded to the total enemy on the outside. The Führer had the power to bind and to loose; he knew the way, the mission, the law of history.

Hitler’s speeches show him in full agreement with all this; he reckoned in centuries and occasionally suggested that he was on special terms with Providence. And just as he had overruled the many Old Fighters who had believed the party program, so he made his Danzig followers hew to the new line on Poland. He insisted on discipline, with no allowance made for local interests. “Everything in Germany begins with this man and ends with him,” his adjutant Wilhelm Brückner wrote.

The surer Hitler felt in the possession of power, the more conspicuously his old bohemian traits came to the fore, his lapses into torpor, his moodiness. For the present he still kept regular office hours, entered his office punctually at ten o’clock in the morning, and to evening visitors displayed the mountains of documents he had worked through. But he had always hated routine. “A single idea of genius,” he used to say, “is more valuable than a whole lifetime of conscientious office work.” Scarcely, therefore, had the excitement of being a Chancellor faded, with the glamour of the historical decor and the thrill of sitting at Bismarck’s desk, than he began discarding it all—just as in his youth he had dropped the piano, school, painting. Sooner or later, in fact, he would drop everything—at the end even the political game and his love of oratory. Ultimately, all he held on to were his obsessive ideas, those products of anxiety and ambition.

Significantly, his manner soon reverted to the Schwabing condottiere style of the twenties. Constantly trailing behind him a motley caravan of demiartists, strong-arm men, and adjutants, he would always be traveling between the chancellery, the Brown House, Obersalzberg, Bayreuth, parade grounds, and meeting halls. As the years went on, his need to be in motion increased. On the morning of July 26, for example, he delivered an address in Munich to a delegation of 470 Italian Young Fascists; at 2 P.M. he attended the funeral of Admiral von Schroeder in Berlin; and by 5 P.M. he was at a concert in Bayreuth. On July 29, still in Bayreuth, he was the guest of honor at a reception given by Winifred Wagner, and the following day laid a wreath on the composer’s grave. In the afternoon he spoke at the German Gymnastic Festival in Stuttgart, then went to Berlin, then to a meeting with high party officials at Obersalzberg. On August 12 he took part in a Richard Wagner Festival in Neuschwanstein, where in the course of his speech he referred to himself as completing the plans of King Ludwig II. From there he returned to Obersalzberg for a week. On August 18 he left for Nuremberg to see to preparations for the party rally, and a day later went to Bad Godesberg for a discussion with SA and SS leaders. It would appear that, now, having achieved success, he was once more prey to the fluctuating desires and interests of his earlier years. Often, he would let himself drift irresolutely for a long while, then he would suddenly display an explosive energy—especially in questions concerning power. In the political realm he manifested a peculiar and surely rare combination of indolence and genius. Soon he was shirking the many burdensome routine duties of his office and brazenly going to the opera or the movies instead. During those early months as Chancellor he once more read through all of Karl May’s nearly seventy volumes of adventure stories—of which he later said that they had opened his eyes to the world. It was this unusual style of undisguised laziness that prompted Oswald Spengler to remark sarcastically that the Third Reich was “the organization of the jobless by the job-shirkers.”³⁶ Rosenberg, for example, was highly indignant that Hitler preferred an ice revue to a demonstration Rosenberg had organized. In years past, Gottfried Feder had wanted to assign an army officer to Hitler to help him handle a proper day’s agenda. But Goebbels explained his master’s working methods in characteristically high-flown terms. “What we. . . are constantly endeavoring to bring to bear has become for him a system in world-wide dimensions. His creativity is that of the genuine artist, no matter in what field he may be working.”

If we look at the matter in retrospect, Hitler accomplished an amazing amount in the first year of his chancellorship. He had eliminated the Weimar Republic, taken the decisive steps toward building a government dependent upon him personally as leader, had centralized the nation, politically regimented it, and had brought it to the point of becoming the weapon he considered it to be, as indeed he considered everything to be a weapon. He had initiated an economic turnaround, had thrown off the fetters of the League of Nations, and had won the respect of the outside world. Within a short time, a pluralistic free society with its many centers of power and influence had been burned down to “pure, uniform, obedient ashes.” As he himself put it, he had “got rid of a world of opinions and institutions and installed another in its place.” Only disorganized groups without political weight were left of the shattered opposition.

Granted, what Goebbels called the “process of resmelting the nation” had not taken place without the use of violence. But we should not overestimate the part played by brute force in the course of the seizure of power. Hitler spoke of the “least bloody revolution in world history.” This soon became one of the rhetorical slogans of the regime. And it certainly contained a kernel of truth. And yet—consider a decree such as Gôring’s of June 22, 1933, “For Combating Griping and Defeatism.” The mere expression of discontent was viewed as a “continuation of Marxist agitation,” and hence a punishable offence. Such a decree made plain what methods were used to heat the smelting crucible.

Similarly, when we contemplate the “miracle” of the folk community, we cannot overlook its illusory character. It was an impressive façade, but for the most part it only covered over and did not eliminate social conflicts. One episode from the first few days of the regime throws light on the way the national “reconciliation” was compounded of coercion and deception. The episode is as grotesque as it is illuminating: on Hitler’s order the notorious leader of “Killer Storm Troop 33,” Hans (“Firebug”) Maikowski, was honored with a state funeral. He had been assassinated on the night of January 30, 1933, returning from the historic torchlight parade. A policeman named Zauritz who had been killed that same night was likewise granted a state funeral. In the name of the “folk community” and over the protests of the church officials, the policeman, who had been a Catholic and a leftist, was without more ado placed on a bier in the Lutheran cathedral alongside the storm trooper, who had been a gangster and a freethinker. To complete the missing element in this forcible reconciliation, the former Crown Prince was sent to lay wreaths on these coffins.

Nevertheless, the second phase of the seizure of power had proceeded more swiftly and more smoothly than anticipated. The necessary measures to organize government and party into a leader state were taken in the course of that legalistic game, which simultaneously prepared the next steps even as it was sanctioning the present one. In the provinces Reichs-tatthalter—federal governors—acted as party bosses, deposing ministers, appointing officials, participating in cabinet meetings, and exercising virtually unlimited authority as soon as the autonomy of the states was abrogated by law and the Reichsrat, the upper house, abolished. The federal government also stripped the states of their judiciary independence. A new organizational scheme for the party divided the country into thirty-two gaus, the gaus into sections, local groups, cells and blocks.

A statute of December 1, 1933, proclaimed the unity of party and state, but in fact Hitler was bent on separating the two. He had his reasons for leaving the national headquarters of the NSDAP in Munich. It was evident that he meant to keep the party from directly affecting government affairs. Hence his appointment of feeble, submissive Rudolf Hess, who lacked any power base of his own, to the post of FUhrer’s deputy. Certainly no political primacy of the National Socialist Party existed. Unity was present only in the person of Hitler, who continued to foster a multiplicity of divided authorities and who allowed the party only in a few special cases to assume governmental functions and carry through its totalitarian claims.

Almost all the powerful institutions in Germany were overwhelmed. Hindenburg no longer counted. He was, as his friend and Neudeck neighbor von Oldenburg-Januschau pungently remarked, “the President we no longer have.” Significantly, the leadership of the party, in taking that mass oath of February 25, swore allegiance to Hitler, not to the President, as should have been the case under the statute promulgating the unity of party and state. The old man still figured in a good many schemes as the supposed embodiment of justice and tradition; but in the meantime he had not only capitulated to Hitler, but allowed Hitler to corrupt him. His willingness to support the Nazi conquest of all power in the state with his moral authority certainly contrasted remarkably with the dour reserve with which he had left the Weimar Republic to its fate. On the anniversary of the Battle of Tannenberg the new rulers made him a gift of the Domain of Langenau, which bordered on Neudeck Estate, and the woodlands of Preussenwald, free and clear. He reciprocated with a gesture almost unprecedented in German military history, conferring upon retired Captain Hermann Göring “in recognition of his preeminent services in war and peace” the honorary rank of an infantry general.

The army remained the single institution that had escaped “co-ordination.” The SA was clearly seething with impatience to carry out that final Gleichschaltung. “The gray rock must be drowned by the brown tide,” Ernst Röhm was in the habit of remarking. Röhm and Hitler were now increasingly at odds, with Röhm suspecting that Hitler might abandon the revolution for reasons of tactics and opportunism. From Hitler’s point of view, the army and the SA constituted the only remaining still independent power factors whose self-assurance had not been shattered. The manner in which he used each to smash the other, thus solving the existential problem of every revolutionary leader is still another example of his tactical genius. He arranged for the revolution to devour first and foremost its most loyal children, and represented his perfidious act as a great service to history.

As always in the decisive situations of his life, he continued to hesitate, to answer those who pressed him to act with “We must let the situation ripen.” But from the spring of 1934 on, forces entered into play that, operating along different paths, accelerated matters. On June 30, 1934, many different interests and impulses coincided, and all met before the rifle barrels of the execution squads.