“It had its beginning in Munich” said my friend Herr Kessler, the one-time Catholic from Bavaria’s neighboring state of Württemberg in southern Germany, “in the most artistic, cultivated, and Catholic city in Germany, the city of art and of song and of love and Gemütlichkeit, the only city in Germany that all the foreign tourists always insisted on visiting. There it had its beginning, a purely local affair without any Weltanschauung, philosophy. Nobody outside paid any attention to it. Only after it spread and took root, Bavarians asked, ‘Who is Hitler? What is this Party with the fancy name? What is behind it?’
“Hitler was a simple soldier, like millions of others, only he had a feeling for masses of people, and he could speak with passion. The people didn’t pay any attention to the Party program as such. They went to the meetings just to hear something new, anything new. They were desperate about the economic situation, ‘a new Germany’ sounded good to them; but from a deep or broad point of view they saw nothing at all. Hitler talked always against the government, against the lost war, against the peace treaty, against unemployment. All that, people liked. By the time the intellectuals asked, ‘What is this?’ it had a solid basis in the common people. It was the Arbeiter, Sozialist Party, the Party of workers controlling the social order; it was not for intellectuals.
“The situation in Germany got worse and worse. What lay underneath people’s daily lives, the real root, was gone. Look at the suicides; look at the immorality. People wanted something radical, a real change. This want took the form of more and more Communism, especially in middle Germany, in the industrial area, and in the cities of the north. That was no invention of Hitler; that was real. In countries like America there is no Communism because there is no desire for radical change.
“Hitlerism had to answer Communism with something just as radical. Communism always used force; Hitlerism answered it with force. The really absolute enemy of Communism, always clear, always strong in the popular mind, was National Socialism, the only enemy that answered Communism in kind. If you wanted to save Germany from Communism—to be sure of doing it—you went to National Socialism. The Nazi slogan in 1932 was, If you want your country to go Bolshevik, vote Communist; if you want to remain free Germans, vote Nazi.’
“The middle parties, between the two millstones, played no role at all between the two radicalisms. Their adherents were basically the Bürger, the bourgeois, the ‘nice’ people who decide things by parliamentary procedure; and the politically indifferent; and the people who wanted to keep or, at worst, only modify the status quo.
“I’d like to ask the American Burger, the middle-class man: What would you have done when your country stood so? A dictatorship, or destruction by Bolshevism? Bolshevism looked like slavery and the death of the soul. It didn’t matter if you were in agreement with Nazism. Nazism looked like the only defense. There was your choice.”
“‘I would rather neither,’” I said.
“Of course, Herr Professor. You are a bourgeois. I was, too, once. I was a bank clerk, remember.”
Of my ten friends, only two, Tailor Schwenke and Bill-collector Simon, the two alte Kämpfer, wanted to be Nazis and nothing else. They were both positive—still are—that National Socialism was Germany’s and therefore their own, salvation from Communism, which, like the much more sensitive bank clerk, they both called “Bolshevism,” “the death of the soul.” “Bolshevism” came from outside, from the barbarous world that was Russia; Nazism, its enemy, was German, it was their own; they would rather Nazism.
Did they know what Communism, “Bolshevism,” was? They did not; not my friends. Except for Herr Kessler, Teacher Hildebrandt, and young Horstmar Rupprecht (after he entered the university, in 1941), they knew Bolshevism as a specter which, as it took on body in their imaginings, embraced not only the Communists but the Social Democrats, the trade-unions, and, of course, the Jews, the gypsies, the neighbor next door whose dog had bit them, and his dog; the bundled root cause of all their past, present, and possible tribulations. Prior to 1930 or 1931, none of my ten friends, except Tailor Schwenke and Bill-collector Simon, hated any Communist he knew (they were few, in nonindustrial little Kronenberg) or identified him with the specter; these were flesh-and-blood neighbors, who would not break into your house and burn it down. After 1933 or 1934 these same neighbors were seen for “what they were”—innocently disguised lackeys of the specter. The Bolshevist specter outraged the property sense of my all but propertyless friends, the class sense of these déclassé Bürger, the political sense of these helpless subjects of the former Emperor, the religious sense of these pro forma churchgoers, the moral sense of these unexceptional characters. It was “the death of the soul.”
The question was not whether Communism threatened the country, as, with the continuation of deteriorating conditions, it certainly did or soon would; the question was whether the Germans were convinced that it did. And they were. They were so well convinced, by such means as the Reichstag fire of 1933, that the Nazis were able, ultimately, to establish anti-Communism as a religion, immune from inquiry and defensible by definition alone. When in 1937 the Pope attacked the “errors” of National Socialism, the Nazi Government’s defense of its policies consisted of a Note accusing the Pope of “having dealt a dangerous blow to the defense front against the world menace of Bolshevism.”
Those Germans who would do anything, be anything, join anything to stop Bolshevism had, in the end, to be Nazis. And Nazism did stop Bolshevism. How it stopped Bolshevism, with what means and what consequences, did not matter—not enough, at least, to alienate them. None of its shortcomings, mild or hideous, none of its contradictions, small or calamitous, ever swayed them. To them, then and now, Nazism kept its promise.
Three of my ten friends, the bank clerk, Kessler, the salesman, Damm, and the tailor’s apprentice, Herr Schwenke’s son Gustav, were unemployed when they joined, and the first two were family men in middle life at the time. In all three cases they joined, I think, because they were unemployed—which is not in the least to say that they would not have joined if they hadn’t been. The two Old Fighters, Tailor Schwenke and Bill-collector Simon, when they joined in 1925, were both employed (the tailor self-employed), but the inflation which had just ended had reduced them (and nearly all other petit bourgeois Germans) to near-starvation.
Willy Hofmeister, the old policeman, joined the Party in 1937 because the new Police Chief said that all the men must join. When I asked him if he could have refused, he said, “Ein Millionär war ich ja gar nicht. A millionaire I was not.” (The Sicherheitspolizei, or detective force, one of whose five members he was in Kronenberg, was subsequently attached willy-nilly to the Gestapo, just as the Volunteer Fire Department was placed under the SS). Horstmar Rupprecht, the student, had been a Nazi since he was eight years old, in the Jungvolk, the “cub” organization of the Hitler Jugend; his ambition (which he realized) was to be a Hitler Youth leader; in America he would certainly have been a Scoutmaster.
The two most active churchmen of the ten, Herr Klingelhöfer, the cabinetmaker, and Herr Wedekind, the baker, both of them vestrymen of their parish church, were the two who today (and, I think, yesterday) put the most emphasis on the “everybody-was-doing-it” theme. (They were both “March violets.”) The fact that they were, of the ten, the two retail tradesmen doubtless contributed to their sensitivity to this urge to go along (mitschwimmen was the term each of them used) with the Party as they had with the Church; the cabinetmaker freely admitted that his church activity “didn’t hurt” his coffin-making, although neither he nor I would say that he was a churchman because it was good business to be one.
Neither Klingelhöfer nor Wedekind read the Party Program, the historic Twenty-five Points, before they joined, while they were members, or afterward. (Only the teacher, of the ten, ever read it.) But they were earnestly impressed, as were most ardent churchgoers in the early years of the movement, by the Program’s demand, of which every one of my friends had heard, for “positive Christianity” for Germany. The baker left the vestry board in 1937, when the Church-Party struggle had become intense. He says he left voluntarily, as a “good Nazi,” because he felt that his Party loyalty compromised his position on the board; his pastor confirms his assertion. But he did not leave the church. Herr Klingelhöfer—”I always joined everything”—remained a vestryman to the end.
All ten of my friends, including the sophisticated Hildebrandt, were affected by this sense of what the Germans call Bewegung, movement, a swelling of the human sea, something supraparty and suprapolitical, a surge of the sort that does not, at the time, evoke analysis or, afterward, yield to it. These men were victims of the “Bolshevik” rabies, to be sure. They were equally victims of economic hardship and, still worse, of economic hopelessness, a hopelessness that they suffered more easily by identifying it with their country’s. But they were seekers, too, and affirmers—agents, not just patients.
Their country was torn to pieces from without, of course, but still more cruelly from within. Germans had been at one another’s throats since 1918, and dissension grew shriller and more bitter all the time. In the course of the decomposition, the principle of being German, so newly won under Bismarck and so preciously held for fear of its slipping away, was indeed being lost. The uniting of the country, of all of its people, was possible only on this one principle of being German, and my ten friends, even including the old fanatic Schwenke, onlookers at the disruptive struggles of the old parties and the old party politicians, at the process of shredding the mystical fabric which supported this principle, asked, “Where is Germany?” Nazism—Hitler, rather—knew this and knew that nothing else mattered to my friends so much as this, the identification of this Germany, the community again, in which one might know he belonged and, belonging, identify himself. This was the movement which any non-German might see at once for what it was; and this was the movement which restored my friends as the sight of home restores the lost child; or as the sight of the Lorelei Maiden, seen sitting high above the Rhine, combing her golden hair with a golden comb in the surprising late sunshine, bewitches the sailor, who overlooks the rocks beneath the river.
National Socialism was a revulsion by my friends against parliamentary politics, parliamentary debate, parliamentary government—against all the higgling and the haggling of the parties and the splinter parties, their coalitions, their confusions, and their conniving. It was the final fruit of the common man’s repudiation of “the rascals.” Its motif was, “Throw them all out.” My friends, in the 1920’s, were like spectators at a wrestling match who suspect that beneath all the grunts and groans, the struggle and the sweat, the match is “fixed,” that the performers are only pretending to put on a fight. The scandals that rocked the country, as one party or cabal “exposed” another, dismayed and then disgusted my friends. (One sensed some of this reaction against the celebrated Army-McCarthy hearing in the United States in 1954—not against one side or another but against “the whole thing” as “disgusting” or “disgraceful.”)
While the ship of the German State was being shivered, the officers, who alone had life-preservers, disputed their prerogatives on the bridge. My friends observed that none of the non-Communist, non-Nazi leaders objected to the 35,000 Reichsmark salaries of the cabinet ministers; only the Communists and the Nazis objected. And the bitterest single disappointment of Nazism—both to Simon, the insensitive bill-collector, and to Hofmeister, the sensitive policeman—was the fact that Hitler had promised that no official would get more than 1,000 Reichsmarks a month and did not keep his promise.
My friends wanted Germany purified. They wanted it purified of the politicians, of all the politicians. They wanted a representative leader in place of unrepresentative representatives. And Hitler, the pure man, the antipolitician, was the man, untainted by “politics,” which was only a cloak for corruption. The “mink coat” scandal in the United States at the beginning of the 1950’s had its counterpart in Berlin in the beginning of the 1930’s, when the Nazis focused their campaign for the mayoralty on the receipt by the wife of the Social Democratic mayor of a für coat from a man who did business with the city.
Against “the whole pack,” “the whole kaboodle,” “the whole business,” against all the parliamentary politicians and all the parliamentary parties, my friends evoked Hitlerism, and Hitlerism overthrew them all. The power struggle within the National Socialist Party, which culminated in the Röhm purge of June 30, 1934, was in essence parliamentary and political, but my friends never knew it. They accepted it as a cleanup of moral degenerates, and if they caught a glimpse of the reality underneath the official propaganda, their nascent concern was dissipated by the fact that the Führer acted with an instant and terrible sword and the “debate” with Röhm was finished; the Führer held the country and the countrymen together.
This was the Bewegung, the movement, that restored my friends and bewitched them. Those Germans who saw it all at the beginning—there were not very many; there never are, I suppose, anywhere—called Hitler the Rattenfanger, the “rat-catcher.” Every American child has read The Pied-Piper of Hamlin. Every German child has read it, too. In German its title is Der Rattenfänger von Hameln.