Mastering Modern World History

by Norman Lowe

  manufacturing synthetic rubber and wool and experimenting to produce petrol from coal in order to reduce dependence on foreign countries;

  increasing expenditure on armaments; in 1938–9 the military budget accounted for 52 per cent of government spending. This was an incredible amount for ‘peacetime’. As Richard Overy puts it: ‘this stemmed from Hitler’s desire to turn Germany into an economic and military superpower before the rest of the world caught up’.

  Religion was brought under state control, since the churches were a possible source of opposition. At first Hitler moved cautiously with both Roman Catholics and Protestants. The Roman Catholic Church In 1933 Hitler signed an agreement (known as the Concordat) with the pope, in which he promised not to interfere with German Catholics in any way; in return they agreed to dissolve the Catholic Centre Party and take no further part in politics. But relations soon became strained when the government broke the Concordat by dissolving the Catholic Youth League because it rivalled the Hitler Youth. When the Catholics protested, their schools were closed down. By 1937 Catholics were completely disillusioned with the Nazis, and Pope Pius XI issued an Encyclical (a letter to be read out in all Roman Catholic churches in Germany) in which he condemned the Nazi movement for being ‘hostile to Christ and his Church’. Hitler was unim-pressed, however, and thousands of priests and nuns were arrested and sent to concentration camps.

  The Protestant Churches Since a majority of Germans belonged to one or other of the various Protestant groups, Hitler tried to organize them into a ‘Reich Church’ with a Nazi as the first Reich bishop. But many pastors (priests) objected and a group of them, led by Martin Niemoller, protested to Hitler about government interference and about his treatment of the Jews. Once again the Nazis were completely ruthless – Niemoller and over 800 other pastors were sent to concentration camps (Niemoller himself managed to survive for eight years until he was liberated in 1945). Hundreds more were arrested later and the rest were forced to swear an oath of obedience to the Führer.

  Eventually the persecutions appeared to bring the churches under control, but resistance continued, and the churches were the only organizations to keep up a quiet protest campaign against the Nazi system. For example, in 1941 some Catholic bishops protested against the Nazi policy of killing mentally handicapped and mentally ill people in German asylums. Over 70 000 people were murdered in this ‘euthanasia’ campaign. Hitler publicly ordered the mass killings to be stopped, but evidence suggests that they still continued.

  Above all, Germany was a police state. The police, helped by the SS and the Gestapo, tried to prevent all open opposition to the regime. The law courts were not impartial: ‘enemies of the state’ rarely received a fair trial, and the concentration camps introduced by Hitler in 1933 were full. The main ones before 1939 were Dachau near Munich, Buchenwald near Weimar and Sachsenhausen near Berlin. They contained ‘political’ prisoners – communists, Social Democrats, Catholic priests, Protestant pastors. Other persecuted groups were homosexuals and above all, Jews; perhaps as many as 15 000 homosexual men were sent to the camps, where they were made to wear pink triangle badges. However, recent research in Germany has shown that the police state was not as efficient as used to be thought. The Gestapo was understaffed; for example, there were only 43 officials to police Essen, a city with a population of 650 000. They had to rely heavily on ordinary people coming forward with information to denounce others. After 1943, as people became more disillusioned with the war, they were less willing to help the authorities, and the Gestapo’s job became more difficult.

  The worst aspect of the Nazi system was Hitler’s anti-Semitic (anti-Jewish) policy. There were only just over half a million Jews in Germany, less than one per cent of the total population, but Hitler decided to use them as scapegoats for everything – the humiliation at Versailles, the depression, unemployment and communism. He began by talking in terms of racial purity – the Aryan race, especially the Germans, must be kept free from contamination by the non-Aryan Jews. This is why they must be cleared out of Germany. In 1925 he wrote in his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle) about the time in Vienna when he was converted to anti-Semitism. He saw:

  a phenomenon in a black caftan and wearing black sidelocks. … The longer I gazed at this strange countenance, the more the question shaped itself in my brain: is this a German? … As soon as I began to investigate the matter, Vienna appeared to me in a new light: was there any shady undertaking, any form of foulness, especially in cultural life, in which at least one Jew did not participate? In putting the probing knife to that kind of abscess one immediately discovered, like a maggot in a putrescent body, a little Jew who was often blinded by the sudden light.

  Ian Kershaw suggests that this was probably a dramatization, since he was known to have been reading anti-Semitic newspapers before he went to live in Vienna. In fact the Jewish community played an important role in the cultural, scientific and business life of Germany, but Hitler would allow them no credit for that. In many speeches before he became Chancellor he spoke about them in the most extreme language. As soon as he became Chancellor, his supporters took it as a licence to begin persecuting the Jews. However, when the government declared a boycott of Jewish shops for 1 April 1933, the expected mass support was not forthcoming. The general public seemed apathetic, and some people even showed sympathy for the Jewish shops. Hitler decided that restraint was called for; clearly people’s main concerns were elsewhere. Consequently further boycotts were cancelled and the focus moved to attempts to strengthen the economy.

  By 1935 Hitler’s attitude had hardened again and he claimed that there was a world Jewish/communist plot to take control. He seemed to assume that communism was a Jewish movement, probably because many of the leading Russian Bolsheviks were Jewish. This, Hitler believed, would plunge the world into a new Dark Age, unless the Germans were able to thwart the plot. Lots of Germans were in such a desperate situation that they were prepared to accept the propaganda about the Jews and were not sorry to see thousands of them removed from their jobs as lawyers, doctors, teachers and journalists. Robert Gellately (in Backing Hitler, 2001) shows that many ordinary Germans actively participated in the atrocities against the Jews, helped themselves to stolen Jewish property and happily took jobs vacated by Jews. Gotz Aly also asked the question: ‘What drove ordinary Germans to tolerate and commit historically unprecedented crimes against humanity?’ His answer is that ordinary Germans co-operated in genocide because they benefited from it in material terms. The anti-Jewish campaign inside Germany was given legal status by the Nuremberg Laws (1935), which deprived Jews of their German citizenship, forbade them to marry non-Jews (to preserve the purity of the Aryan race), and ruled that even a person with only one Jewish grandparent must be classed as a Jew.

  Until 1938 Hitler still proceeded relatively cautiously with the anti-Jewish policy, probably because he was concerned about unfavourable foreign reaction. Later the campaign became more extreme. In November 1938, he authorized what became known as Kristallnacht (the ‘Night of Broken Glass’), a vicious attack on Jewish synagogues and other property throughout the whole country. When the Second World War began, the plight of the Jews deteriorated rapidly. They were harassed in every possible way; their property was attacked and burnt, shops looted, synagogues destroyed, and Jews themselves herded into concentration camps. Eventually the terrible nature of what Hitler called his ‘Final Solution’ of the Jewish problem became clear: he intended to exterminate the entire Jewish race. During the war, as the Germans occupied such countries as Czechoslovakia, Poland and western Russia, he was able to lay his hands on non-German Jews as well. It is believed that by 1945, out of a total of 9 million Jews living in Europe at the outbreak of the Second World War, about 5.7 million had been murdered, most of them in the gas chambers of the Nazi extermination camps. The Holocaust, as it became known, was the worst and most shocking of the many crimes against humanity committed by the Nazi regime (see Section 6.8 for full det
ails).

  (c) Hitler’s policies were popular with many sections of the German people

  It would be wrong to give the impression that Hitler hung on to power simply by terrorizing the entire nation. True, if you were a Jew, a communist or a socialist, or if you persisted in protesting and criticizing the Nazis, you would run into trouble; but many people who had no great interest in politics could usually live quite happily under the Nazis. This was because Hitler took care to please many important groups in society. Even as late as 1943, when the fortunes of war had turned against Germany, Hitler somehow retained his popularity with ordinary people. Gotz Aly (in Hitler’s Beneficiaries, 2007) argues that the Nazis were as much socialist as they were nationalist, and that they genuinely tried to make life better for ordinary Germans. Hitler told a reporter that his ambition was to raise the general standard of living and make the German people rich.

  His arrival in power in January 1933 caused a great wave of enthusiasm and anticipation after the weak and indecisive governments of the Weimar Republic. Hitler seemed to be offering action and a great new Germany. He was careful to foster this enthusiasm by military parades, torchlight processions and firework displays, the most famous of which were the huge rallies held every year in Nuremberg, which seemed to appeal to the masses.

  Hitler was successful in eliminating unemployment. This was probably the most important reason for his popularity with ordinary people. When he came to power the unemployment figure still stood at over 6 million, but by the end of 1935 it had dropped to just over two million, and by 1939 it was negligible. How was this achieved? The public works schemes provided thousands of extra jobs. A large party bureaucracy was set up now that the party was expanding so rapidly, and this provided thousands of extra office and administrative posts. There were purges of Jews and anti-Nazis from the civil service and from many other jobs connected with law, education, journalism, broadcasting, the theatre and music, leaving large numbers of vacancies. Conscription was reintroduced in 1935. Rearmament was started in 1934 and gradually speeded up. Thus Hitler had provided what the unemployed had been demanding in their marches in 1932: work and bread (Arbeit und Brot).

  Care was taken to keep the support of the workers once it had been gained by the provision of jobs. This was important because the abolition of trade unions still rankled with many of them. The Strength through Joy Organization (Kraft durch Freude) provided benefits such as subsidized holidays in Germany and abroad, cruises, skiing holidays, cheap theatre and concert tickets and convalescent homes. Gotz Aly looked at documents from the former East German archives which show in detail that the Nazis passed scores of laws extending and increasing social security provision, doubling workers’ holiday entitlement, with pay, and making it more difficult for landlords to increase rents and evict tenants. According to Aly, the Nazi dictatorship was built not on terror but on a mutual calculation of interest between leaders and people.

  Wealthy industrialists and businessmen were delighted with the Nazis in spite of the government’s interference with their industries. This was partly because they now felt safe from a communist revolution, and because they were glad to be rid of trade unions, which had constantly pestered them with demands for shorter working hours and increased wages. In addition they were able to buy back at low prices the shares they had sold to the state during the crisis of 1929–32, and there was promise of great profits from the public works schemes, rearmament and other orders which the government placed with them.

  Farmers, though doubtful about Hitler at first, gradually warmed towards the Nazis as soon as it became clear that farmers were in a specially favoured position in the state because of the declared Nazi aim of self-sufficiency in food production. Prices of agricultural produce were fixed so that they were assured of a reasonable profit. Farms were declared to be hereditary estates, and on the death of the owner, had to be passed on to his next of kin. This meant that a farmer could not be forced to sell or mortgage his farm to pay off his debts, and was welcomed by many farmers who were heavily in debt as a result of the financial crisis.

  Hitler gained the support of the Reichswehr (army), which was crucial if he was to feel secure in power. The Reichswehr was the one organization which could have removed him by force. Yet by the summer of 1934, Hitler had won it over: Although some of the generals thought that Hitler was a contemptible upstart, on the whole the officer class was well-disposed towards him because of his much publicized aim of setting aside the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty by rearmament and expansion of the army to its full strength.

  There had been a steady infiltration of National Socialists into the lower ranks, and this was beginning to work through to the lower officer classes.

  the army leaders were much impressed by Hitler’s handling of the troublesome SA in the notorious Rohm Purge (also known as ‘the Night of the Long Knives’) of 30 June 1934.

  The background to this was that the SA, under their leader Ernst Röhm, a personal friend of Hitler from the early days of the movement, was becoming an embarrassment to the new Chancellor. Röhm wanted his brownshirts to be merged with the Reichswehr and himself made a general. Hitler knew that the aristocratic Reichswehr generals would not hear of either; they considered the SA to be little more than a bunch of gangsters, while Röhm himself was known to be a homosexual (which was frowned on in army circles as well as officially among the Nazis) and had criticized the generals in public for their stiff-necked conservatism. There were also divisions within Nazi ranks: some leading Nazis, including Gregor Strasser and Röhm himself, repeatedly urged Hitler to be more radical and socialist in his policies. Again, this was something that would not be to the taste of the Nationalists and the army. Röhm had enemies in the party; Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler, who were both busy building up their own power bases, also felt that Röhm was getting too powerful. Himmler told Hitler that Röhm was planning to use his SA to seize power from Hitler (see Illus. 14.3). Apparently this caused Hitler to make up his mind – for all these reasons Röhm must be removed.

  Illustration 14.3 Hitler and the Sturmabteilung (SA) at a Nuremberg Rally

  Hitler’s solution to the problem was typical of Nazi methods – ruthless but efficient; he used one of his private armies to deal with the other. Rohm and most of the SA leaders were murdered by SS troops, and Hitler seized the opportunity to have a number of other enemies and critics murdered who had nothing to do with the SA. For example, two of Papen’s advisers were shot dead by the SS because ten days earlier Papen had made a speech at Marburg criticizing Hitler. Papen himself was probably saved only by the fact that he was a close friend of President Hindenburg. It is thought that at least 400 people were murdered during that one night or soon afterwards. Hitler justified his actions by claiming that they were all plotting against the state.

  The German historian Lothar Machtan, in his book The Hidden Hitler (2000), suggested that Hitler was a homosexual who had a series of relationships with young men during his early days in Vienna and Munich, which Röhm and his friends knew all about. If Machtan is right, then another explanation for the purge was the need for Hitler to safeguard his reputation, as the rift between himself and Röhm widened. ‘Hitler’s principal motive for taking action against Röhm and associates was fear of exposure and blackmail. … The elimination of witnesses and evidence – that was the real purpose of this act of terrorism.’

  Whatever Hitler’s true motives, the purge had important results: the Reichswehr were relieved to be rid of the troublesome SA leaders and impressed by Hitler’s decisive handling of the problem. When President Hindenburg died only a month later, the Reichswehr agreed that Hitler should become president as well as Chancellor (though he preferred to be known as the Führer). The Reichswehr took an oath of allegiance to the Führer.

  Finally, Hitler’s foreign policy was a brilliant success. With each successive triumph, more and more Germans began to think of him as infallible (see Section 5.3).

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bsp; 14.5 NAZISM AND FASCISM

  There is sometimes confusion about the meaning of the terms ‘Nazism’ and ‘fascism’. Mussolini started the first fascist party, in Italy; later the term was used, not entirely accurately, to describe other right-wing movements and governments. In fact, each brand of so-called ‘fascism’ had its own special features; in the case of the German Nazis, there were many similarities with Mussolini’s fascist system, but also some important differences.

  (a) Similarities

  Both were intensely anti-communist and, because of this, drew a solid basis of support from all classes.

  They were anti-democratic and attempted to organize a totalitarian state, controlling industry, agriculture and the way of life of the people, so that personal freedom was limited.

  They attempted to make the country self-sufficient.

  They emphasized the close unity of all classes working together to achieve these ends.

  Both emphasized the supremacy of the state, were intensely nationalistic, glorifying war, and the cult of the hero/leader who would guide the rebirth of the nation from its troubles.

  (b) Differences

  Fascism never seemed to take root in Italy as deeply as the Nazi system did in Germany.

  The Italian system was not as efficient as that in Germany. The Italians never came anywhere near achieving self-sufficiency and never eliminated unemployment; in fact unemployment rose. The Nazis succeeded in eliminating unemployment, though they never achieved complete autarky.