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71 Werner Best, op. cit., 1941, p. 99.
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72 This, however, was not the fault of Hitler, who always insisted that the very name of the SA (Sturmabteilung) indicated that it was only “a section of the movement” just like other party formations such as the propaganda department, the newspaper, the scientific institutes, etc. He also tried to dispel the illusions of the possible military value of a paramilitary formation and wanted training to be carried through according to the needs of the party and not according to the principles of an army. Op. cit., loc. cit.
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73 The official reason for the foundation of the SA was protection of Nazi meetings, while the original task of the SS was protection of Nazi leaders.
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74 Hitler, op. cit., loc. cit.
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75 Ernst Bayer, Die SA, Berlin, 1938. ‘Translation quoted from Nazi Conspiracy, IV.
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76 Rohm’s autobiography shows clearly how little his political convictions agreed with those of the Nazis. He always desired a “Sohtatenstuat” and always insisted on the “Primat des Soldaten vor dem Politiker” (op. cit., p. 349). Especially telling for his nontotalitarian attitude, or rather for his inability even to understand totalitarianism and its “total” claim, is the following passage: “I don’t see why the following three things should not be compatible: my loyalty to the hereditary prince of the house of Wittelsbach and heir to Bavaria’s crown; my admiration for the quartermaster-general of the World War [i.e., Ludendorff], who today embodies the conscience of the German people; and my comradeship with the harbinger and bearer of the political struggle, Adolf Hitler” (p. 348). What ultimately cost Rohm his head was that after the seizure of power he envisioned a Fascist dictatorship patterned after the Italian regime, in which the Nazi party would “break the chains of the party” and “itself become the state,” which was exactly what Hitler meant to avoid under all circumstances. See Ernst Rohm, Warum SA?, speech before the diplomatic corps, December, 1933, Berlin, undated.
Within the Nazi party, the possibility of an SA-Reichswehr plot against the rule of the SS and the police apparently never was quite forgotten. Hans Frank, Governor General of Poland, in 1942, eight years after the murder of Rohm and General Schleicher, was suspected of wishing “after the war ...to inaugurate the greatest fight for justice [against the SS] with the assistance of the Armed Forces and the SA” (Nazi Conspiracy, VI, 747).
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77 Hitler, op. cit., Book II, chapter xi, states that propaganda attempts to force a doctrine on the whole people while the organization incorporates only a comparatively small proportion of its more militant members.—Compare also G. Neesse, op. cit.
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78 Hitler, op. cit., loc. cit.
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79 Hadamovsky, op. cit., p. 28.
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80 The Death Head units of the SS were placed under the following rules: 1. No brigade is called for duty in its native district. 2. Every unit is to change after three weeks’ service. 3. Members are never to be sent into the streets alone or ever to display their Death Head insignia in public. See: Secret Speech by Himmler to the German Army General Staff 1938 (the speech, however, was delivered in 1937, see Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 616, where only excerpts are published). Published by the American Committee for Anti-Nazi Literature.
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81 Heinrich Himmler, Die Schutzstaffel ats antibolschewistische Kampforganisation: Aus dem Schwarzen Korps, No. 3, 1936, said publicly: “I know that there are people in Germany who get sick when they see this black coat. We understand that and don’t expect to be loved by too many people.”
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82 In his speeches to the SS Himmler always stressed committed crimes, underlining their gravity. About the liquidation of the Jews, for instance, he would say: “I also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly.” On the liquidation of the Polish intelligentsia: “...you should hear this but also forget it immediately...” (Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 558 and 553, respectively).
Goebbbels, op. cit., p. 266, notes in a similar vein: “On the Jewish question, especially, we have taken a position from which there is no escape.... Experience teaches that a movement and a people who have burned their bridges fight with much greater determination than those who are still able to retreat.”
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83 Souvarine, op. cit., p. 648.—The way the totalitarian movements have kept the private lives of their leaders (Hitler and Stalin) absolutely secret contrasts with the publicity value which all democracies find in parading the private lives of Presidents, Kings, Prime Ministers, etc., in public. Totalitarian methods do not allow for an identification based on the conviction: Even the highest of us is only human.
Souvarine, op. cit., p. xiii, quotes the most frequently used tags to describe Stalin: “Stalin, the mysterious host of the Kremlin”; “Stalin, impenetrable personality”; “Stalin, the Communist Sphinx”; “Stalin, the Enigma,” the “insoluble mystery,” etc.
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84 ”If [Trotsky] had chosen to stage a military coup d’etat he might perhaps have defeated the triumvirs. But he left office without the slightest attempt at rallying in his defence the army he had created and led for seven years” (Isaac Deutscher, op. cit., p. 297).
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85 The Commissariat for War under Trotsky “was a model institution” and Trotsky was called in in all cases of disorder in other departments. Souvarine, op. cit., p. 288.
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86 The circumstances surrounding Stalin’s death seem to contradict the infallibility of these methods. There is the possibility that Stalin, who, before he died, undoubtedly planned still another general purge, was killed by someone in his environment because no one felt safe any longer, but despite a great deal of circumstantial evidence this cannot be proved.
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87 Thus Hitler personally cabled his responsibility for the Potempa murder to the SA assassins in 1932, although presumably he had nothing whatever to do with it. What mattered here was establishing a principle of identification, or, in the language of the Nazis, “the mutual loyalty of the Leader and the people” on which “the Reich rests” (Hans Frank, op. cil.).
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88 “One of Stalin’s distinctive characteristics ...is systematically to throw his own misdeeds and crimes, as well as his political errors ...on the shoulders of those whose discredit and ruin he is plotting” (Souvarine, op. cit., p. 655). It is obvious that a totalitarian leader can choose freely whom he wants to impersonate his own errors since all acts committed by subleaders are supposed to be inspired by him, so that anybody can be forced into the role of an impostor.
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89 That it was Hitler himself—and not Himmler, or Bormann, or Goebbels—who always initiated the actually “radical” measures: that they were always more radical than the proposals made by his immediate environment; that even Himmler was appalled when he was entrusted with the “final solution” of the Jewish question—all this has now been proved by innumerable documents. And the fairy tale that Stalin was more moderate than the leftist factions of the Bolshevist Party is no longer believed, either. It is all the more important to remember that totalitarian leaders invariably try to appear more moderate to the outside world and that their real role—namely, to drive the movement forward at any price and if anything to step up its speed—remains carefully concealed. See, for instance, Admiral Erich R
eader’s memo on “My Relationship to Adolf Hitler and to the Party” in Nazi Conspiracy, VIII, 707 ff. “When information or rumours arose about radical measures of the Party and the Gestapo, one could come to the conclusion by the conduct of the Fuehrer that such measures were not ordered by the Fuehrer himself.... In the course of future years, I gradually came to the conclusion that the Fuehrer himself always leaned toward the more radical solution without letting on outwardly.”
In the intraparty struggle which preceded his rise to absolute power, Stalin was careful always to pose as “the man of the golden mean” (see Deutscher, op. cit., pp. 295 ff); though certainly no “man of compromise,” he never abandoned this role altogether. When, for instance, in 1936 a foreign journalist questioned him about the movement’s aim of world revolution, he replied: “We have never had such plans and intentions.... This is the product of a misunderstanding ...a comic one, or rather a tragicomic one” (Deutscher, op. cit., p. 422).
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90 See Alexandre Koyré, “The Political Function of the Modern Lie,” in Contemporary Jewish Record, June, 1945.
Hitler, op. cit., Book II, chapter ix, discusses extensively the pros and cons of secret societies as models for totalitarian movements. His considerations actually led him to Koyré’s conclusion, i.e., to adopt the principles of secret societies without their secretiveness and to establish them in “broad daylight.” There was, in the prepower stage of the movement, hardly anything which the Nazis consistently kept secret. It was only during the war, when the Nazi regime became fully totalitarianized and the party leadership found itself surrounded from all sides by the military hierarchy on which it depended for the conduct of the war, that the elite formations were instructed in no uncertain terms to keep everything connected with “final solutions”—i.e., deportations and mass exterminations—absolutely secret. This was also the time when Hitler began to act like the chief of a band of conspirators, but not without personally announcing and circulating this fact explicitly. During a discussion with the General Staff in May, 1939, Hitler laid down the following rules, which sound as if they had been copied from a primer for a secret society: “1. No one who need not know must be informed. 2. No one must know any more than he needs to. 3. No one must know any earlier than he has to” (quoted from Heinz Holldack, Was wirklich geschah, 1949, p. 378).
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91 The following analysis follows closely Georg Simmel’s “Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies,” in The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. XI, No. 4, January, 1906, which forms chapter v of his Soziologie, Leipzig, 1908, selections of which are translated by Kurt H. Wolff under the title The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 1950.
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92 ”Precisely because the lower grades of the society constitute a mediating transition to the actual center of the secret, they bring about the gradual compression of the sphere of repulsion around the same, which affords more secure protection than the abruptness of a radical standing wholly without or wholly within could secure” (ibid., p. 489).
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93 The terms “sworn brothers,” “sworn comrades,” “sworn community,” etc., are repeated ad nauseam throughout Nazi literature, partly because of their appeal to juvenile romanticism which was widespread in the German youth movement. It was mainly Himmler who used these terms in a more definite sense, introduced them into the “central watchword” of the SS (“Thus we have fallen in line and march forward to a distant future following the unchangeable laws as a National Socialist order of Nordic men and as a sworn community of their tribes [Sippen],” see D’Alquen, op. cit.) and gave them their articulate meaning of “absolute hostility” against all others (see Simmel, op. cit., p. 489): “Then when the mass of humanity of 1 to 1½ milliards [sic!] lines up against us, the Germanic people,...” See Himmler’s speech at the meeting of the SS Major Generals at Posen, October 4, 1943, Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 558.
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94 Simmel, op. cit., p. 490.—This, like so many other principles, was adopted by the Nazis after careful reflection on the implications of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Hitler said as early as 1922: “[The gentlemen of the Right] have never yet understood that it is not necessary to be an enemy of the Jew to drag you one day ...to the scaffold ...it is quite enough... not to be a Jew: that will secure the scaffold for you” (Hitler’s Speeches, p. 12). At that time, nobody could guess that this particular form of propaganda actually meant: One day, it will not be necessary to be an enemy of ours to be dragged to the scaffold; it will be quite enough to be a Jew, or, ultimately, a member of some other people, to be declared “racially unfit” by some Health Commission. Himmler believed and preached that the whole SS was based on the principle that “we must be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to members of our own blood and nobody else” (op. cit., loc. cit.).
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95 See Simmel, op. cit., pp. 480–481.
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96 Souvarine, op. cit., p. 319, follows a formulation of Bukharin.
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97 Souvarine, op. cit., p. 113, mentions that Stalin “was always impressed by men who brought off ‘an affair.’ He looked on politics as an ‘affair’ requiring dexterity.”
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98 In the inner-party struggles during the twenties, “the collaborators of the GPU were almost without exception fanatic adversaries of the Right and adherents of Stalin. The various services of the GPU were at that time the bulwarks of the Stalinist section” (Ciliga, op. cit., p. 48).—Souvarine, op. cit., p. 289, reports that Stalin even before had “continued the police activity he had begun during the Civil War” and been the representative of the Politburo in the GPU.
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99 Immediately after the civil war in Russia, Pravda stated “that the formula ‘All power to the Soviets’ had been replaced by ‘All power to the Chekas.’...The end of the armed hostilities reduced military control ...but left a ramified Cheka which perfected itself by simplification of its operation” (Souvarine, op. cit., p. 251).
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100 The Gestapo was set up by Göring in 1933; Himmler was appointed chief of the Gestapo in 1934 and began at once to replace its personnel with his SS-men; at the end of the war, 75 per cent of all Gestapo agents were SS-men. It must also be considered that the SS units were particularly qualified for this job as Himmler had organized them, even in the prepower stage, for espionage duty among party members (Heiden, op. cit., p. 308). For the history of the Gestapo, see Giles, op. cit., and also Nazi Conspiracy, Vol. II, chapter xii.
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101 It was probably one of the decisive ideological errors of Rosenberg, who fell from the Fuehrer’s favor and lost his influence in the movement to men like Himmler, Bormann, and even Streicher, that his Myth of the Twentieth Century admits a racial pluralism from which only the Jews were excluded. He thereby violated the principle that whoever is not included (“the Germanic people”) is excluded (“the mass of humanity”). Of. note 87.
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102 Simmel, op. cit., p. 492, enumerates secret criminal societies in which the members voluntarily set up one commander whom they obey from then on without criticism and without limitation.
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103 Ciliga, op. cit., pp. 96–97. He also describes how in the twenties even ordinary prisoners in the GPU prison of Leningrad who had been condemned to death allowed themselves to be taken to execution “without a word, without a cry of revolt against the Government that put them to death” (p. 183).
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104 Ciliga reports how the condemned party members “thought that if these executions saved the bureaucratic dictatorship as a whole, if they cal
med the rebellious peasantry (or rather if they misled them into error), the sacrifice of their lives would not have been in vain” (op. cit., pp. 96–97).
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105 Goebbels’ notion of the role of diplomacy in politics is characteristic: “There is no doubt that one does best if one keeps the diplomats uninformed about the background of politics.... Genuineness in playing an appeasement role is sometimes the most convincing argument for their political trustworthiness” (op. cit., p. 87).
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106 Rudolf Hess in a broadcast in 1934. Nazi Conspiracy, I, 193.
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107 Werner Best op. cit., explained: “Whether the will of the government lays down the ‘right’ rules ...is no longer a question of law, but a question of fate. For actual misuses ...will be punished more surely before history by fate itself with misfortune and overthrow and ruin, because of the violation of the ‘laws of life,’ than by a State Court of Justice.” Translation quoted from Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 490.
Antisemitism: Part One of the Origins of Totalitarianism Page 93