Antisemitism: Part One of the Origins of Totalitarianism
Page 95
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26 Arthur Rosenberg, op. cit., loc. cit.
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27 Maunz, op. cit., p. 12.
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28 The jurist and Obersturmbannfuehrer, Professor R. Hoehn, has expressed this in the following words: “And there was still another thing which foreigners, but Germans, too, had to get used to: namely, that the task of the secret state police ...was taken over by a community of persons who originated within the movement, and continue to be rooted in it. That the term state police actually makes no allowance for this fact shall be mentioned here only in passing” (Grundfragen der deutschen Polizei, Report on the Constitutive Session of the Committee on Police Law of the Academy for German Law, October II, 1936. Hamburg, 1937, with contributions by Frank, Himmler and Hoehn).
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29 For example, such an attempt to circumscribe the separate responsibilities and to counter the “anarchy of authority” was made by Hans Frank in Recht und Verwaltung, 1939, and again in an address titled Technik des Statues, in 1941. He expressed the opinion that “legal guarantees” were not the “prerogative of liberal systems of government” and that the administration should continue to be governed, as before, by the laws of the Reich, which now were inspired and guided by the program of the National Socialist party. It was precisely because he wanted to prevent such a new legal order at any price that Hitler never acknowledged the program of the Nazi party. Of party members who made such proposals he was wont to speak with contempt, describing them as “eternally tied to the past,” as persons “who are unable to leap across their own shadow” (Felix Kersten, Totenkopf und Treue, Hamburg).
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30 “The 32 Gaue ...do not coincide with the administrative or military regions, or even the 21 divisions of the SA, or the 10 regions of the SS, or the 23 zones of the Hitler Youth.... Such discrepancies are the more remarkable because there is no reason for them” ( Roberts, op. cit., p. 98).
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31 Nuremberg Documents, PS 3063 in the Centre de Documentation Juive in Paris. The document is a report of the supreme party court about “events and party court proceedings connected with the antisemitic demonstrations of November 9, 1938.” On the basis of investigations by the police and the office of the Attorney General the supreme court came to the conclusion that “the verbal instructions of the Reichs-propagandaleiter must have been understood by all party leaders to mean that, to the outside, the party did not wish to appear as the instigator of the demonstration, but in reality was to organize and carry it through.... The re-examination of the command echelons has shown ...that the active National Socialist molded in the prepower struggle [Kampfzeit] takes it for granted that actions in which the party does not wish to appear in the role of organizer are not ordered with unequivocal clarity and down to the last detail. Hence he is accustomed to understand that an order may mean more than its verbal content, just as it has more or less become routine with the order giver, in the interests of the party ...not to say everything and only to intimate what he wants to achieve by the order.... Thus, the ...orders—for instance, not the Jew Grünspan but all Jewry must be blamed for the death of Party Comrade vom Rath,...pistols should be brought along,...every SA-man now ought to know what he had to do—were understood by a number of subleaders to mean that Jewish blood would now have to be shed for the blood of Party Comrade vom Rath....” Particularly significant is the end of the report, in which the supreme party court quite openly takes exception to these methods: “It is another question whether, in the interest of discipline, the order that is intentionally vague, and given in the expectation that its recipient will recognize the intent of the order giver and act accordingly, must not be relegated to the past.” Here, too, there were persons who, in Hitler’s words, “were unable to leap across their own shadow” and insisted upon legislative measures, because they did not understand that not the order but the will of the Fuehrer was the supreme law. Here, the difference between the mentality of the elite formations and the party agencies is particularly clear.
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32 Best (op. cit.) puts it this way: “So long as the police execute this will of the leadership, they are acting within the law; if the will of the leadership is transgressed, then not the police, but a member of the police, has committed a violation.”
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33 See footnote 31.
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34 In 1933, after the Reichstag fire, “SA leaders were more powerful than Gauleiter. They also refused obedience to Göring.” See Rudolf Diels’s sworn affidavit in Nazi Conspiracy, V, 224; Diels was chief of the political police under Göring.
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35 The SA obviously resented its loss of rank and power in the Nazi hierarchy and tried desperately to keep up appearances. In their magazines—Der SA-Mann, Das Archiv, etc.—many indications, veiled and unveiled, of this impotent rivalry with the SS can be found. More interesting is that Hitler still in 1936, when the SA had already lost its power, would assure them in a speech: “All that you are, you are through me; and all that I am, I am through you alone.” See Ernst Bayer, Die SA, Berlin, 1938. Translation quoted from Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 782.
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36 Compare Rosenberg’s speech of June, 1941: “I believe that our political task will consist of ...organizing these peoples in certain types of political bodies ...and building them up against Moscow” with the “Undated Memorandum for the Administration in the Occupied Eastern Territories”: “With the dissolution of the USSR after her defeat, no body politic is left in the Eastern territories and therefore ...no citizenship for their population” (Trial of the Major War Criminals, Nuremberg, 1947, XXVI, p. 616 and 604, respectively).
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37 Hitlers Tischgespräche, Bonn, 1951, p. 213. Usually, Hitler meant some high-ranking Nazi functionaries who had their reservations about murdering all those without compunctions, whom he described as “human junk [Gesox]” (see p. 248 ff. and passim).
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38 For the variety of overlapping party organizations, see Rang-und Organisationsliste der NSDAP, Stuttgart, 1947, and Nazi Conspiracy, I, 178, which distinguishes four main categories: 1. Gliederungen der NSDAP, which had existed before its rise to power; 2. Angeschlossene Verbände der NSDAP, which comprise those societies which had been co-ordinated; 3. Betreute Organisationen der NSDAP; and 4. Weitere nationalsozialistische Organisationen. In nearly every category, one finds a different students’, women’s, teachers’, and workers’ organization.
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39 The gigantic organization for public works, headed by Todt and later led by Albert Speer, was created by Hitler outside of all party hierarchies and affiliations. This organization might have been used against the authority of party or even police organizations. It is noteworthy that Speer could risk pointing out to Hitler (during a conference in 1942) the impossibility of organizing production under Himmler’s regime, and even demand jurisdiction over slave labor and concentration camps. See Nazi Conspiracy, I, 916-917.
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40 Such an innocuous and unimportant society, for instance, as the NSKK (the National Socialist corps of automobilists founded in 1930) was suddenly elevated, in 1933, to the status of an elite formation, sharing with the SA and the SS the privilege of an independent affiliated unit of the party. Nothing followed this rise in the ranks of the Nazi hierarchy; retrospectively, it looks like an idle threat to the SA and SS.
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41 F. Beck and W. Godin, Russian Purge and the Extraction of Confession, 1951, p. 153.
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42 Ibid., p. 159 ff.—According to other repor
ts, there are different examples of the staggering multiplication of the Soviet police apparatus, primarily the local and regional associations of the NKVD, which work independently of one another and which have their counterparts in the local and regional networks of party agents. It is in the nature of things that we know considerably less about Russian conditions than we do about those in Nazi Germany, especially as far as organizational details are concerned.
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43 According to the testimony of one of his former employees (Nazi Conspiracy, VI, 461), it was “a specialty of Himmler to give one task to two different people.”
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44 In the aforementioned address (see footnote 29) Hans Frank showed that at some point he wanted to stabilize the movement, and his numerous complaints as Governor General of Poland testify to a total lack of understanding of the deliberately anti-utilitarian tendencies of Nazi policy. He cannot understand why the subjected peoples are not exploited but exterminated. Rosenberg, in the eyes of Hitler, was racially unreliable because he meant to establish satellite states in the conquered Eastern territories and did not understand that Hitler’s population policy aimed at depopulating these territories.
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45 The notion of a division into “little principalities” which formed “a pyramid of power outside the law with the Fuehrer at its apex” is Robert H. Jackson’s. See chapter xii of Nazi Conspiracy, 11, 1 ff. In order to avoid the establishment of such an authoritarian state, Hitler, as early as 1934, issued the following party decree: “The form of address ‘Mein Fuehrer’ is reserved for the Fuehrer alone. I herewith forbid all subleaders of the NSDAP to allow themselves to be addressed as ‘Mein Reichsleiter,’ etc., either in words or in writing. Rather, the form of address has to be Pg. [Party Comrade]...or Gauleiter, etc.” See Verfügungen, Anordnungen, Bekanntgaben, op. cit., decree of August 20, 1934.
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46 See the Organisationsbuch der NSDAP.
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47 See Chart 14 in Vol. VIII of Nazi Conspiracy.
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48 All oaths in the party as well as the elite formations were taken on the person of Adolf Hitler.
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49 The first step of Himmler in this direction occurred in the fall of 1944, when he ordered on his own initiative that the gas installations in the extermination camps be dismantled and the mass slaughter be stopped. This was his way of initiating peace negotiations with the Western powers. Interestingly enough. Hitler apparently was never informed of these preparations; it seems that no one dared tell him that one of his most important war aims had already been given up. See Léon Poliakov, Brévaire de Haine, 1951, p. 232.
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50 For the events following Stalin’s death, see Harrison E. Salisbury, American in Russia, New York, 1955.
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51 See the excellent analysis of the structure of the Nazi police in Nazi Conspiracy, I J, 250 ff., esp. p. 256.
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52 Ibid., p. 252.
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53 Franz Neumann, op. cit., pp. 521 ff., is doubtful “whether Germany can be called a State. It is far more a gang where the leaders are perpetually compelled to agree after disagreements.” Konrad Heiden’s works on Nazi Germany are representative for the theory of government by a clique.—As regards the formation of cliques around Hitler, The Bormann Letters, published by Trevor-Roper, are quite enlightening. In the trial of the doctors (the United States vs. Karl Brandt et at., hearing of May 13, 1947), Victor Brack testified that as early as 1933 Bormann, acting no doubt on Hitler’s orders, had begun to organize a group of persons who stood above state and party.
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54 Compare the author’s contribution to the discussion of the problem of German guilt: “Organized Guilt,” in Jewish Frontier, January, 1945.
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55 In a speech of November 23, 1939, quoted from Trial of Major War Criminals, Vol. 26, p. 332. That this pronouncement was more than a hysterical aberration dictated by chance is apparent from Himmler’s speech (the stenographic transcript can be found in the archives of the Hoover Library, Himmler File, Folder 332) at the conference of mayors at Posen in March, 1944. It says: “What values can we place onto the scales of history? The value of our own people.... The second, I would almost say, even greater value is the unique person of our Fuehrer Adolf Hitler,...who for the first time after two thousand years ...was sent to the Germanic race as a great leader....”
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56 See Hitler’s statements on this question in Hitlers Tischgespräche, pp. 253 f. and 222 f.: The new Fuehrer would have to be elected by a “senate”; the guiding principle for the Fuehrer’s election must be that any discussion among the personalities participating in the election should cease for the duration of the proceedings. Within three hours Wehrmacht, party and all civil servants will have to be newly sworn in. “He had no illusions about the fact that in this election of the supreme head of the state there might not always be an outstanding Fuehrer personality at the helm of the Reich.” But this entailed no dangers, “so long as the over-all machinery functions properly.”
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57 One of the guiding principles for the SS formulated by Himmler himself reads: “No task exists for its own sake.” See Gunter d’Alquen, Die SS. Geschichte, Aufgabe und Organisation der Schutzstaffeln der NSDAP, 1939, in Schriften der Hochschule fur Politik.
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58 See David J. Dallin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Russia, 1947, who also report that during the war when mobilization had created an acute problem of manpower, the death rate in the labor camps was about 40 per cent during one year. In general, they estimate that the output of a worker in the camps is below 50 per cent of that of a free laborer.
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59 Thomas Reveille, The Spoil of Europe, 1941, estimates that Germany during the first year of war was able to cover her entire preparatory war expenses of the years 1933 to 1939.
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60 William Ebenstein, The Nazi State, p. 257.
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61 Ibid., p. 270.
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62 This is supported by the fact that the decree to murder all incurably sick was issued on the day the war broke out, but even more so by Hitler’s statements during the war, quoted by Goebbels (The Goebbels Diaries, ed. Louis P. Lochner, 1948) to the effect that “the war had made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times,” and that, no matter how the war turned out, “the Jews will certainly be the losers” (p. 314).
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63 The Wehrmacht of course tried time and again to explain to the various party organs the dangers of a war conduct in which commands were issued with utter disregard for all military, civilian and economic necessities (see, for instance, Poliakov, op. fit., p. 321). But even many high Nazi functionaries had difficulty understanding this neglect of all objective economic and military factors in the situation. They had to be told time and again that “economic considerations should fundamentally remain unconsidered in the settlement of the [Jewish] problem” (Nazi Conspiracy, VI, 402), but still would complain that the interruption of a big building program in Poland “would not have happened if the many thousands of Jews working at it had not been deported. Now the order is given that the Jews will have to be removed from the armament projects. I hope that this ...order will soon be cancelled, for then the situation will be still worse.” This hope of Hans Frank, Governor General of Poland, was as little fulfilled as his later exp
ectations of a militarily more sensible policy toward Poles and Ukrainians. His complaints are interesting (see his Diary in Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 902 ff.) because he is frightened exclusively by the anti-utilitarian aspect of Nazi policies during the war. “Once we have won the war, then for all I care, mince-meat can be made of the Poles and the Ukrainians and all the others who run around here....”
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64 Originally, only special units of the SS—the Death Head formations—were employed in the concentration camps. Later replacements came from the Armed SS divisions. From 1944 on, units of the regular armed forces were also employed but usually incorporated in the Armed SS. (See the Affidavit of a former SS official of the concentration camp of Neuengamme in Nazi Conspiracy, VII, 211.) How the active presence of the Wehrmacht made itself felt in the concentration camps has been described in Odd Nansen’s concentration camp diary Day After Day, London, 1949. Unfortunately, it shows that these regular army troops were at least as brutal as the SS.
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65 Deutscher, op. cit., p. 326. This quotation carries weight because it comes from the most benevolent of Stalin’s non-Communist biographers.
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66 The Nazis were especially fond of reckoning in terms of millennia. Himmler’s pronouncements that SS-men were solely interested in “ideological questions whose importance counted in terms of decades and centuries” and that they “served a cause which in two thousand years occurred only once” are repeated, with slight variations, throughout the entire indoctrination material issued by the SS-Hauptamt-Schulungsamt (Wesen und Aufgabe der SS und der Polizei, p. 160).—As for the Bolshevik version, the best reference is the program of the Communist International as formulated by Stalin as early as 1928 at the Party Congress in Moscow. Particularly interesting is the evaluation of the Soviet Union as “the basis for the world movement, the center of international revolution, the greatest factor in world history. In the USSR, the world proletariat for the first time acquires a country...” (quoted from W. H. Chamberlin, Blueprint for World Conquest, 1946, where the programs of the Third International are reprinted verbatim).