Hitler

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by Joachim C. Fest


  The enemy, Hitler argued, had done it differently. Their atrocity propaganda, “as ruthless as it was brilliant,” had made a deep impression upon Hitler, and he repeatedly extolled its psychological acumen and boldness. He admired the “rabid, impudent bias” and “indefatigable persistence” of the enemy lies,58 and said that he “learned enormously” from them. In general, Hitler tended to illustrate his own ideas by pointing to what the enemy had done. There is no doubt that he drew his belief in the effectiveness of psychological influence from the example of enemy propaganda of the World War. It must be recognized, however, that a large part of the German public was convinced of the enemy’s superiority in psychological warfare. This was actually just one more of those legends with which a nation proud of its military strength attempted to explain on nonmilitary grounds what otherwise seemed inexplicable: that after so many victories on all the battlefields and after so many efforts and sacrifices Germany had nevertheless lost the war. But Hitler, with that characteristic mixture of insight and vapidity that made him wise in his mistakes, used this transparent rationalization as the starting point for his views on the nature and power of propaganda. Propaganda must above all be popular, he argued; it must not be aimed toward the intelligentsia but “always and exclusively to the masses,” and its level “must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to.” Furthermore, effective propaganda must concentrate on a few plausible points and hammer away at these in the form of slogans. It must always appeal to the emotions, never to the intellect, and must eschew any attempt at objectivity. Not even the shadow of a doubt in the rightness of one’s own cause is permissible; propaganda must present “love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way.” Again these were not original ideas. But the energy with which Hitler framed them and the frankness with which he viewed the masses—without contempt but recognizing their limitations, their apathy and resistance to change—would soon put him far ahead of every rival for the favor of those same masses.

  Even now he began to have intimations of this superiority. For he regarded his experiences in this late phase of the war as confirmation of the opinion he had formed during his Vienna years: that without the masses, without knowledge of their weaknesses, virtues and sensitivities, politics was no longer possible. In his mind the great democratic demagogues, Lloyd George and Clemenceau, joined his idol Karl Lueger. Later he added to these President Wilson—even though the American President was sicklied over by the pale cast of thought. One of the principal reasons for the ever more obvious German inferiority was, Hitler believed, that there was no convincing opponent in the Reich to these Allied populist leaders. Isolated from the common people and incapable of recognizing their growing importance, the German ruling class remained frozen in stubborn conservatism. Arrogant and unimaginative, it clung to its traditional positions. Recognition of its failures was one of the major perceptions Hitler drew from this period in German history. Free of those class prejudices and the self-centeredness that was the characteristic sign of weakness in an abdicating ruling class, Hitler thought only in terms of effects. Hence he admired the stale fables of enemy propaganda when it portrayed German soldiers as butchers hacking off the hands of children or slitting the bellies of pregnant women. For such images exploited the special spell of fear, the mechanism by which atrocities are magnified in the fantasies of the masses.

  Again he was deeply struck by the mobilizing power of ideas. He appreciated the crusading formulas with which the Allies decked their cause and made it seem that they were defending the world and its most sacred values against the onslaught of barbarism. The German side had scarcely anything to oppose to this missionary élan. The Allied line proved to be all the more telling because the Germans, in the pride of their early military successes, had abandoned the thesis that they were fighting a purely defensive war. More and more boldly they had been announcing the aim of a peace with victory and wholesale annexations—failing to realize that the world might look askance on such ambitions. Some better reason would have had to be found than what Germany offered: that she had come too late to the distribution of the world’s lands and so had to make up for it now by territorial aggrandizement. Meanwhile, at the end of 1917, defeated Russia in the fervor of social redemptionism was calling for a “just and democratic peace without annexations based on the right of self-determination of peoples, such as the exhausted and tormented classes of the workers and laborers of all countries long for.” And, on the other side, Woodrow Wilson, at the beginning of 1918, presented to the Congress a comprehensive draft of a peace that was to refashion the world on new and better lines. He held out the promise of an order based on justice, of political and moral self-determination, of a world without force and aggression. It was inevitable that these proposals, contrasting with the assertion of sheer might by the Reich, should have had a strong effect upon the exhausted country. A significant anecdote of the autumn of 1918 tells of a German General Staff officer who in a moment of sudden insight clapped his hand to his brow and exclaimed, “To think that there are ideas we have to fight against and that we are losing the war because we didn’t know anything about these ideas!”

  To this extent, then, there is something to the thesis of extramilitary causes for the German defeat. It cannot be laid solely to the Siegfried complex of a nation that preferred to think it had been defeated by cunning and treachery than in open battle. That thesis, in endless variations, later became a staple item in the repertory of the Right. But it contained a kernel of truth. For in fact Germany had also been defeated on fields other than the battlefields, although in a sense the nationalistic spokesmen did not mean. An outmoded, anachronistic political system had proved itself inferior to a democratic order more in keeping with the needs of the age. For Hitler’s part, he was for the first time seized by the thought that an idea can never be successfully combatted by sheer force but only with the aid of another and more suggestive idea. “Any attempt to combat a philosophy with methods of violence will fail in the end, unless the fight takes the form of attack for a new spiritual attitude. Only in the struggle between two philosophies can the weapon of brutal force, persistently and ruthlessly applied, lead to a decision for the sake of the side it supports.”59 It may very well be that these reflections, set down in Mein Kampf, were still vague in Hitler’s mind at the time of the war. But, even so, they represent his lasting profit from the war years.

  In the summer of 1918, however, a German victory seemed once more within grasp. A few months earlier the Reich had won a resounding success, not just one more of those temporary victories in battles that were bleeding it to death. Early in March Germany had imposed upon Russia the peace of Brest-Litovsk, and a month or so later had demonstrated to Rumania, in the Treaty of Bucharest, that its power was still formidable. The two-front war had come to an end, and the German army of the West, with 200 divisions and approximately 3.5 million men had been brought up to the manpower of the Allied armies. In equipment and arms, however, it remained distinctly inferior; to the enemy’s 18,000 artillery pieces the Germans had only 14,000. But the High Command, supported by a new although not entirely wholehearted feeling of public confidence, had at the end of March launched the first of five offensives intended to force a decision before American troops could arrive. Now the German people had only the choice between victory or doom, Ludendorff declared in a statement that rang with the same passion for a great gamble that in later years possessed Hitler.

  Throwing their last remaining forces into the fight, determined after so many fruitless successes and vain exertions to win victory at last by breaking through on a broad front, the German units went over to the attack. Hitler participated in these battles as a soldier in the List Regiment; he was in the pursuit after the breakthrough at Montdidier-Nyons and later took part in the battles of Soissons and Reims. During the early part of the summer the German formations actually succeeded in throwing the British and French
armies back to within nearly forty miles of Paris.

  But then the offensive ground to a halt. Once again the German armies had displayed that fatefully limited power which enabled them to win only sham victories. The toll of lives that their gains had cost, the desperate shortage of reserves, the effectiveness of the enemy in stabilizing the front after each of the German breakthroughs—all this was in part concealed from the German public, in part repressed by that public as it exulted over the good news from the front. The German operations came to a standstill, and the Allies passed over to counterattack on a broad front. Yet Hindenburg and Ludendorff continued their policy of systematic deception. A Privy Council meeting was held at army headquarters on August 14, long after the German lines had broken. The army leaders presented such an illusory picture of the military situation to Chancellor Hertling and Foreign Minister Hintze that both men went away completely unaware of the gravity of the military collapse. To be sure, Hertling himself was largely responsible for the policy of bowing to the military authorities. But since the High Command itself had staked everything on the radical alternative of victory or defeat, it was obliged by its own premise to admit defeat, since victory had not been won. Instead, it continued its deceptions into September—purportedly in order not to dishearten the people. It took into account the obvious hopelessness of the situation only by sounding its claims of German invulnerability in a somewhat more muted key.

  The consequence was that the German public regarded victory and the longed-for end of the war as closer than ever before—in this summer of 1918 when the country was on the verge of defeat. This state of affairs completely refutes Hitler’s arguments about the weakness of German propaganda—although he drew accurate conclusions from his inaccurate premises. Even responsible politicians, even high army officers with a broad view of conditions, were prone to the most amazing delusions. Very few among those who should have known better were able to find their way in the fog of misguided hopes.

  The majority were therefore all the more stunned by the sudden plunge into reality. On September 29, 1918, Ludendorff hastily summoned the political leaders and demanded that they immediately ask for an armistice. His nerves were at breaking point; he would not hear of any tactical safeguards. Significantly, in spite of his talk about victory or doom he had launched the new offensive without giving any thought to the possible consequences of its failure. He does not seem to have even developed a clear strategic goal. At any rate, when the Crown Prince questioned him on that, he replied, with characteristic irritability: “We’re going to chop a hole. Then we’ll see what comes next.” And when the new Chancellor, Prince Max von Baden, wanted to know what would happen in case of failure, Ludendorff snarled: “Then Germany is done for, that’s all.”

  As things stood, the last card had actually been played with the great offensive in the spring of 1918. The increasingly vigorous Allied counterattack had had a daunting effect on German troops everywhere. The men were exhausted, “dull and apathetic,” as an army commander reported.

  For the operations of the spring months, with their heavy casualties, had used up the soldiers’ last physical strength. Failure had consumed their remaining psychological reserves. There is much truth in Winston Churchill’s remark that it was the Germans’ own offensive, not that of the Allies, that devoured the forces of the army on the Western front. Ludendorff, that is, not Joffre or Haig, brought defeat to the Germans. Nevertheless, the troops held their ground on the whole in an amazing fashion. The defensive battles of that final phase were, in both military and human terms, among the most impressive achievements of the war, and paradoxically they added to the myth of the German army. Once again Ludendorff, who had daily expected a vast catastrophic breakthrough by the Allies, found that he was mistaken.

  Unprepared politically and psychologically, the nation, which in a contemporary phrase had believed in the superiority of its arms “as in a gospel,” was plunged into an abyss. An illuminating although almost unbelievable remark of Hindenburg’s shows how hard the national illusion died. Immediately after Ludendorff’s admission that the war was lost, old Hindenburg in all seriousness asked the Foreign Minister to do everything possible in the impending negotiations to obtain annexation of the mines of Lorraine. Here was a first example of that peculiar trick of denying reality to which growing numbers of Germans resorted throughout the postwar years to help them through the misery of the times. They continued to do so right up to the intoxicating days of Spring, 1933. The shock effect of this alternation “from the fanfare of victory to the dirge of defeat” strongly colored the history of the period—so much so that we may say the period can scarcely be understood without taking that disenchantment into consideration.

  It was a particular shock to the brooding, overtense private, first class of the List Regiment who had surveyed the war in the sweeping terms of a general. His regiment had been thrown into the defensive battle in Flanders in October, 1918. On the night of October 13, south of Ypres, the British launched a gas attack. On a hill near Wervick, Hitler came into several hours of drumfire with gas shells. Toward morning he felt violent pain, and when he arrived at the regimental command post around seven o’clock, he could barely see. A few hours later he went blind: “My eyes had turned into glowing coals,” he afterward wrote. He was shipped back to the Pasewalk hospital in Pomerania.”60

  In the hospital a curious excitement prevailed. Confusing rumors went the rounds—that the monarchy was about to fall, that the war would soon be over. Hitler—characteristically as if he bore larger responsibilities—feared local unrest, strikes, insubordination, even though these rumors seemed to him “more the product of the imagination of individual scoundrels”; strangely, he noticed nothing of the discontent and exhaustion so widespread among the people. At the beginning of November the condition of his eyes began to improve, but he still could not read newspapers and expressed his fears to fellow patients that he would never be able to draw again. The revolution came, for him, “suddenly and unexpectedly”; it was led, he thought, by “a few Jewish youths” who had “not been at the front” but had come “by way of a so-called ‘clap hospital’ and ‘raised the red rag.’ ” Hitler believed that what he was seeing was “a more or less local affair.”61

  On November 10, 1918, however, the truth was brought home to him, “the most terrible certainty of my life.” Summoned to a meeting by the hospital pastor, the patients learned that a revolution had broken out, that the House of Hohenzollern had fallen and a republic had been proclaimed in Germany. Sobbing gently to himself—thus Hitler described the “old gentleman”—the pastor recalled the merits of the ruling house, and “not an eye was able to restrain its tears.” But when the pastor began to tell them that the war was now lost and that the Reich was throwing itself unconditionally upon the mercy of its previous enemies—“I could stand it no longer. It became impossible for me to sit still one minute more. Again everything went black before my eyes; I tottered and groped my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my bunk, and dug my burning head into my blanket and pillow. Since the day I had stood at my mother’s grave, I had not wept…. But now I could not help it.”62

  To Hitler the disillusionment was as sudden and incomprehensible as had been his failure to win acceptance into the Academy. He magnified it into a legend and made it one of the basic themes of his career. Later he ascribed his resolve to enter politics to this moment. In virtually every major speech Hitler would ritualistically refer to the November revolution. He would speak of it as if his whole life dated from that event. This obsession has led some analysts to suggest that the revolution triggered the great political awakening of his life. It has also been suggested that his going blind in October, 1918, was to some extent a hysterical symptom, precipitated by the shock he felt at the abrupt change in the course of the war. Hitler himself occasionally furnished some support for such theories. In a speech to army officers and officer candidates in February, 1942, for example, he referre
d to the danger he had faced of going completely blind, and declared that eyesight meant nothing if all one could see was a world in which the nation was enslaved. “In that case what can I see worth seeing?” And at the end of 1944, faced with approaching defeat, he gloomily told Albert Speer that he had reason to fear that once again, as toward the end of the First World War, he would go blind.63

  Similarly, there is a passage in Mein Kampf confirming the idea that Hitler had been roused from his inconspicuous existence by an inexorable summons resounding in his ears:

  In daily life the so-called genius requires a special cause, indeed, often a positive impetus, to make him shine…. In the monotony of everyday life even significant men often seem insignificant, hardly rising above the average of their environment; as soon, however, as they are approached by a situation in which others lose hope or go astray, the genius rises manifestly from the inconspicuous average child, not seldom to the amazement of all those who had hitherto seen him in the pettiness of bourgeois life…. If this hour of trial had not come, hardly anyone would ever have guessed that a young hero was hidden in this beardless boy…. The hammer-stroke of Fate which throws one man to the ground suddenly strikes steel in another.64

  We may assume, however, that such remarks were merely meant to explain the transition between the preceding years of bohemianism, apathy, and vague reveries and the phase of revealed genius. In reality, the November days had numbed him and left him in a quandary. “I knew that everything was lost.” The requirements imposed by the hated bourgeois world, those requirements that four years of war had set aside, were confronting him once more. He was no further along in meeting the problems of vocation and earning his livelihood. He had no training, no work, no goal, no place to stay, no friends. In that outburst of despair, when he wept into his pillow at the news of the defeat and the revolution, he was expressing more of a personal than a national sense of loss.

 

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