Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  Rattenhuber ordered the bodies to be taken into the courtyard. There he had the gasoline poured over them and invited the mourners to come up. No sooner had they assembled than Russian shelling drove them back to the bunker entrance. Hitler’s SS adjutant Otto Günsche thereupon tossed a burning rag upon both corpses, and when the leaping flames swathed the bodies, everyone stood at attention and gave the Nazi salute. A member of the guards detachment who passed by the spot half an hour after this ceremony could “no longer recognize Hitler because he was pretty well charred.” And when he visited the spot again toward eight o’clock “a few flakes were flying up in the wind,” as he put it. Shortly before 11 P.M. the remains of the almost totally consumed bodies were swept onto a canvas shelter half, according to GUnsche’s account, “let down into a shell hole outside the exit from the bunker, covered over with earth, and the earth pounded firm with a wooden rammer.”77

  Long ago, in the days of struggle, Hitler had let himself be represented grandiloquently as “the man who would rather be a dead Achilles than a living dog.” Later on, he had begun to elaborate the scenario for his obsequies. His burial place was to be a mighty crypt in the bell tower of the gigantic structure he had planned to build on the bank of the Danube at Linz. But in fact he was hastily shoveled into a shell hole among mountains of rubble, fragments of wall, cement mixers, and scattered rubbish.

  This was not yet the end of the story. Goebbels tried to coax the Russians into separate negotiations by references to their “common holiday of May 1.” When these efforts failed, Goebbels and his family committed suicide. Bormann, together with the other inhabitants of the bunker, made an attempt to break out. Then Soviet troops occupied the abandoned bunker and immediately set about searching for the remains of Hitler’s body. A medical report dated May 8, 1945, of an autopsy of a severely charred male body came to the conclusion that this was “presumably Hitler’s corpse.” Other statements shortly afterward cast doubt on this assertion. Then again Soviet sources maintained that Hitler had after all been identified on the basis of dental studies; but this statement, too, was questioned, and rumors arose that the British authorities were hiding Hitler in their zone of occupation. At the Potsdam Conference in July, 1945, Stalin assured his Western colleagues that the Russians had not found the corpse and that Hitler was hiding in Spain or South America.78 In the end the Russians managed to swathe the whole question in such obscurity that the wildest versions concerning the end of Hitler circulated. Some said he had been shot in the Berlin Tiergarten by a German squad of officers. Others had him fleeing in a submarine to a remote island. Still other stories maintained that he was living in a Spanish monastery or on a South American hacienda. All his life Hitler had owed his successes largely to one or the other of his enemies. Now, once more, his ill-wishers—as if in a last display of all the mistakes of the era—made it possible for him to live a mythical posthumous life.

  For all that the event had no consequences, it was a symbol. It once again forcibly suggested that the appearance of Hitler, the conditions of his rise and his triumphs, were founded upon premises that point far beyond the narrow framework of merely German conditions. Granted, every nation bears the responsibility for its own history. But only a mind that has learned nothing from the misfortunes of these times will call him the man of a single nation and refuse to recognize that a powerful tendency of the age culminated in him, a tendency that dominated the entire first half of this century.

  Thus Hitler not only destroyed Germany. He also put an end to old Europe with its nationalisms, its conflicts, its hereditary foes, and its insincere imperatives—as well as with its brilliance, its grandeur, and the magic of its douceur de vivre. Possibly he was deceiving himself when he called that Europe “outmoded.” His unique radicality, his visions, his missionary fever, and, as the outcome of these, an unprecedented explosion of energy, were needed to destroy it. But ultimately it must be granted that he could not have destroyed Europe without the help of Europe.

  CONCLUSION

  The Dead End

  A man once said to me: “Listen, if you do that, Germany will fall apart in six weeks.”

  I said: “What do you mean by that?”

  “Germany will just collapse.”

  I said: “What do you mean by that?”

  “Germany will just cease to exist.”

  I answered: “Once upon a time the German people survived the wars with the Romans. The German people survived the Great Migrations. The German people survived the later great battles of the Early and Late Middle Ages. The German people survived the wars of religion at the dawn of modern times. The German people survived the Thirty Years’ War. The German people later survived the Napoleonic Wars, the Wars of Liberation; it even survived a World War, even the Revolution—it will survive even me!”

  Adolf Hitler, 1938

  Almost without transition, virtually from one moment to the next, Nazism vanished after the death of Hitler and the surrender. It was as if National Socialism had been nothing but the motion, the state of intoxication and the catastrophe it had caused. It is not accidental that in the contemporary accounts dating from the spring of 1945 certain phrases crop up repeatedly—to the effect that a “spell” had been broken, a “phantasmagoria” shattered. Such language borrowed from the sphere of magic conveys the peculiarly unreal nature of the regime and the abruptness of its end.

  Hitler’s propaganda specialists had talked constantly of invincible alpine redoubts, nests of resistance, and swelling werewolf units, and had predicted a war beyond the war—but there was no sign of this. Once again it became plain that National Socialism, like Fascism in general, was dependent to the core on superior force, arrogance, triumph, and by its nature had no resources in the moment of defeat. The cogent point has been made that Germany was the only defeated country in the Second World War that failed to produce a resistance movement.1

  This impermanence also showed up in the conduct of the regime’s leaders and functionaries. It was especially apparent in the course of their efforts during the Nuremberg trials to exculpate themselves ideologically. They denied or belittled the crimes that shortly before had had eschatological portent, so that in the end everything—the violence, the war, the genocide—assumed the character of a ghastly, stupid misunderstanding. That behavior, too, contributed to the impression that Nazism had not been a phenomenon spanning and characterizing the era, but a superficial movement sprung from an individual’s urge for power combined with the resentments of a restive nation with a craving for conquest. For had it been deeply rooted in the times, had it been one of the age’s elemental movements, a military defeat could not have consigned it so abruptly to oblivion.

  Nevertheless, after only twelve years it had given the world a different aspect; and it is patent that such tremendous processes cannot be adequately explained solely as resulting from the whims of an individual in power. Such events become possible only if this individual embodies the emotions, anxieties, or interests of a multitude, and if powerful forces of the age are impelling him onward. Here we see once more Hitler’s role and importance in relation to the energies that surrounded him. An enormous, chaotic potential of aggressiveness, anxiety, devotion, and egotism lay ready to hand; but it needed to be called forth, concentrated, and applied by an imperious figure. To that figure it owed its impetus and legitimacy, with that figure it celebrated its imposing victories, and with that figure it went down to destruction.

  But Hitler was more than the unifying figure for many of the tendencies of the age. He also imposed direction, extension, and radicalness upon the course of events. In this he was aided by his habit of thinking in absolutes and subordinating everything, principles, opponents, allies, nations, and ideas, icily or maniacally to his own monstrous goals. His extremism corresponded to his inward remoteness. August Kubizek had noted his friend’s tendency “to overturn the millennia.” And although we should not lay undue emphasis on such recollections, Hitler’s later way
of dealing with the world did have something of the infantile radicalness that this phrase suggests. His own remark, that he confronted “everything with a tremendous, ice-cold absence of bias,”2 points in the same direction. We might even contend that contrary to his claim, which he dated back to his youth, he never grasped the true nature of history. He thought of it as a kind of hall of fame with doors wide open to ambitious men. He knew nothing of the meaning and the justification of tradition. In spite of the aura of bourgeois decline that surrounded him, he was a homo novus. And in that spirit, with an unconcern that seems abstract, he went about realizing his intentions. He changed the map of Europe, destroyed empires, and promoted the rise of new powers, evoked revolutions, and brought the colonial age to an end. Finally, he enormously widened the horizon of mankind’s experience. To paraphrase a saying of Schopenhauer, whom he revered after his fashion, it might be said that he taught the world some things it will never forget.

  Dominant among his motivations—and here he was borne along on the powerful current of his era—was an inescapable sense of being threatened—the fear of annihilation that had seized many political entities and nations in the course of centuries. But only now, at this crossroads in history, did this annihilation become a universal force threatening all mankind. One of the photos from the new chancellery shows Hitler’s-desk, on which lies a folio-sized book titled The Salvation of the World.3 And at various junctures in his life it became evident that he took his role of savior with the utmost seriousness. That was not only his mission and “cyclopean task,” but also—in this life dominated by histrionic concepts—the great exemplary part that he connected with memories of his early favorite opera, Lohengrin, and with the myths of a good many liberating heroes and white knights.

  For him the idea of salvation was indissolubly linked with European pride. Aside from Europe no other continent counted, no other culture of significance existed. All other continents were only geography, areas for slaves and exploitation, unhistorical empty spaces: hie sunt leones. Thus Hitler’s attitude was also a last exaggerated expression of Europe’s claim to remain master of its own history, and thus of history in general. By the time he was done, Europe played the same part in his view of the world that Germanism had in his early years: it was the supreme value, but so threatened that it was already almost lost. He was extremely alert to the pressure of dissoluton to which the Continent was exposed on all sides, to the dangers to its nature that came both from outside and from inside, to the vastly multiplying “lesser breeds” of Asia, Africa, and America that were swarming over the globe and virtually suffocating it, and to the democratic ideologies within Europe itself that denied its history and its greatness.

  He himself, it is true, was a figure of the democratic era, but he represented only its antiliberal variant, which flourished on rigged elections and the charisma of a leader. One of the things he learned from the November, 1918, revolution, and was never to forget, was an insight into the obscure connection between democracy and anarchy. He had seen, he thought, that chaotic conditions were the real, unfalsified expression of true popular rule and that the law of such rule was arbitrariness. Thus Hitler’s dictatorship may be regarded as a last desperate effort to hold old Europe to the conditions that had made for her onetime greatness, to defend the sense of style, order, and authority against the dawning era of democracy with its consultation of the masses, its egalitarian encouragement of everything plebeian, its emancipation, and its concomitant decline of national and racial identity. He saw the Continent subject to a mighty dual assault by two alien forces, devoured by “soulless” American capitalism, on the one hand, and by “inhuman” Russian Bolshevism on the other hand. Rightly, the nature of his commitment has been defined as a “death agony.”

  Expand these ideas to a global plane, and we see the parallel to the state of mind of the early Fascist followings, those middle-class masses who saw themselves being slowly crushed by the unions on the one hand and the department stores on the other, by Communists and anonymous corporations—all this against a general background of panic. In these terms Hitler can also be understood as an effort to maintain a kind of third-force position between the two dominant powers of the times, between Left and Right, East and West. This may account for his appearance of dualism, so that none of the unequivocal definitions, none of the attempts to classify him as conservative, reactionary, capitalistic, or petty bourgeois, really comprehend him. By standing between all positions he shared in all of them and usurped crucial elements of them; but he combined them into his own unique, unmistakable phenomenon. His accession to power brought to an end the conflict that Wilson and Lenin had initiated over Germany after the First World War. The former had tried to win Germany over to parliamentary democracy and the idea of international peace, the latter to the cause of world revolution. Twelve years later, the struggle was renewed and settled in Solomonic fashion by the partition of the country.

  The third position that Hitler sought to occupy was intended to embrace the entire continent, with Germany as its vital nucleus. He held that the contemporary mission of the Reich was to reinvigorate tired Europe and rouse her to a consciousness of her grandeur. He wanted to make up for the missed imperialistic phase in Germany’s development, and though coming late on the historical scene win the highest imaginable prize: hegemony over Europe secured by vast expansion of power in the East, and through Europe domination of the world. With some justification he assumed that under developing patterns of power, the chances for conquering an empire were growing slimmer, and since he always thought in sharp alternatives, he saw Germany condemned either to found an-empire or “to close her existence… as a second Holland and a second Switzerland,” if not worse, “to vanish from the earth or serve others as a slave nation.”4 That the country lacked the energies and resources to meet this aim did not much worry him. What really was at stake, he argued, was “to force the German people, who are hesitating to confront their destiny, to take the road to greatness.” When someone pointed out the risk of ruining Germany by setting her such goals, he merely answered that in that case everything would be “in a mess.”5

  Hitler’s nationalism, consequently, was also not without its equivocations and rode roughshod over the interests of the nation. Still, it was vehement enough to be taken as a challenge and aroused widespread resistance. This must be said even though Hitler formulated the defensive emotions of an age and a continent, and even though his messianic slogans proved effective far beyond the borders of Germany, so that through him Germany was the object of respect and even envy.6 In spite of such “internationalism,” Hitler never managed to give his own defensive intentions more than a harsh and narrow nationalistic profile. In the bunker mediations of the spring of 1945 he referred to himself as “Europe’s last chance,” and in light of that idea tried to justify his application of force against the whole Continent: “It [the Continent] could not be conquered by charm and persuasiveness. I had to rape it in order to have it.”7 But Europe’s chance was precisely what Hitler was not, not even prospectively, not even as an illusion or a possible way. At no time was he able to convince people beyond his own borders that he offered them a viable political alternative. During the war, when the campaign against the Soviet Union could have been presented as a European crusade, he revealed himself as the sworn enemy of “imposed internationalism” that he had been from the start. He remained profoundly a European provincial with his gaze irretrievably fixated on the antagonisms of a vanished era.

  We are thus once again compelled to confront Hitler’s oddly fractured position in time. Despite his fundamentally defensive posture, he was long regarded as the really progressive, modern figure of the age. To most of his contemporaries it was clear that he was striding toward the future. Yet to our present-day sensibility, what is most striking is the anachronistic quality he displays. During the twenties and thirties the mélange of elements that were regarded as modern and in keeping with the spirit of the ag
e were technology and collectivist ideas, monumental proportions, bellicose attitudes, the pride of the mass man, and the aura of stardom. One of the reasons for Nazism’s success was that Hitler ingeniously appropriated all these elements. Another of these “modern” elements was the imperious manner of great individuals. Hitler’s rise and sovereignty took place within a pattern of Caesaristic tendencies stretching all the way from the totalitarian cult of personality in Stalin’s Soviet Union to the autocratic style of President Roosevelt. Against such a background Hitler, who blatantly proclaimed himself a ruler of this type, seemed the perfect representative of the new age. He himself also consistently stressed the optimistic, future-oriented character of Nazism. Its reactionary features, its pessimistic nostalgia with regard to civilization, were largely given voice by Himmler, Darre, and a sizable band of the SS leadership.