43. The statistics on the dead and wounded in the bloody weeks after the lifting of the ban on the SA differ greatly. Cf., for example, Wilhelm Hoegner, Die verratene Republik, pp. 312 f.; also Friedrich Stampfer, Die vierzehn Jahre der ersten deutschen Republik, p. 629, and Bullock, pp. 213 f., who refers to the account given by Albert Grzesinski. Reliable figures on the victims have not been drawn up to this day. The “Roll of Honor of Those Killed for the Movement,” which was later published by H. Volz, gives the following figures for the Nazis: 1929, eleven dead; 1930, seventeen; 1931, forty-three; 1932, eighty-seven.
44. Preiss, p. 194.
45. Völkischer Beobachter, August 21—22, 1932. Hitler’s scornful reference to Hindenburg’s age was made in the speech of September 4, 1932. In context it went: “When today the President of the Reich is presented to me as an opponent, it makes me laugh. I will endure the struggle longer than the President.” Preiss, p. 189.
46. Cf. the statistics in Bracher, Auflösung, pp. 645 ff.; also the evidence bearing chiefly on the social situation (unemployment) in H. Bennecke, Wirtschaftliche Depression, pp. 158 ff. Bennecke’s statistics likewise bring to light the remarkable fact that there was no direct, at best an indirect connection between unemployment and voting for the NSDAP. The percentage of votes netted by Hitler’s party was much greater in the rural areas, which did not suffer nearly so severely from the effects of the Depression, than in, say, the Ruhr district or even Berlin, where the Nazi percentage of the vote did not reach as much as 25 per cent—approximately half that of the NSDAP vote in Schleswig-Holstein.
47. According to Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power, p. 256. For the provisions of the planned constitutional reform, cf. Bracher, Auflösung, pp. 537 ff. and 658 f.
48. Cited in Bernhard Schwertfeger, Rätsel um Deutschland, p. 173. Hitler’s letter, mentioned in the next paragraph, was called a “masterpiece” by Goebbels and is in fact a good example of Hitler’s tactics, psychology, and faculty for hair-splitting; it is printed in Domarus, pp. 154 if. According to Brüning, Memoiren, p. 634, however, the letter was ghosted in the Hotel Kaiserhof by Hjalmar Schacht.
49. Franz von Papen, Der Wahrheit eine Gasse, p. 250. Here, too, on page 249, are details about the war-games study as given by then Lieutenant Colonel Ott.
50. Rauschning, Gespräche, p. 254. The following remark of Hitler’s may be found in the Tischgespräche, p. 364. On the resigned attitude of his antagonists, see also Eschenburg, in Holborn, Republic to Reich, pp. 47 ff.
51. Harold Laski, in the Daily Herald, November 21, 1931, as quoted in Viscount Templewood, Nine Troubled Years, p. 121.
52. Bullock, p. 243.
53. Bracher, Auflösung, p. 691. Hitler himself conceded that the Cologne meeting had been a turning point; at the time, he commented, he had “gathered the impression that his affairs stood very well.” Cf. Tischgespräche, p. 365.
The version of the meeting presented here has, incidentally, not gone unchallenged. Papen, in particular, has vigorously denounced it (see his letter to Das Parlament, 111:14, April 8, 1953). However, the account given in his self-justificatory Memoirs makes considerable demands upon the reader’s credulity. Among other things, he tries to make the meeting appear quite accidental and casual; he repeatedly stresses that its sole purpose was to obtain information. This version contradicts Schroeder’s declaration, in a sworn affidavit, that only a few weeks before Hitler had refused to negotiate with Papen. Even if Papen’s later assertion is correct, that no offer was made, the fact remains that Hitler felt himself to have been directly addressed by Hindenburg through Papen. At the very least the offer existed in the person of Papen; as a diplomat he should have known this, and undoubtedly did know it. Furthermore, Papen alleges that he conducted the conversation in the interests of Schleicher, and for the sake of supporting Schleicher. Moreover, Papen further alleges, the plan for a duumvirate referred not to Hitler and himself, but to Hitler and Schleicher. If nothing else, then, the anxious secrecy surrounding the meeting reveals the absurdity of this version.
54. The estate, purchased principally with funds supplied by industry, was not given formally to Hindenburg, but to his son, in order to evade the inheritance tax. Hindenburg also worried a good deal about Papen’s coup of July 20, 1932. Brüning has recorded: “Erwin Planck, who visited me in the hospital one evening four days before Schleicher’s resignation from the chancellorship, told me about the difficulties the administration was encountering because of Hindenburg’s fear of indictment, and I have been told that this was one reason for Hindenburg’s finally consenting to appoint Hitler Chancellor.” Cf. H. Brüning, “Ein Brief,” in: Deutsche Rundschau, 1947, p. 15. In the summer of 1935 Brüning added, in conversation with Count Kessler, that Oskar von Hindenburg “slithered into all sorts of murky stock exchange dealings and consequently found himself in a position where he was constantly afraid of ‘revelations.’ ” Count Kessler, In the Twenties, p. 469.
55. According to Brüning, Memoiren, p. 645, who had his information from Schleicher, Hindenburg allegedly said: “Thank you, Herr General, for everything you have done for the Fatherland. Now, with God’s help, let us see how the cat jumps.”
56. Kessler, In the Twenties, p. 443.
57. Thomas Mann, “Bruder Hitler,” in: Gesammelte Werke 12, p. 774.
58. Report of Police Detective Feil, HStA Munich, Allgemeine Sonderausgabe I, No. 1475.
59. Hitler to Schleicher, beginning of February, 1933. Cf. Brüning, Memoiren, p. 648.
60. Cf. Frank, pp. 121 f. In the published version of his book, however, Frank does not quote the eschatological passage cited here; cf. on this Görlitz and Quint, p. 367.
INTERPOLATION II
1. Gottfried Benn, “Doppelleben,” Gesammelte Werke IV, p. 89.
2. G. A. Borgese, Goliath: The March of Fascism, p. 361.
3. Friedrich Franz von Unruh in a series of articles, “Nationalsozialismus,” which was published in the Frankfurter Zeitung between February 22 and March 3, 1931.
4. E. Vermeil, “The Origin, Nature and Development of German Nationalist Ideology in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” in: The Third Reich, p. 6. Cf. also Rohan D’O. Butler, The Roots of National Socialism, W. M. Govern, From Luther to Hitler, and W. Steed, “From Frederick the Great to Hitler. The Consistency of German Aims,” in: International Affairs, 1938:17.
5. Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe.
In spite of many accurate observations on single items, all historians who have tried to assess Hitler as the focal point of centuries of history run one great risk: they come dangerously close to the Nazis’ own interpretations of their movement. For that is what the Nazis were claiming when they usurped the Hansa, mysticism, Prussianism and Romanticism, and hailed their Third Reich as the fulfillment of German history. But there is something equally dubious about the opposing school, which seeks to represent National Socialism, and totalitarianism in general, as aspects of the crisis of the democratic era, flowing out of its rebellion against tradition and its petrified systems, its social antagonisms and economic weaknesses. For this school Nazism is the consequence of the modern rather than the German character; it is the negative utopia of the total state, such as was evoked in many pessimistic prophecies of the nineteenth century. For National Socialism viewed itself precisely as the world-historical corrective of that crisis. In the German accounts that posit this interpretation, Hitler frequently appears as an overwhelming foreign influence, a “counterpoise to tradition, especially to the Prusso-German and Bismarckian tradition,” as Gerhard Ritter puts it in his contribution to the collection of essays in The Third Reich (pp. 381 ff.), in which he consistently takes a stand diametrically opposite to that of E. Vermeil. Ritter argues that even the wrongheaded attitudes of which the Germans have been accused were on the whole characteristic of the age: “It is astonishing how many expressions of nationalistic ambition, militaristic principles, racist pride and antidemocratic criticism can be found in the intell
ectual and political literature of all European countries.”
None of these excessively one-sided interpretations can possibly grasp the nature of the phenomenon; the standard Marxist interpretation makes that crystal clear. Constantly hampered by their own actions and by piety toward their comrades who went down to defeat, the Marxist spokesmen have basically never been able to free themselves from the well-known, officially proclaimed definition of National Socialism as a manifestation of the “open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinistic and imperialistic elements of finance capital.” Consequently, if this thought is followed to its logical conclusion, the key personalities of National Socialism must have been not Hitler, Goebbels, and Streicher, but Hugenberg, Krupp, and Thyssen. Such a view is in fact actually taken by, for example, Czichon, in Wer verhalf Hitler zur Macht? and by many others. Cf. for this whole subject the instructive survey in Bracher, Diktatur, pp. 6 ff.
6. Cf. Note 13 to Interpolation I. During a stay in Germany in the early twenties the Rumanian Fascist leader Codreanu complained, significantly, that there was no visceral, consistent anti-Semitism in that country; cf. Nolte, Krise, p. 263.
7. Rudolf Höss, at one time commandant of Auschwitz; see Gustave Mark Gilbert, The Psychology of Dictatorship, p. 250.
8. Harold J. Laski, “The Meaning of Fascism” in: Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, p. 106.
9. Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen was the title of an embittered criticism of democracy by Edgar J. Jung, who later became Papen’s assistant and was killed during the purge of June 30, 1934.
10. Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, p. 113.
11. Pierre Vienot, Is Germany Finished?, p. 97.
12. Domarus, p. 226.
13. Albert Speer, in a memo to the author; for Hitler’s rejection of Hess or Himmler as his successor, cf. Speer, Inside the Third Reich, pp. 137, 276.
14. G. Ritter asserts in Carl Goerdeler, p. 109, that the idea of having fallen into the hands of an unscrupulous adventurer would have seemed absolutely grotesque to the majority of the German bourgeoisie. Rudolf Breitscheid’s reaction is reported by Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Offiziere gegen Hitler, p. 12; Julius Leber’s comment on the lack of an intellectual foundation comes from a diary entry; see his Ein Mann geht seinen Weg, pp. 123 f. Many Social Democrats secretly expected that Hitler would quickly tangle with Papen and Hugenberg, and they would reap the benefit. “Then there will be a settlement of accounts, and very different it will be from 1918,” Prussian ex-State Secretary Abegg threatened in conversation with Count Kessler; see Kessler, In the Twenties, p. 447.
15. Kessler, p. 428.
BOOK V
1. What went on at this meeting and how important it proved to be was first revealed during the Nuremberg trial; see IMT XXXV, pp. 42 ff.; also IMT V, pp. 177 ff., XII, pp. 497 ff., and XXXVI, pp. 520 ff.
2. See Domarus, pp. 207, 209, 211, 214; also Baynes, I, pp. 238, 252.
3. Hans Mommsen, “The Reichstag Fire and Its Political Consequences,” in Holborn, ed., Republic to Reich, pp. 129 ff.
4. Cf. IMT IX, pp. 481 f. and PS-3593. To the very end, incidentally, Göring vigorously denied having participated in any way in setting the fire. He remarked—quite believably—he would not have needed any pretexts to strike against the Communists. “Their debt was so heavy, their crime so tremendous, that without any further prompting I was determined to begin the most ruthless war of extermination with all the instruments of power at my command against this plague. On the contrary, as I testified at the Reichstag Fire trial, the fire which forced me to take measures so rapidly was actually extremely awkward for me, since it forced me to act faster than I intended and to strike before I had made all my thorough preparations.” Hermann Göring, Aufbau einer Nation, pp. 93 f.
5. Brecht, Vorspiel, pp. 125 f. The emergency decree of February 28, 1933, read: “Articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124 and 153 of the Constitution of the German Reich are for the time being nullified. Consequently, curbs on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press, of association, and of assembly, surveillance over letters, telegrams and telephone communications, searches of homes and confiscations of as well as restrictions on property, are hereby permissible beyond the limits hitherto established by law.”
6. Goebbels, Kaiserhof, p. 271, and Bullock, p. 264.
7. Proclamation by Hitler of March 10, 1933, cited in Domarus, p. 219. On the other hand cf. Hitler’s anger when faced with a complaint by von Winterfeld, Deputy Chairman of the German National People’s Party, of March 10, 1933, in: BAK Reel 43 II, 1263. Concerning Hitler’s letter to Papen, copies of which were sent to Hindenburg and to the Defense Minister, see Martin Broszat, Der Staat Hitlers, p. 111. From January 31 to August 23, 1933, the German newspapers reported the following violent deaths: 196 enemies of National Socialism and 24 followers of Hitler. During the period up to the March elections 51 opponents and 18 Nazis were killed.
8. Bracher, Sauer, Schulz, Machtergreifung, p. 158. As early as March 17, the VB triumphantly calculated that merely by excluding the eighty-one Communist deputies the NSDAP would have ten seats over an absolute majority.
9. Berliner Börsenzeitung of March 22, 1933, quoted from Horkenbach, p. 127.
10. The speech is printed in Domarus, pp. 229 ff.
11. Quoted from Philipp W. Fabry, Mutmassungen über Hitler, p. 91; for the following quotation, which evidently reproduces the sense of remarks made in the President’s entourage, see Brüning, Memoiren, p. 650.
12. Rauschning, Gespräche, pp. 78 ff. For Carl Goerdeler’s assertion see Edouard Calic, Ohne Maske, p. 171.
13. Speech to the Reichsstatthalters of July 6; cf. VB of July 8, 1933.
14. Ibid.
15. Rauschning, Gespräche, p. 96; also Luedecke, I Knew Hitler, p. 518.
16. Thus in the above-mentioned speech to the Reichsstatthalters on July 6.
17. Heyen, Alltag, p. 134; report of the district magistrate of Bad Kreuznach.
18. François-Poncet, The Fateful Years, pp. 67 f.
19. Golo Mann, Deutsche Geschichte, p. 804.
20. Gottfried Benn, “Antwort an die literarischen Emigranten,” Gesammelte Werke IV, p. 245.
21. Bracher, Diktatur, p. 271.
22. Edgar J. Jung, “Neubelebung von Weimar?” in: Deutsche Rundschau, June, 1932. For the remark of Paul Valéry, see Thomas Mann, Nachlese. Prosa 1951–55, p. 196.
23. Gottfried Benn, in the letter mentioned in note 20.
24. Rauschning, Gespräche, pp. 151, 179 f.
25. David Schoenbaum, Die braune Revolution, p. 150; also T. Eschenburg, “Dokumentation,” in: VJHfZ 1955:3, pp. 314 ff; also Historikus, Der Faschismus als Massenbewegung, p. 7.
26. Thus to Mayor Krogmann of Hamburg on March 15, 1933; cf. Jacobsen, Aussenpolitik, p. 395; here, too, on p. 25, illuminating information on the shifts in personnel that took place in the course of the seizure of power. In the Foreign Service, for example, “at most six per cent were replaced for political reasons,” and only a single diplomat, von Prittwitz-Gaffron, the German ambassador to Washington, quit the service because he had political reservations. For Hitler’s opinion of the Foreign Office see Rauschning, Gespräche, p. 250.
27. See Shirer, Rise and Fall, p. 210, for the foreign reaction.
28. IMT XXXIV, C-140.
29. Nolte, Krise, p. 138.
30. Thus the British journalist G. Ward Price in the course of an interview with Hitler on October 18, 1933. See VB of October 20, 1933; also Horkenbach, p. 479.
31. Hermann Rauschning, Gespräche, pp. 101 ff.
32. Cf. report of the British ambassador of November 15, 1933, in Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919—1939, 2nd Series, vol. VI (1933–34), London, 1957, pp. 38 ff. Cf. also the telegram that Martin Niemöller and other clergymen addressed to Hitler on this occasion: “In this hour of decision for the people and the Fatherland we salute our Führer. We thank him for the
valiant action and the clear speech that have preserved Germany’s honor. In the name of more than 2,500 Protestant pastors who do not belong to the German Christian religious movement we pledge loyal obedience and intercessory remembrances.” Quoted from Fabry, Mutmassungen, p. 123.
33. Documents on British Foreign Policy, 2nd series, vol. IV, report of January 30, 1934.
34. Thus Arnold Toynbee in 1937; quoted in M. Gilbert and R. Gott, The Appeasers, p. 82. See also Karl Lange, Hitlers unbeachtete Maximen, pp. 113 f. Similarly, Sumner Welles remarked that American attention concentrated chiefly on Hitler’s idiosyncrasies and on the resemblance of his mustache to Charlie Chaplin’s; Gilbert and Gott, pp. 125 f.
35. Many further references in Jacobsen, Aussenpolitik, pp. 369 ff. The episode with Sir John Simon is reported by Ivone Kirkpatrick, The Inner Circle, p. 68.
36. Cf. Anton M. Koktanek, Oswald Spengler in seiner Zeit, p. 458. On Hitler’s reading of Karl May, see Libres propos, p. 306; also Otto Dietrich, Zwölf Jahre, p. 164.
37. Rauschning, Gespräche, pp. 143 f. There are, however, two differing versions of Röhm’s intentions. According to one, he wanted to organize the SA as a kind of militia alongside the army; according to the other, he wanted to see the SA declared the official armed force, and the army incorporated into it. The documents, and a number of different indications, suggest strongly that Röhm advocated both ideas, depending on whom he was talking to, and conceived of the first version as a transition to the second.
38. Görlitz and Quint, p. 440.
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