The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  Rüdiger’s support for the idea of the ‘classless’ Germany was encapsulated by one experience after the Nazis came to power. ‘It was shortly before Christmas and everybody was collecting money, especially on the Day of National Solidarity as it was called then.* And leading members of the party were present as well as ministers and industrialists. They were on the street in the wind and the rain.’ A rich foreigner approached one of the German industrialists and asked why he was standing out in the cold asking the public for small change when all he needed to do was to ‘put a thousand marks in the tin’. The German industrialist turned to Jutta Rüdiger and said simply, ‘They do not get the point at all.’

  Bruno Hähnel, who joined the Nazi party in the early 1920s, also felt drawn to the idea of a ‘national community’ (in German, Volksgemeinschaft). ‘It simply means that there had always been two distinct strata in German society,’ he says, ‘the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. And so in order to bridge the gap, a national community was to be established, in order to ensure that both the intellectuals and the workers would join forces. The national community was expressed in the [Nazi party’s] catchphrase, which I think most of us used again and again: “The public’s interest comes first.” Hence also the expression that we weren’t merely National Socialists, but national-minded Socialists.’26

  As a senior German officer, secretly recorded in captivity by the British during the war, put it: ‘Some things will remain for ever. They will last for hundreds of years. Not the roads [the Nazis built] – they are unimportant. But what will last is the way in which the state has been organized, particularly the inclusion of the workingman as part of the state. He [Hitler] has made a place for the workingman in the state and no one has ever done that before … This principle of everyone working for the common cause, the idea that the industrialist is really the trustee for the capital represented by German labour and for the other capital, all sounds so easy, but no one managed it before.’27

  However, the Nazi supporters who approved of ‘classlessness’ were also, as a consequence, supporting a darker idea altogether. That is because Hitler taught that this new ‘classless’ life would be possible only when those of a different ‘race’ were excluded from the society of ‘true’ Germans. ‘We said to ourselves’, Hitler declared, ‘there are no such things as classes: they cannot be. Class means caste and caste means race.’28 The notion of a ‘classless’ Germany followed, as far as Hitler was concerned, from an acceptance that ‘race’ was the most vital quality of all. The Jews were thus the barrier to a Germany in which everyone was united in the Nazi ideal of a classless world. It was the Jews who were preventing Germans becoming happy and prosperous. If their ‘power’ was not somehow neutralized, there could be no progress, no way out of the morass. In a speech in September 1922, Hitler summed up what he saw as Germany’s predicament: ‘We in Germany have come to this: that sixty-million people sees its destiny to lie at the will of a few dozen Jewish bankers.’29

  The Nazi party was not the only organization promoting both anti-Semitism and the ideals of the völkisch movement. Up to seventy other groups listed in the German Völkisch Yearbook of 1921 all believed that by stripping the Jews of German citizenship the Volk could flourish anew.30 One of them, the small Deutschsozialistische Partei (German Socialist Party), based in Franconia in northern Bavaria, established a newspaper in 1920. An article in the first edition tried to convert socialists to the cause of the radical right by arguing that, while the parties on the left claimed to ‘fight against all capital, even the Jewish big loan money’, they were actually sponsored by the Jews: ‘Do you really think that the Rothschilds, Mendelssohns, Bleichröders, Warburgs and Cohns will ever let you near their supply of money? Don’t believe this swindle after all! As long as the blood brothers of the Mendelssohns, of the Bleichröders and Cohns are your captains and as long as your group leaders are mercenaries of the Jews, you don’t pose a danger to the big-money people. As long as you do not become leaders yourselves, as long as the black shadow of aliens is behind you, you are seduced and fooled. The black alien is interested in his own benefit, not in you.’31

  The author of the article was a thirty-six-year-old schoolteacher and veteran of the First World War who would subsequently play a leading role in inciting anti-Semitism in Germany. His name was Julius Streicher. Like Hitler, Streicher had won the Iron Cross during the war, but unlike Hitler he had been born a German, not an Austrian. He had grown up around Augsburg in south-west Bavaria. This area changed a great deal during his childhood as the population increased and several thousand Jews moved into the district. Streicher traced his own dislike of the Jews to an incident that he claimed occurred when he was five years old. His mother bought some fabric from a Jewish shop and it later turned out that the material wasn’t of high quality. His mother burst into tears and said that this deception was typical of a Jew.32

  In the autumn of 1921 Streicher joined the Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft (German Working Community), and his attacks on the Jews became more extreme and more personal. He claimed that Jews in Nuremberg snatched Christian children and murdered them in order to obtain blood to use in baking bread at Passover – the same ‘Blood Libel’ that had helped incite the pogrom in Kishinev in Russia nearly twenty years before. On 5 September 1922, at the district court in Schweinfurt, in a judgment against Streicher for ‘an offence against religion’, the assessor stated that Streicher had ‘accused the Jews of still maintaining the custom of ritual murder. He [Streicher] referred to the east, where he previously fought in the World War as an officer, and explained that the people over there spoke quite bluntly about ritual murders by the Jews. He added that in Germany one hundred children would mysteriously disappear every year around the Easter period and he asked: “Where do these children get to?” ’33

  In another speech in 1922 Streicher said it should not be considered a crime if ‘one day we stand up and chase the Jews to hell’ and ‘grab the bastards for their lies’.34 He also alleged that the Jews had been ‘proven’ to ‘wish for Germany’s misfortune’ and that if ‘the [German] people had known the contents of the secret treaties of the war, they would have slain all the Jews’.35

  While Streicher’s rhetoric was popular among a select group, it was also inevitably the cause of conflict. At least one meeting had to be called off after he inflamed the audience so much that they started to fight among themselves. Even the leadership of the Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft criticized Streicher for his antics. It was obvious to everyone that he was an aggressive and potentially dangerous individual who was obsessed with hatred of the Jews and foreign ‘races’. As a result, he was precisely the kind of man that Hitler wanted in the Nazi party. Reminiscing about this period nearly twenty years later, Hitler remarked that ‘More than once’ Dietrich Eckart had told him that Streicher was a ‘lunatic’. But, said Hitler, Eckart ‘always added that one could not hope for the triumph of National Socialism without giving one’s support to men like Streicher’.36

  Late in 1922, Streicher travelled to Munich and listened to Hitler speak for the first time. At his trial at Nuremberg after the war, he described the experience: ‘First slowly, hardly audible, then faster and more powerfully, and finally with overpowering strength … He revealed an enormous treasure trove of thought in a speech of more than three hours, clothed with the beauty of inspired language. Each person felt it: this man spoke from a godly calling, he spoke as a messenger from heaven at a time when hell threatened to swallow up everything. And everyone understood him, whether with the brain or the heart, whether man or woman. He had spoken for everyone, for the entire German people. Just before midnight his speech concluded with the inspiring call: “Workers, blue collar or white! To you is extended the hand of a German people’s community of heart and action.” ’37

  Streicher now believed that it was his destiny to serve Adolf Hitler. Indeed, he seems to have experienced an almost religious conversion. ‘I saw this man shortly before midnigh
t,’ he said at Nuremberg, ‘after he had spoken for three hours, drenched in perspiration, radiant. My neighbor said he thought he saw a halo around his head, and I experienced something which transcended the commonplace.’38 Shortly afterwards, Streicher persuaded his own followers to join the Nazi party and accept Hitler’s leadership. In 1923 he launched his anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer and he continued to preside over this infamous hate sheet until the end of the Second World War.

  Around this time Hitler attracted others into the party who would subsequently become leading figures in the Nazi movement. Ernst Röhm, Hermann Göring, Hans Frank, Rudolf Hess – all of these people and more decided to follow Hitler in the early 1920s. Some of them were young and impressionable, but men like Röhm and Göring were hard-bitten, cynical veterans of the war. Both had served as officers and had distinguished themselves as leaders of men in battle. Now, in the wake of the German defeat, they had countless political parties to choose from in order to pursue their goals, and yet they decided to subordinate themselves to a former soldier from the ranks called Adolf Hitler.

  In part, this was because they witnessed the power of his rhetoric. They saw how he could attract new followers to the cause – just as he had with Julius Streicher. But just as important, they shared Hitler’s beliefs. In terms of policy, Hitler had to convince them of nothing. What he offered them, in large part via his speech-making, was a combination of clarity of vision and the promise of a radical method of turning this vision into a reality.

  As a necessary precondition of this, Hitler spoke with absolute certainty. He laid out the alleged reasons for the mess Germany was in, and then he told his audience the way these troubles should be fixed. There was no debate, no discussion. Hitler’s belief that he was right was so intense that it dominated everything else. At a rally in Munich in 1923 Professor Karl Alexander von Müller watched him walk to the stage. He had previously met the Nazi leader once or twice in private houses, but the man before him now was a different Hitler. ‘Gaunt, pale features contorted as if by inward rage,’ wrote Professor Müller afterwards, ‘cold flames darting from his protruding eyes, which seemed to be searching out foes to be conquered. Did the crowd give him this mysterious power? Did it emanate from him to them? “Fanatical, hysterical romanticism with a brutal core of willpower” I noted down. The declining middle class may be carrying this man, but he is not one of them. He assuredly comes from totally different depths of darkness.’39

  Many in the völkisch movement had longed for an individual to come forward and offer them a way through the disorder that appeared all around. As Stefan George, the prophet of the movement, put it in 1907: ‘The Man! The Deed! Volk and high counsel yearn for The Man! The Deed!’40 Now Hitler appeared to fulfil this destiny. As Nazi supporter Bruno Hähnel says: ‘it was our aim that a strong man should have the say, and we had such a strong man.’41

  Hitler was soon the undisputed leader of the Nazis, and in a memorandum he wrote in January 1922 he outlined where previous leaders of the völkisch movement had gone wrong. They had been intelligent but ‘fantastically naive’ and had ‘lacked the warm breath of the nation’s youthful vigour’. What Hitler believed the movement needed was ‘the impetuous force of headstrong fire-eaters’.42 And he found just such men in Streicher, Röhm and Göring. They were exactly the people he needed for what he called ‘a party of struggle and action’.

  Hitler thus offered not only a racist and anti-Semitic vision of the world; not only an analysis of why Germany had lost the war and was now losing the peace; not just a promise of a ‘classless’ nation. He also offered a way forward that was exciting, dangerous and calculated to appeal to the young. ‘The old parties train their youth in the gift of the gab,’ he said in a speech in July 1922, ‘we prefer to train them to use their bodily strength. For I tell you, the young man who does not find his way to the place where in the last resort the destiny of his people is most truly represented, only studies philosophy and in a time like this buries himself behind his books or sits at home by the fire, he is no German youth! I call upon you! Join our Storm Divisions!’43

  During that same year, 1922, a twenty-one-year-old agricultural student at the University of Munich called Heinrich Himmler was trying to make sense of his own life. In the process, he absorbed many of the beliefs of the radical right. However, he was not moved by the crude, emotional anti-Semitism of men like Julius Streicher. Instead, Himmler preferred the pseudo-academic analysis contained within Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s work. He wrote of Foundations of the Nineteenth Century that it was ‘objective’ and not full of ‘hate-filled’ anti-Semitism.44 The young Himmler believed that he could deal with individual Jews in a professional fashion, while still understanding that racially the Jews were a threat. In January 1922, for instance, he met a Jewish lawyer and described him in his diary as ‘Extremely amiable and kind’, but nonetheless ‘He cannot hide his Jewishness’ because it was in his ‘blood’.45 Himmler also approved of treating in a brutal way those Jews who were perceived by fanatical nationalists to have harmed Germany. When he heard the news that the German Jewish Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau had been shot in June 1922, he wrote, ‘I’m glad … he was a villain.’46

  Like many who hadn’t seen combat in the First World War, Himmler wanted to show that he could be a brave fighter. After hearing a speech in Munich from a general who in 1919 had fought in the Baltic against the Bolsheviks, he wrote in his diary, ‘Now I know more certainly than ever, if there is another campaign in the east, I will go along. The east is the most important thing for us. The west is simply dying. In the east, we need to fight and settle.’47 They were unconsciously prophetic words, given that Himmler would subsequently orchestrate genocide ‘in the east’ during the Second World War.

  The Himmler that emerges from his diaries is a repressed, prissy young man who thinks a great deal of himself, and has trouble in his relationships with women. He believed that he was one of those ‘types of people’ who were ‘melancholic’ and ‘strict’ and ‘who are necessary in the people’s community, but who in my opinion will still fall one day if they don’t get married or engaged soon enough, because the human animalistic nature is too powerful within us’.48 He also believed that ‘the objective that every man should have’ was ‘to be an upright, straight, fair man, who is never shy or afraid and that is hard’.49 Like that of many others, Himmler’s career development was damaged by the economic problems of 1922. He had hoped to stay on and study politics at the University of Munich after finishing his agricultural exams, but instead, by the autumn of 1922, he was working for a fertilizer company. It was a change in fortune almost certainly caused by the hyperinflation that was now rampant and that made it hard for middle-class parents to fund their children’s studies. Himmler had not yet met Adolf Hitler, but he was already predisposed by his intellectual beliefs and his personal circumstances to find his message an attractive one.

  Above all else in these early years, Hitler and his party saw themselves as revolutionaries. They lived in a time of revolution – from the Communist uprisings in Berlin and Munich in 1919 to the right-wing Kapp Putsch in 1920. And by 1922 Hitler was not only prepared to talk about violence as the route to power, he was ready to lead into battle his own group of paramilitaries – the Stormtroopers or Sturmabteilung. Originally members of the euphemistically known ‘gymnastic and sports’ section of the party, the Stormtroopers protected party rallies and beat up political opponents.

  In October 1922 Hitler hired a train to take around 800 Nazi Stormtroopers to Coburg in the north of Bavaria, an area with strong left-wing support. His aim at Coburg was to provoke a confrontation; and he succeeded, as his Stormtroopers fought the socialists in the streets before finally declaring themselves victorious. As a consequence of actions like this, the true nature of the Nazi party was clear for all to see.

  Like all revolutionaries, Hitler was not concerned whether his ideas succeeded at the ballot box. He did not have to wor
ry whether or not a majority of Germans supported Nazi policies – such as his desire to strip the Jews of their citizenship – which was just as well for him, because there was no evidence that most Germans supported this radical idea. The Nazis, it should be remembered, were still a fringe party opposed by substantial groups who despised their anti-Semitic and racist beliefs. Indeed, a study of voting patterns at national elections in the early 1920s reveals that a majority of Germans voted for parties who did not agree with anti-Semitic policies.50 Nor should it be forgotten that there were many Germans, like Josef Felder, later a Social Democratic member of the Reichstag, who felt revulsion when they heard what Hitler had to say. He remembers listening to one of Hitler’s anti-Semitic diatribes in the early 1920s and afterwards remarking to a friend that ‘hopefully’ Hitler ‘would never come to power’.51

  However, in 1922 it appeared to Hitler and his followers that the omens for a successful revolution were good. The same month that Hitler led his Stormtroopers into the streets of Coburg, a fellow revolutionary – Benito Mussolini – saw his Blackshirted followers march on Rome and provoke a change in government. By the end of October that year Mussolini was Prime Minister of Italy. Meanwhile, in Germany the economic crisis escalated when French and Belgian troops crossed into German territory at the start of 1923 and occupied the Rhineland. The occupation – the result of Germany defaulting on reparation payments – was, not surprisingly, hugely unpopular. It appeared that the Weimar government could not even protect German borders. In the wake of the crisis, membership of the Nazi party more than doubled and by November there were about 55,000 members. It was one of the first signs that this was a movement that thrived on calamity.

  In Bavaria, Gustav von Kahr became State Commissioner – effectively a dictator. Hitler now hoped to force Kahr and the German troops based in Bavaria to support the Nazis and other right-wing paramilitaries in a march on Berlin. What had worked for Mussolini in Italy would now, Hitler supposed, work for the Nazis in Germany. Nazi Stormtroopers interrupted a meeting that Kahr was holding at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich on the evening of 8 November and then marched through the city the following day. Taking part in what became known as the ‘Beer-Hall Putsch’ were many who would go on to play important roles in the Nazi party, including Himmler (who had still not met Hitler personally), Göring and Streicher – all of them dedicated revolutionaries. During the march through Munich the Nazis and their supporters were confronted by police at the corner of the Feldenherrnhalle and the Odeonsplatz in the centre of the city. Shots were fired and sixteen Nazis and four policemen were killed that day.