Ominous Parallels

by Leonard Peikoff

  In the early months of 1930, with the nation desperate for leadership, the party stumbled into its “proletarian” stance: it decided to bring down a coalition government headed by a Social Democratic Chancellor, Hermann Mueller, because of a proposed measure that might have had the effect of reducing unemployment benefits in the future. The Weimar politicians had long been engaged in Kühhandel, as the Germans called it, “cattletrading,” and had treated the country to a procession of musical-chair coalitions, sudden governmental collapses, and continual new elections. The spectacle had evoked widespread contempt for popular government even before the depression. After the Mueller cabinet fell on March 27, however—the “black day” of the Republic—no new coalition could be formed; the economic warfare among the parties was too virulent. The Germans’ contempt for the Reichstag became disgust. There was only one solution that seemed feasible.

  On March 28, 1930, the Reichstag’s normal legislative prerogatives were suspended by President Hindenburg. A semi-dictatorial system of government, a system of rule by emergency executive decree, was established under Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, a conservative Centrist. Popular government was abandoned for the duration of the emergency. The dichotomy between political and economic freedom was breaking down by itself, without any help from the Nazis.

  In regard to methods, the Bruning government was dictatorial. In regard to policies, however, it was democratic. The program Bruning (and his two short-lived, authoritarian successors in 1932) enacted was an exact reflection of the popular will. These men “did something,” in the German sense of the term.

  The government issued a torrent of new decrees. It raised the tariffs, the taxes, the unemployment-insurance premiums; it expanded public works, imposed rigid restrictions on foreign exchange, and introduced a twenty-month “voluntary labor service” for young people; etc. Most important of all, the Reich in this period effectively erased the last significant remnants of private economic power, by turning the banks, the cartels, and the labor unions into mere administrative organs of the state. The Republic, writes Gustav Stolper (a member of the Reichstag at the time), “came close to being a thoroughly developed state socialism.... Government was omnipresent, and the individual had become used to turning to it in every need.”3

  The government’s policies did not work. Among other things, hyperprotectionism (in Germany and abroad) was strangling the country’s vital foreign trade; the cascade of sudden new taxes and emergency decrees was creating a climate of acute business uncertainty, which made impossible any significant recovery of German investment and production; the unions’ adamant opposition to further wage cuts was exacerbating the unemployment.

  The Germans attempted to assess the situation and determine the cause of the government’s failure. “At last,” writes Stolper,

  it became common knowledge that all this state interference ... was of no avail in the most disastrous economic crisis that had befallen Germany in the course of her history. Paradoxically, the system of state interference as such, being far too deeply rooted in the German political and economic tradition, was not blamed by the opposition. On the contrary, the general mood of the public backed the demands that this imperfect and incomplete system of state intervention be superseded by one more perfect and complete. This was the content of the so-called anticapitalistic yearning which, according to a National Socialist slogan of the time, was said to pervade the German nation.4

  The harbingers of the era to come were the university students. Well before the rest of the country, these young intellectuals turned for guidance to the self-declared “party of youth,” whose leader was promising “a revolt of the coming generation against all that was senile and rotten with decay.” 5

  In the student elections of 1929, the Nazis won a majority or plurality of the vote at nineteen universities. Hitler’s off-campus support at the time was still insignificant; many Germans were not yet reconciled to the Nazi manners. The students, however, placed content above form, i.e., ideals above social graces. Their ideals were instinct, sacrifice, and hatred, hatred of “the Western enemy” and of “the bourgeois system.”

  One German observer noted in these youths a “strange connection” between “revolutionary mutiny against authority” and “blind discipline toward the ‘Führer.’ ”6 In fact, the students were mutinying against the Republic not because it stood for overbearing authority in their eyes, but because it stood for freedom. They regarded even some shaky fragments of an individualist way of life as selfish materialism. What they wanted was service to a social cause they could accept as noble, and when they found the cause’s spokesman they were ready to bow obediently.

  As living standards continued to fall, their parents began to mutiny, too. Hitler offered people leadership, an end to class warfare, a “final solution” to the problems of the mixed economy, and, to each group, his special protection. These were the practical inducements. He also offered what had won the campuses: “idealism,” as all understood the concept. In the September 1930 Reichstag elections, the first nationwide result of these promises leaped into view: the Nazi vote increased sevenfold (to about six and one-half million votes), making the party Germany’s second largest (after the Social Democrats). According to one study, the party membership in 1930 included among other groups: blue-collar workers, 28.1 percent; white-collar workers, 25.6 percent; self-employed, 20.7 percent; and farmers, 14.0 percent.7

  If any of these Germans wanted to be moral, he was ready to sacrifice himself for the sake of others, and intrigued by a party that loudly demanded this of him. If he wanted to live, it seemed necessary to sacrifice others to his own group, by joining a party that loudly promised this to him. If he despaired of either course, he was ready to lash out blindly, at fate or at the Jews, and he knew which party felt the same way. The motive might vary, but not the result. It was Hitler for the love in men, and Hitler for the greed, and Hitler for the hatred. “Love” in this context means Christian love; “greed” means the desire to survive in a controlled economy; “hatred” means nihilism.

  In 1930-31, pro-Hitler feeling surged higher at the universities. The Nazi totals “rose at the University of Munich from 18.4 to 33.3 percent, at Jena from 30.0 to 66.6, at Erlangen from 51.0 to 76.0 and at Breslau from 25.4 to 70.9.” The Nazis were winning something like a fifth of the national vote; the students already “were largely National Socialist in sympathy; perhaps half of them were Nazis. . . .”8

  Again, as people grew still more desperate, the country moved to catch up. In the March 1932 election for President, Hitler polled more than 11 million votes. In the July 1932 Reichstag elections, the party doubled its 1930 vote. For the first time the Nazis were the largest party in Germany. The hours of Weimar, it was widely said, were numbered.

  The Nazis, however, were far from being a majority. Almost 64 percent of the votes in July 1932 were cast for non-Nazi candidates. To some Germans, the action to take seemed obvious: if the other parties would only join forces, they said, Hitler, despite his following, could never gain power.

  The other parties were unable to join forces. Each acted according to its nature and its basic premises.

  The Nationalists, who had long scorned Hitler as a proletarian rowdy, soon discovered his popular appeal and decided to make use of it. In 1929, Alfred Hugenberg had welcomed Hitler onto a prominent committee he was chairing, designed to fight against the latest reparations plan. For Hitler, writes historian Erich Eyck,

  it was a major triumph to be thus received into proper society.... When this mighty leader of the German Nationalists accepted Hitler, the man who had previously been rejected and despised by ‘decent’ people ... many Germans felt obliged to take Hitler seriously and to forget his record of misconduct.

  Thereafter the Nationalists made money available to Hitler, joined with him in a powerful united front (the Harzburg Front of October 1931), backed him in a presidential runoff election (April 1932), and, at the end, were eager to serve
in the first Nazi cabinet. “We see in National-Socialism the German Liberation Movement,” explained one ardent Lutheran pastor, “which we would profess even were it to be led in the name of the Devil.”

  It would be quite safe, said Hugenberg, to let Hitler become Chancellor, because the cabinet would be filled with traditional conservatives, who would keep him in line. “In this way,” said Hugenberg, “we will box Hitler in.”9

  The Communists, too, wanted to use Hitler. Time after time their deputies voted with the Nazis in the Reichstag; they voted against legislation designed to cope with emergencies, against measures designed to curb violence, against the attempt to maintain in office any kind of stable government. The Communists even agreed to cooperate with Nazi thugs. In November 1932, for instance, the two mortal enemies could be observed standing comfortably, shoulder to shoulder, on the streets of Berlin, collecting money to support a violent strike by the city’s transportation workers.

  When Hitler’s fortunes seemed to be faltering for a time in 1932, a stream of anxious Nazis poured into the ranks of the Communists; the Germans watching said that a Nazi is like beefsteak: brown on the outside, red on the inside. Soon, however, the traffic was in the opposite direction. “[T]here is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it,” said Hitler to Rauschning.

  There is, above all, genuine revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere in Russia except where there are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will.10

  In the final months the Communists viewed the growing Nazi strength with equanimity. The triumph of Nazism, they said, has been ordained by the dialectic process; such triumph will lead to the destruction of the republican form of government, which is a necessary stage in the achievement of communism. Afterward, they said, the Nazis will quickly fade and the party of Lenin can take over.

  In July 1932, despite the machinations of the Nazi-Nationalist-Communist axis, the two main republican parties, the Centrists and the Social Democrats, were still holding about 40 percent of the electorate. (The Democrats, having lost their following, were virtually extinct. So was the People’s party.)

  The Centrists during the depression were stressing to the nation’s Catholics the urgent need for a moral reawakening, to consist of anti-materialism, social consciousness, faith, and discipline. The party was also seeking an emergency alliance with like-minded groups so as to form a “bloc for public order.” In this regard party leaders did not hesitate to be specific. Repeatedly during 1932 they called for a “strong national government in tune with the interests of the people and including the National Socialists.”

  The responsibilities involved in sharing power, the Centrists said, would “channel” the Nazis into more temperate paths and would “tame” Hitler.11

  The Social Democrats, meanwhile, were being “tamed” in another way by Chancellor Franz von Papen. In July 1932, using only a token armed force, he ousted them illegally from the government of Prussia. The party leaders understood that this coup, if uncontested, would mean the loss of their last bastion of strength. But they observed the swelling ranks of the Nazis and Communists; the Prussian police and the German army brimming with nationalist militants; the millions of unemployed workers, which made the prospects for a general strike bleak—and they decided to capitulate without a fight, lest they provoke a bloody civil war they had no heart to wage and little chance to win.

  There were not many Social Democrats who rose up in fury over the “rape of Prussia.” The party had long since lost most of those who take ideas or causes seriously. There was not much youthful ardor to summon to the side of social democracy. “Republik, das ist nicht viel, Sozialismus ist unser Ziel” (“A republic, that is not much, socialism is our goal”)—such were the signs carried in parades by young workers of the period.12

  The republicans from every political party and group were in the same position: more and more, the contradictions involved in their views were leaving these men lifeless, and even speechless. They could hardly praise freedom very eloquently, not while they themselves, like everyone else, were insisting on further statist measures to cope with the economic crisis. They could not extol self-government, when the Reichstag had just collapsed. They could not affirm even the principle of statism, while they were struggling to stave off totalitarianism.

  To the last-ditch spokesmen of Weimar, from whatever party they hailed, political ideas as such became an embarrassment; theory was not a means of enlisting support or aiding their cause, but a threat to it. The solution of most such men was to counsel “practicality” while dismissing “abstractions,” i.e., to turn pragmatist and become enemies of ideology.

  We must get away from the “unfruitful controversy over the terms capitalism and socialism,” said Chancellor von Papen in a July 1932 radio address designed to rally the country. Instead, he said, Germany should be guided by a moral principle: “general utility comes before individual utility.”13

  The principle is right, answered the Nazis; and it means the end of the Republic.

  On December 15, General Kurt von Schleicher, the last pre-Nazi Chancellor, delivered his version of anti-ideology. He explained in a fireside broadcast “that he was a supporter ‘neither of capitalism nor of socialism’ and that to him ‘concepts such as private economy or planned economy have lost their terrors.’ His principal task, he said, was to provide work for the unemployed and get the country back on its economic feet.”14

  It is our task, too, answered the Nazis; but a drastic problem requires a drastic solution.

  The spokesmen of Weimar had no answers. They could not set aside lesser differences and unite in the name of an overriding political principle; having rejected ideology, they acknowledged no such principle. They could not suggest any alternative to the Nazi plan for a Führer-state; they had no definite idea to communicate, except a gingerly fear of definite ideas.

  The totalitarians knew what they stood for. The non-totalitarians stood for nothing, and everyone knew it. “Democracy has no convictions,” sneered one of the Nazis. “Genuine convictions, I mean, for which people would be willing to stake their lives.”15

  The symptoms of the end were the messiahs preaching God to wild-eyed mobs; the bookstores flaunting titles such as The Whip in Sexuality, Massage Institutes, Sappho and Lesbos; the promiscuity, the nudism, the orgies; the cocaine and opium addiction; the venomous xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Still more eloquent was the collapse of the universities, and its corollary: the murder in the streets.

  The Weimar students practiced everything they had learned. Believing that objectivity is impossible, they did not try to reason about political questions. Believing that a man is nothing in the face of the community, they did not concern themselves with an opponent’s individual rights. Committed to action based on feeling, they responded to disagreement by unstopping their fury.

  The students launched violent mass demonstrations on campus. They invaded the classes of unpopular professors. They gathered in jeering mobs outside lecture halls. They rushed hotly into head-smashing brawls and they coolly instigated bloody riots, both of which soon became routine at the German universities.

  When the defenders of one besieged professor appealed to the authorities for help, the Prussian minister of education, a Social Democrat,

  promised that he would not give in, that the professor had the full protection of the government. The excited students committed excesses in the lecture building, prevented students who wanted to attend from coming to classes by bodily force—and got away with it. The professor was given leave of absence for an indefinite time, the students who had wanted to stand up for him were threatened and ill-treated.16

  The student rebels defended their actions by claiming that the universities must serve the people
, and therefore must be transformed into agents of revolution. The rebels dismissed the view that a university should uphold freedom of thought; they rejected free thought; fundamentally, they rejected it on the grounds that thought as such is a waste of time.

  The universities could not survive the assault for long. They bowed to the rebels’ demands. They ceased being centers of learning during the Weimar years. The agent of enslavement had not been Hitler, but their own students.

  The faculties, the administrations, the authorities, and the press explained to the country that the universities were not enslaved and that the students were victims. “I remember Germany and Austria in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s,” writes an American who served in the U.S. Embassy in Austria. The “idealistic youth”

  broke up classrooms, invaded university campuses, broke shop windows. The liberals of Berlin and Vienna sprang to the defense of the youth. They labeled any police action against them as ‘brutality.’ One of the phrases used to describe the idealistic German youth by editorial writers and educators, believe it or not, was ‘the culturally deprived.’ ... When they broke windows of Jewish shops, the liberals—even intellectual Jews of Germany and Austria—said: ‘how else shall they show their resentment? Most of the shops just happen to be owned by Jews.’17

  Hitler was soon equipped to show his resentment, too. In 1930 the SA had numbered upwards of 60,000 men. A year later it had grown to about 170,000. By late 1932 it reached at least 400,000.

  Increasingly, especially at election times, savage physical battles erupted throughout the country between young Nazis and young Communists. The weapons used ranged from fists and knives to grenades and bombs. The toll of dead and wounded became a commonplace, which was reported by the press in the manner of automobile accidents or the weather.

  Many Germans begged the government to restore order. The student rebels and their professorial defenders had, however, been a microcosm. The new youth “are saturated with hatred,” Heinrich Mann had observed as early as 1922.