The Origins of Totalitarianism
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35 SS applicants had to trace their ancestry back to 1750. Applicants for leading positions in the party were asked only three questions: I. What have you done for the party? 2. Are you absolutely sound, physically, mentally, morally? 3. Js your family tree in order? See Nazi Primer.
It is characteristic for the affinity between the two systems that the elite and police formations of the Bolsheviks—the NKVD—also demanded proof of ancestry from their members. See F. Beck and W. Godin, Russian Purge antI the Extraction of Confession, 1951.
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36 Thus the totalitarian tendencies of McCarthyism in the United States showed most glaringly in the attempt not merely to persecute Communists, but to force every citizen to furnish proof of not being a Communist.
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37 “One should not overestimate the influence of the press..., it decreases in general while the influence of the organization increases” (Hadamovsky, op. cit., p. 64). “The newspapers are helpless when they are supposed to fight against the aggressive force of a living organization” (ibid., p. 65). “Power formations which have their origin in mere propaganda are fluctuating and can disappear quickly unless the violence of an organization supports the propaganda” (ibid., p. 21).
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38 “The mass-meeting is the strongest form of propaganda...[because] each individual feels more self-confident and more powerful in the unity of a mass” (ibid, p. 47). “The enthusiasm of the moment becomes a principle and a spiritual attitude through organization and systematic training and discipline” (ibid., p. 21–22).
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39 In the isolated instances in which Hitler concerned himself with this question at all, he used to emphasize: “Incidentally, I am not the head of a state in the sense of a dictator or monarch, but I am a leader of the German people” (see Altsgewählte Reden des Führers, 1939, p. 114).—Hans Frank expresses himself in the same spirit: “The National Socialist Reich is not a dictatorial, let alone an arbitrary, regime. Rather, the National Socialist Reich rests on the mutual loyalty of the Führer and the people” (in Recht und Verwaltung, Munich, 1939, p. 15).
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40 Hitler repeated many times: “The state is only the means to an end. The end is: Conservation of race” {Reden, 1939, p. 125). He also stressed that his movement “does not rest on the state idea, but is primarily based on the closed Volksgemeinschaft” (see Reden, 1933, p. 125, and the speech before the new generation of political leaders [Führernachwuchs], 1937, which is printed as an addendum in Hitlers Tischgespräche, p. 446). This, mutatis mutandis, is also the core of the complicated double talk which is Stalin’s so-called “state theory”: “We are in favor of the State dying out, and at the same time we stand for the strengthening of the dictatorship of the proletariat which represents the most powerful and mighty authority of all forms of State which have existed up to the present day. The highest possible development of the power of the State with the object of preparing the conditions for the dying out of the State; that is the Marxist formula” (op. cit., loc. cit.).
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41 Alexander Stein, Adolf Hitler, Schüler der “Weisen von Zion,” Karlsbad, 1936, was the first to analyze by philological comparison the ideological identity of the teachings of the Nazis with that of the “Elders of Zion.” See also R. M. Blank, Adolf Hitler et les “Protocoles des Sages de Sion,” 1938.
The first to admit indebtedness to the teachings of the Protocols was Theodor Fritsch, the “grand old man” of German postwar antisemitism. He writes in the epilogue to his edition of the Protocols, 1924: “Our future statesmen and diplomats will have to learn from the oriental masters of villainy even the ABC of government, and for this purpose, the ‘Zionist Protocols’ offer an excellent preparatory schooling.”
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42 On the history of the Protocols, see John S. Curtiss, An Appraisal of the Protocols of Zion, 1942.
The fact that the Protocols were a forgery was irrelevant for propaganda purposes. The Russian publicist S. A. Nilus who published the second Russian edition in 190S was already well aware of the doubtful character of this “document” and added the obvious: “But if it were possible to show its authenticity by documents or by the testimony of trustworthy witnesses, if it were possible to disclose the persons standing at the head of the world-wide plot ...then...’the secret iniquity’ could be broken....” Translation in Curtiss, op. cit.
Hitler did not need Nilus to use the same trick: the best proof of their authenticity is that they have been proved to be a forgery. And he also adds the argument of their “plausibility”: “What many Jews may do unconsciously is here consciously made clear. And that is what counts” (Mein Kampf, Book I, chapter xi).
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43 Fritsch, op. cit., “[Der Juden] oberster Grundsatz lautet: ‘Alles, was dem Volke Juda nützt, ist moralisch und ist heilig.’”
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44 “World Empires spring from a national basis, but they expand soon far beyond it” (Reden).
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45 Henri Rollin, L’Apocalypse de Notre Temps, Paris, 1939, who considers the popularity of the Protocols to be second only to the Bible (p. 40), shows the similarity between them and the Monita Secreta, first published in 1612 and still sold in 1939 on the streets of Paris, which claim to reveal a Jesuit conspiracy “that justifies all villainies and all uses of violence.... This is a real campaign against the established order” (p. 32).
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46 This whole literature is well represented by the Chevalier de Malet, Recherches politiques et historiques qui prouvent l’existence d’une secte révolutionnaire, 1817, who quotes extensively from earlier authors. The heroes of the French Revolution are to him “mannequins” of an “agence secrète,” the agents of the Freemasons. But Freemasonry is only the name which his contemporaries have given to a “revolutionary sect” which has existed at all times and whose policy always has been to attack “remaining behind the scenes, manipulating the strings of the marionettes it thought convenient to put on the scene.” He starts by saying: “Probably, it will be difficult to believe in a plan which was formed in antiquity and always followed with the same constancy:...the authors of the Revolution are no more French than they are German, Italian, English, etc. They constitute a peculiar nation which was born and has grown in darkness, in the midst of all civilized nations, with the aim of subduing them all to its domination.”
For an extensive discussion of this literature, see E. Lesueur, La Franc-Maçonnerie Artésienne au 18e siècle, Bibliothèque d’Histoire Révolutionnaire, 1914. How persistent these conspiracy legends are in themselves, even under normal circumstances, can be seen by the enormous anti-Freemason crackpot literature in France, which is hardly less extensive than its antisemitic counterpart. A kind of compendium of all theories which saw in the French Revolution the product of secret conspiracy societies can be found in G. Bord, La Franc-Maçonnerie en France dès origines à 1815, 1908.
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47 Reden.—See the transcript of a session of the SS Committee on Labor Questions at SS headquarters in Berlin on January 12, 1943, where it was suggested that the word “nation,” a concept being burdened with connotations of liberalism, should be eliminated as it was inadequate for the Germanic peoples (Document 705—PS in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, V, 515).
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48 Hitler’s Speeches, ed. Baynes, p. 6.
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49 Goebbels, op. cit. p. 377. This promise, implied in all antisemitic propaganda of the Nazi type, was prepared by Hitler’s “The most extreme contrast to the Aryan is the Jew” (Mein Kampf, Book I, chapter xi).
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50 Dossier Kersten, in the Centre de Documentation Juive.
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51 Hitler’s early promise (Reilen), “I shall never recognize that other nations have the same right as the German,” became official doctrine: “The foundation of the national socialist outlook in life is the perception of the unlikeness of men” (Nazi Primer, p. 5).
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52 For instance, Hitler in 1923: “The German people consists for one third of heroes, for another third, of cowards, while the rest are traitors” (Hitler’s Speeches, ed. Baynes, p. 76).
After the seizure of power this trend became more brutally outspoken. See, for instance, Goebbels in 1934: “Who are the people to criticize? Party members? No. The rest of the German people? They should consider themselves lucky to be still alive. It would be too much of a good thing altogether, if those who live at our mercy should be allowed to criticize.” Quoted from Kohn-Bramstedt, op. cit., pp. 178–179.—During the war Hitler declared: “I am nothing but a magnet constantly moving across the German nation and extracting the steel from this people. And I have often stated that the time will come when all worth-while men in Germany are going to be in my camp. And those who will not be in my camp are worthless anyway.” Even then it was clear to Hitler’s immediate environment what would happen to those who “are worthless anyway” (see Der grossdeutsche Freiheitskampf. Reden Hitlers vom J. 9. 1939— 10. 3. 1940, p. 174).—Himmler meant the same when he said: “The Führer does not think in German, but in Germanic terms” (Dossier Kersten, cf. above), except that we know from Hitlers Tischgespräche (p. 315 ff.) that in those days he was already making fun even of the Germanic “clamor” and thought in “Aryan terms.”
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53 Himmler in a speech to SS leaders at Kharkov in April, 1943 (Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 572 ff.): “I very soon formed a Germanic SS in the various countries....” An early prepower indication of this non-national policy was given by Hitler (Reden): “We shall certainly also receive into the new master class representatives of other nations, i.e., those who deserve it because of their participation in our fight.”
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54 Hadamovsky, op. at.
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55 Heiden, op. cit., p. 139: Propaganda is not “the art of instilling an opinion in the masses. Actually it is the art of receiving an opinion from the masses.”
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56 Hadamovsky, op. cit., passim. The term is taken from Hitler, Mein Kampf (Book II, chapter xi), where the “living organization” of a movement is contrasted with the “dead mechanism” of a bureaucratic party.
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57 It would be a serious error to interpret totalitarian leaders in terms of Max Weber’s category of the “charismatic leadership.” See Hans Gerth, “The Nazi Party,” in American Journal of Sociology, 1940, Vol. XLV. (A similar misunderstanding is also the shortcoming of Heiden’s biography, op. cit.) Gerth describes Hitler as the charismatic leader of a bureaucratic party. This alone, in his opinion, can account for the fact that “however flagrantly actions may have contradicted words, nothing could disrupt the firmly disciplinary organization.” (This contradiction, by the way, is much more characteristic of Stalin who “took care always to say the opposite of what he did, and to do the opposite of what he said.” Souvarine, op. cit., p. 431.)
For the source of this misunderstanding see Alfred von Martin, “Zur Soziologie der Gegenwart,” in Zeitschrift für Kulturgeschichte, Band 27, and Arnold Koettgen, “Die Gesetzmässigkeit der Verwaltung im Führerstaat,” in Reichsverwaltungsblatt, 1936, both of whom characterize the Nazi state as a bureaucracy with charismatic leadership.
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58 Hadamovsky, op. cit., p. 21. For totalitarian purposes it is a mistake to propagate their ideology through teaching or persuasion. In the words of Robert Ley, it can be neither “taught” nor “learned,” but only “exercised” and “practiced” (see Der Weg zur Ordensburg, undated).
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59 R. Hoehn, one of the outstanding Nazi political theorists, interpreted this lack of a doctrine or even a common set of ideals and beliefs in the movement in his Reichsgemeinschaft and Volksgeme’mschaft, Hamburg, 1935: “From the point of view of a folk community, every community of values is destructive” (p. 83).
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60 Hitler, discussing the relationship between Weltanschauung and organization, admits as a matter of course that the Nazis took over from other groups and parties the “racial idea” (die völkische Idee) and acted as though they were its only representatives because they were the first to base a fighting organization on it and to formulate it for practical purposes. Op. cit., Book II, chapter v.
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61 See Hitler, “Propaganda and Organization,” in op. cit., Book II, chapter xi.
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62 Himmler’s vehemently urgent request “not to issue any decree concerning the definition of the term ‘Jew’” is a case in point; for “with all these foolish commitments we will only be tying our hands” (Nuremberg Document No. 626, letter to Berger dated July 28, 1942, photostatic copy at the Centre de Documentation Juive).
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63 The formulation “The will of the Fuehrer is the supreme law” is found in all official rules and regulations governing the conduct of the Party and the SS. The best source on this subject is Otto Gauweiler, Rechtseinrichtungen und Rechtsaufgaben der Bewegung, 1939.
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64 Heiden, op. cit., p. 292, reports the following difference between the first and the following editions of Mein Kampf: The first edition proposes the election of party officials who only after their election are vested with “unlimited power and authority”; all following editions establish appointment of party officials from above by the next higher leader. Naturally, for the stability of totalitarian regimes the appointment from above is a much more important principle than the “unlimited authority” of the appointed official. In practice, the subleaders’ authority was decisively limited through the Leader’s absolute sovereignty. See below.
Stalin, coming from the conspiratory apparatus of the Bolshevik party, probably never thought this a problem. To him, appointments in the party machine were a question of accumulation of personal power. (Yet, it was only in the thirties, after he had studied Hitler’s example, that he let himself be addressed as “leader.”) It must be admitted, however, that he could easily justify these methods by quoting Lenin’s theory that “the history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness,” and that its leadership therefore necessarily comes from without. (See What is to he done?, first published in 1902, in Collected Works, Vol. IV, Book II.) The point is that Lenin considered the Communist Party as the “most progressive” part of the working class and at the same time “the lever of political organization” which “directs the whole mass of the proletariat,” i.e., an organization outside and above the class. (See W. H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, ¡917–1921, New York, 1935, II, 361.) Nevertheless, Lenin did not question the validity of inner-party democracy, though he was inclined to restrict democracy to the working class itself.
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65 Hitler, op. cit., Book II, chapter xi.
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66 Ibid. This principle was strictly enforced as soon as the Nazis seized power. Of 7 million members of the Hitler youth only 50,000 were accepted for party membership in 1937. See the preface by H. L. Childs to The Nazi Primer.—Compare also Gottfried Neesse, “Die verfassungsrechtliche Gestaltung der Ein-Partei,” in Zeitschift für die gesamte Staalswissenschaft, 1938, Band 98, p. 678: “Even the
One-Party must never grow to the point where it would embrace the whole population. It is ‘total’ because of its ideological influence on the nation.”
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67 See Hitler’s differentiation between the “radical people” who alone were prepared to become members of the party and hundreds of thousands of sympathizers who were too “cowardly” to make the necessary sacrifice. op. cit., he. cit.
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68 See Hitler: chapter on the SA in op. cit., Book II, chapter ix, second part.
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69 In translating Verfugungstruppe, i.e., the special units of the SS which originally were supposed to be at Hitler’s special disposal, as shock troops, I follow O. C. Giles, The Gestapo. Oxford Pamphlets on World Affairs, No. 36, 1940.
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70 The most important source for the organization and history of the SS is Himmler’s “Wesen und Aufgabe der SS und der Polizei,” in Sainmelliefle ausgewahlter Vortrage und Reden, 1939. In the course of the war, when the ranks of the Waffen-SS had to be filled with enlistments owing to losses at the front, the Waffen-SS lost its elite character within the SS to such an extent that now the General SS, i.e., the higher Fuehrer Corps, once again represented the real nuclear elite of the movement.
Very revealing documentary material for this last phase of the SS can be found in the archives of the Hoover Library, Himmler File, Folder 278. It shows that the SS went about its recruiting both among foreign workers and the native population by deliberately imitating the methods and rules of the French Foreign Legion. Enlistment among the Germans was based on an order by Hitler (never published) dated December, 1942, according to which “the 1925 class [should] be drafted into the Waffen-SS” (Himmler in a letter to Bormann). Conscription and enlistment were handled ostensibly on a voluntary basis. Precisely what this amounted to can be seen from numerous reports of SS leaders entrusted with this assignment. A report dated July 21, 1943, describes how the police surround the hall in which French workers are to be enlisted, how the French first sing the Marseillaise and then try to jump out of the windows. Attempts among German youth were scarcely more encouraging. Although they were put under extraordinary pressure and told that “they certainly would not want to join the ‘dirty gray hordes’” of the army, only 18 out of 220 members of the Hitler youth reported for duty (according to a report of April 30, 1943, submitted by Häussler, head of Conscription Center Southwest of the Waffen-SS); all others perferred to join the Wehrmacht. It is possible that the greater losses of the SS, as compared with those of the Wehrmacht, entered into their decisions (See Karl O. Paetel, “Die SS,” in Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, January, 1954). But that this factor alone could not have been decisive is proved by the following: As early as January, 1940, Hitler had ordered the drafting of SA-men into the Waffen-SS, and the results for Koenigsberg, based on a report that has been preserved, were listed as follows: 1807 SA-men were called up “for police service”; of these, 1094 failed to report; 631 were found to be unfit; 82 were fit fot service in the SS.