The Origins of Totalitarianism
Page 94
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108 See Kravchenko, op. cit., p. 422. “No properly indoctrinated Communist felt that the Party was ‘lying’ in professing one set of policies in public and its very opposite in private.”
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109 “The National Socialist despises his fellow German, the SA man the other National Socialists, the SS man the SA man” (Heiden, op. cit., p. 308).
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110 Himmler originally selected the candidates of the SS from photographs. Later a Race Commission, before which the applicant had to appear in person, approved or disapproved of his racial appearance. See Himmler on “Organization and Obligation of the SS and the Police,” Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 616 ff.
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111 Himmler was well aware of the fact that it was one of his “most important and lasting accomplishments” to have transformed the racial question from “a negative concept based on matter-of-course antisemitism” into “an organizational task for building up the SS” (Der Reichsführer SS und Chef der deutschen Polizei, “exclusively for use within the police”; undated). Thus, “for the first time, the racial question had been placed into, or, better still, had become the focal point, going far beyond the negative concept underlying the natural hatred of Jews. The revolutionary idea of the Fuehrer had been infused with warm lifeblood” (Der Weg der SS. Der Reichsführer SS. SS-Hauptamt-Schulungsamt. Dust jacket: “Not for publication,” undated, p. 25).
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112 As soon as he was appointed chief of the SS in 1929, Himmler introduced the principle of racial selection and marriage laws and added: “The SS knows very well that this order is of great significance. Taunts, sneers or misunderstanding don’t touch us; the future is ours.” Quoted from d’Alquen, op. cit. And again, fourteen years later, in his speech at Kharkov (Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 572 ff.), Himmler reminds his SS leaders that “we were the first really to solve the problem of blood by action ...and by problem of blood, we of course do not mean antisemitism. Antisemitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness.... But for us the question of blood was a reminder of our own worth, a reminder of what is actually the basis holding this German people together.”
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113 Himmler, op. cit., Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 616 ff.
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114 Himmler in his speech at Posen, Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 558.
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1 The Nazis fully realized that the seizure of power might lead to the establishment of absolutism. “National Socialism, however, has not spearheaded the struggle against liberalism in order to bog down in absolutism and start the game all over again” (Werner Best, Die deutsche Polizei, p. 20). The warning expressed here, as in countless other places, is directed against the state’s claim to be absolute.
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2 Trotsky’s theory, first pronounced in 1905, did of course not differ from the revolutionary strategy of all Leninists in whose eyes “Russia herself was merely the first domain, the first rampart, of international revolution: her interests were to be subordinated to the supernational strategy of militant socialism. For the time being, however, the boundaries of both Russia and victorious socialism were the same” (Isaac Deutscher, Stalin. A Political Biography, New York and London, 1949, p. 243).
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3 “The year 1934 is significant because of the new Party statute, announced at the Seventeenth Party Congress, which provided that “periodic ...purges are to [be] carried out for the systematic cleansing of the Party.” (Quoted from A. Avtorkhanov, “Social Differentiation and Contradictions in the Party,” Bulletin of the Institute for the Study of the USSR, Munich, February, 1956.)—The party purges during the early years of the Russian Revolution have nothing in common with their later totalitarian perversion into an instrument of permanent instability. The first purges were conducted by local control commissions before an open forum to which party and non-party members had free access. They were planned as a democratic control organ against bureaucratic corruption in the party and “were to serve as a substitute for real elections” (Deutscher, op. cit., pp. 233-34).—An excellent short survey of the development of the purges can be found in Avtorkhanov’s recent article which also refutes the legend that the murder of Kirov gave rise to the new policy. The general purge had begun before Kirov’s death which was no more than a “convenient pretext to give it added drive.” In view of the many “inexplicable and mysterious” circumstances surrounding Kirov’s murder, one suspects that the “convenient pretext” was carefully planned and executed by Stalin himself. See Khrushchev’s “Speech on Stalin,” New York Times, June 5, 1956.
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4 Deutscher, op. cit., p. 282, describes the first attack on Trotsky’s “permanent revolution” and Stalin’s counterformulation of “socialism in one country” as an accident of political maneuvering. In 1924, Stalin’s “immediate purpose was to descredit Trotsky.... Searching in Trotsky’s past, the triumvirs came across the theory of ‘permanent revolution,’ which he had formulated in 1905....It was in the course of that polemic that Stalin arrived at his formula of ‘socialism in one country.’”
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5 The liquidation of the Rohm faction in lune, 1934, was preceded by a short interval of stabilization. At the beginning of the year, Rudolf Diets, the chief of the political police in Berlin, could report that there were no more illegal (“revolutionary”) arrests by the SA and that older arrests of this kind were being investigated. (Nazi Conspiracy. U. S. Government. Washington, 1946, V, 205.) In April, 1934, Reichsminister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick, an old member of the Nazi Party, issued a decree to place restrictions upon the exercise of “protective custody” (ibid., III, 555) in consideration of the “stabilization of the national situation.” (See Das Archiv, April, 1934, p. 31.) This decree, however, was never published (Nazi Conspiracy, VII, 1099; II, 259). The political police of Prussia had prepared a special report on the excesses of the SA for Hitler in the year 1933 and suggested the prosecution of the SA leaders named therein.
Hitler solved the situation by killing these SA leaders without legal proceedings and discharging all those police officers who had opposed the SA. (See the sworn affidavit of Rudolf Diels, ibid., V, 224.) In this manner he had safeguarded himself completely against all legalization and stabilization. Among the numerous jurists who enthusiastically served the “National Socialist idea” only very few comprehended what was really at stake. In this group belongs primarily Theodor Maunz, whose essay Gestalt and Recht der Polizei (Hamburg, 1943) is quoted with approval even by those authors, who, like Paul Werner, belonged to the higher Fuehrer Corps of the SS.
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6 Robert Ley, Der Weg zur Ordensburg (undated, about 1936). “Special edition ...for the Fuehrer Corps of the Party ... Not for free sale.”
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7 Heinrich Himmler, “Die Schutzstaffel,” in Grundlagen, Aufbau unit Wirtschajtsordnung des nationalsozialistischen Staates, Nr. 7b. This constant radicalization of the principle of racial selection can be found in all phases of Nazi policy. Thus, the first to be exterminated were the full Jews, to be followed by those who were half-Jewish and one-quarter Jewish; or first the insane, to be followed by the incurably sick and, eventually, by all families in which there were any “incurably sick.” The “selection which can never stand still” did not stop before the SS itself, either. A Fuehrer decree dated May 19, 1943, ordered that all men who were bound to foreigners by family ties, marriage or friendship were to be eliminated from state, party, Wehrmacht and economy; this affected 1,200 SS leaders (see Hoover Library Archives, Himmler File, Folder 330).
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8 It is common knowledge that in Russia “the repression of socialists and anarchists had grown in severity in the same ratio as the country became pacified” (Anton Ciliga, The Russian Enigma, London, 1940, p. 244). Deutscher, op. cit., p. 218, thinks that the reason for the vanishing of the “libertarian spirit of the revolution” at the moment of victory could be found in a changed attitude of the peasants: they turned against Bolshevism “the more resolutely the more they became confident that the power of the landlords and the White generals had been broken.” This explanation seems rather weak in view of the dimensions which terror was to assume after 1930. It also fails to take into account that full terror did not break loose in the twenties but in the thirties, when the opposition of the peasant classes was no longer an active factor in the situation.—Khrushchev, too (op. cit.), notes that “extreme repressive measures were not used” against the opposition during the fight against the Trotskyites and the Bukharinites, but that “the repression against them began” much later after they had long been defeated.
Terror by the Nazi regime reached its peak during the war, when the German nation was actually “united.” Its preparation goes back to 1936 when all organized interior resistance had vanished and Himmler proposed an expansion of the concentration camps. Characteristic of this spirit of oppression regardless of resistance is Himmler’s speech at Kharkov before the SS leaders in 1943: “We have only one task,...to carry on the racial struggle without mercy.... We will never let that excellent weapon, the dread and terrible reputation which preceded us in the battles for Kharkov, fade, but will constantly add new meaning to it” (Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 572 ff.).
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9 See Theodor Maunz, op. cit., pp. 5 and 49.—How little the Nazis thought of the laws and regulations they themselves had issued, and which were regularly published by W. Hoche under the title of Die Gesetzgebung des Kabinetts Hitler (Berlin, 1933 ff.), may be gathered from a random remark made by one of their constitutional jurists. He felt that in spite of the absence of a comprehensive new legal order there nevertheless had occurred a “comprehensive reform” (see Ernst R. Huber, “Die deutsche Polizei,” in Zeitschriftfür die gesamte Staatswissenschaft, Band 101, 1940/1, p. 273 ff.).
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10 Maunz, op. cit., p. 49. To my knowledge, Maunz is the only one among Nazi authors who has mentioned this circumstance and sufficiently emphasized it. Only by going through the five volumes of Verfügungen, Anordnungen, Bekanntgaben, which were collected and printed during the war by the party chancellery on instructions of Martin Bormann, is it possible to obtain an insight into this secret legislation by which Germany in fact was governed. According to the preface, the volumes were “meant solely for internal party work and to be treated as confidential.” Four of these evidently very rare volumes, compared to which the Hoche collection of the legislation of Hitler’s cabinet is merely a façade, are in the Hoover Library.
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11 This was the Fuehrer’s “warning” to the jurists in 1933, quoted by Hans Frank, Nationalsozialistische Leitsätze für ein neues deutsches Strafrecht, Zweiter Teil, 1936, p. 8.
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12 Deutscher, op. cit., p. 381.—There were earlier attempts at establishing a constitution, in 1918 and 1924. The constitutional reform in 1944 under which some of the Soviet Republics were to have their own foreign representatives and their own armies, was a tactical maneuver designed to assure the Soviet Union of some additional votes in the United Nations.
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13 See Deutscher, op. cit., p. 375.—Upon close reading of Stalin’s speech concerning the constitution (his report to the Extraordinary Eighth Soviet Congress of November 25, 1936) it becomes evident that it was never meant to be definitive. Stalin stated explicitly: “This is the framework of our constitution at the given historical moment. Thus the draft of the new constitution represents the sum total of the road already traveled, the sum total of achievements already existing.” In other words, the constitution was already dated the moment it was announced, and was merely of historical interest. That this is not just an arbitrary interpretation is proved by Molotov, who in his speech about the constitution picks up Stalin’s theme and underlines the provisional nature of the whole matter: “We have realized only the first, the lower phase, of Communism. Even this first phase of Communism, Socialism, is by no means completed; only its skeletal structure has been erected” (see Die Verjassung des Sozialistischen Staates der Arbeiter und Bauern, Editions Prométhée, Strasbourg, 1937, pp. 42 and 84).
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14 “German constitutional life is thus characterized by its utter shapelessness, in contrast to Italy” (Franz Neumann, Behemoth, 1942, Appendix, p. 521).
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15 Quoted from Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, New York 1939, p. 695.
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16 Stephen H. Roberts, The House that Hitler Built, London, 1939, p. 72.
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17 Justice Robert H. Jackson, in his opening speech at the Nuremberg Trials, based his description of the political structure of Nazi Germany consistently on the co-existence of “two governments in Germany—the real and the ostensible. The forms of the German Republic were maintained for a time and it was the outward and visible government. But the real authority in the State was outside of and above the law and rested in the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party” (Nazi Conspiracy, I, 125). See also the distinction of Roberts, op. cit., p. 101, between the party and a shadow state: “Hitler obviously leans toward increasing the duplication of functions.”
Students of Nazi Germany seem agreed that the state had only ostensible authority. For the only exception, see Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State, New York and London, 1941, who claims the co-existence of a “normative and a prerogative state” living in constant friction as “competitive and not complementary parts of the German Reich.” According to Fraenkel, the normative state was maintained by the Nazis for the protection of the capitalist order and private property and had full authority in all economic matters, while the prerogative state of the party ruled supreme in all political matters.
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18 “For those positions of state power which the National Socialists could not occupy with their own people, they created corresponding “shadow offices’ in their own party organization, in this way setting up a second state beside the state...” (Konrad Heiden, Der Fuehrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power, Boston, 1944, p. 616).
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19 O. C. Giles, The Gestapo, Oxford Pamphlets on World Affairs, No. 36, 1940, describes the constant overlapping of party and state departments.
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20 Characteristic is a memo of Minister of the Interior Frick, who resented the fact that Himmler, the leader of the SS, should have superior power. See Nazi Conspiracy, III, 547.—Noteworthy in this respect also are Rosenberg’s notes about a discussion with Hitler in 1942: Rosenberg had never before the war held a state position but belonged to the intimate circle around Hitler. Now that he had become Reichsminister for the Eastern Occupied Territories, he was constantly confronted with “direct actions” of other plenipotentiaries (chiefly SS-men) who overlooked him because he now belonged to the ostensible apparatus of the state. See ibid., IV, 65 ff. The same happened to Hans Frank, Governor General of Poland. There were only two cases in which the attainment of ministerial rank did not entail any loss of power and prestige: that of Minister of Propaganda Goebbels, and of Minister of the Interior Himmler. As regards Himmler, we possess a memorandum, presumably from the year 1935, which illustrates the systematic singlemindedness of the Nazis in regulating the relations between party and state. This memorandum, which apparently originated in Hitler’s immediate entourage and was
found among the correspondence of the Reichsadjudantur of the Fuehrer and the Gestapo, contains a warning against making Himmler state secretary of the Ministry of the Interior because in that case he could “no longer be a political leader” and “would be alienated from the party.” Here, too, we find mention of the technical principle regulating the relations between party and state: “A Reichsleiter [a high party functionary] must not be subordinated to a Reichsminister [a high state functionary].” (The undated, unsigned memorandum, entitled Die geheime Staatspolizei, can be found in the archives of the Hoover Library, File P. Wiedemann.)
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21 See the “Brief Report on Activities of Rosenberg’s Foreign Affairs Bureau of the Party from 1933 to 1943,” ibid., Ill, 27 ff.
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22 Based on a Fuehrer decree of August 12, 1942. See Verfügungen, Anordnungen, Bekanntgaben, op. cit., Nr. A 54/42.
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23 ”Behind the ostensible government was a real government,” which Victor Kravchenko (/ Chose Freedom: The Personal Life of a Soviet Official, New York, 1946, p. 111) saw in the “secret police system.”
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24 See Arthur Rosenberg, A History of Bolshevism, London, 1934, chapter vi. “There are in reality two political edifices in Russia that rise parallel to one another: the shadow government of the Soviets and the de facto government of the Bolshevik Party.”
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25 Deutscher, op. cit., pp. 255–256, sums up Stalin’s report to the Twelfth Party Congress about the work of the personnel department during his first year in the General Secretariat: “The year before only 27 per cent of the regional leaders of the trade unions were members of the party. At present 57 per cent of them were Communists. The percentage of Communists in the management of co-operatives had risen from 5 to 50 per cent; and in the commanding staffs of the armed forces from 16 to 24. The same happened in all other institutions which Stalin described as the ‘transmission belts’ connecting the party with the people.”