The other document consisted of my “Secret Conversations” of 1941-44. In fact they were simply a record of the small talk with which I used to entertain my female secretaries and, from time to time, some other guests. They owe their existence to my former secretary and subsequent Head of the Party Chancellery, Martin Bormann. Starting in the summer of 1941, Bormann was the closest to me of all my associates. When my workday ended, his began, with the result, as he once told his son, that for years on end he never slept more than five hours a night. Brutal—he readily did all kinds of jobs others had no taste for—but highly efficient, I used to call him my mole who moved mountains overnight.
One and all, Bormann’s aides hated him and kept complaining about him. One even claimed that he was as he was because, growing up in the countryside, his early contacts had been mainly with animals! I laughed but kept him nevertheless. He acted as a useful barrier between me and them, enabling me to take unpopular measures without assuming the guilt for them. At one point he decided that my every word was immensely valuable and had to be written down so posterity could seek enlightenment in it. In fact I liked talking about all kinds of things, related and unrelated. Doing so was a form of relaxation. And I could see no reason why he shouldn’t do as he proposed. But secret conversations? Anyone who makes this claim simply has not read a single word of them. In truth, the conversations are a bit like the present book. Only, perhaps, not as well organized.
Thus four of these five “basic” documents were rather dubious. That did not prevent historians from lifting entire paragraphs from them and throwing them at one another in the hope of reconstructing the path I had taken. They just could not make up their minds: Were all my objectives present from the first? Or did some of them at least develop later on? How consistent was I? What was real? What was make-believe? What was strategy? What was tactics? Did I really hate the Jews? (Of course I did and with very good reason, too.) Or did I simply use them as scapegoats, a target I could present to my countrymen for them to unite against and to shoot at? Entire libraries were written about these questions. As if anyone, least of all a statesman, is born fully grown and armed like Minerva emerging from Jupiter’s brow. As if flexibility and the willingness to use the opportunities that come one’s way are necessarily the opposite of long-term consistency. And so on. All these are academic debates whose true significance, if any, is limited. Better leave them to the universities, where they belong.
Nevertheless, at the risk of repeating myself, I want to put the essence of my Weltanschauung on paper once more. Yes, I put Germany first. Deutschland, Deutschland über alles. Yes, I believed that in order to harness the masses to the national chariot, any modern political movement worth its salt had to profess and practice some kind of socialism. But the socialism I had in mind was not of the Marxist variety. Marxism was disqualified by the fact that it was, or claimed to be, international and by its desire to do away with private property. Plus, it was Jewish. Yes, I came to hate Jews with all my heart; even if that hatred did not have its first roots in my childhood in Linz but a few years later in Vienna, right before World War I. Yes, I loathed democracy and insisted on the Führerprinzip as the only sound way on which to base a polity. Yes, I despised the kind of reactionary ideology on which the Second Reich was built. Yes, the state I wanted to build was going to be of a completely different kind. Not reactionary, but revolutionary. Not democratic, but totalitarian. And not international, but national socialist.
No, I did not believe in individual freedom of the liberal sort. No, I did not believe all men (and women, but that is a different story) were created equal. For this there were two reasons. First, mankind originated not in one race but in two or more—this being a point which the most recent anthropological discoveries, which are based on DNA, seem to confirm. Some of the races into which mankind is divided are valuable and create culture. Others are inferior and can do nothing but destroy it. Among the latter, the most prominent and the most dangerous, dangerous because of their parasitical nature, are the Jews. Working now in secret, now openly, but always in unison, their true goal is world domination.
Second, nature has decreed that life should be a struggle—vide, on this point, the great Charles Darwin and our own Ernst Häckel. In this struggle the strong emerge on top whereas the weak are pressed to the wall. And those who do not take part lose. That applies both to the lives of private individuals and to foreign policy as it is conducted among states. For us Germans, the supreme goal of that policy ought to be the acquisition of living space in the east. To do so we had to use every ounce of military force at our disposal. Am I, my dear professors, making myself clear?
Meanwhile, the Party was not doing well. That, in fact, was the reason why the various state governments lifted the ban on my public speaking. Miserable worms that they were, they firmly believed the Party and I were finished. They could not have been more wrong! The event that triggered our ascent was the financial crisis of late 1929. I am no economist, and my interest in economics has always been limited. Instead, I believed that, if the will is there, the means will follow. I can say, in all modesty, that my own career itself provides the best possible proof of that.
My secret in gaining adherents was to do the opposite of what most politicians, especially in democracies, do. I neither tried to put voters to sleep nor to reach them by way of rational arguments. Nor did I promise them, say, cheaper kindergartens, subsidized housing, better railway service, and free birth control. Except perhaps in the U.S., as the land of the dollar, and among the English, the nation of shopkeepers, such promises will seldom get a leader very far. Look at Switzerland. It may well be the most democratic country in the world. But it is also the most tepid and most uninteresting one. There is nothing there but banks, cheese, chocolate, and cuckoo-clocks! When the Swiss are in doubt, which, owing to their immense wealth, rarely happens, what they do is sit down for dinner.
No. To enthuse the masses, to infuse them with the kind of spirit with which great deeds are performed, one has to do two things. The first is to make them feel that they are the victims of an injustice, to point out those responsible, and to turn them into the object of hatred. The second, which follows naturally from the first, is to demand purposeful work and sacrifice so as to bring about a better future. There is nothing like purposeful work, even such as is hard and/or dangerous, to pull people out of their lethargy and to make them happy. Sacrifice makes them feel better, nobler, than they are. Blood, toil, tears, and sweat. The imams who are currently busy radicalizing Europe’s Muslims and turning them against the native Aryan majority understand this all too well. Like me, they are using democracy against itself. Like me, they have taken the position of the underdog. Arousing sympathy and making them, the imams, hard to hate; when people started to realize the truth, it was too late.
Anyhow, the years from 1925 to 1929 were relatively prosperous. But the prosperity, based on huge American loans as it was, was artificial. When Wall Street collapsed in October 1929, the first thing the banks did was to call in the loans. The effect was to make the entire structure, which people like Gustav Stresemann had built so painfully from 1925 on, disintegrate like a house of cards. First in the U.S. and then in the rest of the world as well. Governments did what they could—or thought they could—do in order to cope with the crisis. As, for example, by raising interest rates in an attempt to maintain the value of their currencies and to prevent money from fleeing abroad; slashing budgets; reducing salaries; and believe it or not, increasing taxes so as to leave people with less spending power than they had. All this only made things even worse than they were.
In the post-2008 world, when people speak of “an economic recession” or even “an economic depression,” what they normally mean is that GDP goes down by a few percent and that there are some more unemployed. A bank or two may go under; but the system, thanks to massive injections of money like the one provided by President Obama in 2009, survives more or less intact. In my tim
e things were very different. Banks, having had the stuffing knocked out of them, collapsed seriatim, taking along the hard-won savings of millions. By 1932 our industrial production had fallen by over forty percent. The plight of our farmers was, if anything, worse still. Unable to compete with cheap American, Argentinian, and Australian imports, many of them went into debt and had to sell their farms. The effect of all this was to drive up the number of unemployed from 1.5 million to 6 million, just over a quarter of the entire workforce. All this was at a time when, since relatively few married women worked outside the home, families were much more dependent on the earnings of the male breadwinner than they later became.
All over Germany, men got up in the morning, ate whatever little there was to eat, and did not know what to do next. They gathered on the street corners. They talked. They collected cigarette butts others had thrown away and smoked them. They begged for work—any kind of work, however nasty or low paying. Those among them who had families to feed lost their self-respect as well as that of their dependents. One outcome was a sharp drop in the marriage rate. In view of the fast-breeding hordes in the east, that was the last thing we needed.
Some people lived more or less illegally in huts or shacks erected in the so-called Schrebergarten, small garden plots surrounding many German cities which people work in on weekends. They were the lucky ones. Others rented—listen to this—ropes strung out by café owners. For ten pfennig a night, they were allowed to rest their backs against them! Last not least, entire classes of young university graduates, the flower of the nation, were unable to find jobs. That was why, once in power, we started cutting down on academia.
At the end of October 1929, all these troubles began to work in our favor. Not that it happened of itself or was easy going. There was plenty of opposition, some of it very violent as the Communist Red Guards challenged our SA in the streets. Our allies, Hugenberg’s Conservative German National People’s Party, played their own games. Now they joined us; now they coyly withdrew. Most galling of all, Gregor Strasser’s younger brother, Otto, chose this moment to challenge me with his radical Left-wing views. I met with him but could not find common ground with him. Even his brother agreed that his agitation against the Party was pure lunacy. In the end he left me no choice but to expel him, whereupon he founded his own “Black Front.”
Somehow we overcame all the difficulties. We worked like men possessed. Mindful that Germany’s future was at stake, and sensing our opportunity, we were men possessed. We, a small fringe party, held as many as a hundred propaganda meetings every day to such effect that, in a private letter I wrote in February 1930, I felt confident enough to prophesy that we would gain power in two and a half to three years. That estimate proved to be spot on.
In March 1930 the Social Democratic Government of Hermann Müller collapsed, and he himself resigned. Some historians have blamed Hindenburg for not allowing him to continue to govern with the aid of the famous Article 48 of the Constitution; the one which enabled him, the President, to ignore the Reichstag and to govern without it if necessary. They forget that, by the time Hindenburg dismissed him, Müller was already a sick man. Deeply disappointed, he no longer had what it took. In his place Hindenburg appointed Heinrich Brüning of the Catholic Center Party. Brüning, who assumed office in March 1930, governed, or at any rate tried to govern, Germany for a little more than two years. A few historians, seeking to belittle my role, have claimed that some of the economic measures we National Socialists later took, such as the Autobahn (motorway) program, originated during that period. If so, Brüning must have kept them well hidden, for the crisis only became worse and worse. By the time he finally left office in mid-1932 the situation had reached nadir.
The first half of 1930 brought us some successes in local elections. That was encouraging, but the real test was still ahead of us. Once more, our will strengthened by our realization that it was now or never, we pulled out all the stops. In Franconia alone, a district made up primarily of small towns and villages, we held over one thousand meetings. The total number of meetings we organized in anticipation of the elections of September of the same year during the last months of the campaign was no fewer than 34,000. People, the authorities specifically included, were astounded by our energy, our determination, and our willingness to take risks. For example, we entered “red” working-class districts in which we were not exactly welcome and where our brave SA men were often attacked and beaten up.
Traveling from one meeting to another, I myself gave twenty big speeches in six weeks. Each one was attended by 10,000-20,000 people. As I did so, I deliberately downplayed the Jewish card. Not, of course, because I had suddenly concluded that the Jews were or could ever be decent, law-abiding citizens of the Reich. But because voters, enveloped in misery or desperately worried that they might lose their jobs and, with it, their standing in society, were, at that moment, not terribly interested in them. Instead, I hammered away on Germany’s collapse. Blaming the Treaty of Versailles and parliamentary democracy, I announced that, with the voters’ help, we would build something different and much, much better. But I also had to attend to the usual party routine: conferring, organizing, raising money, appointing, and occasionally dismissing those who did not fall into line or failed to perform as required. Standing for hours in my open car, right arm extended, I took the salute in God knows many SA march-pasts. To be sure, I trained with the aid of springs; but how I ever did it I can no longer imagine. Over time it affected my physique, leaving me with my right shoulder slightly higher than the left one.
This was before public opinion polls, a typical American invention dating to the 1930s, started being used in Europe. Not that it mattered much. As we know, polls are very often wrong. Knowing, as I do, something about the way states and politicians steer public opinion, I could easily point out the reasons for this. Polls can even be dangerous. Told that party so-and-so is either going down to defeat or to win big-time, many people will not bother to cast their vote. Polls, in other words, can nullify their own results in advance. Basically, all we had to gauge how well we were doing was our intuition. My intuition, above all: going from strength to strength, as I did for many years, I showed that I understood the German people better than anyone at the time or, perhaps, at any time.
To this must be added the fact that such polls are not exactly suited for a strong Führer regime such as mine. I never believed in transparency, freedom of information, and similar drivel people today value or, in a great many cases, pretend to value. My collaborators and I wanted to control public opinion, not just to find out where it was blowing. As a result, it was only after World War II had ended that the first surveys were held in our Motherland.
The elections took place on 14 September. When the results were announced, it was as if Germany had been shaken by an earthquake. Just a decade earlier, we National Socialists had set out as a ridiculously small club of fewer than ten cranky people. Now we succeeded in making over six million Germans vote for us. Consequently, the number of our representatives in the Reichstag grew six-fold, to 107 seats out of a total of 577, making us the second strongest party after the Social Democrats. On our heels came the Communists, who had also made big gains, and the trusty old Catholic Center, which had registered a small loss.
All the rest suffered, and suffered badly. That was particularly true of the traditional Right—people who, their minds frozen in 1914, had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Listening to them, one would have thought the economic crisis had never existed and that millions of their countrymen were not suffering! Several factors accounted for our success. Among them were our ability to attract people in the small cities of the north, with the result that the number of Protestants who voted for us exceeded that of the Catholics for the first time. In addition, many young people, whose first election this was, cast their ballots in our favor.
My associates and I were beside ourselves with joy and made the most of our triumph. But our real work, I knew
very well, was just beginning.
10. Reaching for Power
As if to confirm my poor opinion of democracy, the Reichstag that emerged from the September 1930 elections included the representatives of no fewer than fifteen different parties and micro-parties. Several of the latter only held three seats. It was a true Babylon of conflicting programs. If, indeed, the miserable ideas most of them claimed to represent deserved that term.
As always, since the years before World War I, the strongest single party was the Social Democrats with 143 seats. That figure represented just under a quarter of the total, meaning that building a coalition would be extremely difficult. This was particularly true because we and the Communists together held 184 seats. This left the theoretical possibility of a Social-Democratic cum Catholic Center coalition, except that the Right did not go along. The outcome was a stalemate, and it was into that stalemate that Brüning, citing Article 48, stepped.
The next twenty-eight months, ending on 30 January 1933, were, for us, a period of frustration. It was not that our momentum had been spent. To the contrary; almost until the last moment, we went from one triumph to the next. So great was the number of those who now flocked to join the Party that the latter’s character was totally transformed. The fact that many of the new members were not idealists committed to helping Germany out of its difficulties but opportunists eager to join our bandwagon hardly requires mentioning. This problem, incidentally, plagued us throughout the years of the Third Reich. At times it obliged us to close the lists so as to gain breathing space, to clear the air, and to prevent ourselves from being flooded.
Hitler in Hell Page 14