How Could This Happen

by Dan McMillan

  The Moroccan Crisis ended in an embarrassing defeat for the German government and drew the French, British, and Russians closer together in their alliance against Germany. In January 1912, Germany’s ruling elites suffered an even more devastating blow: the socialist party took more than one-third of the vote in the national elections, becoming Germany’s largest party. The Moroccan crisis and the election of 1912 demonstrated the complete failure of nationalist politics. Germany was surrounded by powerful military enemies whom she had alienated by her bullying foreign policy. At home, Germany’s ruling elites faced greater pressure for democratic reform than ever before, and a socialist revolution seemed eminently possible. Their backs against the wall, most of these elites dug in their heels against any reform, and many adopted a more radical set of ideas, ideas that foreshadowed the core beliefs of Nazism. Drawing together strands of thought that had been developing on the German Right for over a decade, Heinrich Class articulated these ideas in 1912 in a manifesto entitled If I Were the Emperor. Class was chairman of the Pan-German League. His book went through five editions before war broke out in 1914.7

  Class anticipated all the major elements of Nazi ideology along with much of Hitler’s domestic political strategy once he took power in 1933: the hope for a harmonious national community, devoid of class conflict and cemented by strong feelings of national identity; identification of the German nation as a race that was genetically superior to other races; condemnation of the Jews, a supposedly destructive race, for all conflicts between Germans, and promotion of a national community defined by excluding them; rejection of democracy as being destructive of the national community; and belief that a charismatic leader could unite the nation and suppress social conflict by acting as a dictator.

  Shortly before the outbreak of war in 1914, Class saw Germany’s situation as desperate. He invoked the fall of the Roman Empire, and asked whether Germany, too, would not sink into chaos. “It is not yet too late to save a noble people,” Class declared histrionically, “but we cannot delay much longer.” Germany’s foreign policy position had worsened, and domestic political divisions had intensified. Class worried that the country’s leadership lacked the will to make the “brutal decisions” that would be needed to solve these problems.8

  Of the “brutal decisions” Class demanded, the most important was to take the vote away from the German working class. Whereas all adult males could vote in national elections, Class wanted to limit the suffrage to men who paid taxes. As he saw it, universal male suffrage silenced or “disenfranchised” Germany’s elites, drowning the voices of society’s natural leaders in the chorus of the propertyless and uneducated. Even worse, lower-class voters acted on primitive “mass instincts” and were easily misled by unscrupulous demagogues. Class argued that Jews were entirely responsible for the rise of the socialist party and the labor movement. Using their alleged control of the press, Jews had cleverly manipulated millions of German voters by exploiting their ignorance and appealing to their baser instincts. Thus the constitution would have to be changed to deprive these misled masses of the vote. This change would have to come “at any price,” including a coup backed by military force. “Our people is deathly ill,” he warned, and compared a coup to a father forcing a sick child to undergo a painful operation.9

  Further steps would eliminate the harmful influence of Jews and gradually wean the German worker from socialism and bring him back into the harmonious national community. Class wanted to stop all Jewish immigration; deport all Jews who were not citizens; take away Jews’ right to vote; bar them from the civil service, the military, the legal profession, school-teaching, and theater; and forbid them to own banks and rural land. Most importantly, any newspaper with Jewish staff had to be clearly identified as a “Jewish newspaper”; the rest of the press would be marked as “German” and would not be allowed to employ Jews. The government should also replace the “poisonous” Jewish press with cheap newspapers, published at state expense, to help “win the masses back to the Fatherland.” Continuing to believe the right-wing fantasy that national pride could be a substitute for democracy and social justice, Class advocated frequent patriotic gatherings in which elites would strive for reconciliation between the warring social classes. “Patriotic festivals for the people” would help accomplish the same end. It would take some years to restore “peace and harmony” between Germany’s social classes, “once the virus causing discord has been eliminated.”10

  By “virus,” Class meant Jews, and they were absolutely central to his thinking. Just as Germany’s elites had tried to unite the country against foreign enemies, now the Jews would serve as a treacherous enemy against whom the nation could rally. By invoking the Jews’ alleged “nature,” Class marked the transition on the German Right to the specifically racist, biological anti-Semitism that would later inspire Hitler to seek the complete extinction of the Jewish people. Jews, it was now believed, could never be persuaded or forced to act in a manner less harmful to Germany. Their genetic makeup determined their destructive behavior, and they were unable to change it. Therefore, Germany had to eliminate them, whether by harsh discrimination, as Class proposed, or by outright murder, as Hitler ultimately decided. Class argued that thousands of Jews automatically acted in the same destructive way, according to their nature. The Jews were a race, he insisted, and “the race is the source of the dangers.” Throughout, Class described the Jewish people in the language of medicine and hygiene, as “the ferment of decomposition” sickening the body politic, so that if action were not taken soon, “no doctor can help anymore.” He complained that the authorities allowed “these strangers to corrupt and poison our people,” and had no doubt that “wherever sickness shows itself in the body of our nation, we find Jews who foster and nurture it.”11

  Class believed that many elites did see the danger and were ready to take “decisive action.” To inspire their efforts, they needed only a charismatic leader to rise up and guide them: “If today the Leader arises, he will wonder at how many loyal followers he has—and what valuable and selfless men rally to him.” Class described this indispensable man using the same word that became Adolf Hitler’s title: the Leader (Führer). “If salvation does not come soon,” Class warned, “then we will fall into chaos.” Only a great “Leader of the Germans” could save the day, a man who would impose Class’s “reforms” at the point of a gun if need be, including taking the vote away from millions of working-class Germans.12

  Class looked to Otto von Bismarck, founder of the German Empire, as the model for the charismatic leader. Bismarck’s extraordinary popularity and outstanding role in German politics helps explain why so many German opponents of democracy hoped that a charismatic leader would solve their problems. However, Bismarck’s precedent was probably not the most important reason why Class and countless other right-wingers longed for a mighty Leader. “Charisma” comes only partly, if at all, from the attractive personal qualities of a political leader. After all, many of Bismarck’s and Hitler’s personal qualities were unattractive in the extreme. Charisma comes above all from situations of severe crisis, when the political system has broken down, and the only remaining hope for the desperate seems to be a man of superhuman strength and skill.

  For Heinrich Class, and probably for most of Germany’s elite in 1914, the political system seemed irreparably broken, leaving them vulnerable to socialism at home and military defeat abroad. Yet their desperation went even further than naïve hopes for a superhuman Leader: some actually hoped for war between the great powers of Europe, thinking that war would resolve Germany’s political crisis and allow them to break through the ring of enemies that surrounded them. Surely, they thought, war would unite all Germans behind their leadership. Facing war on two fronts against three enemies, even socialist workers would give up their claims to economic justice and democracy, and begin to see themselves as Germans and not as workers. Moreover, a war would keep them from rising in rebellion when people like Hein
rich Class arrested their leaders and took away their right to vote. The narrowness of vision among the German elites, their selfishness and arrogance, and their capacity for self-delusion might even be funny had their behavior not had such tragic consequences.

  In the 1912 edition of If I Were the Emperor, Class praised war as “the awakener of all good, healthy, strong energies in the nation,” a political tonic that would bring to life “everything that is great and prepared to sacrifice, and thus is selfless,” cleansing the German soul of selfish “pettiness.” To Class and his allies, of course, the German worker’s demands for fair wages and democratic government sprang from the selfishness and materialism with which Jews had supposedly poisoned the lower class. Class wanted this war even though he recognized that Germany’s enemies could deploy superior resources, and that it would take the nation’s “entire strength” to win. However, victory promised rich rewards: an election would send a nationalist majority to parliament, and this parliament would enact Class’s antidemocratic reforms. He expected “the most vehement resistance” to his reforms from “those whose imaginary rights would have to be diminished by the reform of the Empire.” He thought that resistance to his “reforms” could be overcome—and the reforms pushed through using the normal constitutional process—by the “spiritual uplift of an overwhelming experience,” that is, a general European war. “Thus,” he reasoned, “a war that a statesman undertook in service of this domestic political goal would be justified.” Class wanted to inflict the calamity of war on Europe’s millions in the hope of blocking democracy indefinitely.13

  Class’s views were extreme, but he was hardly alone in holding them. Many tens of thousands of men from German society’s elite, quite possibly a majority of the country’s most influential citizens, joined and led the many nationalist pressure groups that so badly poisoned German political life on the eve of World War I. These were owners and managers of corporations, titled aristocrats, military officers, wealthy landowners, and especially men who worked in occupations that required a university degree: higher civil servants, doctors and lawyers, and teachers at college preparatory high schools. Fully one-half of the Pan-German League’s leaders came from this educated sector of society. More than 15,000 such educated men belonged to the German Colonial Society at one point, more than 22,000 to the Eastern Borderland Association, and probably tens of thousands to other nationalist leagues. Since there were only about 135,000 university-trained elites in Germany in 1914, it seems clear that a huge fraction of Germany’s best-educated men belonged to such groups. Especially given that educated elites tended to dominate the nationalist groups they joined, it seems probable that most of Germany’s elites of education, or at least those who were politically most active, had committed themselves to radical nationalism by the eve of World War I. These pressure groups thus prepared a whole generation of Germany’s leading citizens to support the most radical nationalist of all, Adolf Hitler.14

  During the twenty-five years before World War I, the future perpetrators of the Holocaust were born. They spent their formative years influenced by Imperial Germany’s poisonous political climate and by the world war that it produced. Adolf Hitler first saw the light of day in German Austria on April 20, 1889. Many of his future henchmen were also born before 1900, grew to manhood before the end of World War I, and witnessed the war’s massive slaughter as combat soldiers. Rudolf Höss, although born late enough (1900) to have escaped the fighting, lied about his age to get into the army, saw combat, and went on to become the commanding officer of the Auschwitz death camp. A slightly younger generation, consisting of men born between 1900 and 1910, supplied most of the leading organizers of the Holocaust, including Heinrich Himmler, future head of the SS, and his deputy, Reinhard Heydrich. Although too young to fight in the war, they absorbed a German nationalism made all the more ferocious by the hatreds born of bloody warfare. Not experiencing firsthand the terror of combat, they eagerly glorified the war and the hardened men who had fought it, modeling themselves on a new and brutal ideal of what the German soldier should be.

  Germany’s political conditions before 1914, as badly dysfunctional as the system had become, were not yet extreme enough to transform normal men into the slaughterers of millions. Although Heinrich Class dreamed of a military coup to make the German Empire less democratic, not even he was calling for murder, nor was anyone else among Germany’s frightened ruling class. World War I would change that decisively.

  CHAPTER 5

  HARDENED BY WAR

  So began for me, as probably also for every German, the greatest and most unforgettable time of my earthly life. Compared to the events of this most tremendous struggle, everything before it receded into a stale nothingness.

  —Adolf Hitler, on his years as a soldier in World War I1

  Thanks to Germany’s irresponsible and provocative foreign policy, a major war had become reasonably likely by 1914. Yet it was far from inevitable, and had it not broken out, history would have taken a very different course in the twentieth century from that which it followed. World War I helped cause the Holocaust in two important ways. First, it inflicted terrible damage on Germany’s already dysfunctional political system, intensifying the social and political conflicts that divided Germans from each other. The radicalization of German politics goes a long way toward explaining why a third of German voters later gave their ballots to Hitler in the country’s last free elections. Second, the war produced a large group of violent men who would later murder millions without hesitation. Ten million men died in combat, including 2 million Germans, and they died in fighting that seemed utterly meaningless, fighting in which the deaths of these young men became almost an end in itself. This pointless slaughter drastically cheapened human life, producing a cohort of genocidal killers who accepted that mass death was simply a normal part of human existence. Without World War I, the Holocaust could never have happened.

  On June 28, 1914, a Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip shot dead the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was Germany’s only real ally. This desperate act set off a chain reaction that drew all the great powers of Europe into war by August 4. Germany and Austria-Hungary fought against the alliance of Britain, France, and Russia. The Germans promptly executed their war plan: a vast, counterclockwise flanking invasion, sweeping down through Belgium into the north of France, aiming to fall upon the French armies in their rear. The Germans believed that Russia needed more time to mobilize its troops than did France. Germany therefore sent the great bulk of its forces into France, hoping to knock France out of the war within the first weeks of fighting. With their western front secure, the Germans could then turn all of their energies to defeating the Russian foe in the East.

  Germany’s invasion of France failed at the Marne in early September 1914, and the war in the West rapidly settled into the pattern it maintained for almost four years: trench warfare. The horrifically pointless and destructive nature of the fighting helps explain why World War I had such devastating consequences. “Trench warfare” meant that the opposing armies each maintained their troops in trenches 8 to 10 feet deep, dug out of the muddy soil. Between the enemies’ front lines lay an open space—sometimes as wide as half a mile, other times only a few hundred yards. Strewn across this space lay barriers of barbed wire that each army had created to keep enemy troops from advancing toward its own trenches. Aptly named “no-man’s-land,” this space between the trenches was a place where no man could long survive.

  Technology, namely the machine gun, had made the horrors of trench warfare possible. Machine guns had been invented in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The American Gatling Gun was an early, primitive version. By 1914 they had developed into fearsome weapons. Whereas an infantry soldier could fire no more than fifteen bullets in a minute, a machine gun fired six hundred shots per minute or more. Positioned strategically atop the trenches, machine guns swept no-man’s-land with withering fire, cutting down
enemy soldiers in waves as they tried to advance, like a scythe mowing down sugar cane, reaping a grim harvest of human lives whenever either side was foolish enough to launch an attack.

  The first day of the Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916, illustrates the terrible consequences of trench warfare for the foot soldier. The British prepared their attack by firing artillery shells at the German trenches around the clock for seven days. The British had two goals: to destroy the Germans’ barbed wire in no-man’s-land and to kill the German machine gunners. The Germans, for their part, sheltered their gunners in sturdy bunkers constructed twenty feet or more below the surface of the earth. The British artillery did not kill them, just as it did not fully cut the wire in no-man’s-land. Just before daybreak on July 1, the British silenced their artillery. Their men climbed out of the trenches and charged the German lines. A race had begun between the German machine gunners, who were climbing out of their bunkers to set up their weapons, and the charging British soldiers. The finish line was the front edge of the German trenches. Whoever lost the race would die.2

  The German machine gunners, having to move only forty or fifty feet, won this fatal race. The British assault failed. Twenty thousand British soldiers paid for their generals’ stupidity with their lives; another 40,000 were wounded. This horrible scene was repeated numerous times over the course of the war. Unable to break through their enemies’ lines, the European armies then settled into a war of attrition. Each side fed more and more men and ammunition into the bottomless pit of trench warfare; the war could end only when one side ran out of the men or weapons to fight it. Erich von Falkenhayn, head of Germany’s armies, embraced this terrible reality when he started the other great battle of 1916: Verdun.3