How Could This Happen

by Dan McMillan

  At the end, Franz von Papen played the fatal role. He was a favorite of Hindenburg, who seemed to regard him with fatherly affection. Papen persuaded Hindenburg to let Hitler form a minority government of Nazis and Nationalists. The Nazis would have only three officials in the cabinet: Hitler as prime minister, Wilhelm Frick as national minister of the interior, and Hermann Göring as Prussian minister of the interior. Papen, serving as deputy prime minister, would be tasked with keeping an eye on Hitler. Hitler was a political amateur, Papen assured Hindenburg, and Papen would exploit Hitler’s popular support while retaining real control over the government. It was the worst mistake in history. Hindenburg said yes, and Adolf Hitler became prime minister of Germany on January 30, 1933.

  The German people did not choose Nazi rule by a majority vote. The Nazi fraction of the electorate peaked at 37.3 percent in July 1932, and fell to 33.1 percent in the last free elections in November. Nonetheless, the Nazis had become the country’s largest party, and so it is important to ask what Germans were voting for when they marked their ballots for Hitler. It is also essential to understand what motivated the nearly 850,000 activists who belonged to the Nazi Party on the eve of Hitler’s taking power.

  A very unusual set of documents reveals a lot about what motivated dues-paying members of the Nazi Party. An American sociology professor, Theodore Abel, gathering data for a book on the Nazis, went to Germany in 1934, a year and a half after Hitler had taken power. Abel sponsored a contest inviting party members to write essays in which they explained why they had become Nazis. Over six hundred Nazi Party activists submitted essays, and Abel awarded modest cash prizes to the best entrants. Their beliefs, and their reasons for joining the party, continued the basic themes of German nationalist politics. Their ideas were not new; they had already been established before World War I, and had become more popular among the middle class thanks to the terrible strains and intensified conflicts of the war and its aftermath.18

  The Nazi belief system, as expressed by Abel’s essayists, boils down to three mutually reinforcing elements: the ideal of a national community, the leadership principle, and anti-Semitism. The central concept of community was, as Abel aptly explained, “an untranslatable term which combines the meaning of ‘unity,’ ‘devotion to the community,’ mutual aid, brotherly love, and kindred social values.” Although the family represented the primary form of community, the Nazis wanted it to encompass the entire German nation. This ideal expressed the Nazis’ most important stated ambition: to overcome the divisions of religion and social class and to replace the distinct identities of each social group with the sole identifier “German.” The ideal of the national community was partly rooted in militant hostility to the socialist and communist parties, which supposedly divided German workers from the rest of society. “While I was in the army,” wrote one activist, “I found that the best soldiers came from the working class; now I had to witness these workers being alienated from the Fatherland. Why then should Germany rend itself? . . . At the same time . . . [Nazism], with its promise of a community of blood, barring all class struggle, attracted me profoundly.”19

  Even as they rejected the Marxist idea of class struggle, ardent Nazis resented the elaborate status hierarchy that prevailed in German society and expressed a faith that the new national community would banish social injustice and elite snobbery. For many, this hope for unity and belonging went back to their experience fighting in World War I, which they idealized as a time of harmony and mutual respect among comrades who came from every walk of life. As one veteran put it, “the war had taught us one lesson, the great community of the front. All class differences, staunchly entrenched before the war, disappeared under its spell. Out there it was what a person was, not what he seemed to be, that counted. There was only a people, no individuals.”20

  Militant German nationalism, and visions of national greatness, formed the necessary complement to this utopian vision of social harmony. Overcoming Germany’s humiliation by the Treaty of Versailles demanded unity among Germans, while intense national pride would replace an individual’s identity as member of a particular social class. “Seldom was our people united and great,” wrote one of Abel’s essayists. “But whenever it was strongly unified, it was unconquerable. This then is the secret of our idea, and in it lies the power of [Nazism]: unity is the goal of our Leader, who wants to make the people strong, so it may become powerful again.”21

  The “leadership principle” further anchored the idealized national community. Within the Nazi Party, officials at every level of the hierarchy were called “leaders,” each receiving obedience from those below. At the top stood “the Leader” (der Führer), Hitler, who would command the whole nation. No interest, no social class, no autonomous group, could pursue its narrow desires in a manner harmful to the national community, because Hitler imposed order upon the entire nation. Germans had expressed a longing for such a leader long before Hitler entered politics, and many of Abel’s essayists voiced this hope. “Around 1923,” wrote a high-school teacher, “I reached the conclusion that no party, but a single man could save Germany.” Hitler’s spellbinding oratory won numberless converts to his movement, convincing them that he was the long-sought Leader who could unite the nation. “I heard Hitler in Bonn, in 1926,” wrote one Nazi. “What he said, in clear, concise phrases, had long agitated the feelings of every good German. The German soul spoke to German manhood in his words. From that day on I could never violate my allegiance to Hitler. I saw his illimitable faith in his people, and the desire to set them free.”22

  Anti-Semitism, the third element, bound each part of the national community together by offering a common enemy, one that could be blamed for the country’s divisions and all of Germany’s recent setbacks. Nazi racial doctrine assumed both the genetic unity of the German people and irreducible differences between Germans and the “destructive” Jews. Being loyal only to other Jews, including Jews in foreign countries, Germany’s Jews had supposedly instigated World War I, profited from the war economy at Germany’s expense, and divided Germans by manipulating the political parties, especially the socialist and communist parties. One of Abel’s essayists declared that “these Jews made use of the different parties to divide the German people against each other, while their leaders all subscribed to the same hidden purpose: namely, the exploitation of German workers.” “I began a searching inquiry into the Jewish question,” wrote another Nazi. “I read a great deal, and it became increasingly clear to me that international Marxism and the Jewish problem are closely bound together. In this fact I recognized the cause of the political, moral, and cultural decay of my Fatherland.”23

  Members of the Nazi Party varied somewhat in which element of the movement’s belief system was most important to them. Of Abel’s activists, roughly a third were principally motivated by hopes for a socially cohesive national community. Another third had responded mainly to ultranationalist themes in the party’s propaganda, such as attacks on the Treaty of Versailles, although militant nationalism can be seen as the necessary complement of the idealized national community. Although anti-Semitism has been justifiably described as the “ideological cement” holding the Nazi movement together, for most members it was not the highest priority. A full two-thirds of these members expressed hostility toward Jews, but only about one member in eight said that anti-Semitism was his principal motive. Almost one-fifth of the sample said that their worship of Hitler was their chief reason for joining the movement. Looking at Abel’s sample another way, namely, by asking who they hated most, two-thirds were “predominantly anti-Marxists.” Over half hoped that Germany would be “reborn” and become “free of the system,” meaning the system of divisive party government under the Weimar Republic.24

  Explaining why 33.1 percent of the electorate voted Nazi in November 1932 is more difficult than explaining why people joined the party, since there were no public opinion polls. No one asked the voters why they had cast their ballots for th
e Nazis. One can make only an educated guess based on the timing of the Nazi electoral successes, the leading themes of the party’s campaign advertising, and the socioeconomic backgrounds of the Nazi voters. In the first place, one must remember that the party polled only 2.6 percent of the vote in 1928. Although the Nazis made significant gains in some local and regional elections in 1929, it seems that the Great Depression, more than anything else, permitted their breakthrough at the national level. Hindenburg’s imposition of a de facto dictatorship only served to further alienate the voters from their government. The government’s economic failures gave the Nazis a tremendous advantage, because they had never borne any responsibility in the government of the Republic, and thus could not be blamed for any of the other parties’ policies. Having never voted for a specific policy, the Nazis were free to make unrealistic, often mutually contradictory promises to different economic interests. The Nazi Party was therefore the ideal vehicle for protest, that is, for the expression of the voters’ discontent.25

  As a party of protest, the Nazis placed great emphasis on negative themes in their campaign advertising. Attacks on the socialists and communists were by far the most important and consistent theme in Nazi electoral propaganda. This assault on the Marxist parties reinforced a second central theme of Nazi Propaganda: that the multiparty democracy of the Weimar Republic—which the socialists had done so much to create—divided Germans against each other to the point of national paralysis. In the campaign leading to the Nazis’ breakthrough in 1930, Hitler emphasized, again and again, that Germany had become fatally divided by antagonisms between the parties; only the Nazi Party could transcend these divisions and unify the nation. In the elections of July 1932, the Nazis again took up this theme, which had brought them success in 1930: only they could unite the country. Luise Solmitz, a Hamburg schoolteacher, wrote in her diary after seeing Hitler speak: “How many look to him in touching faith as the helper, savior, the redeemer. . . . To him, who rescues the Prussian prince, the scholar, the clergyman, the peasant, the worker, the unemployed out of the party into the people.” To his claim for national unity through Nazism, Hitler added, with greater emphasis, the idea that the other parties had presided over the ruin of Germany, and that only the Nazi Party could save the country. To make this argument in 1932, Hitler had only to point to the flailing Brüning and Papen governments, whose policies worsened their people’s suffering.26

  Although the Nazi Party eventually drew members and voters from every walk of life and both major Christian denominations, the Protestant middle classes were heavily overrepresented in the Nazi electorate and the membership of the party. Protestants predominated largely because the Center Party was able to maintain its long-standing ties to the Catholic population and its organizational base in associations linked to the Catholic Church. Middle-class Germans were overrepresented partly as a result of the decade of economic misfortune that had begun for much of the middle class in 1914: the planned war economy that benefited big business and organized labor, but hurt family farms and urban small businesses, and then the hyperinflation that peaked in 1923, reducing the life savings of millions and the value of pensions by 85 percent. When the government ended the inflation in 1923 and 1924, reestablishing the value of all debts and pensions at only 15 percent of their prewar value, the established parties of the Protestant middle classes began to lose voters to dozens of new “splinter parties.” Most of these parties represented very specific economic interests. A host of “revalorization” parties demanded that debts and pensions be revalued at some level higher than 15 percent of the prewar level, perhaps even at 100 percent. Other parties represented tenants or landlords, peasants or craftsmen, and so on. Such parties took 7.8 percent of the vote in the elections of December 1924, 13.7 percent in 1928, and 14.4 percent in 1930.27

  While each splinter party demanded different policies, most of them had certain beliefs and attitudes in common and emphasized themes that also predominated in Nazi campaign advertising. They were especially critical of “the system” of parliamentary democracy. In particular, they complained that social-welfare spending, for example on health insurance, was too generous, and that their taxes were too high. These parties generally displayed not only a ferocious hostility to socialism and communism, but also a resentment of “big capitalism,” for example, in the form of department stores that competed with small businesses. None of these tiny parties could accomplish anything in parliament on its own, but they represented a collective vote of protest. They reflected a profound alienation from the established middle-class parties and from the democratic form of government by voters who now lacked a political home. In the last free elections of the Republic, during the darkest depth of the Great Depression in 1932, these voters seem to have found their new political home in the Nazi Party. In the July 1932 balloting, the Nazis rocketed to 37.3 percent of the vote, while the splinter parties fell to 3.2 percent, far below their 1930 total of 14.4 percent. The three larger parties that had previously represented the Protestant middle classes had shrunk to only 8.1 percent of the vote, down from 36.9 percent in the election of December 1924. Most likely, the bulk of their lost voters had gone over to the Nazis.28

  The history of the splinter parties, which reflected profoundly antidemocratic attitudes among much of the electorate, shows that the Great Depression by itself did not cause Hitler’s rise to power and the collapse of German democracy. After all, although the Great Depression affected the entire world, established democracies such as the United States, France, and Great Britain never faced a serious challenge from an extremist movement comparable to the Nazi Party. An equally important factor was that much of the German electorate, and probably most of the country’s elite, did not believe in democracy. German elites, in part because they feared socialism, had energetically fought against democratic reform from the 1890s on. As for the voters, they had had no experience of democracy before the 1918 revolution, and thereafter most of what they saw was simply bad. In the July 1932 election, nearly three-quarters of the voters chose parties that had explicitly rejected parliamentary democracy: not only the Nazis (37.3 percent), the Communists (14.3), and the Nationalists (5.9), but also the Catholic Center Party (15.7 percent), which had once been a mainstay of the Republic, but had now moved sharply to the right. In sum, three factors were needed to put Hitler in office: the Great Depression; Hindenburg’s blunders and determination to destroy the parliamentary system; and the hostility of millions of Germans toward democracy. Had any one of these factors been absent, Hitler would have remained an unimportant agitator on the margins of German politics.29

  When Hitler became prime minister in January 1933, he soon finished the task that President Hindenburg and Heinrich Brüning had begun in 1930: destroying Germany’s first democracy. With that step a crucial barrier against genocide had fallen. Functioning democracies do not perpetrate genocide: although majorities have voted to discriminate against minorities (as in the American South), voters would never support mass murder. With Hitler in office, World War II and the Holocaust were now at least conceivable. Yet for Hitler to radicalize his Jewish policy to full-blown genocide, and to launch his murderous war against the Soviet Union, he needed to become far more than a dictator. To unleash this unprecedented violence, Hitler in fact needed more than his countrymen’s passivity and failure to rebel against him. He needed their enthusiastic support, and he needed the country’s elite—including professionals, businessmen, higher civil servants, and military officers—to actively participate in the murder of the Jewish people. When Hitler took power, most of these men were not Nazis; most of them were nationalist conservatives who disdained Nazism as a lower-class movement, and who looked down on Hitler because of his vulgarity and limited education.30

  By the time Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 and began the mass murder of Jews behind the German lines, he had become much more than a tyrant, although he was that also. Millions of Germans had come to worship him,
believing that his judgments were infallible and that his commands were a historical necessity. This near-deification of Hitler was a cause of the Holocaust in its own right. How did it come about?

  CHAPTER 8

  FROM DICTATOR TO DEMIGOD

  As my “creator,” his portrait hangs both in my workplace and in the living room at home. A look at him has often produced in me what “pious people” allegedly feel when deep in prayer.

  —A 1939 letter about Hitler to a German newspaper

  I will go down as the greatest German in history.

  —Adolf Hitler, March 15, 19391

  By the time the Holocaust began in 1941, Hitler had become, in the eyes of millions of his people, a mythic figure, known by the quasi-religious title “the Leader” (der Führer), whose every command deserved obedience. This “Hitler myth” was composed of a set of beliefs that others held concerning him: that he was impervious to ordinary human appetites and needs, whether for love, companionship, sex, or luxury; that he was the first servant of his people, devoted to them and nothing else; that he embodied the German nation and its special destiny; and that he was a political and military genius of superhuman abilities, even an instrument of divine Providence.2

  The belief in Hitler’s magical qualities drew strength from many sources: the long-standing hope among countless Germans that a charismatic leader could heal the nation’s divisions and solve all problems; the German people’s desperation amid the terrible crisis of the Great Depression; Hitler’s gifts as a public speaker; the new medium of radio, which brought his voice into German homes; the skillful use of propaganda to burnish Hitler’s image; and, above all, from Hitler’s astonishing run of dramatic successes, beginning with the suppression of socialism and communism in early 1933, and ending only with the failure of German armies to capture Moscow in December 1941.3