How Could This Happen

by Dan McMillan

  16. Theodore Abel, Why Hitler Came into Power, fwd. Thomas Childers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986 [1938]), 137–146.

  CHAPTER 4

  1. Daniel Frymann [Heinrich Claß], Wenn ich der Kaiser wär’: Politische Wahrheiten und Notwendigkeiten (Leipzig, Dieterich, 1912), 50 (“Class 1912” hereafter). The 5th edition, published before the outbreak of war in 1914, also published by Dieterich in Leipzig, was expanded by two chapters at the end, at 236–270, and hereafter will be referred to as “Class 1914.” I have rendered Claß’s name as “Class” so as not to confuse English-language readers. The ß symbol is pronounced the same as “ss.”

  2. Indirect evidence comes in the form of the markedly populist quality of German radical nationalism, as explored by Geoff Eley in Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change After Bismarck (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 188, 193–194, 201–205, 356. Radical nationalists frequently claimed to express the “free will of the people,” said to be ignored by the parliament, the government, and implicitly even the emperor. One piece of circumstantial evidence might be the qualitatively greater force and intensity of German radical nationalism before World War I in comparison to its counterpart in Great Britain. I contend that this difference supports my thesis: since Britain was a democracy, the British had no need of nationalism in its role as a substitute for democracy. Of course, historians have offered other explanations for the differences between British and German nationalism. See Paul Kennedy and Anthony Nicholls, eds., Nationalist and Racialist Movements in Britain and Germany Before 1914 (London: Macmillan, 1981), essays by Kennedy (esp. 16), Summers (esp. 73), Fest (esp. 171), and Eley (esp. 57 and n. 23). Similarly, Hans-Ulrich Wehler concludes that domestic political pressures for imperialist expansion were stronger in Germany than anywhere else in the Western world. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3, 1849–1914 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995), 1291.

  On nationalism as a weapon against socialism: see, for example, Eley, Reshaping the German Right, 167–176; Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 3:985–990, 1129–1141.

  3. See, for example, Ernst Graf zu Reventlow, Die deutsche Flotte: Ihre Entwickelung und Organisation (Zwiebrücken i. Pfalz: Lehmann, 1901), 53: “Alle die verschiedenen Elemente, die für das Flottengesetz vereint kämpften, haben sich dadurch überhaupt einander genähert und vor allem das gemeinsame Gefühl, Deutsche zu sein, empfunden.” See also Eley, Reshaping the German Right, 200.

  4. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 3:1071–1081; Eley, Reshaping the German Right, especially concerning the Navy League.

  5. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 3:1068–1071, 1075–1077.

  6. See, especially, Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1890–1914 (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1984).

  7. Class 1912 (see n. 1 above).

  8. Class 1914, 235–237.

  9. Class 1912, 53.

  10. Ibid., 68–69, 74–78.

  11. Ibid., 34–38, esp. 38; Class 1914, 253. Most of these quotations are emphasized in the original by wider spacing between the letters, but I have chosen not to italicize them. I have translated the word Erreger as “virus.”

  12. Class 1914, 255–260. Class refers not directly to armed force, but to a “coup” (Staatsstreich), which he and others assumed would require that the military suppress protest by the socialists and labor unions. The first sentence quoted in this paragraph was emphasized in the original.

  13. Class 1912, 53, 183, 185. The first phrase quoted in this paragraph was emphasized in the original.

  14. By “university” I mean all institutions of higher learning, including Technische Hochschulen. The percentage of each age cohort of nineteen- to twenty-four-year-olds reached 3.4 percent in 1911, having risen sharply since 1871, so less than 3 percent is a rough average over the entire history of the empire. The number of students at all German institutions of higher learning rose from 17,800 in 1870 to 79,305 in 1914, and thus almost quintupled, whereas the country’s population rose by only about 60 percent. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3, 1211, vol. 4, 1914–1949, 463.

  CHAPTER 5

  1. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1943), 179. The edition cited in this book is the 805–809th printing, which is an unaltered reprint of the 1925–1926 first edition.

  2. John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Penguin, 1976), 207–289. The image of a fatal race is Keegan’s.

  3. On the eastern front, where Germany and Austria-Hungary fought Russia, the fighting was much more mobile, as major offensives moved the front lines great distances back and forth. However, just as on the western front, the fighting was enormously costly in materiel, munitions, and human lives.

  4. John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 278–279; Bernd Hüppauf, “Schlachtenmythen und die Konstruktion des ‘Neuen Menschen,’” in Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich, and Irina Renz, eds., Keiner fühlt sich hier mehr als Mensch . . . Erlebnis und Wirkung des Ersten Weltkriegs (Essen: Klartext, 1993), 43–84, esp. 61.

  5. Keegan, First World War, 278–286.

  6. “Battle of materiel” translates Materialschlacht.

  7. Ernst Jünger, In Stahlgewittern (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1961 [1920]), 193; Otto Germar, “Trommelfeuer,” in Ernst Jünger, ed., Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges. Fronterlebnisse deutscher Soldaten (Berlin: Neufeld und Henius, 1930), 27–35, esp. 35 (“Jünger, ed., Antlitz,” hereafter); Friedrich Bethge, “Offensive,” in Jünger, ed., Antlitz, 55–71, esp. 56.

  8. Jünger, Stahlgewittern, 106–107.

  9. Germar, “Trommelfeuer,” 32–33. According to Germar, being buried alive was a common fate and probably the one most greatly feared. See also his “Verwundet,” in Jünger, ed., Antlitz, 72–86; Jünger, Stahlgewittern, 109.

  10. Germar, “Trommelfeuer,” 28; Grote, “Bilder aus der Sommesschlacht,” in Jünger, ed., Antlitz, 163–183, esp. 180–181.

  11. Quoted in Peter Knoch, “Erleben und Nacherleben: Das Kriegserlebnis in Augenzeugenberichten und im Geschichtsunterricht,” in Hirschfeld et al., eds., Keiner fühlt sich hier mehr als Mensch, 199–219, esp. 205.

  12. On the “war youth generation” born between 1900 and 1910, too young to be drafted but old enough to be caught up in the wartime nationalist fervor: see, especially, Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office, trans. Tom Lampert (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009).

  13. On Jünger’s importance: Ulrich Herbert, Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989 (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz, 1996), 95; Jünger, Stahlgewittern, 104.

  14. Jünger, Stahlgewittern, 195–197, esp. 197.

  15. Grote, “Bilder aus der Sommesschlacht,” 181–182; Germar, “Trommelfeuer,” 32–33.

  16. Quoted in Hüppauf, “Schlachtenmythen und die Konstruktion des ‘Neuen Menschen,’” in Hirschfeld et al., eds., Keiner fühlt sich hier mehr als Mensch, 43–84, esp. 64; Germar, “Trommelfeuer,” 27.

  17. Beingolf, “Das Grauen,” in Jünger, ed., Antlitz, 12–15, esp. 13.

  18. Hitler, Mein Kampf, 181–182.

  19. Jünger, Stahlgewittern, 103.

  20. Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, trans. Jeremy Noakes and Lesley Sharpe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 26, 315–351, 738–739.

  21. Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds., Nazism 1919–1945: A Documentary Reader, vol. 3, Foreign Policy, War, and Racial Extermination (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1988), 1199–1200; Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 689ff.

  22. Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin, 2008), 28. Of 221 leaders of the Reich Security Main Office studied by Michael Wildt, over 10 percent had belonged to the Free Corps or other right-wing paramilitary formations. Wildt, Uncompromising Generation, 29. The early, pre-1933 leadership of the SS was recr
uited, above all, from men born during the years 1890 to 1900 who had fought in World War I, usually as officers, and who often joined Free Corps and found it difficult to adjust to civilian life. Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 128ff.

  CHAPTER 6

  1. General Friedrich von Bernhardi, Deutschland und der nächste Krieg (Berlin: J. G. Cotta, 1912), 53. I have used some poetic license in the translation: “So wird sich die Auffassung nicht bestreiten lassen, daß es unter Umständen die sittliche und politische Pflicht des Staates ist, den Krieg als politisches Mittel zu verwenden.”

  2. The emperor made this statement on July 31, 1914. Rudolf H. Lutz, The Fall of the German Empire: Documents, 1914–1918, 2 vols. (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1932), 1:9.

  3. Slightly modified from Barbara Henderson’s translation, which appeared in the New York Times, October 15, 1914. Lissauer wrote the poem on August 24, 1914; it can be found in Ernst Lissauer, Der brennende Tag: Ausgewählte Gedichte (Berlin: Schuster und Loeffler, 1916), 40–42.

  4. Quoted in Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 161.

  5. A brief summary of Bethmann-Hollweg’s September Program is in David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780–1918, 1st ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 480.

  6. Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 168–172.

  7. The revolution came during October by the calendar then in use in Russia, but in November by the calendar used in Germany and other Western societies.

  8. The voting percentages are from Thomas Childers, The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 58, 211. The French Communist Party enjoyed comparable support, polling 8 percent of the vote in 1924 and 9.3 percent in 1928: Philippe Bernard and Henri Dubief, The Decline of the Third Republic, 1914–1938 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 155.

  9. The most recent one-volume history of the Weimar Republic is the engaging and readable work by Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); see also the seminal work of Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans. Richard Deveson (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989); also useful is Mary Fulbrook, Divided Nation: A History of Germany, 1918–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

  10. These voting percentages are from Peukert, Weimar Republic, 33.

  11. The troop numbers are from Alexander Watson, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914–1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 188–189.

  12. Hagen Schulze, Weimar: Deutschland, 1917–1933 (Berlin: Severin und Siedler, 1982), 206–207; Ian Kershaw, “Hitler’s Role in the ‘Final Solution,’” in Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 90.

  13. For a balanced assessment of the Versailles Treaty, see Peukert, Weimar Republic, 42–46. But cf. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt Brace and Howe, 1920).

  14. Schulze, Weimar, 193–201; speech by Schiffer in Verhandlungen der Verfassunggebenden deutschen Nationalversammlung: Stenographische Berichte (Berlin: Druck und Verlag der norddeutschen Buchdruckerei, 1920), 1118–1120 (June 22, 1919). The German People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei, or DVP) was the successor to the National Liberal Party of the empire; the German Nationalist People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, or DNVP) was the successor to the two conservative parties and, arguably, the radical nationalist pressure groups of the empire. See the speeches of Wehner-Posadowsky (DNVP) in ibid., 1120ff, and Kahl (DVP) in ibid., 1129ff.

  15. Schulze, Weimar, 222. Schulze rounded the vote percentages to the nearest single digit. Of the parties of the Weimar Coalition, the Social Democratic Party polled 21 percent, the Center Party 18 percent, and the German Democratic Party 8 percent, down from 37.9 percent, 19.7 percent, and 18.5 percent, respectively, in January 1919.

  16. See, for example, Hagen Schulze, Freikorps und Republik, 1918–1920 (Boppard: H. Boldt, 1969), 54–68.

  17. Ibid., 80. On Munich: Ian Kershaw, Hitler, vol. 1, 1889–1936: Hubris (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 112–115. On the Ruhr: Schulze, Freikorps und Republik, 304–318, death toll at 316.

  18. Kershaw, Hitler, 1:171; Schulze, Weimar, 210–211, 240. Nominally Erzberger won his lawsuit, but he lost in the court of public opinion; some of Helfferich’s less damning accusations stuck. Erzberger was murdered on June 26, 1921.

  19. Schulze, Weimar, 238–243, verse at 242. In the original: “Haut immer feste auf den Wirth / Haut seinen Schädel, daß es klirrt / Auch Rathenau, der Walther / Erreicht kein hohes Alter / Knallt ab den Walther Rathenau / Die gottverfluchte Judensau!”

  20. Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 103–107. A war bond that sold for 1,000 marks at the beginning of the war was worth only about 300 prewar marks by the summer of 1918. Ibid., 107. Taking the cost of living in 1913 as 1, it had reached 20.41 by January 1922, and 1,120.27 by January 1923. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 4, 1914–1949 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2003), 246.

  21. Childers, Nazi Voter, 50; Schulze, Weimar, 261.

  22. Childers, Nazi Voter, 61, 125, 263.

  23. Kershaw, Hitler, 1:24, 39–43, 48.

  24. Ibid., 52–54, 83–85.

  25. Quoted in ibid., 88.

  26. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1943), 225; Kershaw, Hitler, 1:104.

  CHAPTER 7

  1. Quoted in Theodore Abel, Why Hitler Came into Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986 [1938]), 152–153.

  2. See, for example, Ian Kershaw, “Hitler and the Holocaust,” in Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 237–281. Raul Hilberg finds that “without him,” the Holocaust would have been “inconceivable.” Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators Bystanders Victims: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), ix.

  3. One might see his companion of his teen years, August Kubizek, as a kind of friend, although Kubizek seems for Hitler to have fulfilled the role of sycophant, feeding Hitler’s narcissism by listening to his endless self-aggrandizing talk. When Hitler failed for a second time (October 1908) to gain admission to the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts, he moved out of their shared apartment and left no forwarding address, probably unable to face Kubizek after this humiliating failure. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, vol. 1, 1889–1936: Hubris (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 20–21, 48.

  4. Hitler’s leading biographer posed the central question of why “highly skilled ‘professionals’ and clever minds in all walks of life were ready to pay uncritical obeisance to an autodidact whose only indisputable talent was one for stirring up the base emotions of the masses.” Ibid., xii.

  5. Ibid., 123–127, 131–133, 195–196.

  6. Examples of incompetence include his resignation from the party in 1921 in a tantrum, furious at his inability to block a merger with another party; his provocation of a confrontation with the Reichswehr in the spring of 1923, which led to a great loss of face on his part; and his failure to provide any leadership for the party during his imprisonment. Ibid., 163–164, 196, 200, 227–230. On the putsch: ibid., 206–211.

  7. Ibid., 214–217, 235–239.

  8. Ibid., 259–311, esp. 259–261, 280, 299–300.

  9. Kershaw describes the Nazis as a “fringe irritant on the political scene,” in ibid., 302. Vote totals in Thomas Childers, The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 61, 125. The figure of 3 percent in 1924 includes votes for smaller radical right groups allied with the Nazis.

  10. For this discussion of Hitler’s path to power, 1930–1933, I have relied primarily on Kershaw, Hitler, vol. 1; Martin Broszat, Hitler and the Collapse of Weimar
Germany (Providence, RI: Berg, 1987); Hagen Schulze, Weimar: Deutschland, 1917–1933 (Berlin: Severin und Siedler 1982); and Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 4, 1914–1949 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995), 512–588.

  11. Kershaw suggests that Hindenburg could have given the prime minister, Hermann Müller, an emergency decree that would have resolved the impasse over the unemployment insurance fund. Kershaw, Hitler, 1:322–324.

  12. Ibid., 333; Childers, Nazi Voter, 192.

  13. Kershaw, Hitler, 1:367. A succinct summary of Brüning’s policies and their disastrous consequences is in Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 4:516–520. See also Broszat, Hitler and the Collapse of Weimar Germany, 95–96, 104–105.

  14. The coalition of moderate parties included the Socialists (SPD), with 24.5 percent; the Catholic Center Party, with 14.8 percent; and the Democrats (DDP), with 3.5 percent. If the People’s Party (DVP), with 4.9 percent, had joined this hypothetical coalition, it would have garnered 47.7 percent of the 1930 vote. Broszat goes so far as to suggest that a government could still be formed on the basis of a parliamentary majority, in Hitler and the Collapse of Weimar Germany, 109. However, it is unclear whether the Center Party, which by then had drifted to the right and begun to openly criticize the system of parliamentary government, would have considered joining such a coalition. In any case, Hindenburg never considered such a course of action.

  15. Kershaw, Hitler, 1:369.

  16. Partly for this reason, Hans-Ulrich Wehler argues that a military dictatorship was not a realistic option, so that after the elections of July and November 1932, appointing Hitler prime minister was the only solution to the crisis of governance. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 4:587.

  17. Kershaw, Hitler, 1:384–385, 395–396.

  18. Abel, Why Hitler Came into Power, 1–4. A total of 683 people submitted essays, but Abel excluded from his analysis the forty-eight submissions by women, since he felt this sample was too small to be meaningful, as well as a large number of essays that were only one or two pages in length, so that his analysis is based on six hundred essays. He limited participation in the contest to people who had joined the Nazi Party, or had been “in sympathy” with it, by January 1, 1933, to exclude party members who may have joined for opportunistic reasons after Hitler took power on January 30 of that year.