by Dan McMillan
19. Ibid., 137–165, esp. 137, 139. Abel adds a fourth element, national socialism, which gave the party its name, but I have collapsed it into the ideal of the national community for the sake of brevity and simplicity, because it simply expresses the notion of national community in other words. “Community” translates Gemeinschaft; “national community” translates Volksgemeinschaft, although this can also be rendered as “racial community,” depending on context.
20. Ibid., 142.
21. Ibid., 138.
22. Ibid., 146–154, esp. 147, 151, 152–153.
23. Ibid., 154–165, esp. 155, 159, 160.
24. Kershaw, Hitler, 1:332, 471. Kershaw bases his analysis on Peter H. Merkl’s examination of the essays that Abel collected in Political Violence Under the Swastika: 581 Early Nazis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), esp. 33, 453, 522.
25. The best expert on the Nazi voter, Thomas Childers, describes the Nazi Party in 1932 as “a catch-all party of protest.” Childers, Nazi Voter, 176–177, 225–226, 231–232, 268–269.
26. On anti-Marxism as a theme: Childers, Nazi Voter, 268. On party divisions: Kershaw, Hitler, 1:329–330; Childers, Nazi Voter, 139. Paradoxically, the Nazis also shrewdly targeted each occupational interest group with appeals tailored to its economic interests. Kershaw, Hitler, 1:333; Childers, Nazi Voter, 11–12, 198–201. The quotation by Luise Solmitz is from Kershaw, Hitler, 1:364. On the failure of other parties: ibid., 369.
27. The Democrats (DDP) were heir to the left-liberal parties of the empire; the People’s Party (DVP) was heir to the National Liberal Party; and the Nationalists (DNVP) were heir to the conservative parties of the empire. The vote totals are from Childers, Nazi Voter, 61, 125, 141.
28. Ibid., 141, 209, 262–263. In December 1924, the DNVP polled 20.5 percent of the electorate, the DVP 10.1 percent, and the DDP 6.3 percent; for July 1932, the corresponding percentages were 5.9, 1.2, and 1.0. Ibid., 61, 209.
29. Ibid., 209, 260–261.
30. Michael Mann has argued that “settler democracies” in parts of North America and Australia perpetrated genocide against native peoples. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 70–110, esp. 85–98. Mann’s argument is problematic for two main reasons: (1) the settler societies were far from being fully democratic, nor was the United States as a whole during this period, and it is an open question whether political conditions on the violent frontier should be better characterized as anarchy than as democracy; (2) characterizing the fate of the native peoples as genocide badly stretches the definition of that crime, as there was no clear intention to wipe out the Amerindians on the part of the national government. Mann tries to evade this problem by describing massacres as “local genocide,” in my view a contradiction in terms. Ibid., 96–98.
CHAPTER 8
1. Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds., Nazism 1919–1945: A Documentary Reader, vol. 2, State, Economy and Society, 1933–1939 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1984), 572. I have slightly altered the translation from the British English of this collection, substituting “workplace” for “work room” and “living room” for “parlour.” Hitler was speaking to his secretaries about having just occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia. Quoted in Ian Kershaw, Hitler, vol. 2, 1936–1945: Nemesis (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 155.
2. For the origins and nature of Hitler’s charisma, the definitive study remains Ian Kershaw, The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
3. As Max Weber explained, a charismatic leader “gains and retains [his charisma] solely by proving his powers in practice. He must work miracles, if he wants to be a prophet. He must perform heroic deeds, if he wants to be a warlord.” Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1114.
4. Kershaw, “Hitler Myth,” 8; Weber, Economy and Society, 1:242, 2:1111–1112.
5. On Bismarck’s dominance: see David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780–1918, 1st ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 400–402; Matthew Jefferies, Contesting the German Empire, 1871–1918 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 101. On “Bismarck towers”: Kershaw, “Hitler Myth,” 15–16.
6. Kershaw, “Hitler Myth,” 20–21.
7. Theodore Abel, Why Hitler Came into Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986 [1938]), 153.
8. Kershaw, “Hitler Myth,” esp. 3, 72–73, 79–80; Lawrence W. Levine and Cornelia R. Levine, The People and the President: America’s Conversation with FDR (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), ix, xi. The authors also note that some 15 million letters to FDR are housed in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, while the National Archives contain “millions more.” On Hitler: see Henrik Eberle, ed., Briefe an Hitler: Ein Volk schreibt seinem Führer. Unbekannte Dokumente aus Moskauer Archiven—zum ersten Mal veröffentlicht (Bergisch Gladbach: Bastei Lübbe, 2007), 9.
9. Ian Kershaw demonstrates that the fire took Hitler by surprise and that he saw a communist uprising as a real possibility. Kershaw, Hitler, 1:457–458, 460. On the suppression of communism as a source of Hitler’s popularity: Kershaw, “Hitler Myth,” 253–254. Despite repeated attempts to show that the Nazis actually set the fire, there remains a consensus among historians that the Dutch communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, acted alone. Anson Rabinbach, “Staging Antifascism: The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror,” New German Critique 103, vol. 35, no. 1 (2008): 97–126, esp. 97–99. Further evidence that no one working for Hitler set the fire comes from an entry in Joseph Goebbels’s diary dated August 9, 1941. Goebbels records a conversation with Hitler in which they speculated on who stood behind Georg Elser’s assassination attempt of November 1939, and Hitler then mused that the communist Ernst Torgler may have instigated the Reichstag fire: “Bei Reichstagsbrand tippt er auf Torgler als Urheber.” Joseph Goebbels, Tagebücher, 1924–1945, ed. Ralf Georg Reuth (Munich: Piper, 1992), 4:1559.
10. On Hitler’s ignorance of economics: Kershaw, Hitler, 1:448–449. Kershaw concludes that by the summer of 1936, “most Germans, whatever their grumbles, were at least in some respects Hitler supporters,” in part because unemployment had practically been wiped out. Kershaw, Hitler, 2:xxxix–xl. More than 6 million Germans were unemployed when Hitler took power in January 1933, a number that fell to slightly more than 1 million in September 1936, and, after a rise to 1.8 million in January 1937, to under half a million in September of that year. Noakes and Pridham, eds., Nazism 1919–1945, 2:359.
11. Kershaw, Hitler, 2:283.
12. On the Austrians’ wishes: see plebiscites conducted during the 1920s. Ibid., 65. The Austrians’ early interest in fusion with Germany was deflected during the 1919 peace negotiations when the victorious Allies promised them better terms if they agreed to remain a separate country. Richard M. Watt, The Kings Depart: The Tragedy of Germany, Versailles, and the German Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 435–436. On British opinion regarding the Treaty of Versailles: Kershaw, Hitler, 1:555, 558. On appeasement: A. J. P. Taylor, Origins of the Second World War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). Taylor’s argument overstates the case but is still useful.
13. On German public opinion: see, for example, Kershaw, Hitler, 2:107, 118, concerning the diplomatic crisis over Germany’s designs on the Sudetenland.
14. Ibid., 549–556, esp. 550, 552.
15. Ibid., 584, 590. “Demoralization” is Kershaw’s translation of Zersetzung. Kershaw, “Hitler Myth,” 125–131.
16. Kershaw, Hitler, 2:79–81. Austrian support is seen also in the 99.75 percent yes vote to annexation and in support of “the list of the Leader” in the April plebiscite in Austria. Ibid., 83; Kershaw, “Hitler Myth,” 130.
17. In mid-November 1937, Lord Halifax, Lord Privy Seal and President of the Council in the British g
overnment, who soon thereafter became foreign secretary, told Hitler that Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the city of Danzig (disputed between Germany and Poland) “fell into the category of possible alterations in the European order which might be destined to come about with the passage of time.” Quoted in Kershaw, Hitler, 2:66; see also 91.
18. Casualty figures from Kershaw, Hitler, 2:297.
19. Ibid., 284; Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 108, 111.
20. Kershaw, Hitler, 2:285; Weinberg, World at Arms, 111–112, 122–123. The planned German invasion was postponed twenty-nine times because of bad weather and disagreements over strategy.
21. Kershaw, Hitler, 2:290–291. Other factors besides Manstein’s plan contributed to the stunning German victory, including the French failure to adapt to the new tank tactics pioneered by the Germans; lack of a combined Allied command, along with a chaotic French command structure; and the French commander Maurice Gamelin’s failure to hold significant forces in reserve. As Gerhard Weinberg said, “the basic factor was surely that a poorly led and badly coordinated Allied force was pierced at a critical point by concentrated German armor and was never able to regain even its balance, to say nothing of the initiative.” Weinberg, World at Arms, 113–114, 123, 126–129.
22. Making the problem worse, the Dutch and Belgian governments, trying to preserve their neutrality in the vain hope of not giving the Germans an excuse to invade, refused to coordinate their defense with the French and British. Thus the Allies had to commit their forces immediately, rushing them northward toward Holland. Weinberg, World at Arms, 113–114.
23. Kershaw, “Hitler Myth,” 155.
24. Ibid., 66, 81. In Kershaw, the woman is quoted as referring to the prayer as “the Our Father” (Vaterunser), which is known to most Americans as the Lord’s Prayer.
25. Noakes and Pridham, eds., Nazism 1919–1945, 2:199–200. See also Ernst Rudolf Huber at 199.
26. Noakes and Pridham, eds., Nazism 1919–1945, 2:496. Himmler is quoted in Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, trans. Jeremy Noakes and Lesley Sharpe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 305.
27. For example, Jürgen Förster shows that the conquest of France overcame the reservations of generals who had objected to SS atrocities in Poland the preceding fall and prepared them to accept the genocidal quality of the forthcoming Russian campaign. Jürgen Förster, “Complicity or Entanglement? Wehrmacht, War and Holocaust,” in Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck, eds., The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 266–283, esp. 272. On the impact of the “Hitler cult” on bureaucrats: Mary Fulbrook, A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 67.
28. Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (New York: Vintage, 2002), 218–222.
29. Rudolph [Rudolf] Höss, Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz, ed. Steven Paskuly (New York: Da Capo, 1996), 153.
30. Raul Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 1:343–344.
31. Michael Wildt observes that the men who led the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) adhered to a “particular form of political thought. Politics always aimed at the unconditional or the whole and was never to be subordinated to a regulating norm or moral law of any kind.” Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office, trans. Tom Lampert (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 432. As Wildt notes, in Poland and in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union, this “dissolution of boundaries and regulations” was complete. Ibid., 433.
32. Quoted in Kershaw, Hitler, 1:529. On the phenomenon of “working towards the Führer”: see, generally, ibid., 529–591.
33. Forster had been Gauleiter (head of the party regional district) of Danzig, Greiser the president of the Danzig Senate. Ibid., 2:239, 250–252.
34. Ibid., 484–485; for other examples of subordinates radicalizing policy on the ground without instructions from Berlin, see Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942, with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 330–352. On Chelmno: ibid., 418.
35. On Hitler’s role: Browning, Origins of the Final Solution, 320–321, 424–428; Ian Kershaw, “Hitler’s Role in the Final Solution,” in Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), esp. 107–111. The idea that Hitler’s subordinates radicalized his thinking is speculation on my part, but seems justified by Hitler’s close working relationship with Himmler in making decisions about Jewish policy in 1940–1941, and by Himmler’s repeated efforts to expand his own power by pushing forward the radicalization of anti-Jewish measures, as thoroughly documented by Longerich in Heinrich Himmler.
CHAPTER 9
1. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1943), 772.
2. Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
3. Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, Nostra Aetate, proclaimed by Pope Paul VI on October 28, 1965. On this accusation in Catholic devotional literature in Germany: see Olaf Blaschke, Victims or Offenders? German Jews and the Causes of Modern Catholic Antisemitism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 34–35; Walter Laqueur, The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 55–56.
4. On conspiracy theories: Laqueur, Changing Face of Anti-Semitism, 82. On hostility to Christianity by Hess, Heydrich, Himmler, and Rosenberg: see Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, trans. Jeremy Noakes and Lesley Sharpe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 218–221. According to Wolfgang Dierker, with Hitler’s “silent agreement,” Nazi Party radicals, including Bormann, Himmler, Heydrich, Rosenberg, and Goebbels, wanted to “completely eliminate the activity of the Christian religion among the German people in the long term.” Wolfgang Dierker, Himmlers Glaubenskrieger: Der Sicherheitsdienst der SS und seine Religionspolitik, 1933–1941 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002), 535. However, while attributing to Heydrich a “particular hatred” toward the Catholic Church during the 1930s, Heydrich’s biographer, Robert Gerwarth, notes that Heydrich claimed to be opposed not to spirituality, but rather to the church’s political influence. Robert Gerwarth, Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 101–102. Joseph Goebbels’s diaries also offer considerable evidence of his own intense hostility to Christianity and that of other leaders of the regime. Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fröhlich, Teil II: Diktate, 1941–1945 (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1996), on Bormann, v. 1 (July-September 1941), 254 (August 18) and 372 (September 7); on Goebbels, v. 2 (October-December 1941), 500 (December 13), 504, 506–507 (December 14). See also Saul Friedländer’s discussion of “redemptive anti-Semitism” in his Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933–1945, vol. 1, The Years of Persecution (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 73–112.
5. Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds., Nazism 1919–1945: A Documentary Reader, vol. 2, State, Economy and Society, 1933–1939 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1984), 522–523; Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 120–121.
6. On envy: Götz Aly has presented a wealth of evidence in his Warum die Deutschen? Warum die Juden? Gleichheit, Neid und Rassenhass, 1800–1933 (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2011). On Jews in German art during the 1920s: see Friedländer, Years of Persecution, 108. On the roots of Hitler’s fury toward Jews in his own failures: see Ian Kershaw, Hitler, vol. 1, 1889–1936: Hubris (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 65–67.
7. Friedländer, Years of Persecution, 79.
8. Daniel Frymann [Heinrich Claß], Wenn ich der Kaiser wär’: Politische Wahrheiten und Notwendigkeiten (Leipzig: Dieterich, 1912), 33, 36–38 (“Class 1912” hereafter, to distinguish this edition from the 1914 edition, also published in Leipzig by Dieterich [“Class 1914”]).
9. Friedländer, Years of Persecution, 93; Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 121; Laqueur, Changing Face of Anti-Semitism, 105.
10. Class 1914, 253–254; this newspaper was the so-called Kreuzzeitung. On the election: Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3, 1849–1914 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995), 1062, 1065–1066.
11. Laqueur, Changing Face of Anti-Semitism, 29, 85, 96ff. On the importance of this document: see also Jerome A. Chanes, Antisemitism: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004), 59.
12. Laqueur, Changing Face of Anti-Semitism, 99.
13. On the decisive role of World War I: see, for example, Laqueur, Changing Face of Anti-Semitism, 29–30; for Germany, Friedländer, Years of Persecution, 81. On the limited appeal of conspiracy theories before World War I: see, for example, Laqueur, Changing Face of Anti-Semitism, 101; Hitler, Mein Kampf, 337. On the limited impact of racist anti-Semitism before World War I: see Laqueur, Changing Face of Anti-Semitism, 94–95; Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites, 76–79.
14. Kershaw, Hitler, 1:101. Class was quoting Heinrich von Kleist in a nationalist screed attacking the French.
15. The revolution fell in October on the calendar then in use in Russia, but in November by the calendar used in Germany and the rest of Western Europe. Mann is quoted in Friedländer, Years of Persecution, 91.