But if the German offizierkorps had made a deal with the devil—and it had—in its defense it could be fairly said that it did not truly know the identity of the contractor. It was much the situation to which the Prince of Denmark gave voice: “For the Devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape”; that is precisely what Hitler did. The swift and decisive action he took in purging Röhm and his henchmen while simultaneously marginalizing the SA—and by implication removing the threat of a genuine revolution and a German civil war—effectively obscured the fact that the selfsame ruthlessness could one day be applied to the army and its officers, or even the entire nation. Only a very perceptive few saw this terrible truth at the time; it was with a chilling prescience that Erwin Planck, a retired infantry officer, wrote to his friend General Werner von Fritsch, saying, “. . . if you look on without lifting a finger, sooner or later you will meet the same fate.”48
Consequently a measure of caution must be exercised before categorically castigating the German generals for their wholehearted endorsement of Hitler: it was impossible for them to see that Hitler was leading them—and Germany—into a moral and physical abyss from which none of them would escape intact, and most of them never escape at all. No one, possibly not even Hitler himself even in his worst psychotic dreams, truly knew what would be the full reach of the Stygian darkness which lay ahead. Only a select few were ever allowed even a peek at the wide-eyed, raving lunatic that lurked behind the composed façade which in these years Hitler presented to the world, and they were in their own ways so malignant and perverse that Hitler and his “philosophies” did not seem at all unusual, or a cause for alarm. Understandably, then, the army applauded the Night of the Long Knives, while the ailing President Hindenburg, Germany’s highly revered military hero, sent a telegram saying, “From the reports placed before me I learn that you, by your determined action and your brave personal intervention, have nipped treason in the bud. He who would make history must also be able to shed blood. You have saved the German nation from serious danger. For this I express to you my most profound thanks and sincere appreciation.” There were no protests forthcoming from the Reichstag, already settling comfortably into its role as Adolf Hitler’s rubber stamp. The German press, having already undergone the first waves of suppression and censorship under Göbbels’ Propaganda Ministry, maintained a judicious silence. Among the German people, however, there was shock at the violence of the Nazis’ actions against some of their own, but of openly expressed anger or outrage there was little. No doubt some of this could be ascribed to fear of the new secret police apparatus, the Gestapo, but for most Germans, there was a sense that the SA had earned their punishment. The Brownshirts had been arrogant, vulgar, and violent, too many innocent Germans had suffered physically or financially from their gangster-like depredations so sympathy was decidedly limited. Victor Klemperer, a Dresden-born Jew who converted to Protestantism before the Great War, recorded in his diary how one close friend praised Hitler’s “personal courage, decisiveness and effectiveness;” another matter-of-factly summed up his feelings: “[Hitler] simply sentenced them”—the guilt and the deserved punishment of Röhm and the SA were already foregone. Historian David Fraser neatly encapsulated the attitude of the German public: “Hitler—dependent as he had been on the SA in his early years and owing them much affection—had acted with moral courage and saved Germany. . . . A sickness seemed to have passed, and the physician—persuasive, optimistic, and successful—was Adolf Hitler.”49
For his part, Rommel’s reactions to the events of June 30 to July 2 were ambiguous. It was impossible for him to have remained ignorant of what happened to Röhm and the other SA leaders—every officer and ranker in the Reichswehr knew what had happened to them. Undeniably the Nazi house had required a good cleaning, and the looming presence of the SA, along with Röhm’s thinly veiled hints about a German civil war, his “second revolution,” were too immediate to be dismissed as mere bluster. Yet it also seemed to Rommel that Hitler had gone too far, had overreacted, in the degree of brutality he exercised in punishing Röhm and his SA henchmen. “The Führer didn’t have to do that,” he told his battalion adjutant. “He doesn’t realize how powerful he is, otherwise he could have exercised his strength in a more generous and legitimate way.”50
The comment is unsettling, for it conveys an essential naivety as to Adolf Hitler’s true character, which Erwin Rommel would retain until barely a year before his own death. Whether or not it was necessary for Hitler to carry out such a bloody and brutal purge of the SA leadership was immaterial: all that mattered to Hitler was that he could do so, without let or hindrance. He had now defined the fundamental nature of his regime: when addressing the Reichstag on July 13 in a speech broadcast nationwide, he declared:
In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the German people. I gave the order to shoot the ringleaders in this treason, and I further gave the order to cauterise down to the raw flesh the ulcers of this poisoning of the wells in our domestic life. Let the nation know that its existence—which depends on its internal order and security—cannot be threatened with impunity by anyone! And let it be known for all time to come that if anyone raises his hand to strike the State, then certain death is his lot.51
Implicit in Hitler’s speech was his self-identification with the state—“L’état, c’est moi!” as it were—with the explicit assurance that anyone who threatened the state—and in so doing, Hitler—would meet the same fate as Röhm. He did not even find it necessary to offer the fig leaf of declaring that he and Germany were one; henceforth the only loyalty which mattered in Germany was not to Germany, but to Adolf Hitler.
A month later the idea became a codified reality. On August 20, two weeks after President von Hindenburg finally shuffled ponderously off to Valhalla and Hitler decreed the unification of the offices of Reichskanzler and Reichspräsident, the cabinet decreed the “Law On The Allegiance of Civil Servants and Soldiers of the Armed Forces” (Gesetz über die Vereidigung der Beamten und der Soldaten der Wehrmacht), requiring all soldiers and civil servants to take an oath of personal loyalty to Hitler. Previously soldiers had sworn the Reichswehreid, pledging their loyalty to “the People and the Fatherland” (Volk und Vaterland); civil servants were further required to swear that they would uphold the constitution and laws of Germany. Now every man and woman in government service was required to make a new pledge, one which vacated any previous oaths sworn, no matter to whom:
Ich schwöre bei Gott diesen heiligen Eid, daß ich dem Führer des Deutschen Reiches und Volkes Adolf Hitler, dem Oberbefehlshaber der Wehrmacht, unbedingten Gehorsam leisten und als tapferer Soldat bereit sein will, jederzeit für diesen Eid mein Leben einzusetzen.
I swear by God this sacred oath that to the Leader of the German empire and people, Adolf Hitler, supreme commander of the armed forces, I shall render unconditional obedience and that as a brave soldier I shall at all times be prepared to give my life for this oath.
This would be known to history as the Fahneneid.
The oath was not Hitler’s idea, as is commonly believed: it was drafted by Defence Minister General Werner von Blomberg and General Walther von Reichenau, the chief of the Ministerial Office, who both held very strong Nazi sympathies (von Reichenau was a Party member, in open defiance of Reichswehr regulations), and who were both thoroughgoing toadies. When presented with the new oath of allegiance, however, unlike Caesar at the Lupercal when thrice “offered a kingly crown, which he did thrice refuse,” Hitler in no way demurred. Historically, Germans have always taken oaths of any kind with utmost solemnity—in this the Germans of the 1930s were no different than their ancestors who swore fealty to Teutonic knights, petty barons, or Hohenzollern princes. The Fahneneid was yet another chain by which Hitler could bind the German people to him and his fate, this one perhaps more significant than the others, as it was a spiritual binding. Erwin Rommel for one would hold firmly to this oa
th—until the pivotal day in June 1944 when he came to realize that not he but Adolf Hitler had dissolved it.
The first meeting of Major Rommel and der Führer came about on September 30, 1934. The occasion was an impromptu inspection of an honor guard provided by Rommel’s Jäger battalion while Hitler was in Goslar to lend his presence to Goslar’s Harvest Festival, an enormous open-air gathering of peasants and farm workers from all over Germany—upwards of a million of them. A photograph of the event exists, showing Hitler, hat in hand, marching down a line of assembled soldiers standing rigidly at “Present arms!” while beside him walks Major Rommel, who is bearing a ceremonial sword and wearing a slightly outsized (on him) coal-scuttle helmet, looking for all the world like an ambulatory, feldgrau mushroom. Rommel appears to be frowning, and there is a particularly grim set to his mouth, as if he were angry. If so, he had good reason to be: just a few moments earlier he had been involved in a row with the SS major commanding Hitler’s personal bodyguard. When called upon to have his battalion fall in for the Führer’s inspektion, Rommel was told that a rank of black-uniformed SS troopers would be interposed between his troops and Hitler, allegedly for the latter’s “protection.” Infuriated, Rommel refused to turn out his battalion, declaring that if his soldiers’ oaths of loyalty weren’t sufficient guarantee of der Führer’s safety, then they would remain in their barracks. Flustered, unaccustomed to such open defiance, the SS officer backed down and the “asphalt soldiers” were dismissed. There is no record of whether Hitler heard anything of the incident, or if he did, what he thought of it. Two years would pass before Hitler and Rommel again crossed paths.
The incident with the SS was indicative of how little regard Rommel had for most of the Nazi apparatus. The SS might be better disciplined than the SA—they were undoubtedly sharper dressers; the SA uniforms had come from surplus pre-Great War stocks of tropical issue—but they were not what Rommel would have ever regarded as real soldiers, and the psuedo-mystical mumbo-jumbo with which Heinrich Himmler attempted to surround his “new order of Teutonic Knights” was, to Rommel, beyond laughable. The hard-headed, practical Swabian in him saw that it served no purpose, but served only to draw personnel and resources away from the Reichswehr, or, as it became known on May 21, 1935, the Wehrmacht. On that date Hitler decreed that peacetime conscription, hitherto barred by the Versailles treaty, would be resumed; he had already announced that Germany would begin openly rearming on March 16. The immediate goal was the creation of an army of 36 divisions; further expansion would follow as Germany’s industries regained the capacity to adequately supply and equip them.
This momentous announcement was greeted with an outpouring of patriotic sentiment all across Germany. Hitler was playing a cagey game, as the realities of rearmament were more complex than merely putting a third of a million young German men in uniforms and passing rifles out to them. A rearmament program would virtually assure full employment throughout Germany, and revitalize several industries that were failing in the economic morass of the Great Depression. This, combined with vast public works projects, such as the construction of the autobahnen (which had its own military significance), would see the fulfillment of the promises which Hitler had made to the German people that he would restore prosperity to the Fatherland. It was yet one more example of that perverse magic which Hitler was able to work on the Volk in those years before Germany again went to war. Little wonder then that the Germans’ sense of loyalty to their Führer continued to grow.
But there was more to that loyalty than only fat pay envelopes and full lunch pails. It was a loyalty produced of genuine feeling, not the product of coercion by the Gestapo. For the German people, the swastika did not begin as a representation of evil, it was a symbol of hope and change.
The key to comprehending the “why” behind the loyalty offered to Hitler by the German people is understanding what is actually meant by that shopworn phrase “he restored the German people’s national pride.” What Hitler did, bluntly, was make Germany—and with the nation the German Army—relevant to the affairs of Europe and the world once again. What shone so brightly for the German people in all that Hitler was telling them—indeed, shone so brilliantly that it dazzled them to much of what else he was saying, particularly the most sinister truths about his intentions—was his dedication to Germany’s rearmament. After the three-quarters of a century of near-continuous violence since 1939, the concept is difficult to grasp for most people—that a large standing army, a powerful navy, a strong air force should be the source of passionate national pride, and that someone preaching, promising, tanks, guns, aircraft and warships should be regaled as a national savior rather than dismissed as a dangerous warmonger. But Mao Zhe Dong’s best-known aphorism holds—quite correctly—that “All political power proceeds from the barrel of a gun.” And there is where Hitler turned armaments into magic.
He was fond of repeating to the German people that the Versailles treaty had left Germany “Heerlos, Wehrlos, Ehrlos”—without an army, without power, and without honor. The words stung, not because they were true, but because the Germans believed them to be true. What is almost always overlooked by observers—then and now—trying to explain the phenomenon of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party is that the Treaty of Versailles formalized, codified, and institutionalized a perpetual marginalization of Germany. For the century following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, moral, physical and financial exhaustion, helped in no small part by Hapsburg ambitions, prevented the German states, a motley collection of baronies, counties, duchies and princedoms, from marshaling the resources as well as the political will necessary to coalesce into a unified German nation. When Prussia began to rise as power under Frederick the Great, Louis XV of France embraced the “Reversal of Alliances” in 1756 in large part to thwart the Prussian king’s ambitions, and Bonaparte, while reducing the number of petty German states from more than three hundred to fewer than forty, still adroitly employed a policy of “divide and conquer” in order to continue to keep the Germans marginalized, a principle to which Metternich of Austria adhered well into the middle of the nineteenth century. When Wilhelm I and von Bismarck achieved the unification of the several German states into the German Empire in 1871, they created a nation which was the military, political, and economic juggernaut of the Continent—proof, to the German people, of their previous repression—a juggernaut which would be spitefully rendered militarily, politically, and economically irrelevant by Germany’s defeat in November 1918. It was worse than impotence, and it was humiliating to a people as proud as the Volk.
Versailles had formalized that irrelevance: with her army diminished in size and power to little more than a national gendarmerie, her navy reduced to a glorified coast guard, forbidden any form of air force and denied modern weapons, burdened with a throttling reparations debt that was literally incalculable, Germany was reduced to abject impotence, her very security dependent on the continued goodwill of smaller, weaker neighbors. This was the same Germany whose military strength had for almost fifty years required that she be a part of every calculus in international politics.
Three-quarters of a century later, looking back at the monstrosity—and monstrousness—of the Third Reich, it requires a prodigious feat of simultaneous imagination and sympathy to be able to remember that in 1935 all the excesses of the Nazi regime lay in the future, and that no one at the time truly knew they were coming. The Nuremburg Laws, the betrayal of Czechoslovakia, the rape of Poland, the Sonderkommando and Einsatzgruppen, the Nacht und Nebel decrees, the Wannsee Conference, the Endlösung, the death camps, medical experiments, slave labor—not to mention the second devastating European war in less than a generation—all seem inevitable in retrospect, as innumerable decisions and actions, large and small, whether by Hitler, his henchmen, or petty, anonymous bureaucrats, are seen to conspire and converge to produce such a monstrous edifice. And yet all of it was far from being so when Hitler and the Nazis assumed power in 1933: while in retrospe
ct that inevitability may seem as a given, the stark truth is that none of it was visible as such before the events took place—inevitability is only obvious after the fact.
And even as Hitler’s malignity began to manifest itself, the magic he worked on the German people still held. Even men like Erwin Rommel would be splattered, if not actually tarred, with the brush of National Socialism because he found Hitler fascinating. And that was precisely the problem: Hitler was fascinating. William Manchester best summed up how the Führer accomplished this feat when he made the point that
. . . National Socialism at its height was one of the most potent political medicines the world has ever known. For xenopobic Germans the tug was irresistable; whatever their reservations about die Neuordnung, they joined ranks behind Hitler whenever the Reich seemed threatened. He knew that they would, and he made certain that the threat was never far off. That was part of the Führer’s genius. His foreign policy made war inevitable, yet each link in the chain of aggression toughened the loyalty of the Herrenvolk. . . .52
Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel Page 15