by A. N. Wilson
Hitler had by now achieved one of his aims, and these doldrum years were the essential period in which to achieve it: namely, total domination of the National Socialist Party and of the völkisch movement in general. This 1929 Nuremberg Rally set the seal on that achievement.
Goebbels and Hitler had set the stage. All that was now needed was thunder and lightning from the wings. For that they were dependent upon the cruel gods of the northern theogony, on the incestuous Wotan, on the furious Thor with his hammer, and on the mad dragons who guarded the gold-hoards. These unseen divinities did not disappoint. On 3 October 1929, Gustav Stresemann, the only truly statesmanlike figure in the Weimar Republic, died of a stroke. Three weeks later, on 24 October, in an entirely disconnected calamity, the New York Stock Market collapsed. The implosion of world capitalism, so long awaited by catastrophe politicians of Left and Right, had finally happened.
Strangely, the Nazis were slow to recognize the significance of this event in America. The Völkischer Beobachter did not even mention it in its next issue. But the effects of the crash on the worldwide economy, and on Germany in particular, could not be hidden from anyone. By January 1930, 14 per cent of the adult workforce were unemployed: the labour exchanges recorded 3,218,000 unemployed but the true figure was much greater, probably nearer 4.5 million.15
Free society was failing.
FIVE
‘A Simple Cowherd can Become a Cardinal’
‘Instead of working to take power by force, we must hold our noses and enter the Reichstag against the Catholic and Marxist deputies’, Hitler had said after he came out of prison in 1924. Far from his party finding it easy to attract votes while its anti-democratic leadership held their noses, they failed to attract the electorate.
After the death of Stresemann, leader of the National Liberal Party, and the Wall Street Crash, everything was different. The German Government broke up in March 1930 and from then until Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933, majority government was impossible. The Centre Left had failed. The President, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, appointed as Chancellor the leader of the Catholic Centre Right party, Heinrich Brüning. He dissolved the Reichstag and thereby inadvertently began the process which would allow the Nazis to achieve power. In the elections which followed, Hitler hoped that his Nazis might win sixty seats in the Reichstag. He won 107, and the Nazis now held about one-fifth of the Reichstag. Brüning, who regarded National Socialism as ‘a feverish phenomenon’, offered Hitler a role in a coalition with the socialists. The offer was of course refused. The government which Brüning had managed to cobble together then proceeded to institute a number of emergency decrees which were both highly unpopular and ineffectual. Wages were cut, unemployment pay was cut, women were dismissed from public employment. When he visited Breslau in 1932, the crowd pelted Brüning with stones. Unemployment soared to 6 million and continued to rise. The working classes hated Brüning. The employers hated him, because he tried to impose a freeze on price rises. The next year, 1932, there were two elections in which the Nazis picked up a yet larger share of the votes.
Hitler was riding the storm, and would eventually come to power by something very close to a democratic process. But he nearly came unstuck through a tragic scandal. On 18 September 1931, when Hitler was criss-crossing the country in an election journey, he received the news that his niece, Geli Raubal, had committed suicide in the Munich flat. It would seem that no other event – not even the death of his mother – affected him as this did. She had shot herself with Hitler’s revolver. All kinds of theories have been advanced. Some suggest that she was having an affair with a Jew and that she was murdered by Nazis to avoid this ‘scandal’. Others have supposed that Nazis murdered her because the peculiar nature of the relationship with her uncle was going to be exposed by blackmailers. Others have imagined what is probably the truth, that, for whatever reason, the poor young woman had had enough of living and did indeed take her own life.
Hitler was completely devastated. Just as, when life was going well for him, he became hyper-energetic and over-excited, so, when setbacks occurred, he was thrown into despair. He said that he wished to give up political life. In all the years which followed, it was forbidden by Hitler’s entourage to mention Geli’s name in his presence. If Geli did inadvertently crop up in the conversation, his eyes always filled with tears. He was truly devastated. A bust of her was placed in the room where she killed herself and for year on year, on the anniversary of her death, Hitler would shut himself in her room for hours on end. Before he left her for the last time, there had been a violent row between uncle and niece. She had wanted to cut loose and go for a while to Vienna, a scheme to which he was implacably opposed. To what extent this triggered her death, we shall probably never know.
Scandal-mongers churned out filth about Hitler and his niece, inventing lurid sexual perversions which the uncle and niece had shared. But there is always the possibility that they were simply very fond of one another. The British poet Stevie Smith, who led a maidenly existence, unmarried, in a dull suburb north of London, once angrily reacted to a person who told her she did not have any experience of love. ‘I do’, she replied. ‘I love my aunt’. Love takes many forms.
After Geli’s suicide, servants were engaged to fill the vacuum. Rosa Mitterer became a maid in the flat, and later at the Berghof. At first when she was engaged by Hitler, she would hear him weeping through the ceiling. Her first task each day, when up in the mountains, was to feed Hitler’s dogs: first Prinz and then two other German Shepherds, Muckl or Muck and Wolf. Her verdict, delivered sixty years later, matched that of almost everyone else who worked for him: ‘He was a charming man, someone who was only ever nice to me, a great boss to work for. You can say what you like but he was a good man to us.’ Hitler, who was deliberately to engineer the deaths of millions, and who ranted at generals and politicians, was habitually gentle with servants and secretaries.
The death of Geli broke Hitler. It also strengthened his other great love – for the crowds. And when it became clear that he was capable of rallying from the sorrow of bereavement, he was able to throw himself even more fervently into his role as the National Saviour – one which, however cynically it was manipulated by Goebbels and the party machine, was one in which Hitler to all appearances passionately and sincerely believed. The very beginning of his political career – as a rabble-rousing speaker in the army at the end of the First World War – had been preceded by a collapse. From the depths of depression, and, as he would have us believe, actual blindness, he rose to a mysterious energy. There were many of these minor falls and rises in his bipolar emotional-political career. But the crisis after the death of Geli was the most profound. Her loss took him to the depths of despair. Thereafter, he rose to a new demonic energy, and there would be no stopping him.
As well as being the time of political advancement for the party on the national scene, it was also the time when the party finalized its own readiness for government.
Much is sometimes made of the Roman Catholic upbringing of both Hitler and Goebbels. In particular it is suggested that the National Socialist love of ceremony derived from the processions which Hitler had seen as a boy in Catholic churches. The great party days and rallies in Nuremberg and elsewhere are modern pieces of cinema more than they are overtly liturgical. It would probably be truer to say that the modern Roman Catholic Church, with its widely filmed papal coronations, its open-air masses in sports stadiums and its torch-lit processions through the streets of Lourdes, learnt from the National Socialists, rather than the other way about.
As well as the historians who lay emphasis on the Catholic upbringing, it was something to which Hitler himself often made allusion, and he was nearly always violently hostile. ‘The biretta! The mere sight of these abortions in cassocks makes me wild!’1 Hitler saw himself as having avoided the power of the priests. ‘In Austria, religious instruction was given by the priests. I was the eternal asker of questions. Since I was c
ompletely the master of the material’ – but naturally – ‘I was unassailable.’ Nevertheless, even as the unassailable war leader in January 1942, he would sit in the middle of the night and remember the power of a certain Father Schwarz at his first school. ‘When Father Schwarz entered the classroom, the atmosphere was at once transformed. He brought revolution in with him. For my part, I used to excite him by waving pencils in the colours of the Greater Germany. “Put away those abominable colours at once!” he’d say … “You should have no other ideal in your heart but that of our beloved country and our beloved house of Habsburg. Whoever does not love the Imperial Family, does not love the Church, and whoever does not love the Church, does not love God! Sit down, Hitler!”’2 In that sentence, if you substitute the Leader for the emperor, and the party for Church, you have the template for the kind of obedience which would come to be expected of Germans under the National Socialist revolution.
What both Goebbels and Hitler did probably learn from their Catholic upbringing was a system of control. In the years when they were growing up, the Catholic Church throughout Europe had seen a catastrophic decline in numbers. Its leadership felt itself threatened by what was called Modernism, the attempt to reconcile scientific learning, modern Biblical scholarship and modern philosophy with the evolving teaching of Christianity. In 1906, the Pope, Pius X, had issued a savage attack on the Modernists and instituted what was in effect a purge of the Church. Catholics were encouraged to tell tales on any priest or religious figure who seemed to be tainted with Modernism. There were extraordinary cases of stray conversations overheard on railway journeys being reported to the authorities, and careers in the Church being ruined in consequence. The Church displayed what was in effect thought-policing. Its techniques were eagerly copied by the extremist politicians of Left and Right in subsequent generations.
When someone begged the Pope to have mercy on a suspected Modernist, Pius X replied, ‘Kindness is for fools.’ Hitler hated Catholicism and in time came to persecute it. But he learnt much from watching its system of power. He told Heinrich Himmler (who had been there from the time of the Munich putsch and who would become the chief implementer of the Final Solution, the massacre of Europe’s Jews) and SS General Reinhard Heydrich one evening in 1941 how much he had admired, as a youth, the way in which the Pope and his henchmen had put down Modernism in 1905–6.3 He admired the dedication of its celibate clergy. He admired, too, the fact that it was classless. ‘A simple cowherd can become a cardinal. That’s why the Church remains militant.’4 He admired its unchanging teachings. He admired its ability to intrude and snoop into private lives. He admired its lack of kindness. Above all, he admired its organizational skills. Always and everywhere, Catholic parishes, schools and dioceses, academies, and youth groups, guaranteed that the faith was propagated in each area. And it was always the same faith, rigidly controlled by the bosses of the hierarchy. More, even, than the Communists, it was the Catholics who had control over the minds of their adherents. Hitler and Goebbels, the two Catholic renegades, recreated a political organization which was comparable to a Church, with its own youth movement, its own simple educational programme or catechism, its own thought police, even the equivalent of the Jesuit order in the elite paramilitary guard, the SS. So superbly well organized had the National Socialist Party become, in a Germany which was rapidly falling into chaos in all its government departments, that the Nazis created, well before they were actually rewarded with political power, a power-structure which had huge control over human lives.
A key component of this structure was the Hitler Youth organization (Hitler Jugend, or HJ). Here the side of Hitler which had admired the novels of Karl May, and who understood the young because he was in many respects childish, came into its own. National Socialism was a young movement. Its chief appeal was to the younger generation. The huge proportion of members of the SA were, naturally enough, young unemployed men. In the consolidation of Nazi power, it was necessary to start a specific youth movement, analogous to Baden Powell’s Scout movement, to counteract the influence of comparable Communist youth movements. Every child who joined could enter a little into the Leader’s own fantasy life and become a Red Indian brave like Karl May’s Winnetou, or a lone-ranging cowboy like Old Surehand. Upon enrolment, the boy would be given a dagger on which the words ‘Blood and Honour’ were engraved. Unlike the more seemly Boy Scouts, the Hitler Youth also had an exciting lack of respectability. When he put on his uniform, the boy would be told that he was superior to a mere civilian. ‘We took this to mean we could beat up civilians if they gave themselves airs’, said one former HJ member.5 Many German boys flocked to join the Hitler Youth, which gave them the chance, in hard economic times, to enjoy sport, and comradeship, and to sleep in tents. When the Nazis took power, the Hitler Youth movement was one of the features of German life which most impressed foreign visitors. Apart from its levels of discipline, it so visibly increased not merely morale but physical health. This was at a time when the youth of English cities, for example, were undernourished, and suffering from rickets, tuberculosis and other diseases. Sir Arnold Wilson, an MP who visited Germany seven times during the period 1933–9, remarked, ‘Infant mortality has been greatly reduced, tuberculosis and other diseases have noticeably diminished. The criminal courts have never had so little to do, and the prisons never had so few occupants. It is a pleasure to observe the physical aptitude of German youth.’ Very many people, in Germany and outside, would have echoed these words from the time of the Hitler Youth movement’s inception, and its popularity, among young people and among their parents, was a factor in the Nazi electoral success of 1931–3.
In a pamphlet about the training of young people, a Nazi author wrote, ‘For us an order and an imperative are the most sacred duties. For every order comes from the responsible personage and that personage we trust – the Leader. So we stand before you, the German Father, the German Mother, we the young leaders of the German Youth, we train and educate your son, and mould him into a man of action, a man of victory. He has been taken into a hard school so that his fists may be steeled, his courage strengthened, and that he may be given a faith, a faith in Germany.’6
Very many Germans, in the anarchy which characterized the last days of the Weimar Republic, felt that a faith in Germany would not come amiss. One of the factors which allowed the Nazis eventually to take power was the fear of the army felt by the soft Left. They dreaded a military or quasi-military government, led by President Hindenburg’s close adviser, the right-wing Major Kurt von Schleicher. He was one of the many ‘useful idiots’ who believed that he could use Hitler for his own purposes. Schleicher’s politics were extreme nationalist. Of course, a military dictatorship under Schleicher would have been tough, but hindsight can be fairly sure it would have been mild compared with what actually came.
Schleicher patronizingly told Hindenburg that Hitler was ‘an interesting man with exceptional speaking abilities. In his plans he outsoars the clouds. You then have to hold him by the coat-tails to keep him on the ground.’7 It was a genuinely fatal judgement, since Hitler would have Schleicher executed on 30 June 1934.
In the chaos of elections and collapsing governments, Hindenburg, a failing, ancient figure from a now vanished Wilhelmine German past, appointed as Chancellor a Catholic aristocrat called Franz von Papen. Papen was even less equipped than Schleicher to deal with the demons being unleashed by the Nazi magic. But, like Schleicher, he also believed that he could manipulate the Nazis, do deals with them, ‘use’ them as a weapon against the Left. Being a man who was, however morally weak, basically sane, Papen could not even see the magic at work. As for Hitler, Papen said, ‘I could detect no inner quality which might explain his extraordinary hold on the masses. He was wearing a dark blue suit and seemed the complete petit bourgeois. He had an unhealthy complexion and with his little moustache and curious hairstyle had an indefinable bohemian quality. His demeanour was modest and polite and although I heard much about th
e magnetic quality of his eyes, I do not remember being impressed by him …’8
The country meanwhile was in anarchy, with general elections being held on an almost monthly basis. In order to secure the support of the Nazis, Schleicher was getting Hindenburg to concede more and more privileges to them. A major mistake was in lifting the ban on private armies, and allowing the SS and the SA into the arena of domestic politics. By now, the Nazis had set in place their perfect formula for revolutionary control of the country. They had established a nationwide organization, each with its own local leaders, or Gauleiters (Gau is the word for an area or region). They had established a popular youth movement, which, to the relief of anxious, unemployed parents, kept their boys off the streets, and kept them fit and active. They had also, with increasing visibility, established the fact that they were frightening. There was now no town in Germany which did not have its brown-shirted storm-troopers standing beside the local Jewish shop, or Jewish dentist (most of the dentists in Germany were Jewish) or doctor’s surgery. It was beginning to require courage to defy them. The majority of the leadership of the Lutheran Church were, if not openly sympathetic to the Nazis, at least prepared to do a deal with them. Only a few saw what an infernal chasm was opening up before German feet. One of these, the admirable Dietrich Bonhoeffer, had spoken, even before Hitler took power, of the possibility that they would have to suffer martyrdom at the hands of the Nazis. He was one of the leaders of the breakaway anti-Nazi schism in the Lutheran Church – the so-called Confessing Church. Within weeks of Hitler’s assumption of power he made a radio broadcast, which was cut off mid-sentence, in which he warned the German people against the cult of personality and said that the Führer would turn out to be the Verführer – the Leader would be a Seducer.