by A. N. Wilson
Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, the leader of the recently outlawed Catholic Party, felt able to tell the Pope, Pius XI, that ‘Hitler knows how to guide the ship … Even before he became Chancellor, I met him frequently and was greatly impressed by his clear thinking, by his way of facing realities while upholding his ideals, which are noble.’ And the Pope, an amiable scholar and former Vatican librarian, was delighted, on 20 July 1933, to sign a concordat with the Third Reich. When he did so, His Holiness met Hitler’s representative, Papen, ‘most graciously and remarked how pleased he was that the German Government now had at its head a man uncompromisingly opposed to Communism and Russian nihilism in all its forms.’11
The dread of Communism extending its tentacles across the whole of Europe blinded all these people to the reality of what Hitler was actually like. The Catholic leaders, for example, could not know that Hitler was fanatically anti-Catholic or that he would eventually imprison over 20,000 priests in Dachau. They could know, by now, that he was a rabid anti-Semite, but this did not trouble them. For them, as for the proprietor of the Daily Mail, Hitler was their strongest ally against Communism.
At that date they were probably right. And now that we know the full extent of Stalin’s gulags, the sheer terribleness of a system which required so high a proportion of its population to be enslaved or imprisoned, we might conclude, even with hindsight, that they were right. Hitler was a bulwark against Stalinism. For this reason, there were many who were prepared to overlook the rough justice with which he treated Reds or potential subversives.
Within a month of Hitler becoming Chancellor, the Communists had planned demonstrations, armed resistance and arson. Then, on 27 February, a young Dutchman named Marinus van der Lubbe, having failed in his attempt to set fire to three government buildings, crept into the Reichstag and set fire to it with four packets of firelighters.12 It was an isolated incident by a fanatic but it was easy, as the flames soared into the night sky of Berlin, for Hitler and his Nazi colleagues in the government to see it as a Communist plot. In private, Hitler’s first reaction to the fire in the parliament building was to say, ‘Good riddance to that trashy old shack!’ He had no more interest in preserving parliamentary debate than did the Communists. But in public he was able to say that if the Communists had power in Europe it would only be a matter of months before the whole continent was aflame like that building.
He could use the fire as an excuse to declare a state of national emergency and to use truckloads of SA auxiliaries to help the police maintain ‘order’. ‘When the Communist menace is stamped out the normal order of things shall return. Our laws are too liberal for us to deal effectively with this Bolshevist underworld.’
The following day, on 28 February, Hitler suspended all press freedom, as well as freedom of assembly and expression. Henceforward, even to make the mildest joke about the Leader could result in a midnight knock on the door from the Gestapo. Conservatives, both of the capitalist industrialist type and of the older officers in the military, were perfectly happy for democracy to be suspended. Such figures as Gustav Krupp von Bohlen pledged a million marks for the Ruhr combine. I. G. Farben gave 400,000 marks to help revive the industrial plants there.
The use of the Brownshirts to maintain order was, however, not something which the old-fashioned military were prepared to tolerate. Hindenburg and the other senior military made it clear to Hitler that he could not have a private army within the Reich. From now on, the German army was prepared to pledge him their personal support on condition that he drastically limited the street-powers of the SA.
Hitler knew that he could not remain in power without the support of the regular German army and its officers. He therefore made the decision to liquidate his old friend Röhm, who was in any case now openly hostile to Hitler himself, and to what he regarded as the sell-out to respectability which taking government had entailed. Göring, Goebbels, Himmler and the rest of the pack were settling down to positions of real political power. Röhm wanted to continue the revolution. He wanted to put the ‘socialist’ back into National Socialist. His ‘sacred socialism seeking the whole’13 would be achieved – for Röhm if not for the movement as a whole – by active homosexuality with street boys and maintaining an implacable distrust of the industrialists such as Krupp who were financing and entrenching Hitler’s position in the German industrial heartlands. ‘Adolf is rotten’, Röhm complained. ‘He’s betraying all of us. He only goes around with reactionaries. His old comrades aren’t good enough for him.’
Röhm had an insight into Hitler’s character which was basically true: ‘Adolf was and always will be a civilian, an “artist”, a dreamer … Right now all he wants to do is sit up in the mountains and play God. And guys like us have to cool our heels … He wants to inherit a ready-made army all set to go.’14
This was all absolutely true. Hitler had bursts of energy and activity, spells of rage-fuelled hyper-activity, but for the most part he was, unlike Röhm, extremely lazy; he was a dreamer, and he was always more of an artist than a soldier. He did indeed see the value of inheriting ready-made institutions and using them for his own purposes. Even during the years before he came to power, when we might expect the party leader to have been busily occupied with gaining political ground, his way of life was that of the lazy bohemian. He never kept regular hours, and he was seldom seen to do any work in his large work room at the Berghof. Afternoons were invariably spent, during those days, at the Café Heck or some similar place, surrounded by admirers, and talking.
By the time he became Chancellor, the pattern of life did not markedly change. He rose late, spent most of the day chatting, and would nearly always round off the evening with a film. Adjutants tried to find him a new film to watch every day. His earlier fondness for high culture began to diminish. He enjoyed ‘light entertainment’, and if women, such as his girlfriend Eva Braun, were present in the evenings, political conversation was banned – as was, of course, that cardinal sin, smoking.
To say that he was an artist and a civilian was not to deny that his political aims were belligerent. But he did not plan to accomplish them by means of Röhm and his street Arabs. The SA was useful to bully Jews and frighten the Reds, but for the bigger plan – as yet not fully disclosed to the German people – namely the expansion by force into Eastern Europe – the German army was an absolute necessity. It was the generals, whom Röhm dismissed as old fogies, who would enable Hitler to become the new Napoleon, and not the Brownshirts.
So Röhm had to go. And as for National Socialist doctrine – beyond the broad outlines of a plan for an absolutist, anti-Semitic state with the ambition to expand east and west throughout Europe – Hitler was actually untroubled by the details which appealed so strongly to the core party enthusiasts.
The so-called Night of the Long Knives, 30 June 1934, not only saw the murder of Röhm and other influential SA officers. It was the excuse to polish off such miscellaneous figures as the former Chancellor, General Schleicher, and his wife, gunned down in their house, Gregor Strasser (taken to Gestapo headquarters and shot), the head of Catholic Action, Erich Klausener, and other political figures who might be thought to have stood in the Leader’s way. In a two-hour-long speech in the Reichstag, Hitler justified the killings – ‘Mutinies are broken according to eternal iron laws.’ Although thirteen members of the parliament had died in the purge, no one rose to protest at this method of justice. Probably as many as 200 people had been gunned down in one night without trial. The Nazis drafted a telegram which they made Hindenburg send to the Leader: FROM THE REPORTS PLACED BEFORE ME I LEARN THAT BY YOUR DETERMINED ACTION AND GALLANT PERSONAL INTERVENTION YOU HAVE NIPPED TREASON IN THE BUD. YOU HAVE SAVED THE GERMAN NATION FROM SERIOUS DANGER. FOR THIS I EXPRESS TO YOU MY MOST PROFOUND THANKS AND SINCERE APPRECIATION.
The extermination of Röhm and the downgrading of the SA had come about as a result of detailed negotiations with the army. In April 1934 Hitler had secretly met the War Minister, General Werner von
Blomberg, on board the battleship Deutschland. They had agreed that the army would support Hitler becoming President, as well as Chancellor, on Hindenburg’s death. The quid pro quo was the elimination of Röhm, and the day after that happened, Blomberg issued an order of the day to the troops commending the Leader’s ‘soldierly’ decision. On 2 August, Hindenburg died, and Hitler, with the full support of the army, now assumed the Presidency. It was agreed that rather than being called Chancellor or President he would in future simply be known as The Leader. This was put to a plebiscite on 19 August and 89.9 per cent of German people voted ‘Yes’. Blomberg remained in office until January 1938 when an embarrassing scandal forced him to resign. Hitler and Göring were witnesses at his wedding to a much younger bride, Margarethe Gruhn, who had, it transpired, been posing for pornographic pictures for a Jewish Czech photographer who was also her lover. Her name also appeared on the police register of Berlin prostitutes.
Hitler did not replace Blomberg. He merely took over the total domination of the armed forces. He was assisted in the administrative task of being Commander in Chief by his devotee General Wilhelm Keitel, who testified at Nuremberg: ‘From then on, Hitler gave orders directly to the army, the navy and the air force. No one issued orders independently of Hitler.’15
All this lay a little in the future. Before the years of militaristic triumph, there were the years of a seemingly miraculous economic recovery. Gone were the strikes. Gone were the unemployment queues. The miracle had been accomplished by vast schemes of public works, the building of the motorways (autobahns), the improvement of the nation’s infrastructure, and by putting Germany on a war economy (surreptitiously manufacturing parts for aircraft and tanks) while superficially celebrating the prosperity of peace. John Maynard Keynes was vainly urging the democratic governments of Europe to ‘prime the pump’ and inject money artificially into their flagging economies. Hitler, like President Roosevelt in America, put Keynesianism into action. In Roosevelt’s case, it was Keynes with ‘fireside chats’ delivered by radio to the grateful recipients of his ‘New Deal’. With Hitler, it was Keynes set to a lurid Wagnerian music.
The economic recovery was played out against a repeated programme of public spectacles. Hitler the architect and stage-designer, Hitler the would-be operatic impresario, made the story of Germany’s recovery into a vulgar pageant of forward-looking nationalism. At Nuremberg, he staged rallies which were breathtakingly spectacular. He engaged the services of a young architect named Albert Speer, who erected a twentieth-century equivalent of pagan games in the world of ancient Sparta or Pergamum. It was in fact the altars of Pergamum which were the inspiration for Speer’s huge tribune structure in the stadium at Nuremberg, which was eighty feet high and crowned by an eagle with a wing-span of 100 feet. At 40-feet intervals were anti-aircraft searchlights with a range of 25,000 feet. At the 1934 Parteitag – Party Day – over 200,000 National Socialists marched into the stadium’s Zeppelin Field, with 20,000 unfurled banners, with lights, with torches, and, as a symbol of their return both to work and to military strength, tools of toil and weapons of war held aloft. Never in the history of the world had there been political displays on quite this scale. The effects on the huge crowds of the special lighting, of the punctiliously choreographed marches and gymnastic displays, of the songs and the lights were ecstatically exciting. Others in the world watched, and sought to imitate, the effect. For example, when the old librarian of the Vatican, Pius XI, died and was replaced by a former Papal Nuncio to Berlin, Eugenio Pacelli, he was crowned with a greater public display, and with more outdoor special effects, than had ever been used before by a Pope. It was directly inspired by the Nuremberg rallies, as were the great march-pasts of tanks and weaponry on Red Square which became a regular feature of life in the Soviet Union. Sir Eric Phipps’s successor as British ambassador to Berlin was overwhelmed by the Nazi pageantry. He recalled, ‘I spent six years in St Petersburg before the war in the best days of the old Russian ballet, but for grandiose beauty I have never seen a ballet to compare with it.’16
Speer, of all those close to Hitler, is in some ways the most depressing, since he was a ‘normal’ man, cold-heartedly cynical and with no particular political beliefs. Another figure who prostituted superb talent to glorify the regime was Leni Riefenstahl, who had made her name with the film The Blue Light, and now recorded the 1934 Party Day as an unforgettable cinematic spectacle – Triumph of the Will. From its opening sequences, in which Hitler is, back-view, in an aeroplane descending upon Nuremberg, Riefenstahl made him into a parody of Christ returning to earth, or at the very least a Lohengrin coming on his swan to save his people. Riefenstahl was a film-maker of enormous talent, with a very sure eye. People gossiped, as they did about Winifred Wagner, about the extent of her intimacy with the Leader. In a rather nauseating anecdote, she afterwards claimed that she had propositioned Hitler and that his reply was that he had given himself to Germany as to a lover. Somehow, the repetition of this story by one of the supposed participants is equally repellent, whether it is true or false.
It was not the Nazis alone, nor the Germans alone, who were manipulated into support of the regime by these vulgarized balletic scenes. In 1936, as it happened, the Olympic Games were scheduled to be held in Berlin. Three years would have passed, by the time the Games took place, from the time the Nazis came to power. They were three years in which the world had become electrified by the spectacle of Hitler’s successes. On the one hand there were those who saw his transformation of the German economy and his routing of the Communists as signs of great hope. On the other side were those who could not believe that the belligerence of his speeches, and the obvious militarism of the regime, could foreshadow a peaceful future in Europe. Quite apart from Germany’s aspiration to be reunited to Austria, or to occupy the German-speaking regions of Czechoslovakia and Poland, what of France? As Hitler spoke of revenge for the Treaty of Versailles, how was Germany’s old enemy going to react? And apart from these territorial questions, the whole political division between the extremes of Left and Right appeared to have divided Europe – in Spain, in Italy, in Portugal. However terrible the millions of deaths in Soviet Russia, was it truly the case that the only alternative to the tyrannies of Communism were the brutalities of the Fascists?
It was against the background of these questions that the 1936 Olympic Games were held in Berlin. Those who attended them were by now fully acquainted with the fact that anti-Semitism was written into the Nazi view of the world. In 1935, the German Government had enacted the Nuremberg Laws – ‘A Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour’. This forebade ‘Aryans’ – to use the crazy classification of Houston Stewart Chamberlain – to marry or have children with ‘non-Aryans’. There were restrictions even upon Jews employing non-Jewish servants and vice-versa. Having made it illegal for Jews to enjoy any close relations or intercourse with other Germans, and deprived them of the right to be policemen, teachers, lawyers, and so forth, it was hoped, as a British Foreign Office document of 1938 made clear, that the Jews would leave Germany peaceably. ‘The ultimate aim of Germany’s Jewish Policy is the emigration of all Jews living on German territories.’ This was written at a time when only about 100,000 Jews had left Germany. As far as the author of the memorandum was concerned, the ‘problem’ here was not that Germany was persecuting the Jews, but that other nations would have to accept the exiles as refugees. Already, in readiness against this undesired eventuality, America, France, the Netherlands and Norway had legislation in place to restrict the numbers of Jews entering their countries.17
Incredible as it may seem to us in the post-Auschwitz world, most diplomatic and political experts throughout the world saw the Nuremberg legislations as ‘moderate’. Instead of the bullying of the SA in the old days, the Germans were merely bringing in laws which restricted Jewish rights. It was only like Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against the Catholics. If a nation wished to restrict membership of its civil service to Lutherans, why not?
Those who took this view were only too happy to turn a blind eye to its obvious monstrousness. And it was to appease these would-be friends of Germany that Hitler gave orders, in the run-up to the 1936 Olympics, that the cruder manifestations of anti-Semitism be played down or actually hidden. Gone were the signs telling Germans not to patronize Jewish shops or businesses. The Nazi propaganda sheets, and the speeches of the anti-Jewish rabble-rousers, were deliberately toned down. There was even a sense in Germany itself that perhaps the anti-Jewish stuff had simply been froth on top of the National Socialist beer. In the period 1934–8, even the rate of Jewish emigration slowed.18
The Olympic Games were a joint attempt, not just by the Germans, but by the human race, to turn a blind eye to what hindsight makes obvious: the essentially warlike, and essentially murderous, nature of Hitler’s programme. Apart from the Leader refusing to shake hands with Jesse Owens, a black man from the United States who won four gold medals for athletics, the Olympics were a display in which the world apparently needed to be bamboozled. Richard Strauss arranged settings of the ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’ and of ‘Deutschland Über Alles’ for a chorus of 3,000. A crowd of 100,000 cheered as Hitler took his place in the stand. All 250 of the French athletes enthusiastically gave him the Roman salute as they marched past his imperial stand. By the time the Games ended, the hypnotic effect of crowd-mania – upon which the Nazis had been playing so successfully for years at home – gripped the international crowd. When the Games ended on 16 August 1936, it was not only Germans who cried out, ‘Sieg Heil! Unser Führer, Adolf Hitler! Sieg Heil!’19