The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  There were, of course, alternatives to Hitler. It was just that none of them was viable. Gustav Stresemann of the People’s Party had offered compromise with the Western powers – symbolized by the 1925 Treaty of Locarno – and the hope of revanche in the East. But he had died of a heart attack on October 3, 1929, at the age of just fifty-one. Heinrich Brüning of the Catholic Centre Party offered government by presidential decree and dreamt vaguely of restoring the monarchy. But his deflationary policies only served to deepen the slump. Franz von Papen, another Catholic, betrayed his party for the sake of becoming Chancellor, in the vain belief that he could do better than Brüning. But neither he nor his successor General Kurt von Schleicher – whom Papen had picked as his own Defence Minister – had anything resembling popular support and, while the Reichstag had been temporarily sidelined by Brüning, it proved impossible to rule indefinitely without some kind of parliamentary majority. Elections in July 1932 saw the Nazi vote soar above 37 per cent. True, it fell back to 33 per cent when new elections were held in November, not least because signs of economic recovery were at last manifesting themselves, but the party’s entitlement to form a government was by now hard to dispute since it was still easily the biggest grouping in the Reichstag. Ever the schemer, Papen now persuaded Hindenburg to dump Schleicher and, against the President’s better judgement, to appoint Hitler to lead a coalition with the conservative German Nationalist Party – the only party except for the Communists to gain significant numbers of new votes in the November election. Hitler duly became Chancellor on January 30, 1933. Thus did German democracy wreak its own destruction. Given the paralysing enmity between the Social Democrats and the Communists, the only way to avoid the Third Reich would have been if Hindenburg himself had shut down the Reichstag and banned the Nazis, an option he does not seem to have contemplated.

  Superficially, Hitler’s appeal to German voters is easy to understand. He simply offered more radical remedies to the Depression than his political rivals. Others might offer piecemeal solutions to unemployment; Hitler was willing to contemplate a bold programme of public works. Others might worry that financing public works with deficits would trigger a new inflation; Hitler bluntly stated that the hoodlums of his Sturmabteilung would deal with any profiteers who charged excessive prices. Others might argue, as Rathenau and Stresemann had, that Germany must try to pay reparations, if only to prove the impossibility of doing so, or must borrow to the hilt in New York so as to drive a rift between the Western creditors; Hitler essentially argued for default. It helped, of course, that the reparations system had itself collapsed by 1932; Germany had already defaulted, albeit with American consent, by the time Hitler came to power. It helped, too, that the Nazis were able to recruit the widely respected former Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht, who had resigned his post in 1930 after effectively endorsing Hitler’s campaign against the revised reparations schedule known as the Young Plan.* Yet even with his imprimatur on them, it took real political skill to sell such unorthodox economic solutions to a relatively sophisticated and highly variegated electorate. The Nazis’ success without doubt owed much to Joseph Goebbels, the evil genius of twentieth-century marketing, who sold Hitler to the German public as if he were the miraculous offspring of the Messiah and Marlene Dietrich. The Nazi election campaigns of 1930, 1932 and 1933 were unprecedented assaults on public opinion, involving standardized mass meetings and eye-catching posters, as well as rousing songs (like the Horst-Wessel Lied) and calculated physical intimidation of opponents. Though much of this owed its inspiration to Mussolini – not least the snazzy uniforms for supporters, and the Roman salutes – Goebbels understood the need for finesse as well as bombast. For one thing, he saw more clearly than the star himself the need to adjust Hitler’ss message according to which of the German electorate’s many segments was being addressed.

  The most impressive indicator of the success of these tactics was, of course, the dramatic growth of the Nazi vote in the crucial elections of 1930 and 1932. Contrary to the old claims that it was the party of the countryside, or of the north, or of the middle class, the NSDAP attracted votes right across Germany and right across the social spectrum. Analysis at the level of the main electoral districts misses this point and exaggerates the differences between regions. More recent research based on the smallest electoral unit (the Kreis) has revealed the extraordinary breadth of the Nazi vote. There is an almost fractal quality to the picture that emerges, with each electoral district somewhat resembling the national map, and hotspots of support (Oldenburg in Lower Saxony, Upper and Middle Franconia in Bavaria, the northern parts of Baden, the eastern region of East Prussia) scattered all over the country. It is true that places with relatively high Nazi votes were more likely to be in central northern and eastern parts, and those with relatively low Nazi votes were more likely to be in the south and west. But the more important point is that the Nazis were able to achieve some electoral success in nearly any kind of local political milieu, covering the German electoral spectrum in a way not seen before or since. The Nazi vote did not vary proportionately with the unemployment rate or the share of workers in the population. As many as two-fifths of Nazi voters in some districts were working class, to the consternation of the Communist leadership. In response, some local Communists openly made common cause with the Nazis. ‘Oh yes, we admit that we’re in league with the National Socialists,’ said one Communist leader in Saxony. ‘Bolshevism and Fascism share a common goal: the destruction of capitalism and of the Social Democratic Party. To achieve this aim we are justified in using every means.’ It was a mark of Goebbels’ skill in making the party seem all things to all men that, simultaneously, dyed-in-the-wool Prussian Conservatives could regard the Nazis as potential partners in an anti-Marxist coalition. Thus were political rivals lured into what proved to be fatal forms of cooperation. The only significant constraint on the growth of the Nazi vote was the comparatively greater resilience of the Catholic Centre party compared with parties hitherto supported by German Protestants.

  Other fascist movements, as we have seen, depended heavily on elite sponsorship to gain power. The Nazis did not need to. For all the attention that has been paid to them, the machinations of the coterie around Hindenburg were not the decisive factor, as those of the Italian elites had been in 1922. If anything, they delayed Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, an office that was rightfully his after the July 1932 election. It was not the traditional elite of landed property that was drawn to Hitler; the real Junker types found him horribly coarse. (When Hitler shook hands with Hindenburg, one conservative was reminded ‘of a headwaiter closing his hand around the tip’.) Nor was it the business elite, who not unreasonably feared that National Socialism would prove a Trojan horse for socialism proper; nor the military elite, who had every reason to dread subordination to an opinionated Austrian corporal. The key to the strength and dynamism of the Third Reich was Hitler’ss appeal to the much more numerous intellectual elite; the men with university degrees who are so vital to the smooth running of a modern state and civil society.

  For reasons that may be traced back to the foundation of the Bismarckian Reich or perhaps even further into Prussian history, academically educated Germans were unusually ready to prostrate themselves before a charismatic leader. Marianne Weber recalled how, in the wake of the 1918 Revolution, her husband, the great sociologist Max Weber, had explained his theory of democracy to the architect of Germany’s defeat General Erich Ludendorff:

  WEBER: Do you think that I regard the Schweinerei that we now have as democracy?

  LUDENDORFF: What is your idea of a democracy, then?

  WEBER: In a democracy, the people choose a leader whom they trust. Then the chosen man says, ‘Now shut your mouths and obey me.’ The people and the parties are no longer free to interfere in the leader’s business.

  LUDENDORFF: I should like such a ‘democracy’.

  WEBER: Later, the people can sit in judgment. If the leader has made mistake
s – to the gallows with him!

  After a politics lesson like that – from a man who was considered a liberal in the German academy – it was not really surprising that Ludendorff ended up a Nazi member of the Reichstag. Professionals, too, proved exceptionally susceptible to Hitler’s appeal. Lawyers and doctors were substantially over-represented within the NSDAP, as were university students (then a far narrower section of society than today). To fat middle-aged lawyers, he was the heir to Bismarck. For their sons, he was the Wagnerian hero Rienzi, the demagogue who unites the people of Rome. ‘Right down to the last, deepest fibre in myself, I belong to the Führer and his wonderful movement,’ wrote the Nazi lawyer Hans Frank in his diary after a concert he had attended with Hitler on February 10, 1937. ‘We are in truth God’s tool for the annihilation of the bad forces of the earth. We fight in God’s name against Jews and their Bolshevism. God protect us!’ Such thoughts helped him and many other lawyers to come to terms with the systematic illegality that characterized the regime from the very outset: the arrests without trial (26,000 people were already in ‘protective custody’ as early as July 1933), the summary executions (beginning with the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934, when between eighty-five and two hundred people, including the over-mighty leaders of the SA, were murdered in cold blood) and, of course, the escalating discrimination against racial and social minorities.

  In similar fashion, artists and art historians turned a blind eye to the fundamental tackiness of Nazi aesthetics. Though Hitler’s youthful daubs confirm that the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts had been right to reject him, his extravagant ambitions for German art were simply irresistible to men like Dr Ernest Buchner, the General Director of the Bavarian State Painting Collections, or the sculptor Arno Breker, who had been hailed as the German Rodin in the 1920s. In May 1933, like thousands of other opportunists, Buchner joined the Nazi party. Before long he was busy replacing ‘degenerate’ (modern) artworks with the kitsch favoured by the Führer. Breker struck the same Faustian pact. By the 1940s his atelier was mass-producing busts of Hitler. Economists were also drawn to Nazism. Statisticians at the German Institute of Business-Cycle Research in Berlin were excited at the prospect of policies that aimed at full employment through state-led investment; its Chilean-born chief Ernest Wagemann understood as well as Keynes, and perhaps before him, the need for a reflationary response to the Depression. Having quarrelled with Brüning, Wage-mann joined the Nazis in the (correct) belief that they would do a better job of bringing about an economic recovery. Others found economic rationales for the Nazis’ policies of ‘racial hygiene’. Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche had published their Permission for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life in 1920, which sought to extrapolate from the annual cost of maintaining one ‘idiot’ ‘the massive capital… being subtracted from the national product for entirely unproductive purposes’. There is a clear line of continuity from this kind of analysis to the document found at the Schloss Hartheim asylum in 1945, which calculated that by 1951 the economic benefit of killing 70,273 mental patients – assuming an average daily outlay of 3.50 marks and a life expectancy often years – would be 885,439,800 marks. Many historians were little better, churning out tendentious historical justifications for German territorial claims in Eastern Europe.

  Later, after it was all over, the historian Friedrich Meinecke tried to explain ‘the German catastrophe’ by arguing that technical specialization had caused some educated Germans (not him, needless to say) to lose sight of the humanistic values of Goethe and Schiller; thus they were unable to resist Hitler’s ‘mass Machiavellianism’. Thomas Mann was unusual in being able to recognize even at the time that, in ‘Brother Hitler’s, the entire German Bildungsbürgertum possessed a monstrous younger sibling who embodied some of their deepest-rooted aspirations. An academic education, far from inoculating people against Nazism, made them more likely to embrace it. So much for the greatness of the German universities. Their fall from grace was personified by the readiness of Martin Heidegger, the greatest German philosopher of his generation, to jump on the Nazi bandwagon, a swastika pin in his lapel.

  Were German intellectuals worse in these respects than their counterparts elsewhere? Possibly. Yet other intellectuals were never exposed to Hitler’s supernatural magnetism – and that, surely, was the crucial factor. For, on closer inspection, what Hitler offered Germans was something much more than Roosevelt was offering Americans. Roosevelt spoke of frankness, action and leadership in a national emergency. But he emphasized in his inaugural address that the nature of that emergency was purely material; spiritually and morally there was nothing wrong with American society. Hitler, by contrast, saw Germany’s economic problems as mere symptoms of a more profound national malaise. Roosevelt made eight references in his speech to the ‘people’; Hitler used the word Volk no fewer than eighteen times. His role was not just to restart the economy but to be the nation’s saviour, the redeemer who would end years of national division by forging a Volksgemeinschaft – a folk-community. Tellingly, Hitler’s first speech as Chancellor ended as follows:

  I cherish the firm conviction that the hour will come at last in which the millions who despise us today will stand by us and with us hail the new, hard-won and painfully acquired German Reich we have created together, the new German kingdom of greatness and power and glory and justice. Amen.

  The response that this messianic proposition elicited was quasi-religious in its fervor. As an SA sergeant explained: ‘Our opponents… committed a fundamental error when equating us as a party with the Economic Party, the Democrats or the Marxist parties. All these parties were only interest groups, they lacked soul, spiritual ties. Adolf Hitler emerged as bearer of a new political religion.’ The Nazis developed a self-conscious liturgy, with November 9 (the date of the 1918 Revolution and the failed 1923 Beer Hall putsch) as a Day of Mourning, complete with fires, wreaths, altars, blood-stained relics and even a Nazi book of martyrs. Initiates into the elite Schutzstaffel (SS) had to incant a catechism with lines like ‘We believe in God, we believe in Germany which He created… and in the Führer… whom He has sent us.’ It was not just that Christ was more or less overtly supplanted by Hitler in the iconography and liturgy of ‘the brown cult’. As the SS magazine Das Schwarze Korps argued, the very ethical foundation of Christianity had to go too: ‘The abstruse doctrine of Original Sin… indeed the whole notion of sin as set forth by the Church… is something intolerable to Nordic man, since it is incompatible with the “heroic” ideology of our blood.’

  The Nazis’ opponents also recognized the pseudo-religious character of the movement. As the Catholic exile Eric Voegelin put it, Nazism was ‘an ideology akin to Christian heresies of redemption in the here and now… fused with post-Enlightenment doctrines of social transformation’. The journalist Konrad Heiden called Hitler ’a pure fragment of the modern mass soul’ whose speeches always ended ‘in overjoyed redemption’. An anonymous Social Democrat called the Nazi regime a ‘counter-church’. Two individuals as different as Eva Klemperer, wife of the Jewish-born philologist Victor, and the East Prussian conservative Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen could agree in likening Hitler to the sixteenth-century Anabaptist Jan of Leyden:

  As in our case, a misbegotten failure conceived, so to speak, in the gutter, became the great prophet, and the opposition simply disintegrated, while the rest of the world looked on in astonishment and incomprehension. As with us… hysterical females, schoolmasters, renegade priests, the dregs and outsiders from everywhere formed the main supports of the regime… A thin sauce of ideology covered lewdness, greed, sadism, and fathomless lust for power… and whoever would not completely accept the new teaching was turned over to the executioner.

  Still, all this leaves one question unanswered: What had gone wrong with the existing religions in Germany? For if National Socialism was a political religion, the fragmentation of the old political parties cannot satisfactorily be presented as the essential precondition for its success. E
vidence of declining religious belief among German Christians is in fact not hard to find: a substantial proportion of Germans exercised the option to be registered as konfessionslos in the 1920s. There were marked declines in church attendance, particularly in North German cities. Significantly, unlike the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church had suffered very heavy financial losses in the hyperinflation. Morale among the Protestant clergy was low; many were attracted to the Nazi notion of a new ‘Positive Christianity’. All this may offer a clue as to why the former were more likely than the latter to vote Nazi in the crucial elections of 1930–33 – as we have seen, the single most striking sociological characteristic of NSDAP support, though here too there was considerable regional variation and it would be quite wrong to infer from this anything stronger than inertia in Catholic voting patterns. After all, Austrians were scarcely less enthusiastic about National Socialism and they were virtually all Catholic. And nearly all the fascist dictators were themselves raised as Catholics: Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, to say nothing of wartime puppets like Ante Pavelić in Croatia and Jozef Tiso in Slovakia, who was himself a priest.