Hitler
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A few days into the campaign Hitler professed himself to Goebbels to be satisfied with ‘the radical turn in the prosecution of priests’ and went on to make a number of fundamental statements concerning future policy towards the Churches. ‘Does not want any religious dimension to the Party. Does not want to be made into a god himself either. Gives Himmler a good roasting over this. We must bring the Churches to heel and make them serve our ends.’ Celibacy was to cease and the Church’s wealth be surrendered. Men were not be allowed to study theology before the age of twenty-four and religious orders had to be dissolved: ‘That’s the only way we’ll bring them into line within a few decades. Then they’ll be eating out of our hands.’19 Hitler also used his speech on 1 May for a broadside against the Churches: ‘As long as they stick to their religious matters the state will not trouble them. If they try by whatever means such as letters, encyclicals, and so on to claim rights that are the business of the state alone, we will force them back into the spiritual and pastoral activities appropriate to them. Nor is it their business to criticise the state’s morality when they have more than enough reasons to look to their own morals. . . . It’s up to the leaders of the German state to look after the morals of the German state and German nation . . .’20
What was meant by this was stated more precisely by Goebbels in the Sportspalast on 28 May in a speech that is generally regarded as the high point of the campaigns against the Churches.21 Hitler had in fact dictated the core statements to him. Even the Propaganda Minister was surprised at the sharp tone of the ‘declaration of hostilities’ that Hitler put in his mouth.22 In this speech, which was given great prominence in the media, Hitler announced through Goebbels that ‘perpetrators of sex offences and those behind them pulling the strings’ would be brought to book. Goebbels had no scruples about adopting the pose of the disgusted father and detailing examples of ‘hair-raising moral depravity’: ‘After confession under-age young people were forced into sexual acts in the sacristies; the victims of seduction were rewarded for their compliance with the immoral desires of these sex criminals with pictures of saints, and after being violated these young people were blessed and the sign of the cross was made over them.’ ‘This sex plague must and will be eradicated, root and branch’, Goebbels announced, and if the Church showed itself too weak to tackle the matter, the state would see to it. His appearance culminated in the threat that it might be deemed necessary ‘to force some very prominent members of the clergy to give an account of themselves under oath in court’.23
Only one day later Hitler had the German chargé d’affaires in the Vatican deliver a note in which he complained bitterly about the Chicago Cardinal George William Mundelein, who had voiced criticisms of conditions in Germany.24 In Hitler’s view his speech ‘removed the basis for normal relations between the German government and the Curia’, as the Vatican was allowing ‘those sweeping public attacks on the head of the German state by one if its most eminent officials to go unchallenged’ and was thereby supporting them.25
The Churches Ministry was prompted by this incident to suggest to Hitler that he terminate the Concordat.26 After some hesitation, at a meeting with Kerrl he gave instructions that first a law concerning the relationship of Church and state should be drafted including provisions to abolish Church Tax and also state support for the Churches; then on Reformation Day he would make a keynote speech to the Reichstag, after which he would send a note terminating the Concordat.27 Yet in the end he decided not to take such a radical step.
On 2 June Hitler gave a speech to the Gauleiters in the Air Ministry about Church policy, once again setting out some fundamental principles. He wanted ‘no Church in the Party. He had no desire to be a Church reformer to regenerate the Churches.28 Make them submit to the state’s laws. No new religions to be founded.’29 Accordingly, the propaganda campaign against the Catholic Church continued.30
Even though Hitler did not intend to found a new religion, during these months he was nevertheless more than usually preoccupied with religious matters and metaphysical problems. And in the process he appears to have concluded, independently of any religious affiliation or concrete notion of God, that he himself was the instrument of a superhuman providence. The idea that the course being followed by the NSDAP was in harmony with ‘providence’ occurs again and again in Hitler’s speeches from 1933 onwards. In August and October 1935 and in his ‘election appearances’ after the occupation of the Rhineland he had on numerous occasions expressed in public the conviction that he was the instrument of providence.31 The formulations he used on 27 June at the Gau Party Congress in Würzburg, however, are far more explicit than those in the speeches referred to above. However weak the individual may be, Hitler explained to the crowd gathered in front of the Residenz, ‘he becomes immeasurably strong the moment he acts in accordance with this providence! Then the power that has marked out every great event in the world pours down upon him.’ Hitler of course related this phenomenon to himself: ‘And when I look back on the five years that lie behind us I may surely say: “That was not merely the work of men!” If providence had not shown us the way, I would often have failed to find these vertiginous paths. . . . For deep in our hearts we National Socialists are believers too! We cannot be otherwise; no-one can make national or world history if he does not have the blessing of this providence on his intentions and actions.’32
It is possible to speculate about whether by invoking providence Hitler wanted to fill the gap he may have felt in his own inner life as a result of his rejection (reiterated so vehemently during the conflict with the Churches) of any concrete notion of religious faith. What is certain, however, is that ‘providence’ was designed to help win the political and ideological struggle against the influence of the Churches. They were not to be allowed sovereignty in metaphysical matters; on the contrary, the regime was allied to omnipotent supernatural powers!
In July, however, while still at the Bayreuth Festival, Hitler issued an order to halt the prosecutions of priests. The situation with regard to the Protestant Church had escalated at the beginning of July, when Pastor Niemöller, the main representative of the Confessing Church, was arrested. However, in the meantime Hitler had once more moved away from his idea of neutralizing the Churches before the start of the ‘great world struggle’. In fact it was his anticipation of those decisive foreign conflicts that persuaded him that it was more important to find a modus vivendi with the Churches in the interests of national unity.33 Although in August Goebbels provided him with material for more ‘priest trials’, he decided for the time being not to act on it.34 The same was true of the termination of the Concordat and the vexed question of the Schools Law.35
In August the Reich School Law was on Hitler’s desk to be signed off; after Eltz-Rübenach’s resignation every minister had signed the draft by the summer. By now, however, Hitler was dithering over whether to sign. Although by 1938 the regime had to a large extent succeeded in imposing community schools, it was crucial in the light of Hitler’s conflict with the Churches that the initiative for them did not appear to come from the Reich government but rather from the states and local authorities.36 When in November Goebbels suggested further measures against the Churches Hitler spoke in favour of ‘reticence’: ‘Let’s not disturb the Christmas season with such things.’37 At the beginning of December at lunch Hitler expatiated ‘once more on the problem of the Churches’, defending his failure to act on tactical grounds: ‘He’s getting closer and closer to a separation of Church and state. But then Protestantism will be destroyed and we’ll no longer have any counterweight to the Vatican.’38 From Hitler’s perspective, in view of the massive rearmament and preparations for war, there could be no question of upsetting the status quo regarding the Churches. As he explained to Goebbels later in December, he wanted ‘peace for the moment . . . with regard to the Churches’.39
More than that, since the temporary truce in the conflict, Hitler had considered
it expedient to declare himself, to some extent, ‘positively disposed’, in his personal attitude to religion and Christianity. Opening the Winter Aid programme on 5 October 1937, for example, he claimed to believe in a ‘Christianity based on action’ that had ‘more right than other kinds to say “That is the kind of Christianity that comes from an open and honest profession of faith . . .”’40 Talking confidentially to Party associates the tone was different. As one of those present recorded, he declared to Party propaganda chiefs at the end of October that after serious inner conflict and fully conscious that his life expectancy was limited he had liberated himself from all childish religious ideas he might still hold. ‘I now feel as fresh as a foal in a meadow.’41
On 23 November he declared to the Party’s district leaders and Gau functionaries that a state was being established that ‘does not see its foundations as being in Christianity or in the idea of a state, but in a united national community’. This new state would be ‘merciless in its treatment of all opponents and any religious or party-based fragmentation’. He promised the Churches ‘absolute freedom in matters of doctrine or in their conception of God. For we are quite certain that we know nothing about that.’ One thing, however, ‘was firmly settled: the Churches might have some influence on individual Germans in the hereafter, but in the here and now these individuals were in the hands of the German nation via its leaders. In a time of rapid change only such a clear and clean separation can make life viable.’ This did not mean, however, that he wished to deny the existence of a God. Rather, humanity was confronted ‘with an immensely powerful, an omnipotent force, so strange and profound that we as human beings cannot grasp it. That’s a good thing! For it can give people consolation in difficult times. It avoids that superficiality and arrogance that leads people to assume that, although they are no more than tiny microbes on this earth and in this universe, they can rule the world and determine the laws of nature, when they can at best study them. So we want our nation to remain humble and really believe there is a God.’42
Consolation and humility for the nation: this was religion conceived in purely instrumental terms. It was clearly irrelevant for a man called by a mysterious providence to lead the nation.
Cultural politics
It was no coincidence that during 1937, and in parallel with his bitter conflict with the Churches, Hitler endeavoured to determine the course of Nazi cultural politics. By presenting himself as a generous supporter, indeed as the creator, of a new National Socialist culture he was obviously aiming to counteract the negative responses his ‘cultural campaign’ against the Churches had provoked at home and abroad and in particular to limit the damage to his personal image. Above all, however, his efforts to inaugurate ‘true’ German art and to give a radical new face to German cities through massive building projects were linked to a desire to provide meaning. Nazi art and architecture were to herald the start of a cultural renaissance, symbolize the founding era of a great empire, and set the standard for millennia. It is hardly accidental that Hitler began his cultural offensive at the point when he was embarking on his policy of expansion. The conqueror also wanted to found a culture.
Hitler began 1937 with a significant cultural announcement: In the Reichstag session on 30 January he announced through Göring that he had created a lucrative ‘German National Prize for Art and Learning’ that henceforth would be conferred annually on ‘three worthy Germans’. The prize was a response to the conferring of the Nobel Peace Prize in November 1936 on the pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, who was in a concentration camp. This gesture had prompted Hitler to issue a decree forbidding all Germans ‘at any time in the future’ to accept a Nobel Prize, the most important international recognition of achievements in scholarship, science, and the work for peace. The German National Prize was intended to be a fitting substitute.43
The first laureates were named by Hitler in September 1937 at the Party Congress.44 In addition to the Party’s ideology expert, Alfred Rosenberg, these were the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, the surgeons Ferdinand Sauerbruch and August Bier (who shared the prize), the Antarctic explorer Wilhelm Filchner, and (posthumously) the architect Paul Ludwig Troost. Hitler then presented the prizes as part of the ceremonies marking 30 January 1938.45
The opening in summer 1937 of the House of German Art with the ‘First Great German Art Exhibition’, a prestigious show of art works created under National Socialism, was designed to establish the future direction of art in the ‘Third Reich’. Since 1933 Hitler had regularly used his annual speech on culture at the Reich Party Congress to pass judgement – sarcastically, dismissively, angrily, – on any kind of modern art. Yet apart from general evocations of the artistic achievements of past epochs, in particular of the classical world, which he especially admired, he had never made any serious attempt to develop what might be called a National Socialist aesthetic. This is what he wanted to do now by making the exhibition and its opening ceremony his personal concern.
On 5 June Hitler flew to Munich accompanied by Goebbels to inspect the Führer building, designed by Troost, on Königsplatz as well as the recently completed House of German Art. He was determined to take a personal look at the selection the jury, led by the chair of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, Adolf Ziegler, had arrived at for the exhibition. He was, however, far from pleased with the jury’s work, as Goebbels records. The choice of paintings was in part ‘catastrophic’ and some of them ‘were positively horrific’. He would rather postpone the exhibition by a year than ‘exhibit such garbage’.46 In the end Hitler decided to reduce the number of exhibits, leaving the choice to his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, whose taste in art he had long known and for the most part shared.47
The difficulty of securing works for display that provided evidence of the allegedly high level of artistic achievement under Nazism gave Hitler and Goebbels the idea of mounting a parallel exhibition of the kind of art that was not wanted in the Third Reich. At the end of June Hitler gave his approval to Goebbels’s suggestion that the exhibition of ‘the art of the era of decline’ originally planned for Berlin be moved at short notice to Munich.48 Management of the exhibition was to be taken on by Ziegler and by Hans Herbert Schweitzer, the former cartoonist from Der Angriff, although Hitler expressed some reservations about the latter’s suitability.49 On the basis of ‘the Führer’s express authority’ Goebbels granted Ziegler special permission to ‘secure’ the relevant art works (‘the art of German decline since 1910’) from all the museums in public ownership in Germany.50 The commission thereupon visited thirty-two collections and requisitioned 700 works of art.51
On 11 July Hitler once again visited the Führer building and the House of German Art. He was again accompanied by Goebbels, who had been made to interrupt a holiday on the Baltic coast with his family a few days before and resume it at Hitler’s villa on the Obersalzberg.52 Hitler’s obvious purpose was to give Goebbels, who had the reputation of not being completely indifferent to modern artistic trends, a thorough lesson in the aesthetics of Nazi art. During this visit Hitler appeared much more satisfied with the works chosen for the Great German Art Exhibition.53 The same was true of the exhibits for its negative counterpart, which he inspected on 16 July in the Hofgarten arcades, very close to the House of German Art, a few days before the official opening of the exhibition, which had been given the title ‘Degenerate Art’. In the end, after Ziegler’s rapid raids on German museums, there were 600 works, including those by Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Otto Dix, Paul Klee, George Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Lyonel Feininger, and Franz Marc. In order to reduce the impact of the pictures they were hung very close together and arbitrarily. The titles and comments were painted on the walls. By the end of November this exhibition had attracted over two million visitors, after which it went on tour to other cities.54 The fact that many visitors did not come to the exhibition to get worked up about ‘degenerate art’ but rather to say farewell to the
se works that met with official disapproval does not appear to have disturbed Hitler, by contrast with Goebbels.55 Hitler was pleased by the number of visitors and gave instructions for a catalogue to be issued.56 Meanwhile, Ziegler still had the task of ‘cleansing’ the public museums and in 1938 this was put on a legal basis. The requisitioned works were sold on the international art market.57
On 18 July Hitler finally opened the Great German Art Exhibition and along with it the House of German Art. A total of 1,200 works were shown, a mixture of sculpture, painting, and graphic art, predominantly historical and genre paintings, landscapes, various ‘Blood and Soil’ themes, heroicizing depictions of the Nazi movement and its rise, portraits and busts of ‘great Germans’. Hitler was the subject of no fewer than twelve.
In his speech opening the exhibition Hitler declared that National Socialism intended to provide ‘German art’ to contrast with the ‘cultural decline’ of the Weimar period. This art would be ‘eternal’. But what did ‘German’ mean in this context? ‘To be German is to be clear’, he suggested. This principle, which he had in fact stressed in his culture speech at the 1934 Party Congress,58 meant that ‘to be German is thus to be logical and above all to be genuine’. National Socialism, he said, had created the material but more particularly the ideological preconditions for a recovery of this ‘genuine German art’, for art itself had now been given ‘new and great tasks’. The opening of the exhibition marked ‘the start of putting an end to idiocy in German art and thus of the destruction of our nation’s culture. From now on we shall wage a merciless war to purge every last element responsible for corrupting our culture.’ In then expressing the wish that the new gallery might be granted the opportunity ‘of again revealing many works by great artists to the German nation in the centuries to come’, he was clearly indicating that he was deeply dissatisfied with the artistic products of the present.59 The speech that followed by Goebbels was similar in tone.60 The ceremonies in Munich were rounded off with a parade on the theme ‘2000 Years of German Culture’.