A Patriot's History of the Modern World (47 page)

Lost in modern discussions of fascism and communism is the stark similarity between Hitler and Karl Marx. Hitler's ideas, for example, strongly internalized the Nazi Party Program of 1920, which incorporated all ten points of Marx's
Communist Manifesto
, then enhanced it with several Jew-specific clauses. Hitler himself incorporated Marxist language throughout his speeches and writings. “History…represents the progression of a people's struggle for survival,” Hitler wrote in his “Second Book,” with almost no variation from Marx's “All history is the history of class struggle.”
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Nazi economic theory, such as it existed at all, was a mix of German nationalism combined with socialism. Hitler flatly stated in his “Second Book,” “I am a socialist.”
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“People who love to speak of socialism,” he insisted, “do not understand that the most socialistic organization of all was the German people's army.”
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One key element of difference between Hitlerian fascism and communism lay in the former's use of race as the aspect of human struggle and the latter's reliance on class. Hitler's broad discussions of geopolitics and conflict always returned to what he saw as three intertwined realities: the death of the Jew, the life of Germany, and the expansion of the Reich's borders. Germany's survival demanded space and foreign powers, especially Russia (with the Jewish Bolsheviks), and Britain and the United States (whose banks were under Semitic control) would resist the acquisition of that space. In Hitler's view, success depended on removing the Jews from power, but he was not only interested in displacing them. Rather, he advocated their extermination—killing them as the Germans moved in to repopulate their newly won territories with a superior race and spread German blood.

Hitler's anti-Semitism has been the subject of innumerable academic works. Ron Rosenbaum's
Explaining Hitler
analyzed the arguments of more than a dozen historians, theologians, and philosophers, none of whom agreed on the essential origins or character of Hitler's Jew-hatred.
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Statements by Hitler have been interpreted so flexibly as to render them all little more than literary linguine. However, if one takes them at face value and
appreciates the heavy spiritual context within which they were written, they take on new clarity:

• “The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is…the Jew.”
  
• “Since the Jew…was never in possession of a culture of his own, the foundations of his intellectual work were always provided by others.”
  
• “If the Jews were alone in this world, they would stifle in filth and offal; they would try to get ahead of one another in hate-filled struggle and exterminate one another.”
  
• “The Jew is led by nothing but the naked egoism of the individual.”
  
• “Thus, the Jew lacks those qualities which distinguish the races that are creative and hence culturally blessed.”
  
• “The Jew cannot possess a religious institution, if for no other reason because he lacks idealism in any form.”
  
• “On this first and greatest lie, that the Jews are not a race but a religion, more and more lies are based.”
  
• “Race…does not lie in the language, but
  exclusively in the blood
  .” (emphasis ours)
  
• “The Jewish influence on economic affairs grows with terrifying speed through the stock exchange.”
  
• “The Jew by means of the trade union…shatters the national economy.”
  
• “With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting [German] girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate.”
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And on and on. As Professor Robert Loewenberg once observed, “Hitler's choice to eradicate the Jews
and Judaism
instead of Armenians or Biafrans is what makes for the Holocaust's particularity” (emphasis ours).
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Understanding Hitler in this way makes it literally impossible to refer to a “Palestinian holocaust,” for example. Repeatedly, Hitler invoked spiritually charged pseudo-Christian terms to describe the war against the Jews, referring to “eternal Germanity,” effecting a “reconciliation of mankind,” emphasizing the “purity of the blood.”
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The fight had to be one to the death,
for the Jew intended the “enslavement, and with it the destruction, of all non-Jewish peoples.”
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Connecting Jewishness to trade-unionism and Bolshevism enabled Hitler to demonize the Soviet Union; linking Jewishness to bankers and financiers permitted him to do the same with the United States and Britain. But these connections only constituted necessary tactics to achieve the final goal, the “extermination” (
Ausrottung
) of the Jews as a “race,” and this objective was only the first step in replacing Christianity with Nazism. The Nuremberg trials revealed the extent of the Nazis' war on Christianity, noting that “Christian churches were systematically cut off from effective communication with the people. They were confined as far as possible to the performance of narrowly religious functions, and even within this sphere were subjected to as many hindrances as the Nazis dared to impose…[including through] illegal and terroristic means.”
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Both the German Evangelical Church and the Norwegian National Church (after the Nazi invasion) were seized by the Nazi government. All other churches were directly controlled through Nazi administration of their finances and through a series of laws that drastically reduced their powers across a broad spectrum of issues. But whether the Jews were (at first) specifically singled out as the end product of Nazi terror, or whether they were the first step toward a National Socialist religion mattered little in practical terms as the decade unfolded and Jews were rounded up, renamed, and eventually gassed.

All the elements worked together—anti-Bolshevism, anti-Semitism (as Hitler claimed the socialist movement was “Jewish”);
Lebensraum
to free the land from the Bolsheviks and Jews; German national fanaticism and liberation from control of the Allies and their (Jewish) financiers; and continued purification of German blood. The latter involved the dual removal of the Jews from German society and concentration of “racial” Germans inside “Greater Germany” (in other words, the concept of
Anschluss
or in
Mein Kampf
, “One blood demands one Reich”).
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Each part fed the other. Each demonic seed grew in perfect harmony, shaded and watered by the rest.

When Hitler was appointed chancellor, only a few Germans and even fewer non-Germans knew what he was up to, but large numbers (perhaps just shy of a majority) agreed with his nationalist impulses and his explanations of why Germany languished. Most thought reparations constituted not only an undue burden on the Weimar Republic, but also an immoral and unjust one. Quickly forgotten were the images of mutinies during the Great War and the public outcry over casualty lists, and in their place came a new wave of resentment and revenge. Betrayal, whether by Wilson promising
“peace talks” that quickly became a surrender, or by the French, who hungrily grabbed Alsace-Lorraine and occupied the Ruhr, increasingly became a common explanation for German humiliation.

Each new government intervention or subsidy involving business brought more vigorous regulation and enforcement by Hitler's government. On Hitler's order, the Nazis also embarked on bloody internal purges, starting with the murder of Vice-Chancellor von Papen's secretary and the arrest of his staff in June 1934 during Operation Hummingbird, better known as the “Night of the Long Knives.” Von Papen himself barely escaped assassination, but other high-profile former leaders did not. Conservative anti-Nazi former chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and his wife were killed, as was Gregor Strasser, who conceived the Nazi “Battle for Work,” the Bavarian officials who had suppressed the Beer Hall Putsch, and some eighty others; then the following month, in Austria, self-identified Nazis shot Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss.

Large numbers of Austrian Germans longed for a deeper relationship between the two nations, and the Nazis in particular stressed the concept of a “greater Germany” that would incorporate Austria. An Austrian version of National Socialists, founded in 1926, had splintered and failed to gain the widespread acceptance that its German cousin had. A decade later, the Austrian National Socialists attracted only 3.6 percent of the vote. Dollfuss, whose Christian Social Party had governed since 1932, banned the Austrian Nazis in 1933. His successor, Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, faced rising domestic violence and hoped closer relations with Germany would ameliorate it. But he also genuinely felt an intense connection to Germany, and in the 1936 “July Agreement,” he released all imprisoned Nazis and allowed Nazi newspapers to reopen. From then on, many Austrians believed it only a matter of time before a complete reunification with Germany occurred.

Whether in Austria or Germany, it was tempting for ordinary people to ignore the violence of the Nazis in the early part of the 1930s. The threat of Bolshevism was real; the Communist street gangs were every bit as dangerous as the Nazis, and to some people, the Nazis merely constituted a homegrown defense mechanism. Many Germans, especially, hoped there was some justification in the name of national security and that genuine conspiracies were at work. After all, Europeans were accustomed to carrying a set of documents with them everywhere and registering and deregistering with police when changing residences, but Nazi Germany increased civilian
control substantially. Life under Nazi rule became regimented and restricted. Attempts to regulate prices involved the
Reichsnährstand
(“Reich Food Production,” or RNS) in the most mundane of grocery shopping and meal preparation, and, just like in the Soviet Union, the growing and consumption of food became political acts. To Hitler, farming regulations were critical if he was going to realize his vision of
Lebensraum
. Where Stalin conducted nothing less than a war on his peasants, Hitler envisioned the farmers as the heroic class of Germans who would lead to a “new Germany” of vastly expanded borders. But his goal presented a paradox: to acquire lands for the
Volk
involved war; but to fight the war, Germany needed far more resources than it had—including agricultural resources and land. Resources demanded war, while war demanded new resources, meaning the “means and ends could no longer be separated [and] War now had to be contemplated…as the logical consequences of preparations being made.”
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Origins of the Nazi War Machine

Although the military had played only a peripheral role in the rise of Nazism up to the point Hitler became Fuehrer (leader), and while the Wehrmacht (literally “defense force,” but generally applied to the German army in particular) viewed Hitler with contempt, seeing him as an amateur, Germany quickly personified the perfect embodiment of a “military-industrial complex,” in which the need for military supplies drove the conquest of territory. Hitler had already insisted that a nation could “become” itself only through aggressive foreign policy and expansion; therefore it followed that “the first task of German foreign policy is the creation of conditions that will enable the reestablishment of a German army.”
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As the new chancellor, Hitler announced that he would spare no expense in making “the German people capable of bearing arms.”
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Hence from 1933 to 1935, German military spending as a share of national income increased tenfold.
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Germany continued to press for more American loans, rightly angering Roosevelt and his secretary of state Cordell Hull, both of whom viewed the appeals as a façade for financing further military expansion. Meanwhile, the Nazis actually provided less funding for such civilian-sector needs as housing than the Weimar Republic had, and housing finance fell by four fifths under Hitler.

Rearmament was only half the game. Hitler was busy rallying the Germans against the artificial borders created at Versailles. He also invoked an approach adopted by Lenin, namely the presumption that no nation's borders
could be considered fixed. “The German borders of 1914,” he wrote, were borders that “represented something just as unfinished as people's borders always are. The division of territory on the earth is always the momentary result of a struggle and evolution that is in no way finished.”
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Support for Germany to expand her borders was found in unlikely places, in particular the British Embassy, where Ambassador Nevile Henderson said he realized that “a nation of 75 million must be allowed to expand economically somewhere.”
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Hitler's rearmament relied heavily on existing companies and their ideas and engineering, sometimes meeting specifications developed by military personnel, but more often promoting their own designs and acquiring military approval. As a result, many of the German weapons were first-class, but the process played havoc with planning. The development of war matériel for the German air force or Luftwaffe (“air weapon”) in particular lacked direction as Hitler lurched from one concept and idea to the next. Probably the best two examples of this lack of planning to meet Hitler's stated goals were the failure to put a long-range heavy bomber into production—only prototypes were ever produced—and the sidelining of jet fighter development and production when jets could have entered the war in 1942. German engineering was often spectacular, but German industry tinkered its way to defeat. The United States completed a design of a weapon and mass-produced it, whereas the Germans constantly improved their weapons, greatly lowering production rates and creating a nightmare in the field with each variation having different and noninterchangeable parts with other models. Consequently, the Germans never had enough of any particular weapon and were repeatedly overwhelmed by American and Soviet numbers.