Europe: A History (200 page)
Agriculture was not a subject that interested the Nazis. They came up with a scheme for the formation of co-operatives. But the main thrust was to guarantee state-fixed prices, and hence the farmers’ security.
Nazi ideology, to put it mildly, was not very sophisticated. Unlike Stalin, Hitler did not inherit a corpus of party thought which could be bent to his own purposes. His one and only work,
Mein Kampf
(1925), which was to find its way onto the bookshelf of almost every German family, contained only two or three consistent ideas, and nothing original. Most important was the chain of argument which led from the supposed existence of the
Herrenvolk
or ‘master race’ to the supposed German right to
Lebensraum
or ‘living space’ in the East.
Hitler took a hierarchy of races for granted. He divided mankind into ‘culture-founders’, ‘culture-bearers’, and ‘culture destroyers’. ‘The bearers of human
cultural development’ today were ‘the Aryans’. ‘The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is the Jew.’ The Jews were the
Todfeind
, the mortal enemy. He did not care to define the Aryans, nor to establish a hierarchy of nations within the Aryan race. His chapter on the subject starts with the observation that some things are so obvious that they don’t need explaining.
39
Hitler also believed in ‘the iron logic’ of’racial purity’. ‘In every mingling of Aryan blood with that of lower people’, he observed, ‘the result was the end of the cultured people.’ ‘All great cultures of the past perished … from blood-poisoning.’
40
Hitler believed that the health of a nation was dependent on the value of its national territory. ‘Only an adequately large space on this earth assures a nation freedom of existence.’ ‘The foreign policy of the folkish state must… create a healthy relation between the nation’s population and the quantity and quality of its soil.’
41
BOGEY
S
OON
after the German Army occupied Austria in March 1938, Adolf Hitler is said to have ordered the commander of Wehrkreis XVII to demolish the village of Dollersheim by ‘target practice’. The inhabitants were evacuated, and all the buildings of the village, including the cemetery, were duly reduced to rubble by artillery. The point behind this savage operation seems to have been that both Hitler’s father and paternal grandmother, Maria Anna Schicklgruber, were buried at Dollersheim, and that Hitler had recently learned the facts of his father’s early life. According to a Gestapo report, the young Frâulein Schicklgruber had conceived Hitler’s father when working as an unmarried domestic servant in a rich Jewish household. The implications, from Hitler’s point of view, were disturbing.
From this, and many other indications, there is reason to believe that Hitler suffered from intense feelings of repressed guilt, shame, and self-hatred about his origins, his blood, his body, and his personality. One is not obliged to take the conflicting evidence at face value to conclude that Hitler is a prime subject for ‘psycho-history’.
1
Particularly interesting, and possibly crucial to the Führer’s wartime state of mind, was his rampant hypochondria. From 1936 to 1945 he placed total faith in a dubious physician, Dr Theo Morell, who treated him with constant massive doses of glucose, vitamins, stimulants, appetizers, relax-ants, tranquillizers, and sedatives, usually by direct intravenous injections. Hitler’s obsession with flatulence addicted him to a huge daily diet of anti-gas pills based on atropine and strychnine. Morell’s rivals unsuccessfully reported to the Gestapo that Morell was poisoning the Führer by stealth.
2
Soldiers can be intuitive. Sometime during the Second World War, marching to the magnificent beat of ‘Colonel Bogey’, someone in the British Army composed the immortal refrain:
‘itler — ‘as only got one ball;
Goering has two but far too small,
‘immler — is rather sim’ler,
But Gerballs—’as no balls—at all.
3
The point here is that twenty years later, when the Soviet authorities released the text of a supposed autopsy report on the late Führer’s corpse, it stated that ‘the left testicle was missing’.
4
The report bore traces of a KGB plant, and was not supported by other witnesses. But some historians have taken it seriously. Since congenital monorchidism is rare, they have concluded that Hitler must have mutilated himself by self-castration.
5
The mystery was not resolved by the opening of the KGB files in the 1990s.
6
Yet the observations do not stop with the physical evidence. Numerous aspects of Hitler’s conduct hint at something hideous beneath the demure exterior. He permitted no talk in his presence about even mildly sexual matters. He had a deep fear of incest. He professed revulsion about ‘filth’ of all sorts. Although the evidence is contradictory, his sex life was either totally sublimated or disgustingly perverse.
At every stage, Hitler’s brilliant openings were paralysed by a pervasive sense of failure. And he repeatedly flirted with suicide. In his love of political ritual, he indulged in a range of pseudo-religious Catholic parodies. Above all, he felt constantly impelled to say that history, or the German nation, or God, or whatever, had found him
würdig
—’worthy’. The inference has to be that the cauldron of self-hatred which seethed within him fuelled the overt hatred which he then projected onto Jews, Slavs, communists, homosexuals, and gipsies, and eventually onto Germany herself.
Needless to say, self-mockery is a healthier mechanism than self-praise. In the First World War, the British had marched to another magnificent refrain, sung to the lugubrious hymn tune of ‘Greenland’s Icy Mountains’:
‘We are Fred Carno’s Army,
*
the ragtime infantry.
We cannot fight; we cannot shoot;
No bleedin’ use are we.
And when we get to Berlin, the Kaiser he will say:
Hochl Hoch! Mein Gotti
What a bloody awful lot
Are the British Infantry!’
6
Since Germany’s neighbours already possessed land in abundance, either in the colonies or, in Russia’s case, through the conquest of the steppes, Germany could only compete by seizing the adjacent lands to the East. ‘We stop the endless German movement to the South and West, and turn our gaze towards the land in the East.’
42
German expansion into Poland and Ukraine would give her the strength not only to fight Russia but also to check France, also ‘the mortal enemy’. Hitler believed that Germany was fighting at a disadvantage in its struggle to exist. ‘Germany is no world power,’ he wailed. ‘Germany will either be a world power, or there will be no Germany.’
43
Overt racism was accompanied by a collectivist creed which has often been described in vague terms such as ‘the herd instinct’, but which has distinct Marxist overtones. Of his own debt to the Marxism of the pre-war SPD, Hitler once said:
I had only to develop logically what social democracy failed in… National socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd ties with a democratic order … Why need we trouble to socialise banks and factories? We socialise human beings.
44
Recent studies have shown that the young Hitler was familiar with Marxist writing, and was impressed by the flag-waving rallies of the Austrian Social Democrats.
45
He may have absorbed more than he knew: the Nazis did not have a strong intellectual tradition, but their reticence does not mean that a primitive sort of socialism lay beyond their horizons. It was the Nazis who first instituted May Day as a national festival for (German) workers.
Nazi policies were deduced very rationally from these few shaky propositions. Hitler’s racist nationalism led immediately to the introduction of antisemitic measures. Jews were excluded from state employment and from German citizenship; Jewish traders were officially boycotted; marriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and non-Jews was forbidden. These measures received their clearest formulation in the Nurnberg Laws of 1935. From the start the Nazis favoured euthanasia, the killing of the mentally and genetically handicapped, and the rewarding of multiple childbirth achieved by heroic German motherhood. On the social plane, the Nazis were contemptuous of all the existing hierarchies—aristocracy,
officer corps, professions, and guilds. The ranks of the Nazi Party-State were thrown open to everyone who was prepared to serve without shame or dissent. Offices were filled by the advancement in every German town and village of the most vulgar, unqualified, and grasping elements. Their idols were the failed chicken farmer, Heinrich Himmler, who ran the SS, or the overweight ex-pilot, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring, who could no longer squeeze into a cockpit.
46
Here was another close counterpart to the ethos of the burgeoning Stalinist bureaucracy of the USSR.
Nazism, like Stalinism, was strong on official fictions. Nazi propaganda peddled many strange notions. Hitler was the new Frederick or the new Bismarck. The Nazis were successors to the Germanic gods or the Teutonic Knights. The Third Reich was the natural heir to the Holy Roman Empire and to the Hohenzollerns. The German people, united and free, knew unbounded love for their homeland, unlimited joy in their learning and art, untrammelled pride in their emancipated women, unstinting wrath against traitors and enemies… It was all rather familiar. The cult of Hitler’s personality knew no bounds. The Führer was the embodiment of all that is beautiful, wise, and good.
Most Nazi leaders were unbelievers; Hitler himself was a lapsed Catholic. Their rituals owed more to the parody of ancient Germanic paganism than to any modern religion. So they had a major problem in defining their relationship with a German nation that was still predominantly Christian. As often as not, they ignored the theoretical issues. But to pacify the Catholics, Hitler signed a Concordat with the Vatican in July 1933, confirming the autonomy of the German See in return for the hierarchy’s renunciation of political involvement. The compromise encouraged some Catholic prelates, such as Archbishop Innitzer of Vienna, to express sympathy for Nazi aims. But it did not prevent the Vatican from ordering
Mit brennender Sorge
(1937), which denounced Nazi ideology, to be read in all Catholic churches in Germany. To manage the Protestants, Hitler announced the creation in 1935 of a state-controlled Union of Protestant Churches. There was also an attempt to found a new movement for ‘German Christians’, where the swastika embraced the cross, under Reichsbishop Dr Muller. In November 1933 these pseudo-Christian Nazi surrogates staged a demonstration in Berlin to the honour of ‘Christ the Hero’. In the end, religion and irreligión had to co-exist as best they could.
In the field of coercion and terror the Nazis were fast learners. Their ‘Brownshirts’ and ‘Blackshirts’ had a solid grounding in common fraud, blackmail, and thuggery. On the other hand, at the head the German
Rechtsstaat
, they did not have 500 years of the Muscovite
oprichniki
behind them. The structures of social control were less complete than in the USSR. There was no state monopoly in employment; there was no collectivized countryside; and there were no party cells or commissars in the Wehrmacht until 1944. All of which goes some way to explain the Nazis’ special style, where studied bestial ferocity had to compensate for structural weaknesses. A high level of well-publicized brutality was required, simply because more refined instruments of control were often lacking.
The security organs of the Reich never assumed the monstrous proportions of their Soviet counterparts. Both the Party Guard, the
Schutzstaffeln
, and the
Gestapo
, the ‘Secret State Police’, were used by the Party to supplement existing military and police forces. But neither was given the same range of competence invested in the NKVD. One concentration camp was opened at Dachau, near Munich, in 1934; but the number of prisoners was dropping in the late 1930s. Nazi-run People’s Courts and People’s Judges increasingly absorbed the work of the traditional judiciary. But wholesale terror was not the norm. In Germany itself, Nazi violence stayed within predictable parameters. Germans who conformed could expect to survive. Some 500,000 German Jews were persecuted and expelled; the
Kristallnacht
of 1938, when Jewish synagogues and shops were smashed, caused vast damage and apprehension. But it does not appear that ‘the Final Solution’ was planned in advance. At no point prior to the outbreak of war did the Reich possess the facilities or the modern death technology which it subsequently employed. It is an open question how far the Nazis emulated the Soviet terror machine, which was both older and larger than theirs.