Ominous Parallels (30 page)

The civilized men in the country did not know what to do. In the words of one historian, the moderates voiced desperate “appeals to reason.... [But] their techniques were distinctly out of tune with the wild emotionalism that seemed to have gripped a large part of the nation.”
²⁰

The civility cherished by the civilized men had finally been defeated by their ideas, although they did not know that this was the cause. After years of preaching contradictions and of evading principles with an anti-ideological shrug, these men were astonished to see the nation conclude that man cannot live by principles, that reason is no guide to action, and that anything goes. After years of institutionalizing interest-group warfare, which they had justified as sacrifice or collective service, these men were astonished to see hostile gangs take to the streets and demand one another’s sacrifice. After years of undercutting the mind by preaching the primacy of gentle feeling (whether “progressive” or religious or skeptical), these men were astonished to find that irrational feeling is no counter to “wild emotionalism.”

After years of spreading or condoning or subsidizing the cult and culture of nihilism, the civilized men were astonished to find that they had nothing more to say, and that there was no one left to listen.

The moderates were helpless. The authorities were helpless. The killers were taking over.

On January 30, 1933, after due attention to every requirement of German law and of the Weimar Constitution, the Nazi rule was made official.

The Weimar culturati could not, they said, endure the nineteenth-century world; but they could triumph over it. Within
their
own sphere, they could act like the god of an ancient legend—in reverse.

When they had extinguished the stars, and the earth was once again without form, and void; when they had remade the living soul of man in
their
image, after
their
likeness; when they had breathed into his nostrils the breath of
anti-life;
when they saw everything that they had made and, behold, it was ruins—ruins and astrology and word salads and toilet training and diseased lungs—then they knew that their triumph had been completed, and they were prepared to rest from all their work.

When the seventh day came, however, they found that something inexplicable had grown up in their garden of ruins. At first, they could hear only distant howls and approaching steps. It took a while before they were able to see the thing. But at last they recognized the face of Adolf Hitler.

12

Hitler in Power

It took over a century for the ideas of the Kantian axis to be implanted in the German mind. It took fourteen years for Hitler, relying on this preparation, to rise to the position of Chancellor.

It took six months for the new Chancellor to transform the country into a totalitarian state.

The process of transformation consisted in establishing the nation’s collectivist premise fully, as the undisputed, uncontradicted law of the land. The method was to wipe out any limitation on the power of the central government.

The first major step was the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State, promulgated (by the aged Hindenburg) on February 28, 1933. This decree abrogated individual rights in Germany.

Restrictions on personal liberty [the decree stated], on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications; and warrants for house searchers, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.
¹

A month later the power of the Reichstag was formally annulled. The Enabling Act of March 23 transferred to Hitler all legislative prerogatives, including the right to deviate from the Constitution at his sole discretion. This act was approved by the Republic’s last freely elected Reichstag; that body committed suicide by a vote of 444-94. The Social Democrats cast the negative votes. The Communists had been barred from their seats. All the other parties voted yes.

The non-Nazi parties, including the Nationalists, were then dissolved. The individual states were turned into mere administrative arms of the Reich. The courts leaped to apply the new rule that “the law and the will of the Führer are one.” The Officer Corps, still a powerful force in Germany, approved Hitler’s policy of rearmament and voiced no opposition to the process of Nazification.

If anyone did voice opposition, he found two new institutions to deal with, both copied from Soviet Russia: the Gestapo and the concentration camps.

Special government bodies were created to control—according to the requirements of “the public interest”—every aspect of literature, music, the fine arts, the theater, the movies, radio, and the press. Hundreds of tons of books were destroyed; the Marxists and the cultural modernists (and several other groups) had done their job; Hitler had no further need for anarchy and subversion of the system. The Churches were not regarded as subversive; though harassed and intimidated, they were allowed to function.

The country’s young people were sent to educational institutions, from kindergarten to university, which had been completely “Aryanized.” The youngsters joined the Hitler youth at the age of six. “The children declared that they would never speak of ‘I’ but only of ‘we.’ ”
²

Through the agency of three new guilds (the Food Estate, the Estate of Trade and Industry, and the Labor Front), the government assumed control of every group of producers and consumers in the country. In accordance with the method of “German socialism,” the facade of a market economy was retained. All prices, wages, and interest rates, however, were “fixed by the central authority. They [were] prices, wages, and interest rates in appearance only; in reality they [were] merely determinations of quantity relations in the government’s orders.... This is socialism in the outward guise of capitalism.”

The nation’s businessmen retained the responsibility to produce and suffered the losses attendant on failure. The state determined the purpose and conditions of their production, and reaped the benefits; directly or indirectly, it expropriated all profits. “The time is past,” explained the Nazi Minister of Economics, “when the notion of economic self-seeking and unrestricted use of profits made can be allowed to dominate.... The economic system must serve the nation.”
³

“What a dummkopf I was!” cried steel baron Fritz Thyssen, an early Nazi supporter, who fled the country.

By ordering a vast series of public works, then a massive rearmament program accompanied by military conscription, the Nazis ended unemployment. Nor did the Germans have to worry about job security any longer. Men were drafted into labor service by the government and attached to their jobs like medieval serfs. The serfs were carefully tended: the state insisted on the beautification of factories, recreational space for the workers, gardens on the factory grounds, better lighting and ventilation, and much more.

The workers’ leisure time was taken over. A comprehensive program of government lecture courses, art shows, vacation trips, and the like (the “Strength Through Joy” program) ensured that, even away from their jobs, men never stopped hearing about the need to work and sacrifice for the community.

As to Hitler’s pledges to the poorer groups: the Republic’s social insurance budgets were greatly increased, and a variety of welfare funds, programs, agencies, and policies were introduced or expanded, including special provisions for such items as unemployment relief, workmen’s compensation, health insurance, pensions, Winter Help campaigns for the destitute, the Reich Mothers’ Service for indigent mothers and children, and the National Socialist People’s Welfare organization.

In regard to fundamentals, Hitler kept his promises to the German people. Everyone, in every class, field, and income bracket, was manacled to the state. The state meant the party.

“The party takes over the function of what has been society—that is what I wanted them to understand,” said Hitler to Rauschning.

The party is all-embracing. It rules our lives in all their breadth and depth. We must therefore develop branches of the party in which the whole of individual life will be reflected. Each activity and each need of the individual will thereby be regulated by the party as the representative of the general good. There will be no license, no free space, in which the individual belongs to himself. This is Socialism—not such trifles as the private possession of the means of production. Of what importance is that if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape? Let them then own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the party, is supreme over them, regardless whether they are owners or workers. All that, you see, is unessential. Our Socialism goes far deeper....

[T]he people about us are unaware of what is really happening to them. They gaze fascinated at one or two familiar superficialities, such as possessions and income and rank and other outworn conceptions. As long as these are kept intact, they are quite satisfied. But in the meantime they have entered a new relation; a powerful social force has caught them up. They themselves are changed. What are ownership and income to that? Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings.
⁴

Living standards dropped for every major economic group and class. The government continuously seized more of the country’s earnings. There was abundance only for the military. “Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat,” said Goering.

The Germans had believed that Nazism was a practical solution to the depression. Even before the war they began to find out otherwise; after 1939 they learned still more. But disaster as such does not change a country’s mind or its ideas.

No matter how they were exploited or what hardships they suffered, the Germans accepted Hitler’s rule. The Nazi reign of terror is merely one part of the reason. The policies and statements of every group still able to speak in the thirties reveal the other part.

The respectable German right rallied behind the swastika from the beginning. The Protestant clergy explained that it saw in the new government the chance for a moral renaissance, which would nourish religious feeling, obedience to authority, and the spirit of sacrifice.

The Centrists protested when the Nazis interfered with Catholic activities or interests, but conceded Hitler’s “achievements,” including (in one Bishop’s summary) the “defeat of Communism ... the introduction of the Führer-principle, the reinforcement of moral power and the banning of street-walkers.” On June 10, 1933, the Catholic prelates issued a lengthy Pastoral. They recognized, they said, “that the individual is part of a larger organism and must work, not simply for himself, but for the common good. Furthermore, just because authority plays such a prominent role in Catholic affairs, they can well understand the emphasis now placed upon it in relation to the State.” The prelates added a reservation: the government, they said, should “not curtail human freedom more than the general welfare warrants....”
⁵
“That many Germans of intellectual as well as of more simple mentality could at the very same time worship the ‘God on the Cross’ and idolize the Führer is one of those irrational aberrations of the human spirit that can merely be described but not intelligently explained,” writes Pinson.
⁶
Perhaps the fact is not quite so baffling as he suggests.

The country’s secular moderates, such as the onetime Democrats, spoke their mind, also. Their reaction to Hitler is epitomized by a remark of Hjalmar Schacht, a founder of the Democratic party who became Nazi Minister of Economics. “This man,” said Dr. Schacht in 1935, “set about first to raise the moral standard of the nation. That is why I think him a great man; he has raised the moral standard of the people.”
⁷

The German left was not free to speak publicly. Many Communists in particular disappeared in Nazi jails or escaped abroad. The Marxists who survived, however, did not challenge Hitler’s basic viewpoint; the absolute state is right, they said in effect, but we could have run it better. This kind of objection posed no threat to the Nazi rule. Nor did it prevent another disciple of Marx from recognizing a community of values with Hitler and acting accordingly. In August 1939, the statesmen of the West, who had long derogated abstract principles, were struck dumb by the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact.

As to the men who ultimately shaped the ideas of the country’s political groups, i.e., the intellectuals: the overwhelming majority forgot their scruples against “rowdiness.” Illustrious, Nobel Prize-winning names eagerly backed the Nazi cause and flocked to embrace the brutes. Professor Eugen Lüthgen, an authority in philosophy and law at Bonn, named the belief at the root of the embrace, in a statement praising and justifying the bookburning. “The voice of blood,” he said, “speaks a louder language than that of the intellect.”
⁸

The remnants of the Weimar leadership, in every field and almost without exception, rushed to agree with the principles of the Nazis. The rush was often opportunism or appeasement; but the agreement was real. The state which Hitler established did in fact embody the fundamental ideas of Germany’s political-cultural tradition.

Many Germans still did not like Hitler’s personality or associates or tactics. They swallowed their reaction down. They could not challenge the essence and climax of their own long-cherished basic premises.

Did an action of their new rulers make no sense to the Germans? They reminded themselves that reason is nothing and that feeling (or authority) is all. Did men never have a moment to breathe free of a noisy,
heiling,
swastika-waving mob? They reminded themselves that the individual is nothing and that the Volk is all.

Was every group terrorized, enslaved, and ruthlessly milked dry? The Germans were willing to endure these conditions. “Selflessness in the sense that oneself does not matter, the feeling of being expendable, was no longer the expression of individual idealism but a mass phenomenon,” writes Hannah Arendt.
⁹

The Germans remembered their age-old vision of national greatness, defined by discipline, obedience, and self-abnegation. They remembered Kant’s idea that “the principle of one’s own happiness is the most objectionable of all” and that self-love is “the very source of evil.” They grasped that now they had their historic chance, the chance to suppress the “evil” and to make the vision a reality—and they seized the chance and they acted on it.

At last, the Germans were practicing in full the philosophy they had been taught.