less widely known. “The economic clauses of the treaty [of Versailles] were malignant and silly to an extent that made them obviously futile [condemning] Germany to pay reparations on a fabulous scale”, – these are the words pronounced not by Adolf Hitler (who rode the wave of the Treaty’s critique), but by Sir Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom[13].
As it is, the Germans were simply robbed. Germany lost about 73 thousand square kilometres of its territory (ca. 13.5 %), with over 6.5 million people living there (ca. 10 %). What is more, the “truncated” country forfeited its overseas colonies, and was to repair all the damage entailed by the conflict to the victorious parties. As to the indemnity, its total sum at first remained undetermined; it was named only later. The sum was fantastic. And it was altered several times. The final version of the calculation would have Germany make their last payment as late as in 1988![14]
It was as if a hurricane had swept over the once prospering land. Large amounts of state property were seized in compensation of the damage, including, for example, 140,000 dairy cows. But before being bled dry, Germany must first be hog-tied to have no chance of rebelling against the “victorious” looters. “Germany was disarmed. All her artillery and weapons were destroyed. Her fleet had already sunk itself in Scapa Flow. Her vast army was disbanded. <…> No military force of any kind was allowed. Submarines were forbidden <…>”, Churchill would testify in his book[15].
The German army was limited to one hundred thousand men; the country was not allowed to produce military aircraft, or tanks, or men-of-war. Chaos and anarchy ensued in the defeated and bled country, multiplied by an economic collapse.
It was against this catastrophic backdrop that Anton Drexler made up his mind to turn his club-like society into something more serious, when on January 5, 1919, he formed the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). Remarkably endowed with oratory skill, young Adolf Hitler quickly became the Party’s new leader, outshining its founder. Eventually he was the one and only Leader – the Führer of the new political force. He changed not only the philosophy of the Workers’ Party, but its name, prefixing it with the word “national-socialist”, so it went down in history as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP).
A great mass of various literature is devoted to the history of the Nazi Party and its leader. You can go to any book market, and will be surely faced with the half-insane eyes of Adolf Hitler staring at you from a couple of front covers, or the heavy-set outlines of his troopers. You may think all questions have long been answered. And yet, as soon as you take a more disinterested look at the history of the Third Reich, every new book you read will bring in more and more obscurity and ambiguity. Very soon you will learn that even the most “authoritative” researchers refer in their books to facts that are strangely at variance with each other. Figures will differ grossly even where they have never been called in question – for example, the membership of Hitler’s party. What can be easier, it seems, than to look up the Nazi literature in the archives for the key figures of the party’s development? We know that the Nazi spoke and wrote much about their “years of struggle” and “fallen comrades”; we should naturally expect the growing number of the Nazi Party to be well documented… Nothing of the kind!
“As of November 1923, the Party numbered 15,000”, writes Konrad Heiden in his Hitler’s Rise to Power, a book he published in 1936, while the party was in its heyday[16].
“The party was rapidly growing. At the end of 1922, it had some 22,000 members. At the time of the putsch [it] numbered some 55,000”, writes the British historian Ian Kershaw in his 1990 book Hitler[17].
Recalling that Hitler’s failed putsch took place exactly in November 1923, we have a tremendous disproportion in the two quoted figures – within the 55 years between the appearance of the two books the Nazi Party membership was estimated four times as large! Keeping that kind of pace, the “historians” of some three hundred years later will subscribe the entire population of Germany to the Nazi Party.
For reassurance, let’s take down a third book for reference – that written by Alan Bullock, another influential “expert” on the Nazi Germany. And once more, we bump into quite different figures. “The membership rose from about 1,100 in June 1920 to 6,000 in early 1922, and about 20,000 in early 1923”[18].
We might suppose that the historians of the Nazi Party each use their own, separate source – a separate archive or documentary, which should explain the discrepancies. But the archives and documents are always the same – it is the quotations that differ! Where on earth are all these figures taken from? – this secret is worse than all the secrets of the Nazi Germany.
To be short, each author has his own version. These versions are then blindly copied by smaller-scale authors, to result in a total mess in literature.
How then can we study the history of the Second World War, where it is essential to know the real numbers of artillery, tanks, and troops involved in battles, once we can’t depend on historians for such an easy question as the number of “members” of the Nazi Party?
But why ask about the number of the Nazi? Why do we need it at all? There is one good reason – to show by a very simple example the amount of sheer ignorance of facts on the part of the Nazi leader’s biographers. This is to warn you against taking for granted all that fudge written about the Second World War – not without checking and double-checking it with your own mind. No fewer cock-and-bull stories are written about the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet people. I conceived this book as an attempt to put in some order the tons of motley information concerning this period in history; to extract that grain of truth that would help us realise the real causes of Russia’s worst tragedy that began on June 22, 1941.
History has its stereotypes. These stereotypes, or clichés, are well known to anyone, though no one can tell who and when created them. Go ask who gave money to Hitler, and you will hear the same reply – German manufacturers. This stereotype has variants, including “major capitalists”, “the Krupp group”, “German corporations” and so on and so forth.
But let us get down to brass tacks. All the political activity of any party is financed by those who take sides with it. This is a naïve point of view. The correct one is as follows: the political activity of a party is financed by those who expect to achieve something by it. This phrase is far more sinister. For example, a party that calls for support of national industry can be sponsored by the owners of textile and footwear factories. The idea is, if this party comes to power, is will raise import fees on shoes and clothing, which will bear a direct benefit to domestic manufacturers. Is this bad for people? Probably not – unless all business competition is destroyed in the country under the banner of boosting “national industry”. Likewise, a party oriented for national defence will be aided and abetted by the military lobby expecting the blabbering of the politicians to be followed by new orders on missiles, radars, tanks, and aircraft. Again, is this bad for the country? Not unless the military expenses go beyond the reasonable. To put it in a nutshell, financial support of political forces by tycoons has always been there, and will always be. This is not something invented in Russia, but a common phenomenon in every country where the supreme authority is elected by the nation. Democracy as the ultimate form of people’s rule leads any politician to one sad conclusion – the largest electorate is won by money, not by nice slogans. Money is needed not to bribe the voting public, but just to get your ideas across – to bring them home to people from television and newspapers – to say and be heard! You will have to pay through the nose for all that, bearing in mind the simple rule: the larger the country, the larger the target
