out on a Napoleonic career of conquest, and immolate himself in Wagnerian fashion after leading his country to the heights of military power and to the depths of collapse and complete defeat. But in Hitler’s case the factual record eclipsed the wildest fictional imagination.
Germany in years of severe crisis and heavy unemployment was responsive to a man who gave himself out as a wonder-worker, a savior. Hitler was a passionate, rapt, almost hypnotic orator in a country where there was little impressive public speaking. The very obscurity of his origin lent a romantic appeal. Perhaps the secret of his attraction lay in his apparent sympathy and affection. Sentimental as it was, and combined also with less obvious mistrust and scorn, his deceptive sympathy for the plight of the unemployed and the suffering made an impression quite unlike that made by the normal type of sober, stolid German politician, especially in such a period of despair and bitterness. Consequently Hitler exerted a powerful attraction on the German masses, who ordinarily took little interest in politics.
Hitler knew how to appeal to German instincts and prejudices. The ideal of the powerful state had always been popular. Hitler promised a “Third Reich,” more glorious than the two which had existed earlier. Interpretations of history in terms of race have long possessed a wide appeal in Germany. Hitler vulgarized and popularized the teachings of Teutonic race theorists like the Germanized Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
Anti-Semitism had been strengthened in Germany after the war by two developments. Many leaders of Communist and extreme leftist movements—Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogisches, Kurt Eisner, to name a few—were of Jewish origin. Many Jews of eastern Europe, fleeing from pogroms and unsettled conditions, had migrated into Germany. Some of these East-European Jews took an active part in the speculation which was rampant in Germany because of the unstable currency and the shortage of commodities.
Of course these two groups, the political extremists and the speculators, had nothing whatever to do with each other. But Hitler exploited both in building up for his audiences a picture of the Jew as simultaneously a conscienceless exploiter and profiteer and a force for the subversion of national institutions.
Like the other modern revolutionaries, Lenin and Mussolini, Hitler profited from the weakness and division of his opponents. The German republic was born in a time of misery, defeat, and humiliation. It never captured the imagination or the enthusiastic loyalty of the German people.
The German labor movement might have been a bulwark against the Nazi onslaught, but it was split between the Social Democrats and the Communists. The latter, on orders from Moscow, concentrated their fire on the Social Democrats, not on the Nazis. They were acting on the highly mistaken calculation that Hitler’s victory would be followed by a reaction in favor of communism.
Whether Hitler reflected the will of the German people or whether they were victims of his dictatorship is often debated. No sweeping, unqualified answer can be accurate.
That the Nazi movement appealed to a strong minority of the Germans is indisputable. Hitler got 37 per cent of the votes cast in the election of 1932, when the rule of law prevailed and all parties were free to state their case. The Nazis got a somewhat higher proportion, about 44 per cent, of the votes cast in the election of March 4, 1933. This made it possible for Hitler to come into power with a small parliamentary majority, since the German Nationalists, who were then in alliance with the Nazis, polled enough votes to insure this result.
This election, however, could not be considered free. Terror was already at work. The Communists had been made scapegoats for the burning of the Reichstag building. Nazi Brown Shirts were beating and intimidating political opponents. Once Hitler had clamped down his dictatorship, there is no means of determining how many Germans professed to support him out of enthusiasm, how many because it was distinctly safer not to be marked down as disaffected.
The idea that all, or a great majority of, Germans were lusting for war is not borne out by objective study of the facts. Up to the outbreak of World War II Hitler persisted in publicly professing his devotion to peace. His favorite pose was that of the veteran soldier who knew the horrors of war and never wished to experience another. This attitude was designed to deceive his own people, as well as the outside world.
Many Germans hoped to the end that there would be no war. Foreigners who were in Germany at critical periods before the outbreak of war and even at the time of Germany’s greatest military success, in 1940, were often impressed by the apathy, the absence of any signs of popular enthusiasm.
It is sometimes represented as a proof of deep, incorrigible depravity in the German character that the average German seems to feel little sense of war guilt. But it is doubtful whether the average Italian spends much time beating his breast in repentance for the misdeeds of Mussolini. Should the Soviet regime be overthrown, the average Soviet citizen would feel little sense of personal responsibility for the horrors of the Soviet slave-labor camps.
One of the most demoralizing effects of totalitarianism in any form is its tendency to paralyze the individual’s feeling of personal moral accountability. The state is so powerful, the individual so weak, that the typical, almost inescapable, reaction is one of helplessness.
Nazism, like communism and fascism, was an ironical product of the war that was fought in the name of democracy. The hard core of Hitler’s following was recruited among men who, in their hearts, had never been demobilized, who could never adjust themselves to civilian life. A great part of Hitler’s appeal was to feelings associated with the lost war, the inflation, the economic hardships of the postwar period.
Communists and Fascists may be inclined to dispute the essential kinship of these two systems. But it would be difficult to deny that the following ten characteristics are very important, politically, economically, and morally. They may be listed as follows.
(1) The all-powerful and supposedly infallible leader. These three plebeian dictators—Hitler, the unknown soldier; Stalin, the son of a drunken cobbler, a hunted political rebel in Tsarist times; Mussolini, whose father was a radical village blacksmith—have reveled in clouds of sycophantic incense which would have been too strong for the nostrils of Tsar or Kaiser. “Sun of the entire world” is one of the many epithets of oriental adulation which have been lavished upon Stalin. The personal power of these modern dictators has been far greater than that of any crowned ruler of modern times. They have been subject to no check or limit in law or public opinion.
(2) The single ruling party. Under communism, fascism, and nazism only the single ruling party has been permitted to exist legally. Parliaments in the Soviet Union, Germany, and Italy became mere rubber stamps for the registration of the party decisions. Voting under totalitarian regimes is virtually unanimous and altogether meaningless. No voice of independent criticism is ever heard.
(3) Government by a combination of propaganda, terrorism, and flattery of the masses. All three dictatorships developed very powerful methods for molding the minds of the peoples under their rule. The Soviet, Nazi, and Fascist citizen (“subject” would be a more accurate word) has been enveloped in a cloud of state-directed propaganda. From the cradle to the grave the idea is drummed into his head, through the newspapers, the schools, the radio, that he is living in the best of all possible worlds, that his highest glory and happiness are to be found in serving the existing regime, that the “toiler,” the “worker,” the “peasant,” by this very service becomes a peculiarly noble and exalted creature.
Open counterpropaganda and free discussion are impossible. And for those individuals who were not converted, there was always the grim threat of the secret political police. This body changed its name, but never its character, several times in Russia, where it has been known at various times as the Cheka, the OGPU, the NKVD, the MVD. The Gestapo in Germany and the Ovra in Italy fulfilled the same functions.
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