Fear was Hitler's basic emotion. It was fear for the fatherland,
fear for the banal and the physical. Fear was eventually turned
into hate. The subject of fear was the fatherland and the object
was the Jew. The Jew was the universal culprit in Hitler's mind.
He believed history had turned an aristocracy of the sword into
an aristocracy of finance. Quote: "This mammonization led
at the same time to the Hebraization of spiritual life and to
the decline of the mating urge." This latter furthered the
incidence of syphilis and hence the greatest sin of all, that
which was contrary to blood and race.
Hitler, of course held the Jews responsible for everything he
did not like. This included what he called "art-bolshevism",
which substituted cubist distortion for beauty, thus destroying
the very foundations of culture. The liberal press in Germany,
influenced by Jewish reporters, according to Hitler were attacking
militarism and thus digging the German people's grave. He believed
that Jewish influence in German thought in general led to the
contempt for honest labor.
He had a particular hatred for Jewish intellectuals. He said they
had a gift for complicating everything and for bringing confusion
into the simplest things. Science which they had produced caused
the greatest harm since it "rendered impotent" and encouraged
weakness. If the world were given over to German Jewish professors,
Hitler believed they would change mankind into cretins with huge
heads.
Jewish intellectualism, according to Hitler, invented "the
emancipation of women, which sought to mix those spheres which
God had separated; it even undertook something as insane as the
emancipation of negroes, the education of semi-apes." Hitler's
racism clearly was all inclusive. The art-bolsheviks who painted
fields blue, the sky green, clouds sulphurous yellow, and allowed
free rein to their dirty imagination, wanted to kill the people's
soul. These painters, in Hitler's view, were in no wise different
from the those Jews who organized night life and turned all normal
morals upside down. The Jews were responsible for every undesirable
trend in the present and in history, including the centuries-old
stability of the price of bread in Venice.
It is obvious that Hitler aimed his criticism at the emancipatory
process as a whole. A basic thesis of Hitler and Nazism was that
the Jew was "the wirepuller of the destinies of mankind."
What is meant by the word Jew is quite clear: it is the historical
process itself.
If the Jewish objective was "indisputably the expansion
of an invisible Jewish state as a supreme over the whole world",
then the attack was aimed primarily at the sovereignty of states
and peoples. Hence the defense and preservation of sovereignty
was the noblest duty of a race-conscious body of national leaders.
Sovereignty was not a legal concept for Hitler, but actual independence,
predicated on two essentials. First, a sovereign people must be
capable of living entirely off the yield of its own soil. Second,
its territory must offer military-geographical protection. Germany
was threatened with a decline tot he level of a small state because
the two basic necessities of sovereignty were declining.
The only escape from this dilemma was shown by nature. For throughout
the ages it was the living who multiplied; that which nourished
space never changed. From this Malthusian premise Hitler proceeded
to consequences which might be called a particular and biological
form of Marxism. Hitler's counterpart to the Marxist revolution
which breaks a trail for the new is war, which adjusts space to
the population figure. Hence there is no other option but the
acquisition of living space or Lebensraum.
War for Hitler was the revolution of healthy peoples. That
is why he called war "the most powerful and classic expression
of life." Hitler always took the endorsement of war for granted.
It was not something he had to learn, like Mussolini. Even as
a boy, so he tells us in Mein Kampf, he had cursed the fate which
had allowed him to be born in an era of peace with its "casual
mutual cheating."
Unlike Röhm, who liked to talk about war romantically, Hitler
was more interested in preparing the nation for war practically.
In the midst of war he was capable of uttering the axiom that
a peace lasting longer than twenty-five years was harmful to a
nation. The prospect of a constant state of war on the Eastern
border filled him with satisfaction. It would, he said, help build
a strong race and prevent Germany from sinking back into European
decadence.
Hitler's war, therefore, was not a war of aggression. It was a
war of pillage and annihilation, and this made it, in Hitler's
opinion, the highest form of life which transformed the youth
into a man and the people into a "race".
Who wages this war for absolute sovereignty? That is, what
is the social structure of this people on the march?
At first sight there seems much to be said for the theory that
National Socialism was a popular mass movement with its leader,
Hitler, acclaimed by plebiscite. All mass movements show resentment
toward class distinctions. Comradeship, unity, national solidarity,
appeared to be the chief catchwords of young National Socialism
and millions joined the movement under this impression.
Hitler was always finding phrases for an almost mystical communion
with the masses. "The struggle which alone can make Germany
free will be fought with the forces welling up from the broad
masses. Without the German worker they will never achieve a German
Reich!" But Hitler also revealed in Mein Kampf a frank and
lordly contempt for the masses and depicted their inertia and
feminine nature with a cynical eye. Even more significant are
his remarks concerning the nature and emergence of states: the
doctrine of the creative race nuclei and of the state as a racial
order of authority.
All bringers of light come from the "Aryan racial nuclei."
The sole conveyors of a "culturally creative primeval force"
are racial elites. "Aryan racial nuclei" have from time
immemorial penetrated the masses of inferior men and women and,
supported by the labors of subjugated peoples, deployed all their
creative qualities. They perish when they succumb to original
sin and mingle their blood with that of their slaves. In this
light, communism is only the attempted revolt of the racially
inferior population strata which had once been subjugated, strata
which are related all over Europe and hence susceptible to an
international appeal.
If you consider that the genocidal appeal to the racially inferior
layer-that is, the appeal which destroys the structure of authority
by breaking down racial barriers is that oft he Jewish intellect,
and that the peoples of Eastern Europe represent the most powerful
massing of inferior human beings, then it becomes obvious that
Hitler's social mythology forms the focal point of his political
thoughts and emotions. Moreover, it becomes clear, that this ideology
of racial inferiority encompassing Jews and Slavs can determine
what seems at first to be the much more potent national motive.
This leader of the masses succumbs in effect to the most radical
form of the conservative anti-masses defense ideology and this
is precisely the outstanding feature of radical fascism. The NSDAP
was simply that reincarnated Aryan race nucleus in the German
people which was ordained by nature to rule. Between the NSDAP
and the Führer there existed a relationship of mysterious
identity which nevertheless did not preclude the strict order
of authority.
Hitler, in his person and his thinking, was the embodiment of
that "third force" between the ruling class and the
populace which, during a certain period of bourgeois history and
under certain conditions, can represent the most successful, that
is, fascist, synthesis.
In its most radical form it created the "race state"
right in the 20th century. Above the broad layer of racially inferior
citizens, whose former leaders had been either wiped out, banished,
or imprisoned, but which was disciplined and kept contented by
a firm hand, the ruling elite of the Nordic race nucleus rose
up in varying degrees, while this elite was in turn ruled absolutely
by the Führer, whose "will is the constitution."
Beginning in April 1933 Hitler was able to place the entire
machinery of government under the almost unchecked jurisdiction
of his autocratic policies. The existence of other political parties
and a number of social, economic and cultural organizations still
barred complete Nazi control over state and society.
The step from bureaucratic-authoritarian dictatorship to total
rule required the smashing or absorption of all voluntary organizations.
In the first four month in office Hitler
1. overpowered the member states or provinces;
2. suppressed the Left by putting most communist and socialist leaders in concentration camps;
3. forced most of the old parties to capitulate;
4. cleansed the machinery of state with the willing cooperation of most bureaucrats;
5. persuaded the army to a benevolent coexistence.
This was the balance sheet of his first four months in office.
The party system, as well as most independent organizations within
the country collapsed, against the background of a sociopolitical
coordination that combined seduction and terror, opportunism and
threats. July 14, 1933, was the date on which the one-party state
was officially proclaimed.
The dissolution of the Reichstag, the abrogation of all basic
rights, the wave of persecutions, the self-suspension of the Reichstag,
and, the legalization of the dictatorship had destroyed the foundations
of the multiparty democracy of Weimar. Although Hitler in Mein
Kampf had posited the leader principle against the principle of
popular elections, the Government continued to resort to the method
of plebiscitary confirmation as an expression of popular support.
Vital to its successful seizure of power was the fact that the
National Socialist leadership, through threat and seduction, was
able to take over the machinery of state intact. Rigid control
of the party from above and support of the civil servant's faith
in status and order - these were the foundations of the solution
offered by the new order of 1933-1934. It was all done under the
slogan of the "unity of party and state." Hitler said
that the party had become the state. All power now rested with
the Reich government.
The task now was to provide intellectual and economic underpinnings
for the total power incorporated in the Hitler government. This
meant expansion instead of continued revolution, taut party discipline
instead of arbitrary and overbearing acts on the part of commissars.
These commissars had been the men who, as executors of the revolution,
had played so vital a role in the political coordination of the
country. But they were no longer needed.
Everything was now directed toward protecting the power won against
unchecked inroads by the party. Goebbels described it well when
he proclaimed the "winding up of the national socialist revolution"
and warned against "camouflaged Bolshevik elements. Hitler
stopped our revolution at exactly the right moment. Now that we
have possession of the state with all its powers, we no longer
have to capture by force positions which are legally ours."
The party was assigned the function of "finding and uniting
the most capable persons in Germany through a selection conditioned
by day to day struggle; to carry out the elitist training for
the leadership hierarchy; to serve as the "political selection
organization" for the authoritarian regime. That was to be
the task of the NSDAP after the seizure of power.
The state, on the other hand, was charged with the "continuation
of the historic and developed administration of the governmental
agencies within the framework and by virtue of the laws. This
sort of jurisdictional division into political training on the
one hand and administration on the other opened up wide possibilities
for a future dualism of party and state, and consequently for
the discretionary powers of the Führer. In essence the Third
Reich remained in a state of permanent improvisation.
The party-state dualism was essentially insolvable. The Nazis
tried to disguise the tension between party and state by such
expressions as the following: In the polarity between political
movement and governmental bureaucracy, the life of the nation
will in future find its expression.
But such vague formulas could not define the relationship between
party and state. The Nazi leadership was essentially incapable
of defining it, and probably not even interested in any ultimate
clarification. Here as in other cases it was easier and at the
same time more effective to let the issue hang fire, to decide
on competencies from case to case, to demonstrate the superiority
of a Führer ruling over both movement and state.
The "unity of party and state", a formula proclaimed
by a special law passed in passed in December 1933 id not clearly
define the jurisdictional spheres either. The purpose of the law
was to confirm the coordination which offered continued opportunities
to the dualism of a dynamic-revolutionary political movement and
a regimented authoritarian state order. Amid this tension, the
numerous existing personal and institutional conflicts were exacerbated
and further complicated by the rise of the SS, with its own bureaucracy
and quasi-governmental powers.
In general terms, the conflict between party and government continued,
and a number of "apparats" became involved in costly
rivalries. This sort of "institutional Darwinism' was strikingly
exemplified by the coexistence of the Foreign Office under Neurath
with the "unofficial" foreign policy pursued by the
offices of Ribbentrop and Rosenberg and Goebbel's Propaganda Ministry.
This situation prevailed until Ribbentrop's appointment to the
Foreign Ministry in 1938. Of even weightier consequences was the
coexistence of Army, the SA party troops, and later the SS.
All these instances involved both organizational and personnel
problems. The fight of job-hungry and influence-hungry party officials
who saw the state as their booty continued throughout the history
of the regime.
The party of 1933-34 was in the process of a profound transformation.
The victory over all opponents and rivals, the rapid growth of
membership and party auxiliaries, the personnel changes and the
official functions acquired by the NSDAP on the road toward officialdom
- all these confronted the "movement" for the second
time since its breakthrough to a mass organization in 1929-1930
with the problem of how to carry out its dual function of elite
and mass party.
Between 1928 and 1932 the membership had grown from 108,000 to
almost 1.5 million. Between January 30, 1933, and the end of 1934,
it again increased by almost 200 percent. The "old fighters,"
now one third of the membership, were confronted with two-thirds
new party recruits. The enormous change also was reflected in
the social combustion and background of the membership. The proportion
of working-class members, though it still fell far below their
share in the population (46%), increased from 28% in 1930 to 32%
in 1934. The percent of white-collar workers fell off (from 25.6%
to 20.6%), although it remained far above their share in the population
(12.4%).
The middle class character of the NSDAP became even more apparent
in the leadership. White collar workers made up 37% of the leadership,
followed by civil servant and independent businessmen. The party
also continued to build its image as the "party of youth."
Some 33 % percent were under 30; 52% were not yet 40; and 15%
were over 50 years of age.
The growth and restructuring of the party brought a significant
turnover in the leadership. Almost 20% of the political leaders
who had belonged to the NSDAP before 1933 had left by the end
of 1934. The party thus became a loyal instrument of tyranny.
Only the SS was able to develop an independent position as the
avant-garde oft he national socialist empire, and it too never
rebelled against Hitler.
The Third Reich claimed to be a social classless community of
all Germans and at the same time a superior command structure
girded for battle. The function of the leader principle lay in
the blending of these two order concepts. It combined the political-charismatic
combat idea of the "movement" with the bureaucratic
military order idea of the authoritarian state.