[This
is Chapter Sixteen of Murphey’s book Understanding
the Modern Predicament.]
Anyone who has seen Hitler's propaganda film "The Triumph of the Will" and who remembers the scene in which flagbearers at the 1934 Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg lowered their flags to the ground one by one as the names of the battlefields of World War I were read off will appreciate how much World War II was a continuation of the First World War. The anger, the nationalism, the militancy all carried over through the short span of intervening years.
Again,
millions were to die. And again it is hard to understand, in light of the size
of the calamity, that we can have so poor an understanding of the causes of the
tragedy. We often think of World War II as having sprung from a unique
aberration. A recent movie was typical of this when it pictured Hitler as a
psychotic.
So
far as an historically adequate perspective of the causes of the war is
concerned, it is really beside the point whether
Hitler was psychotic -- although I am inclined to think that he was not, at
least until he drove his health to extremes under the pressures of war and of
his eccentric living habits. It is a mistake to focus on Hitler at all. A
twentieth century Tolstoy could easily write another War and Peace that
would show how particular individuals -- even dominating individuals such as
Hitler -- were swept along on a tide they hardly controlled. The forces that
produced Nazi totalitarianism and led to war were rooted in the intellectual
and spiritual condition of
I
will want to place the Nazi phenomenon in this larger context, and this
involves reviewing five main antecedents, which will be:
·
The psychology of the "mass-man" as
described by Jose Ortega y Gasset. This will take us back into some of the
things I discussed in Chapter 8.
·
The role played by modern man's yearning for a
secular religion.
·
The intellectual preconditions.
·
The cultural preconditions.
·
And the specific factual circumstances that led
to Hitler.
The psychology of the “mass-man.” In
Chapter 8, I stressed that our age has been highly problematical not just
because of the rapid development of science and technology, but because of the
average man's rise to predominance for the first time in history. In that
chapter, I referred at length to Ortega. It is worth noting, though, that many
thoughtful men have commented on the dangers that are inherent in the
shallowness, rootlessness and spoiledness of the type of man who is born into
an advanced civilization but who takes it for granted without moving himself
from his self-assurance enough to understand and appreciate its wonder and
delicacy.
This
state of mind has definite repercussions in the political life of modern
society. During the past century, great masses of people have come into being
who have been willing to use brutal "direct action" methods without
regard to their effect on humane institutions. Young Germans cried in 1932 that
"We do not want to discuss any more, we want only to act."1 Although each varies in degree, there is a
fundamental similarity between Sorel's syndicalist "general strike"
technique in France, the sit-ins and mass marches that occurred in the United
States in the 1960s, the truckers' mass closing of the highways at the time of
the fuel crisis in the United States in 1973, the garbagemen's strike in New
York City a few years before, the actions of the New Left in Chicago in 1968,
Hitler's relish in breaking up bourgeois meetings, and the like. Hitler
expressed a point of view that was in tune with all of these "direct
action" movements when he gloated, "How many a time the eyes of my
lads glittered when I explained to them the necessity of their mission and
assured them over and over again that all the wisdom on this earth remains
without success if force does not enter into its service….”2 When means such as these are widely used in a
society, it isn't surprising that that society's politics will exhibit the same
traits. In fact, as Ortega pointed out, the totalitarian state is the ultimate
embodiment of this "direct action" psychology and method. The
civilizing principle that force should be the last resort is reversed. Instead,
force is made the first or even the only resort.3
If we see Hitler in this context, we see that his rise was consistent with the mentality of countless people other than himself. I can't speak for the reader's experience, but my own convinces me that the character traits that Ortega described are prevalent. Far from being the exclusive possession of a few anti-social eccentrics, they reflect a major human failure in modern Western life. (It is always worthwhile to mitigate Ortega's observations, though, by realizing that this modern failure isn't a fall from an earlier perfection. In the beginning chapters of this book I sought to create a long-term perspective that would permit us to see that our own voids are part of the cosmic condition of mankind as we find ourselves at this point in our development.)
The yearning for a secular religion.
Religiously-centered philosophers such as Richard Weaver have argued that
because of its preoccupation with secular values the modern age has sunk into
decadence, lacking a God-centered perception and wandering emptily without
spiritual focus. The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl has observed that "the
loss of meaning" is today's most common spiritual affliction. And even the
atheist Jean Paul Sartre has said that "by forlornness we mean the absence
of God." Lostness is a recurrent theme in modern literature, philosophy,
art and motion pictures.
The
spiritual question isn't wholly absent from the life even of the commonplace
man who seems to accept a life of averageness without question. Of course, it
is possible to say that its mere absence as a positive factor in his life will
affect his values and behavior. Such a man's spiritual mediocrity is an
important datum for himself and for those who live with him even though it is
often unrecognized. But beyond this, it is often true that, despite
appearances, the spiritual question is felt by him. Since circumstances don't
always set the stage for a comfortable acceptance by him of a superficial
reality, they can force him to question the meaning of life.
The
great mass movements have, in part, served as substitute religions to satisfy
this spiritual emptiness. The religious aspect of National Socialism can easily
be imagined if we compare the humdrum quality of the daily life of a German
factory worker who may have worked all day, stopped at a beer garden on his way
home, spent the evening with his family, and repeated the same round the next
day, with the excitement and transcendent feeling he probably felt as he heard
of German armies on the march and attended massive rallies with half-a-million
other people. He could easily have been carried away by the large
brilliantly-colored flags, the bands playing stirring music and the collective
shouts of "sieg heil" as Hitler pranced exultantly about. All of this
offered something larger, more meaningful, than the worker saw in his own
small, ordinary existence. The Nazi Party rallies were secular religious
experiences. "Religion? Of course," Howard Becker says. "Any value-system
for the sake of which its devotees sacrificially live and gladly die is a
religion, regardless of whether or not it has a god in the traditional
sense."4
In
Mein Kampf, Hitler told of his despair
over having been born "in an age of shopkeepers." He wished he had
been born a century or so before, in time to take part in the Wars of
Liberation against Napoleon. In the preceding chapter, I quoted authors who in
the nineteenth century praised war for its spiritual excitement. War, with its heavy
baggage of carnage and destruction, appears sick and existentially hollow when
thought through, but it has fascinated those who either have not identified
with peaceable society or have lacked sufficient personal resources to find
meaning elsewhere. Walter Laqueur mentions that "a prodigious wave of
enthusiasm swept over German youth at the outbreak of the world war in
1914. 'We had not known the reason of
our existence -- youth had seemed to us a burden and a curse,' wrote Ina
Seidel, in her poem ending: '0 holy fortune, to be young today!"'
The intellectual precondition. The
many modern thinkers who -- in their disaffection from mass, industrial,
bourgeois culture -- have preached "blood and thunder" philosophies
were as much precursors of World War II and of National Socialism as of World
War I. The same intellectual milieu contributed to each.
But
the alienated intellectual temper did more than extol violence and the state;
it undercut constructive attachment to the more civilized, humane aspirations of
the new age. This intellectuality has not identified with liberal values.
"As for liberalism," Laqueur says, "there was no greater
abomination: 'German youth turns away from liberalism with nausea and especial
contempt..."' The alienation has
fed resentment and a carping, neurotic rejection of society. The result has
been that the main movements of the twentieth century have not been in harmony
with the finest potential of the time, but with discordances and tensions. It
is no surprise that after many years of an intellectual milieu in Germany that
included the Storm and Stress movement, the Romantic rejection of the
Enlightenment, the Historical School with its debunking relativism and its
anti-bourgeois attitudes, the Lassallean socialists and the Marxists, the
cultural tendencies that led to Hitler were present. Those tendencies reflected
the alienation and shattering of consensus.
It
is a mistake to lose sight of the broad intellectual context, but the
intellectual movement that was most directly related to the rise of National
Socialist ideology was the Volkish movement that followed on the heels of
Romanticism. [Note: “Volkish” is pronounced “Folkish,” since the German “v” is pronounced like an
English “f.”] George Mosse
has traced the origins of Volkish thought in The Crisis of German Ideology.
He says that "'Volk' is one of
those perplexing German terms which connotes far more than its specific
meaning. 'Volk' is a much more comprehensive term than 'people,' for to German
thinkers ever since the birth of German romanticism in the late eighteenth
century 'Volk' signified the union of a group of people with a transcendental
'essence' The essential element here is the linking of the human soul with its
natural surroundings, with the 'essence' of nature... According to many Volkish
theorists, the nature of the soul of a Volk is determined by the native
landscape. Thus the Jews, being a desert people, are viewed as shallow, arid,
'dry' people."5 He says that "men like Father Jahn, Arndt,
and Fichte began to conceive of the Volk in heroic terms during the wars of
liberation against Napoleon." The Volkish worldview was elaborated later
in the nineteenth century by such authors as Heinrich von Sybel, Theodor
Fontane, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, Berthold Auerbach --
and many others. As it went on, Volkish thought escalated toward the eventual
National Socialist ideology: "In Der Wehrwolf (1910), the most
famous German peasant novel," Mosse says, "Hermann Lons eventually
carried the glorification of brute force to its heights. " In the
meantime, "popular literature, mainly novels (which sold in the millions),
portrayed the alien Jew in growingly distasteful stereotypes.'
There
were two authors, though, whose names especially stand out in connection with
Volkish thought. Mosse says that "the ideology was elevated into a
Germanic faith, an achievement for which two men bear a large share of the
responsibility: Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn." "Any humaneness
Lagarde possibly possessed was eventually obscured by his call for the
extermination of the Jews like bacillae. This outburst clearly paralleled his
advocacy of physical force and violence to crush the recalcitrant contemporary
state 'like an eggshell. "' Just the same, "ideas of race played a
greater role in Langbehn's theology than in Lagarde's. Race and vitality of
nature were viewed as equivalent forces." I could go on quoting Mosse,
especially about the extension of an ever-more-virulent Volkish
ideology into the twentieth century, but what I have already cited is enough to
show the extent to which National Socialist ideology found origins in the
earlier Volkish worldview, which in turn had sprung quite readily from the
mystical, nationalistic, anti-Enlightenment attitudes of the Romantic movement.
The latter, of course, had been an important part of the existential struggle
that many thinkers had waged against the advance of modern and liberal values.
We see the connection between Romanticism, Volkish ideology and National
Socialism in the statement by the Nazi philosopher Alfred Baeumler that
"Romanticism saw man again in the light of his natural and historical
ties. Romanticism opened our eyes to the night, the past, our ancestors, to the
mythos and the Volk."6
The cultural preconditions: the German Youth Movement. The
German Youth Movement began in about 1896 and continued until it was absorbed
into the Hitler Youth in the 1930s. It was a movement that ranks with the
Jacobins, the Russian nihilists and the American New Left as a symptom of
extreme social and ideological disintegration. A study of it lends a great deal
to our perspective of the rise of Hitler, since the movement reveals patterns
that are helpful in explaining Hitler's role as a charismatic leader of his
peers.
Howard
Becker's German Youth: Bond or Free and Walter Laqueur's Young
Germany tell about the movement from a scholarly point of view. But
because unimpassioned scholarship doesn't adequately convey the appropriate
sensibilities of civilized men as they see, with considerable abhorrence, such
things as the German Youth Movement or the American New Left, I think it is
best to begin with the description given by Ludwig von Mises in Bureaucracy in
1944. Mises is
less "objective" and for some reason, perhaps out of sarcasm, falls
into a quaintness of style that is not typical of his writing, but the
following passage tells us more than an impartial description can:
"In
the decade preceding the First World War Germany, the country most advanced on
the path toward bureaucratic regimentation, witnessed the appearance of a
phenomenon hitherto unheard of: the youth movement. Turbulent gangs of untidy
boys and girls roamed the country, making much noise and shirking their school
lessons. In bombastic words they announced the gospel of a golden age. All
preceding generations, they emphasized, were simply idiotic; their incapacity
has converted the earth into a hell. But the rising generation is no longer
willing to endure gerontocracy, the supremacy of impotent and imbecile
senility. Henceforth the brilliant youths will rule. They will destroy
everything that is old and useless, they will reject all that was dear to their
parents, they will substitute new real and substantial values and ideologies
for the antiquated and false ones of capitalist and bourgeois civilization, and
they will build a new society of giants and supermen.
"The
inflated verbiage of these adolescents was only a poor disguise for their lack
of any ideas and of any definite program. They had nothing to say but this: We
are young and therefore chosen; we are ingenious because we are young, we are
the carriers of the future; we are the deadly foes of the rotten bourgeois and
Philistines. And if somebody was not afraid to ask them what their plans were,
they knew only one answer: Our leaders will solve all problems.
"It
has always been the task of the new generation to provoke changes. But the
characteristic feature of the youth movement was that they had neither new
ideas nor plans. They called their action the youth movement precisely because
they lacked any program which they could use to give a name to their endeavors.
In fact, they espoused entirely the program of their parents. They did not
oppose the trend toward government omnipotence and bureaucratization. Their
revolutionary radicalism was nothing but the impudence of the years between
boyhood and manhood; it was a phenomenon of a protracted puberty. It was void
of any ideological content.
"The
chiefs of the youth movement were mentally unbalanced neurotics. Many of them were
affected by a morbid sexuality, they were either profligate or homosexual. None
of them excelled in any field of activity or contributed anything to human
progress. Their names are long since forgotten; the only trace they left were
some books and poems preaching sexual perversity….”7
I believe that Mises missed placing the Youth Movement in its proper intellectual context when he spoke of its "lack of any ideas" and said that it was "void of ideological content." As other fragments of the above passage indicate, the Youth Movement did have ideas -- and these were the ideas that stemmed from a century of intellectual alienation that repudiated the Enlightenment and the bourgeoisie. It is true that the alienation that existed throughout the German Youth Movement did not produce a consensus and that different factions grasped at a variety of specific ideologies; but the young people who participated clearly inherited the patterns of alienation from the intellectual subculture of Europe. A similar inheritance took place in the United States as a precondition to the later rise of the New Left. Such youth movements should not be considered separately from the context of an alienated intellectual subculture. It is no coincidence that both the German Youth Movement and the American New Left followed years of intense intellectual alienation.
Laqueur and
Becker give considerable detail about the Youth Movement. The Movement's first
phase was that of the Wandervogel between 1896 and 1919. The second was
the Bund (or Bunde) phase that continued from 1919 until the Movement was
absorbed into the Hitler Youth in 1933. The Movement had no input from the
German working class; it was composed entirely of middle class young people,
who nevertheless were in revolt against "bourgeois respectability."
In his introduction to Laqueur's book, R. H. S. Crossman writes of the Wandervogel
young people as "long-haired untidy bacchants and
super-bacchants." He says they
despised liberalism (by which he almost certainly means pro-bourgeois classical
liberalism, as the word is used in Europe) and were suspicious of intellectual
analysis.8
Alienation
from the bourgeoisie was the consistent thread. Laqueur says that "the Wandervogel
chose the other form of protest against society -- romanticism. Their
return to nature was romantic, as were their attempts to get away from a
materialistic civilization, their stress on the simple life, their rediscovery
of old folk songs and folklore, their adoption of medieval names and
customs." He tells of "such harmless antics as living in a cave or
walking about in bearskins." One group "practised primitive
communism, traveled from town to town and preached the salvation of mankind in
semi-religious, semi-sexual ecstatic surrender to folk dancing (“swinging")
and singing." Laqueur says that "Scheler rejoiced in (the Youth
Movement's) anti-capitalist mentality." He adds that "if an outsider
inquired about the meaning of all this, he would be told that if he did not
feel it he would never understand it. It was not something that could be
explained to Philistines in rational terms." "All of this,"
Laqueur goes on, "was based on the tacit assumption that life in a group,
in intimate association, was vastly preferable to life in interest-motivated,
atomistic, impersonal society. The Bunde, and the youth movement in general,
thought that the group was a deeper, more immediate and organic way of living
together than that provided by 'mechanistic society.’" Becker emphasizes
the alienation when he says that "the older generation had lived through
the triumphs of the 'sixties and the 'seventies, the upward zoom of Germany as
a first-rate as well as military power in the 'eighties, and the
plush-upholstered comfort and respectability of the 'nineties. Were the youngsters
grateful for the warmth of Germany's place in the sun? To put it mildly, they
thought that the brave new world was brassy and that the brass was badly
tarnished, that the warmth was not the warmth of the sunshine but the
enervating stuffiness of overheated, tawdrily furnished apartments filled with
the reek of stale beer arid the acrid fumes of cigar stubs. Specifically, they
thought that parental religion was largely sham, politics boastful and trivial,
economics unscrupulous and deceitful, education stereotyped and lifeless, art
trashy and sentimental, literature spurious and commercialized, the drama
tawdry and mechanical, dance cheaply titillating or excessively formal, family
repressive and insincere, and the relations of the sexes, in marriage or out,
shot through with hypocrisy." The result, Becker says, was that
"German youth of Karl Fischer' s day loathed and hated the world of their
elders." (I would, of course, have us ask how it happened that so many
young people were suddenly independent philosophers having so great a
sensibility to higher and finer values. Instead of reaching this subtle and
extensive analysis themselves, they were no doubt picking up the entire body of
values and social critique from the alienated intellectual generation that
preceded them. In what I have covered in earlier chapters, we have seen how
often the alienated intellectual has repeated the bill of particulars against
bourgeois society, as restated by Becker in the passage above, during the past
two hundred years.)
At
the large meeting of the Wandervogel in 1913 at the Hohe Meissner,
"practically every phase of contemporary adult respectability was assailed
and the demands of youth for its own sake vigorously asserted."
In its first phase, the movement was slovenly and nondescript; in its second, it became militaristically oriented. But at all times a wide variety of alienated viewpoints existed within it. The alienation becomes apparent when Laqueur says the movement's members "were frequently corrupted in the twenties by the politics of moral nihilism: It was neither a Hitlerite nor a Communist who declared that 'even the most heinous means is consecrated if used in the struggle for national liberation,' and that 'we must say "no" to humanism, we must use even the most barbaric means, if it is necessary" to further the national resurrection' -- it was Ernst Niekisch, who enjoyed great authority in the youth movement."
And
the variety appeared in the many ideological groups that participated. Laqueur
says that "Wiltfeber, published in 1912, became the Bible of the
right-wing Wandervogel" and that it was "not intended as a party
manifesto, but expressed the unformulated discontents of a young German
patriot." Wyneken, who was one of the Movement’s most influential leaders
between 1913 and 1920, held strongly to the idea of "jugenkultur"
(youth culture) .The Movement's left wing advocated "premarital sexual
freedom" and there was considerable homosexuality. Anti-semitism was also
a significant factor, with religious anti-semitism giving way to the racial
form. (There had been a "great anti-semitic wave" in the 1880s and
1890s.) Laqueur says "anti-semitism...
became one of the basic articles of faith of many members of the youth
movement." A theory of Aryan racist
superiority was developed by "Graff and his friends... When pressed for an
explanation or definition of their Germanic and Aryan mission, or when
confronted with the evidence that a pure Aryan race had never existed, least of
all in Germany, they invariably replied that this did not disturb them in the
least; they would create such a race in the future. "
The
Movement had its left wing, where, as Laqueur says, "many, perhaps most of
the Freideutche believed with Karl Korsch, that capitalism was at its last gasp
and that scientific socialism had become a practical necessity. Alexander
Rustow, then a radical socialist, called capitalism the real enemy of the youth
movement... Karl August Wittfogel believed in the victory of the proletariat,
and urged that the duty of the best forces among the younger bourgeois was to
transmit the cultural treasures of the past to the class which was destined to
establish the classless society. Paul Tillich thought that socialism and
Christianity would become one in a new world order."
Laqueur
reports that on the Movement's right wing "some of Tusk's antics surpassed
the worst excesses of the White Knight era; emotionalism and moral relativism
ran wild." He says that "with their glorification of the soldier, of
military virtues and even of the 'death wish,' the local branches of the Jungenschaft
became ‘garrisons' and every boy a budding warrior. Finding even the Prussian
tradition too mild to serve his turn, Tusk held up the ideal of the Samurai (in
his book The Heroes’ Bible). In an article extolling harikari, he
affirmed that the most important virtue was 'demonic, knightly
masculinity."'
From
all of this, it is easy to see that Adolf Hitler and National Socialism were
not strange intruders into a hostile milieu. Almost everything involved in
National Socialism was an extension of already-existing factors. Referring to
the "Fuhrerprinzip, the leadership principle," Becker tells us
that "the general acceptance of this principle among Germans, of the
younger generation in particular, has often been pointed to as the real secret
of the strength of the Nazis. And now note this: The principle goes back at
least as far as 1896, when Karl Fischer introduced it among the Roamers, whose
unquestioned leader he was. The leader was not the elected or delegated
representative of the group; on the contrary, a man who felt himself 'called'
simply proclaimed himself leader."
Becker
goes on to inform us that even "the great ritual symbols of the Nazis, the
shout of 'Heil!' and the extended right arm, were not originally Nazi at all.
'Heil!' was a greeting carried over from the Middle Ages, and used well over
thirty years ago by the Roamers, and in 1923 there were several Youth Movement
sects in which the ramrod arm was a standard gesture.”
The continuity between the Youth Movement and National Socialism is just as apparent in Becker's statement that "anyone observing a squad of Hitler Youth on an expedition (at least before 1939) would see lutes, fluttering ribbons, knapsacks, and cooking pots, and would hear roaming songs which, although not drawn from The Pluck (which the Nazis have prohibited), would sound much like the old repertory. Even the uniforms would not strike an utterly false note, for the alliance youth of the 'twenties had abandoned the individualistic raggle-taggle of Karl Fischer's boisterous crew. The same observer could overhear talk about the extraordinary qualities of the squad leader, the sense of fusion, folk community, and Germany's mission which would sound strikingly like the stock-in- trade of the Free German Youth."
National Socialism and Hitler. It is significant that Laqueur says that "National
Socialism came to power as the party of youth. Its cult of youth may have been
less pronounced than that of Italian Fascism, whose very hymn was called
'Giovinezza'; but Hitler lost few opportunities of declaring that his movement
was inter alia a revolt of the coming generation against all that was
senile and rotten with decay." Speaking more broadly, Laqueur says that
"Hitler's regime was certainly no sudden break in the continuity of German
history, not as unprecedented as some would like to believe; nor was racial
anti-semitism thinkable without the different kind of anti-semitism that
preceded it. The sources of National Socialism are deeply rooted, and can be
traced far back in German history."
David Schoenbaum
has written a thoughtful book about the National Socialist internal policies, Hitlers
Social Revolution. In it, he observes that "the most general theory --
that National Socialism was a revolution of the lower middle class is defensible
but inadequate... National Socialism was no less a revolt of the young against
the old." He recounts that "the average age was thirty to thirty-two,
corresponding to the age of Hitler himself who was thirty when he arrived in
Munich. A war of the young against the old was as great a possibility as the
mobilization of the de classe against the established. This opportunity
Hitler was quick to exploit with his organization of an ‘active’ Party
auxiliary, a 'sport' group organized from the remnants of the anti-communist
militia of the first postwar months..., to ride around in trucks, pick fights
with the C0mmunists, and be seen. Of the twenty-five members of the first SA
group, formed in 1921, only one was over thirty, and fifteen were under twenty,
too young even to have been in the war."9
The Nazis came to have
considerable strength in the universities, and this flowed out of the fact, as
Laqueur says, that "the German universities in the nineteen-twenties were
bulwarks of anti-democratic thought." The situation was so hospitable that
'when the National Socialists were still only a small splinter party in
the Reichstag they already topped the poll in many universities, and in some
they had an absolute majority."
Militant German nationalism was
already present among German young people and "needed only systematic
expression and propagandizing," Becker says, "to bring it hand in
glove with Nazi doctrines." He notes "the hatred of internationalism;
the reiteration of the 'stab in the back' legend; the demand for other
territories reassigned by the Treaty of Versailles; and the identification of
efforts to develop a peaceful Germany with spineless pacifism."
Schoenbaum gives considerable detail about the flavor of Hitler's
administration. I have been especially interested in the nature of Hitler's
socialism. Schoenbaum quotes Hitler as having said
that "we are not a charitable institution but a Party of revolutionary
socialists." Combining a number of ingredients, "the new regime was,
by its own definition, revolutionary, socialist, egalitarian, and elitist at
once." The result was "a verbal radicalism in the old socialist
tradition... As the worker was declared the pillar of the community, the bourgeois
and the capitalist were excoriated as the enemies of the people."
Schoenbaum says that "what characterized its socialism was not the ownership of capital but its relationship to the
State. Capital remained in private hands because this seemed expedient. But the
threat of intervention was always present and generally adequate to produce the
desired cooperation." He tells us that "a Party editorial in 1939
declared free enterprise to be the very basis for Germany's
socialism." In characteristic socialist fashion reminiscent of Britain's
R. H. Tawney, the Nazi E. R. Huber "defined the right of property as a
function of duty." Even though Schoenbaum points to a gap between Nazi
rhetoric and Nazi practice (and here he fails, I think, to give sufficient weight
to the brevity of the Nazi civil administration before the onset of war), he
believes that socialist ideology and rhetoric were important to Nazism.
"As an affective concept," he says, "socialism had a very real
meaning in Nazi attitudes. It was hortatory and defined a state of mind."
He tells us that it "referred principally to a basic social egalitarianism
with a streak of social welfare, and a considerable element of militancy."
In the ideology, a "socialist” world was set off against a
"bourgeois" world. The farmers, workers and soldiers were identified
with socialism, while "the enemies of National Socialism included not only
the 'Jewish Marxists,' and the Catholics, but 'certain elements of an
incorrigible, stupid, reactionary bourgeoisie."' During the brief period
before the war Nazism hadn't gained complete control over the economy, but in
its ideology it "claimed total control of the economy; total command over
resources; total direction of wages, prices, production; total organization of
credit, manpower, transportation, and planning." Nazi law authorized the
Fuhrer "to limit or expropriate property at will where this limitation or
expropriation was consonant with the 'tasks of the community.'” Schoenbaum says
"the Third Reich was notable for the far-reaching transfer of managerial
decisions from the managers. Wages, prices, working conditions, allocation of
materials: none of these was left to managerial decision, let alone to the
market. It was expedience, not ideological bias, that left property in the
hands of its owners, something made evident by the regime's own free-wheeling
entrepreneurial activity, its theoretical treatment of the right of
property."
The
social egalitarianism that existed within Nazism is illustrated by Schoenbaum
when he quotes the petty human concerns of a prison camp guard: “Formerly when
I went to the theatre with my wife, there was always trouble. We got a seat in
the twentieth row. But Huber, our chief accountant, and his wife were in the
tenth row. And afterward all hell broke loose. Why can the Hubers afford the
tenth row and not ourselves? Nowadays, six nights a week, all the seats in the
theatre cost the same. First come, first served. Sometimes the Hubers sit in
the tenth row, and we sit in the twentieth. But my wife knows that's because
the Hubers live nearer the theatre."
As
has been true with a great deal of socialism both in and out of Germany, the
egalitarianism was also elitist. Schoenbaum quotes the Nazi Ley as having said
that "there are no longer classes in Germany. In the years to come, the
worker will lose the last traces of inferiority feelings he may have inherited
from the past." He points out, though, that a Dutch correspondent heard
Ley say that "people are children. They have childlike wishes. The state
has to care for these and see to it that they get their presents if they are to
be happy."
The
Nazi program worked toward a number of ends. "Visible state pressure on
employers produced visible results in better working conditions, housing, and
swimming pools," Schoenbaum says. There were more "symphony concerts,
theatre performances, excursions, large-scale tourism.” Hitler wanted to make
the cities smaller, the concentration of capital less; to increase the rural
population; to return women to the home; to reduce inequalities of income. And
it was all done to a litany of ideology and propaganda, as we see when
Schoenbaum tells us that "the Third Reich' s best publicized and best
received contribution to industrial relations was without doubt the 'Strength
through Joy' organization" and that "the Volkswagen... took the
interesting sociological role of making the automobile, heretofore a bourgeois
status symbol, at least potentially available to the working classes."
The circumstances of Hitler's rise. I
have stressed the continuity of National Socialism with the anti-bourgeois
alienation and with several traditional socialist values because it is in those
things that the main lessons are to be learned from it. But it is probably
true, as people are quick to see, that Hitler wouldn't have acquired power if
it had not been for the straitened circumstances of Germany in the 1920s and
early 'thirties. The experience of World War I and of the defeat in that war,
especially when combined with the humiliations of Versailles and the severe
reparations, not to mention the traumas that were involved in run-away
inflation and in brief Communist takeovers, were all factors that worsened the
crisis that existed independently in the German mind and spirit. The social
turmoil and economic difficulties placed a strain upon democratic institutions
in other nations as well as in Germany. And we must not lose sight of the fact
that the Weimar Republic was a new democratic experience for Germany, so new
that it seemed alien to a milieu that detested precisely its democratic aspect.
Laqueur points out that "in Germany large sections of the middle classes
believed that political democracy was a foreign importation unsuited to German
conditions, and there had been signs of anti-liberal and anti-parliamentarian
unrest since the very first year of the Weimar Republic." A number of
circumstances in Germany militated against liberal institutions.
It
is not hard to see, then, why it is almost totally irrelevant whether Hitler
was or was not psychotic. An understanding of the rise of Hitler and of the
advent of World War II calls into play all of the factors I have discussed in
this book. In the broadest sense, the horrors of National Socialism reflected
the problematical condition of contemporary Western man as the inheritor of a
deeply rooted division and immaturity.
1.
Walter Z. Laqueur, Young Germany (New York: Basic Books Publishing Co.,
Inc., 1962), pp. 152, 87, 179-180, xviii, xxi, 6, 8, 11, 116, 139, 165, 9, 31,
44, 53, 52, 60, 74, 75, 105-106, 117-118, 168, 191, 197, 140, 141, 179.
2.
Adolf Hit1er, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), p. 491.
3. Jose
Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, Inc., 1960), p. 75.
4.
Howard Becker, German Youth: Bond or Free (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1946), pp. 145, 51, 73, l00, viii, ix, 189, 158.
5.
George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology (New York: Grosset &
Dunlap, 1964), pp. 4, 14, 25, 27, 29-30.
6.
George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture (New York:
Grosset & Dunlap, 1966), p. 97.
7.
Ludwig von Mises, Bureauceacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944),
pp. 94-95.
8.
Laqueur, Young Germany, pp. xviii, xxi.
9.
David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution (Garden City: Doubleday and
Company, Inc., 1966), pp. 44, 18-19, 27, 53, 55, 56, 57, 69, 119, 154, 157,
299, 112, 117, 298, 110, 111.