Why Hitler Succeeded (He Gave Germans Jobs And Meaning)

II.

An excerpt from, “The Germans” By Gordon A. Craig, Meridian, 1983, Pg. 65 – 69:

In Bracher’s book—and in its sequel, The National Socialist Seizure of Power, written in collaboration with Wolfgang Sauer and Gerhard Schulz in 1960—Hitler’s personal tastes and social gifts received small attention. The emphasis was rather upon his political qualities, and particularly his ability to ingratiate himself with the resentful and deprived elements of the nation and to retain their allegiance in times of discouragement, his superb sense of timing, his almost uncanny ability to take advantage of the mistakes made by political antagonists, and the speed and ruthlessness with which he expanded the relatively limited power that was placed in his hands in January 1933, so that, within a year, he was master of the nation.

The sixties and seventies saw a steady stream of biographies and special studies of Hitler and the Third Reich, the best of which showed the influence of Bracher’s pioneer studies, as of the brilliant biography of the Englishman Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1957), which was widely read in Germany, and the work of his fellow countryman H. R. Trevor Roper, particularly his essay “The Mind of Adolf Hitler.” The first notable German biographies were those of Helmut Heiber (1960) and Hans Bernd Gisevius (1963), the first remarkable chiefly for the brevity with which it recounted the known facts of Hitler’s life and career, the second because it was written by a man who had been an active member of the resistance movement and had, indeed, in 1938, when Neville Chamberlain’s decision to go to Berchtesgaden had lamed the resolution of those General Staff officers who had been planning a coup against Hitler, pleaded with General Erwin von Witzleben to take action despite the British collapse. Despite some lack of balance between its parts, the Gisevius book contributed to the search for a convincing explanation of why Germans accepted Hitler as a leader by describing in convincing detail his undoubted intellectual gifts, his diplomatic skill and tactical virtuosity, and by giving striking examples, from Gisevius’s own experience, of the Fuhrer’s ability to make elite groups as amenable to his persuasive powers as the untutored masses.

Since 1973, the standard German biography has been the brilliant work of Joachim C. Fest, Hitler: A Biography, a book based on exhaustive and meticulous research and covering every phase of his career with masterful authority. Fest’s account is filled with challenging hypotheses, not the least striking of which is his view that by his very nature Hitler was bent upon self-destruction and that, after 1939, he abandoned the world of rational politics and devoted himself to that end. But how did he reach the position of eminence that enabled him to pull the world down with him? Fest suggests three answers. In the first place, he exploited what Fest calls die grosse Angst (the Great Fear) that affected the German bourgeoisie in the last decades of the nineteenth century and particularly in the wake of the First World War—a panic that was rooted in part in apprehension over the rising tide of Communist revolution, but whose deeper cause was a fear of modernity. The technical-economic process of modernization came later to Germany than to other countries but was then much faster and more radical in its realization, and as a result it aroused more irrational fears and more violent movements of reaction. The relentless advance of industrialism and urbanism eroded all inherited cultural and moral values and seemed to threaten the individual with a society of scientific management and assembly lines; and fear and disgust over this prospect allied themselves with a romantic longing for the lost past. The Great Fear was a compound of cultural pessimism, social resentment and racial antipathy (for the Jews were widely believed to be the prospective beneficiaries of the process of change and decay); and the foundation of Hitler’s power over the German people was his ability, from the moment when he began to make speeches in the beer halls of Munich in 1919, to articulate and mobilize these feelings of anxiety and give them direction and thrust. “None of the followers whom he began, after a shaky beginning, to attract,” Fest writes, “was able to express the basic psychological, social, and ideological motives of the movement as he was. He was never only their leader, he was always their voice.” He was at once the embodiment of the “backward-looking utopianism” of millions of his countrymen and the promise that it would be achieved by means of a satisfyingly violent vengeance upon all those who had brought Germany to this critical pass.

The key to Hitler’s political rise was, in the second place—as most of Hitler’s biographies had recognized—his superb oratorical gifts. It was perhaps difficult for Fest’s contemporaries to understand the compulsive force of his speeches when they listened to old recordings of his performances on the podium, and the bathos of the sentiments expressed and the incomparable vulgarity of the style made it even harder. The secret lay in the magic bond that was established, as soon as the first sentences had been uttered, between the speaker and the individual auditor. Hitler spoke to every one’s secret grievance and hidden desire as well as to the collective mood. Fest says, “Without this correspondence between the individual- and the social-pathological situation, Hitler’s acquisition of such a magically demanding power over their spirit is unthinkable. What the nation was momentarily experiencing—the succession of disenchantment, collapse, and loss of status, and the search for objects of guilt and hatred—he had long ago experienced himself. Since then he had all the explanations and excuses at hand and knew all the formulas and culprits, and that gave his own formulations of understanding an exemplary character, so that the people, as if electrified, recognized themselves in him.”

Finally, to an unpolitical people who distrusted politics and whose antipathy seemed to have been justified by the venal and ineffectual party trafficking of the Weimar period, Hitler offered salvation by means of art and myth. He had always regarded himself as an artist rather than a politician, and Thomas Mann once wrote an essay called “Brother Hitler” in which he argued that he was not mistaken in doing so. In 1923, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the philosopher of racism, said that Hitler was “the opposite of a politician,” adding that “the ideal politics is to have none; but this nonpolitics must be boldly recognized and forced upon the world.” Hitler appears to have taken these words to heart, replacing the usual pedestrian goals of the working politician with a grandiose conception of German destiny and aestheticizing the rituals of politics in such a way as to dramatize it. The Weimar politicians had no psychological sense. In contrast, Fest writes: 

Hitler was the first—by means of firm screening effects, theatrical scenery, ecstasy, and the tumult of adoration—to give back to public occasions their intimate character. Their striking symbol was the dome of lights: walls of magic and light against the dark, threatening outside world. And if the Germans might not share Hitler’s hunger for space, his anti-Semitism, the vulgar and brutal traits that were a part of him, the fact that he had once more given to politics the great note of destiny and had mixed it with an element of dread brought him applause and adherents.

One more notable book should be mentioned in this brief catalogue, trivial in scope in comparison with the Fest biography, but admirable in its insight and its focus on practical matters often forgotten, and that is Sebastian Haffner’s brief essay in book form, Comments on Hitler (1978). Speaking directly to the question of the German submission to Hitler, and with particular reference to the years 1938-1939, Haffner writes:

Today, the question “How could we have?” comes easily to the tongues of the elderly, and the question “How could you have?” to those of the young. But then, it required a quite extraordinary sharpness of vision and incisiveness to see in Hitler’s achievements and successes the hidden roots of the future catastrophe, and a wholly extraordinary strength of character to abstract oneself from the effect of those achievements and successes. Hitler’s barking and ravening speeches, which, listened to again today, arouse disgust or an impulse to laugh, at that time had often a foundation in fact that silenced the listener’s rebuttal, and it was the factual foundation, not the barking and the ravening, that counted. 

Haffner cited a speech of April 28, 1939, in which Hitler had boasted that he had overcome the chaos in Germany, restored order, increased production in all branches of industry, eliminated unemployment, united the German people politically and morally, “destroyed, page by page, that treaty which, in its 448 articles, included the most shameful oppression ever exacted of peoples and human beings,” restored to the Reich the provinces lost in 1919, returned to their fatherland millions of unhappy Germans who had been placed under foreign rule, restored the thousand-year-old unity of the German living space, all without shedding blood or inflicting the scourge of war upon his own or other peoples, and all by his own efforts, although, twenty-one years earlier, he had been an unknown worker and soldier. This outburst, Haffner commented, was “nauseating self-adulation,” couched in a “laughable style. But zum Teufel!, it’s all perfectly true—or almost all!. . . .Could people reject Hitler without also giving up everything that he had accomplished, and were not all of his unpleasant characteristics, and his evil deeds as well, mere blemishments compared with his accomplishments?”

Few people who spent any time in Germany in the 1930s can deny the thrust of this question. Provided they were not Jews or Communists (a dreadful proviso that they preferred not to think about), most Germans profited materially and psychologically from the first six years of Hitler’s rule, and they were quick to point this out when criticism of any kind was leveled against the Leader. Moreover, as Haffner also noted, when that criticism was particularly acute, there was an instinctive tendency to argue that the Fuhrer did not know about the matter in question and would not have tolerated it if he had. The devotion that Hitler won from the Germans by the positive achievements of the years before the war was remarkably resistant to reason and reality. The Fuhrer’s hold over the German people was, of course, reinforced, once the war had begun, by patriotism on the one hand and the efficient brutality of his system and his monopoly of force on the other; but the continuing loyalty of many Germans was a personal one, a willingness to believe, in the face of all the facts, that the man who had done so much for them in his first years could do no wrong and would somehow emerge, victorious and immaculate, to confound his enemies and detractors.