Europe: A History (199 page)

In those years, the Nazis took part for the first time in a rash of five parliamentary elections. On three successive occasions they increased both their popular vote and their list of elected deputies. On the fourth occasion, in November 1932, their support declined; and they never won an outright majority. But in a very short time they had established themselves as the largest single party in the Reichstag. What is more, the rising tide of street violence, to which Nazi gangs greatly contributed, took place in a much-changed international setting. In the early 1920s, Communist-led strikes and demonstrations were overshadowed by the apparently limitless power of the
Entente
. German industrialists and German democrats knew exactly whom to call in if the Communists ever tried to take over. But in the early 1930s Britain, France, and the USA were in no better fettle than Germany, and the Soviet Union was seen to be modernizing with remarkable energy. With the communists claiming almost as many votes as the Nazis, Germany’s conservative leaders had much-reduced means to keep the red menace at bay.

Somewhere in German political culture there also lurked the feeling that general elections could be supplemented by a national plebiscite on specific controversial issues. Given the chance, Hitler would not miss it. In the chaos of crumbling Cabinets, one of the transient ministers invoked emergency presidential powers. In September 1930, in the interests of democracy, one minority Chancellor persuaded President Hindenburg to activate Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. Henceforth, the German president could ‘use armed force to restore order and safety and suspend ‘the fundamental rights of the citizen’. It was an instrument which others could exploit to overthrow democracy.

The sequence of events was crucial. The storm raged for three years: deepening recession, growing cohorts of unemployed, communists fighting anti-communists on the streets, indecisive elections, and endless Cabinet crises. In June 1932 another minority Chancellor, Franz von Papen, gained the support of the Reichstag by working with the Nazi deputies. Six months later, he cooked up another combination: he decided to make Hitler Chancellor, with himself as Vice-Chancellor, and to put three Nazi ministers out of twelve into the Cabinet. President Hindenburg, and the German right in general, thought it a clever idea: they thought they were using Hitler against the Communists. In fact, when Hitler accepted the invitation, suitably dressed in top hat and tails, it was Hitler who was using them.

Less than a month later, and a week before the next elections, a mysterious fire demolished the Reichstag building. The Nazis proclaimed a Red plot, arrested
communist leaders, won 44 per cent of the popular vote in the frenzied, anti-communist atmosphere, then calmly passed an Enabling Act granting the Chancellor dictatorial powers for four years. In October Hitler organized a plebiscite to approve Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations and from the Disarmament Conference. He received 96.3 per cent support. In August 1934, following the President’s death, he called another plebiscite to approve his own elevation to the new party-state position of’Führer and Reich Chancellor’ with full emergency powers. This time he received 90 per cent support. Hitler was in control. In the final path to the summit, he did not breach the Constitution once. The personal responsibility for Hitler’s success is easily pinpointed. Four years after the event, Hitler received his former partner, von Papen, at Berchtesgaden. Hitler said: ‘By making me Chancellor, Herr von Papen, you made possible the National Socialist Revolution in Germany. I shall never forget it.’ Von Papen replied, ‘Certainly, my Führer.’
³⁶

Hitler’s democratic triumph exposed the true nature of democracy. Democracy has few values of its own: it is as good, or as bad, as the principles of the people who operate it. In the hands of liberal and tolerant people, it will produce a liberal and tolerant government; in the hands of cannibals, a government of cannibals. In Germany in 1933–4 it produced a Nazi government because the prevailing culture of Germany’s voters did not give priority to the exclusion of gangsters.

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) was an Austrian who became the master of all Germany as no German had ever been. He had been born at Braunau on the Bavarian frontier, the son of a customs official, and had grown up with the stigma of his father’s bastardy (for this reason, unkind acquaintances sometimes called him ‘Schickelgrüber’). His early life had been painful and, in career terms, disastrous. He had some artistic ability, but failed to follow the requisite courses, and drifted round Vienna’s twilight doss-houses as a part-time decorator and postcard artist. Introverted, resentful, and lonely, he was well versed in the social pathology of German Vienna’s anti-Slav and antisemitic
demi-monde
. Having fled to Munich, he welcomed the First World War, which came as a blessed relief to his personal misery. He served with courage, was twice decorated with the Iron Cross (second class and first class), survived when his comrades died, and was gassed. He ended the war in a military hospital, profoundly embittered. [
LANGEMARCK
]

Hitler’s post-war political career filled the void of the early failures. His party, the NSDAP, had adopted a brew of commonplace racism, German nationalism,
and vulgar socialism which proved attractive first to drifters like himself and later to millions of voters. On the soap-boxes and street-corners of defeated Germany, he found the gift for oratory, or demagoguery, which would carry him to the heights. He learned to modulate the pitch and tempo of his voice, to gesticulate, to wrap his face in winning smiles and blazing fury, and so to captivate an audience that the substance of his words was almost immaterial. His skill, which would soon be magnified by searchlights, loudspeakers, and musical choruses, can only be likened to that of revivalist preachers or of latter-day popstars, whose pseudo-hypnotic performances induce mass hysteria. His emotional intensity uncannily matched the feelings of a humiliated nation. He played on people’s fears, ranting against the ‘Jewish–Bolshevik conspiracy’ and the Allies’ ‘stab in the back’. His one and only attempt to seize power was a total fiasco. The ‘Beer-Cellar
Putsch’
of November 1923 taught him to stick to ‘legal means’—that is, to mass rallies, electoral procedures, and political blackmail. His trial, where he railed impressively at the judges, made him a national figure: and his two years in the Landsberg gave him the leisure to write his rambling memoirs,
Mein Kampf
(My Struggle, 1925–6), which became a best-seller.
Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer
was exactly what the majority of Germans wanted to hear. He promised to make Germany great again, in a ‘Third Reich’ that was to stand a thousand years. To be precise, he kept it in being for twelve years and three months. ‘In the Big Lie’, he had written, ‘there is always a certain force of credibility.’

In his private life, Hitler remained withdrawn, and unmarried until his final hours. He loved animals and children, and kept a homely mistress. In contrast to his companions, many of whom were swaggering louts, he was well-groomed and polite. He has never been linked to personal violence, although he clearly gave the (unrecorded) orders for genocide. But his heart was filled with hate. He was given to quoting Frederick II, whose portrait hung in his study to the end: ‘Now that I know men, I prefer dogs.’
³⁷
His one passion was architecture. In the 1920s he built himself a magnificent mountain chalet, the
Berghof
, perched on a peak near Berchtesgaden. Later, he revelled in grandiose plans to rebuild the ruins of Berlin or to turn his native Linz into the art centre of Europe. Western commentators have built Hitler up into an ‘evil genius’. ‘Evil’ is accurate, ‘genius’ doubtful. [
BOGEY
]

Once at the helm, Hitler moved swiftly to eliminate rivals and opponents. He had to crush the socialist wing of the NSDAP, which had considerable popularity, and which had been calling for the ‘second, socialist revolution’ to follow his own success. On the night of 30 June 1934, ‘the Night of the Long Knives’, he called in the Party’s new élite guard, the SS ‘Blackshirts’, to cut down the Party’s older formation of stormtroopers, the SA ‘Brownshirts’. All the Führer’s immediate rivals were killed at a stroke—Ernst Röhm, the SA leader, Gregor Strasser, the Party’s leading socialist, General von Schleicher, the Nazis’ leading ally in parliament. Having banned the German Communist Party in 1933, he then dissolved all the other parties. Assuming Hindenburg’s office of Commander-in-Chief, he won the army to his side and proceeded to remove unreliable elements.

Hitler arrived with no grand economic design. After all, Germany did not need to be modernized as Russia did. But he soon gained a feel for collectivist economics, and was offered a ready-made scheme by Dr Hjalmar Schacht, President of the Reichsbank. His initial industrial backers were demanding action, and he guessed that action would generate confidence and employment. Schacht’s plan combined Keynesian financial management with complete state direction of industry and agriculture: the trade unions were replaced by a Nazi labour front; strikes were outlawed. The new deal, like its American counterpart, aimed at full production and full employment through a state-funded work creation programme. The flagship projects included the building of the German Autobahns (1933–4) the launching of the Volkswagen (1938), and, above all, rearmament.

The relationship between Nazism and German industry provides a most contentious issue. One standard interpretation, much favoured by communist scholarship, posited ‘the primacy of economics’. According to this, the interests of big business determined not only short-term political policy, aimed at the destruction of the German left, but long-term strategic policy as well. Germany’s expansion to the East was supposedly motivated by German industry’s demands for raw materials, secure oil, and cheap labour. A contrary interpretation has posited the ‘primacy of politics’. In this view, Hitler soon threw off the tutelage of the industrialists and developed the state-owned sector as a counterweight to private industry. As from 1936, the introduction of a Four-Year Plan, the replacement of Schacht as chief economic adviser, and the promotion of the state-owned steel corporation, the Reichswerke Hermann Göring, all pointed in that direction. A compromise interpretation argues on the basis of the shifting alliances of a ‘poly-cratic power centre’ made up of the NSDAP, army, and industry.
³⁸
Rearmament was important for psychological and for political reasons. The German armaments sector, which had been artificially constrained, could recover very quickly; Krupps’ turnover began to improve dramatically from 1933. But rearmament also healed Germany’s wounded pride; and it won over the army, which in 1935–6 was able to reintroduce conscription. Hitler had no precise plans for using his rearmed forces. But it was convenient to let people think that the gun under his coat was loaded.