Hitler (80 page)

In fact all these inglorious downfalls meant that the nation was inwardly bidding good-bye to the Weimar Republic. From now on the political order of the past was no longer a concept in whose name some hope, let alone opposition, might have gathered. The feeling of a great change, which had affected people vaguely, as a kind of euphoric expectation, when Hitler entered the government, now overcame wider and wider sectors of the population. Hitler had moved rapidly from the status of demagogue to that of a respected statesman. The craving to join the ranks of the victors was spreading like an epidemic, and the shrunken minority of those who resisted the urge were being visibly pushed into isolation. Faced with a defeat apparently imposed “by history itself,” they concealed their bitterness and their lonely disgust. The past was dead. The future, it seemed, belonged to the regime, which had more and more followers, which was being hailed everywhere and suddenly had sound reasons on its side. “The only ones who give the impression of resolute refusal to accept it all, although they say nothing, are the servant girls,” Robert Musil ironically noted in March, 1933. But he, too, admitted that he lacked any alternative for which to fight; he was unable, he wrote, to imagine the new order being replaced by a return of the old or of a still older state of affairs. “What this feeling probably signifies is that National Socialism has a mission and that its hour has come, that it is no puff of smoke, but a stage of history.” Kurt Tucholsky on the Left implied much the same thing when he wrote, with that brash resignation peculiar to him: “You don't go railing against the ocean.”

Such moods of fatalism, of cultural resignation, speeded the success of Nazism. Only a few were able to resist the swelling current of the triumphant cause. Not that the terrorism and the injustices went unnoticed. But in the old European dichotomy
d'être en mauvais ménage avec la conscience ou avec les affaires du siècle,
more and more people swung over to those who seemed to have history and business as well on their side. Now that it had conquered power, the regime set about conquering people.

I did not become Chancellor in order to act otherwise than I have preached for fourteen long years.

Adolf Hitler, November 1, 1933

 

There was no pause, no sign of failing grip, in the transition from the first to the second phase of seizing power. The smashing of the democratic constitutional and parliamentary state was barely concluded in the summer of 1933 when its metal began to be smelted into the monolith of the totalitarian Führer state. “We have the power. Today nobody can offer us any resistance. But now we must educate German man for this new State. A gigantic project lies ahead.” Thus Hitler outlined the tasks of the future to the SA on July 9.

For Hitler was never interested in establishing a mere tyranny. Sheer greed for power will not suffice as explanation for his personality and energy. Unquestionably, power, the virtually unrestricted use of it, with no necessity to account to anyone—that kind of power meant a great deal to him. But he was at no time satisfied with it alone. The restlessness with which he conquered, extended, and applied that power, and finally used it up, is evidence of how little he was bom to be a mere tyrant. He was fixated upon his mission of defending Europe and the Aryan race from deadly menace, and to this end he wanted to create an empire that would last. The study of history, particularly the history of his own age, had taught him that material instruments of power alone would not suffice to guarantee duration. Rather, only a great “revolution comparable to the Russian Revolution” could develop the tremendous dynamism such a goal required.

As always, he thought of this task also chiefly in terms of psychology and propaganda. Never had he felt so dependent upon the masses as he did at this time, and he watched their reactions with anxious concern. He feared their fickleness, not only as the child of a democratic age but because of his personal craving for approval and acclamation. “I am not a dictator and never will be a dictator,” he declared, and added rather contemptuously: “As a dictator any clown can govern.” He had, he admitted, eliminated the principle of democratic voting, but that by no means meant that he was free; strictly speaking, no such thing as arbitrary rule existed, only various ways of expressing the “general will.” He solemnly assured his listeners: “National Socialism is the true realization of democracy, which has degenerated under parliamentarianism.... We have cast aside outmoded institutions precisely because they no longer served to keep in fruitful contact with the totality of the nation, because they led to idle chatter, to impudent cheating.” Goebbels was saying the same thing when he remarked that in the age of political masses, government could not function “by states of emergency and nine-o'clock curfews.” Either the people would have to be given an ideal, an object for their imaginations and their loyalties, or they would go their own ways. The scholars of the period spoke of “democratic Caesarism.”

In keeping with this view, the psychological mobilization of the country was not left to chance or whim, certainly not to the operations of dissent. It was the product of consistent, totalitarian penetration of all social structures by means of a close-knit system of supervision, regimentation, and guidance. The object was to “belabor people as long as necessary, until they succumb to us.” That meant penetrating the private realm as well as every social area: “We must develop organizations in which an individual's entire life can take place. Then every activity and every need of every individual will be regulated by the collectivity represented by the party. There is no longer any arbitrary will, there are no longer any free realms in which the individual belongs to himself.... The time of personal happiness is over.”

But the whole of national existence could not be reshaped overnight. Part of Hitler's keen tactical sense was a sure feeling for tempo. More than once during the hectic early summer of 1933 he worried that control of events might slip away from him: “More revolutions have succeeded in the first onslaught than successful ones have been checked and brought to a halt,” he told his followers during this period in one of those speeches exhorting them to patience.
¹³
Unlike them, he was not carried away by the headiness of success. He was prepared at any time to subordinate the emotions of the moment to his further power aims. Thus he vigorously opposed efforts to push on with further seizures of the government apparatus after those first months. His instinct told him to go slow. The departmental chiefs of the shadow government that the party had developed during the years of waiting had to cool their heels a while longer. Only Goebbels, Darre, and to an extent Himmler enjoyed the fruits of victory during this second phase. Rosenberg, for example, whose ambition had been the Foreign Office, was disappointed. So was Ernst Röhm.

Hitler's refusal to turn the government over to the party was based on two considerations. By showing constraint, he would create the sense that he was engaged in healing the nation's wounds and thus entrench himself deeper. With the coolness of the modern revolutionary, whose nature differs fundamentally from that of the fervent barricade builders of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Hitler repeatedly warned his followers in the summer of 1933 “to be prepared for many years and to calculate in very long spans of time.” If in doctrinaire haste they went “looking around to see whether there was anything else to revolutionize,” they would gain nothing, he told them; rather, they must be “prudent and cautious.”
¹⁴

On the other hand, he had begun to regard the government as an instrument with which to keep the party, whose leader he was, in check. The technology of power was involved. Just as he had always encouraged competing institutions and rival subleaders within the party so that he might stand above their dissensions and bickerings and maintain his omnipotence all the more unchallenged, so he now employed the various executive offices of the government as counters in an even more baffling and Machiavellian game by which he strengthened his control. In the course of time he even increased the number of such offices. Two, and after Hindenburg's death three secretariats were at his sole disposal: the Reich secretariat (Reichskanzlei) under Dr. Hans Lammers, the Führer's secretariat under Hess and Bormann, and, finally, the presidential secretariat under State Secretary Meissner, a holdover from the days of Ebert and Hindenburg. Foreign policy, education, the press, art, the economy, were battlegrounds fought over by three or four competing departments, and this guerrilla warfare over territory, the din of which continued down to the last days of the regime, permeated even the lowest branches of the bureaucracy. One official complained about contradictory instructions and conflicts over areas of authority when he was only trying to organize a proper celebration of the solstice. In 1942 there existed fifty-eight Supreme Reich boards as well as a plethora of extragovemmental bureaus whose orders criss-crossed, who wrestled over precedence, insisting on authority they might or might not have. With some justice the Third Reich can be called authoritarian anarchy. Cabinet ministers, commissioners, special emissaries, officials of party affiliates, administrators, governors, many of them with assignments kept deliberately vague, formed an inextricable knot of interlocking authorities, which Hitler alone, with virtually a Hapsburgian grasp of puppet mastery, could supervise, balance, and dominate.

This bureaucratic chaos was also one of the reasons the regime was so extremely bound up with the person of Hitler, so that to the end there were no struggles over ideological questions, only over the Führer's favor. Such squabbles, it must be granted, were as fierce as any conflict over orthodoxies. While it is generally thought that authoritarian systems manifest decisiveness and energy in execution, in fact they are far more rife with chaos than other forms of governmental organization. The to-do about “order” was largely meant to conceal the deliberate confusion. During the war the SS leader Walter Schellenberg complained about the practice of issuing commands twice over and about pointlessly competing bureaus. Hitler defended such duplications in the pseudoscientific terms he loved so well: “People must be allowed friction with one another; friction produces warmth, and warmth is energy.” But what Hitler had really discovered was that such friction was useful for consuming energy which might otherwise be a threat to him. When, after 1938, he abolished cabinet meetings, it may have been because there was too much comradely spirit at such sessions. Once State Secretary Dr. Lammers wanted to invite his fellow ministers to an evening of social drinking. Hitler forbade such conviviality. His style of leadership has aptly been described as “institutionalized Darwinism,” and the widespread view of his greater efficiency has been called the selfdelusion of all authoritarian systems.

 

The fact that Hitler did not simply turn the government over to the party as part of the loot of victory caused great dissatisfaction among his followers. For, in spite of all the ideological motives, the material impetus that underlay the movement remained of the greatest importance. Six or more million unemployed represented a source of tremendous revolutionary energy: they longed for work, hungered for booty, and hoped for rapid careers. The Nazi victory had carried only a thin stratum of functionaries into the legislatures and the town halls, and washed others up to the desks of dismissed officials. Now the empty-handed, still nourishing the anticapitalistic moods of preceding years, were pressing into the larger and more profitable fields of trade and industry. “Old Fighters”—those who had early joined the Nazi party—wanted to become managers, presidents of chambers of commerce, directors, or simply, by force or blackmail, partners. Their robust conquistadorial ambitions gave a revolutionary complexion to events that otherwise might have passed unnoticed. Kurt W. Luedecke has reported how one of these power-hungry and job-greedy party functionaries, on entering the office he had just taken over, called out happily: “Hi there, Luedecke! Terrific! I'm a big shot!” At the other end of this social spectrum is the desperate outburst reported by Hermann Rauschning on the part of a party member who feared he would miss his chance: “I don't want to fall back down. Maybe you can bide your time. You're not sitting in any fire. But I've been unemployed, do you hear! Before I go through that again I'll turn criminal. I'm staying on top, no matter what. We won't climb up twice.”
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Hitler was conscious of the need to tame these radical, uncontrolled energies. His three major speeches at the beginning of July were an attempt to apply the brakes to revolutionary
élan,
much as he had done in March, on the occasion of the “SA revolt.” Everything depended, he said, on “channeling the released current of revolution into the secure bed of evoluton.”
¹⁶
Yet he also needed to give the current greater impetus. For a freezing of existing conditions was equally dangerous. Things could too easily come to a standstill because of exaggerated anxiety about revolution or simply because of the unwieldiness of a party of millions suffocating from the constant influx of new members. Thus, while Hitler was still calling on his followers to maintain discipline, he was also worrying about the tendency toward “bourgeoisization.” An influx of 1,500,000 new members within three months had made the 850,000 “old comrades” a minority. At this point Hitler ordered a halt to admissions. For show, he had certain members expelled, with a good deal of fanfare, for having permitted themselves unauthorized raids on chambers of commerce and industrial concerns. To set an example, some were sent to concentration camps.

Among his intimates he defended the desire for personal gain as a revolutionary motive force and spoke of “justified corruption.” Bourgeois circles were criticizing him for trying former officials for corruption while his own men were lining their pockets, he said. “I have answered these simpletons,” he thundered, “could they tell me how I am to meet the legitimate wishes of my party comrades for some kind of compensation for their inhuman years of struggle. I asked them whether they would prefer me to turn the streets over to my SA. I could still do that, I said. I wouldn't mind. And I said it would be healthier for the whole nation if there were a real bloody revolution lasting for a few weeks. Out of consideration for them and their bourgeois comfort I'd refrained from doing that, I said. But I could always make up for lost time!... If we make Germany great, we have a right to think of ourselves also.”