The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (41 page)

Only in Germany was fascism both revolutionary and totalitarian in deed as well as in word. Only in Germany did dictatorship ultimately lead to industrialized genocide. There were good reasons for this. Fascist movements were optional accessories for most dictators. Not in the German case. As Figure 7.1 shows, no other fascist parties came close to achieving the electoral success of the National Socialists. In terms of votes, fascism was a disproportionately German phenomenon; add together all the individual votes cast in Europe for fascist or other extreme nationalist parties between 1930 and 1935, and a staggering 96 per cent were cast by German-speakers.

Viewed globally, the collapse of democracy cannot easily be blamed on the Depression; as we have seen, too many democracies survived deep economic crises and too many dictatorships were formed before the slump or in the wake of quite modest declines in output. Viewed in strictly European terms, however, it is hard to ignore the correlation between the magnitude of a country’s economic difficulties and the magnitude of its fascist vote (see
Figure 7.2
). By and large, the countries with the deepest Depressions were the ones that produced the most fascist voters. The economic crisis was most severe in Central and Eastern Europe. That was also where the political appeal of fascism was greatest. But the crucial point is that it was Germans – inside and outside the Reich – who were most attracted to fascism; or, to put it differently, the only variant of fascism that was truly a mass movement was German National Socialism.

Two things made the German experience unique. The first was Hitler himself, who was in many ways more bizarre than Chaplin knew. An art-school reject who had once scraped a living by selling

Figure 7.1
Maximum percentage of votes won by fascist or ‘semi-fascist’ parties in free national elections held during 1930s

kitschy picture postcards; an Austrian draft-dodger who had ended up a decorated Bavarian corporal; a lazy mediocrity who rose late and enjoyed both Wagner’s operas and Karl May’s cowboy yarns – here indeed was an unlikely heir to the legacy of Frederick the Great and Otto von Bismarck. In Munich in the early 1920s he could be seen attending the soirées of a Romanian princess ‘in his gangster hat and trenchcoat over his dinner jacket, touting a pistol and carrying as usual his dog-whip’. It is not altogether surprising that President Hindenburg assumed he was Bohemian. Others thought he looked more like ‘aman trying to seduce the cook’, or perhaps a renegade tram conductor. I fit had not been for the advice of his publisher Max-Amann, he would have called his first book
Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice
instead of the distinctly catchier
My Struggle
. The longer title captures something of Hitler’s shrill and vituperative personality. As for his sexuality, about which there has long been speculation on the basis of circumstantial or tainted evidence, he may have had none. Hitler hated. He did not love.

The second crucial difference between the Third Reich and the

Figure 7.2
Real output from peak to trough in the Depression

other fascist regimes of the 1930s was simply Germany. Most of the countries where democracy failed between the wars were relatively backward, with half or more of the working population engaged in agriculture in around 1930. Indeed, there would have been a relatively close negative correlation between this proportion and the likely duration of democracy, but for two outliers. Those were Germany and Austria, both societies where fewer than one in three people worked on the land. The challenge is to explain how a pathological individual like Hitler was able to gain total control over what seemed to many people, at least prior to 1933, to be the most sophisticated country in Europe, if not the world.

To many visitors, Germany in the 1920s was the United States of Europe: big, industrial, ultra-modern. It was home to some of Europe’s biggest and best corporations: the electrical engineering giant Siemens, the financial titan Deutsche Bank, the automobile maker Mercedes Benz, the chemical conglomerate IG-Farben. Berlin boasted the biggest film industry in Europe, producing in Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis
the science-fiction masterpiece of the twenties and in the same director’s
M
the definitive
film noir
. Berlin had newspapers as sensational as William Randolph Hearst’s (the
8Uhr-Abendblatt
); department stores as big as Macy’s (the Kaufhaus des Westens); sports stars as idolized as ‘Babe’ Ruth (the boxer Max Schmeling). So pervasive was the transatlantic influence that Franz Kafka felt able to write
Amerika
without even going there. Indeed, in one vital respect Germany went one better than the United States. It had by far the best universities in the world. By comparison with Heidelberg and Tübingen, Harvard and Yale were gentlemen’s clubs, where students paid more attention to football than to physics. More than a quarter of all the Nobel prizes awarded in the sciences between 1901 and 1940 were awarded to Germans; only 11 per cent went to Americans. Einstein reached the pinnacle of his profession not in 1932, when he moved to Princeton, but in 1914, when he was appointed Professor at the University of Berlin, Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics and a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Even the finest scientists produced by Cambridge felt obliged to do a tour of duty in Germany.

There was, however, another Germany – a Germany of provincial hometowns that felt no affection for the frenzied modernism of the
Grossstadt
. This Germany had been traumatized by the upheavals that had begun with the ghastly revelation of military defeat in November 1918.
*
Nearly all the revolutionary events of the immediate post-war
period took place in the big cities: Berlin, Hamburg, Munich. Despite the decision to draft the new republic’s constitution in the sleepy capital of Thuringia, the Weimar Republic was always a metropolitan affair. Not much changed in the provinces, as the English ‘wandering scholar’ Patrick Leigh Fermor found when he set off to walk from the Rhine to the Danube in late 1933. His first encounter in the Third Reich was with a troop of brownshirts in a small Westphalian town, who held a perfunctory parade in the main square and then repaired to the nearest inn for beer and a hearty sing-song. From the Krefeld workhouse run by Franciscan monks to the book-lined study of a deceased professor, from the hold of a Rhine barge to a farmhouse near Pforzheim, Fermor passed through a Germany little different from the Germany his father or even his grandfather would have seen had they made the same journey. As the industrialist and philosopher Walther Rathenau complained to the diarist Harry, Count Kessler, ‘There was no revolution. The doors only sprang open. The wardens ran away. The captives stood dazzled in the prison courtyard, incapable of moving their limbs.’

The Republic attempted the impossible: simultaneously to create a welfare state and to pay the reparations imposed under the Treaty of Versailles. The strains this imposed on Germany’s economy produced not just one but two crises: first hyperinflation in 1923 and then steep deflation after 1929. It is hardly surprising that these twin crises undermined Weimar’s already frail legitimacy. The inflation seemed to signal a collapse not just of monetary values but of all the values of the pre-war
bürgerliche Gesellschaft
(bourgeois society). What price the
Rechtsstaat
– the state based on law – if long-standing contracts could be fulfilled only with worthless paper marks? As for
Ruhe und Ordnung,
the peace and order that had been so dear to nineteenth-century Germans, there seemed little left of that. In every year between 1919 and 1923 there were attempted coups by the extreme Left or the extreme Right, to say nothing of a spate of assassinations by sinister secret societies, one of which claimed the life of Rathenau, who as Foreign Minister had become identified with the effort to fulfil
the Versailles obligations. In the wake of the currency collapse, many voters drifted away from the middle-class parties of the centre-right and centre-left, disillusioned with the horse-trading between business and labour that seemed to dominate Weimar politics. There was a proliferation of splinter parties and special interest groups, a slow process of fission that was the prelude to the political explosion of 1930, when the Nazi share of the vote leapt to seven times what it had been in 1928. The Depression was crucial not because the unemployed voted for the Nazis, but because so many of them swung to the Communists; as in so many other countries, fascism seemed to many a rational political response to the threat of Red revolution. The Depression also exposed the dysfunctional character of the Weimar system, which seemed too democratic – or, rather, too representative of well-organized interests – to deal with so vast and universally perceptible a crisis. But the political disintegration of republican Germany had begun seven years prior to the election breakthrough of 1930, with the wheelbarrows of worthless cash that symbolized Weimar’s bankruptcy.

There were, of course, alternatives to Hitler. It was just that none of them was viable. Gustav Stresemann of the People’s Party had offered compromise with the Western powers – symbolized by the 1925 Treaty of Locarno – and the hope of revanche in the East. But he had died of a heart attack on October 3, 1929, at the age of just fifty-one. Heinrich Brüning of the Catholic Centre Party offered government by presidential decree and dreamt vaguely of restoring the monarchy. But his deflationary policies only served to deepen the slump. Franz von Papen, another Catholic, betrayed his party for the sake of becoming Chancellor, in the vain belief that he could do better than Brüning. But neither he nor his successor General Kurt von Schleicher – whom Papen had picked as his own Defence Minister – had anything resembling popular support and, while the Reichstag had been temporarily sidelined by Brüning, it proved impossible to rule indefinitely without some kind of parliamentary majority. Elections in July 1932 saw the Nazi vote soar above 37 per cent. True, it fell back to 33 per cent when new elections were held in November, not least because signs of economic recovery were at last manifesting themselves, but the party’s entitlement to form a government was by
now hard to dispute since it was still easily the biggest grouping in the Reichstag. Ever the schemer, Papen now persuaded Hindenburg to dump Schleicher and, against the President’s better judgement, to appoint Hitler to lead a coalition with the conservative German Nationalist Party – the only party except for the Communists to gain significant numbers of new votes in the November election. Hitler duly became Chancellor on January 30, 1933. Thus did German democracy wreak its own destruction. Given the paralysing enmity between the Social Democrats and the Communists, the only way to avoid the Third Reich would have been if Hindenburg himself had shut down the Reichstag and banned the Nazis, an option he does not seem to have contemplated.

Superficially, Hitler’s appeal to German voters is easy to understand. He simply offered more radical remedies to the Depression than his political rivals. Others might offer piecemeal solutions to unemployment; Hitler was willing to contemplate a bold programme of public works. Others might worry that financing public works with deficits would trigger a new inflation; Hitler bluntly stated that the hoodlums of his
Sturmabteilung
would deal with any profiteers who charged excessive prices. Others might argue, as Rathenau and Stresemann had, that Germany must try to pay reparations, if only to prove the impossibility of doing so, or must borrow to the hilt in New York so as to drive a rift between the Western creditors; Hitler essentially argued for default. It helped, of course, that the reparations system had itself collapsed by 1932; Germany had already defaulted, albeit with American consent, by the time Hitler came to power. It helped, too, that the Nazis were able to recruit the widely respected former Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht, who had resigned his post in 1930 after effectively endorsing Hitler’s campaign against the revised reparations schedule known as the Young Plan.
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Yet even with his
imprimatur on them, it took real political skill to sell such unorthodox economic solutions to a relatively sophisticated and highly variegated electorate. The Nazis’ success without doubt owed much to Joseph Goebbels, the evil genius of twentieth-century marketing, who sold Hitler to the German public as if he were the miraculous offspring of the Messiah and Marlene Dietrich. The Nazi election campaigns of 1930, 1932 and 1933 were unprecedented assaults on public opinion, involving standardized mass meetings and eye-catching posters, as well as rousing songs (like the
Horst-Wessel Lied
) and calculated physical intimidation of opponents. Though much of this owed its inspiration to Mussolini – not least the snazzy uniforms for supporters, and the Roman salutes – Goebbels understood the need for finesse as well as bombast. For one thing, he saw more clearly than the star himself the need to adjust Hitler’ss message according to which of the German electorate’s many segments was being addressed.