The Nazis- a Warning From History Read online

  When confronted with the choice of cooperating in armed revolution or supporting the Bavarian authorities the police made a clear decision; they rejected the Nazis and shots were fired (it is unclear who fired the first shot – the marchers or the police). Thus, the Putschists’ march through Munich came to a violent end. ‘You asked me what emotions I felt,’ says Emil Klein. ‘I’d like to say that actually those were the first political emotions that I ever had. The way things can go wrong. That in itself was a blow to me and to many of my comrades. That such a thing could happen.’ Hitler, too, was to learn from this experience. From now on the Nazis tried to gain power from within the democratic system.

  Hitler, meanwhile, was arrested and his trial began on 26 February 1924. He was charged with high treason and the evidence against him was damning; not only had the Nazis committed armed robbery during the Putsch, but the violent confrontation had resulted in the death of three policemen. But unlike the others implicated in the failed Putsch, such as the World War I hero General Ludendorff, Hitler stood up and took full responsibility for his actions. His speeches to the judges made him known throughout Germany and he became, for the first time, a national figure. ‘Gentlemen,’ Hitler told the court, ‘it is not you who pronounce judgment upon us, it is the eternal court of history which will make its pronouncement upon the charge which is brought against us . . . You may pronounce us guilty a thousand times, but the goddess who presides over the eternal court of history will with a smile tear in pieces the charge of the Public Prosecutor and the verdict of this court. For she acquits us.’13 Brave words, but based upon deceit. What the vast majority of Germans did not know at the time was that as Hitler gave that speech he had every reason to suppose that he would be treated extremely leniently by the court, and a man is not courageous when he knows there is virtually no risk. For the judge who presided at the Putsch trial, Georg Neithardt, was the same judge who had sat at another lesser-known trial in January 1922. On that occasion the defendants had been accused of violently breaking up a meeting in the Löwenbräu cellar the previous September. They had been charged with the minimum possible offence, breach of the peace, then given the minimum possible sentence, three months in prison. Yet Georg Neithardt wrote to the superior court, saying that he wanted the sentence to be even more lenient, believing that the ‘purpose of the imprisonment could be achieved by the imposition of a fine’. One of the defendants at that trial was Adolf Hitler. Judge Neithardt was so taken with him that he managed to press his superiors to allow Hitler’s sentence of three months in prison to be commuted to one month in prison with a period on probation. Hitler was standing in front of this self-same judge during the Putsch trial, a man he knew to be extremely sympathetic to his cause. It was in the courtroom of Georg Neithardt that Hitler made his impassioned speech to the ‘eternal court of history’. It is hardly surprising then, that after they came to power the Nazis seized almost all the documents relating to this first trial and burnt them. The sentence in the second, famous case was therefore predictable: five years’ imprisonment – the minimum possible – but with the assumption that Hitler would soon be out on probation.

  The Bavarian government have a great deal to account for. The Nazi Party had been banned in most German states in 1922, but not in Bavaria: there the Nazis were tacitly encouraged. After his conviction for high treason, Hitler was imprisoned in relative comfort at Landsberg Prison, near Munich, where he occupied himself by working on Mein Kampf.

  While Hitler was in Landsberg, the Nazi Party split into factions. It was only after his release in December 1924 (after serving less than nine months of his five-year sentence) that the party could be put back together again. The Bavarian authorities acted true to form and allowed the party to be refounded on 27 February 1925 at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich. But by now events in Germany were against the Nazis. The hyper-inflation was over and the future appeared full of hope. The middle years of the 1920s were the Weimar Republic’s so-called ‘golden’ period. But this new prosperity was financed on credit; the German government used borrowed money to pay the Allies their reparations. Still, at the time, everything looked idyllic. The Nazis could never flourish in such sunlight and they were reduced to a tiny rump of fanatical support. Without a crisis to feed on, they were lost. Until the end of the 1920s they were active only at the margins of German political life.

  Yet it was during these quiet years that the party evolved structurally into the Nazi Party which was eventually to govern much of Europe. Hitler’s position became increasingly secure. He easily brushed away a small internal challenge to his absolute authority in 1926 by a simple appeal to loyalty. The collapse of the party during his absence in prison had demonstrated that it was only his presence as leader that held the movement together.

  The Nazis were not a political party in the sense that we today understand the concept. Little in the way of detailed Nazi policy was ever published. A commitment to the Führer (as Hitler became known around this time) and a general belief in the aims of the movement was enough to prove one’s loyalty. This was a party not of talk but of action, not of policy but of emotion. As a philosophy, this appealed particularly to the young; research shows that during this period the average age of those joining the party was less than thirty. One young man who joined at the age of twenty-five was a failed novelist called Josef Goebbels. Looking back fondly on the 1920s, after the Nazis had come to power, he spoke emotionally to a group of young people about these years of struggle: ‘Then there were young people who wrote the word “Reich” on their banners, against a world of hatred and calumny and malice. They were convinced that a lost war was not enough to push a people into permanent servitude.’

  ‘It was exciting,’ says Wolfgang Teubert, who joined the Nazi Storm Troopers in the 1920s. ‘There was the comradeship, the being-there-for-each-other, that’s for a young man something outstanding – at least it was then.’ Something else the party offered a man like Teubert, who wore the Storm Trooper’s brown shirt with pride, was a sense of importance. In that shirt he may have been young, but he was still a somebody: ‘We marched behind the swastika flag, marching through the towns. Outside working hours there was nothing but the Storm Troopers.’ And then there was the factor that perhaps appealed most to these youths – fighting. ‘There was the danger, the threats from other people. Night after night we increasingly provided protection at hall meetings not just in our town but in many other towns to strengthen the Storm Troopers there. We had no weapons, the most we could do was defend ourselves with our fists and only work the enemy over with our fists – where it was necessary. And it was necessary more often than not!’ Teubert and his friends in the Bochum Storm Troopers would regularly fight the youths of the Communist Party. ‘Breaking up the chairs in the hall and then fighting with the chair legs, that happened quite a lot.’ Teubert smiles at the memory. ‘Both sides did that, each as much as the other.’

  Bruno Hähnel came into the Nazi Party at the same time via another popular route – from the Wandervogel, a ‘folklorical’ group which sought a return to nature and its values. At weekends, as a young Wandervogel, Herr Hähnel would wander with friends through the countryside. He dates his decision to join the Nazi Party to a discussion evening held in a youth hostel in 1927: ‘There was one about the subject of internationalism and among other things it was said that one had to reach the point of being able to marry a Negress. And I found that thought very uncomfortable.’ In so far as other reasons influenced Herr Hähnel in his decision to join the Nazi Party, they were the usual negative feelings about Versailles and the ‘November criminals’ of 1918. As a result, he had a strong ‘resistance’ to any international movement such as Communism. ‘Many of us said simply, “We are Germans first”,’ says Herr Hähnel, ‘and now there was a group who said “Germany first”. They shouted, “Germany awake!”’

  Recruits like Herr Hähnel were not concerned that they were joining an anti-Semitic party: ‘I still remember th
ose statements which frequently occurred, that 50 per cent of all Berlin doctors were Jews, 50 per cent of all Berlin lawyers, that the whole press in Berlin and in Germany was in the hands of the Jews and this had to be done away with.’ While tacitly supporting this anti-Semitic idea in principle, Herr Hähnel had no problem in reconciling it with the realities of his own family life: ‘I had relatives who were Jews and we would meet at family gatherings. I had a very warm relationship with two cousins who were Jewish. It didn’t stop me from agreeing with the other things which the party demanded.’

  For other young people at the time, such as Alois Pfaller, this anti-Semitic attitude proved a barrier to joining the Nazis: ‘That was something very strange,’ he says, ‘this extreme anti-Semitism, the Jews being held responsible for everything. I knew Jews and I had friends with whom I used to spend time and I absolutely didn’t understand what difference there was supposed to be – we’re all humans . . . I have always stood up for justice – what is just and reasonable, that was my problem, and also fighting injustice, that was my problem, and not somehow persecuting other races or other people.’ Alois Pfaller turned his back on the Storm Troopers, but, still looking for a radical solution to the country’s problems, he joined the German Communist Party.

  Hitler saw his personality as the Nazi Party’s greatest strength; he cultivated ‘great man’ mannerisms, such as staring straight into the eyes of whoever was speaking to him. Fridolin von Spaun remembers just such an encounter with the Führer at a party dinner: ‘Suddenly I noticed Hitler’s eyes resting on me. So I looked up. And that was one of the most curious moments in my life. He didn’t look at me suspiciously, but I felt that he is searching me somehow . . . It was hard for me to sustain this look for so long. But I thought: I mustn’t avert my eyes, otherwise he may think I’ve something to hide. And then something happened which only psychologists can judge. The gaze, which at first rested completely on me, suddenly went straight through me into the unknown distance. It was so unusual. And the long gaze which he had given me convinced me completely that he was a man with honourable intentions. Most people nowadays would not believe this. They’d say I am getting old and childish, but that’s untrue. He was a wonderful phenomenon.”

  Hitler had a similar effect on many others. Herbert Richter watched him in 1921 when he walked into a student café behind the university in Munich: ‘He was wearing an open-necked shirt and he was accompanied by guards or followers. And I noticed how the people with whom he arrived – there were about three or four of them – how their eyes were fixed on Hitler. For many people there must have been something fascinating about him.’ But whatever it was that these others found so entrancing had no effect on Herbert Richter. ‘He started to speak and I immediately disliked him. Of course I did not know then what he would later become. I found him rather comical, with his funny little moustache. I was not at all impressed by him.’ Nor did Hitler’s speaking style have the desired effect: ‘He had a kind of scratchy voice,’ remembers Herr Richter. ‘And he shouted so much. He was shouting in this small room. And what he was saying was really simple. You couldn’t say much against it. He mostly criticized the Versailles Treaty – how it had to be set aside.’

  Aldous Huxley wrote, ‘The propagandist is a man who canalizes an existing stream. In a land where there is no water he digs in vain.’ Hitler was no exception to this rule. To those like Herbert Richter, who were sophisticated in their political judgements, he seemed a comical character who spoke the obvious. To those who were predisposed to believe in such solutions, he was a ‘wonderful phenomenon’. It is all too easy in retrospect for Hitler’s charisma and speaking talents to be used as an excuse. ‘He hypnotized a nation’ it has often been suggested. No, he didn’t. A hypnotist does not make speeches which convince only those who like what they hear, as Hitler did.

  The Nazis prided themselves on the fact that their party lacked democratic principles. (After all, had democracy not been brought in by the ‘November criminals’ and produced Versailles?) Towering over the structure of the party was the figure of Adolf Hitler. Unlike other political organizations, which relied on committees or policy discussions, in the Nazi Party only Hitler could arbitrate – he was the only man capable of making a final decision. Even in embryonic form, a dictator-led party like this should have collapsed under the weight of work the leader had to shoulder. Yet not only was Hitler not deluged with the burden of decision-making but, paradoxically, he seems scarcely to have been stretched by administrative tasks at all. An understanding of the reason for this apparent paradox gives an insight into not just how the Nazi Party was structured, but why it was so attractive to the young. For Hitler relied heavily on his own interpretation of the work of one dead Englishman to tell him how to govern the party – Charles Darwin.

  ‘The idea of struggle is as old as life itself,’ Hitler said in a speech at Kulmbach on 5 February 1928. ‘In this struggle the stronger, the more able, win while the less able, the weak, lose. Struggle is the father of all things . . . It is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely by means of the most brutal struggle.’ Hitler sought to apply the Darwinian theory of the survival of the fittest to human action. ‘God does not act differently,’ he said over dinner on 23 September 1941. ‘He suddenly hurls the masses of humanity on to the earth and he leaves it to each one to work out his own salvation. Men dispossess one another, and one perceives that, at the end of it all, it is always the stronger who triumphs. Is not that the most reasonable order of things? If it were otherwise, nothing good would ever have existed. If we did not respect the laws of nature, imposing our will by the right of the stronger, a day would come when the wild animals would once again devour us – then the insects would eat the wild animals and finally nothing would exist on the earth but microbes.’14

  It should be no surprise, then, to learn that Hitler ran the Nazi Party according to pseudo-Darwinian theory. When Gustav Seifert wrote to Nazi Party HQ and asked to be reappointed as leader of its Hanover branch, he received this reply, dated 27 October 1925, from Max Amann, editor of the Nazi paper the Völkischer Beobachter: ‘Herr Hitler takes the view on principle that it is not the job of the party leadership to “appoint” party leaders. Herr Hitler is today more than ever convinced that the most effective fighter in the National Socialist movement is the man who wins respect for himself as leader through his own achievements. You yourself say in your letter that almost all the members follow you. Then why don’t you take over the leadership of the branch?’ Why don’t you ‘take over’? What command could be more exciting to a young man? If you don’t like it, change it, don’t come to us for orders, if you are stronger than your enemies, you’ll win. Equally, if you aren’t stronger than your enemies and you lose, then that’s simply the way it should be. Such a mindset helps to explain the bizarre utterings of Hitler towards the end of the war when he remarked that Germany ‘deserved’ her fate at the hands of the Soviet Union.

  When the Nazis came to power, Goebbels’ film propaganda hammered the same point home – the fittest should thrive and the weak should perish. In one of his later propaganda films, scientists are shown filming an experiment in which two stag beetles are fighting each other. The laboratory technician expresses some doubts about what she sees. ‘It is a shame really,’ she says to her professor, ‘to catch these beautiful, strong animals for a fight between life and death. And to think back in the forest they could have a quiet life.’ ‘But my dear,’ the professor tells her, ‘there is no such thing as a quiet life anywhere in nature . . . They all live in a constant struggle, in the course of which the weak perish. We regard this struggle as completely natural, but we would think it unnatural if a cat lived peacefully with a mouse or a fox with a hare.’

  In any attempt to understand the ideology of Nazism the significance of such views can scarcely be understated. Nazi ideology placed man as an animal with an animal’s values. The bully
who wins ought to win if he is stronger. The child who dies ought to die if he is weak. If one country is stronger than another, it ought to conquer its neighbour. Traditional values, like compassion and respect for the law, are nothing but man-made shields behind which the weak can cower and protect themselves from the fate that is naturally theirs. (It was no accident that the two professions Hitler hated above all others were lawyers and priests.) The Nazis were first and foremost a racist party who believed that nation states, just like individuals, were locked in a permanent amoral struggle to see who should govern the largest portion of the Earth.

  However, if Hitler had been applying his Darwinian theory to the Nazi Party in 1928, he should have despaired, for in the general election of that year the Nazis polled only 2.6 per cent of the vote. Germany did not want them because it saw no need for them – yet. Shortly after the election, the economic and political situation in Germany radically changed. First an agricultural depression hit home and then the Wall Street Crash triggered the most serious economic crisis ever encountered in Germany, as the United States called in its loans.

  Unemployment started to grow and the effects were deep and bitter. ‘In those days,’ remembers Bruno Hähnel, ‘our unemployed would stand in huge queues in front of the labour exchange every Friday, and they would receive 5 marks at the counter. This was a new and different situation – there were many who simply didn’t have the means to buy food.’ ‘It was a hopeless business,’ recalls Alois Pfaller. ‘People walked around with spoons in their pockets because they got a meal for 1 mark [from the charity soup kitchens].’