The Nazis- a Warning From History Page 8
Uwe Bitzel took us down into the dusty basement of Aplerbeck and showed us the few remaining records from which he has pieced together the true story of Aplerbeck. The official record of deaths at the hospital shows a large number of children dying from inconspicuous diseases such as measles or ‘general weakness’. On the same day Manfred Bernhardt met his death, two other children died. In the previous week eleven children lost their lives. In the following week nine children died. As Uwe Bitzel concludes, ‘This is such a high death rate that it can be ruled out that all these children died of natural causes.’ The cause of measles or ‘general weakness’ at Aplerbeck turned out to be either a massive overdose of luminal (a powerful sedative) or morphine.
The origin and practice of child euthanasia in the Third Reich is not just abhorrent, it is instructive. As we have seen, it originated not just out of Nazi racist ideology, but from the chaotic manner in which decisions were taken in the Third Reich. A chance letter to the Führer on a subject dear to his heart resulted eventually in the deaths of more than five thousand children. By the time Manfred Bernhardt met his death, two years after the policy was instigated, doctors in homes such as Aplerbeck did not have to fill in Bouhler’s form. In a typical example of how policies could spiral out of control, staff independently selected the children they wanted to kill. The chaotic radicalism inherent in the Nazi system meant that, unlike in the Fascist states of Italy and Spain, German Fascism could never settle to a status quo, however dreadful or repulsive. Any idea, given a leader who spoke in visions and enthusiastic supporters anxious to please, could grow radically to an extreme in almost an instant. The consequences, not just for Germany but for the rest of the world, would be enormous.
Of course, in 1939 the vast majority of Germans would have known nothing of the evil policy of child euthanasia. Nor would they have realized the chaotic structure of Nazi government and the reasons for it. Nor would they have understood just why the Gestapo was so effective. What they chose to see was a dynamic country on the move – and they were part of it.
Neither a study of the documents nor the opinions of academics enabled me to understand how it was possible, before World War II, to actually like living in Nazi Germany. But after listening to witness after witness, not hardline committed Nazis, tell us how positive their experiences had been, a glimmer of understanding emerged. If you have lived through times of chaos and humiliation, you welcome order and security. If the price of that is ‘a little evil’, then you put up with it. Except there is no such thing as a ‘little’ evil. I am reminded of the old joke about the man who says to a woman, ‘Will you sleep with me for ten million pounds?’ The woman says, ‘Yes.’ The man replies, ‘Now we have established the principle, let’s negotiate the price.’
For the people of Germany the price of putting up with ‘a little evil’ would be very high indeed.
3
THE WRONG WAR
AT THE BERGHOF, his house in the shadows of the moutains of Bavaria, Hitler would relax by watching feature films. One of his favourites was a 1930s Hollywood epic of adventure and conquest, The Bengal Lancers, which contained a message of which Hitler approved: it demonstrated how one ‘Aryan’ nation had subjugated another more numerous but ‘inferior’ race.
‘Let’s learn from the English,’ Hitler said over dinner on 27 July 1941, ‘who with 250,000 men in all, including 50,000 soldiers, govern 400 million Indians.’1 Here, according to Hitler, was clear evidence of the superiority of the ‘Aryan’ race: the English could rule India with a relatively tiny force because of their better blood. ‘What India was for England,’ said Hitler in 1941, ‘the territories of Russia will be for us. If only I could make the German people understand what this space means for our future!’2
When he became Chancellor in 1933, Hitler wanted close friendship with England (by which he meant Great Britain). Dr Günter Lohse of the German Foreign Office says, ‘He wanted England as an ally, a real ally.’ Other diplomats agree; Herbert Richter confirms that Hitler saw the English as fellow members of the very select ‘master race’ club.
Yet in 1939, Hitler ended up at war with Great Britain, the one country in the world he wanted as an ally, while Germany allied herself to the Soviet Union, the one country, as we shall see, he most believed he risked conflict with. This war was not planned. But the combination of Hitler’s character, the international tensions of the time and the institutional structures of the Nazi state made a war of some kind inevitable. It was just that the war of 1939 was, from Hitler’s initial point of view, the wrong one. How could he, a man often praised for his political acumen, make such a mess of his own foreign policy?
When he came to power in January 1933 Hitler told the world he wanted to rid Germany of the shackles of the Versailles Treaty in order to make her strong once more. To accomplish this goal the country needed massive rearmament. His reply in February 1933 to a proposal from the Reich Ministry of Transport to build a reservoir demonstrates the extent to which, in his eyes, the policy of rearmament came before anything else: ‘The next five years in Germany had to be devoted to rendering the German people again capable of bearing arms. Every publicly sponsored measure to create employment had to be considered from the point of view of whether it was necessary with respect to rendering the German people again capable of bearing arms for military service.’3
Rearmament could only be possible if the German economy provided the funds. But Hitler knew next to nothing about economic theory. ‘The Nazi movement was really quite primitive,’ confirms the banker Johannes Zahn, who knew Hjalmar Schacht, the man who was to be responsible for getting the German economy on its feet in the 1930s. Hitler may have known nothing about how to run an economy but Schacht thought he knew everything. ‘It is clear, obviously,’ says Zahn discreetly, ‘that Schacht was very self-confident.’ In 1923, at the age of 46, Schacht was made Reich Currency Commissioner and told to stabilize the economy in the face of runaway inflation; later that year he became head of the Reichsbank. In 1930 he resigned in protest at the Young Plan, a regime of reparation payments to the victors of World War I to which the German government had agreed. He turned to Hitler and the Nazis for the solution to Germany’s problems. ‘I desire a great and strong Germany,’ he said, ‘and to achieve it I would enter an alliance with the devil.’4
Hitler appointed Schacht as Minister of Economics in 1934 and passed a law giving him dictatorial powers over the economy. Unemployment had already started to fall sharply as a result of huge work-creation schemes, such as the autobahn construction programme, and the economy as a whole was beginning to recover from the effects of the Great Depression. Schacht managed to pay for rearmament via the ‘Mefo bills’ – a form of deficit financing that had two advantages: it allowed the risky early stages of rearmament to be kept relatively secret and meant the Nazis could pay for it on credit. The regime also benefited from an upturn in the world economy and the effective cancellation of reparation payments that had been negotiated by Chancellor Brüning at the Lausanne conference in 1932.
For Hitler this turnaround in the economy must have seemed like magic – simply another exercise of his will. He certainly wasn’t concerned with how Schacht was working this miracle. He said in August 1942: ‘I have never had a conference with Schacht to find out what means were at our disposal. I restricted myself to saying, “This is what I require and this is what I must have.”’5
The army could not have been more positive about Hitler’s actions. He was finally ridding Germany of the ‘ignominy’ of disarmament. ‘This was absolutely welcomed,’ says Graf von Kielmansegg, an army officer at the time, ‘and he didn’t ask about the cost at all. At last, an army was to be formed which, everyone agreed, was truly capable of defending Germany. The Reichswehr [German Armed Forces] were not capable of doing this with their 100,000 men. And don’t forget, Germany was surrounded by its main enemies from World War I.’ For many of the soldiers we talked to, rearmament also had a symbolic, almost
spiritual importance; it was the means by which the country regained its potency. Others thought that if the newly rearmed forces were used to threaten Germany’s neighbours so that some of the wrongs of Versailles could be righted, then well and good. Nobody we talked to believed during the 1930s that they were engaged in the preparations for a world war of conquest. Yet in 1924, Hitler had outlined in Mein Kampf some clear foreign policy objectives: ‘We are taking up where we left off six hundred years ago. We are putting an end to the perpetual German march towards the south and west of Europe and turning our eyes towards the east . . . However, when we speak of new land in Europe today, we must principally bear in mind Russia and the border states subject to her. Destiny itself seems to wish to point the way for us here.’6 And how was Germany going to gain this new land? The answer is clear: ‘At the present time, there are on this Earth immense areas of unused soil only waiting for the men to till them. However, it is equally true that Nature as such has not reserved this soil for the future possession of any particular nation or race. On the contrary, this soil exists for the people which possesses the force to take it and the industry to cultivate it.’7
Few people, however, had read Mein Kampf, or if they had read it, they had dismissed it. ‘Nobody believed Mein Kampf was of any importance,’ says diplomat Manfred Freiherr von Schröder. ‘What would politicians think today of what they have written twenty years ago?’
‘But let me digress a little,’ says Johannes Zahn. ‘If you take Christianity, for example, the demands of the Bible, the demands of the catechisms, do you know anybody who fulfils the demands of Christianity 100 per cent, or even pretends to fulfil them 100 per cent? And one thought the same way about Mein Kampf – these are demands, these are ideas, but nobody thought that they were to be taken literally.’ Herbert Richter, who worked in the Foreign Office, says, ‘I too am to blame. I read the first fifty pages and found it so crazy that I did not read any more of it.’
Had these gentlemen taken seriously what they read in Mein Kampf, they would have learnt that Hitler believed Germany lacked Lebensraum (living space). If life was a struggle between the fittest races, then in order to triumph the Germans needed the right balance between population numbers and agricultural land. But Germany, according to Hitler’s analysis, lacked the land it needed to support a strong population. Germans were thus a ‘people without space’.
Hitler looked around and saw one nation that had solved the problem of lack of living space – England. In the early years of Hitler’s Chancellorship he pursued the dream of an alliance with England, something that also fitted his desire to deal with European nations one by one rather than through the collective League of Nations.
In parallel with the policy of friendship with England, Hitler attempted to shake off the restraints of Versailles. Germany withdrew from the League of Nations and a disarmament conference in October 1933 after agreement had not been reached on a revision of the Versailles Treaty as it applied to German armaments. Now, Hitler tried to reach an agreement separately with England. At this point in the story one of the oddest Nazis makes his entrance – Joachim von Ribbentrop. Hitler was so impressed by this former wine merchant, who had married into money and society, that he made him his personal emissary and sent him to London to float the question of a non-aggression pact between the two nations. The unspoken idea behind the attempted friendship was, as former diplomat Reinhard Spitzy says, ‘that Britain and Germany should practically rule the world. Britain should rule the waves and Germany should rule from the Rhine to the Urals.’
In 1935 the strategy of wooing Britain appeared to work. After meetings between Sir John Simon, the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, the Under-Secretary, and Hitler and Ribbentrop a naval agreement was signed that allowed Germany to rebuild her navy to 35 per cent of the British surface fleet and 100 per cent of her submarine fleet. An important factor in the British decision to sign the naval agreement was the view that Germany had been punished too much by Versailles and that a reasonable accommodation should be reached with Adolf Hitler.
In March 1935 Germany had announced that it had no further intention of observing the defence limits in the Versailles Treaty. In April the League of Nations had passed a motion of censure against the Germans. The British, by their naval agreement, showed what little store they placed in the League of Nation’s collective response to German military expansion. Hitler described hearing news of the naval agreement as the ‘happiest day of his life’.8
The following year, Ribbentrop was appointed German ambassador to Britain. He did not make a good first impression. When he presented his letters of accreditation to the King, he raised his right arm in a Hitler salute. The British press ridiculed him for it, but having done it once, he felt compelled to do it every time he met the King or he would lose face. Dr Lohse, who worked with Ribbentrop, believes that ‘he couldn’t and wouldn’t forgive the English for his own mistake’.
The atmosphere in the London embassy was not a happy one. According to Reinhard Spitzy, who served there, Ribbentrop was almost impossible to work for, continually postponing appointments; he was ‘pompous, conceited and not too intelligent’. More seriously for his reputation, Ribbentrop also mistreated British tradesmen. He would keep tailors waiting for hours, not realizing that they would tell their other aristocratic clients about his thoughtless behaviour. ‘He behaved very stupidly and very pompously,’ says Spitzy, ‘and the British don’t like pompous people.’
Ribbentrop was intensely disliked by many who crossed his path. Goebbels said, ‘He bought his name, he married his money and he swindled his way into office.’9 Count Ciano, the Italian Foreign Minister, remarked that, ‘The Duce says you only have to look at his head to see that he has a small brain.’10 His was the one name guaranteed to raise a negative response from our interviewees. Herbert Richter thought he was ‘lazy and worthless’ and Manfred von Schröder believed him to be ‘vain and ambitious’. No other Nazi was so hated by his colleagues.
Hitler was well aware of the low opinion in which Ribbentrop was held. According to Herr Spitzy, Göring told Hitler that Ribbentrop was a ‘stupid ass’. Hitler replied, ‘But after all, he knows quite a lot of important people in England.’ Göring retorted, ‘Mein Führer, that may be right, but the bad thing is, they know him.’
So why did Hitler support Ribbentrop? In essence the answer is simple. Because Ribbentrop knew how to handle Hitler. At one level he was merely a sycophant: ‘Ribbentrop didn’t understand anything about foreign policy,’ says Herbert Richter. ‘His sole wish was to please Hitler. To have good relations with Hitler, that was his policy.’ In pursuit of this policy Ribbentrop used every device he could think of, including informants. He would ask people who had had lunch with Hitler to report back to him on what Hitler had said. Then, the next day, he would tell Hitler the same opinions but pretend they were his own. Hitler, not surprisingly, felt Ribbentrop had fine judgement. But there is another, more sophisticated, reason why Ribbentrop was so favoured by Hitler during this period. As Reinhard Spitzy puts it: ‘When Hitler said, “Grey,” Ribbentrop said, “Black, black, black.” He always said it three times more, and he was always more radical. I listened to what Hitler said one day when Ribbentrop wasn’t present: “With Ribbentrop it is so easy, he is always so radical. Meanwhile, all the other people I have, they come here, they have problems, they are afraid, they think we should take care and then I have to blow them up, to get strong. And Ribbentrop was blowing the whole day and I had to do nothing. I had to brake – much better.”’
Thus, despite his obvious faults, Ribbentrop had found the key to ingratiating himself with Hitler, something that was lost on his more obviously gifted colleagues; he realized that the Führer always smiled kindly on a radical solution. This fact alone meant that Nazi foreign policy must lead to crisis. To Hitler, the most exciting solution to any problem was always the most radical. It did not matter whether the radical solution was adopted – the mere fact o
f suggesting it proved the true National Socialist credentials of its proposer. The corollary of this was that qualities of intelligence and ability in subordinates were not valued by Hitler as much as loyalty and radicalism, a truth that Hjalmar Schacht, the most intelligent of all the leading figures in the Nazi government, was about to discover.
‘The Nazis turned towards the obvious ills,’ says Johannes Zahn. ‘These were unemployment and disarmament and these things are not really economic questions.’ Talking of Schacht’s actions during 1933–5, Zahn says: ‘The Nazis had solved the problem simply by increasing the circulation of banknotes without having a real understanding of the concept of inflation.’ The difficulty with the Nazi policies of rearmament and road-building was that, as Herr Zahn puts it, ‘A motorway doesn’t sit in a shop window, a motorway cannot be sold, though the purchasing power remains. Rearmament cannot be sold, though the purchasing power remains.’ As an economist Zahn knew what Hitler didn’t – money is purchasing power and only at your peril do you create purchasing power without having goods to sell.
According to Zahn, Schacht was very clear about the destabilizing and inflationary pressure that had been injected into the German economy by his short-term solution to the problem of financing rearmament. Schacht knew that unless industry soon made goods that people could buy in the shops, or which could be exported for foreign currency, Germany was heading inexorably towards ruin. He made this reality clear in a speech in November 1938 in which he echoed Herr Zahn’s point that the economy was creating a demand from those with money to spend which could not be satisfied. Schacht’s conclusion was simple: ‘The standard of living and the extent of armament production are in inverse ratio.’11