Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism was a system without any redeeming features at all, although it obviously appealed to the majority of Germans who were pleased that the regime ended unemployment and made Germany a great power again. Nazism was a racist and militaristic ideology rather than a form of socialism in the Western sense, and was based on Hitler’s own delusions and paranoia, and his obsessions about the Jews infecting the body of the ‘healthy’ Aryan Volk. Unlike most of the other Communist and nationalist revolutions, it also took place in a highly urbanized and industrialized economy that was second only to the United States in 1933. His hatred of the Jews and other ‘non-Aryans’ was clearly pathological and he frequently expressed the desire to kill them all with his own hands. As early as 1922, he was on record stating that he would hand all the Jews in Germany and leave their bodies on the public gallows “as long as hygienically possible” (Kershaw 3). In 1929, Hitler said that 70-80% of German infants should be exterminated every year to “strengthen the bloodline” (Kershaw 11). He had long planned to exterminate the handicapped, mentally ill and senile persons, and this T-4 euthanasia program began in 1939. Two years later, many of its personnel were transferred to Poland to organize the first death camps for the Jews, and his last will and testament in April 1945 still blamed them for the war and “all the evils of mankind” (Waite 414). Hitler had often threatened to kill himself in difficult or stressful situations, and finally did so on April 30, 1945 when the Soviet armies were only a few hundred yards from his Bunker. Thus he spared the Allies the trouble of putting him on trial and executing him at Nuremberg.
Historians have spent decades examining the history and culture of Germany, searching for clues about how the society took such a radical and destructive turn in 1933-45. Of course they found anti-Semitism dating back to the feudal period and the Reformation, most notoriously in the writings of Martin Luther or the massacres of Jews during the Crusades and bubonic plague. In addition, Germany always had its share of racism, xenophobia, authoritarianism and militarism, although none of this was unique to the Germans by any means. In this respect, the rise and fall of the Nazi state “also causes us to examine the veneer of civilization that exists in all societies” (Spielvogel and Redles 294). Nazism was a conscious and open rejection of Western liberalism and democracy, as well as Enlightenment rationalism and the belief in human rights and equal citizenship. They also intended to abolish individualism and replace it with a mass consciousness shaped by intense propaganda and obedient only to the Fuehrer’s will. Indeed, the historical record demonstrates that during the Third Reich, the German people, the old conservative elites, industrialists and ‘apolitical’ bureaucrats and experts all formed an effective team for wars of aggression and genocide, and that they also profited personally from the plunder and looting of Jews and occupied countries.
Only a small minority actively opposed the regime and even though their actions were nothing less than heroic they were also tragically ineffective. Most Germans only regretted that Hitler had lost the war, and they denied any knowledge of the crimes of the regime or complicity with them. Part of the reason for this was the traditional German authoritarianism and passive acceptance of a string state. Even so, Hitler’s support was enthusiastic in the 1930s and during the early years of World War II, when he claimed credit for ending unemployment and a strong of quick, easy victories over Czechoslovakia, Poland and France. This support only began to turn lukewarm with the defeats on the Eastern Front, the entrance of the United States into the war and the night-and-day bombing of German cities. In the glory years of Nazism, “women and young people, in particular, were apparently enthusiastic about the new regime”, and about Hitler (Sax and Kuntz 515).
Even in defeat, Germans rarely criticized Hitler, no doubt reinforced by the fact that doing so was against the law, although lower-level Nazis came in for more public criticism due to their corruption and venality. At all times the urban working class “clearly displayed large-scale indifference to Nazi rule”, but there was never any organized opposition or work stoppages (Sax and Kuntz 515). Nazi organizations dominated all professional, labor and community life, leaving those who were “disaffected with the regime isolated and ineffective” (Sax and Kuntz 516). Not all of the Germans were true believers in Nazism but enough of these existed to dominate the state, the larger society and the coercive apparatus. Many were not enthusiastic about the Nazi policies toward the Jews, either, although there was no opposition to this as there had been in the case of the mass killing of the handicapped and mentally ill. With the Jews, most simply looked the other way at “the disenfranchisement, segregation, and eventually the destruction of a segment of their fellow citizens” (Sax and Kuntz 517).
Yet the Nazis never attempted a real social revolution and did not mold one national-racial community (Volksgemeinschaft) free of all class, regional and religious differences. For example, during the war refugees from bombed-out cities quickly found that the people in rural areas “did not wish to share their food supplies with them” (Spielvogel and Redles 294). Nazism took root not in the primitive past but during a crisis of modernity in an urban, industrialized society. Because of the demoralization of defeat in World War I and the collapse of the economy during the Great Depression, “the German sense of security, community, and common decency was weakened” (Spielvogel and Redles 295). Hitler’s Third Reich fill the vacuum left in the wake of this modern collapse, but the Nazi empire in the end had no “redeeming values” and only offered the “constant repetition of inhumane acts” (Spielvogel and Redles 295). Ultimately, it revealed a profound hollowness and nihilism at its core, as did Hitler himself.
Germans had always had a well-developed sense of victimhood about both world wars in which the country had lost a great deal of territory and population. Even after World War II, they regarded themselves as victims of the Nazi regime, Allied bombing, military occupation, division of the country in two and millions of refugees driven out of the regions east of the Oder River that were annexed by Poland. In the 1960s there were also more trials of the perpetrators of genocide, but even then the majority of Germans refused to believe that these crimes “had not been the actions of a few outsiders but instead had come from the mainstream of German society” (Gassert and Steinweiss 4). They were also reluctant to pay compensation to the survivors, not least because many Germans had profited from the looting and plunder of the Jews and occupied countries during the war. Even the German police saw themselves “as victims, having been exploited by an overwhelmingly coercive authority” despite incontrovertible evidence of their complicity and participation in all the crimes committed by the Nazi regime (Gassert and Steinweiss 5).
Ian Kershaw explained the strangely dualistic nature of the Nazi state, which was a totalitarian police state which at the same time had many chaotic and anarchic features as a function of Hitler’s Social Darwinist ideology. He believed in violent competition and conflict and survival of the fittest, which is why he encouraged the creation of numerous competing agencies run by ‘little Fuehrers”, and parallel Nazi Party organizations overlapping with those of the state. These ideas were all expressed openly in Mein Kampf, with its fascist ideology “based on struggle as a way of life, the right of the strong leader to dominate, and the missionary need to create the Aryan racial state” (Spielvogel and Redles 294). Lower level bureaucrats and officials were always “working towards the Fuehrer” and developing “radical initiatives from below” in attempting to anticipate his wishes based on their interpretation of his intentions and orders (Collier and Pedley 1). Hitler tolerated a wide variety of initiatives and variations on Nazi ideology as long as he perceived no threat to his own power and position, although he also eliminated Nazis like Ernst Roehm and Gregor Strasser when he concluded that they intended to overthrow him. His experience as a common soldier in World War I was also central to his worldview, based on “the concept of slaughter and sacrifice”, along with his intense belief that Germany would avenge the humiliation of defeat by overturning the Versailles Treaty. Nor did he think that Germany had lost World War I in any case, but that the country had been stabbed in the back by Communists, socialists and Jews (Collier and Pedley 9).
In the1930s, the Nazi state was not yet complete, and Hitler was forced to compromise with the army, the great industrialists and landowners, the civil service and other members of the old conservative elites. For this reason, the Third Reich was “a tangled mixture of the new and old”, although the S.S. and other Nazi organizations began to gain predominance during the war (Collier and Pedley 10). According to German historians like Fritz Fischer and Ralf Dahrendorf, the Prussian-German road to modernity after the failed revolutions of 1848 had been a Sonderweg (Special Path) in which “intensive industrialization was not accompanied by a corresponding social or political modernization” (Collier and Pedley 11). In culture, politics and government, the country was still authoritarian and even semi-feudal, and after 1933 these institutions coordinated themselves with the new Nazi state. All competing political parties and labor organizations were destroyed by the Gestapo and the concentration camp system, which meant that opposition to the Nazi regime could “only ever be expressed through the actions of individuals” (Collier and Pedley 14). Only in 1944, when the war was clearly lost, did the army and the conservative elites attempt to overthrow Hitler, and were ruthlessly crushed when their coup failed.
One example of the cooperation of conservative and ‘apolitical’ civil servants the Nazi regime was that of the financial and economic technocrats who assisted in the preparation for war and plundering the Jews and occupied countries. Indeed, neither the war nor genocide would have been possible at all without the assistance of these specialists and experts, who also ensured that the German people profited from these actions. Even before 1939, they had followed Hitler’s orders in “reshaping public finances so that state debts would be covered by a war of imperialistic plunder” (Aly and Chase 310). Both the Fuehrer and his advisors knew from the start that Germany could not win a prolonged war, which is why they gambled on a series of short, quick Blitzkrieg campaigns. They also realized that they were running the war economy on deficits and IOUs and were warned by conservative anti-Nazis like Carl Goerdeler that this could not be sustained indefinitely. Hitler was no expert on finance or economics, which were subjects that bored him, but he did all these experts to do whatever they pleased in foreign countries as long as the German people benefited. Industrialists, bankers, bureaucrats and the Wehrmacht all collaborated in conquest, slave labor and genocide, as well the “state-sponsored campaign of grand larceny” that accompanies these (Aly and Chase 311).
No history of the Nazi state would ever make sense without the ideology and personality of Hitler, who was the leading force in guiding and shaping the Third Reich. Beyond question, the wars of aggression, the extermination of the Jews and the plunder of occupied Europe all occurred on his direct orders, even though he often left the details to be worked out by competing groups of subordinates. He was quite effective in his policies of divide and rule, as well as keeping the German masses bribed and contented with the loot from the rest of Europe. He also promised them better days to come if they proved themselves worthy in the Social Darwinist struggle about became the lords and masters of Europe. In carrying out all these crimes and atrocities, however, he had considerable assistance from the old conservative elites, industrialists and bureaucrats, who were not simply mindless robots following orders but frequently took the initiative to better fulfill the wishes of the Fuehrer—and not coincidentally to line their own pockets along the way. So did the ordinary soldiers and civilians whenever the opportunities presented themselves, although in the aftermath of defeat and occupation they naturally found it more comfortable to regard themselves as victims of the Nazis rather than complicit in their crimes. Apart from a minority of genuinely heroic resisters, most were not victims at all except in losing a war of their own making.
WORKS CITED
Aly, Gotz and Jefferson Chase. Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State. Holt Paperbacks, 2005.
Caplan, Jane and Nikolaus Waschmann (eds). Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories. Routledge, 2010.
Collier, Martin and Philip Pedley (eds). Hitler and the Nazi State. Heinemann Educational Publishers, 2005.
Gassert, Philipp and Alan F. Steinweiss. Coping with the Nazi Past: West German Debates on Nazism and Generational Conflict, 1955-1975. Berghahn Books, 2006.
Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: A Biography. NY: Norton, 2008.
Sax, Benjamin and Dieter Kuntz. Inside Hitler’s Germany: A Documentary History. D.C. Health Publishing, 1991.
Spielvogel, Jackson T. and David Redles. Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History, 6th Edition. Prentice Hall, 2009.
Waite, Robert G.L. The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. De Capo Press, 1993.
