In this series, Dr. Carson examines the connection between ideology and the revolutions of our time and traces the impact on several major countries and the spread of the ideas and practices around the world.
“By their fruits ye shall know them,” Scripture says. By contrast, ideologists contend that by their intentions you must distinguish among them. It is crucial to understand this mode of thinking as it is practiced, particularly by socialist ideologues. The idea that has the world in its grip gains adherents, spreads, and tightens its hold because of the alleged good intentions of its believers. The results of the idea are everywhere destructive, the degree of the destruction depending mainly on the extent of the application. But this is obscured so far as possible behind a smokescreen of good intentions.
If the methods of operation of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany and of Joseph Stalin (or Nikolai Lenin or Malenkov) are compared, as they will be at a later point, it can be shown that their differences were insignificant alongside their similarities. They are differences such as there may be between the Communist penchant for the shot in the back of the neck or death by exposure in the frozen north and the Nazi preference for execution by poison gas. Yet Nazis and Communists are generally held to be quite different species, the Nazi behavior having been beyond the pale while we must learn to live with Communists. Their differences are supposed to be somehow decisive.
How Different?
What are these differences? Let us go to what is supposed to be the nub of the matter at once. The Nazis, it is said, were racists, anti-Semitic, and sought to destroy the Jewish people. Grant the point, for the weight of the evidence is overwhelming that this was the case. But what of the Communists of the Soviet Union ? Have they not persecuted and attempted to destroy the Jews in their own way? The point here is not so readily granted, for it is generally believed that some distinctions are in order, and perhaps they are. At any rate, let us make some.
In the first place, Jews have not been the only ones, or even the main ones, persecuted in the Soviet Union. A case could be made that Communists do not discriminate on the basis of race or nationality those whom they persecute, though examples could be given that would cast doubt on this proposition. But, for the sake of argument, let the statement stand, since members of every race, nationality, religion, or ethnic complexion have been persecuted by the Communists. More, some Jews have been able to survive within the Soviet Union. Some, who are technically called Jews, have even prospered, been members of the Party, and even sat in the counsels of the government.
But at what price? In answering this we come closer to the crux of the matter. They had better not be Zionists. If they are to prosper, they must not practice the Hebrew religion, even if they have an opportunity to do so. More, their chances of succeeding would be greatly advanced if they could somehow divest themselves of every aspect of their culture which might distinguish them as Jews. In short, a Jew is likely to succeed in the Soviet Union to the extent that he is not a Jew.
It can be argued, of course, that Soviet persecution of Jews is not racial in origin. It is, instead, cultural. The Communists only wish to wipe out Jewish culture, or what might be called “Jewishness,” not Jews. That is a most interesting distinction, one which would probably have appealed to the Medieval scholar, Duns Scotus (from whom we derive the word “dunce”), for he had an especial liking for subtle distinctions.
The difficulty lies in the fact that there is no such thing as “Jewishness.” Hence, government cannot act on it. It cannot be arrested, locked up, interrogated, tortured, shot, or put in slave labor camps. That can only be done to real beings, and Communists have specialized in doing it to people, even Jews. Whether it would have comforted Zinoviev, Kamanev, Trotsky, and Bukharin (Communist leaders of Jewish derivation put to death on orders from Stalin) or thousands of other Jews to learn that they were not put to death because they were Jews but because of their “Jewishness” we have no way of knowing.
Communists do not admit that they persecute Jews for their “Jewishness,” but there is no doubt of the assault on the Hebrew religion, on Zionism, or on aspects of Jewish culture, and there is good reason to believe that Jews have suffered disproportionately for their heterodoxy in a land that requires orthodoxy. There comes a point when intentions matter not in the least; Zinoviev, Kamanev, Trotsky, and Bukharin are just as dead as they would have been had they died in a Nazi gas chamber. They died because they did not conform to some pattern in the mind of Stalin.
Rooted in Socialism
Communism and Nazism have common roots. The focus on Hitler’s racism and the playing down of Soviet anti-“Jewishness” has helped to obscure this fact. These common roots are not only obscured but denied by the claim that Communism belongs to the “left wing” and Nazism to the “right wing.” According to this terminology, they belong to opposite ends of the political spectrum. Writer after writer in book after book employs these terms in this way as if they applied to some obvious actual state of affairs. What they are doing, however, is propagating an illusion, an illusion which in its day may have satisfied the Nazis well enough and still satisfies the Communists.
That Nazis and Communists were usually political opponents is true, but there is no reason to conclude from that fact that they belonged on opposite ends of the political spectrum. The rivalry between brothers in a family is often intense; it is not even something new, for Cain slew Abel. And Communism and Nazism were brothers, or something of the sort, under the skin.
The full name of the Nazi Party was National Socialist German Workers’ Party. But was Hitler a socialist? Clearly, opinions differ as to the correct answer to this question. According to the Communist Party line, he was not a socialist. The weight of opinion of avowed socialists, and their fellow travelers, around the world has been that he was not. Indeed, the gravamen of the claim that he belongs to the “right wing” is that he was not a socialist. Their desire to blame Hitler on something other than socialism is understandable (he’s yours, not ours, they are saying), but that is hardly reason to accept their position.
Narrowly Nationalistic
Hitler claimed to be a national socialist, in contrast to international socialists. (“International,” in Nazi ideology, would refer both to Communism and to any socialism with which Jews might be associated.) But if we look at the realities instead of the claims, this distinction tends to break down too. Hitler’s Germany was hardly more nationalistic than Stalin’s Russia, with its virtually uncrossable borders and chauvinistic appeals to the people. Indeed, every socialist regime is nationalistic in cutting its people off from trade and limiting intercourse with nonsocialist countries. Hitler’s claim to being a socialist should be accepted, but since it is not generally, the demonstration of it will have to occupy a part of our attention.
The most direct way to determine in what corner of the political spectrum Nazism belongs may be to change the terminology. Instead of asking whether or not Hitler was a socialist, it will be much more fruitful to ask whether or not he was a collectivist. The answer to this can be made without equivocation: Hitler was a collectivist. The Nazi Party was collectivist. The purpose of so many of the practices, forms, and activities of the Nazis was collectivist—the mass meetings, the raised hand salute in unison, the cries of “Sieg Heil,” the multitude of Swastika-adorned flags, the jackbooted soldiers on parade with their exaggerated precision drills, and the highly emotional speeches of the leaders. These and other such activities were aimed at arousing a single emotion which all would share, the forging of a unity, a collective, through shared common experience. So, too, was the appeal to German nationality, to blood and soil, to the master race, to a common destiny. War was glorified by the Nazis precisely because more than any other activity it calls forth and sustains the unified effort which is the aim of collectivism. War is collectivism in action; the spirit of collectivism becomes flesh in battle.
Collectivistic
Nazism was collectivist. Socialism is collectivist. All of them are on the same side of the political spectrum. They belong to the “left wing,” if such terms must be employed, though the present writer would be happy to see those phrases lumped together with a host of other journalistic argot which now corrupts the language, and consigned to the waste bin.
The kinship of these ideologies becomes apparent, too, when we recall the basic idea that has the world in its grip. The idea is: To achieve human felicity by concerting all efforts toward its realization, to root out and destroy the cultural supports to individualism and the pursuit of self-interest, and to use government to concert all efforts on behalf of a general felicity and destroy the cultural obstacles to it. All socialist ideologies, indeed all modern ideologies, if there are any that are not in some sense socialist, proceed by discovering some ill or ills that afflict society (the Apple in the Garden of Eden, so to speak) and set forth the means by which the ills are to be corrected. As the present writer noted some years ago:
The ideologue tends to fanaticism. Whatever it is that will set things right… becomes for him a fixed idea. This fixed idea may be democracy, equality, the triumph of the proletariat, the coming of the kingdom, the single tax, or whatever his panacea happens to be. Come the proletarian revolution, one will say, and the good society will be ushered in. Employ creatively his abstraction, the “state,” another will hold, and a great and productive social unity will emerge. Extend democratic participation into every area of life, and life will be glorious. Abolish property, abolish government, single tax the land, redistribute the wealth, maintain racial solidarity, organize interest groups, form a world government, develop an all-embracing commitment to the nation, use government to make men free, andso on through the… enthusiasms which have animated those under the sway of some ideology or other.’
The content varies, but these ideologies come out of a similar mold of analysis and mode of operation.
A Disruptive Element
The main ill besetting German society, Hitler claimed, was the Jews and their various intellectual offspring: cultural diversity, democracy, communism, artistic disintegration, finance capitalism, and so on. The Jews were a disruptive element preventing an organic unity of the German people. They were aliens within the society acting as a huge obstacle to its productive fruition. Root out, remove, and destroy this disruptive element and the Germanic or Aryan race could concert its efforts toward great ends. The Jews were to Nazism what the bourgeoisie (or capitalists) were to Marxism. The Jewish exploitation of Germans was to Nazism what capitalist exploitation of labor was to communism. The German race was to Nazis what the proletariat was to Communists. The parallels are even closer than this may suggest.
Hitler’s most basic appeal was to German workers to rise up and throw off the exploitation of the Jews, though he did not always approach it in this way. The Nazis aimed, too, to root out and destroy every cultural artifact which was thought to be a product of Jewishness. A revolution was to be wrought in German life. Communism was one of the putative enemies, but a good case can be made that Nazism was an aberrant subspecies of communism. Its positions were paradigmatic; its methods were essentially the same.
Nazism was dipped from the simmering cauldron of ideologies contending for power in Germany in the 1920′s. It may be, as some contend, that what is here being referred to as the idea which has the world in its grip was born amidst the French Revolution in France, but the shaping of these ideologies was much more the work of Germans. In any case, Germans were mightily bent toward collectivism in the 1920′s. Why this was so, and why Nazism emerged triumphant can be partially explained by German history.
Nationalism, Revolution and Social Reform
The three main ingredients of the German ideologies were nationalism, revolution, and social reform. It may well be that nationalism was the most important of these. Certainly, it has occupied the center stage for much of the time in the last hundred years or so of German history. In fact, strictly speaking, there is no German history prior to 1871. German was onlya language, a language in search, it may be, of a state to encompass the area in which it was spoken. True, Germany had been united to some extent for a time in the Middle Ages as part of a larger empire. But it was not called Germany, and its boundaries were in no way restricted to what we now think of as Germany. At any rate, this empire broke up long before the modern era began. One writer describes the situation this way: “By the thirteenth century there were ninety-three ecclesiastical and fourteen lay princes. A century later there were forty-four lay princes, and their number continued to multiply as partitions took place between heirs. Many parts of the country were converted into tiny fragments.”2 The relics of empire were strengthened somewhat by strong Spanish monarchs in the sixteenth century, but their hold was severed by the Protestant Reformation and its aftermath.
German unification was finally accomplished in 1871 with the proclamation of a German Empire at the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War. The architect of this unification was Otto von Bismarck. The king of Prussia was proclaimed as emperor (Kaiser) of Germany as well as retaining his old position as the head of the leading German state. Princes and kings in other provinces retained their hereditary thrones, and provincial legislatures continued to share in governing the provinces.
The German Empire ruled over by Kaisers Wilhelm I (1871-1888) and II (1888-1918) was a federated empire. The symbol of its unity was the Kaiser himself, who also held the reins of power. Chancellors were not creatures of the legislature but of the Kaiser, though Bismarck gave distinction to the post. Although there was a German parliament composed of a Bundesrat, in which the states or provinces were represented, and a Reichstag, in which the populace was represented, the main instrument of unity was the Prussianized armed forces. Although Austria, another German-speaking country, was not a part of the German Empire, German unification had been virtually achieved.
Shattering the Unity
In the closing days of World War I, this unity was shattered. The symbol of unity, Kaiser Wilhelm II, fled to Holland and abdicated, prompted by his prime minister and undeterred by the High Command. In short order, all the other German princes and kings abdicated as their power dissolved before them. The armed forces disintegrated both in consequence of the imminent military surrender and the thrust of soldiers and sailors organized into soviets or councils.
The stage appeared to be set for a repetition of the events that had taken place in Russia the year before. The parallels with the February Revolution were very close. In Russia in February of 1917 and in Germany in November of 1918, the emperors abdicated, the armed forces refused to obey their commanders, and workers and soldiers organized into soviets or councils. Red flags were waving in the streets, and there were those ready to rush on immediately to a Bolshevik revolution in Germany. More, Friedrich Ebert, the leader of the Social Democratic Party, formed a provisional government and began preparations for having a constituent assembly.
But there were important differences between the German situation and the Russian one, too. For one thing, the war was over in Europe, and the German provisional government did not have to wrestle with conducting a war. For another, the soldiers do not appear to have been as radicalized as they were in Russia. Even more crucial, the main Marxist party in Germany, the Social Democratic Party, had been largely won over to evolutionary or gradualist socialism. Its leadership could, and did, claim to be the party of the workers, thus defusing some of the revolutionary ardor, and Ebert used what armed forces he could assemble to suppress the incipient revolution.
The Communist Party was small—that was true in Russia too—, and it was not under the discipline of leaders like Lenin and Trotsky. More, two of the communist leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, were put to death in the course of suppression of the revolution. Kurt Eisner, a socialist who had formed a republic in Bavaria, was shot down on the streets of Munich. Those determined to avert revolution used more muscle than those seeking to make one.
It is not too much to say, though, that Germany was waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak, in the 1920′s. The first shoe had dropped, the first stage of revolution had occurred, in November of 1918. That is not to say that a revolution must go full cycle once it has begun. But once a government has been overturned an effective one, one which has authority over and has the respect or awe of the populace, must take its place sooner or later. Germany in the 1920′s hung between continued disintegration and establishing an effective government. The bureaucracy, the police, the army, and local governments maintained authority when and where they would and could, but their attachment and loyalty to the government of the Weimar Republic was tentative and uncertain. The centripetal forces often gained on the centrifugal, opening the way again and again to revolution.
The Treaty of Versailles
Germany was bent toward collectivism and collectivist nationalism by the Treaty of Versailles which was imposed on her after World War I. German leaders asked for and were granted an armistice. An armistice is what would most likely be called a cease-fire today, i. e., a stopping of hostilities in order to consider the terms of peace. It is not a surrender, and certainly not an unconditional surrender. Even so, the terms of the peace were not negotiated but imposed by the Allies on Germany.
Large areas mainly inhabited by Germans were separated from Germany or demilitarized or, in the case of the Ruhr, occupied by foreign troops for a time. Germany was supposed to have only a tiny army and only small ships in its navy. Most devastating of all, the German people were held to be collectively guilty for the war. Reparations were to be paid in huge amounts by the German government to the Allies. It did not matter that the German government of the Weimar Republic was not the government which had started and prosecuted the war. The German people were guilty, collectively guilty, the settlement proclaimed. Collective guilt, one suspects, can only be purged or renounced collectively.
The tendency of the Treaty of Versailles was to denationalize Germany, to make it a military nonentity, to make being German a shameful condition, and to penalize the status by reparation payments for several generations. Whether the treaty was just or not, it failed to produce the desired psychological effect on many Germans. Instead, it provoked the most virulent nationalist sentiments. Far from being ashamed that they were Germans, many found new virtue and pride in it, that special virtue attaching to those who are convinced they have been deeply wronged.
Negotiating for Concessions
One of the most difficult tasks of the governments of the Weimar Republic was to send their foreign ministers, hat in hand, to seek concessions from the Allies. People who believe they have been wronged do not wish to go hat in hand for concessions; they are defiant, and wish to demand and force the righting of the wrong. To the more radical of the nationalists, anyone negotiating for concessions was a traitor. Hitler was able to use the fact that Jews, notably Walter Rathenau and Gustav Streseman, undertook the difficult task of negotiation to bolster his charge that the Jews were selling out the German people.
But Germany was in much greater danger of falling apart in the 1920′s than it was of unified or collective action. Indeed, a good case could be made that Germany had fallen apart at the end of World War I, and that it was never drawn together in the 1920′s. The method of election to the Reichstag prescribed by the Weimar Constitution, adopted in 1919, came close to guaranteeing this state of affairs.
The Constitution called for proportional representation of parties in the Reichstag according to the share of the vote which each party received in general elections. Many members of the legislature received their appointments from party lists. This assured party control over the members, gave impetus to having a multiplicity of parties, and fragmented German politics into ideological configurations. The dominance of party made it difficult for any leaders with popular following to emerge. The Reichstag hardly spoke or acted for Germany; it spoke and acted for the parties and their individual ideological versions of what should be done.
The parties fell into three configurations generally. There were the socialist parties: the Social Democratic Party, the Independent Social Democratic Party, and the Communist Party. Then there were the center parties: the Democratic Party, the Catholic Centre Party, and, sometimes, the People’s Party. The other grouping, usually described as “right wing,” would have been made up of the Bavarian People’s Party (though it might sometimes be centrist), the Nationalist Party, and the Nazis, among others.
Minority Positions
From a parliamentary and, I believe, ideological point of view these classifications are drastically wrong in the case of at least two of the parties. Neither the Communist nor the Nazi Party participated in any of the governments of the 1920′s; they were purely opposition parties. Moreover, they usually opposed the same things. True, their spokesmen may have used their most vicious invective on one another, but if they are to be placed in any parliamentary bloc in the 1920′s it is with one another. As to the ideological affinities of the Nazis, that is a point requiring further attention.
None of the parties ever gained a majority of the popular vote or had a majority of members in the Reichstag. This meant that every government organized had to be a coalition government, a coalition usually of at least three parties. The Social Democratic Party was the largest single party in the 1920′s, but it infrequently participated in organizing a government, both because of its own finely honed principles and because non-socialists tended to shy away from any of the socialist parties.
The usual process for organizing a government was this. The President, Friedrich Ebert until 1925 and General von Hindenburg thereafter, would select some member of the Reichstag, usually a man with influence in his own party, to form a government. He would usually then begin negotiations with other party leaders to get their support for a government. The coalitions so formed were unstable, and one government followed another in dreary fashion throughout the twenties. Disaffection with the republic was always widespread, and the succession of compromise governments increased the frustration with the system.
A Political Standoff
One thing that this standoff of parties did do; it prevented any of the governments from taking very drastic or radical action. As one history notes, the Weimar Republic was largely the creation of the Social Democrats, but “it was remote from anything socialistic. No industries were nationalized. No property changed hands. No land laws or agrarian reforms were undertaken…; there was almost no confiscation… of… property….”3
It may be technically true that there was little confiscation of property, but there was, nonetheless, a massive and catastrophic redistribution of wealth. It came by way of the runaway inflation in 1922-23. The government flooded the country with paper money in ever-larger doses; the purpose, ostensibly, was to repudiate the reparations debt and resist French occupation of the Ruhr. It failed on both counts, but it succeeded in wiping out domestic debt and virtually producing economic collapse. By November of 1923 it required over 21/2 trillion marks to purchase a dollar. Shortly thereafter the inflation was ended, but such faith in the government as there had ever been was seriously eroded.
Sharp Conflict of Ideologies in the Reichstag
The conflict of ideologies was sharp and acrimonious in the Reichstag. When President Hindenburg entered the hall for his inauguration in 1925, the Communist members rose en masse and walked out. Nazis and Communists were generally considered to be pariahs to other members. Non-socialists generally resisted association with socialists. Votes were often dictated by parties on ideological grounds. Here is an example of such a vote. It concerned the building of an armored cruiser. The Social Democrats, who were militant anti-militarists, had campaigned against the building of such a cruiser. The Communists, not to be outdone, circulated a petition around the country to bar armored cruisers. These events then took place:
When the Reichstag reassembled.. the Social Democratic delegation moved that the construction of Cruiser A be halted. This move naturally evoked strong and angry reactions from the other ministers and their parties… Such a step could well have had serious consequences for the entire government. All this could have been foreseen. But the dogmatists among the Social Democrats forced a resolution through the delegation, requiring that all party members, including the Social Democratic ministers, support the delegation’s motion en bloc. Even the President’s personal suggestion that the ministers be at least permitted to abstain found no mercy at the hands of the delegation’s majority. Thus, on November 17, 1928, the German Reichstag witnessed the grotesque spectacle of chancellor Hermann Miller voting against a decision which a cabinet he had chosen had passed with him in the chair.’
The motion failed, but if it had passed the world might have been treated to the unusual spectacle of the fall of a government because its premier had voted with the majority!
But what went on in the Reichstag was generally peaceful and tame compared to what was happening around the country during much of the 1920′s. The ideological conflict was hardly restricted to even the vigorous expression of ideas. Private armies, if not commonplace, were not unusual in the 1920′s. A Red army existed for a time in 1920. It was organized in the wake of the Kapp Putsch in March of the same year.
A renegade brigade of the German army was used to drive the government out of Berlin and install Wolfgang Kapp at its head. A general strike paralyzed Berlin and much of the country, and Kapp capitulated. As the troops withdrew from the city, this startling incident occurred: “As they marched along the Unter den Linden, a boy in the crowd hooted at them. Some soldiers broke ranks, hurled themselves on the boy, clubbed him to death with their rifle butts and then stomped him with their hobnailed boots. The crowd shouted in horror, while the soldiers calmly returned to their column. Infuriated by the shouts of the crowd, an officer wheeled round and ordered his troops to shoot into it with rifles and machine guns. Then they marched out of Berlin, singing.”5
Fed by Violence
The Nazi movement fed on the ideological conflicts and the violence which they engendered. Hitler began to gain his following with speeches in beer halls in Munich. Violence often served as a backdrop for his emotional tirades. Hitler’s private army was probably organized at first to protect him in these situations as well as to provide the violent setting. Here is an account of one of these conflicts:
A sudden shout from a Communist took him [Hitler] by surprise; he faltered when replying; and suddenly they were all standing up shouting and hurling beer mugs. There was a deafening chorus of “Freiheit!” Tables were being torn apart so the legs could be used as clubs. The storm troopers… formed flying columns to wrestle with the Communists. One of the columns was led by Rudolf Hess who had already shown himself to be a formidable fighter. They used fists, chair legs, and beer mugs…. When the battle was won, Hermann Esser jumped on a beer table and shouted: “The meeting continues. The speaker has the floor.”6
Hitler then finished his speech. Hitler did not wait long before trying to go on to bigger things. With the aid of General Ludendorf he attempted a coup d’etat in what is known as the Munich Putsch in 1923. It failed, and Hitler was subsequently arrested, tried and convicted of treason, and sentenced to prison. He served only a little more than eight months of the term before he was released, but while in prison he worked on his book, Mein Kampf. The book is an attempt not only to set forth his ideology and methods but also to give them a historical gloss by providing what purported to be the historical record of the Aryan race.
There were other private armies in the service of ideology in the 1920′s. The largest of these was one organized by the Social Democratic Party, mainly in Saxony and Thuringia. It was called the Reichsbanner, and was founded in February of 1924. The Reichsbanner was supposed to defend the republic from its enemies, but that did not change the fact that it was a private army, composed mainly of Social Democrats. Within a short time, it had three million members.’
Calm Before Storm
The German deterioration did not proceed on a straight line from bad to worse to revolution in the 1920′s. If the Nazis, or the Communists, or whatever radical party, had brought off a revolution in late 1923 or early 1924 that would have been the case. The worst disorders—the initial revolt of the soldier’s and worker’s councils, the disintegration of the army, the Kapp Putsch, the assassinations of Eisner, Rathenau and Erzberger, the revolt of the Red army, the Munich Putsch, the runaway inflation—occurred from 1918 through 1923.
The Weimar Republic weathered these and other disorders. Indeed, the political situation appeared to have stabilized from 1924-1929. A stable currency was introduced, the economy revived, the Allies began to grant concessions, foreign money began to pour into Germany, and the people enjoyed something approaching domestic tranquility for a few years. If Hindenburg’s electionto the presidency did not increase attachment to the republic, it at least reassured monarchists and nationalists that they were not without friends in high places. Even Hitler was more restrained for a time, as he concentrated his energies on developing a national following.
It was, of course, the calm before the storm.
The Weimar Republic survived for about fourteen years, more by luck than by design. It survived for want of a generally acceptable alternative—the socialists would not entertain the idea of restoration of the monarchy, and those who despised the republic could not unite behind a common banner—and, perhaps, because those who would make a revolution could not find a handle for bringing it off.
From Crisis to Collapse
The French Republic survived the years from World War I to World War II without collapsing, and France had many political parties, revolving-door governments, sharp ideological conflicts, and a similar deterioration to that of Germany. But France had not suffered the German defeat, had not experienced a runaway inflation, and was not so clearly poised on the brink of revolution. Even so, it should be noted that the French Republic collapsed in less than five weeks in 1940 under pressure from German, then Italian armies. It required only a sufficient crisis to bring about collapse.
That crisis for Germany was the Great Depression. Many countries were hit by depression after 1929, but none harder than Germany. The foreign money which had poured into Germany after the adoption of the Dawes Plan was no longer available. Liquidity preference in Germany evinced itself in many instances in the transfer of bank accounts to other lands. Unemployment mounted. There were reparation payments to be made. Germany’s unemployment insurance program placed a heavy burden upon the government and upon those who were working. By 1930, or in the course of the year, there was widespread agreement about the necessity of emergency measures.
Hitler was waiting in the wings, indeed, had been waiting for some time. The Nazi Party vote grew rapidly as the crisis deepened. It is not generally understood how cleverly Hitler had constructed the Nazi ideology, and never will be by those who insist on forcing it into a “left wing” or “right wing” mold. It is neither of these, if there are any such ideologies.
Broadening the Base
The Nazi ideology cut across the spectrum of German parties and ideologies. It was clearly designed to draw from all of them while being none of them. It claimed to be national, hence appealing to those concerned to establish national unity and military prowess. It claimed to be socialist, thus appealing to those for whom socialism was the elixir for modern man. It claimed to be German, which in its own freighted framework meant racist and anti-Semitic, and racism and anti-Semitism had much potential appeal in Germany, as elsewhere. And it was, it said, the party of workers. There is no way of knowing how much design went into the choice of words here. Hitler built his initial following on the base of a worker’s party; hence the term might simply have been taken over without much thought. Whatever the case may be, he did seek to build his support on a broad base of manual workers. Beyond these, he proposed to go further than monarchy by establishing the leadership principle, i. e., personal dictatorship.
None of the existing parties could get a majority by their sectarian ideological appeals. He would draw from the several leading parties and ignore the established spectrum of parties. There were those, of course, from whom he would not attempt to draw. He was anti-Communist, anti-Semitic, anti-democratic, and anti-republican. These were the enemies: democrats were too ineffectual to merit anything more than his contempt, but Jews and Communists (quite often indistinguishable to Hitler) were powerful enemies to be overcome.
From the elements to which he would appeal Hitler intended to weld a powerful collective unity. Whether he could ever have got a majority in a free election is now a moot question. He came close enough to it to achieve his purpose of attaining power.
Next: 10. Germany: National Socialism in Power.
—FOOTNOTES—
1Clarence B. Carson, The Flight from Reality (Irvington, N. Y., FEE: 1969), p. 302.
2Arnold J. Heidenheimer, The Government of Germany (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1971, 3rd ed.), p. 4.
3R. R. Palmer and Joel Colton, A History of the Modern World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958, rev. ed.), pp. 759-60.
4Erich Eyck, A History of the Weimar Republic, II (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 164.
5Robert Payne, The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler (New York: Praeger, 1973), p. 151.
6lbid., pp. 161-62.
7See S. William Halperin, Germany Tried Democracy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1946), pp. 285-86.
