Hitler and Nazism

Richard Geary

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9781138144125
• eBook ISBN: 9781134633258
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

Hitler and Nazism is an essential introduction to a notorious figure and crucial theme in modern European history. Focusing on the key themes of Nazi domestic policy, this book draws together the results of recent research into a concise analysis of the nature of Nazi rule and its impact on German society.

This book continues to explore how Nazism took hold in Germany; the issues of Hitler's beliefs and their role in the Third Reich; the factors that brought the party to power, and the structure and nature of both government and society in the Third Reich. It also develops further its analysis of the important issues of modernisation, gender, racial hygiene and the origins and implementation of the Holocaust.

1
Hitler: the man and his ideas

Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 in the small Austrian town of Braunau am Inn, where his father was a customs official. After five years at primary school, some time as an undistinguished pupil in Linz and experience as a boarder in Steyr, the apparently unremarkable Hitler, who never enjoyed his schooling (apart from his history lessons) and did not get on too well with his father, moved to Vienna in 1907. With sufficient support from relatives he remained for a time idle, doing little but daydream. The temporary end of such support led him to go through a short period of real hardship in 1909, when he lived rough, slept in the gutters and then found refuge in a doss house. Money from an aunt then put an end to this hardship; and Hitler made a living selling paintings and drawings of the Austrian capital and producing posters and advertisements for small traders. His two attempts to gain entry to the Academy of Graphic Arts failed, however, leaving the young Hitler an embittered man.

It was also while in Vienna that, by his own account, his eyes were opened to the twin menaces of Marxism and Jewry. The Jewish population of the Austrian capital (175,318) was larger than that of any city in Germany and included unassimilated and poor Jews from Eastern Europe. Anti-semitism was part of daily political discourse here; and in this regard Hitler learnt a great deal from the Viennese Christian Social leader Karl Lueger, who was for a time mayor of the city. Isolated, unsuccessful and with a marked distaste for the ramshackle and multinational Habsburg Empire, Hitler fled to Munich in 1913 to avoid service in the Austrian army. His flight was no simple act of cowardice, for, with the outbreak of war in August 1914, he rushed to enlist in the Bavarian army. He served with some distinction, being awarded the Iron Cross on two occasions and being promoted to lance-corporal in 1917. For him the war was a crucial formative experience. The ‘Kamaraderie’ of the trenches and sacrifice for the Fatherland were the values that Hitler was subsequently to contrast with the divisive and self-interested politics of the Weimar Republic. He was in hospital, recovering from a mustard-gas attack, when he learnt to his horror of Germany’s defeat, the humiliation of the armistice and the outbreak of revolution in November 1918. Henceforth Hitler became a major proponent of the ‘stab-in-the-back legend’, the belief that it was not the army but civilian politicians who had let the nation down by signing the armistice agreement. Such politicians he denounced as ‘November criminals’.

On leaving hospital Hitler returned to Munich, which experienced violent political upheavals in 1918 and 1919. Here he worked for the army, keeping an eye on the numerous extremist groups in the city. He soon came into contact with the nationalist and racist German Workers’ Party (DAP), led by the Munich locksmith Anton Drexler. It rapidly became clear that Hitler was a speaker of some talent – at least to those who shared his crass prejudices. In October 1919 he made his first address to the DAP, won increasing influence in its councils and became one of its most prominent members. On 24 February 1920 the organisation changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). As both this new name and its programme made clear, the party was meant to combine nationalist and ‘socialist’ elements. It called not only for the revision of the Treaty of Versailles and the return of territories lost as a result of the peace treaty (parts of Poland, Alsace and Lorraine) but also for the unification of all ethnic Germans in a single Reich. Jews were to be excluded from citizenship and office, while those who had arrived in Germany since 1914 were to be deported, despite the fact that many German Jews had fought with honour on the German side during the First World War.

In addition to these staples of völkisch (nationalist/racist) thinking, the supposedly unalterable programme of the NSDAP made certain radical economic and social demands. War profits were to be confiscated, unearned incomes abolished, trusts nationalised and large department stores communalised. The beneficiary was to be the small man. (Note that this form of ‘socialism’ did not aim at the expropriation of all private property. Indeed, small businessmen and traders were to be protected.) Even so, whether these socially radical aspects of the programme, so dear to the heart of Gottfried Feder, the party’s ‘economic expert’, ever meant much to Hitler himself is open to doubt. In any case, by the late 1920s this aspect of Nazism was explicitly disavowed by Hitler, as the movement sought to win middle-class and peasant support. Hitler now made it clear that it was only Jewish property which would be confiscated. It was – somewhat paradoxically – the giant corporations, such as the chemical concern IG Farben, which were to prove the major financial beneficiaries of Nazi rule between 1933 and 1945.

During his time in Munich, Hitler also came into contact with various people who were subsequently to be of great importance to the Nazi movement. Some of these became his life-long friends: Hermann Göring, a distinguished First World War fighter pilot with influential contacts in Munich bourgeois society; Alfred Rosenberg, the ideologist of the movement; Rudolf Hess, who had actually served in Hitler’s regiment during the war; and the Bechstein family of piano-makers. Among the most important of his associates at this time was Ernst Röhm of the army staff in Munich, who recruited former servicemen and Freikorps members (the Freikorps had been used to repress leftwing risings in 1918–19) into the movement and thereby established the Sturmabteilung or SA, the Nazi organisation of storm troopers, which was to increase the influence of the initially small party to a significant degree. All these people shared Hitler’s view that Germany had been betrayed and was now confronted with a ‘red threat’. They expressed a violent nationalist ardour that often encompassed racism and in particular anti-semitism. In 1922 Julius Streicher, the most vicious of the anti-semites, also pledged his loyalty to Hitler, bringing into the party his own Franconian organisation and thereby doubling its membership. In the same year the first intimations of the cult of the Führer, the idea that it was Hitler who was uniquely blessed to shape Germany’s destinies, were seen.

At this time the NSDAP was but one of a plethora of extreme völkisch organisations in Munich (there were 73 in the Reich and 15 in the Bavarian capital alone). By 1923 it had links with the other four patriotic leagues in the Bavarian capital and was also in contact with the disaffected war hero General Ludendorff. Even the Bavarian state government under Gustav von Kahr was refusing to take orders from the national government in Berlin; and some of its members wanted to establish a separatist conservative regime, free from alleged socialist influence in the Reich capital, though they had no intention of including Hitler in any such arrangement. This tension formed the background to the attempted Beer Hall Putsch on the evening of 8 November 1923, which ended in farce in the face of a small degree of local resistance and the fact that the Reichswehr, the army, refused to join the putschists. In consequence the Nazi Party was banned and Hitler stood trial on a charge of high treason for his part in the attempt to overthrow Weimar democracy by force, receiving the minimum sentence of five years’ imprisonment. This example of the right-wing sympathies of the German judiciary in the Weimar Republic was further compounded by the fact that Hitler, at this stage still not even a German citizen, was given an understanding that an early release on probation was likely. The trial created Hitler’s national reputation in right-wing circles; and in any case he was released from the prison as early as December 1924, despite the severity of his crime. While in gaol in the small Bavarian town of Landsberg am Lech, however, he had dictated to a colleague the text of what became Mein Kampf.

Mein Kampf (‘My Struggle’) is scarcely one of the great works of political theory. Its style is crass and was in earlier editions ungrammatical. Free from subtleties of any kind, it repeats over and over again the most vulgar prejudices and blatant lies. It uses interchangeably words which in fact have different meanings (people, nation, race, tribe) and bases most of its arguments not on empirical evidence but on analogies (usually false ones). In so far as the book possesses any structure, the first part is vaguely autobiographical, the second an account of the early history of the NSDAP. As autobiography and history it is full of lies – about Hitler’s financial circumstances in Vienna, which were nothing like as dire as he would have the reader imagine, about when he fled from Vienna and when he joined the German Workers’ Party. It is important to note, however, that the strange style, the repetition of simplistic arguments and blatant untruths, in Mein Kampf was not simply a consequence of Hitler’s intellectual deficiencies. He never claimed to be an intellectual and had nothing but contempt for them. What he was attempting in Mein Kampf was to render the spoken word, political demagogy, in prose. This was partly because Hitler was in prison when he dictated the work and therefore unable to address public meetings in person. (In fact the ban on his speaking publicly continued for some time after his release.) It was also, however, a consequence of his beliefs about the nature of effective propaganda.

A considerable part of Mein Kampf is devoted to reflections on the nature of propaganda. Hitler believed that one of the reasons for British success in the First World War was the fact that British propaganda had been superior to that of the imperial German authorities, superior in its simplicity, directness and willingness to tell downright lies. He had also been influenced by certain ideas about the susceptibility of the masses adduced by theorists such as the American MacDougall and the Frenchman Le Bon. What this thinking added up to was that the masses were swayed less by the written word than by the spoken, especially when gathered in large numbers in a public place. The way to win mass approval and gain mass support under such circumstances was neither by reference to factual details nor by logical sophistication. Rather the most effective route to the popular heart lay in the perpetual repetition of the most simple and vehement ideas. If you are going to lie, then tell the big lie and do not flinch from repeating it. This argument worked because, to Hitler, the masses were ‘feminine’. In his sexist view, women were swayed not by their brains but by their emotions.

If such reflections explain perhaps a little of the deficiencies of Mein Kampf in terms of logic and literary elegance, what, then, of its content? Various issues are picked up in the work in no thorough or systematic fashion. One of these is the appropriate diplomatic and foreign aims of the German state. Hitler was always adamant that the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles had to be overturned and the Reich’s lost territories (Alsace, Lorraine and parts of Poland) returned to Germany. He was also aware that France would never surrender Alsace and Lorraine peacefully. Thus a coming war with France was already implicit in his thinking. However, Hitler’s territorial ambitions did not end with the re-creation of the boundaries of Bismarck’s Germany. Bismarck, after all, had deliberately excluded Austria and thereby Austrian Germans from the Reich that was created after the victories of 1866 and 1871. In contrast Hitler advocated the pan-German vision of a Reich which would include all ethnic Germans: he wanted ein Volk, ein Reich (one people, one empire). Despite the ostensible commitment of the US President Wilson and his victorious allies to the self-determination of peoples, such self-determination had been denied to the Germans at the end of the First World War. Anschluss (union) with the rump Austrian state was not permitted. At the same time the new states of Czechoslovakia and Poland contained significant German minorities. The ambition to unite all ethnic Germans in a single Reich thus had highly disruptive implications for Central and Eastern Europe.

Even these pan-German aims, however, were not sufficient to satisfy Hitler. He further believed that the German people were being forced to live in a territorial area that was overcrowded and could not meet their needs. Such circumstances bred moral and political decay, especially as many of a nation’s best qualities were to be found not in the cities but in the rural areas and among the peasantry. This became known as the ideology of Blut und Boden (blood and soil). What the German people needed was Lebensraum (living space). In turn this raised the question: where was such living space to be found? One answer might be in the possession of colonies; but Hitler quickly rejected such a solution. Colonies could not be easily defended and could be cut off from the Fatherland by naval action, exactly as had happened between 1914 and 1918. Any German bid for colonies was also likely to antagonise Britain, according to Hitler the very mistake that the imperial leadership had made before the First World War. Increasingly, therefore, he came to believe that Lebensraum would have to be found in the east of Europe and in Russia in particular, where foodstuffs and raw materials were also abundant. Here then was a programme which implied war in the east. In Hitler’s view, such a war was to be welcomed. First, he subscribed to a crude form of social Darwinism, which claimed that wars between peoples were a natural part of history. Pacifism he dismissed as a Jewish invention! Second, a war against Soviet Russia would be a holy crusade against Bolshevism, a claim that had no little attraction, not only to many Germans, but also to conservatives throughout Europe. Third, a war against Russia would be a war of superior ‘Aryans’ (the term Hitler restricted incorrectly to the Nordic peoples) against both inferior Slavs and disastrous Jewish influence – for Bolshevism was yet another evil that Hitler considered to be a Jewish concoction. Indeed, he believed in the existence of an international Jewish conspiracy which embraced both international Marxism and international finance. Like many fellow anti-semites, Hitler thought that the existence of such a conspiracy had been demonstrated by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document which was forged by the Tsarist secret police and intended to distract popular discontent away from the regime and towards the archetypal Jewish scapegoat.

The core of Hitler’s obsessive beliefs and prejudices was a virulent racism, a vicious anti-semitism, set out in the chapter on ‘People and Race’ in Mein Kampf. Here Hitler stated that the peoples of the world could be divided into three racial groups: the creators of culture, the bearers of culture (people who can imitate the creations of the superior race), and inferior peoples who are the ‘destroyers of culture’. Only ‘Aryans’ were capable of creating cultures, which they did in the following way: small groups of well-organised Aryans, prepared to sacrifice themselves for the communal good, conquered larger numbers of inferior people and brought to them the values of culture. (It is worthy of note that ‘culture’, another undefined term, is in this account created by the sword.) For a time all went well until the master race began to mix with its inferiors. This ‘sin against the blood’ led to racial deterioration and inevitable decay. As a result Hitler came to believe that the prime role of the state was to promote ‘racial hygiene’ and to prevent racial intermixing. Subsequently the Nazi state did embody these eugenic values, with vicious consequences for the ‘impure’. Significantly the superiority of the Aryan resided, according to Hitler, not in the intellect but in the capacity for work, the fulfilment of public duty, self-sacrifice and idealism. He believed that these qualities were not created by society but were genetically determined.

For Hitler the opposite of the Aryan was the Jew. Again it is significant that he explicitly denied that Jewishness was a matter of religion; rather it was inherited: that is, biologically determined. Historically a great deal of European anti-semitism had been generated by the Christian denunciation of the Jews as the murderers of Christ. Unpleasant and murderous as the consequences of this religious form of anti-semitism had often been, it had nonetheless regarded those Jews who converted to Christianity as no longer Jewish. In the pseudo-scientific, biological anti-semitism of the Nazis, on the other hand, such a possibility was excluded: once a Jew, always a Jew. And, for Hitler, being a Jew meant the invariable possession of those traits which made the Jew the opposite of the Aryan: possessing no homeland – what would Hitler have made of the existence of the state of Israel today? – the Jew was incapable of sacrificing himself for a greater, communal good; he was materialistic and untouched by idealism. Through international finance and international Marxism the Jew attempted to subvert real nations and in fact became parasitical upon them. The use of parasitical analogies reached horrendous proportions in Hitler’s thinking: Jews were likened to rats, vermin, disease, the plague, germs, bacilli. Almost anything that Hitler disliked was blamed on the Jews: the decisions of both Britain and the United States to fight against Germany during the First World War; Germany’s defeat in that war; the Russian Revolution; international Marxism; the rapacious banks; and the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The language used to denounce the Jews was significant: portrayed in inhuman terms, Jews did not have to be treated as human beings. If Jews were ‘vermin’, then they were to be treated as such: that is, eradicated. Mein Kampf spoke darkly of the ‘extermination’ of ‘international poisoners’ and reflected that the sufferings of Germans in the First World War would not have been in vain had Jews been gassed at its inception.

So far we have seen that the ideas expressed in Mein Kampf involved the possibility of war in west and east, and policies of racial hygiene and anti-semitism. They were also clear that the Nazi state would not be democratic. For Hitler democratic competition between political parties was self-interested horse-trading. Democratic politics brought out the divisions within a nation rather than unity and would not prove sufficiently strong to resist the threat of communism. What was needed, therefore, was a strong leader, a Führer, who would recognise and express the popular will and unite the nation behind him in a ‘people’s community’ (Volksgemeinschaft), in which old conflicts would be forgotten.

The various ideas that appear in Mein Kampf have raised two particular questions for historians: first, were such ideas the product of a deranged mind or, if not, what were their origins? Second, did these ideas constitute a programme that was systematically implemented in the Third Reich? In terms of the origins of Hitler’s anti-socialist and anti-semitic obsessions, and of his territorial ambitions, few historians have been prepared to dismiss him as simply mad. Much psychological speculation rests on a few shreds of miscellaneous evidence or on none at all. What is more, much of this evidence has been provided by people with axes to grind and scores to settle. This is not to say that Hitler was not obsessive about certain things, nor that he was never neurotic. He was a hypochondriac and extremely fastidious about his food, becoming a vegetarian in the early 1930s. He was pre-occupied with personal cleanliness. Most markedly, he possessed an unshakable belief in his own rightness and destiny, found it difficult to accept contradiction and had nothing but contempt for intellectuals. He could be enormously energetic at certain times, yet was often indolent (with consequences that will be explored later). Somewhat remote, he did not make friends easily but enjoyed the company of women. On the other hand, when he did make friends he remained extremely loyal to them, especially towards those who had been with him in the early days in Munich. It is true that Hitler sometimes appeared to behave in a manic way, as in the tantrums of rage thrown before foreign leaders or in the clippings seen so often by British audiences of his apparently hysterical public speeches. Much of this, however, was misleading. Hitler’s speeches were carefully planned; indeed, he practised his gestures in front of the mirror. Furthermore the speeches normally began quietly and slowly. The apparent hysteria at the end was thus planned and instrumental; and the same could be said of many, if not all, of his tantrums. It is true that towards the end of the war the Führer increasingly lost touch with reality; but, considering that he was living in remote forests, growing dependent on drugs for the treatment of ailments real or imagined and confronted with by then insuperable problems, this is scarcely surprising. In none of this is there the slightest suggestion of clinical madness.

In any case, one does not need to speculate upon the psychological consequences of Hitler’s experience of mustard gas during the First World War or certain physical peculiarities (the failure of one testicle to drop) or a supposedly ‘sado-masochistic’ personality in order to locate or understand the origins of his ideas, however evil they may have been. Sad as it may be, völkisch and anti-semitic prejudices were far from uncommon in Austria before the First World War; and it was significant that Hitler came from Austria rather than the more western parts of Germany. Indeed, many of the leading anti-semites in the NSDAP, including the theorist Alfred Rosenberg, who came from the Russian town of Reval, were ‘peripheral Germans’. For race was an issue of much greater importance in Eastern Europe, where national boundaries did not overlap with ethnic ones. The pan-German movement emerged in Austria in the late nineteenth century under the leadership of Georg von Schönerer, whose ideas had a considerable impact on the young Hitler. In part pan-Germanism, the demand for a single country for all Germans, was a response of Germans within the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the growing national awareness of other ethnic groups, among them Poles and Hungarians, with a historical nationhood, and others such as Czechs and Serbs seeking at the very least greater autonomy and in some cases independence. The virulence of popular anti-semitism in eastern Europe was equally a response to the fact that the Jewish presence there was much more marked than in Germany, where there were no huge ghettos and where Jews constituted less than 1 per cent of the total population. Racial hatred was further fuelled in the eastern parts of Europe by the fact that many of the Jews there were unassimilated, dressed distinctly and remained loyal to their own traditions. Hitler’s account of encountering a Jew on the streets of Vienna makes great play of the latter’s wearing of a caftan and ring-locks. (It should also be noted that ideas about racial hygiene were not restricted to Hitler, nor, for that matter, to Central Europe. Originating in England and adopted with some enthusiasm in the United States and Scandinavia, the idea of sterilising the infirm and degenerate was widespread in the 1920s.) Other influences on Hitler’s anti-semitism, however, were more ‘German’. This applies in particular to the views of the Bayreuth circle – to some extent to those of Richard Wagner himself but even more to those of his family survivors, admirers and Houston Stewart Chamberlain – who embraced what Saul Friedländer has described as a ‘redemptive anti-semitism’, a belief that the redemption of the Aryan required the eradication of the Jew.

The extent to which Mein Kampf constituted some kind of plan for policies later implemented by the Nazis is much more problematical. It is the case that Hitler unleashed a world war, destroyed parliamentary democracy and led a state that embarked upon the policies of racial genocide. Thus it is easy to understand why many historians have regarded the Third Reich and its barbarism as the inevitable conseque...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• IN THE SAME SERIES
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Foreword
• Glossary and list of abbreviations
• 1: Hitler: the man and his ideas
• 2: Weimar and the rise of Nazism
• 3: The Nazi state and society
• 4: War and destruction
• Conclusion
• Select bibliography