Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (55 page)

There was, indeed, an element of deception right at the heart of this rivalry between the Communist and fascist forms of totalitarianism. They were organically linked in the process of historical development. Just as the war had made Lenin’s violent seizure of power possible, and German ‘War Socialism’ had given him an economic policy, so the very existence of the Leninist state, with its one-party control of all aspects of public life and its systematized moral relativism, offered a model to all those who hated the liberal society, parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. It inspired imitation and it generated fear; and those who feared it most were most inclined to imitate its methods in constructing defensive counter-models of their own. Totalitarianism of the Left bred totalitarianism of the Right; Communism and fascism were the hammer and the anvil on which liberalism was broken to pieces. The emergence of Stalin’s autocracy changed the dynamic of corruption not in kind but in degree. For Stalin ‘was but old Lenin writ large’. The change in degree nonetheless was important because of its sheer scale. The arrests, the prisons, the camps, the scope, the brutality and violence of the social engineering – nothing like it had ever been seen or even imagined before. So the counter-model became more monstrously ambitious; and the fear which energized its construction more intense. If Leninism begot the fascism of Mussolini, it was Stalinism which made possible the Nazi Leviathan.

Hitler emerged from the Landsberg prison at the end of 1924 at almost exactly the same moment that Stalin completed the political destruction of Trotsky and established himself in a commanding position at the head of the Leninist state. The two events were connected, for Hitler now realized that he could not storm the Weimar state by force but would have to infiltrate it by creating a mass party; and the lengthening shadow of Stalin was an essential
ally in this task. It was the Communist state of 1919 which first gave Hitler his base in Bavaria, bringing together in a unity of fear the ‘black’ Catholic separatists and the ‘brown’ radical-nationalists of Captain Roehm’s private army. The core of the party was Bavarian, as well as an important group of Baltic refugees from Leninism living in Bavaria.
⁷¹
But to take power Hitler had to break out of the Bavarian enclave and move into the industrial north. In 1925 he formed an alliance with Gregor Strasser, a radical demagogue who, with his gifted lieutenant Joseph Goebbels, preached his own brand of socialist revolution to the working class. Hitler persuaded Strasser to transform his idea of a specifically ‘German revolution’, with its anti-capitalist but nationalist aims, into an ‘anti-Jewish revolution’, which had a broader middle-class appeal.
⁷²
It was Strasser and Goebbels who first established Nazism as a broad movement in the north. But at the Bamberg Conference in 1926 Hitler was able to assert his supremacy in the party and Goebbels transferred his allegiance.

During the years 1925–9, the best years of Weimar, when Germany was enjoying an industrial revival which came close to pre-war levels and there were no economic factors working in his favour, Hitler established himself as a brilliant and innovatory speaker, a hard-working party organizer and an authoritarian leader of terrifying will-power. As with Leninism, the organization was to become the basis of control once power was assumed. Hitler divided the country into thirty-four
Gaue
, based on electoral districts, each with a
Gauleiter –
whom he chose personally – and with seven additional
Gaue
for Danzig, the Saar, Austria and the Sudetenland, the objects of the first wave of future expansion. His party, like Lenin’s, was highly centralized – in himself, in effect – but it was also ‘participatory’, as was his future regime: so there was a Hitler Youth, a Nazi Schoolchildren’s League, a Union of Nazi Lawyers, a Students’ League, a Nazi Teachers’ Association, an Order of German Women, a Nazi Physicians’ League and scores of other societies. Hitler’s method was always to deny his followers any real share in decisions but to give them endless scope for furious activity (including violence).

The violence came in increasing measure as Stalinism established itself in the international Communist movement and the once highly intellectual party of Rosa Luxemburg left the study and took to the streets. There, gleefully, the SA Brownshirts of Roehm joined them in bloody battles from which both parties derived benefit. The Communists used the violence to erode the Social Democrats (whom they called ‘Social Fascists’ and treated as the real enemy), presented by them as too weak and ‘reformist’ to stand up to the naked power of
the Right. But the Nazis were bound to be the ultimate gainers because, while using violence, they posed as the defenders of ‘Aryan order’, with Weimar being too weak to uphold it effectively, and as the only force in Germany capable of exorcizing the ‘Red Terror’ and giving innocent citizens the peace of real authority. It was the constant street warfare which prevented the Weimar Republicans from deriving any permanent benefit from the boom years. Those who rejected alike a Stalinist-type tyranny and a liberal-capitalist state which could not provide national self-respect or even elementary security were always looking for a ‘third way’. That, significantly, was the original title of Bruck’s book
The Third Reich.
In the late 1920s ‘third way’ men included such influential figures as Carl Schmitt, Germany’s leading jurist, who was in no way a Nazi but who argued and pleaded in a long series of widely read books that Germany must have a more authoritative constitution and system of government.
⁷³
Another was Oswald Spengler, whose ‘third way’ embodied the
Führerprinzip
of authority, the
Führer
being a representative member of the race of the
Volk
, marked out by his charismatic leadership.
⁷⁴
Once Hitler established himself as a major public figure, he and his party fitted this specification more closely than any other contender, especially after the rise of Stalin. Spengler had warned about the new epoch: it would be an age of cruel wars in which new Caesars would rise and an élite of steely men, who did not look for personal gain and happiness but for the execution of duties towards the community, would replace the democrats and humanitarians.’
⁷⁵
The age had come: did not the very name ‘Stalin’ mean ‘steel’; where was Germany’s ‘steely man’?

Weimar Germany was a very insecure society; it needed and never got a statesman who inspired national confidence. Bismarck had cunningly taught the parties not to aim at national appeal but to represent interests. They remained class or sectional pressure-groups under the Republic. This was fatal, for it made the party system, and with it democratic parliamentarianism, seem a divisive rather than a unifying factor. Worse: it meant the parties never produced a leader who appealed beyond the narrow limits of his own following. The Social Democrats, that worthy but dull and obstinate body, were most to blame. They might have created an unassailable Left-Centre block by dropping their nationalization and taxation schemes; but they refused to do so, fearing to lose ground on the Left to the Communists.

Only two Weimar politicians had multi-party appeal. One was Gustav Stresemann, Foreign Minister 1923–9, whose death at the age of fifty-one was a milestone to Hitler’s victory. The other was Konrad Adenauer, Mayor of Cologne. By a tragic irony, Stresemann
destroyed Adenauer’s chances. City administration, drawing on the solid bourgeois traditions of the medieval past, was the only successful political institution in Germany. Adenauer ran the most highly rated municipal administration in the country with the help of the Socialists. In 1926, when he was fifty, he was asked to form a governing coalition on similar lines. He was later to show himself one of the ablest and most authoritative democratic statesmen of the twentieth century, skilfully mixing low cunning and high principle. It is more than likely he could have made the Weimar system work, especially since he would have taken it over at what, from an economic viewpoint, was the best possible moment. But Adenauer was a strong ‘Westerner’, some said a Rhineland separatist, who wished to tie Germany firmly to the civilized democracies of Western Europe, and in particular to bring about what he secretly described as ‘a lasting peace between France and Germany … through the establishment of a community of economic interests’. Stresemann, however, was an ‘Easterner’, true to the then predominant German belief in the
Primat der Aussenpolitik.
Working through Ernst Scholtz, leader of the People’s Party, and much helped by Marshal Pilsudski’s establishment of a fierce military dictatorship in Poland, which occurred during the crisis, Stresemann successfully torpedoed Adenauer’s bid to form a coalition including the Socialists. So his opportunity, which might have radically changed the entire course of history, was missed; and Hitler, the greatest ‘Easterner’ of them all, was the beneficiary.
⁷⁶

Weimar prosperity, 1924–9, was not as impressive as it seemed to some. The British
CIGS
, to judge by his reports, was terrified of Germany’s growing industrial strength.
⁷⁷
The inflation had cleared German industry’s load of debt, and during the second half of the 1920s Benjamin Strong’s bank-inflation had provided the Ruhr with huge quantities of American investment finance. German exports doubled in the five years after 1924. Production passed the pre-war level in 1927 and by 1929 it was 12 per cent higher
per capita;
Germany was investing a net 12 per cent of income.
⁷⁸
But even in the best year incomes in real terms were 6 per cent below pre-war levels. Unemployment was high too. It was 18.1 per cent in 1926, dropped to 8.8 and 8.4 for the next two years, then passed the 3 million mark again in the winter of 1928–9, reaching over 13 per cent long before the Wall Street crash brought to an end cheap American finance. After the Smoot—Hawley tariff it quickly jumped to well over 20 per cent: it was 33.7 per cent in 1931 and an appalling 43.7 per cent at one point in 1932. That winter there were over 6 million permanently unemployed.
⁷⁹

Hitler was put into power by fear. In the 1928 elections the Nazi deputies fell from fourteen to twelve and he only got 2.8 per cent of the vote. Yet this election marked the turning-point for him, for it brought a
huge surge in Left, and especially Communist, support and thus created the climate of fear in which he could flourish. By 1929 his party had 120,000 members; by the summer of 1930 300,000; and by early 1932 almost 800,000. The
SA
grew too, numbering half a million by the end of 1932.
⁸⁰
At each stage, Hitler’s support among the student and academic population rose first, then was followed by a general increase. By 1930 he had captured the student movement; the recruitment of graduates was also a function of unemployment – the universities turned out 25,000 a year, adding to a total of 400,000, of whom 60,000 were officially registered as unemployed. In 1933 one in every three of the
Akademiker
was out of a job.
⁸¹

By 1929 Hitler was respectable enough to be taken into partnership by Alfred Hugenberg, the industrialist and leader of the Nationalist Right, who thought he could use the Nazis on his road to power. The effect was to give Hitler access to business finance, and thereafter he never lacked money. The party system was visibly failing. After the 1928 election it took a year to form a government. In 1930 the Centre Party leader, Heinrich Brüning, tried to invoke Article 48 to rule by Presidential decree, and when the Reichstag refused he dissolved it. As a result, the Nazis with 107 seats and the Communists with 77 became the second and third largest parties in the Reichstag. Brüning, terrified of inflation, deflated vigorously, thus helping both Nazis and Communists, and in the second half of 1931 the international monetary system, and the era of economic co-operation, came to a startling end. Britain, followed by seventeen other countries, went off the gold standard. The tariff barriers went up everywhere. It was now every country for itself. America went completely isolationist for the first time. Britain retreated into protection and Imperial preference. Germany chose the weird combination of savage government cuts to keep up the value of the mark, with decree-laws which fixed wages and prices and gave the government control of banking policy and through it of industry. As a result, Brüning forfeited the confidence of German industry. There began serious talk of bringing Hitler into some kind of right-wing coalition. Roehm held secret talks with General Kurt von Schleicher, the political head of the army. Hitler met Hindenburg for the first time, after which the President said that, while he would not make ‘this Bohemian corporal’ Chancellor, he might employ him as Postmaster-General.
⁸²

Both Left and Right totally underestimated Hitler, right up to the second he stepped into the Chancellery. As we have seen, the Left was dependent on an antiquated Marxist—Leninist system of analysis which was pre-fascist and therefore made no provision for it. The Communists thought Hitler was a mere excrescence on capitalism,
and therefore a puppet of Hugenberg and Schleicher, themselves manipulated by Krupp and Thyssen.
⁸³
Under the influence of Stalin, the German CP at this time made no real distinction between the Social Democrats (’Social Fascists’) and Hitler. Their leader, Ernst Thälmann, told the Reichstag on 11 February 1930 that fascism was already in power in Germany, when the head of the government was a Social Democrat. Their principal intellectual organ, the
Links-kurve
, virtually ignored the Nazis, as did the only real Communist film,
Kuhle Wampe
(1932). The only notice the Communists usually took of the Nazis was to fight them in the streets, which was exactly what Hitler wanted. There was something false and ritualistic about these encounters, as Christopher Isherwood noted: in the middle of a crowded street a young man would be attacked, stripped, thrashed and left bleeding on the pavement; in fifteen seconds it was all over and the assailants had disappeared.’
⁸⁴
In the Reichstag, Thälmann and Goering combined to turn debates into riots. Sometimes collaboration went further. During the November 1932 Berlin transport strike thugs from the Red Front and the Brownshirts worked together to form mass picket-lines, beat up those who reported for work, and tear up tramlines.
⁸⁵
One of the reasons why the army recommended the Nazis be brought into the government was that they thought they could not cope with Communist and Nazi paramilitary forces at the same time, especially if the Poles attacked too. Blinded by their absurd political analysis, the Communists actually wanted a Hitler government, believing it would be a farcical affair, the prelude to their own seizure of power.