Ominous Parallels (29 page)

it was a major triumph to be thus received into proper society.... When this mighty leader of the German Nationalists accepted Hitler, the man who had previously been rejected and despised by ‘decent’ people ... many Germans felt obliged to take Hitler seriously and to forget his record of misconduct.

Thereafter the Nationalists made money available to Hitler, joined with him in a powerful united front (the Harzburg Front of October 1931), backed him in a presidential runoff election (April 1932), and, at the end, were eager to serve in the first Nazi cabinet. “We see in National-Socialism the German Liberation Movement,” explained one ardent Lutheran pastor, “which we would profess even were it to be led in the name of the Devil.”

It would be quite safe, said Hugenberg, to let Hitler become Chancellor, because the cabinet would be filled with traditional conservatives, who would keep him in line. “In this way,” said Hugenberg, “we will box Hitler in.”
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The Communists, too, wanted to use Hitler. Time after time their deputies voted with the Nazis in the Reichstag; they voted against legislation designed to cope with emergencies, against measures designed to curb violence, against the attempt to maintain in office any kind of stable government. The Communists even agreed to cooperate with Nazi thugs. In November 1932, for instance, the two mortal enemies could be observed standing comfortably, shoulder to shoulder, on the streets of Berlin, collecting money to support a violent strike by the city’s transportation workers.

When Hitler’s fortunes seemed to be faltering for a time in 1932, a stream of anxious Nazis poured into the ranks of the Communists; the Germans watching said that a Nazi is like beefsteak: brown on the outside, red on the inside. Soon, however, the traffic was in the opposite direction. “[T]here is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it,” said Hitler to Rauschning.

There is, above all, genuine revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere in Russia except where there are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The
petit bourgeois
Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will.
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In the final months the Communists viewed the growing Nazi strength with equanimity. The triumph of Nazism, they said, has been ordained by the dialectic process; such triumph will lead to the destruction of the republican form of government, which is a necessary stage in the achievement of communism. Afterward, they said, the Nazis will quickly fade and the party of Lenin can take over.

In July 1932, despite the machinations of the Nazi-Nationalist-Communist axis, the two main republican parties, the Centrists and the Social Democrats, were still holding about 40 percent of the electorate. (The Democrats, having lost their following, were virtually extinct. So was the People’s party.)

The Centrists during the depression were stressing to the nation’s Catholics the urgent need for a moral reawakening, to consist of anti-materialism, social consciousness, faith, and discipline. The party was also seeking an emergency alliance with like-minded groups so as to form a “bloc for public order.” In this regard party leaders did not hesitate to be specific. Repeatedly during 1932 they called for a “strong national government in tune with the interests of the people and including the National Socialists.”

The responsibilities involved in sharing power, the Centrists said, would “channel” the Nazis into more temperate paths and would “tame” Hitler.
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The Social Democrats, meanwhile, were being “tamed” in another way by Chancellor Franz von Papen. In July 1932, using only a token armed force, he ousted them illegally from the government of Prussia. The party leaders understood that this coup, if uncontested, would mean the loss of their last bastion of strength. But they observed the swelling ranks of the Nazis and Communists; the Prussian police and the German army brimming with nationalist militants; the millions of unemployed workers, which made the prospects for a general strike bleak—and they decided to capitulate without a fight, lest they provoke a bloody civil war they had no heart to wage and little chance to win.

There were not many Social Democrats who rose up in fury over the “rape of Prussia.” The party had long since lost most of those who take ideas or causes seriously. There was not much youthful ardor to summon to the side of social democracy. “Republik, das ist nicht viel, Sozialismus ist unser Ziel” (“A republic, that is not much, socialism is our goal”)—such were the signs carried in parades by young workers of the period.
¹²

The republicans from
every
political party and group were in the same position: more and more, the contradictions involved in their views were leaving these men lifeless, and even speechless. They could hardly praise freedom very eloquently, not while they themselves, like everyone else, were insisting on further statist measures to cope with the economic crisis. They could not extol self-government, when the Reichstag had just collapsed. They could not affirm even the principle of statism, while they were struggling to stave off totalitarianism.

To the last-ditch spokesmen of Weimar, from whatever party they hailed, political ideas as such became an embarrassment; theory was not a means of enlisting support or aiding their cause, but a threat to it. The solution of most such men was to counsel “practicality” while dismissing “abstractions,” i.e., to turn pragmatist and become enemies of ideology.

We must get away from the “unfruitful controversy over the terms capitalism and socialism,” said Chancellor von Papen in a July 1932 radio address designed to rally the country. Instead, he said, Germany should be guided by a moral principle: “general utility comes before individual utility.”
¹³

The principle is right, answered the Nazis; and it means the end of the Republic.

On December 15, General Kurt von Schleicher, the last pre-Nazi Chancellor, delivered his version of anti-ideology. He explained in a fireside broadcast “that he was a supporter ‘neither of capitalism nor of socialism’ and that to him ‘concepts such as private economy or planned economy have lost their terrors.’ His principal task, he said, was to provide work for the unemployed and get the country back on its economic feet.”
¹⁴

It is our task, too, answered the Nazis; but a drastic problem requires a drastic solution.

The spokesmen of Weimar had no answers. They could not set aside lesser differences and unite in the name of an overriding political principle; having rejected ideology, they acknowledged no such principle. They could not suggest any alternative to the Nazi plan for a Führer-state; they had no definite idea to communicate, except a gingerly fear of definite ideas.

The totalitarians knew what they stood for. The non-totalitarians stood for nothing, and everyone knew it. “Democracy has no convictions,” sneered one of the Nazis. “Genuine convictions, I mean, for which people would be willing to stake their lives.”
¹⁵

The symptoms of the end were the messiahs preaching God to wild-eyed mobs; the bookstores flaunting titles such as
The Whip in Sexuality, Massage Institutes, Sappho and Lesbos;
the promiscuity, the nudism, the orgies; the cocaine and opium addiction; the venomous xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Still more eloquent was the collapse of the universities, and its corollary: the murder in the streets.

The Weimar students practiced everything they had learned. Believing that objectivity is impossible, they did not try to reason about political questions. Believing that a man is nothing in the face of the community, they did not concern themselves with an opponent’s individual rights. Committed to action based on feeling, they responded to disagreement by unstopping their fury.

The students launched violent mass demonstrations on campus. They invaded the classes of unpopular professors. They gathered in jeering mobs outside lecture halls. They rushed hotly into head-smashing brawls and they coolly instigated bloody riots, both of which soon became routine at the German universities.

When the defenders of one besieged professor appealed to the authorities for help, the Prussian minister of education, a Social Democrat,

promised that he would not give in, that the professor had the full protection of the government. The excited students committed excesses in the lecture building, prevented students who wanted to attend from coming to classes by bodily force—and got away with it. The professor was given leave of absence for an indefinite time, the students who had wanted to stand up for him were threatened and ill-treated.
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The student rebels defended their actions by claiming that the universities must serve the people, and therefore must be transformed into agents of revolution. The rebels dismissed the view that a university should uphold freedom of thought; they rejected free thought; fundamentally, they rejected it on the grounds that thought as such is a waste of time.

The universities could not survive the assault for long. They bowed to the rebels’ demands. They ceased being centers of learning during the Weimar years. The agent of enslavement had not been Hitler, but their own students.

The faculties, the administrations, the authorities, and the press explained to the country that the universities were not enslaved and that the students were victims. “I remember Germany and Austria in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s,” writes an American who served in the U.S. Embassy in Austria. The “idealistic youth”

broke up classrooms, invaded university campuses, broke shop windows. The liberals of Berlin and Vienna sprang to the defense of the youth. They labeled any police action against them as ‘brutality.’ One of the phrases used to describe the idealistic German youth by editorial writers and educators, believe it or not, was ‘the culturally deprived.’ ... When they broke windows of Jewish shops, the liberals—even intellectual Jews of Germany and Austria—said: ‘how else shall they show their resentment? Most of the shops just happen to be owned by Jews.’
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Hitler was soon equipped to show his resentment, too. In 1930 the SA had numbered upwards of 60,000 men. A year later it had grown to about 170,000. By late 1932 it reached at least 400,000.

Increasingly, especially at election times, savage physical battles erupted throughout the country between young Nazis and young Communists. The weapons used ranged from fists and knives to grenades and bombs. The toll of dead and wounded became a commonplace, which was reported by the press in the manner of automobile accidents or the weather.

Many Germans begged the government to restore order. The student rebels and their professorial defenders had, however, been a microcosm. The new youth “are saturated with hatred,” Heinrich Mann had observed as early as 1922.

But the older generation has a bad conscience, and never punishes them. All protests, all threats and actions of the young are directed against the older generation and its way of life. The old note all this carefully—and give them even more freedom of action. If shots are fired, they frown and wait for the next shooting. They go to the theater and warmly applaud the plays about the most popular of subjects-parricide.
¹⁸

The older generation, liberal and conservative alike, was squirming with guilt. It was disarmed by the fact that, while it disapproved of the street thugs’ actions, it agreed with all their basic premises and ideals. The Social Democrats had opposed the Communists in the postwar upheavals, but had been and still were loath to confront or denounce them. Now the law-abiding rightists were caught, too. Though they actively disliked the gangs of idle, brawling Storm Troopers, they were unable to condemn or resist men whom they themselves regarded as idealists.

The antiwar movie
All Quiet on the Western Front
opened in Berlin in December 1930. The Nazis, making it a test case, demanded that the movie be withdrawn. Gangs of hoodlums invaded the theater, set off stink bombs, let mice loose among the audience, and threatened patrons with bodily harm. The government decided to restore peace—by banning the movie.

In April 1932, beset by demands that the violence be stopped, the government imposed a ban on the SA and SS; but on June 15, after a deal between Chancellor von Papen and Hitler (who promised his “toleration” of the latest cabinet), the ban was lifted.

A wave of political violence and murder such as even Germany had not previously seen immediately followed.... In Prussia alone between June 1 and 20 there were 461 pitched battles in the streets which cost eighty-two lives and seriously wounded four hundred men.
¹⁹

On August 9, 1932, the government decreed the death penalty for those convicted of political murder. The next night a band of Nazis invaded the home of a Communist worker in the Silesian village of Potempa and stamped him to death, kicking his larynx to pieces. When the killers were arrested, tried, and sentenced in accordance with the new law, Hitler responded with threats and demonstrations. On September 2, the government gave its answer: the death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. (The killers were freed by Hitler the next year.)