CONTENTS
COVER
ABOUT THE BOOK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1 HELPED INTO POWER
Chapter 2 CHAOS AND CONSENT
Chapter 3 THE WRONG WAR
Chapter 4 THE WILD EAST
Chapter 5 HIGH HOPES
Chapter 6 A DIFFERENT KIND OF WAR
Chapter 7 THE TIDE TURNS
Chapter 8 THE ROAD TO TREBLINKA
Chapter 9 REAPING THE WHIRLWIND
PICTURE SECTION
NOTES
NOTES ON EYEWITNESSES
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PICTURE CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
Following the success of Rees’ bestselling Auschwitz, this substantially revised and updated edition of The Nazis – A Warning from History tells the powerfully gripping story of the rise and fall of the Third Reich.
During a 16-year period, acclaimed author and documentary-maker Laurence Rees met and interviewed a large number of former Nazis, and his unique insights into the Nazi psyche and the Second World War received enormous praise.
At the heart of the book lies compelling eyewitness accounts of life under Adolf Hitler, spoken through the words of those who experienced the Nazi regime at every level of society. An extensive new section on the Nazi/Soviet war (previously published in Rees’ War of the Century) provides a chilling insight into Nazi mentality during the most bloody conflict in history.
Described as one of the greatest documentary series of all times The Nazis – A Warning from History won a host of awards, including a BAFTA and an International Documentary Award.
Laurence Rees is the writer and producer of the major BBC television documentary series World War II: Behind Closed Doors, War of the Century, Horror in the East and Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’. He won the British Book Award for History Book of the Year in 2006 for his international bestseller Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’.
Rees’ career as a writer and filmmaker, focusing on the Nazis and World War II, stretched back nearly 20 years. His body of work has won him several awards, including a BAFTA and a Grierson Award. Rees was educated at Solihull School and Oxford University and is the former Creative Director of BBC TV History programmes.
For Oliver, Camilla and Benedict
If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Jenseits von Gut und Böse
IT’S ONLY BY looking back that life takes on a pattern. That’s as true of our own individual lives as it is of the great events of history. I never thought, for example, when I embarked on Nazis: A Warning from History in the early 1990s that it would be the start of such a long journey. For it was only whilst making Warning from History that I fully realised the wealth of new historical material that the fall of the Berlin Wall had just made available in Eastern Europe. It was that, plus the growing realization that it was almost impossible to overemphasize the importance of the Hitler/Stalin war in any attempt to understand the mentality of the Nazis, that led me to move straight onto another project. I spent several more years writing, producing and directing War of the Century about the epic struggle between Nazism and Communism.
The pattern of all this work seems clear to me only now, in a way that it never was at the time, which is why I’m so grateful to BBC Books for reissuing here, not just the original Nazis: A Warning from History, but for allowing me to incorporate within it the majority of the War of the Century book. For I think the material in War of the Century – particularly the chapter ‘A Different Kind of War’ – vividly demonstrates the practical consequences of Nazism. Certainly travelling around Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine, and hearing stories about the Nazi occupation, allowed me personally to gain a greater insight into the essential nature of Hitler’s world view: a bleak landscape where pity is outlawed and life is reduced to a Darwinian struggle in which the weak deserve to suffer because it is their destiny.
Of course there are potential problems in slotting one book inside another. Some are easy to rectify – the danger of repetition, for example – and I’ve done my best to re-edit the text to avoid going over the same ground twice. I’ve also updated the content in places where my thinking has changed since writing the original words – that’s particularly the case with the section on the origins of the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’. But there remains the real danger that, by focusing chiefly on the War in the East and hearing the extensive stories of Russian veterans, an impression is created that somehow the war in the West ‘didn’t matter’. So I need to emphasize here that nothing could be further from my own belief. I grew up on the heroic stories of the sacrifice of British and American servicemen during World War II. My father flew in the RAF and my uncle was torpedoed and killed whilst serving on the Atlantic convoys. It was because I wanted to see the full story of the Western Allies’ fight against Nazism told to the widest possible audience that I devised television series such as Battle of the Atlantic and D-Day to Berlin, and then editorially oversaw their construction.
But the book you are holding in your hand is about something different. What I have tried to do here is to penetrate as deeply as I can the essential nature of Nazism. It’s not a history of World War II or an account of all the significant military decisions of the conflict, but an attempt to see how far it is possible to understand why the Germans and their allies did what they did. It is in pursuit of that aim – and that aim alone – that I thought it important to include the material from War of the Century.
As I look back on this work now, I also see another aspect of it that I didn’t fully recognize at the time. These books, and the television series that went with them, were based on approximately 100 unique interviews – many with former members of the Nazi Party. I had the chance to meet and question people who adored Hitler, worked for Himmler, fought on the Eastern Front and committed atrocities whilst members of the SS. This is now an opportunity that is no longer available to anyone else who comes after me – for the simple reason that most of the people we interviewed have since died. In the heat of the production process, focused as I was on a forthcoming transmission or publication date, it didn’t really occur to me that we were making something of value for future generations.
Of course, as the number of survivors diminishes, attitudes to Nazism and World War II will also change. For my generation the only way of understanding the world we grew up in was to know what happened during World War II: a divided Germany, the Cold War, the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe – the consequences of the conflict were all around us. But for today’s schoolchildren it is all very different. I remember the daughter of a friend asking me, when she was seven years old: ‘What came first, Adolf Hitler or the Battle of Hastings?’ To her generation Nazism is just another bit of history, part of an enormous jigsaw that has to be fitted in along with the Romans, the Normans and Henry VIII.
You won’t be surprised to hear, I guess, that I don’t think that the Third Reich is ‘just another bit of history’. I believe that a study of Nazism still offers us a level of insight into the human condition that is different from the benefits of understanding some other periods of the past. To start with, obviously, the Nazis walked the earth not so very long ago. They came from a civilized country at a time when, in the wake of World War I, a whole series of positive values and beliefs about democracy and human rights were prevalent in Europe. They smashed all that away, having gained power as a result of a series of elections that demonstrated that a majority of Germans – in voting for either the Communists or the Nazis – had chosen to vote out democracy. Given that today there are so many fledgling democracies in the world, it’s a stark warning.
Then there’s something even more significant that I think we ought to take from this history. I’d expected when I embarked upon this task all these years ago to meet countless former Nazis who would say, ‘I only committed war crimes because I was acting under orders.’ However, when a former Nazi perpetrator was pressed on why he did what he did, his most likely response was: ‘I thought it was the right thing to do at the time.’ It was a much more terrifying answer than the trite and self-serving one I’d been expecting. These former Nazis believed that their support of Hitler had essentially been a rational response to the situation around them. They told of how they had felt humiliated by the Versailles Treaty at the end of World War I, and then had to endure the revolutions and hyper-inflation of the immediate post-war years, followed by the mass unemployment and bankruptcies of the early 1930s. They craved a ‘strong man’ who would restore national pride and defeat the growing threat of Communism.
As the years went by and I met more and more former Nazis, I came also to believe that there was another dimension to their support for the Third Reich that wasn’t ‘rational’ at all. Instead, it was emotional and based on faith. The quasi-religious dimension to Nazism is obvious, of course, and I discuss this at greater length in the first chapter of the book. But we also have to recognize that Hitler as an individual provided something for these Germans that other political leaders didn’t. Hitler scarcely ever mentioned anything so dull as ‘policies’. Instead he offered a leadership couched in visions and dreams. In doing so he touched something deep within the human psyche. As George Orwell put it in his famous review of Hitler’s Mein Kampf: ‘human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags, and loyalty parades’. Many people also, Orwell might have added, like being told they are ‘superior’ to others merely by virtue of their birth, and that recent catastrophic events in their country’s history were nothing to do with them, but the result of some shady ‘international conspiracy’.
I think in many ways I was naïve about human motivation before I started on this project. I used to think that people made important decisions about their lives based on rational, intellectual criteria. Instead, the decision to follow Hitler and support him through bad times as well as good was to a large extent an emotional one. And we mustn’t think of this as some kind of uniquely ‘German’ trait. Look at your own life and ask yourself how many of the decisions you make in your life are actually ‘rational’. Was it a ‘rational’ decision you made to buy the house or car you did? Do you like certain people and dislike others for ‘rational’ reasons or ‘emotional’ ones?
And despite all of the work conducted over recent years by structuralist historians who seek to emphasize the circumstances that created Nazism, we still have to face the uncomfortable fact that Adolf Hitler was an extraordinary person who successfully played on the emotions of the German people. Of course you already had to be predisposed to believe in what he was saying to be affected by him – many testimonies contained in this book make that clear – and it needed an economic crisis over which he had no control to catapult him from obscurity to power. But the essential truth remains that for a number of people, even in the early years, meeting Hitler was a life-changing event. Albert Speer memorably said that after meeting Hitler he felt like he was living his life on ‘high voltage’, and he was not the only highly intelligent individual who felt compelled to subordinate himself to the will of the Austrian corporal. Charisma is, we learn from this history, a quality that we should treat with suspicion. More worryingly still, we also learn that we should harbour similar scepticism about those who follow political leaders out of ‘faith’.
Ultimately, there is one overarching reason why I think this history remains of worth. As I wrote at the end of the short introduction to War of the Century nearly six years ago: ‘This is not a happy story and it offers little comfort. But it should be taught in our schools and remembered. For this is what human beings were capable of in the twentieth century.’
Laurence Rees
London, October 2005
NEAR WHAT WAS the east Prussian town of Rastenburg and is now the Polish town of Ketrzyn lies a tangled mass of reinforced concrete hidden in a forest. Today, in this remote part of eastern Poland near the border with Russia, it is hard to imagine a place more distant from the heart of power. But if you had stood on this spot in the autumn of 1941 you would have been inside the command centre of one of the most powerful men in history – Adolf Hitler. His soldiers stood on the beaches of Brittany and in the wheat-fields of Ukraine. More than 100 million Europeans, who only months previously had lived in sovereign states, were now under his rule. In Poland one of the most bestial ethnic rearrangements of all time was in full swing. And, transcending all of this in evil, Hitler was just about to conspire with Heinrich Himmler to order the elimination of an entire people – the Jews. The decisions Hitler took in this now-ruined concrete city touched all our lives and shaped the course of the second half of the twentieth century – all for the worse.
How was it possible that a cultured nation at the heart of Europe ever allowed this man and the Nazi Party he led to come to power? Knowing as we do the suffering and destruction the Nazis were to bring to the world, the idea that Adolf Hitler could have become Chancellor of Germany in 1933 by constitutional means seems almost incomprehensible.
One popular way of explaining the Nazis’ rise to power is through the character of Hitler. No human being’s personality has been more discussed; there are more than twice as many biographies of Hitler than of Churchill. The Nazis themselves pursued this biographical route to extremes in their own search for an explanation of their success. Hitler’s own disciples in the Nazi Party concluded that he was not a mere mortal but a superman. ‘Hitler is lonely. So is God. Hitler is like God,’1 said Hans Frank, Reich Minister of Justice, in 1936. Julius Streicher, a Nazi with a particular fondness for hyperbole, went further: ‘It is only on one or two exceptional points that Christ and Hitler stand comparison, for Hitler is far too big a man to be compared with one so petty.’2 A new prayer was read in German kindergartens in the 1930s: ‘Dear Führer, we love you like our fathers and mothers. Just as we belong to them so we belong to you. Take unto yourself our love and trust, O Führer!’3
This is also the explanation of the Nazi rise to power that Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, wanted the whole world to have. (He himself asked of Hitler after reading Mein Kampf (My Struggle): ‘Who is this man? half plebeian, half god! Truly Christ, or only St John?’)4 In the Nazi version of history, Hitler, the man of destiny, came to power in Germany in much the same way as Christ came to save the world two thousand years ago. In both cases their careers were predetermined by their superhuman destiny. This reasoning, although seldom taken to this extreme, is still popular in some quarters today as an explanation of how the Nazis came to power. It fits with the desire many people have to understand the past simply in terms of the story of ‘great men’ who carve the world to their will regardless of the circumstances around them. There is just one problem with this as an answer to the question ‘How did the Nazis come to power?’ – it’s wrong.
The Nazi Party took part in the German general election of May 1928. Hitler had then been leader of the party for nearly seven years. The German people had by now had ample opportunity to witness his superhuman qualities and to fall under his hypnotic spell. In that election the Nazi Party polled precisely 2.6 per cent of the popular vote. In a secret Reich report of 1927 there is, in the context of the time, a sensible judgement on the Nazis; the Nazi Party has, according to this document, ‘no noticeable influence on the great masses of the population’.5 Thus the idea of Hitler having hypnotic or quasi-divine influence on the Germans regardless of circumstance is nonsense. Of course, Hitler was an extraordinary individual and his impact on events should not be underestimated, but the content of his character is not a sufficient explanation either for how the Nazis came to exist or for how they went on to gain power. The reality is that Hitler and the Nazis were just as much trapped in the circumstances of their time as we all are. Regardless of who Hitler was, only with the collaboration, weakness, miscalculation and tolerance of others could the Nazis come to power. Indeed, without a crisis that shook the world, the Nazi Party would not even have been born in the first place.
When Germany surrendered and World War I ended in November 1918, there were those in the German Army who couldn’t understand why this disaster had happened. ‘We did wonder,’ says German war veteran Herbert Richter, ‘because we didn’t feel beaten at all. The front-line troops didn’t feel themselves beaten, and we were wondering why the armistice was happening so quickly, and why we had to vacate all our positions in such a hurry, because we were still standing on enemy territory and we thought all this was strange.’ Herbert Richter’s memory of how he and his friends felt about the surrender is still vivid: ‘We were angry because we did not feel we had come to the end of our strength.’ This anger was to have dangerous consequences. Those who felt it quickly looked around to blame someone for the sudden and, to them, suspicious circumstances of the armistice. The myth of the ‘stab in the back’ grew – the idea that while German soldiers had been laying down their lives, others, behind the lines, back in the Fatherland, were betraying them. Who were these ‘others’? They were the politicians of the Left who had agreed to the humiliating armistice in November 1918 – the so-called ‘November criminals’. Germany had turned to democracy for the first time in its history at the end of 1918, and to the politicians it was obvious that continuing the war was pointless – Germany must lose. But many soldiers saw it differently; to them the circumstances of Germany’s defeat in November 1918 brought only shame and dishonour.
In Bavaria, part of southern Germany, this feeling of betrayal was keenly felt among many of the returning soldiers and civilians on the right of the political spectrum. Munich, the capital of Bavaria, was in political chaos in 1919. The socialist politician Kurt Eisner was assassinated in February and this led to the Räterepublik (the councils republic), eventually a Communist government of Bavaria, in April 1919. In the violence and disorder of that spring the military forces of the Right, in part consisting of Freikorps troops (armed mercenaries supported by the government) brutally suppressed the Communists in Munich on 1 and 2 May. The very existence of this final, Communist-led, government of Munich made it plain to many in this traditionally conservative part of Germany that their fear of Communism was well founded. ‘Long Live the World Revolution!’ ends one of the pamphlets from this period by the Communist Party of Germany – just one of the many pieces of propaganda that fed the Right’s paranoia and created an atmosphere in which radical parties opposed to the Communists could flourish.
There was another, more sinister, reason why the Munich Räterepublik was to have a lasting effect on the consciousness of the Right. The majority of the leaders of this left-wing coup were Jewish. This served to reinforce the prejudice that the Jews were behind all that was wrong in Germany. Rumours spread of how Jews had shirked their war service and of how it had been a Jew in the government – Walther Rathenau – who had deviously inspired the humiliating armistice. Even now, so the lies continued, German Jews were selling the country out as part of a worldwide conspiracy organized by international Jewry.
These lies were effective partly, and ironically, because there were surprisingly few Jews actually living in Germany. In June 1933 they numbered only 503,000, a mere 0.76 per cent of the population, and, unlike the Jewish populations of other European countries, such as Poland, they were relatively assimilated into the general population. Paradoxically, this worked in the German anti-Semites’ favour, for in the absence of large numbers of flesh-and-blood Jews, a fantasy image of Jewishness could be spread in which the Jews became symbolic of everything the Right disliked about post-war Germany. ‘Politically it was very easy for lots of people to focus upon the Jew,’ says Professor Christopher Browning. ‘The Jew became a symbol for left-wing politics, for exploitative capitalism, for avant-garde cultural kinds of experimentation, for secularization, all the things that were disturbing a fairly large sector of the conservative part of the political spectrum. The Jew was the ideal political buzz-word.’
German Jews had been the victims of prejudice for hundreds of years and banned from many walks of life. Not until the latter half of the nineteenth century were they free even to own land and farm it. Germany after World War I was a country in which anti-Semitism was still common. Eugene Leviné, a German Jew brought up in Berlin in the 1920s, suffered as a child simply because he was Jewish. Until he was four or five he used to play with other, non-Jewish children; then, when their older brothers came home, they began to say, ‘Dirty little Jew, you can’t play here, you’ve got to go.’ ‘The other children were quite sad,’ says Eugene Leviné, ‘but these boys were already full of anti-Semitism. Once, one of the bigger boys beat me up, and as a six-year-old you’re not much match for a fourteen-year-old.’ Other than that brutal experience, the anti-Semitism he experienced had a bizarre ritual to it: ‘In any new school in the first mid-morning break somebody would pick on you because you were a Jew and see what you were made of, and you’d have a fight. And if you could fight back – you didn’t even have to win – but if you could fight back adequately, they’d leave you alone.’
Yet one must be careful not to be guilty of overstatement. As everyone knows the reality of Auschwitz, it is all too simple to leap to the conclusion that at this time Germany was a uniquely anti-Semitic country. It wasn’t. While anti-Semitism existed, it was generally, in the words of Eugene Leviné, ‘not the kind of anti-Semitism that would get people to burn synagogues’. Tragically, given what was to happen in Germany under the Nazis, a number of Jews fled from Poland and Russia to Germany after World War I partly in order to escape anti-Semitism at home. These ‘eastern Jews’ tended to be less assimilated than other German Jews, and so attracted more anti-Semitism. Bernd Linn, who later became an SS officer, grew up in Germany in the early 1920s and his anti-Semitism was fed by what he perceived as the ‘foreign’ behaviour of the ‘eastern Jews’ in his father’s shop: ‘We had many Jewish customers. They took so many liberties. After all, they were our guests and they didn’t behave as such. The difference was obvious between them and the long-settled Jews with whom we did have a good relationship. But all those eastern Jews that came in, they didn’t get along at all with the western Jews, the settled ones. And how they behaved in the shop, that increased my antagonism all the more.’ Bernd Linn happily confessed to us that as a child he threw fireworks at the Jews in the school playground and, in one trick which was a personal favourite, he and his schoolmates would post pretend one-way tickets to Jerusalem through Jewish letterboxes.
Fridolin von Spaun was old enough, immediately after World War I, to have joined one of the Freikorps. Like Bernd Linn, he too was to support the Nazi Party and he too had a personal problem with Jews. ‘If the Jews had brought us something beautiful, that would have been OK,’ he says. ‘But they cheated us. When they make a fortune they go bankrupt and disappear with their pockets full. So I find it very natural that a generally anti-Jewish attitude became widespread.’ Fridolin von Spaun goes on to add, without irony: ‘Throughout my life I’ve had a lot to do with Jews, even as a child, and I must make this personal reproach to the Jews: among all those people whom I have met, not one has become my friend. Why? Not because of me. I had nothing against them. I always noticed they only want to use me. And that annoyed me. That is, I am not anti-Semitic. They are simply not my cup of tea.’
Eugene Leviné’s reaction to all this is straightforward: ‘I can’t be very outraged by something that is so pointlessly unreasonable. To say it’s unjust is to give it too much pride. It’s a form of ignorance, isn’t it? If two people have the same fault, then if it’s a Jew they say, “Well typical – what would you expect. Bloody Jews.” And if it’s an Englishman, you say, “That’s odd, that’s not the English way of behaving.” There are, after all, a hundred stories about this very attitude. About how the anti-Semite says, “This is another outrage by the Jews, and quite apart from that you Jews sank the Titanic.” And the Jew says, “But excuse me, that’s ridiculous, the Titanic was sunk by an iceberg.” And he says, “Iceberg, Greenberg, Goldberg, you Jews are all the same.”’
Against this background, on 12 September 1919, a 30-year-old German Army corporal called Adolf Hitler walked into a meeting of the German Workers’ Party in the Veterans’ Hall of the Sterneckerbräu beer hall in Munich. Hitler had been sent to observe the party by Captain Mayr, head of press and propaganda in the Bavarian section of the army. At the meeting Hitler turned on one speaker who was calling for the secession of Bavaria from Germany and, showing an immediate rhetorical gift, demolished his arguments. Anton Drexler, a locksmith, who had founded the right-wing party only nine months previously, immediately asked Hitler to join.
Who was this man who walked into history that night at the Sterneckerbräu? Nothing in his first thirty years had marked him out as anything more than an oddball. A failure at school, a failure in Vienna where he had been rejected by the Academy of Graphic Arts, his only success in life had been as a soldier in World War I where his bravery had won him an Iron Cross First Class.
Sources for Hitler’s life before that meeting in the Sterneckerbräu are sketchy. One of the chief ones is Hitler’s own writing, dating from 1924, in Mein Kampf. Here he writes how, as he travelled through Vienna before World War I, ‘I began to see Jews, and the more I saw the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity . . . Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it?’ These familiar words confirm the idea Hitler wanted us to have – that here was a human being who had been set in his anti-Semitic views from the first. But is it true? Some of the most intriguing new work on Hitler’s time in Vienna has recently been completed by Dr Brigitte Hamann. She set herself the task of minutely checking the registration details of the people with whom Hitler had come into contact at the Viennese men’s hostel where he lodged. This led her to a startling conclusion: ‘The picture which Hitler gives of Vienna in Mein Kampf is not correct. He says he became an anti-Semite in Vienna, but if you check the contemporary sources closely, you see that, on the contrary, he was very good friends with very many, extraordinarily many Jews, both in the men’s hostel and through his contact with the dealers who sold his pictures.’ She found that none of those many Jews with whom Hitler had good relations during his time in Vienna said that he was an anti-Semite in the period before 1913. Indeed, says Dr Hamann, Hitler ‘preferred’ selling his paintings to Jewish dealers ‘because they took risks’.6
This is an important discovery. It demonstrates that Hitler, far from being the certain, quasi-divine individual he wanted us to think he was, had actually been buffeted around by circumstances as much as anyone else. In Vienna, according to Dr Hamann, Hitler ‘didn’t harm anybody, he was law-abiding, he painted fairly good paintings to make ends meet. He was an innocuous person.’ The events that turned this ‘innocuous person’ into the Hitler that history was to know were the same events that traumatized the rest of Germany – World War I and its immediate aftermath. After his time in Vienna, in order to make sense of the new circumstances around him, Hitler, according to Dr Hamann, remembered the prophecies of the rabid Austrian anti-Semites and began spouting them himself.
A common thread in almost all of Hitler’s political philosophy is theft. Most often he simply stole his arguments from others. But perhaps he knew that a ‘great man’ does not steal ideas, something that led him to place the origins of his vicious anti-Semitism in Vienna rather than in the commonplace feelings of betrayal and hatred felt by millions in 1918 and 1919.
Hitler falsified his own early history in other ways. Once he became famous, he was eager to show that he had been one of the earliest members of the German Workers’ Party – member number seven. The fact that Hitler had been party member number seven was expressed to us by a number of former Nazis, proud of the fact that the Führer had been in at the start, shaping the fledgling Nazi Party from the very beginning. But it’s not true. Anton Drexler wrote a letter of complaint to Hitler in January 1940: ‘Nobody knows better than yourself, my Führer, that you were never the seventh member of the party, but at best the seventh member of the committee when I asked you to step in as propaganda representative. A few years ago I was forced to complain about this at a party meeting, that your first German Workers’ Front card which carried Shüssler’s and my own signature had been falsified, whereby the number 555 had been deleted and the number seven inserted . . . How much better and more valuable it would be for posterity if the course of history had been portrayed as it really had happened.’7
However, during 1919 Hitler discovered he did have one genuine and original talent – a gift for public speaking. So effective was he at the kind of rabble-rousing speeches then necessary to distinguish one far-right party from another that the German Workers’ Party began to grow in membership. One of the earliest to join was Ernst Röhm, a Reichswehr (German Army) captain, who rapidly came to recognize the crowd-pulling attraction of Hitler’s personality. Röhm was a man who liked action. ‘Since I am an immature and wicked man,’ he said, ‘war and unrest appeal to me more than good bourgeois order.’8 The party Hitler wanted could use a thug like Röhm. ‘Brutality is respected,’ Röhm once stated. ‘The people need wholesome fear. They want to fear something. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive.’9
Within two years of joining the German Workers’ Party Hitler had become its most valuable asset. His speeches attracted new members and his personality began to shape its growth. After a power struggle within the party in August 1921, Hitler emerged victorious, confirmed as the absolute ruler of the renamed National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazis for short (a change of name made in February 1920 in an attempt to appeal both to nationalists and socialists). From the first this was a party that traded less in detailed political manifestos than emotional commitment, rejecting democracy, preaching revolution. ‘I joined the party because I was a revolutionary,’ Hermann Göring was later to say, ‘not because of any ideological nonsense.’10 The mission of the party was and would remain plain – to right the wrongs done to Germany at the end of World War I, to punish those responsible and to ‘annihilate the Marxist world view’.
In terms of this general policy there was little to distinguish the embryonic Nazi Party from the host of other small, extreme right-wing groups that flourished in the turmoil of post-World War I politics in southern Germany. The first party programme, presented on 24 February 1920, was a mish-mash of vague economic promises intended to protect the middle class and small businesses, coupled with a clear commitment to exclude Jews from full German citizenship. In none of this was the party unusual. Indeed, in its published programme of action it did not go as far as some other right-wing groups of the time. In the Marktbreiter Wochenblatt, the party newspaper of the German Protection and Defiance League, there appeared the following statement: ‘It is absolutely necessary to kill the Jews.’11 Another pamphlet read: ‘What shall we do with the Jews? Don’t be afraid of the slogan “No violent anti-Semitism” because only through violence can the Jews be driven away.’12
The symbols of the young Nazi Party were as unoriginal as its ideas. The swastika was already popular with other German right-wing groups before it was adopted by the Nazis. The skull and crossbones, which would become infamous on the caps of the SS, had been used by the German cavalry. Even the stiff-armed Roman salute was taken from the greeting used by Mussolini’s Fascists.
In one respect, however, the Nazi Party was different. Though these were violent times, this was, from the first, an exceptionally violent movement. In 1921 ‘Storm Detachments’ were formed from the innocuously named ‘Gymnastic and Sports Section’ of the party to protect Nazi meetings and to disrupt the gatherings of rival parties. Battles between Nazi Storm Troopers and the followers of other political parties would be a common feature of German political life until 1933.
Since the Nazis were preaching that they were the ‘salvation’ to Germany’s problems, it followed that their own fortunes would depend on the extent of the difficulties the country faced. The party had been born out of the trauma following the end of World War I and could flourish only in an atmosphere of political instability. Thus the Nazis benefited when a new crisis occurred involving the French. Angry at Germany’s failure to keep up with reparation repayments, France sent troops to occupy the Ruhr at the beginning of 1923. For a nation already dismayed by the loss of honour that accompanied the armistice of November 1918 and the harsh terms of the Versailles peace treaty this was a grave humiliation. The German sense of shame was further increased by the behaviour of the French Army of occupation. ‘That was when we found out that the French ruled with an iron hand,’ says Jutta Rüdiger, the woman who was later to head the BDM, the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth. ‘Perhaps they simply wanted their revenge. Revenge is an emotion I do not know at all.’ Frau Rüdiger then adds the following assessment of the French; more than ironic given what the Nazis were later to do, but none the less revealing: ‘But the French have a slightly different character, don’t they? Perhaps there is a tiny bit of sadism there.’
Bernd Linn was five years old when he witnessed the French occupation of the Ruhr. As the French soldiers marched past, he stood on the pavement by his grandfather’s house, wearing a child’s army uniform and carrying a toy gun: ‘I turned round and then a Frenchman came and he disarmed me – apparently he needed this for his children. And I felt very hurt.’ Bernd Linn, the little boy from whom the French took a child’s pop gun, later became a colonel in the SS (Schutzstaffeln – originally the personal bodyguard of Hitler in 1920s).
The Ruhr crisis coincided with Germany’s massive economic problems – most notoriously, runaway inflation. ‘I once paid 4 billion marks for a sausagemeat roll,’ says Emil Klein, who attended his first Hitler meeting in 1920. ‘And this collapse naturally supported the Hitler movement and helped it grow, because people said, “It can’t go on like this!” And then slowly emerged the discussion about the need for a strong man. And this stuff about a strong man grew more and more because democracy achieved nothing.’
In the political crisis caused both by the French occupation and Germany’s economic difficulties, the right-wing Bavarian authorities clashed with the government of Gustav Stresemann in Berlin. The central government in Berlin tried to make the Bavarian authorities censor attacks by the Nazi paper, the Völkischer Beobachter, on Stresemann and his government. Kahr, the newly appointed state commissioner of Bavaria, refused, as did General von Lossow, the local military commander. In this atmosphere of internal conflict, Hitler attempted to hijack a meeting at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich at which both Kahr and von Lossow were speaking. Hitler called for a Putsch (national revolution) to overthrow the central government. The Putschists began a march the next morning, intending to press on to Berlin. Emil Klein took part in that Nazi march through Munich; alongside him were Hitler, Göring and Himmler. ‘We shone as marchers that day,’ he recalls with fervour. ‘But then we turned on to the Maximilianstrasse and as I came to the corner of the Residence [the palace of the former kings of Bavaria] we heard the shots ahead. What’s going on?’
When confronted with the choice of cooperating in armed revolution or supporting the Bavarian authorities the police made a clear decision; they rejected the Nazis and shots were fired (it is unclear who fired the first shot – the marchers or the police). Thus, the Putschists’ march through Munich came to a violent end. ‘You asked me what emotions I felt,’ says Emil Klein. ‘I’d like to say that actually those were the first political emotions that I ever had. The way things can go wrong. That in itself was a blow to me and to many of my comrades. That such a thing could happen.’ Hitler, too, was to learn from this experience. From now on the Nazis tried to gain power from within the democratic system.
Hitler, meanwhile, was arrested and his trial began on 26 February 1924. He was charged with high treason and the evidence against him was damning; not only had the Nazis committed armed robbery during the Putsch, but the violent confrontation had resulted in the death of three policemen. But unlike the others implicated in the failed Putsch, such as the World War I hero General Ludendorff, Hitler stood up and took full responsibility for his actions. His speeches to the judges made him known throughout Germany and he became, for the first time, a national figure. ‘Gentlemen,’ Hitler told the court, ‘it is not you who pronounce judgment upon us, it is the eternal court of history which will make its pronouncement upon the charge which is brought against us . . . You may pronounce us guilty a thousand times, but the goddess who presides over the eternal court of history will with a smile tear in pieces the charge of the Public Prosecutor and the verdict of this court. For she acquits us.’13 Brave words, but based upon deceit. What the vast majority of Germans did not know at the time was that as Hitler gave that speech he had every reason to suppose that he would be treated extremely leniently by the court, and a man is not courageous when he knows there is virtually no risk. For the judge who presided at the Putsch trial, Georg Neithardt, was the same judge who had sat at another lesser-known trial in January 1922. On that occasion the defendants had been accused of violently breaking up a meeting in the Löwenbräu cellar the previous September. They had been charged with the minimum possible offence, breach of the peace, then given the minimum possible sentence, three months in prison. Yet Georg Neithardt wrote to the superior court, saying that he wanted the sentence to be even more lenient, believing that the ‘purpose of the imprisonment could be achieved by the imposition of a fine’. One of the defendants at that trial was Adolf Hitler. Judge Neithardt was so taken with him that he managed to press his superiors to allow Hitler’s sentence of three months in prison to be commuted to one month in prison with a period on probation. Hitler was standing in front of this self-same judge during the Putsch trial, a man he knew to be extremely sympathetic to his cause. It was in the courtroom of Georg Neithardt that Hitler made his impassioned speech to the ‘eternal court of history’. It is hardly surprising then, that after they came to power the Nazis seized almost all the documents relating to this first trial and burnt them. The sentence in the second, famous case was therefore predictable: five years’ imprisonment – the minimum possible – but with the assumption that Hitler would soon be out on probation.
The Bavarian government have a great deal to account for. The Nazi Party had been banned in most German states in 1922, but not in Bavaria: there the Nazis were tacitly encouraged. After his conviction for high treason, Hitler was imprisoned in relative comfort at Landsberg Prison, near Munich, where he occupied himself by working on Mein Kampf.
While Hitler was in Landsberg, the Nazi Party split into factions. It was only after his release in December 1924 (after serving less than nine months of his five-year sentence) that the party could be put back together again. The Bavarian authorities acted true to form and allowed the party to be refounded on 27 February 1925 at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich. But by now events in Germany were against the Nazis. The hyper-inflation was over and the future appeared full of hope. The middle years of the 1920s were the Weimar Republic’s so-called ‘golden’ period. But this new prosperity was financed on credit; the German government used borrowed money to pay the Allies their reparations. Still, at the time, everything looked idyllic. The Nazis could never flourish in such sunlight and they were reduced to a tiny rump of fanatical support. Without a crisis to feed on, they were lost. Until the end of the 1920s they were active only at the margins of German political life.
Yet it was during these quiet years that the party evolved structurally into the Nazi Party which was eventually to govern much of Europe. Hitler’s position became increasingly secure. He easily brushed away a small internal challenge to his absolute authority in 1926 by a simple appeal to loyalty. The collapse of the party during his absence in prison had demonstrated that it was only his presence as leader that held the movement together.
The Nazis were not a political party in the sense that we today understand the concept. Little in the way of detailed Nazi policy was ever published. A commitment to the Führer (as Hitler became known around this time) and a general belief in the aims of the movement was enough to prove one’s loyalty. This was a party not of talk but of action, not of policy but of emotion. As a philosophy, this appealed particularly to the young; research shows that during this period the average age of those joining the party was less than thirty. One young man who joined at the age of twenty-five was a failed novelist called Josef Goebbels. Looking back fondly on the 1920s, after the Nazis had come to power, he spoke emotionally to a group of young people about these years of struggle: ‘Then there were young people who wrote the word “Reich” on their banners, against a world of hatred and calumny and malice. They were convinced that a lost war was not enough to push a people into permanent servitude.’
‘It was exciting,’ says Wolfgang Teubert, who joined the Nazi Storm Troopers in the 1920s. ‘There was the comradeship, the being-there-for-each-other, that’s for a young man something outstanding – at least it was then.’ Something else the party offered a man like Teubert, who wore the Storm Trooper’s brown shirt with pride, was a sense of importance. In that shirt he may have been young, but he was still a somebody: ‘We marched behind the swastika flag, marching through the towns. Outside working hours there was nothing but the Storm Troopers.’ And then there was the factor that perhaps appealed most to these youths – fighting. ‘There was the danger, the threats from other people. Night after night we increasingly provided protection at hall meetings not just in our town but in many other towns to strengthen the Storm Troopers there. We had no weapons, the most we could do was defend ourselves with our fists and only work the enemy over with our fists – where it was necessary. And it was necessary more often than not!’ Teubert and his friends in the Bochum Storm Troopers would regularly fight the youths of the Communist Party. ‘Breaking up the chairs in the hall and then fighting with the chair legs, that happened quite a lot.’ Teubert smiles at the memory. ‘Both sides did that, each as much as the other.’
Bruno Hähnel came into the Nazi Party at the same time via another popular route – from the Wandervogel, a ‘folklorical’ group which sought a return to nature and its values. At weekends, as a young Wandervogel, Herr Hähnel would wander with friends through the countryside. He dates his decision to join the Nazi Party to a discussion evening held in a youth hostel in 1927: ‘There was one about the subject of internationalism and among other things it was said that one had to reach the point of being able to marry a Negress. And I found that thought very uncomfortable.’ In so far as other reasons influenced Herr Hähnel in his decision to join the Nazi Party, they were the usual negative feelings about Versailles and the ‘November criminals’ of 1918. As a result, he had a strong ‘resistance’ to any international movement such as Communism. ‘Many of us said simply, “We are Germans first”,’ says Herr Hähnel, ‘and now there was a group who said “Germany first”. They shouted, “Germany awake!”’
Recruits like Herr Hähnel were not concerned that they were joining an anti-Semitic party: ‘I still remember those statements which frequently occurred, that 50 per cent of all Berlin doctors were Jews, 50 per cent of all Berlin lawyers, that the whole press in Berlin and in Germany was in the hands of the Jews and this had to be done away with.’ While tacitly supporting this anti-Semitic idea in principle, Herr Hähnel had no problem in reconciling it with the realities of his own family life: ‘I had relatives who were Jews and we would meet at family gatherings. I had a very warm relationship with two cousins who were Jewish. It didn’t stop me from agreeing with the other things which the party demanded.’
For other young people at the time, such as Alois Pfaller, this anti-Semitic attitude proved a barrier to joining the Nazis: ‘That was something very strange,’ he says, ‘this extreme anti-Semitism, the Jews being held responsible for everything. I knew Jews and I had friends with whom I used to spend time and I absolutely didn’t understand what difference there was supposed to be – we’re all humans . . . I have always stood up for justice – what is just and reasonable, that was my problem, and also fighting injustice, that was my problem, and not somehow persecuting other races or other people.’ Alois Pfaller turned his back on the Storm Troopers, but, still looking for a radical solution to the country’s problems, he joined the German Communist Party.
Hitler saw his personality as the Nazi Party’s greatest strength; he cultivated ‘great man’ mannerisms, such as staring straight into the eyes of whoever was speaking to him. Fridolin von Spaun remembers just such an encounter with the Führer at a party dinner: ‘Suddenly I noticed Hitler’s eyes resting on me. So I looked up. And that was one of the most curious moments in my life. He didn’t look at me suspiciously, but I felt that he is searching me somehow . . . It was hard for me to sustain this look for so long. But I thought: I mustn’t avert my eyes, otherwise he may think I’ve something to hide. And then something happened which only psychologists can judge. The gaze, which at first rested completely on me, suddenly went straight through me into the unknown distance. It was so unusual. And the long gaze which he had given me convinced me completely that he was a man with honourable intentions. Most people nowadays would not believe this. They’d say I am getting old and childish, but that’s untrue. He was a wonderful phenomenon.”
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