Das Reich der niederen Dämonen Englisch

The Empire of the Lower Demons

Ernst Niekisch

The Empire of the Lower Demons

Rowohlt

Verlag Hamburg

Umschlag- und Einbandentwurf von Werner Rebhuhn

1st - 6th thousand

Copyright 1953 by Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, Hamburg. All rights reserved, including those of reprinting excerpts, photomechanical reproduction, and translation Typesetting and printing by Clausen & Bosse, Leck/Schleswig Binding by Ladstetter & Co, Hamburg.

JOSEPH DREXEL

HORST KRUMREICH

TO FRIENDS AND COMPANIONS IN BATTLE AND SUFFERING

Part Three - The Road to War

Part Four – Conclusion

At the threshold

It is true that the fact has not remained hidden that heavy-industrial bourgeoisie prepared the Third Reich in many years of systematic work; however, one has lost sight of how this happened in detail. What the big bourgeois were aiming at had already become apparent in the Kapp-Putsch. After this failed, they continued their criminal work with new methods. Their historical responsibility for the National Socialist regiment of blood and terror becomes clear as soon as the heavy industrial-big bourgeois policy of the years 1920 to 1923 is wrested from the past.

The Kapp Putsch of 1920 had been a coup de main. The heavy industrial big bourgeoisie and the militaristic Junkertum wanted to kill the compromise of the Weimar Republic with one stroke. At that time, the capitalist dictatorship wanted to get rid of all troublesome guises, to rid itself of the false costs and to shake off the expenses for its parliamentary, liberal-humanitarian cult. The capitalist dictatorship was to come cheaper by not making a democratic fuss from now on. Meanwhile, the upper middle classes had overreached themselves. Together with its junker allies, it had already taken on too much for the moment. Its coup failed. It had to step aside and send its activist soldiers into the desert. It had to prepare itself for a campaign that demanded its strategic rationale, its tactical finesse, its due time. Before opening this campaign, it had to develop an overall picture of the situation to which it would have to adhere.

The loss of the German colonies, the merchant fleet, the foreign assets, the chasing away from the world markets had shortened the annuity on which the German bourgeoisie had been feeding. There were many mouths to be sated, many pockets to be filled. The broad bourgeois class lived as before. No one was willing to be saddled with the costs of the lost war. There was much to be gained for the big bourgeoisie if the petty and middle bourgeois groups were deprived of their pension shares. If the bourgeois masses were expropriated, the big bourgeoisie was spared having to bleed. Inflation was the raid orchestrated against the petty and middle bourgeoisie. The middle classes lost capital and interest. Its impoverishment showed what losses the war had inflicted on the national wealth as a whole. The more thoroughly the small and middle citizen was impoverished, the less the big bourgeoisie needed to reach into its pockets. If access to the pot from which interest was spoonfed was closed to the middle classes, there was no need to cut short the shares of the select few to whom access was not denied.

Admittedly, the beneficiaries of inflation were not allowed to appear as its masterminds. They wanted to cover their tracks so as not to be held accountable. If inflation appeared to be the inevitable result of predicaments, then expropriation was endured as a fate that could not be escaped. The predicaments were created; the big bourgeoisie conjured up national catastrophes in order to reap its inflationary harvest unnoticed.

One can identify a number of guidelines and principles by which the big bourgeoisie proceeded politically. The claim was championed that Germany had completely collapsed economically and, as a result, could not pay reparations. This attitude of resistance accepted the occupation of territory on the right bank of the Rhine; it was less harmful than reparations. Germany could not enter into reparation agreements until the amount of reparations had been finally determined. The currency problem could be solved neither from the monetary side nor from the side of public finances; only the economy could cope with it through more work and more production. German financial and economic policy must be based on the fundamental view that first comes the economy and then the state.

The decisive leaders of upper-middle-class politics in those years were Stinnes and Helfferich. Stinnes chose the challenge of the Entente as the expedient method of German foreign policy.

"We also," he said at the Spa conference on July 19, 1921, "as realists, envisage the possibility that we will not be able to convince you that the utmost has been done by us, so that you will proceed to the use of force, to the occupation of the Ruhr or the like. Even if this act of violence should be carried out by blacks, at the sight of whom, as bearers of public power, every white and every German's heart is outraged, nothing can be gained by it either for France or for Europe."

After this speech Sauerwein, the representative of the "Matin," asked him, "Do you know, Mr. Stinnes, that your speech could mean the breaking off of the negotiations?" Stinnes replied, "I know that and have foreseen it." A few days later, on July 21, 1921, Foreign Minister Dr. Simons told the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Reichstag: "Stinnes was of the opinion that the Allies, if they were to occupy the Ruhr, would not be able to hold it for long." In a speech in Essen, Stinnes himself confirmed this Simons charge. "I must emphasize," Stinnes elaborated there, "as I have done elsewhere, that I consider there to be less danger of any more German land being occupied. For it would then be shown to the French that they would gain nothing by it except that they would get still less at increased expense." The parliamentary spokesman for this challenging policy of "national resistance" was Helfferich. "What happens to the substance you capture?" he asked in the Reichstag on July 6, 1921. "The whole purpose is: pay to the Entente." In November 1921, he defended his disaster policy. "I see in it," he said, "the only possibility of escaping the catastrophe into which your policy will lead us in a few months with certainty and with giant strides. In such a situation, in the history of the world, only he has existed who was determined, if need be, rather to perish with honor. He who cannot make up his mind to go down with honor, if necessary, in such a situation, is worthy to perish in disgrace." On July 23, 1922, the day before Rathenau's assassination, Helfferich hurled at the government, "Salvation will come when the world has understood that in Germany it is once again - let me sum it up in one word - dealing with men." /

Through such speeches by Helfferich, the German upper middle classes let the Entente know that they were sabotaging the reparations policy of the Weimar Republic; the discount ability of the Weimar government's signature was to be called into doubt internationally. At the same time, the big bourgeoisie boycotted attempts at currency stabilization. It fought all property taxes, the Reichsnotopfer, the Vermögenszuwachssteuer, the inheritance tax. "A large part of the taxes," Helfferich said in the Reichstag on November 4, 1920, "which are already demanded of German taxpayers today in order to meet the tremendously increased current expenditures of the so-called ordinary budget, can no longer be taken by the taxpayer out of his income; he is forced to fall back on property substance to the greatest extent." It was a misconception, he asserted, "that the improvement of the valuta could be brought about at all by purely valuta-technical means by way of tax legislation." In early July 1920, the "Bergisch-Märkische Zeitung," the organ of Rhenish-Westphalian heavy industry, wrote:

"At any rate, tax evasion is not as immoral today as it was under the former nicer conditions. Serious economic reasons even make capital flight seem useful under certain circumstances. We should not even talk about the fact that other reasons of a personal nature, such as the pronounced hostility to entrepreneurs and the highly one-sided orientation of German tax and economic policy, cannot exactly induce entrepreneurship to strengthen the opposing camp through large tax payments."

When, under the pressure of public opinion, a tax on real assets threatened to be imposed, the Reichsverband der deutschen Industrie (Federation of German Industry) held out the prospect of credit assistance from German industry to the Reich on September 27, 1921. Soon thereafter, however, the Federation withdrew from its promise; Stinnes persuaded it to break its word. Industry and the export trade left the foreign currency acquired through the export business abroad. On November 9, 1921, the Reich Federation of German Industry met again. Stinnes accused the presidium of the Reich Association of highhandedness and justified a resolution against credit assistance. He imposed conditions on the state: the

Stinnes wants to privatize the Reichsbahn 13 Reichseisenbahnen were to be sold to a private legal entity. The big bourgeoisie had cut countless straps from the skin of the tormented German people by means of inflation and national catastrophe policies. Only one loot escaped it; the privatization of the imperial railroads did not reach it. Stinnes had ventured as far as the border of treason. While Rathenau was negotiating loans with London at the end of 1921, Stinnes also went to the English capital. There he advocated the plan to privatize the German railroads, claiming that this would be the quickest way to eliminate the rail deficit. He advised to combine the privatization of the German railroads with a plan for the reorganization of the Eastern and Southeastern European railroad networks. He suggested to various City personalities to solve the reparations question on the basis of railroad privatization. After German public opinion resisted handing over the Reichsbahn to private enterprise, Stinnes sought assistance from the City's financial masters. With the help of British finance capital, he wanted to take control of the Reichsbahn. However, since Stinnes was "not sufficiently aware that the leading people in the City of London have a very carefully educated sense of the common good, especially for the nation, but also for international needs, "* he was unsuccessful. The authoritative English f/eise reacted to his proposals "with irony and indignation." This raid failed because the City found no taste in standing lookout for the assassination of the "great patriot" Stinnes against the German nation.

In May 1922, the upper middle classes broke the back of a planned forced German bond issue. On September 7, Stinnes told the Belgian negotiator Bemelmans that inflation was a blessing. On November 9, he confessed that he had "always fought and would continue to fight an attempt to stabilize the mark at any price."

He thwarted the government's efforts to obtain a foreign loan. The big bourgeoisie made its own class-bound foreign policy against the Weimar leadership. When Reich Chancellor Cuno submitted reparations proposals to the London Conference on December 9, 1922, Stinnes declared in the "Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung*" on December 11: "Industry has not been asked about the German offer. We do not consider the proposal directed to London to be expedient or economically viable, because it does not bring a final solution."

In January 1923, the big bourgeoisie reached its goal; disaster struck: the Ruhr was occupied. The Reichsbank wanted to support the currency through lending despite everything. On April 18, 1923, Stinnes inflicted the decisive defeat on this support action. From April 9 onward, the Stinnes Group made inquiries for considerable amounts of sterling in Berlin outside stock exchange hours, i.e., outside the dampening control of the Reichsbank, thus making "the whole market sentiment" into "what it gradually became." On April 9, the group had bought 27000, on April 12 65000, on April 15 45000, and on April 17 10 000 pounds sterling. Until then, the mark had still held at the rate of 20,000 for the dollar; that was now the end of it. The Stinnes Group's foreign exchange collecting company, Hugo Stinnes A. G., Hamburg, did not deliver any export currency to the Reich. The Weimar state was to be financially hollowed out until it had become a docile instrument in the hands of the big bourgeoisie. Germany had "given itself over to the ragamuffin spirit of the banknote press and thereby squandered in a few years ten times what the enemy demanded of it."

However, the big bourgeoisie had done good business in the process; the patriot Stinnes had marched in the lead. The fall of the mark made the upper middle classes healthy. The Reichsbank loans, in the disguise of the bill discount, were giant gifts to the entrepreneurs. The money with which they covered their debts was always infinitely worse than the money they had borrowed. The German need, which Stinnes helped to increase, was excellent for him. His wealth swelled; everywhere he made it secure abroad. "The continued expansion of such concerns in pretty much all parts of the world," remarked the Frankfurter Zeitung, "naturally requires enormous capital, which can certainly not be procured from currency deposits, but only from large currency profits which are reinvested abroad. It is not for nothing that Herr Stinnes in particular has earned the name of the great buyer throughout the world." Briand said in the French Senate on October 27, 1923: "In Germany, the great owners, the great financial lords, the great industrialists have acquired huge fortunes."

The Inflation Charges

Because the highly self-serving heavy-industrial policy spoke the language of a national power policy, the same bourgeois strata that fell woefully by the wayside became nationalistically heated. In the delusion of their nationalist intoxication, they did not notice what was going on and what was being inflicted upon them. Their sense of causality was numbed; they lost sight of causes and effects. No one looked for blame on the upper-class strongmen because they were national strongmen. Impoverishment appeared falsely as a fate for which the "victorious states" and the Weimar Republic, which was in pact with them, were responsible. The inflationary authors, who were at the same time the inflationary beneficiaries, took the brazen inversion of things to the extreme by raising themselves up as public accusers. While emptying the piggy banks of the bourgeois middle class, they boldly pointed at labor and the Weimar ministers and shouted in the key of nationalist obsession: "Stop the thief.” In his Reichstag speeches, Helfferich described the bleak situation of the German middle classes - he described it in order to win the confidence of the impoverished. In March 1922, he exclaimed, "The Herr Reichskanzler and his policies bear the blame, and he will not be able to wash away the guilt, that it took the terrible experiences of the past year, that it took the shattering of countless livelihoods, to make the world understand to some extent the madness of the fulfillment policy." Earlier, on September 21, 1921, the "Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung" had unabashedly written:

"In the last hour, however, we have recently to make the demand that in German politics all demagogues, fantasists and fools, that all apostles of new economic doctrines, possessed by megalomania, should retire into the shadow from which they have emerged to Germany's misfortune in dark times. They have led the German people to ruin."

The big bourgeoisie pushed the bourgeois lower and middle classes down into the social depths by driving the devaluation of savings capital to zero. If it already raged against its own bourgeois flesh and blood under the trepidation of imperialist constriction, it could be no less relentless against the working classes. The pressure it exerted on the living conditions of the proletarian class was unrelenting; it wanted to cash in on the social gains of November 1918, impose wage cuts and rob the working class as thoroughly as pettybourgeois savings bank ledgers. The big bourgeoisie knew that it had to fight desperately for its existence and that its only last resort was a social structural transformation by which the worker would have to be degraded to the status of a white slave, in the deprived servitude of a rich and luxury-loving thin bourgeois upper class. The Japanese standard of living was prescribed to the German working class as a social prescription; the more thoroughly the working class swallowed these pills, the less the upper middle class needed to grow gray hairs.

Stinnes and Helfferich were also at the forefront of these big-bourgeois attacks on the social and political power positions of the working class. What the big bourgeoisie was aiming at, Stinnes had stated in the Reich Economic Council on November 9, 1922.

"I stand on the point of view," he had said there, "that the prerequisite of life in Germany is quite great overwork; and I do not presume to declare that, according to my conviction, the German people will have to work certainly two hours more a day for a number of years, ten, fifteen years, in order to bring production up to such a level that they can live and still spare something for reparations."

German industry attached to its financial guarantee offer of Mal 25, 1923, conditions that were ultimate in character. The state was to commit itself to a fundamental abstention from the private production of goods, to reorganize tax legislation according to the wishes of the big bourgeoisie, and to "legislate" the increase of general labor output. The upper middle classes demanded "with the basic maintenance of the eight-hour day, an increase in tariff work along the lines of the preliminary work of the Reich Economic Council, the creation of a law on working hours, and further relief of the economy from unproductive (i.e., social) burdens."

While Stinnes was still doing minor sociopolitical work, Helfferich was already blowing up an open storm against the power-political entrenchments of labor. "The way that leads to the solution," he said on November 4, 1920, "is not through Marxist social democracy, the way is to overcome Marxist social democracy." On March 16, 1922, Helfferich repeated: "If the German people still don't see and still haven't understood how bankrupt the whole Social Democracy is, you have to thank the friendly people for that, who always shout to an adoring public: 'For God's sake, be quiet! We can't do without social democracy! This superstition, too, will vanish in a haze."

As early as 1921, the big bourgeoisie had come under suspicion of heading for the Ruhr occupation in order to be able to realize socio-political ulterior motives.

"During this time, coal production was to continue at full capacity under the protection of the French troops, and the stockpiles were to be filled to bursting point. When such a huge stockpile had been accumulated, wage reductions and shift extensions were to be decreed and enforced by means of a lockout under the protection of General Foch. After the backbone of the miners had been broken, it was hoped to have an easy game with the rest of the workforce," wrote the "Schwäbische Tagwacht" of March 15, 1921. In October 1923, the big bourgeoisie confirmed by its actions that this suspicion had been sufficiently well-founded. Soon after the 'Ruhrkampf broke off, Stinnes, Klöckner, Velsen and Vogler went to the French General Degoutte; they requested French support for the reintroduction of pre-war working hours in the Ruhr mining industry. According to the protocol of j. October 1923, Klöckner had told Degoutte that the industry was convinced that it had been a serious mistake to give in to socialist influences and to introduce reduced working hours after a lost war. The Rhenish-Westphalian mining industry had decided to reintroduce prewar working hours, that is, eight and a half hours including entry and exit for underground workers and ten hours for above-ground workers. The industry, however, was not in a position to carry out its intentions without the support of the occupying powers.

The traitorous big bourgeois, however, had no luck; it was not in the French interest to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the German socio-political reaction. Degoutte let the "patriots" depart; he retorted that the eight-hour day was German law, that its introduction, moreover, was due to the peace treaty, and that he was in no position to intervene in negotiations between employers and employees.

Just as here the big bourgeoisie had wanted to call in a French general to help against the German workers, who had held out brilliantly during the occupation of the Ruhr, so in June 1923 it had had Stinnes negotiate in Paris with deputy Reynaud and French political and economic groups to make reparations a semipartnership between German and French industrialists. The whipped-up petty- and middle-bourgeois passion of passive resistance was an energy that the German big bourgeoisie wanted to exploit less for national victories than for huge international deals.

The big bourgeoisie gathered as much power and money as it could get. It waged its class struggle with equal ruthlessness against the bourgeois middle class as against the proletariat. It was not sentimental; it whipped up the bourgeois middle class against the French today and ran begging to their generals tomorrow. National sentiment was to it no more than the weak point at which one could seize the people if one wanted to pluck them. The upper middle class saw the fronts and understood the friend-or-foe distinction; it never lost sight of the fact that it had to box down an opponent.

This opponent was put in the wrong from the outset: he was the "shield-holder of Bolshevism". The concept of Bolshevism signaled the abyss of everything horrible; this was how the German people had been prepared since 1918. The big bourgeoisie had achieved that the curse of "Bolshevism" was attached to the heels of everyone who recited obedience to it; thus it had an easy game. Bolshevism" became the bogeyman that harnessed the capitalist domestic policy of the German bourgeoisie just as usefully for itself as its imperialist

Traitor to the country at Degoutte

foreign policy did; just as General Hoffmann, in association with Arnold Rechberg, had wanted to rally the frightened Europeans against Russia, so Stinnes and Helfferich wanted to rally all the frightened German citizens around them. The "Bolshevik" jack-in-the-box was supposed to strike everyone in the face who was suspicious of the imperialist policy of the big bourgeoisie. Once the "Bolshevik" danger had become a fixed idea of the entire German people, then it was ripe for any cure that the big bourgeoisie prescribed for it. Insofar as prudent care was taken to be able at any time to cast the cause of the working class in a "Bolshevik" light, it was easy, according to expediency and need, to rally the entire bourgeoisie against the interests of the working class.

The bourgeois interest needed an anti-Bolshevik movement that strove just as much to bring down the Soviet Union in foreign policy as it did to bring down the working class in domestic policy. Right at the end of November 1918, the German big bourgeoisie had still let the anti-Bolshevik fire blow. The quickly founded "General Secretariat for the Study and Combat of Bolshevism" was the fireplace. Purchasable intelligence was available; Helfferich dinged it. The big bourgeoisie was not stingy with money; in January 1919 the "big pot" was founded, from which from now on every adventurer, every publishing house, every party, every enterprise par excellence was fed as soon as they committed themselves to the campaign against "Bolshevism." "If the German industrial, commercial and banking world are not willing and able," declared Stinnes at the time, "to raise an insurance premium of joo million marks against the danger pointed out here, then they are not worthy to be called German industry." The bourgeoisie founded its class war treasury; it raised the money by levies. Capitalism jumped millions in order to save itself and its substantial basis, which included the power of disposal over billions. The Citizens' Council movement, the advertising offices for free corps, student labor offices, active troops, and even the Social Democratic Party received support from this anti-Bolshevik fund. The "Anti-Bolshevik League" whipped up the people through pamphlets and meetings; it incited the lansquenets on Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The "Solidarierkreis", the circle of "conscience" around Moeller van den Bruck, the Herrenklub were advertising centers where intellectuals in need of supplies were trained for the fight against Bolshevism and provided with the necessary hand money. For the comprehensive campaign against "Bolshevism", the "Anti-Bolshevik League" supplied the ideas, the Anti-Bolshevik Fund the money; but the generals and active officers, who first raised Freikorps, later the Reichswehr, in order to win in the civil war the laurels which they had not won in the world war, brought in the troops.

Since 1920, Bavaria had become the most secure base of operations for this campaign. Here, the high bureaucracy was in cahoots with political conspirators, with high and national traitorous plots, with antiBolshevik fan organizations. The police headquarters in Munich provided bourgeois femicide murderers with false passports, helped them to escape and prevented the investigation of their crimes. Here alone had the Kapp Putsch conquered terrain for bourgeois-capitalist reaction. In Munich, the Social Democratic ministers had been removed from office in the wake of the Kapp Putsch and the working class had been deprived of its political power. Since then, there had been no Weimar coalition in Bavaria; with continued separatistparticularist insurgency, the authority of the Weimar Republic was systematically destroyed from Munich. The Bavarian "cell of order" submitted to the order of the Weimar state only insofar as it suited it; the Bavarian government issued decrees that openly contradicted the Reich constitution. Bavaria rebelled against the law protecting the republic: its own national ambition, its political means of power, which gave it territorial scope and population, its state organizations served the tendencies of the German upper middle classes. Bolshevism," against which Bavaria was constantly clamoring at the time, was understood as the epitome of the legal rights of the working class and the working-class impact of the Weimar compromise solution. The civil war against the workers was to start from Bavaria. Berlin was to be conquered from Munich; in Bavaria, the bourgeois-capitalist dictatorship marched up against the democratic empire, which was permeated by proletarian influences.

The political general staff of the German big bourgeoisie, the All-German Association, had devised a "patent solution"; a dictatorial directorate was to seize power and push the workers to the wall. Bavaria was chosen as the implementing body of this patent solution.

The Weimar Republic never settled accounts with Bavaria. Even to the extent that the left-leaning bourgeoisie was involved in the Weimar compromise, it stood by Bavaria. No bourgeois democrat allowed this bourgeois reserve to be touched. Labor, too, had state-organized reservoirs of power: Saxony and Thuringia. However, the Social Democrats did not make use of them; they were more embarrassing than desirable. When in November 1923 the "patent solution" of the All-German Association was to be forced upon the Reich by the adventurous enterprise of the Hitler-Putsdies, the armed might of the Reich liquidated proletarian democratism in Saxony and Thuringia, but not bourgeois high spirits in Bavaria. The bourgeois November putsch in Munich in 1923 was a welcome occasion for the Wehrmacht to break the self-governing pillars of power of the working class in Saxony and Thuringia.

II. Search for the Caesar

In November 1918, Germany's military ruling class seemed to have played its hand. It had led the war for four years, had been in possession of unrestricted political, economic and military powers, and the capitulation of 1918 was the last word in its wisdom.

Several officers had their epaulets torn off in the November days of 1918: no master class that had plunged its people into misfortune had ever escaped more lightly. She felt the leniency of the people as weakness. No sooner was she sure that she would not be called to account than she got back on her high horse. She raised a clamor against the "mob" that denied her the respect she had not earned for a long time. She turned the handle and rolled all the blame for defeat and doom on those who had never had anything to say, but always had to obey. The same people who had kept her away from any responsibility for decades were suddenly supposed to be responsible for everything she herself had caused. She boldly claimed that victory had been within her grasp; it was only the "stab in the back" that had brought on all the disaster. When the military ruling class had to confess to the fatal end of those deeds on which it had so far lavishly lavished laurels of anticipation, it shamefully and cowardly pulled itself out of the noose. She wanted to forget all at once that she had occupied all commanding heights.

The military ruling class shamelessly shifted the entire blame for the defeat onto the people in order to gain the moral right to regain the lost positions of power in domestic politics. This goal she immediately set her sights on; she headed for it with stubborn firmness. With remarkable clarity, after the failure of the Kapp putsch in May 1920, the upper middle classes had understood that they could only rise again if they renounced the feudal-junior façade and made the cause of the pure bourgeois nation-state exclusively their own. At the same time, the instinct of the upper middle classes was that the Weimar parliamentary democracy was not the final form of the German bourgeois nation-state. On the one hand, a parliamentary state did not from the outset offer it the unlimited scope for development that it demanded, and on the other hand, Weimar was based precisely on the fact that the old ruling classes had been humiliated. The Caesarism of the nation-state was tailored to the body of the big bourgeoisie in a completely different way;

if it headed toward this, then the entire German people could be forced back into military cadre obedience, which at the same time made it possible to re-establish the "lord-of-the-house" standpoint around the big companies. It was not a false speculation to bet on nation-state Caesarism. Spengler had given the hint in his book "Untergang des Abendlandes"; he had had a fine nose. This Caesarism was demagogic in nature; one had to speak after the mouths of the same masses that one despised and wanted to take revenge on for November 1918. But if there was no other way: Paris was worth a fair, and since one was confident of being able to deceive the masses, it cost little effort to flatter them. However, it was not possible to reach the masses directly; one needed intermediaries, agents, "demagogues. The question was whether the disgraced sword would find a mouth unwashed enough to bite even at his dirty requests.

The unwashed mouth was there when the saber looked for it in the street. Hitler was "education officer", military informer, when his clients discovered him. The education officer was the barracks-yard demagogue to whom the military ruling class clung when the water began to rise to its neck in the course of 1918. The education officer had to be a man who could talk. He did not even have to wear the epaulets; he could be a non-commissioned officer if necessary, even a mere private. He had to be skilled in the art of coloring nicely and lightening the mood. He had to stand up to the naysayers, muzzle the complainers and "steel" the will to persevere. Then, when he had accomplished this day's work, he had to report: one wanted to learn from him how the pulse of the common man was beating and which agitators in particular were to be taken to task and had to be rendered harmless. He had partly to educate, partly to denounce. The educational officer was to play the masses back into the hands of the military ruling class; when he enlightened the masses, he only taught them to see the world in the light most favorable to the military ruling class.

Hitler, however, had become an education officer only after the November upheaval. He rendered services to the military leaders when they sought their laurels in the civil war; as late as 1920 he was still under the staff of the Munich Group Command. Hitler had been sent to the "German Workers' Party" as member No. 7 to see if it was an organization by means of which the "worker" and the masses at large could be enlisted in the cause of the Wehrmacht. The Reichswehr was lucky; Hitler discovered here his secret of being a popular speaker and mass leader. Thus the Reichswehr had the demagogue to set in motion the mass movement it needed. Captain Rohm became the liaison between the Reichswehr and the "German Workers' Party"; he drove members to it and opened sources of money. "I was absent", Rohm wrote in his memoir "The Story of a High Traitor", "almost at no meeting and was able to bring to the party any friend, mainly from the circles of the Reichswehr. Thus we comrades-in-arms from the Reichswehr were also able to lay many building blocks for the rise of the young movement."

The new German Wehrmacht was thus the godfather of the birth of the Plitier movement. It created the tribune for the nascent tribune and paved the way for the rising Caesar. Hitler began his political career as a creature of the Reichswehr. Generals always helped out when Hitler began to stumble. This movement, which from the beginning marched precisely in rank and file, reliably trained to cadavers' obedience, and with voluptuousness dragged both intellectual and civic freedom movements into the excrement, promised to become a perfect preparatory school for that total barrack yard into which the generals strove to transform Germany. It does not take much to make the barrack yard and the marching up in rank and file palatable to the German. The German is a "born soldier" by original disposition and historical upbringing. In him there is a tendency to violence, to strike at others, to make short work of them, to disregard the life of others as well as his own; he prefers to react with blows of his fist rather than with thoughts. The stupid Siegfried, the slow-witted hero, who never discusses because he does not have what it takes, but always immediately reaches for the sword in order to split skulls with it, which are a nuisance to him with their brains, the dumb fool, who tears apart with a spear thrust the fine web, which a resourceful mind spins: such

education

19 heroic manslayers are German ideals. He distrusts the priest and poet, the thinker and man of letters, the trained head and polished mind; here he becomes crude. This spiritless heroism is his "Nordic-Germanic blood heritage". But the subjugation under which he was forced by his noble lords, his princes and country fathers, continues to have an effect: as rough as he is when he is allowed to intervene, as strong is his reluctance to take responsibility for the chaos he causes, to take personal responsibility for the ruins he leaves behind, to take personal responsibility for the sacrifices he "kills". He wants to be commanded to the acts of destruction which he undertakes with lust; he wants to perform them out of a sense of duty - he wants to practice obedience while he rages like a berserker. Any brutality is a matter of the heart for him, if a leader has ordered it. From the faithful fulfillment of orders he draws his good conscience; by dutifully acting out the bestial basic instincts of his nature, he need no longer be ashamed of them: he is in service, and the ethos of his obedience justifies everything. The German Landsknecht, the German soldier is the hero who will stop at nothing if he is ordered to do so.

The soldierly instincts that lay dormant in the German masses had been deeply offended by the outcome of the war, by the disarmament, by the coercive military paragraphs of the Versailles Treaty. If one showed understanding for their gloomy need for revenge, they asked little about what dark cause they were being harnessed for besides. Although the Reichswehr had done enough for the time being, if the soldierly instincts were whipped up at all, it at the same time took precautions that these instincts should not enter into any social-revolutionary bonds. They were to mow the sows of the bourgeois order to their own. As the old military institutions were to be renewed, so the bourgeois-capitalist society was to be renovated at the same time. That is why the military raised Hitler on its shield, because he personally guaranteed that he appealed to the bourgeois instincts, while he drummed up the soldierly instincts.

III. The chance of the drummer

Hitler never made a choice, he never wavered, he did not decide. He had it in his mind from the beginning that only in the bourgeois front there was something to be gained for him, that with bourgeois activism one could mow a great political career. The bourgeois had to be on the post if he did not want to be swept away in the face of the Bolshevik wave, and he mowed the race who, despite the gloomy present, put the biggest raisins in the bourgeois's head. Hitler immediately staged civil war. His language, his racket and tumult, his blasts at meetings and hall battles taught that he was not interested in intellectual disputes, but that he was out to box down the proletarian opponent. The party education he cultivated was civil war drill, and the party events were civil war maneuvers. The soldierly instincts were given their due; here they marched and drilled, scouted and outwitted, punched and stabbed, commanded and obeyed. Here, one did not ponder over problems, did not ask about merits, had no scruples; what bothered one, was trampled underfoot. Thus one was rid of it in the most thorough way. With Hitler, one could be a heroic citizen: that was truly to German taste. Hitler had a way of dealing with the proletarian class opponent that instilled confidence in the citizen. If this turned out well for him, he had to become the great man of bourgeois society. The Munich Räterepublik had been Hitler's good fortune; then, at its collapse, the bourgeois had tasted proletarian blood and the thrill of victory of the civil war. Thus he was prepared for Hitler's civil war maneuvers; it was perhaps advisable after all, as had been tried out on the Spartacists, to drive the whole working class into couples. "With the heads of these people we will once again pave the road," said a Bavarian Freikorpsführer in 1919. * That was the mood of the Bavarian bourgeoisie against workers' detention in general near the end of the Räterepublik.

No sooner had the proletarian revolution risen in Munich in 1919 than it had the whole of urban and rural Bavaria against it; the traditional hatred of Prussia was buried overnight. The Bavarian citizen and peasant would rather die Prussian than perish proletarian. He cheered the North German Freikorps, who came with superior force against the heap of Bolshevik revolutionaries, and took a liking to the Prussian methods with which the victor of the civil war cooled his chin on the defeated. He found the fuselage of defenseless workers in order, and about the murder of the twenty-five innocent Catholic journeymen he did not lose a word. After the withdrawal of the Freikorps, the Bavarian bourgeois was firmly in the saddle. He felt like a dragon slayer who could take some credit for having passed such an adventure. His bourgeois sense of self could no longer stand Hoffmann's Social Democratic coalition government. After getting rid of it during the Kapp putsch, he brought the Bavarian system of government into bourgeois-clerical shape. The courts applied double standards; it made a great difference whether one stood before their bars as a citizen or as a proletarian. In the trials for war crimes and treason, Bavaria sought to cleanse itself of the "disgrace of the November coup". It should be forgotten that in 1918 the Bavarian citizen and peasant had received the Eisner Revolution with a sense of relief. The police exercised great care to cover all traces of Feme murderers. The Munich police chief Pöhner provided the Erzberger and Gareis murderers with false passports and facilitated their escape abroad. All the enemies of the Weimar Republic who were being pursued by the authorities had a merry get-together in Munich under the protection of the authorities. In contrast, legality ceased where it should have benefited the proletarian: this earned Bavaria the reputation of being the bourgeois "cell of order".

In northern Germany, Bavarians envied this regiment. Herr von Kahr's fame reached as far as Pomerania and East Prussia. Ludendorff moved to Munich; here he felt closer to Prussia than north of the Main. The North German upper middle classes took notice. Minoux, Stinnes' right-hand man, studied Munich conditions. Bavaria was teeming with civil war formations eager for restoration, with military associations and armed organizations of all kinds. They were grouped around Ludendorff; his great military authority was still intact. From it most benefit was derived by Hitler, who was hailed as the commander's national drummer.

The citizen was further along in Bavaria than in the Reich. There, one still had to get along with the Marxist worker. The bourgeois hotspurs in the German north and west praised Bavaria's mission: to purge the entire Reich of Marxism. This did not fail to have an effect in Munich, where people were confident of the deed expected of Bavaria. It was believed that there was no time to lose; the "Marxist rule" was to be broken in all German districts, and all of Germany was to be transformed from Munich into a single "cell of order. The Hitler putsch of November 1923 thus occurred as an outgrowth of bourgeois-capitalist impatience.

The Bavarian bourgeois-restorationist movement had admittedly overreached itself. Only numerically small fractions of the petty-bourgeois stratum and a contingent of the lumpen proletariat, which had nothing to lose and a great deal to gain, marched. The overwhelming majority of the bourgeoisie had observed the adventure with undisguised sympathy; direct and active assistance, however, still seemed too risky to this bourgeois majority. They feared burning their fingers prematurely. Thus, under the all too thin cover of the petty bourgeois and lumpen proletarian strata, the naked saber of the Reichswehr shone through all too clearly. The students of the Munich war school had refused to obey the legal government in favor of Hitler, and the group commander von Lossow had played a most dubious role. The Bavarian Reichswehr was compromised by its participation in the abortive putsch; it had become involved in a frivolous affair. Such a misstep could not be allowed to happen to it a second time. Hitler had to beat the drum much harder than he had done so far. The National Socialist movement had to develop into a mass movement on a completely different scale; it had to get the last village on its feet. The Reichswehr had to learn to wait until the seed had ripened and the harvest fell into its lap of its own accord. When the civil war enterprise was set in motion once more, it had to work out and be designed for the greatest conditions. The rise from demagogue to

Caesar was not to be had so cheaply; Hitler's cries had to ring in the ears of the German people for years before Germany was "awakened".

Still quite different stocks of the lumpen proletariat than had hitherto been drawn into the movement by Hitler had to be attracted. Lumpen proletarian is, as a rule, every bankrupt existence, no matter at what social level it has made its bankruptcy. The word lumpen proletarian is perhaps not well chosen; it is not true that the lumpen proletarian is primarily a mere variety of the proletarian. The proletarian, too, can sink to the level of the lumpen proletariat; but in so doing he only falls into a pool in which he meets the dregs of the bourgeois and feudal strata of society. From the best families, channels lead down into the depths of the lumpen proletariat. The lumpen proletariat is, as the Communist Manifesto says, the "passive rottenness" of old social strata.

After the lost war, one met lumpen proletarians on paths and footbridges in Germany: war volunteers who had left their studies or their apprenticeship and who, after the experiences of the battlefield, were no longer able to fit into the old bourgeois order of life, but above all discharged former active officers who knew nothing to do with themselves in civilian life. They filled the Freikorps, which marched here into the Baltic, there against German workers. Once they had belonged to distinguished society; now they no longer counted for anything - they could hardly fill their hungry stomachs. Although they slobbered against the "cowardly bourgeois," they were far from being rebels against the bourgeois order; they insulted the bourgeois for sitting in the club chair in which they were not allowed to be comfortable. They had several reasons for flirting with "socialism." On the one hand, they understood socialism to be the correction of the bourgeois distribution order through which they could once again enjoy life and luxury. On the other hand, socialism was for them a means of blackmail: the citizen was to be frightened into drawing his checkbook and paying something to prevent these "wild fellows" from being driven into the camp of the real social revolution. It is never difficult to buy the lumpen proletarian; he is constantly waiting for the buyer who will offer a decent price.

These position less officers had suffered the fate of declassification because the condition that collapsed in 1918 had become in itself untenable. The same state, however, to whose bankrupt mass they belonged, they had represented. They had been its pillars, organs and beneficiaries. The judgment that had been passed on the pre-war state was executed on them. If the state had to end badly because it was rotten to the core, then it was just and quite in order that they, as its former representative components, experienced its bad end in their own bodies. That is why they were careful not to throw stones at this past state: they wanted to restore it in order to come up again with it themselves. They did not touch tradition; they were "conservative revolutionaries". It was not internal rottenness that, in their view, had brought about the downfall of the old state; it was the working class, which had taken over the evil inheritance in 1918, that had sacrilegiously brought it down. The proletariat, Marxism were to blame for everything. The lumpen proletarians had the scapegoat on whom all the responsibility for their misery could be shifted. They did not need to beat their own breast. At the same time, they had a cheap political recipe; by pushing the working class back down into the ranks, they hoped, the old state would rise anew, giving them back lost honors, lost splendor and wealth. They were merciless against Marxist workers; these stood in their way. "According to its whole condition of life," remarks the Communist Manifesto, "the lumpen proletariat will be willing to be bought into reactionary machinations."

The capitalist bourgeoisie kept these lumpen proletarians warm; it clothed them in a romantic veil and smiled sympathetically when it heard them shouting their loudmouthed lansquenet songs. They might be discontented and irreverent, but they were all the better for being recruited and harnessed. The bourgeois

The Lumpen proletarian

laughed up his sleeve when they occasionally spat against the bourgeois fat belly; he knew that in due course the whole storm would be unleashed against the Marxist working class, as soon as they were rewarded by being allowed to put on the same fat belly.

The type of this lumpen proletarian found its most perfect embodiment in Goering. The captain with the Pour le mérite is suddenly rootless after the lost war. He studies, comes to Hitler, deals in parachutes, anesthetizes himself with morphine, beats himself as soon as he is ordered to do so. But behind all the revolutionary impetuosity that rumbles across his lips in the years of agitational demagogy, there is nothing but the consuming addiction to one day be able to unfold Neronian pomp and pageantry, Caesarian splendor. The "socialist* . Goering is a prevented prodigal; he is a revolutionary because he lacks the money he needs to be able to go to the expense his pathological disposition craves. He puts himself into any uniform, if he can only fill his pockets in the end. After he has shown the world how far an unscrupulous lumpen proletarian is able to go, he is left with that strange need to surprise those around him with the rich variety of his wardrobe, which he constantly adds to with inexhaustible inventions of his imagination.

This lumpen proletariat began to pin its last hopes on Hitler. As much as it was already "mass," it was not present en masse on Feldherrnplatz in Munich in November 1923.

The unemployed in himself is not yet a lumpen proletarian; but he can become one in the long run. Capitalism, in order to function and to produce profit, needs the "surplus population." The reserve army of unemployed proletarians must be in the rear and exert pressure on wages if the big bourgeoisie is to take possession of "surplus value." It is not the surplus population that has created capitalism and its expansion, but capitalism that has given the impetus to the increase in population. There are always capitalist interests at play where one cries out for birth surplus. Since the capitalist order has existed, there has been an unemployed reserve army; however, its human stock has been constantly changing. Unemployed workers found open jobs after a certain waiting period; in exchange, workers elsewhere who were on the payroll were laid off. For the individual worker, unemployment was not a permanent phenomenon; it was a misfortune that he got over after a while. Savings, union support, the help of comrades, and social insurance benefits were enough to get them through the difficult period. People did not stop being workers; they diligently looked around to find a new job.

The post-war period brought unemployment as a permanent fate. Germany had lost ground on the world market; as a result, it had to put up with production shrinkage. There were workers who had been on the street for years; they became accustomed to public charity. They demanded their unemployment benefits as the Roman plebs had once demanded their grain donations. They were kept out, they were parasites. The return to work was beyond their horizons; they outgrew work skill as well as work discipline. The man at work was for them an object of envy; he moved on another plane that had become inaccessible to them. They were no longer in solidarity with him; they were no longer workers. They no longer thought anything of the unions; they looked askance at their "bigwigs" and begrudged the organized the protection that the federation still gave them. They ran for every handout that was offered to them. They were not even "exploited," for they produced no value to be cheated out of.

This lumpen proletariat allowed itself to be turned against the working class, which was still class-conscious because it felt itself to be an exploited proletariat, against the proletarian parties, against the trade unions and their leaders. Hitler seized the opportunity. If he held out the prospect of free soup at noon and a bottle of free beer for the evening, he could fill his columns of thugs with these lumpen proletarians; in this case, he had as many people as he wanted. After 1928, when unemployment took on catastrophic forms, lumpen proletarians came running into his meetings from all sides. They formed the recruiting pools from which he drew the rank and file SA man. The lumpen proletarians became the guards with which he made breaches

Goering type of lumpen proletarian 23 in the ranks of the proletariat; they were the "workers' tribe" that gave him the authority to speak on behalf of the working class even as a "workers' leader." Under the command of the lumpen proletarians of better origin, the Sturmabteilungen and Schutzstaffeln allowed themselves to be led by lumpen proletarians from working-class backgrounds against the class-conscious Marxist working class.

The lumpen proletariat is the "rabble". The riffraff always falls first to a newly rising movement; there it hopes to get solid ground under its feet again and to secure a good place for itself in a new state of order. He who rests firmly in an order has no desire for any change in things. The citizen tolerated the agitated activity of this "rabble" because he expected it to promote his cause. Hitler, it can be said, commanded only lumpen proletarian cliques in 1923. In 1933, he had immense lumpen proletarian armies at his disposal. His petty-bourgeois following developed similarly.

The petty bourgeois has always been a figure of agitated movement in critical times. His property is all the more threatened the smaller it is; in a certain sense he is one of those last whom the dogs bite. The raid against the lower people, in which he also has to let his hair down, always starts from the great, powerful and rich of this world. Against them he is also initially angry and bitter. As soon as then freilidi the lower strata of the people who are still under him want to make short process with the upper classes, his heart falls into his pants. Suddenly he is seized by a sudden fright before the "social underworld"; he feels solidarity with the same master class that has also played badly with him. His agitated rage and indignation are discharged against the yeast layer, which is animated by true revolutionary determination; against them he rages. He wants to gain a new security of his social position by rushing to the aid of the upper class. Because he has the feeling of falling into the unknown and bottomless if he makes common cause with the deep class he looks down upon, he saves the master class from annihilation, although it plunders him where it can. He serves it in the hope of finally being able to make it merciful. His initial revolutionary impetus ends up advancing the ventures of reaction.

The shocks of war and subsequent inflation had shaken the ground on which the German petty bourgeoisie had established itself. Its revolutionary moods were a kind of social seasickness. At first, in the January elections of 1919, the petty bourgeoisie sought to find a foothold in Social Democracy. Soon, however, pettybourgeois moods began to emerge to which the proximity of the proletariat, which could not be avoided there, became uncanny. They succumbed to Hitler's influence: the lumpen proletarians with good childhood habits whom they met there were still "better company" than calloused industrial workers. But it was only after 1923, when the petty bourgeoisie had been hurled by inflation into the space of hopeless existential insecurity, that it flocked to Hitler in bright heaps. The upper-class social consciousness of the petty bourgeoisie was at odds with his social situation. He cultivated a false social consciousness. He regarded his proletarianized social situation as provisional; he did not want to settle down in it. He wanted to recreate the social situation that belonged to his stubbornly held social consciousness. If it did not go on natural ways, then the miracle had to help; who let him believe this, was his man. Marxism expected the petty bourgeois to feel proletarian because he lived proletarian - it wanted to rob him of his pride and hope. However, he refused this honest life balance, which Marxism demanded of him. He wanted to "correct" his life's ledger until the unforeseen event occurred that instituted him to put the corresponding social reality behind his fake social facade again. Hitler's National Socialism spread among the petty bourgeoisie like an epidemic. Because Hitler gave the petty bourgeois life balance falsifications a good conscience, the petty bourgeoisie gave him unlimited authority. Hitler prepared the day of the great miracle, when every petty-bourgeois existence would rise from its proletarianized lowliness. Hitler was the savior who cleansed the pettybourgeois soul of proletarian filth. Like every savior, however, he demanded unconditional faith.

Recruit depot of the

After the big bourgeoisie had swept away the petty-bourgeois property in the inflationary period, only the petty-bourgeois sense of honor had remained. From this petty-bourgeois sense of honor Hitler now extracted what could be extracted against Marxism. By 1933, under Hitler's leadership, the entire German petty bourgeoisie had acquired a taste for retaliating against the working class for the inflationary raid that the big bourgeoisie had organized in 1922 and 1923, for this raid that had since been so good for the big bourgeoisie. The anti-working-class petty-bourgeois groups of 1923 swelled into vengeful petty-bourgeois civil-war heaps schooled in crudeness. The heavy-industrial big bourgeoisie, disempowered by the collapse of 1918, and its junkerish-militarist ally had found in this motley army of lumpen proletarians and pettybourgeois a mass base which seemed sufficiently solid to be able to dare the most adventurous policies based on it.

IV. The mass base

Hitler became the refuge of the discontented. Those who had a score to settle with the world chose him as their trustee; those who were weighed down by grief at the injustice of their fate sank into the maelstrom of Hitler's eloquence. Thus Hitler also won the hearts of the bourgeois youth.

The post-war bourgeoisie grew up in a powerless Germany whose world power had collapsed. The secure future that had once opened up for their fathers was gone. These young people did not know how to find a place to live, how to earn a living, how to make a career, how to start a family. Pre-war Germany had become a historical memory for them. If the fathers lamented the youthful coolness toward proud traditions, they could be silenced by asking why they had not done better and more victoriously for these traditions. The fathers had put their sons in the ink; it was natural that the sons now also saw everything black in black. The "ideals of the fathers" had fallen into disrepute; the ideals were respected as little as the fathers. The fathers had had little to worry about in terms of their well-paved careers. The secure position in life, the respectability of the earned age, the sanctity of private property made the youth laugh; this sheltered world had perished; therefore even the memory of it was ridiculed by the youth. The bourgeois youth had previously had a monopoly on the intellectual professions and the high state positions; since November 1918 it had proletarian competition there. Trade-union men and Social Democratic party officials invaded state offices; the careers of academics were thus perceptibly cut short.

Youth rarely sends itself into a dark lot; this post-war generation did not want to resign either. Revolutionary moods always suit youth; they are the usual tribute that the growing man pays to his pubertal epoch. The revolutionary moods of the post-war generation, however, were not without malice. This youth wanted the overthrow: as long as it had no private property, it liked to be "socialist". Their socialism, however, was limited in time. It was to reach no further than the time when they themselves had achieved private property. There was a primitive sense to the overthrow she was aiming at. It wanted to drive the old generation, as well as trade union and party men, from the well-paid places in order to be able to sit on them itself. Since Jews were strongly represented in the intellectual professions, this youth also became antiSemitic. With the robustness that fully grasped the importance of the feeding ground, this postwar sex ran up a storm against the old world. Behind the heat of youthful idealism stood as reality the ruthlessness of youthful elbows.

These young people sensed that they had come to the right address with Hitler. The explosions that National Socialism was aiming at were not meant to unhinge orders, but men. Behind all its anti-bourgeois clamor lay only the impatience to get hold of the sinecures of the capitalist state and the capitalist economy. They did not want to saw off the branch of capitalist society because they intended to settle down on it themselves. The bourgeois youth suspected that with Hitler's help they could climb to high positions at a young age. General directorships and ministerial posts beckoned for twenty-five and thirty-year-olds. Even as a minor, one could hope to get to his car and his mistress and - to his country house at Walchensee. The bourgeois youth provided the Hitler movement with momentum; in return, the Hitler movement issued the youth bills of exchange on salaries, titles, booty. The bourgeois youth was then trained to practice their office-robbing hooliganism as an outflow of their socialist ethos and as a fulfillment of their nationalist mission. Thus the Hitler movement gradually achieved a social breadth that filled everyone who needed to get afloat again with confidence that they could ride well with it.

It was a decisive moment when the German peasant also began to see in National Socialism his last salvation. The time of war and inflation had been good for the peasant; it had freed him from the burden of his debts. The lost war had been paid for by the inflationary dispossessed petty bourgeoisie; the peasant had pulled himself out of the noose together with the big bourgeoisie. But he, too, was by no means to escape unscathed. Germany's progressive integration into the world economy, its dependence on tribute, the credit mechanism in which it was involved, the legal principles of bourgeois society had a murderous effect on the existence of the German peasantry. The measure of its taxes and tributes, the interest on its loans, some of which had been virtually forced upon it, crushed the peasant. The import of cheap food from the world markets, the throttling of the domestic market, which were both a consequence of the reparation payments and the deflation policy, cut his income. The price gap that had opened up in the face of the low valuation of agricultural products and the increase in prices for industrial products deprived him of economic freedom of movement. The subsidies, interest rate reductions, debt rescheduling schemes, relief actions, and customs support measures had little effect. The farmer was strangled by the shackles of debt bondage; he ended up as a bankrupt and exchanged the plow for the begging stick, 105,000 bailiffs were on the move around the year 1931 to take his cattle out of the barn and to bring the farms under the hammer.

The farmer would have committed himself to the devil under these circumstances; it was made easy for Hitler to draw him to himself. The same Brüningian dictatorship of emergency decrees, which had meted out the constitutional machinery to fascism, whipped the peasant into a state of mind that made him ripe for National Socialism. Poisonous sentiments against the "system government," which sent out its bailiffs, smoldered in the village. Hitler only had to blow with full cheeks into the gloomy embers of this rebellious despair. He did not fail to do so. The peasant believed in him; in his primitive sense he promised himself of. Hitler tax relief, breaking of the servitude to interest, cancellation of debts, securing of his inheritance. In this way, Hitler became the village messiah.

When the upper middle classes realized that Hitler was destined to become the savior of all the malcontents in Germany, they made a deal with him. It provided Hitler with connections to powerful circles and invested a lot of money in his movement. By taking Hitler into its service, the big bourgeoisie had also seized the masses who believed in him. The mass movement was thus steered on a track on which the big bourgeoisie could not in any respect fall by the wayside. All the elementary bluster of the "awakening of the people" proved to be a thunderstorm that cleared the thick air that lay over the corridors of the big bourgeoisie of the Marxist fumes. The subsidies that the upper middle classes pumped into the Hitler movement proved in due course to be a reliable preventive spell against the social hailstorm.

V. Varieties of demagogy

The demagogue is a type that occurs in the most diverse varieties. Every social place, every stage of social development, every social situation has its special demagogic case. The demagogue represents the deception that an upper social stratum performs on lower strata; his tactics, his means, his social range are adapted to the task he has to perform. His format, his level, his culture, his language, his style of communication depend in each case on who is to be deceived here and who is to be deceived there. He has to adapt himself to the deceiver as well as to the deceived. Both must understand him; the first must be able to consider him reliable, the second trustworthy. There are considerable shadings whether the big bourgeois wants to deceive only the middle bourgeois or at the same time also the petty bourgeois or even the proletarian, whether the big landowner wants to deceive the middle peasant alone, the middle and petty peasant together or with them also the agricultural laborer, whether the city takes steps to bag the land or whether finally all social strata as a whole are to dance to the tune of a small high-capitalist minority: each time a demagogue of a different character must be employed.

The closer the social stratum is to the leading group from which it is to be lured onto the ice, the more the representative demagogue can always have a special character for himself. If the big bourgeois merely wants to win over the middle bourgeoisie, the demagogue whom he sends forward need only show a middle-class heart; the demagogue reaches his goal, even if he does not hide the fact that he comes from an "upper middle-class family. The more distant the social strata are which the leading group intends to outwit, the less the demagogue may be of higher origin. The more different these social strata are again among themselves, the less he may be stamped for himself. That he comes "from above" can be just as detrimental to him as that he shows a special social note at all. The more diverse are the social strata which he has to bring down to that one denominator which can be conveniently inserted into the calculation of the leading group, the more monotonous and insubstantial he himself must be. The demagogue needs the belief that he is the trustee of those whom he wants to get hold of. Every stratum must let him be regarded as its equal; he must be able to be so much for others in a varied way that he is no longer able to be anything genuine and original for himself. By becoming exclusively a public existence, there is no corner left for it to exist privately for itself. He becomes a mere formula that represents the masses standing behind him.

However, before in Germany after 19x8 the different social strata were brought to the denominator of the general mass, which from now on could be conveniently handled by the formula of its single demagogic leader in every arithmetical approach of the big bourgeoisie, still numerous operations had to be carried out by which the simplification of the social quantities and values took place. Demagogues of numerous intermediate stages were necessary; they had to solve their special tasks, they had to push forward the social unification process from stage to stage. When they had done their work, they were superfluous; they were thrown on the garbage heap that had been laid out for used-up demagogues.

Hardly can they be counted, these run-down demagogues. They were in competition for a long time; for years the "national front" was filled with the noise of the Führer's quarrel. The big bourgeoisie discovered, made and saw off the demagogues; it gave its orders, supplied the money and dropped everyone as soon as there was nothing more to be done with him. The first demagogues were still allowed to show the airs of fine people. They had to scare the middle bourgeoisie with the Bolshevik scare in order to deny it the desire for honest and serious socialism. They were allowed to be quietly still of some bourgeois solidity: so the bourgeois instincts of their victims found their way in them. Eduard Stadtier, whom Stinnes temporarily hired

as an anti-Bolshevik trumpeter, dug out old recipes from the people and the factory community; it was advisable to try out their effectiveness once again in the new times. The concessionary front socialists, like Seldte, took the middle and smaller citizens by the portepee, so that they would not run away to communism. The folkish socialism of Ludendorff, Wille, and Count appealed to the romantic vein of the German citizen and peasant; the capitalist institutions dived into the abysses of German blood in order to sanctify themselves there. The Prussian socialism of Hugenberg, developed theoretically by Spengler and practiced by the gentlemen's clubmen, commanded the subject who is in every German citizen, "Stillgestanden!" The German socialism of Otto Strasser and the Tat-Kreis made the petty bourgeois understand that the rapture for the German soul was cheaper than the class struggle that the Marxist devilry was up to.

While these pseudo-socialist demagogues had to keep the bourgeois in the upper-class sphere of power by teaching him that he was actually already enough of a socialist not to need the Marxist cure as well, some defectors from the proletarian side tried to encourage the upper-class game. They wanted to convert the Marxist socialists to bourgeois socialism. The latter were to desert, as they themselves had done, to the bourgeois front.

Their renegadeism embodied that type of social democrats who, out of the inner tug of their heart, made themselves equal to the bourgeois interest. Because they were allowed to promise themselves all sorts of things for their own social situation by handing over the working class to the power of the big bourgeoisie, they believed in their innocence that they had thereby also rendered service to the proletariat. They were demagogues who made good use of the advantage their social background gave them; they worked for the account of the bourgeois class with the ulterior motive that one day they would be admitted to their circle on an equal footing. Gradually, the entire German bourgeoisie and peasantry were brought to a common denominator; the denominator was called "national socialism. It was so general that every citizen and peasant could be absorbed in it without rest. There was no lack of indications that a large part of the working class could eventually be brought down to this denominator. The question was which social demagogue was indefinite and indeterminable, ambiguous and serviceable enough to represent all these social "values and quantities that had entered into the vague denominator of "national socialism." Stadtier was too intellectual, the "willfulness of his mind leaped too compromisingly into view. Seldte, Hugenberg were too much bourgeois-honorable, Ludendorff, "Wulle, Gräfe too much feudal-backward colored, as that they could have been utilized "generally valid"; they were still too much "upper class" not to be suspicious in some deep layers. Strasser was a rabid petty bourgeois who was difficult to calculate; the upper middle classes were not sure that he would function reliably in every case. Various Social Democratic defectors pushed up too fiercely to the upper class; they made it too obvious where their responsible directors were to be found. This compromised the upper-class cause. The demagogue must seem to approach the social stratum he has to dupe; if he betrays that he wants to rise higher, then he is a bungler in his trade. Thus even those social democratic defectors were eliminated from the "contest of the demagogues. The demagogic synthetic who was sought had to carry so much social emptiness in himself that he had room for every social ballast. He had to weigh so light socially that any social tendency could take him on its back. Socially, it had to be so insubstantial that no social form of life would be offended by it. It had to be socially so directionless that it could be set in motion towards any goal. It had to be socially so centerless that it was oriented toward the strongest center of gravity, the upper middle class, under all circumstances. Nothing of its own and genuine was allowed to slumber in it, lest, when it awoke to life, it should assert its right against the order from the higher and upper social regions. The more this demagogic synthetic was a social nothing, the more certainly he could be a social something, a social savior and redeemer to all social strata. If he was a bourgeois, he disgruntled the peasant; if he was a peasant, he met with bourgeois reservations; if he was a worker, a last residue of peasant and bourgeois distrust remained. When the petty demagogues had united all the

bourgeois strata on the line of "national socialism," when the social-democratic demagogues had also done their baleful work, time demanded total social zero, absolute social nothingness. The total social zero, the absolute social nothing, however, was the tramp, the man from the Viennese asylum for the homeless.

VI. The species

The big bourgeoisie was the mastermind behind German affairs; it was closely allied with the Reichswehr. It needed an army power for its imperialist policy, toward which it was heading again; the Reichswehr expected from the big bourgeoisie the delivery of an armament apparatus that would give it superiority over any opponent and guarantee its reinstatement in the lost traditionally honorable position. The problem for both was how to make the unleashed masses docile again. The masses had to be made to return voluntarily to the capitalist stables and to become enthusiastically militaristic again. The big bourgeoisie and the Reichswehr had no direct access to the working masses; the petty-bourgeois masses, however, were within their grasp. If they first directed the petty-bourgeois masses, then they had a steamroller with the help of which the working-class masses could also be "brought down".

The tangible big-bourgeois egoism developed its own reason, and this class reason was as unerring as any state reason could be. Part of the class reason was its Machiavellianism - and this class Machiavellianism reached the amorality of classical Machiavellianism in every respect. When the German public reacted sourly to the upper middle classes and the Reichswehr after 1918, both entrenched themselves behind a demagogic mimicry. This mimicry, however, were the fascist programs.

It is the essence of a program that it proclaims the point from which the world is to be cured. This point is elevated to the decisive one; there must be no disagreement about it. It indicates to the common force of action the direction in which it must strike. It must be hammered into the heads until it "sits"; it will be swallowed all the more readily the more it appeals and convinces by itself, by the mental and emotional elements of which it is composed. When people have "already similarly thought" the way out themselves, when he brings to his aid favorite ideas that are in vogue, then it lights up most quickly and most strongly.

The purpose of fascist programs is to divert the petty-bourgeois masses so inescapably to outlandish points drawn by the hair with enthusiastic determination, and to occupy them so exclusively with them that they completely lose sight of the crux of the matter, which is the leaping social point. The masses have to occupy themselves with things which are highly indifferent to the big bourgeoisie; but they have to sink their teeth into them to such an extent that they are infatuated with the deluded conviction that in them they are meeting the power bases of the big bourgeois upper class. In this way they dissipate their forces and have nothing left to be able to directly assess the real power positions of the upper bourgeoisie. The fascist programs revolve around the idea of species identity. There is no higher and more important concern than it. Arteigen is above all that which is owed to tradition; the strict reactionary basic attitude is thus determined from the outset. At the same time, however, one reserves the right to select and sift out what from the treasure trove of historical props is to be given the stamp of full validity. However, only that which works for the upper middle class is fully original. The artifice is the red thread, with whose help the labyrinth of the whole history can be roamed. One can wander back to the most distant prehistoric times and has the

advantage of also being able to exploit the immense jumble of dark moods, premonitions, misty tribal feelings, mythical ideas and images for the needs of the upper classes of the moment. The upper middle class still knows how to suck honey from the most imaginative prehistoric excesses. On the one hand, they always have a side that teaches the human cropping’s the ever-useful lesson that they are no match for the warriors, the real noble people. On the other hand, no one who builds himself up on old Germanic bear skins gets entangled in questionable and embarrassing analyses of the capitalist order. Whose curiosity is directed at old Germanic chariot castles and sanctuaries, he does not think of looking at the big bourgeoisie on the fingers. With artifice, one has everything that makes romantic strings, which no human being lacks, vibrate: Blood and soil, honor and loyalty, people and homeland, sword and nobility and, last but not least, the whole anti-Semitism. Everything that is annoying to the bourgeoisie is alien, everything that is useful to it, even if it is the most whimsical quirk in which an eccentric has bitten. Artificiality is a passport with which the strangest saints suddenly gain access to the stage of history. As long as only the basic tendency of their strange doctrines and systems is under the arms of the upper bourgeoisie, they are welcome.

Since it is a question of recapturing the masses and putting them on a leash, the most important and essential achievement which the upper middle classes expect from their approved demagogue is that his programmatic ideas legitimize in principle the existence of the upper classes par excellence. Hitler, too, the man from the homeless asylum and from the country road, repeatedly emphasizes "the aristocratic principle of nature," which places the "eternal prerogative of power and strength" far above "the mass of numbers and their dead weight." Disdainfully, he pushes aside "the number of the respective heap" and praises "the aristocratic fundamental idea of nature. "* As soon as the masses themselves proclaim the aristocratic fundamental idea of nature, a hundredweight burden falls from the heart of the big bourgeoisie. If the aristocratic fundamental idea of nature is first a mass dogma, then it does not need any more great arts of interpretation to convince that nature announces its aristocratic selection intentions by the numbers, in which the hierarchy of the bank accounts betrays itself. The Germanic Arteigenheit demands masters to whom one can obey and be subservient; the upper middle classes display with bold impartiality the master consciousness by which the "number of the respective heap" has to let itself be impressed accordingly.

Arteigenheit is the possession which every German man of genuine shot and grain carries within himself. He does not need to dig deep, he only needs to look "into his own heart". Arteigenheit is attuned to the horizon, the power of comprehension, the understanding of the man of the street; through it the commonplace which everyone carries within himself is made into political, economic, social, spiritual gospel. The level is fixed, above which nothing may rise. A great being is made out of the self-evident; what was not worth talking about before, because it was daily practice, is now prattled about for hours and days by those of one's own kind. One is a "fanatical German"; one thinks of nothing "but Germany and its welfare. Until now, one had been ashamed to say this specifically; now one shouts it incessantly over the country through loudspeakers. Everyone who hears the self-evident is gripped; he could have said the same thing. In the meantime, things of a completely different nature are going on unnoticed in the background; the masses are not supposed to get on the trail of these very things. The head of the masses is to be stuffed with so much artifice that nothing else has room in it. The whole noisy abundance of actions, which rolls off under the keyword of artifice, is nothing but popular theater; the audience is supposed to forget the seriousness of the real events for the sake of comedy.

The National Socialist program finally took the cake; it took into account all the needs of the upper middle class and also knew how to tickle the man in the street at every weak point, to hit at every "commonplace" Achilles' heel, to grab at every dull vanity. It gathered together all those elements of thought that had since proven themselves time and again in their effect on petty-bourgeois masses.

The anti-Semitic movement of the late nineteenth century had already been a first "fascist" attempt. Ahlwardt, the "Rector of the Germans," Count Pückler, the "Radauantisemit," the court preacher Stöcker, who did not credit the Jewish people with having produced the "Lord Jesus" whom he preached, had at that time wanted to set the petty bourgeois against the worker in motion. They had foreseen the pains that would one day plague the rich people and, as a preventive measure, did not want it to come to that. When they had failed politically because the intelligentsia at that time had not been willing to follow them "to their level" and because bourgeois society did not believe in the ghosts they had painted on the wall, Houston Stewart Chamberlain took up the failed cause. In his "Fundamentals of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries" he made the racial-Aryan mythology, for which Count Gobineau had already taken up the cudgels in France, acceptable to the courts and academia in Germany as well. The educated circles were only supposed to take a bite and get a taste for it; once they had been introduced to it, they would one day also take it, even if the food was prepared and served in a less exquisite manner. In the "Hammer," Theodor Fritsch, a clumsy, coarse and uncouth head, put Chamberlain's erudition into a simple anti-Semitic formula that had to be equally well received by the intellectual and the social middle classes.

After 1918 the great time of the Ahlwardt, Pückler and Stoecker heirs, but also of the Chamberlain epigones, dawned. Now they were really needed; therefore everything they touched prospered.

The egg from which the National Socialist movement crawled, like its program, was laid in Munich; the Third Reich, if one goes back to its first origin, was hatched from the Thule Society.

The Thule Society had been founded in 1917 as an angular lodge, a Teutonic Order. The founder, a Count Sebottendorff, had sought brothers and sisters through newspaper advertisements. The Thule Society owned the "Münchener Beobachter", which later changed into the "Folkisher Beobachter". Rudolf Heß, Hans Frank were members, Hitler, Rosenberg, Dietrich Eckart, Anton Drexler guests; Feder frequented it. Streicher maintained relations with it. It attracted attention in 1918 and 1919 for its reactionary activities; seven members were shot as hostages during the Räterepublik after the Weißgardists committed murders. The Thule Society avenged this by the bustle and activity it displayed behind the scenes in defeating the soviet republic.

The Deutsch-Sozialistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft, from which the National Socialist Workers' Party later developed, emerged from the Thule Society.

Only those who had made a blood confession were admitted: "The undersigned affirms to the best of his knowledge and conscience that no Jewish or colored blood flows in his and his wife's veins and that there are no members of the colored races among his ancestors." His picture was examined for racial purity; after a long period of examination he was admitted to the Friendship Degree. The new brother had to swear absolute allegiance to the Master. The ceremony which thereby unrolled symbolically represented the return of the lost Aryan to the German sanctuary, to the swastika. The Aryans were supposed to find their way back to themselves; "racial corruption" was regarded as the root cause of all illness and misery in general. "The fight against everything un-German", the fight against the International, against Jewishness in the German should, as guidelines say, to which the Thule Society felt obliged, "be driven forward with all energy". In the appeal of the "Teutonic Order" of Christmas 1918, all the components of the program that the National Socialist movement later established are already united: Binding of the soil in the sense of the later Erbhof law, replacement of Roman law by a "German common law*; breaking of the bondage to interest; cleansing of the press of Jews, "fundamental change in the position of the German to the Jew." The "Master" Sebottendorff confidently remarks in his memoirs: "The salvation and victory of the Thule Society made Hitler the victory salvation of the Germans. The Führer made the 'Folkisher Beobachter' the fighting paper of the National Socialist movement of Greater Germany. Hitler made the swastika the symbol of the

victorious NSDAP." The NSDAP succeeded with the props of the Thule Society. The musty sectarian wisdom of a southern Bavarian philistine society mushroomed in the following years as political doctrines of salvation for the entire German people.

They were able to do so because they offered themselves as a useful tool of big-bourgeois interests within the special German situation.

As neutral as the idea of originality seemed to be, as abysmal was the malice with which it was pregnant. It was a point of view, a way of looking at things; it wanted to raise itself to the highest point of view, to the exclusively ruling way of looking at things. It should be the sense of the new time to look from now on with "biologically trained eye" on the course of the things; who did not want to understand himself to it, was nineteenth century. But the point of view "Arteigenheit" did not make objective, natural-scientific statements, it evaluated at the same time. It hastily distinguished between good and bad races. Not pure cognitive instinct, but an insidious will of evaluation raised the question of Arteigenheit in general.' The Aryan race alone was good; it was sunny, noble, lordly; it could risk the point of view of Arteigenheit, it did well in it. If the Aryan emphasized the point of view of originality, it was inevitable that the "non-Aryan" would be discredited. He had to leave the community of the Aryans. The non-Aryan resisted the point of view of originality. Thus his weakness was revealed; his disgrace of not being Aryan was brought to light. The Aryan race gave the standards for everything that was of good kind. The Aryan race cultivated the consciousness of being the navel of the world; beyond the Aryan race, sub humanity and the underworld began. The Aryan race was a community with its esprit de corps, its solidarity, its world view, its war morals. Necessarily it lived on hostile footing with its non-Aryan environment. It had defiantly brought the point of view of the Arteigenheit into the foreground, in order to be able to connect as Aryan race with all "non-Aryans".

Who, of course, who was really Aryan? Does not the racial probe, with which the German national mixture is examined, bring to light from its blood heritage, besides Wends, Croats, Pandurs, besides Hussites and other Slavs, besides Romans, Celts and Iberians, also Huns, Avars, Magyars? Is the purely biological classification, which does not pursue any extra-scientific flinter intentions, alone sufficient to heat up the minds, can it seriously become the subject of political tensions and decisions?

The racial principle would not attract a dog behind the stove if it pursued no other purpose than the clarification of biological origins. The biological origin is a fact that cannot be changed. It starts to be interesting only when it can be used as a pretext to throw an opponent into the sand. One does not eliminate an opponent because of his biological origin; one only imputes his biological origin to him because one has other reasons to want to get rid of this opponent.

Racism offers the most appropriate template for the relationship of domination toward which imperialism is striving. The master class, which has in mind an unrestrained regiment of violence, does not want to legitimize itself by appealing to property. This legitimation would never be internally recognized by the subjugated ! Racism fetches from an extra-economic field a social relational diema which is able to justify a hard, unconditional relationship of domination in a captivating and convincing way. It establishes higher and lower races. Then it is obvious that the higher races are born to command, the lower races to obey. To the masses, who are left with the pride of belonging to the master race, their dependent position is made palatable, in that they are to be regarded as the "followers" of a thin master and leader class, whose privileges are at the same time their own, even if they have nothing of them. Their allegiance must be unconditional in order to assert and guarantee the claim of their own higher race to rule over the 'bad' race. Even if they themselves are practically only miserable servants, it is enough for them to be able to feel themselves followers of the leader, who is, after all, only trustee of the common cause of the good race. The race delusion provides them, although they themselves are only slaves, with a false master consciousness.

Race delusion gives master consciousness

This false master consciousness blinds them to such an extent that they no longer notice how their fate is the same one which they help to impose on the rejected bad race.

One comes across this background as soon as one clarifies against whom the race-proud Aryan is actually running a storm.

His enemy is the "Red", the "Marxist"; he understands the Jew as the father of Marxism. The "Aryan" is antiSemitic because the Jew has the "Marxist world plague" on his hands. Marxism is the attack on the bourgeois-capitalist position; it is this attack that puts the "Aryan" in harness and in the end drives him into the arms of the "biological worldview". Racism feels quite the crude bourgeois wedge placed on the Marxist block. The order whose decomposition racism accuses Marxism of as a crime is the bourgeois-capitalist order; the culture which racism defends against Marxism is the occidental-bourgeois culture. The pure Aryan is the German bourgeois whom Hitler's call awakens to the consciousness of a sacred all-German world mission; his Herrentum is financially underpinned, and the voice of his blood speaks in bourgeois primal sounds.

The bourgeois has always had a peculiar relationship to nature. Since the feudal time had not made a great being with her, he brought her, in order to shame the feudal order also from this side, to high honors. He expected, of course, that she would show her gratitude for it; nature was to make the citizen's cause her own. If one returned to nature, one ended up in the bourgeois order; if one brought down one's natural right from heaven, one had the bourgeois rights of freedom in one's hands. The revolt of folkish elementarity gave birth to the bourgeois nation-state. The citizen exploited nature in every sense. Racism is the bourgeois grasp into its darkest depths; everything that had been easier to get, it had consumed in the meantime.

The nation had been the elementary-fed formation in which the bourgeois class had overturned the feudal order. It brought the aristocracy down to the bourgeois level; if the nobleman did not fit into the bourgeois framework, he was placed outside the laws of the nation and lost property and life. The industrial proletariat, however, could not be dealt with in the same sense by the nation. To the national man belongs the private property, which is taken in protection by the nation; who has no private property, to him the nation has not much to offer. The national suggestion bounced off the proletariat. Sensing that the nation was only a bourgeois form of life, it organized itself into the International. The> International aimed against the bourgeois order. The national interest had never been anything but the bourgeois class interest; but by asserting itself in the form of the national interest, the bourgeois interest gave the appearance of being a general interest. Before this appearance the feudal interest had to capitulate, which suddenly had to accept being discredited and detested as a presumptuous special interest.

The proletarian interest cannot be dismissed in this way as a special interest; there are too many proletarians. The proletariat could declare itself the nation proper: the bourgeois upper class would be the deceived fraud whose protest would have little moral weight. The founding of the proletarian International showed that industrial labor now regarded the nation only as a bourgeois class institution. Thus the nation no longer fulfilled its purpose of polishing the bourgeois class interest to such a shine that everyone was dazzled by it and no one grasped the heart of the matter. The "national man" did not impress the proletariat. His pathos no longer had any effect; his ideology was regarded as sand thrown into the eyes of his victims by the bourgeois profiteers. When the "national man" made himself important, it twitched ironically around the proletarian corners of the mouth. In view of the new situation, the "nation" had gradually become as supernumerary as bourgeois humanitarianism and bourgeois liberalism had been; it was no longer any use against the rising proletarian class.

Racism is the new twist with which the bourgeois now wants to come against the proletariat just as he had come with the nation against feudalism.

In the framework of the nation only those weighed fully who possessed real private property; racism makes it cheaper. The good Aryan race demands only the reliable private property attitude. The pious desire for private property can be cherished by every proletarian. Every have-not joins the community of the "Aryan nobles" as soon as the principle of private property becomes a matter of the heart to him. If he finds the private property which others have quite all right and stands up for the institution of private property, even though he personally has come away empty-handed, then he is a racially good gentleman. That flatters and compensates for many a thing. The collectivist-communist attitude, on the other hand, makes the racially miserable subhuman. The citizen could not have it more comfortable.

Thus the citizen comes out of the isolation of his class-limited existence; he wins auxiliaries from the hostile counter class

Both nationalism and racism are great strategic maneuvers of concealment, which have to mislead about the true sense of all bourgeois operations; nationalism blinds the feudal attacked, racism the proletarian attacker. Racism organizes around the bourgeois class struggle against the proletariat no less ceremonial pomp than nationalism had organized around the same class struggle against the feudal master class. There are still countless workers and employees who are proletarians without already knowing it. The proletarian mercenaries run away from the bourgeois division by division when they first find out that they are fighting for nothing but the ordinary bourgeois class interest. Therefore he must neither speak of class struggle himself nor let others speak of it. The bourgeois must not allow himself to be caught in the act of class struggle; otherwise he loses the whole reputation on which his position of power rests. He therefore never goes out on class warfare without first having provided for a convincing alibi. Racism is his alibi towards the proletarian, as nationalism was his alibi towards the feudal masters.

One does not see the social horse's foot on racism. It hides behind the haze of confused blood feelings. Although the racial struggle is unleashed against "Reds and Marxists," the opponents of private property, the bluster that is raised about blood purity and blood honor seeks to allay the suspicion that it is only the disguised bourgeois class struggle. The elemental savagery released by the stirring of primordial racial secrets suits the bourgeois.

The process of the racist obfuscation of the bourgeois-capitalist restoration finally finds its most condensed expression in the symbol of the National Socialist movement. The swastika is an old sun sign; the atmosphere of millennia flickers around it, and cosmic connections announce themselves meaningfully. The swastika obliges: one is a tool of the highest powers and does things that touch the deepest ground of all being. In any case, one aligned one's style of existence to cosmic dimensions when one placed oneself under the emblem of the swastika, this symbol of the sun. Not only the pyramids, which used the swastika as an ornament, but the starry sky itself was treated as a watching audience of human destinies. The liberal nationstate had been even more modest; it had not yet engaged the universe for itself. The tricolor, the national flags, were colorful signs that confronted everyone with the choice of whether or not to belong to the nation. Whoever professed them, counted to the nation. It was possible to attach a deeper meaning to the colors: "When I look at the cheerful flag, it shines white and blue. But this remained only the sensual play of lyrical minds. The national colors were the distinguishing mark that the nations had given themselves; in this sense, the colors were dear to the heart; one honored the nation in the colors.

The swastika wants to be more than a distinguishing, honorable sign - it wants to be a destiny. One is born for the swastika, and whoever had bad luck with his parents remains eternally rejected. The will of the cosmic providence wants to be respected behind the swastika, and one must know that this will still manifests itself in the social lot that has been given to everyone. Who rebels against the social order, offends the stars. It is true that the swastika is erected irreconcilably against the Jew; but one does not think only of the puny half

The swastika wants to be destiny

million Jews who live as a minority among sixty million Germans: it would be too much honor to them to have chosen the symbol only in relation to them.

VII. The 25 points

The whole mixture of racial ideas of destiny and social ulterior motives, which had once been stirred up by the Thule Society, found a new programmatic expression in the 25 points of the National Socialist German Workers' Party of February 24, 1920.

The program calls for the Greater German national state, which by its very nature cannot be other than bourgeois-imperialist. It demands it at a time when it must be created not against feudalism but against the social-revolutionary proletariat, against imperial Bolshevism, but at the same time when the bourgeois cards cannot be openly revealed against the industrial workers. Here the Jew comes in handy; the extent of the disenfranchisement intended for the class-conscious worker is announced to the Jew: "No Jew can be a comrade of the people." Socialism is still the fashion of the time: after all, the party calls itself the National Socialist Workers' Party. One must throw some socialist grains to the petty bourgeois if they are to crawl onto the big-bourgeois glue. The party goes further in the momentum of its first years than it can later sustain: it still mouths off in a big way. It promises the confiscation of war profits, the breaking of the bondage of interest, the nationalization of all "hitherto" already socialized enterprises, profit sharing in large enterprises, "immediate communalization of large department stores and their renting at cheap prices to small tradesmen," land reform, the abolition of land rents and the prevention of all land speculation, the death penalty for usurers and racketeers. Within the framework of bourgeois social reform were plans for the expansion of unemployment insurance, for the education of gifted children of poor parents, and for the improvement of public health. German common law, which is to replace Roman law, is to be the means for exercising arbitrary power against the enemy of the citizen, unencumbered by paragraphs; the violence that was later inflicted on the press is announced unabashedly. The people's army is natural to the nation-state, as is the strong centralism envisaged in the program.

In 1920, the party was still allowed some social-revolutionary demagogy, which it later, when no citizen wanted to be reminded of it, tacitly dropped. In one thing, however, the party had to openly retreat and repent before the god of the bourgeois order, private property. In the 17th point of the program, the party had demanded the "creation of a law for the gratuitous expropriation of land for charitable purposes. This went especially over the peasants' heads; the success in the countryside that the upper middle classes expected from Hitler was at stake. Hitler issued a statement on April 13, 1928: "In view of the mendacious interpretations of paragraph 17 of the NSDAP program on the part of our opponents, the following statement is necessary: Since the NSDAP stands on the basis of private property, it is self-evident that the passage 'gratuitous expropriation' refers only to the creation of legal possibilities for expropriating, if necessary, land that has been acquired illegally or is not administered according to the principles of the people's right. Accordingly, this is directed primarily against the Jewish large-scale land speculation companies."

As a purely interpretative achievement, this explanation is pitiful and poor; it smells of fraud and deception at a hundred meters against the wind. However, it is neither a mere appendage nor actually a tactical move: it gives the cue by which from now on all 25 points are put into perspective. The big bourgeoisie was preparing to make Hitler its favorite once and for all. Before it concluded the deal and entered into the commitment, it wanted to have a document in its pocket that gave it security. Hitler had to certify in black and white that the institution of private property was sacred to him. It was to be solemnly stipulated that the 23 points would be valid only insofar as they did not touch the institution of private property. If the wording of individual programmatic formulations sounded social revolutionary, it could by no means be understood in this way; in truth, the most radical sentence had a reactionary meaning. The declaration of April 13, 1928, with its commitment to private property, had, before one knew it, also admittedly become the programmatic pivot of the National Socialist movement.

Hitler was already so firmly in the saddle as party leader that he no longer needed to be afraid of riding down obligations imposed on him by his own past. He already enjoyed such unlimited confidence among the masses that he could afford to engage in any social revolutionary mirror fencing with a brazen brow and challenging bluntness. The masses refused to believe the most drastic eye-opener when he spoke against Hitler. The public reception of that additional declaration made visible that he possessed an unlimited general power of attorney of the petty-bourgeois masses. They clung to him regardless of what he said and what he did. The upper middle classes and the Reichswehr had been more critical; they had wanted to know where the journey was going. Since the petty-bourgeois masses followed blindly, the upper middle classes and the Reichswehr had the confirmation that they were right when they speculated on the racially sprucedup national-state democratic Caesarism.

VIII. Hitler's World of Thought

Adolf Hitler's book "Mein Kampf " is undoubtedly one of the strangest psychological, human and political documents of the European people.

A demagogue develops here his life story and his program; openly and unvarnishedly he reveals at the same time the tricks of his demagogy. He woos the masses by unabashedly exposing to them the secret of his advertising technique. He deceives, one may say, by exposing himself. He casts the spell of his magic by exposing his tricks; he relies on the fact that he is considered an honest and trustworthy man precisely because he allows everyone to see the mechanics with which he performs his magic tricks. "Mein Kampf" is not the book of a believer, but of a man who has made it his life's work to make others believe. Hitler had been underestimated for a long time; he was thought to be a naïf, which he was not for a moment. The intelligentsia made it too easy for themselves with him, because they hardly read him. They feared his "level"; later they had to pay dearly for not having risen in time to spy out this level. She renounced the discoveries that could be made here; that's why Hitler then succeeded in surprising her so thoroughly that she lost sight and hearing. One day, he proved to be the smartest and cleverest; after all, it was he who deceived a whole nation.

In the two volumes of his work, Hitler presents his "world view", his ideas, his doctrine of salvation, with which he draws people to himself.

The pivot around which world history revolves is blood, is race.

There are three kinds of races, the culture-creating, the culture-bearing and the culture-destroying. Only the Aryan race is culture-creative. The Aryan is "the Prometheus of mankind, from whose light forehead the divine spark of genius has sprung forth at all times." A sense of sacrifice, which goes as far as the "devotion of one's own life for the existence of the community," the fulfillment of duty, idealism are his virtues; the entire development of culture is his work. Only because the "originally creative race died of blood poisoning", "all great cultures of the past perished". But the preservation of culture is "bound to the iron law of the necessity and the right of the victory of the best and the strongest in this world". The weak and inferior must serve. "Certainly the first culture of mankind was based not so much on the tamed animal as on the use of inferior men." Just as the Aryan race is enthroned as the master race above all other inferior races, there is also within a body of people an "extreme of the best humanity" which is called to leadership. It is in accordance with the aristocratic principle that these "extreme best" are the upper class. "The statement that Volk is not equal to Volk is then transferred to the individual within a Volksgemeinschaft roughly in the sense that head cannot be equal to head." The differentiation is necessary by nature. "A world-view which, rejecting the democratic mass thought, endeavors to give this earth to the best people, that is, to the highest people, must logically obey the same aristocratic principle again within this people and secure for the best heads the leadership and the highest influence in the people concerned."

In dazzling indeterminacy the boundaries of Aryan race, Germanic peoples, and German Volk are blurred; it is true that our German Volkstum "unfortunately no longer rests on a uniform racial nucleus," but a part of "our best blood" fortunately remained pure and "escaped racial lowering." The noblest components which have remained unharmed must be preserved and promoted; it is "the highest purpose of the folkish state to take care of the preservation of those racial primordial elements which, as culture-giving, create the beauty and the becoming of a higher humanity." The unity of the blood expresses itself in a sure herd instinct which creates a unified herd at critical moments. "If the German people in its historical development had possessed that herd-like unity which has benefited other peoples, then the German Reich would probably today be mistress of the globe." From now on, the German Reich "as a state shall embrace all Germans with the task not only of collecting and preserving from this people the most valuable stocks of primal racial elements, but of slowly and surely leading them up to a dominant position." Germany is to become the leading imperialist nation-state.

The antithesis and enemy of the Aryan is the Jew; he forms "the most formidable contrast to the Aryan". However, "the Jew" is even more ambiguous and blurred than the Aryan is. His appearance changes with the points of view under which one looks at him. As a biological figure he remains pure Jew; as sociological he becomes Marxist, as world-political Bolshevist. "It belongs to the genius of a great leader to make even opponents who are apart always appear as belonging to only one category." The Jew embodies all those principles which Hitler abhors: he is pacifist, liberal, humane, just; he is for political and social equality, for collectivism, and against private property. The Jew wants to poison the race, to destroy culture, to elevate the bad over the good, to establish Jewish world domination. It is the doom of the time that the Jew has gained power over the Aryan. Public life is "flooded with the most inferior manifestations of our days. The "splitting fungus of mankind," the Jew, the "parasite of the people," uses the workers as a battering ram against the bourgeois "world. The worker has "only the task to fence for the future of the Jewish people". Palestine is the "organizational center of their international world braggadocio," a "refuge of transferred rags and a college of becoming crooks." By all means the Jew corrupts

the racial foundations of the people he wants to subjugate. "The black-haired Jew boy lurks for hours, satanic joy in his face, for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood and thus robs of his, the girl's, people." In Russia, the democratic Jew of the people became the Jew of blood and the tyrant of the people. The "Jewish rabble" stole the weapons from the German people in 1918. Everywhere the Jew causes decay, dissolution, decomposition. The Jew was the real author of the "November treason". He seduced the German people to dishonor and cowardice.

Hitler is drumming up the "heroic Aryan instincts"; German decay will come to an end when only the Aryan will have come to himself again. The mighty lever by means of which Germany is turned on its axis, what was hitherto on top is hurled into the depths and what was below is brought up - this mighty lever is propaganda. The essence of politics is propaganda; he who knows propaganda well has already won his political game. If in pre-war Austria the All-German movement only managed to play a moderate role and was soon outflanked by the Christian Social Party, this was brought about by the fact that Dr. Lueger was a greater propagandist than Dr. Schönerer. Marxism had become great only through his propaganda. The En tente won the war because it possessed great propagandists; Germany lost it because German war propaganda was "insufficient in form, psychologically wrong in essence." Even in 1918, Germany could have won the war if Hitler had been appointed propagandist in time, "more than once I was tormented by the thought that if fate had put me in the place of these incompetent or criminal incompetents or non-wishers of our propaganda service, then fate would have been told to fight differently..., In these months I felt for the first time the full force of the fate that kept me at the front and in a place where the random grip of any Negro could shoot me down, while in another place I would have been able to render other services to the fatherland. For I was presumptuous enough to believe at that time that I would have succeeded in this. But I was a nameless man, one among eight million." Propaganda could later have redeemed the German people from the syphilis of defeatism. Propaganda basically also vouches for the right selection: "The more radical and whipping up my propaganda was, the more this repelled weaklings and timid natures and prevented their penetration into the first core of our organization." Propaganda moves the masses; it imposes on them the direction in which one wants to pull them.

Propaganda receives its decisive thrust from the violence of speech. "The power, however, which set the great historical avalanches of a religious and political nature rolling, has since time immemorial been only the magic power of the spoken word. The broad mass of a people above all is always subject only to the power of speech." Never have the great upheavals in this world been accomplished by "a goose quill." "But to whom passion fails and the mouth remains closed, heaven has not chosen him to be the herald of its will."

Admittedly, only the orator is pardoned who grips the masses; the mass meeting "is the only way of a really effective, because immediate personal influence"; the parliamentary orator, on the other hand, is basically always only a "babbler." Hitler knows the Aryan race, the Nordic Germans, the German people only in the state of the masses; as masses the Aryans fill the beer cellars and circuses; as masses they hear him; as masses he leads them to 'victory.

Domestically, this victory consists in the elimination of racial defilement, in the cultural, civic and economic disenfranchisement of Jewry, in the eradication of Marxism, in the implementation of the Führer principle, in the weakening of the people. In foreign policy it aims at the state unification of all Germans in Europe, at the conquest of settlement land in the Russian East. The Soviet Union is a Jewish foundation; on the Slavic body sits a Jewish head; against the Jew there the German Aryan asserts his right of the better and stronger. "A State which in the age of racial poisoning devotes itself to the cultivation of its best racial elements must one day become master of the earth." Lordship of the earth, then, is the ultimate meaning of the Third Reich.

The essence of politics is propaganda

As high as Hitler seems to reach here, he does not hide the fact that his movement is not an independent outburst of original, pent-up, historically unconsumed forces which harbored the ambition to reorder the world. The National Socialist movement, like fascism in general, is defensive. It is the bourgeois answer to a proletarian question; it adapts the bourgeois defense to the rules of war of the Bolsdiewist attack. Active as it is in this, it remains pure reaction. "If Social Democracy," Hitler writes, "is opposed to a doctrine of better truthfulness but equal brutality of execution, it will be victorious." Early on he is moved by the thought of doing likewise to Marxism. "Terror in the workplace, in the factory, in the assembly hall, and on the occasion of the mass rally will always be accompanied by success as long as it is not countered by an equally great terror." Hitler invents a worldview with which to oppose the Marxists. "But in a time in which one side, equipped with all the weapons of a world-view, albeit a thousand times criminal, sets out to storm against an existing order, the other can eternally offer resistance only if this itself dresses itself in the forms of a new, in our case political, faith and exchanges the slogan of a weak and cowardly defense for the battle cry of courageous and brutal attack." Hitler is admittedly trying to "make up for what you have failed to do in your criminal stupidity." He looks up all the arts from the Marxist opponent. "A world-view filled with infernal intolerance, however, will only be broken by a new idea driven forward by the same spirit, championed by the same strongest will, yet pure in itself and thoroughly true." Nor does he disdain Jewish-forged weapons. Even if the first spiritual terror may have come into the world with Christianity, one must now adjust oneself to it; one must reckon with the fact "that since then the world has been oppressed and dominated by this compulsion, and that one can only break compulsion [again] by compulsion, and that one can only break it by compulsion.

[again] by coercion and terror only with terror." The "national parties" had remained old-fashioned; that is why they did not master Marxism. "What had once given Marxism its success was the consummate interplay of political will and activist brutality. What excluded national Germany from ' any practical shaping of German development was the absence of a closed collaboration of brutal power with ingenious, political will." He goes to his opponent in the school, sees off the war technique to him and - puts himself so in a position to disarm him before he still goes to the prank. "I learned something important in a short time, namely to strike the weapons of the enemy's counterattack right out of his own hand."

The opponent Hitler wants to confront through worldview and terrorist determination is Marxism, the worldview of the class-conscious industrial worker. The polarity in modern bourgeois society no longer moves, as it did until the middle of the 19th century, between the opposites of town and country, bourgeois and feudal, money and land, but between the opposites of capital and labor, bourgeoisie and proletariat, capitalism and communism, private and collective property. Here there is only an either-or; whoever opposes one pole belongs to the other. By taking sides against Marxism, Hitler leads the cause of capitalism.

Even when he was an unskilled worker in Vienna, Marxist analysis of the bourgeois order got on his nerves. "In any case, what I heard was capable of irritating me to the extreme. Everything was rejected there: the nation, as an invention of the capitalist - how often I had to hear this word - classes; the fatherland, as an instrument of the bourgeoisie for the exploitation of the working class; the authority of the law, as a means of oppressing the proletariat; the school, as an institute for the training of slave material, but also of slave owners; religion, as a means of dumbing down the people destined for exploitation; morality, as a sign of stupid sheep patience, and so on. But there was purely nothing there that was not thus dragged into the excrement of a horrible depth." The German war economy, which Rathenau had organized and which had made it possible for Germany to hold out for a long time, was regarded by Hitler as an instrument "to put an end to the national and free economy"; he, in agreement with the big bourgeoisie, equated the interest of the free capitalist economy with the national interest. Because capital depended on the independent free state, it was forced to stand up for the freedom, power and strength of the nation. In contrast to the

Hitler learns from the enemy

39 international mobile stock exchange capital, there is the ground-based national capital of industry. "The sharp divorce of stock exchange capital from the national economy offered the possibility of opposing the internationalization of the German economy without also threatening the foundations of independent national self-preservation with the struggle against capital in general." Protectively, he placed himself in front of heavy industry. "The permanent struggle against German 'heavy industry* was the visible beginning of the internationalization of the German economy striven for by Marxism." The German youth must establish the folkish state if they do not want to "be the last witness to the complete collapse, the end of the bourgeois world." Hitler wants to heal this capitalist era, "which is inwardly sick and rotten" - not destroy it. The National Socialist state is not concerned with distinguishing itself "by a better equalization of wealth and poverty or by more co-determination rights of broad strata in the economic process or by fairer remuneration, by the elimination of wage differentials that are too great"; anyone who harbors such expectations "is stuck in the extreme and has not the faintest idea of what we have to call a world outlook." The "covetousness" of the worker, which makes life sour for the capitalist, finds no advocate in Hitler. The culture that Hitler wants to save from Bolshevism is the culture of bourgeois society.

Hitler did indeed understand the German situation after 1918 from the bottom up. The position of the upper middle classes may have been shaken at the end of the First World War, but it was far from collapsing. Since 1919, the upper middle classes had been recovering more thoroughly from year to year. It was the pettybourgeois masses that gave him the most serious worries; as long as these had not yet been definitively and irrevocably pushed away from the working class, the danger of surprising social earthquakes was not averted. This was Hitler's starting point; he sensed a very great opportunity. He was aware of his art of mass treatment; he wanted to make his fortune through the masses. It was easy for him to gain power over the masses: in doing so, he conspired with the upper middle classes. He did not feel himself to be the administrator of the masses against the big bourgeoisie, but the trustee of the big bourgeoisie against the masses, who trusted him. He has an uncannily sure instinct that he will rise higher if he betrays the masses to the big bourgeoisie than if he leads the masses to fight against the big bourgeoisie. He comes from the lowest yeast of the masses: he is happy to escape from it and to be able to be in cahoots with the upper bourgeoisie. Audi during the Berlin streetcar strike in the fall of 1932, he is careful not to look to Bolshevism; he leaves that exclusively to Goebbels. He remains loyal, without ever wavering, to the upper bourgeoisie and the Wehrmacht; he does not want to come under the slightest suspicion of a Bolshevik aberration, a Social Democratic misstep. He is stingy for the glory of having weathered every Bolshevik storm as a rock of the capitalist order. The petty-bourgeois masses rapturously raised him on the shield as their leader; he makes it their duty to honor the ally in the upper bourgeois class.

He despises the masses who cheer him and blindly follow him into the capitalist bondage to which he delivers them - he despises them and tells them so. Surprisingly, the masses never notice that it concerns them when it disgusts him before them. She is all the more submissive at his feet the harder he chastises her. "Not servant shall the National Socialist Party be to the masses, but master. * He humiliates the masses by holding up the mirror image to them: "Like woman, whose soul feeling is determined less by reasons of abstract reason than by those of an indefinable, emotional longing for complementary power, and who therefore prefers to bow to the strong than to dominate the weakling, the masses also love the ruler more than the suppliant, and feel more satisfied inwardly by a doctrine which tolerates no other beside it than by the permission of liberal liberty; they know little to do with it and even feel easily abandoned. The impudence of its spiritual terrorization does not come to her consciousness any more than the outrageous maltreatment of her human freedom, for she has no idea whatsoever of the inner insanity of the whole doctrine. Thus it sees only the ruthless force and brutality of its purposeful utterances, to which it always finally bows." Always the majority is a "representative of stupidity" and also of cowardice. "It is the aversion of the masses to any superior genius that is an almost instinctive one." The greater the mass that is to be grasped, the lower must

Contempt for the masses

be the intellectual presuppositions with which one approaches it. Whoever does not speak to the masses "in a catchword-like manner" will not have any effect; they do not want any intellectual impositions, since they are "neither able to digest nor to retain the material offered." One must know the "primitiveness of the feeling of the broad masses"; only a "thousand fold repetition of the simplest concepts will finally give them their memory." The principle is correct, "that in the greatness of the lie there is always a certain factor of being believed." With the "primitive simplicity of their mind" the masses "fall victim to a big lie more easily" than to a small one, "since they themselves sometimes tell small lies, but would be too ashamed of too big lies. They do not want to believe "in the possibility of such a tremendous impudence of the most infamous distortion" even in others; this is "a fact which all great lie artists and lie societies in this world know only too well and therefore also use basely". The masses are as lazy in thinking as they are presumptuous; they are a "herd"; in the "pack" the mass man "still feels somewhat secure". Every mass organizer must try to "make equal allowance for weakness and bestiality." There is a difference between the leaders "and the great mindless herd of mutton of our sheep-patient people." This mass leader knows how to take his beast; even while the masses are licking his hand, he is impressing upon them that he considers them a dull, stupid herthough, of course, an Aryan, Nordic-Germanic, Germanic animal.

It confirms Hitler's omnipotence over the petty-bourgeois masses that they obey him, although he despises them. He will not only prevent it from approaching the proletarian mass: he will overrun the proletarian mass with it. Just as the medieval journeyman stood by the master craftsman because he saw in himself the future master, so the petty bourgeois defends the upper bourgeois class because it is his hope in life to climb up to it. The class-conscious industrial worker shatters the world of wonder into which the petty bourgeois wants to penetrate; he robs the petty bourgeois of the pleasure of feeling that he is "something better." By defending the upper class, the petty bourgeois forces it to take up intercourse with him; while it needs him, it must be affable to him. Thus the petty bourgeois has on his tongue the foretaste of the height to which he wants to rise.

In Hitler, the petty bourgeois hatred of the class-conscious industrial worker, who wanted to sweep away the upper class, to whom the petty bourgeois looked up in demand, increased to boundless fierceness; the upper bourgeoisie itself had never been capable of so much hatred. Hitler is as intolerant of Marxist doctrine as he is of Marxist organizations. Marxist doctrine is regarded by Hitler as the "most outrageous fraud of the people"; it is the "pestilence walking under the larva of social virtue and charity." It is the "world plague"; it embodies the "baseness". It leads to the "destruction of all mankind" and is "vapor and fraud." It "represents an inseparable mixture of reason and human folly, but always in such a way that only madness is able to become reality, never reason." It is the "spawn of a criminal brain," "economic and political madness." Marxist newspapers act on him like "spiritual vitriol"; he suffers from "the brutal daily press of this doctrine of salvation of the new humanity, which shrinks from no perfidy, works with every means of slander and a truly beam-bending virtuosity of lies". The whole official Marxist party literature is, "as far as it deals with economic questions, incorrect in assertion and proof; as far as the political aims are treated, mendacious". It is "adapted to the mental horizon of the least educated people"; its task is not "to lead people out of the mire of a lower mind and up to a higher level, but to meet their basest instincts." He feels sorry for the bourgeoisie, which is exposed to the attacks of this press, which "at a given sign always lets loose a formal drumfire of lies and slander against the opponent who seems most dangerous to it.

The "materialism" that Marxism nurtured in the worker had created powerful instruments for itself in the free trade unions; they waged struggles for higher wages and better working conditions. The free trade unions were those forms of organization of the Marxist "world plague" which most troubled the big bourgeoisie. They had restricted the master right of the entrepreneur in his own house; they observed the business cycles and calculated the employer's profits: no sooner did he earned better than usual than they

The Marxist

incited the "envy," the "materialistic instincts," the "greed for money" of his workers; the dissatisfied proles wanted to share in his successes. The entrepreneur was much richer and more carefree when he was rid of the unions.

Hitler's implacability against the trade unions, which had first educated the industrial worker to a sense of human dignity, stood in a revealingly harmonious relationship to the repugnance felt by the upper middle classes against the same trade unions. The mere sight of the organized strength of the industrial workforce made Hitler uneasy; for almost two hours he once let a workers' demonstration pass him by and "watched with bated breath the monstrous human dragon worm that slowly rolled past." In just a few decades, he said, the unions had "gone from being a tool for defending social human rights to being an instrument for smashing the national economy." They had served only as a "pile driver of the class struggle. "Like a threatening thundercloud" the trade union movement hung over the "political horizon". It was "one of the most terrible instruments of terror against the security and independence of the national economy, the solidity of the state, and the freedom of the person." It has turned the concept of democracy into a "disgustingly external phrase," desecrated liberty, mocked fraternity. The union leader wants "not a healthy, sturdy race before him, but a rotten herd capable of subjugation." He captures the masses by "the most impudent promises": he has no moral qualms. "In keeping with all his inner rapacious brutality, he at the same time sets the trade-union movement up for the most brutal use of force." No big bourgeois had ever suspected such a monster behind the bland trade union functionary; he would never have thought him capable of more than the "ruin of the national economy," that is, of the capitalist economy.

The trade union movement serves "not the real interests of the worker" but "exclusively the destructive intentions of world Jewry". The "international world Jew" uses the trade union movement "for the destruction of the economic basis of the free independent national states, for the destruction of their national industry and their national trade, and thus finally for the enslavement of free peoples in the service of the supranational world financial Jewry." Every business syndic was of the same opinion; in this language Hugen- berg had also given expression to the views of the big bourgeoisie on the trade union movement. Hitler gives the big bourgeoisie assurance that he will not cast out the devil with the Beelzebub, will not replace the free trade union with a National Socialist trade union. "A National Socialist trade union which sees its mission only in competition with the Marxist one would be worse than none at all." He wants "economic chambers"; there "entrepreneurship and workers no longer rage against each other in the wage and tariff struggle"; they solve "these problems together in a higher place"; the welfare of the whole of the people and of the state must thereby "be in their minds in shining letters." There will be no more strikes as soon as "a national socialist, national state exists.

This prospect of a state free of trade unions must have made the mouth of every bourgeois water. But Hitler also offered the destruction of the political organization of Marxism, the Social Democracy. The Social Democratic leaders were "perjured criminals." They were the authors of the "basest villainy" - the ammunition strike in 1918. The demand for universal suffrage for Prussia was "a basest banditry". "The Independent Social Democratic Party and the Spartacus League were the assault battalions of revolutionary Marxism." Hitler calls the Marxist leaders "political party rabble," shirkers, jailers, day thieves who are "ripe for the rope." They are "wretched and depraved criminals," world reconciliation apostles, wretched and depraved fellows, forgetful liars, insane people, half-fools, crooks, degenerates, deceitful assassins of the nation, perjurers, perjurers, cunning swindlers, anti-patriotic fellows, pimps, vipers, preserved scum of our national body, revolutionary vultures, paid and paid traitors, murderers of the people, canalized leader creatures, international swindlers. "As little as a hyena leaves from the aase, so little does a Marxist leave from the treason of the country." The Marxist leaders do not want the "good of the nation" but the "filling of empty pockets." Drooling, he confesses, "I hated the whole pack of these wretched people-cheating party

Union free state

rags to the uttermost." He sought forces determined to "declare war of annihilation on Marxism." He advises to "beat the Marxist seducers and corrupters to the wall." They should be taken by their "long ears", dragged "to a long pole" and pulled up "by a rope"; they should be "summarily put on trial and mercilessly exterminated". One should put them behind lock and key, keep them under poison gas. Only in the "brain of a monster" had the plan of the Marxist organization been able to take shape; the activity of this organization had to lead "as a final result to the collapse of human culture and thus to the desolation of the world".

Therefore one had to put a stop to Marxism in time. During the Ruhr struggle, the National Socialist movement should have been given the opportunity to confront Marxism. While the workers in the Ruhr were bringing down the French plans for power, Hitler wanted to open civil war against them; "but I preached to deaf ears." "No, a truly national government at that time had to desire unrest and disorder, if only under its turmoil a principled reckoning with the Marxist mortal enemies of our people finally became possible and took place. If this was omitted, then any thought of resistance, of whatever kind, was pure madness." Hitler does not say a word about the open treason of heavy industry; but he accuses the trade unions of having misused the Ruhr struggle only to fill their coffers with "Cuno's money." He ends up with the upper-middle-class wisdom that Helfferich and Stinnes had repeatedly recited since 1920 in the German Rexdistag: "On the day when Marxism will break in Germany, in truth its fetters will break forever." He incites to anti-Marxist civil war the conviction "that before one defeats external enemies, one must first destroy the enemy within." The situation of 1918 must not be repeated: lest once again the working class should escape from the powerless hands of defeated and helpless generals, their blood should first be shed in torrents. Hitler organizes the civil war against the class-conscious worker. By pointing out the points in which the bourgeoisie must adapt itself to the rules of warfare, he proves to the big bourgeoisie that it understands the subject of civil war better than anyone else. If the bourgeois class wants to do a complete job, it must no longer cling to parliamentary weaknesses; again and again parliamentary democracy will give shelter to Marxism. Parliamentary democracy is the undergrowth from which Marxism leads its guerrilla warfare against capitalism. Hitler wants to burn down this undergrowth so that the opponent of the big bourgeoisie will no longer find a hiding place. "I had always hated parliament," he says. It offers him "a miserable spectacle"; he hears only "talk" there and becomes aware of the "ridiculousness of the institution."

Parliamentarism floods public life with "the basest manifestations of our days"; the parliamentarians are incompetents, babblers, are a herd of muttonheads and plaster heads; they are irresponsible "fools", statesmanlike mumblers, creatures, incompetents, fools, spiritual half-world of the worst kind, a gaggle of spiritually dependent zeroes, "ornaments" of manliness, parliamentary bugs, parliamentary party rags, conscienceless criminals, job hunters, scoundrels, scoundrels. "To these traitors to the nation, any pimp is still a man of honor." The parliamentarian is a "politicizing three-cheese-high," a good-for-nothing.

Parliament no longer fulfilled its function for the big bourgeoisie since the social will of the working classes could no longer be fobbed off with the freedom of speech it had been granted in parliament. If parliamentarism does not in all circumstances protect the big bourgeoisie from the direct revolutionary action of the working class, if, on the contrary, it satisfies the proletarian need for freedom to the fullest extent through legislation, then it no longer fulfills its purpose. Hitler describes the moment when faith in the capitalist reliability of parliamentarism broke down. In November 1918, he notes, "Marxism did not care in the least about parliamentarism and democracy, but dealt a death blow to both by roaring and shooting mobs of criminals. That the bourgeois chattering organizations were defenseless in the same eye was selfevident."

Parliamentary democracy is class-castle democracy; Hitler replaces it with Führer democracy, Caesarist democracy, which is warlike in nature. In its space liberalism, freedom of the press, humanity, pacifism

necessarily wither away: Hitler gives them the kicks that a right-wing civil war man can only have left for these residues of another political climate. The journalists are "press rags" who pry into the most secret family affairs and do not rest until their "truffle-seeking instinct" has unearthed a find; they are thugs and riffraff. Hitler knows only revolver journalism. He speaks of humanity only ironically. He who is humane is not "carved from the wood of nature." The "humanity of nature", which "destroys weakness in order to give place to strength", will break all "ridiculous fetters of a so-called humanity", which has something for the weak. Under the addiction of self-preservation "the so-called humanity melts as an expression of a mixture of stupidity, cowardice and imagined better knowledge like snow in the March sun". It is one of the symptoms of decay that the humanitarianism becomes fashionable.

Hitler does not misunderstand himself and does hardly anything to be misunderstood. If one considers him a "socialist," he himself bears the least blame for having fallen into this light. Basically, he raised the false flag only once: when he called his organization the National Socialist German Workers' Party. However, he never denied the misconception that was circulating about him; he allowed himself to enjoy the advantage that this misconception gave him. The upper middle classes discounted Hitler's "socialism"; as often as Hitler came to speak before the gentlemen of Western heavy industry, they were of one heart and soul with him.

It is astonishing to note with what awareness Hitler sensed where the shoe pinched the upper middle classes and with what superior certainty he proposed the most effective and infallible remedies. He was more at home with the concerns of the upper middle classes than they were themselves, and he also had a more reliable grasp of how to deal with them. "If at times he seemed to take a stand against the big bourgeoisie, one could be sure that Hitler was protecting the big bourgeois from their own short-sightedness and forcing them to pursue their cause with greater vigor than they intended to expend.

Even during the world war Hitler observed that in the new situation the bourgeois cause was no longer in good hands with the traditional bourgeois parties vis-à-vis the proletarian masses; these parties had been set on peaceful reconciliation and understanding agreement: but the time for that was over. Hitler grasped that "here two worlds confront each other, partly naturally, partly artificially separated, whose attitude toward each other can only be one of struggle. Only a movement that had to be more than a parliamentary party is capable of "ruthlessly taking up the fight against social democracy. The bourgeois parties must disappear precisely in the interest of capitalism.

Hitler has the first thoughts of "becoming politically active later on after all": as soon as he feels that the capitalist order can only defend itself by robust means, he wants to be the organizer of the civil war. In November 1918, the bourgeois order is suspended in a thousand fears; it no longer has an army against the enemy within. "During those nights, hatred grew in me, hatred against the authors of this act." He becomes aware of his fate. "But I decided to become a politician." After a lecture by Feder, in which he heard for the first time in his life " a principled confrontation with international stock exchange and loan capital," the thought also "immediately flashed through his mind that he had now found the way to one of the most essential prerequisites for founding a new party." He takes it upon himself to win the masses over again to the bourgeois-capitalist points of view, or, as he says, to "nationalize" them.

There, of course, he must not be half-objective. Here one can only get ahead with a ruthless and fanatically one-sided attitude; he decides on "all the vehemence inherent in the extreme." With a clear-sightedness unparalleled, he knows what a high temperature of feeling is necessary if one wants to form the raw material mass; he practices the art of creating this temperature of feeling. "Faith is more difficult to shake than knowledge, love is less subject to change than esteem, hatred is more lasting than aversion, and the motive power for the most tremendous upheavals on this earth lay at all times less in a scientific knowledge animating the masses than in a fanaticism dominating them and a hysteria sometimes chasing them

Journalists are "press rags" forward." It is not the bourgeois virtues of calm and order, but the forces of "fanatical, even hysterical passion" that overthrow things.

Since he is heading for civil war, he provides his army with a worldview; because "worldviews proclaim their infallibility". Never is a worldview ready to "share with a second"; thus it creates the heated state of mind that wants to exterminate the opponent if he does not convert. He sees the success of his revolution "if the new worldview is taught to all people, if possible, and, if necessary, imposed later." He knows "the powerful effect of suggestive intoxication and enthusiasm"; he works with the "magical influence of what we call mass suggestion." The correctness of the program is not important; "here, too, one has to learn from the Catholic Church." A militant movement needs the "unshakable certainty and firmness of its program. In the formulation of its program, it must not submit to making concessions to the spirit of the times, but must forever maintain a form once found favorable, and in any case until it has been crowned with victory." Victory is not achieved in order to realize the program; the program only serves the purpose of helping to achieve victory. What comes after remains in the unknown. "For the great number of followers, the essence of our movement will lie less in the letter of our guiding principles than in the meaning we are able to give them."

In a conversation Hitler had with Otto Strasser on May 20 and 21, 1930, he pushed the consciousness of his play with the masses to the point of open cynicism. "I am a socialist," he said, "quite different from, for example, the highly wealthy Herr Graf Reventlow. I started out as a simple worker. I still can't see today if my chauffeur has a different meal than I have. But what you mean by socialism is simply crass Marxism. You see, the great mass of workers want nothing but bread and games, they have no understanding of any ideals, and we will never be able to count on winning over the workers to any considerable extent. We want a selection of the new master class which is not driven, as you are, by any morality of pity, but which realizes that it has the right to rule on the basis of its better race and which ruthlessly maintains and secures this rule over the broad masses."

Strasser developed his childish petit-bourgeois ideas of what socialism should be in the course of the disputes. Strasser's "socialism does not want to abolish private property; it makes the arrangement "that 49 per cent of the ownership and profit share remain with the present owners, while 41 per cent belong to the state, as the representation of the nation, and 10 per cent to the workforce of the plant concerned. The management share, as it would be expressed and reflected in the supervisory board, would be divided among one third of the present owners, one third of the state and one third of the workforce, in order to reduce the influence of the state and increase that of the workforce of the individual plant.

Hitler replied brusquely, "That is pure Marxism, what you are saying here; that is downright Bolshevism. You are introducing the system of democracy, which in the field of politics has made the heap of ruins that we have before us today, now also into the economy and are destroying the whole economy with it. In so doing, you are also rendering invalid the whole progress of mankind, which always proceeds only from the great individual, from the great inventor." There is, Hitler remarked, in the sense of the usual attacks on capitalism, "no capitalist system at all. You see, the owner of a factory is, after all, dependent on the labor power and the will to work of his workers; if they go on strike, then his so-called property is completely worthless. Moreover, by what right do these people demand a share in the property or even in the management? Mr. Amann, would you put up with your stenotypists suddenly telling you what to do? The entrepreneur who is responsible for production also creates bread for the workers. It is precisely our great entrepreneurs who are not interested in raking in money, living well, etc., but for whom responsibility and power are the most important things. They have worked their way to the top on the basis of their efficiency, and on the basis of this selection, which in turn only proves the superior race, they have a right to lead. They should now let an incompetent government council or a works council, which has no idea about anything, have a say; every

business leader will forbid that." When Strasser asked whether Hitler wanted to leave everything as it was in the ownership, profit and management relations after he had taken power, the latter replied, "But of course. Do you think I am so insane as to destroy the economy? Only if people did not act in the interest of the nation would the state intervene. But for this there is no need of expropriation and no right of codetermination; that is done by the strong state, which alone is able to be guided exclusively by great points of view without regard to interests."

The term "socialism" is bad in itself, Hitler said. We could adopt the model of fascism without further ado. In reality, he said, there is always only one system in the economy: responsibility upward, authority downward. This had been the case for thousands of years and could not be any other way. The fact that the director and the foremen bear responsibility upward and are allowed to "show off" downward is "absolutely correct as a system, and there can be no other. The contrast between capitalism and socialism was only a desk difference; to demand co-ownership and co-determination was Marxism.

In this conversation Hitler uncovered all the cards; here he gave the National Socialist guiding principles the meaning which they had not always wanted to bring to light with equal clarity. The "right of the person," which the folkish state had to "ensure flawlessly," was the return of the lord-of-the-house point of view. The "few percent" who were to rise "to be masters of the whole number," the minority called to make "world history," was the capitalist upper class. It solves the riddle that Hitler's warm affection for slavery gives up; the "material of inferior people" and of the inferior race is a "technical aid" for the "culture-creating elemental force." The wage slaves only release the "culture-creating ability" slumbering in the upper middle class and provide this ability with the scope to be able to "grow up to the most brilliant flowering." Hitler unleashes the dynamism of the petty-bourgeois masses in order to set up a petty-bourgeois state system; the petty-bourgeois upper class appears in it as a racial selection whose rule is in order according to the principles of the petty-bourgeoisie itself. "Thus the instinct of the poor," Sorel once wrote, "can serve as the basis for a popular state composed of bourgeois who wish to continue bourgeois life, who uphold bourgeois ideologies, but who nevertheless pretend to be agents of the proletariat."

The masses remain under the spell of this bent political condition because they misinterpret the realities; they hold on in good faith to a deceptive overall picture of things which flatters them and in which they do well. They do not have the right key which at once unlocks the natural order of facts and connections; although much of what they see certainly seems strange to them, they nevertheless believe that they can make sense of it. But the clear and simple sense of things has not dawned on them. It must not dawn on them either, it must not fall from their eyes like scales, because otherwise no one would keep them in line anymore. Hitler knows the importance of the delusion for his mass rule; as far as the delusion reaches, so far reaches Hitler's power. There is a good reason that he is so much at home in "Wahnfried" - with Winifred.

Hitler does not hide his dealings with the upper middle classes; the more openly he consorts with them, the less the imagination of the masses is occupied with it, the less suspicion he has to fear: what takes place in full daylight cannot be anything suspicious. But he gives the attention of the masses an occupation by which they are occupied, by which they are prevented from falling into stupid thoughts. He entangles the masses in the nets of a shallow sham problem; he sends them into harmless but tiring sham battles. Let them not come to their senses, then they will think nothing of it when they see him in the company of the upper middle classes. If the Aryan is also a ghost, he nevertheless fulfills his purpose when the masses waste their time in tracing his machinations from the historical past to the present. Those who no longer sleep over the race question have no other worries, and those who sniff out Jewish bed-sheet secrets certainly no longer stick their noses into the balance sheets of joint-stock companies. The more one is fed with biology, the less appetite he has for sociology; the more one is after the methods of upbringing, the colder the capitalist exploitation practices of the bourgeoisie leave him. The "purity of blood" robs the paltriness of the standard

Hitler reveals the cards of living of bitterness, and one who has racial pride gets over it more easily if he lacks bread. A hall battle is more than a successful collective bargaining.

Hitler once described how the Jew had nourished particularistic jealousies and stirred up denominational fights; he had done it in order to then be able to fish in the mud: "In any case, the Jew has achieved the desired goal; Catholics and Protestants are waging a merry war with each other, and the mortal enemy of Aryan humanity and of Christianity as a whole is laughing up his sleeve." By reckoning to the Jew the secret of the technique of raising sham problems in order to profit by them, Hitler betrays how well he knows how to do it himself; only, while he is staging the sham battles, it is not the Jew but the big bourgeoisie who carries home the spoils.

If the sham issue is to capture all the senses of the masses, it must be adapted to their horizon. Hitler has the surest instinct for what attracts the masses, what grips them. What people can fall for, because it is on their level, must become the spiritual content of the whole epoch; since the masses have to fight for it, no one, lest they become suspicious, is allowed to be above it. The best heads have to thresh the same spiritual straw that pleases the masses. If the world view of the masses has become the world view in general, then the world must offer a most whimsical, whimsical and comical sight; mass opinions are always only sectarian opinions that have become universal.

For the world view which shows the world in such a way as it is most convenient for the masses, the latter can also be fanatized, provided it is skillfully done. Fanaticism is the doggedness of the blinker: it strengthens the self-feeling of the masses when it is bloodily avenged on everyone to see further, deeper and more than they do. The masses feel all the weightier the more exclusively everyone must be blessed according to their own liking; they feel all the more divine the more relentlessly they are allowed to give respect, with fire and sword, to those dogmas in which the faith is expressed conceptually that makes sense to them. It means as much as its fanaticism makes of it; it means absolutely everything when its fanaticism allows nothing to exist beside it.

Hitler's consciousness reaches so far that he sees through the masses even in these dark reasons and that he has developed a system of making use of this mass-psychological knowledge. He engages the masses by fanatizing them; they thank him for the blood-drunk intoxication into which he puts them - as the European educated rabble thanked Richard Wagner for the nerve sensation which he had given them in Bayreuththey eat out of his hand as often as he fanatizes them; he fanatizes them every time they have to swallow one of those indigestible loaves which the cooks of the upper middle classes have prepared for them.

Hitler fanatizes the masses by fanatizing himself; he drives himself into frenzy by driving the masses into frenzy. But his frenzy is by no means the explosion of bubbling, vital forces, it is not a storm tide of unleashed, living reserves. He relates in his book that in October 1918 he was caught in a barrage of gas shells that lasted several hours. "Towards morning the pain also seized me angrier from quarter of an hour to quarter of an hour, and at seven o'clock in the morning I stumbled and staggered back with burning eyes, still taking my last report in the war with me. Already a few hours later my eyes had turned to glowing coals; it had become dark around me." This report is not reliable. It was not due to gas poisoning that Hitler lost his eyesight; it was hysterical blindness that afflicted him. The doctors who attended to his nervous condition in the military hospital at Pase walk treated him as a rare case; hysterical blindness was not common.

Hitler is a hysteric whom things that are set in motion easily knock over; as a result of his nervous weakness and lack of inhibition he is carried along in such a whirl that he himself is carried along again, which is not quite certain. No sooner has the mass infected him than he himself infects it again. "He will always let himself be carried along by the broad masses in such a way that, emotionally, just the words he needs to speak to the hearts of his respective listeners will flow out of them." If only an igniting spark has seized him from the

47 masses, he is immediately ablaze; soon his igniting speech also transforms the masses into a sea of fiery passions. He will soon be as fanatical as the masses should be; rarely do they lag behind him. He heats himself with the fuel accumulated in the masses; in the mass meeting he fills himself up with it. He screws himself and the masses, by revving the engine of fanaticism to the highest revs, up into the state of a godlike frenzy of power. He knows what he owes to fanaticism; the word "fanatical" has done it to him.

Admittedly: he is still above his fanaticism; he is hysterically seized by it, but he never goes down in it. He is a power addict. His instinct of power protects him from the error that the fanatical mass can confer a lasting power; it is considered by him only as a boost to reach the summit of that more solid power which bourgeois society has to confer. If he had been allowed to speak in time, he would have won the world war; the German people would have gone farther with the drumfire of his propaganda than with the drumfire of Ludendorff's artillery. He was haunted by the thought of having missed a great hour in the world war. He instructs his readers that the most brilliant writer has nothing to report next to a "great and brilliant popular orator." The "average birdbrain of a German, scientifically, of course, highly educated writer's soul" does not come into consideration next to the "genius of the speaker." He praises the people happily, to whom in their distress "fate will one day give the man gifted for it, who will at last bring the fulfillment long longed for." He tells Germany what it has in him: "The union, however, of theoretician, organizer, and leader in one person is the strangest thing that can be found on earth; this union creates the great man." He indicates that he is willing to bear "with the highest unrestricted authority, also the last and highest responsibility." "Only the hero is called to do this." In the conversation with Strasser he said, "With us, leader and idea are one, and every party comrade has to do what the leader commands, who embodies the idea and alone knows its ultimate goal." He would not tolerate the SA being built up as a military association; that way the officers would wring it out of his hand. It had to remain a "means of protection and education of the National Socialist movement"; he gave it idea and goals and in this way remained its lord and master.

Hitler clarifies about himself in order to legitimize his claim to d unlimited power; who like him could have turned the fate of the world war, who like him is a brilliant speaker, theoretician, organizer, leader, creator of ideas and realizer of ideas, belongs to the top. He started as a drummer; but he carried the marshal's baton in his knapsack from the beginning - he knew it. "Success is the only judge of the right or wrong of such a start"; he burned for success, and he was sure of it.

This power-addict stands at the end of the rotten bourgeois world; he is as empty as a person, as exhausted and lazy as it is as an institution. He basically has only one idea: to start the bourgeois misery all over again; in this idea is reflected the bourgeois determination not to abdicate voluntarily under any circumstances. He wants power in order to show the big bourgeoisie how it should have wound up the bourgeois gears earlier. He shows it - but the sum of his achievements is exhausted in the fact that he rehashes the old capitalist cabbage. With dictatorial force he forces this cabbage on the German people once more, although its taste is more repulsive than it had been at any time.

In Hitler lives, as it were, the pure power instinct of bourgeois society, regardless of the fact that there is nothing left in it that still gives it a right to exist. Hitler's idea is not the spiritual reflection of a young reality of life that has matured in the bosom of time and is now preparing to fill the world with itself; it is a spiritual will-o'-the-wisp that hovers above the swamp of the bourgeois order - it is for him personally the convulsively constructed meaning that his urge for power wants to lead into the field for itself. This idea naturally needs "fanatically deluded" followers; it would not bear to be put through its paces.

The special situation in which Hitler and the cause for which he stands find himself also gives his concept of leader its character. The leader has unlimited power: it is really a matter of the whole; every decision requires the total commitment of the bourgeois existence. The player here can only be a dictator with blank power.

The leader is the incarnation of the idea; he alone knows where it wants to go. No one is allowed to ask, to make up his own mind, to look the idea directly in the face: if he would find out what in truth lies behind the idea, he would no longer lift a finger for it. By being the exclusive vessel of the idea, the leader reaches into supersensible precincts where no one may follow him; he is a mediator, as the pope is. Since the thing is immersed in mystic darkness, which no lesser mortal penetrates, it does not harm it to be the worst and most disreputable of all things.

The leader is mouth and sword, prophet and warrior of his idea at the same time. The beginnings of the new social order, the planned economic order, act like parting waters on the shattered bourgeois world; they must be swept away if doom is not to befall it. As the herald of the revived bourgeois doctrines of salvation, the Fuehrer falls upon all Marxist "pestilence" and drags them before his court of punishment. The Marxist is an infidel, is a mangy dog for whom there is no mercy. Thus, the leader is in essence a resurrected Mohammed, who sets out to cleanse the world of error. He is less a Caesar, as Napoleon was, than a militant prophet. His armies do not actually consist of soldiers who are satisfied with the orders of the commander, but of obsessed dervishes who proclaim the message of their prophet to the world, carrying weapons as well. The petty-bourgeois masses, who were almost disgusted with the bourgeois world, are the poor sons of the desert who feverishly chase the mirage that Hitler shows them; the struggle against Bolshevism is their path to the bourgeois paradise. Restored capitalism is their Allah and Hitler his Mohammed. Hitler's Mein Kampf is their Koran and Munich the new Mecca. "The geopolitical significance of a central hub of a movement cannot be overestimated in this respect. Only the existence of such a place, surrounded with the magic charm of a Mecca or Rome, can in the long run give to a movement the strength which lies in its inner unity and the recognition of a pinnacle representing that unity." Like a great play, Hitler puts on his movement in the style of Islam; he issues stage directions that betray the school of the Arab prophet. He himself reserves the heroic role. His hysterical empathy makes it easy for him almost to forget that the Mohammed he gives is after all only an acting performance and that the passion with which he rages is not fed by unspent elemental force but is the morbid expression of a shattered nervous system.

His prophetic mantle is a dummy. Hitler appears as the God-sent instrument who will snatch the whole of European culture from the jaws of Bolshevik Satanism, as the Antilenin who will root out the weeds which the man from the Kremlin has sown among the capitalist wheat, as the White Savior who will wrest domination of all the peoples of the earth from the Nordic race, as the German hero who will subdue the globe to the German people. "Believe me," he declared to Strasser, "the whole National Socialism would be worth nothing if it were confined to Germany and did not seal the domination of the high-quality race over the whole world for at least one or two thousand years." In truth, it is merely the well-subsidized instrument of the German big bourgeoisie which, adapting itself to the changed circumstances of the times, is trying to regain its lost imperialist position in the world through a demagogue.

Hitler's two-volume book is without originality - but it testifies to unusual natural intellect. When Hitler repeatedly mocks the trained intelligentsia with venomous scorn and seeks to disparage the professional civil servant, one may guess how much he suffered in his youth from the social arrogance of intellectual strata to whom he felt superior in innate cleverness. The book is without structure and disposition; it is not a work of thought, it is the written down flow of speech of a gifted man. His talent, however, does not lie in original idiosyncrasy and creative depth; it is, strictly speaking, a rare dexterity of appropriation of all that floats in the atmosphere. Hitler has hardly worked through any scientific work; it is, however, astonishing what he has got out of the reading of newspapers and magazines alone. He is a sponge that has soaked itself full of all its ideological filth in the stagnant waters of the capitalist order; in his book he releases the murky broth. Everything is there again: the Dolchstoß legend, the journeyman saddler Ebert, the grinding rage

Hitler's idea a spiritual will-o'-the-wisp 49 against Marxism, the stale wit that tries its hand at "parliamentary chatter," the cry for the strong man, the staid social heart for the worker, but also the Nordic fad of the folkish sect brethren.

The reflections are insignificant, without subtlety or depth; they are on a par with the opinions exchanged at the beer table. In fact, the beer bench has sacral significance for National Socialism: beer halls are its first temples and mosques, where the faithful are seized by the spirit; but beer halls are also the first consecrated battlefields, where the old fighters perform their heroic deeds; in a beer hall Hitler opens the November putsch I923 by the shot he fires against the ceiling. The beer bench is literally the altar in front of which the divine power descends upon the ingenious speaker and graces him with tongues that no heart is able to resist. Hitler becomes almost tender and soft when he speaks of the Hofbräuhausfestsaal, and with embarrassing accuracy he relates: "I always stood in the Hofbräuhausfestsaal at one of the long fronts, and my podium was a beer table."

The book's style is washy, lacking in force and precision; it seldom hits the mark, usually a hair's breadth off; in its breadth, it is more clumsy than weighty. No chapter dispenses with invective; however, they ring hollow. They are not Lutheran juicy and coarse, but vulgar. Hitler is careless with the honor of his opponents; he accuses and smears into the blue. What he hurls as a "word of strength" is mostly only a pathetic slander. He has a low soul; when he rants, it becomes clear how low one is to be dragged down by him. His favorite word is "brutal"; he is incessantly in a state of "brutal determination." He was impressed by the simplified method of fisticuffs; it is not by chance that he advocates boxing and jiu-jitsu.

Next to the imposing scientific textbook of Marxism, "Capital," Hitler's "Mein Kampf" looks like a bloated Salvation Army tract. However much natural talent Hitler might have been born with, his "Kampf" is nothing more than a political trash book. It set the altitude at which the Third Reich was later founded.

IX. The Myth of the 20th Century

IN that conversation with Otto Strasser, Hitler had described Rosenberg's book "The Myth of the 20th Century" as "the most formidable of its kind," "greater even than Chamberlain's Fundamentals of the 19th Century." Although the National Socialist Workers' Party, for tactical reasons, wanted the book to be considered only a "private work" before the public, although Rosenberg himself assured that it offered only personal confessions, not "program points of the movement" to which he belonged, the party leaders nevertheless treated the work as their ideological-philosophical primer. Rosenberg was the chief editor of the leading organ of the movement; even if his views were not finally in harmony with the ideas of the movement, the movement nevertheless had to take responsibility for the essential content of the literary work of its civil servant and paid leading publicist, and as long as it tolerated him at his post, it had to share the responsibility for it. Hitler's enthusiastic judgment of the book, moreover, acknowledged how deep Rosenberg's influence on the party indeed was; if it distanced itself from him, it was not in order to shake him off, but only so as not to make anyone's head spin where he acted as a "red rag." But he belonged to it; Rosenberg formulated world-philosophically what Hitler had to do politically.

The "myth of the 20th century" is the myth of blood. The highest human values blossomed from the Nordic ground of life; where the Nordic race set its foot, there culture grew. The earth of India, Persia, Hellas and

Islam as a role model

Rome was blessed by the Nordic man; he is a gifted giver and appointed ruler. His works disintegrate when the sub-human, the "Eastern-Syrian" man in particular, gains ground, when the Nordic man knows how to mix races and leaves his inheritance to bastards.

Woltmann, Gobineau, Chamberlain developed this doctrine already earlier; in the end they even believed to have tracked down Jesus' Nordic nature. Rosenberg shapes and bends those teachings until they have the form they need to satisfy the theoretical needs of a political movement. In the process, of course, it turns out that one is never able to cover the traces of one's origins and that the world view that one carries within oneself never denies from which angle the eye first fell upon the world. Rosenberg is a Balte; in him lives a racial consciousness of superiority over a lower, subservient and disenfranchised foreign race. The Estonian was for the German-Baltic "Untermensch"; so contemptuous and unapproachable could a Balte once move in the midst of his Estonian environment.

Rosenberg's foreign policy conception also bears the imprint of Baltic viewpoints. The Baltic Sea is the politically decisive area for the Balts; when he longed to get out of his Russian bondage, he looked to the Baltic powers that had once drawn the borders of Russian power: his eyes wandered to Sweden in particular, to Sweden, whose royal Charles XII had once pressed even the great Peter not a little. Thus Rosenberg wants an alliance of the Baltic states; Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and perhaps also Denmark are to come together; the "Gustav-Adolf line" of German policy is to be taken up again. But this bloc should be supported by England: the whole alliance system rests in this way on the ground of a beautiful Nordic racial community. By the strength of this alliance system the Russian-Mongolian Empire could be shattered.

Rosenberg's blood myth is far less "biological" than it looks; the whole biological effort is set in motion by the old, well-rehearsed social mechanics hiding behind it. The anti-Roman affect is aimed against the ideas of 1789, against liberalism, humanitarianism, the idea of law, the intellectual content of the 19th century, all of which the German citizen now no longer needs. The ideas of 1789 were secularized Roman Catholic Christianity. Rosenberg mercilessly traces them to their "Eastern Syrian" origins. In the universality of the Roman Catholic Church there is always a counterbalance against the overstretch of authority and power of social upper classes of individual peoples. There is a point from which the Church, in order to continue to exist, must stand by the social lower classes: this is its humanity, from which it must never renounce. The Roman universal church is a source of danger for every upper class striving for totality; That is why Rosenberg threw down the gauntlet to it, that is why he "unmasked" it as a "male association of priests" which saw its power threatened by the sense of honor of racially proud peoples and unmasked its head as a "sorcerer" and "medicine man" who could most successfully perform his mumbo-jumbo in front of a characterless racial mishmash in which everyone was equal to everyone else. Rome becomes the epitome of all tendencies, which fill every individual with the feeling of human dignity, the pride of equality of all that wears a human face and the love of personal and civic freedom.

The Germanic-Nordic, on the other hand, embodies the brutal will to rule of the upper bourgeoisie; it is the master race that wants to replace the spirit of free competition and the free contract of labor with the bondage of strict industrial-feudalistic forms of life. The German upper bourgeois wants to deal with the proletarian lower classes as arrogantly as the Baltic baron once dealt with his Estonians; the distance between the upper bourgeois master race and the proletarian lower race is to be unbridgeable.

In domestic politics the Germanic-Nordic principle first establishes the right order of precedence between the upper classes and the workers, and in foreign politics between the Teutons and the Slavs. The German Herrenmensch fulfills the meaning of his existence, which is implanted in him by divine counsel, only when he rides "towards the East" as a conqueror; since he has forgotten it for a few centuries, Rosenberg wants to remind him of it again. It is the German vocation to bring culture and civilization to the Russians and to

The arrogance of the Baltic 51 teach them obedience. The Germanic racial consciousness is supposed to give courage to the German bourgeois to tie up with the Soviet Union.

But this is then again only a first step into world politics. The quality of the Germanic-Nordic substance justifies that the whole world is distributed as booty between the German, English and North American big bourgeoisies. Here, the anti-Roman affect gets a new world-political point: the Romance bourgeoisie is to go away empty-handed; France and Italy are to go under the wheels in this deal just as Slavs and Asians. The newly rising big-bourgeois imperialism is to bear exclusively Germanic coloration; only Germans, Englishmen and North Americans are to be admitted as partners. If it is true that there is only one Nordic art and that everywhere, from the Chinese to the Egyptians, a Nordic upper class, sitting on a lower-racial people's body, created the masterpieces, then one also knows what the future demands of the Teutons: the world will be in right shape again only when a big-bourgeois head of Germanic origin has been put on it at all corners and ends.

Rosenberg is not an original thinker; he is not even to the limited extent that the incomparably more wellread Chamberlain still was. He, too, has scoured many books: but one notices it too strongly. Where the sources are good, Rosenberg's account is also on a decent level - for instance in the chapter on Hellas, where he was allowed to collect such noble treasures as those laid down in Rhodes' "Psyche" and Burckhardt's "Greek Cultural History". As soon as the sources fail, he also fails. When Rosenberg tries to pave his own way, he gets entangled in canonical and political issues.

It is not a creation from one cast, glowed by the divine spark; just the breath of the creative does not glow transfiguringly over the whole.

Rosenberg's philosophy is a politically very transparent philosophy; the practical tendencies for which it provides the spiritual haze want to be understood quickly and nimbly. It makes use of the right of mass movements to banality. The "thinkers," too, must be immediate combatants; the numerous intermediate stages by which subtle and abstract systems were formerly separated from everyday life must be dismantled. Rosenberg determined the philosophical level which became binding for the Third Reich. Insofar as philosophy rises above Rosenberg's regions, it inhibits immediate action by filing minds too fine and sharpening intellectual probity too fine. Bourgeois society now tolerates for the control of its state of emergency only robust minds that know only how to distinguish black from white and unconditionally take sides with what seems to them to shine white. Rosenberg's "myth of the 20th century" is the philosophy of the robust heads; it instills in them that it is now a matter of blood. Thus it appropriately tunes the civil war situation: Rosenberg's blood mysticism is the philosophical reflection of the fascist thirst for blood.

X.

"I box, therefore I am."

All events, the forces that determine its movement, its tempo, its rhythm, the fullness in which it completes its course, the direction, the refractions, the reversal of its course, its basic tendencies, the crises and catastrophes into which it gets confused, the meaning it discovers in itself: all this is reflected in spiritual formations that a time produces, in its literature, art, science and philosophy. By no means is this spiritual precipitation the creative original, the self-ruling origin, the history-witnessing beginning; it remains a second, later, accompanying, added, dependent and derived, even if it reveals the essence of the event, is its self-knowledge and self-disclosure. What the event had included in itself, where it aimed at, what it wanted to be regarded as before itself and the observer, which wish-image, which secret longing it was pursuing: all this is revealed by the spiritual precipitation and "superstructure", the spiritual production. The spiritual formations are neither accidental nor arbitrary; they are like delicate deposits and incrustations which are thrown on the beach of time and in which the energies of movement, the change of form, the states of the basic substance of the event emerge in turn, in their infinite stages. The men in whose intellectual works the stages of the course of reality are represented with level and format are the celebrities who strike; they are the beacons by which one can orientate oneself; they inform about where one stands and where the current is drifting.

The most representative literary figure that the bourgeoisie of the period between 1900 and 1933 produced was Thomas Mann. In terms of origin, substance, instincts, horizons, points of view and value standards, he was a citizen of this time; in him, this bourgeoisie became aware of itself. This citizen no longer fought against the feudal enemy; he had come to a highly advantageous understanding with him. The feudal upper class made as much room for the bourgeois as he claimed. It resolutely adjusted itself to the bourgeois interest and contented itself with the concession of still being allowed to perform its harmless feudal social theater. The German bourgeois had climbed the highest peak to which he was free to ascend; he could go no further upward: he rested and enjoyed. He enjoyed the goal he had reached, the views his position offered him, the world that lay at his feet. He breathed "mountain air"; far away he kept bad smells. His ideas of reason, liberality, humanity, and justice no longer needed to function in a practically offensive way against the feudal adversary; he could rejoice in their fine content; they shone all the more nobly because they no longer needed to be up to any malice against the feudal class adversary. The bourgeois behaves as an aesthete: he loves the beautiful and, as far as his business now runs by itself, cultivates his inclination to the arts. In Thomas Buddenbrook, the bourgeois finds himself in that stage in which he has become an aesthete and feels comfortable as an aesthete; he is pleased to have reached this degree of sophistication and civilization. Even in the poet's chosen, polished, and controlled language, the height and refinement of the taste to which this bourgeois holds himself is betrayed as he surrounds himself with beautiful things at his country house outside the city, things that make him forget the dirty business that his staff does thoughtlessly and routinely in the city. But the beauty-declared summit existence does not agree with him; he becomes consumptive in the regions of his magic mountain. Already mysterious forces are pushing up against him from below, questioning his aestheticized existence, which they only want to accept as unbearable parasitism, which has to be put to an end. The aestheticized bourgeois existence suddenly sees itself thrown onto the same historical pile of rubble onto which feudal existence had once hurled it, and on which all backward and backwoods things finally have a rendezvous. Moods of doom creep over the aestheticized bourgeois; he suspects that he will not escape the doom into which he, from his height, looks down. In "Death in Venice" Mann describes the exhaustion of the bourgeois condition. This shows the "elegant self-control, which until

the last moment hides an inner undermining, the biological decay from the eyes of the 'world; the yellow, sensually deprived ugliness, which is able to kindle its smoldering rut into a pure flame, yes, to rise to dominion in the realm of beauty; the pale impotence which draws from the ardent yeasts of the spirit the power to prostrate a whole high-spirited people at the foot of the cross, at its feet; the amiable attitude in the empty and austere service of form; the false, dangerous life, the rapidly enervating desire and art of the born deceiver." This "heroism of weakness" was the end of the powerful run-up that the European bourgeoisie had taken in 1789.

Certainly, the first world war was only an evasion of the perplexity of the European bourgeois existence; but at the same time it seemed to be a way out. Something happened, something was done; one believed to be able to free oneself and to start again from scratch and to begin a completely new, original existence. Because one gathered up one's last and had to give it away, one thought that one had become richer, stronger, more powerful. The uniform that Hans Castorp slipped into gave him a strange support that allowed him to simply ignore his consumption for the time being: being able to ignore it already meant to him, in the exuberance of his feelings, that he was cured of it. Thomas Mann himself was such a Hans Castorp, who breathed a sigh of relief when he slipped into the colorful skirt of Prussian heroism: this skirt was the panacea against bourgeois consumption; whoever did not want to put it on was guilty of remaining a consumptive.

The German "civilization literate" had suffered no less from the hopelessness of the German bourgeois condition, only admittedly he saw the cause of all evil in the fact that the German citizen had never radically submitted to the cure of 1789. He did not expect anything from the steel bath of the war; he continued to adhere to Mr. Settembrini and, although even this libertine had not been spared the consumption, he found Jacobinism more digestible for the German citizen than Prussianism, however radiantly it had presented itself in the August days of 1914. This appealed to Thomas Mann; in his "Reflections of an Unpolitical Man" he presented himself as a Prussian-militant citizen who sought recovery from decay and newly bubbling vitality in the noise of arms; he impatiently settled accounts with all literary doctors, insofar as they were reluctant to go along with the change of healing methods as faithfully as he himself had done.

Admittedly, the war did not make the German bourgeoisie healthy; it emerged from it sicker and more consumptive than before. The time of tranquil self-indulgence, of aestheticism, was over. The war's cure had had no effect; it had ravaged the last reserves of strength. The bourgeoisie no longer had the means for a casual existence on the Magic Mountain - not to mention the fact that its overall constitution was no longer able to cope with this thin mountain air and would have succumbed to the galloping final stage there within a very short time.

Although Thomas Mann liquidated his Prussian-militant digression in 1918, just as the entire bourgeoisie did, his representative weight was temporarily extinguished. A new bourgeois type slowly pushed itself into the foreground. The Stresemann era seemed to want to restore the Wilhelmine bourgeois once again. But this economic restoration was financed by borrowing and foreign credit assistance; its unsoundness was abruptly and embarrassingly exposed when the promissory bills were to be redeemed. That was the end of all the aesthetic, civilization-drunk, pacifist-humanitarian glory of the German bourgeoisie. The last person to exploit it in a literary enterprise worth millions, shortly before its worm-eatenness was palpable, was Remarque. Remarque profited from that low variety of pacifism that wanted to burden the English, the French and the Americans with the whole concern for the German fate. Thomas Mann stood towering above this misery.

The train of things changed direction; with astonishing agility the German citizen ran over from Remarque's pacifism to the "Harzburg Front". Thomas Mann senses this turn of the German bourgeois toward violence,

The aestheticized existence toward willed inhumanity, toward intolerance, toward the chthonic powers, and takes it into account. But even that bourgeois manifestation, which is fundamentally repugnant to him, he grants high rank; even the brutality he cannot think of otherwise than that it shows spirit and is charming like that Naphta, who is quite a match for Settembrini in the dialectic conversation and who, when he learns that humanity can really have character and stand by its principles, does not know how to smoke out the fatally seductive spirit otherwise than by shooting a bullet into his head.

In his great novel "Joseph and His Brothers" Mann himself sacrifices to the chthonic powers. It was, however, a very rationalistic-skeptical and finely ironizing way in which Thomas Mann, as it were, de-mythified the mythical material. Thomas Mann seemed to give in to the German pull toward myth; but in doing so, he stripped this pull of its malignant and delusional character. If the myth was rationalized, then it was at the same time humanized and thus lost that gloom under whose protection it confused and barbarized minds. The myth was, one may say, withdrawn from political-propagandistic abuse.

Many poets, thinkers and artists are heralds, who proclaim the rule of a time tendency, which has long since taken the reins under the cover, now before all the people. Voltaire and Rousseau did not first lift the bourgeois spirit onto the horse, but merely chattered that it had already been sitting in the saddle for a long time; Schiller and Beethoven revealed that it had already made itself very wide-spread in Germany, too. The more vital, weighty, exciting a rising epoch will be, the more unforgettable will be the works that heralded it.

Next to these heralds, however, stand the "transfigurers"; before an epoch finally sinks, they pour the whole greatness, fullness and depth of the essence of that epoch into poetic, pictorial, musical and sculptural symbols and systems of wisdom; in this form the heritage of the departing age lives on into all the future. The very great poets, artists and thinkers are, as a rule, more transfigurers than heralds: of their kind are Homer and Plato, Dante and Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe and Mozart, Pushkin and Tolstoy.

Thomas Mann belongs to the transfigurers: only, of course, he does not bid farewell to a millennium, but at best to a seculum, and with all the high art of form he cannot give more than this century contained.

Even at the end of the liberal-humanitarian bourgeois period, a bold talent doubted whether the bourgeois substance was worth all the fascist effort by which the bourgeois wanted to make himself afloat again for a few years: it was Bert Brecht. In Bert Brecht's poetry, bourgeois rot looks itself in the face with matter-offact detachment; it does not whitewash itself and does not loathe itself. A stinking reality presents itself without any ideology: it does not stand before any judgement chair of an idea; it does not want to be justified and approved, nor condemned and rejected; it simply spreads out and leaves it up to each viewer whether he wants to be disgusted, whether he wants to be amused, whether he wants to look in or whether he wants to turn away. To a certain extent, she also leaves it up to the devil whether he wants to draw a title to take her from the sight of her festering herd. If Brecht has an ulterior motive, then it is only that of spoiling her love of life in the sight of her own eaten grimace and of robbing her of the desire to lift even one finger in her self-defense.

This paralysis of the bourgeois will for self-defense naturally worked into the hands of the proletarian class enemy; whoever aided and abetted it could be regarded as its agent and disguised confederate. In this way Albert Einstein came into disrepute as a partisan of the proletarian class enemy. His theory of relativity was originally certainly only a variety of mathematical-physical speculations and was concerned exclusively with laws of motion in a highly abstract sense. But it had general effects on the mental attitude in general, on the attitude in particular, in which one confronted the movement phenomena of the social life. The laws of the capitalist economy had claimed absolute validity; the bourgeois order wanted to be not only eternal but solely binding. The idea of relativity aroused doubts against everything that claimed absoluteness and sole

bindingness: as soon as one changed one's location, one entered another frame of reference and the relationship of things suddenly presented a completely different face. There were systems of social order and reference in which the capitalist laws were without meaning; there was no reason why their principle bindingness should be less than the bindingness of the bourgeois social order. If one chose another point of reference, the overall aspects changed.

The capitalist order was the order of the citizen; there was no reason why the worker should not have his own system of order. If he created it, it was no less sensible, expedient, pertinent and necessary for him than the capitalist order had been for the bourgeois. The proletarian received the right to feel the bourgeois order for himself as senselessly as the bourgeois felt for himself the collectivist order. But if the bourgeois order was only relative in this sense: how did it want to continue to exist, how did it want to assert itself against the onslaught of the proletarian class? By making the obligatory power of the bourgeois order questionable for the proletarian, the idea of relativity broke its neck. Einstein did not fight directly in the Marxist front, but by undermining the naive confidence in the eternal and exclusive validity of the bourgeois order, his system of thought in its further effect gave the citizen the "stab in the back".

The law teacher Hans Kelsen performed a similar function. The state is the instrument of rule of a class; law is the totality of norms behind which the class power entrenches itself; justice is the magnanimity of the leading class to show respect to the law even if it itself has the damage of it in between. Kelsen treated the state as a pure system of norms; he made the power that sets and applies the norms disappear into nothingness. The pure norm benefits everyone, the strong as well as the weak; if the principle of formal legality prevails, then there is no escape for a ruling class once a majority has decided on an inconvenient law. Kelsen's normativism and formal legalism ignored the will to power, the brutal egoism of the bourgeoisie; every legislative act of a runaway un-' bourgeois majority pulled the rug from under the feet of the bourgeois institutions. Kelsen leaves in the dark who constitutes this runaway majority; but he knows that there are chances for the proletarian class against the bourgeoisie. It all depended on whether the bourgeois egoism could be ignored, which until now still reserved for emergencies the right to operate with natural law against positive law, with living legitimism against formal legalism, and which let every majority be kicked by its dictators as soon as it tampered with the sanctity of bourgeois treasuries. The German bourgeois certainly felt that formal legality, when it no longer coincided with bourgeois egoism, became a proletarian class struggle weapon; the popular law and the living legitimacy, with which he soon defended his skin, were all the more convincing because the fists were truly very coarse that made use of these "revolutionary" legal principles.

Kelsen's formalism wanted to eliminate the bourgeois class will in the event that the norms handled by a proletarian parliamentary-democratic majority now gave validity to the proletarian class power.

Kelsen, like Einstein, shook the ground on which the bourgeoisie stood; both shook the belief in the immutability of the foundations of bourgeois class rule. Suddenly the other, the opposite, the proletarian "class enemy" was allowed to claim for itself as much reason and right as was granted to the bourgeois. But if the bourgeois no longer had anything in advance in terms of higher historical justification, then he was finished as a social upper class.

This undermining of the bourgeois position, which lay in the tendency of Einstein as well as of Kelsen, appeared as the course of an unheard-of process of spiritualization, which dissolved everything coarsesubstantial into processes of movement, into wave movements, into radiations and functions; the firm structure of definite spiritual as well as social forms, in which the bourgeoisie had established itself, dissolved into nothing but indeterminable relations and floating conditions. The spirit, which had so long been the pacemaker of the bourgeois cause, suddenly turned against it; it dissolved more and more into foam in its

Bert Brecht and Albert Einstein

element. If the bourgeois now still wanted to assert himself, he had to begin to throw down the gauntlet to the spirit; he had to seek help from the chthonic powers as if he were a medieval feudal man. The spirit was judged by being exposed as the "adversary of the soul".

The activist-fascist movement wants to re-stabilize the bourgeois order like a "rodher de bronce"; intolerantly it insists that only the bourgeois society is in real harmony with eternal basic laws of social life. Any conception of order that would displace bourgeois-capitalist society is a sign of social disease, of corrupt susceptibility, a betrayal of the true will of nature, a crime against the foundations of human existence. With fire and sword these phenomena of decay must be eradicated and the unconditional autocracy of the bourgeois order must be reasserted. In doing so, it would not need to justify itself anew, it would not need to withstand any examination: by unceremoniously establishing its dictatorship in the hour of danger, it would stamp any question about the proof of this vocation as impertinence worthy of punishment; in every way it would be permissible to shut the mouths of such curious people who were annoying.

It goes without saying that the intellectual haze surrounding fascist activism reflects the same tendencies. The fascist intelligentsia wants to get a firm, immovable, absolute under its feet at any price; it detests the confusing vortex into which the theory of relativity, theoretical physics, pure legal doctrine have dragged modern man.

Already Spengler had taken these fascist needs into account; the tangible massive he offered them was blood and soil. From blood to race was only one step. Blood, soil, race were dark, primitive realities of which one felt sure; they were not to be relativized and did not melt between the fingers. They became the basic capital of fascist thinking; fascist intellectuality circled around these values, it fell back on these values again and again. Fascist thinking had thus taken a direction that led away from the spirit as a principle, from its vastness and brightness, into the night regions, the deep districts, the mystical, and at the same time also into the limited, narrow, homely-provincial, childlike primitive. Paul Klee's paintings translated this move towards puerilism into color; it is one of the incomprehensibilities of this time that the painterly infantile genius that distinguished him did not help him to that great fascist career to which his painterly primitivism had given him a rightful claim.

On this path to the regions of blood and soil, fascist thought repeatedly encountered the marvelous, the unpredictable, the opaque, the instinctive. Inevitably, it got involved in all kinds of quackery and sectarianism: sectarian medicine, interpretation of the worldview, sectarian astrology, occultist agriculture, sectarian world economic and financial programs conquered the ground on which the conscientious spirit of science had hitherto exercised its strict control. In the end, the entire German political system, its terminology, ideology, methods and self-representation adapted to the horizon of sectarianism that had become total: the political cranker administered Bismarck's legacy. Insofar as the fascist intelligentsia was intelligent, it took pains, by the dowry of its nature, not to sin against the fascist style; it harnessed its mind in a truly infernal way, to the mind in general; she not infrequently astonished by the wealth of mind she expended in pleading in favor of unspirituality; with admirable inventiveness she listed to herself the "dumb fool" for whom she had originally brought far too much to be able normally to slip into his skin. She, like Naphta, committed mental suicide in unlimited numbers. The world in which she lived bore the style of nobly formed "gigantic banality" anticipated by Stefan George.

For the philosophical head the ontic problem was topical at the moment when it understood that the fixed and immovable was the commandment of the time. It increased the feeling of its inviolability when bourgeois society was allowed to know that in principle there was indeed something eternally lasting, a ground of being that could not be set out of course by anything, eternal categories on which one could rely for millennia. The rebels against capitalism had operated with the "frightening realization" that surplus value,

profit, capital, even private property, the citizen and the peasant in general were only historical categories that would fade into the uncommitted at some time; this had just given the bourgeois self-confidence that jolt from which it wanted to recover through the fascist cure.

The fascist citizen expected from his philosophers that they statued something eternal again: the eternal of a given being and its categories. The ontology of Martin Heidegger did its best to spare him a disappointment. The conclusion that the historical expression of the evident metaphysical ground of being was the bourgeois order did not need to be drawn by the philosophers themselves; the fascist bourgeois, when it was so far, personally took care of that. For the bourgeois, eternal being was a symbol of his social immortality; ontic philosophy thus became a metaphysical confirmation of the bourgeois urge for self-assertion and selfpreservation.

This unbreakable being is immediately present; it does not need any intellectual feats to get on its track: one does not give this satisfaction to the spirit. In case of need it is even possible without special intuition. One proves the existential, by simply letting go of the state in which one finds oneself; one doesn't care about reasons and proofs; one is there par excellence and shows it to everyone who doubts it. The thinking of being is stopped; the one who can't let go of it is hit on the head so that he loses his ability to think; this is how the existential manifests itself beyond all reasons. I box, therefore I am. The violence is the emphasis that the bourgeois being puts against all those who do not understand its eternal duration; it is the immediately convincing self-revelation of the existential. Humanity, liberality, spirituality are only indirect manifestations of existence: they are a fuss that demands so much effort that the existent may know nothing more of it in the end. There is nothing that gives respect to the being more thoroughly than the turned up shirt sleeve and the loosely fitting shooting iron. Modern ontologism and existentialism is the philosophy of the fascist activists; the citizen has again the certainty of a profit-blessed being, and not to want to exist bourgeoisly means, as every German Marxist knows, not to be allowed to exist at all. Being and existence have their eternally unbreakable quality: they are bourgeois; what is not bourgeois is not. The very means that Being uses to make clear that its bourgeois character is beyond all discussion make the totality, absoluteness and inviolability of bourgeois existence evident.

The same quick-witted ontologism and short-tempered existentialism, which answered every distrust in the eternity of the bourgeois reason of being with a purge action, had a point where it also became weak: in its furthest fold of heart it was in a bad way with its faith in itself. Activism was so quickly determined because it needed to be; bourgeois fascism must therefore act with uninterrupted breathlessness because it secretly trembles before the result of its self-contemplation. One does not fear the spirit and thought, examination and criticism, if one can stand one's ground, if one has a clean vest, does not have to hide any rottenness and is certain of one's future. One does not trample down every questioner ruthlessly in a hurry if one does not have to shy away from every question.

The downfall of the Occident, which the "Prussian socialist" Spengler had prophesied, was the downfall of the bourgeois order. Spengler's basic conviction was that the citizen had nothing left to hope for. "Only dreamers believe in ways out," he said in his book "Man and Technology"; "we are born into this time and must bravely go to the end of the path that is destined for us." "The citizen must persevere at the lost post like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a gate in Pompeii, who died because they forgot to relieve him when Vesuvius erupted." To persevere like this in the heroic attitude of a meaningless existence is a duty, he said. The citizen who remains at his post in this attitude is the grand bourgeois; he is the last master who must not give himself away, even if no one can say anymore for what reason and for what purpose he defends his place. It is no longer the "coal" on which he bases his position of rule, but simply the cannon; the cannon is the striking argument with which the industrial dukes crush any doubt about their authority. It is an authority which justifies itself by nothing else than by opening a merciless bombardment

against every questioner who demands historical authority from it. Its real being is reduced to powder, lead and poison gas, by means of which it makes tabula rasa where it is provoked to action. Her existential right, behind which nothingness opens, is the armor with which she shows off.

"Years of Decision" was the name of Spengler's book, and it perpetuated the fiction as if one were still committing oneself to a content that makes sense in itself when making one's choice for big-bourgeois gentility.

It is characteristic of this whole period that "decisionism" in itself is developed into a system. One does not decide on the basis of valid contents, but one first makes something out of something by deciding for it. The bourgeois world is aware of its hollowness and emptiness: it expects that the one who decides for it will at the same time bring it new values. It even takes its last interest from the blood spilled by those who still want to die for it.

Within the limbo of the Weimar Republic, the decisionist doctrine was most astutely developed by Carl Schmitt. But neither the center party of the Weimar period, nor the authoritarian government of Brüning, nor the grand bourgeois regiment of Papen had dared to refound bourgeois existence par excellence on a pure act of decision; only fascist activism was capable of this later.

Nevertheless, the feeling that the whole activism was a spectacle to cover up the fear of the inevitable downfall, the inexorable fall into nothingness, was not lost. Hans Grimm's "people without space" is not only the people who build on nothingness and who desperately look around to see if no prey can be found with which they can fill their emptiness from the outside; even the existence of its fictional awakener, whom a stone throw kills, perishes in futility. Even the fascist intelligentsia cannot hide that its activism is only a theater of frenzy above the abyss of nothingness. Heidegger's philosophy makes no more secret of this. The Being, with which Heidegger provided the desperate citizen, so that he could get solid ground under his feet again, was nevertheless only a deceptive ground: it was a "Being to death". Hegel's Being was a stage above which the absolute spirit reached the consciousness of itself, Schelling's Being completes itself in freedom: in both cases, in the element of the metaphysical, the citizen became glad of the great future he still had before him. Heidegger's Being, on the other hand, no longer has any other outlook than nothingness and finally admits this to itself: no wonder that its "Befindlichkeit", the basic state in which it continues to hover, and which explains all the fascist breathlessness at the end, is fear.

In action, one confirms to oneself that one exists; for inscrutable reasons, the uncertainty always arises as to whether one has not already been rejected by life and is still only a ghostly shadow. One acts to lead this uncertainty ad absurdum and to silence it. The more it comes to the fore, the more the actions accumulate. One cannot come to rest; one would fear to give oneself already lost with it; one is whipped to incessant actions by the dark feeling to be nothing outside of the action. One lives in order to die; life is exhausted in exposing oneself to death; its whole content is to throw oneself into the arms of death. What matters is the willingness to sacrifice, not the good for which the sacrifice is made. The organic being feeds on the fullness of its living power even when it abandons itself to silence; the machine is what it is only when it is in operation: in this it is irrelevant whether it runs empty, threshes full ears of corn or empty straw. Fascist activism is machine-like: at any price the wheels must be set in motion. Thus the bourgeois order demonstrates to itself that it has not yet fallen into the realm of lifelessness and rigor mortis. Only the whirring of the wheels is conclusive - nothing else. The tremendous upheaval of fascist activism is the last evasion of nihilism to avoid the open declaration of bankruptcy; if it were not for the upheaval, it would be obvious to all that there is nothing left.

This activist nihilism hungers for success; success is the best fuel with which the whole spectacle is still heated. If success fails to materialize, then the bloated showpiece collapses, then the gigantic gearbox runs

out of "puff". The action must always be an armed action in order to be able to rush from success to success; one must always be even more strongly armed than the opponent against whom the action is staged. The first action is the armament, the second its deployment. Nihilism has never been more militant than it is now; mobilization has never been more total, one has never been more of a "fighter"; one is, after all, nothing more than a fighter; even as a green boy one can already be an "old" fighter. But the struggle lacks meaning and purpose; one fights simply to fight. One fights because, if one did not, it would not be possible to hide for long how rotten, corrupt and void one is.

Ernst Jünger gave the formulas and catchwords to this militant nihilism. His nihilistic instinct had found out that there was nothing left to mobilize for the protection of; once the warlike action had started, everything without exception had to be set in motion. There was no longer any fixed point in the phenomena of flight.

The total mobilization, which Jünger announced, is the action which reaches the outermost limits, the highest peak of the ability to increase at all. It sets the very last in motion, it does not tolerate any resting anymore - also no woman, no child, no old man. It calls infants to march, calls girls to arms and uses up the most hidden reserves. This action leaves no stalk behind: it rummages through the most secret corners and brings the most inconspicuous "button" to the front. It is the most radical effort into which nihilism throws itself, after it has become almost inevitable for it to finally have to glare itself in the face.

Second Part

The tyranny

XI. The seizure of power

The National Socialist Party is by origin a civil war formation; it is destined for civil war, it sets itself up for it; it wants it. Its fighting enthusiasm is the passion of civil war. It has the mission of hewing the big bourgeoisie out of the proletarian-Marxist embrace. Thus the myth of battle is inherent in it from the outset; civil war men also go into the field.

The German Marxist proletariat is considered as an army which Russian Bolshevism maintains on German soil; one wages war against world Bolshevism, which disturbs the sleep of the nights of the entire European big bourgeoisie, if Marxist labor is not thrown to the ground. Just as the nation is always only the politically ruling bourgeois class, one equates Germany par excellence with Germany cast in bourgeois forms: Germany, one supposes, will be bourgeois or it will not be. Every weakening and shaking of the bourgeois order is branded as German decay; the same Germany which formerly existed in feudal constitution is now supposed to be as short-lived as the historically conditioned bourgeois order is: it is supposed suddenly not to be able to survive the transformation into a proletarian-socialist constitution as well. The pure and genuine German is the big bourgeois; in so far as the big bourgeois cannot develop freely, Germany lacks the "rule of the best". Germany is in bad, corrupt hands when it is ruled by resolutely anti-bourgeois strata of the people. One conquers "Germany" when one drives Marxist workers out of all positions of power; the more thoroughly one restores the bourgeois order, the more gloriously one renews Germany. Thus one had one's historical cothurn, which gives a grand appearance to every human paltriness: while one was merely a lansquenet of the big bourgeoisie and a gendarme of its coffers, one was allowed to feel oneself the savior of Germany. Everyone fought for Germany who shouted Heil in a meeting, stuck his party badge, hung the swastika flag out of the window.

The more the movement's membership and electoral numbers grew, however, the more obvious became the strange discrepancy between the extent of the militantly whipped up means of power and the carefully limited operational goals. The "German fortress" had been ready to storm since 1930; it could hardly have withstood the "revolutionary" contempt for death of the SA and SS regiments. However, Hitler did not give the order to attack. From month to month it became clearer that he would not take it by force, but that he would be patient until it surrendered voluntarily. He evaded the battle for which he had mustered his army.

The upper middle classes had not forgotten the Kapp Putsch of 1920, the Reichswehr the Munich disgrace of 1923. They did not want to get into the crooked position of illegality at any price; but they did not need to. Over the years, they had acquired the decisive positions of power in the Weimar Republic; they did not want to run the slightest risk of losing them again. If the risk of a National Socialist uprising had been small since 1930, they did not even want to take that risk anymore. Hitler was to destroy parliamentary democracy by exposing the parliamentary principle through abuses not forbidden by law; he was to make parliamentary democracy non-functional by exploiting all its possibilities against the Republic. It was to die of its own accord, so to speak. The big bourgeoisie and the Reichswehr held their hand over Hitler; they prevented any special legislation that could have thwarted Hitler's wicked intentions once and for all.

When General Gröner, as Minister of the Interior, out of a sense of loyalty to the Republic to which he had sworn an oath of allegiance, disbanded the brown civil war army, the Wehrmacht and the big bourgeoisie immediately fell into his arms; he was overthrown and the ban was lifted again. Hitler was to be allowed, as it were, under the pretense of rendering service to the "German fortress," to drain it of water, to lay down its outworks, to strip its ammunition dumps, to render its guns useless, to demoralize its garrison. He was to profess legality; the big bourgeoisie and the Wehrmacht saw to it that he was doing well when he suddenly

Schleicher wants to blow up the NSDAP

took a poisonous meaning from all laws, on the basis of which the Weimar state staggered willy-nilly toward its suicide.

In the course of the Leipzig trial of the Reichswehr against officers Scheringer, Ludin and Wendt, Hitler swore to his legality; in this way he gave the Wehrmacht and the upper middle classes the assurance that they would not have to experience any unpleasant surprises if they let him have his way. Hitler kept his oath; he wanted to steal power over Germany, not conquer it. Only then would the bloody reckoning with the Marxist enemies take place: "Legal," Gregor Strasser had once said, "legal to the last rung of the ladder-but hanging it is."

Pope's coup d'état of July 20, 1932, which unseated the democratic Prussian government, had had the purpose of bringing state power directly into the hands of the big bourgeoisie, the Junkers, and the Reichswehr. Hitler's mass movement was to be put in the predicament of having to support the authoritarian government because it was national, without benefiting itself in the process. Hitler, however, was less compliant than Papen had expected. He rebelled against the gentlemen's club regiment, and in the Berlin streetcar strike he showed that he could also play with the fire of social revolution. Then Papen resigned; his government was the second failed experiment of the upper classes to get along without a mass base; the first had been the Kapp putsch.

Now the interaction of the big bourgeoisie, the Junkers, the Wehrmacht and the mass movement was to be set in motion. It was in the apartment of the Bonn banker Schröder that the arrangement between these forces came about; Papen negotiated there with Hitler on behalf of the ruling class. The "Harzburg" front had already prepared this agreement.

In the meantime, the Reich Chancellor Schleicher had had second thoughts; in conducting foreign affairs, he had come to the conclusion that Hitler would give the German destiny an intolerable turn. When the Junkers bucked, he threatened to expose the Osthilf scandal. He had in mind, with the help of Gregor Strasser, to blow up the Hitler Party and to use the trade unions to form the government. The industrial rulers, however, were not willing to let the reckoning with the labor movement pass them by. They exacerbated social tensions by artificially increasing unemployment: their agents urged entrepreneurs not to fill foreign orders, and Reichsbank President Schacht denied municipalities the loans they would have needed to carry out job creation plans.

The Junkers were no less strident. They incited Hindenburg, who had got his own fingers dirty by reaching into the Eastern aid pot, against Schleicher, and the Landbund threw down the gauntlet to the latter. Schleicher had toyed with the idea of having a Potsdam regiment arrest the National Socialist leaders and Hindenburg himself. He hesitated too long in carrying it out; Hugenberg betrayed the plan, and Schleicher was sent to the desert. The way was clear for Hitler.

The negotiations between the Reich Presidential Palace and the Kaiserhof, Hitler's headquarters, in late 1932 and early 1933 were handover negotiations. The big bourgeoisie and the 'Wehrmacht still imposed conditions, as a final safeguard, before they appointed Hitler commander and opened all the gates to his armed hordes. Hugenberg, Papen, Seldte and Blomberg were to be attached to Hitler as trustees of the bourgeoisie and the Wehrmacht. The Wehrmacht had instructed Hitler in 1919 to win back the pettybourgeois masses for the bourgeois order; in 1933 it had convinced Marshal Hindenburg that the "Bohemian corporal" had done his job well. From the hands of the Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht, on January 30, he received the political reward for which he had served faithfully for almost "fourteen years."

As the petty-bourgeois masses filed past Hindenburg and Hitler on the night of January 30, 1933, they celebrated the victory they had won for the big bourgeoisie over the working class; they rejoiced because

they had succeeded in freeing the big bourgeois upper class from the burdensome control which the proletarian masses had exercised since 1918, after all.

The seizure of power on January 30, 1933, however, had a bitter aftertaste for the National Socialist movement. The movement had to share power not only with the German Nationalists and the Stahlhelm: it lacked the experience of the final struggle, the decisive battle. Hitler had been entrusted by the Reich President with the formation of the government; this was also how Papen, Brüning, Hermann Müller had previously attained the chancellorship. The change of system had gone too smoothly; the caesura was not great enough to make it clear that from now on a new epoch had begun.

"Today," Göring had said in his radio address on January 30, "today will be the day when we close the book of German history of the last years of hardship and disgrace and begin a new chapter, and on this chapter will stand freedom and honor as the foundation of the coming state." Declarations of this kind were not impressive enough, since no stirring event marked the revolutionary upheaval. The militants had been mobilized, but no clash had occurred; the whole effort seemed ridiculously exaggerated. The Marxists simply resigned; neither Social Democrats nor Communists did the SA and SS the favor of taking to the streets to be slaughtered. Papen had already crushed the last spark of the Social Democracy's willingness to assert itself in July 1932; the Communists, however, understood the power situation and felt the hopelessness of any revolutionary resistance. They understood how urgently the National Socialist movement longed for a communist uprising, how feverishly it looked for the slightest indications of such an uprising, how necessary it needed the appearance of a communist uprising in order to credibly identify itself as the heroic savior of the German people. Nowhere did the Communists rise up; nowhere did they put up a fight; nowhere did they disturb order; nowhere did they give even a remarkable sign of life. The cue that the SA and SS were expecting failed to materialize; the Communist Party was careful not to give it; many endangered leaders left the country; the functionaries kept quiet; the economic party enterprises were liquidated. It was a fatal situation for the National Socialist movement; there were no pretexts for I breaches of the constitution and acts of violence; there were no firecrackers with the help of which one could drive the German people out of their minds. Desperately and against all truth, Hitler had said in the appeal of the German Reich Government of i. February 1933: "The thousands of wounded, the innumerable dead, which this internal war is already costing Germany, may be a weather light of warning before the storm." This very fact made the National Socialist leaders unhappy that no storm broke out.

They decided to correct the fate. Since the communist class fighter did not really take up arms, an artificial arrangement had to be made which pretended the battle against its specter and shadow and created the occasion to be able to impose civil war law. The correction of destiny was made in the course of the election campaign with which Hitler began his regiment.

On February 1, the Reichstag had been dissolved; the new government did not want to "subject the work of reconstruction to the approval of those who were to blame for the collapse." The left-wing parties were unconstitutionally terrorized; they could not develop electoral propaganda. Nevertheless, Hitler feared he would not get the blanket power he wanted. Audi broad bourgeois popular strata were not convinced of his savior mission; Marxist passivity had spoiled his concept. Something had to happen, which would terrify the entire bourgeoisie and drive the bourgeois hesitants into his arms after all. If the communists did not carry out the due act of shame, then it had to be staged by the government itself; it was only a question of covering one's own tracks skillfully enough and of nimbly and deftly charging the communist scapegoat with the crime that one had committed oneself. The boundless simplicity of the apolitical German citizen was to be reckoned with: even if the full evidence testified against his authorities, his faith in their ethos remained unshaken.

On 1. On February 27, the government announced that the Reichstag was burning and that the Communists had set it on fire. As early as February 28, Reich Minister Göring informed the astonished world: "A police officer observed people with burning torches in the dark building. He fired immediately. He succeeded in apprehending one of the perpetrators.... This arson is the most monstrous act of terror of Bolshevism in Germany so far. Among the hundreds of hundredweight of decomposition material discovered by the police during the search of the Karl Liebknecht House were the instructions for carrying out Communist terror on the Bolshevik pattern." The civil war situation was there; it had been "rocked." The German suddenly looked into the opened jaws of the "Bolshevik monster." Hitler shone as a white hero, as Siegfried, as a Nordic dragon slayer. The great battle in this monstrous war had broken out. "It can be stated that the first attack of the criminal forces has been beaten off for the time being."

Which National Socialist brain concocted the plan of the Reichstag arson, which SA leaders entered the Reichstag building through the underground passage from Goering's official palace in order to set the fire there, will perhaps never be revealed again: on June 30, 1934, most of the co-conspirators were knocked out cold. No one will ever know by what promises the representative criminal van der Lubbe was persuaded; his mouth was sealed for all eternity. The diabolic nature of the enterprise to whip up the people to boiling point against communism by an attack on the very building which stood in nobody's way less than the communists, but which was a "stone of stumbling" for the National Socialists, this diabolic nature is truly tightrope-walking, and it could have sprung from Goebbels' head. Whether in fact this National Socialist arson was originally coordinated on international horizons by faking traces pointing to Moscow through forged documents is hard to prove after the liaison between Lord Deterding and Hitler, Dr. Bell, was murdered by SA men on Austrian soil. The things he knew were so dangerous that he had to be brought around the corner at any cost.

That rope-dancing diabolicism of National Socialist crime, of course, almost touched the point where the balance could no longer be maintained: the promptness with which Goering immediately accused the Communists of authorship would have made any other people of greater political intelligence wonder. Goering was already shouting: "Stop the thief!" when, apart from the National Socialists, no one else was to be seen at the scene of the crime; the Communists who were to be hanged were dragged in haphazardly and too late. It was the biggest and most treacherous directorial mistake, which almost spoiled everything. The police misfortune of having seized a demonic-genius man of Dimitroff's rank in the embarrassment was irreparable: it deprived the National Socialists of the spectacle of seeing communist subhumans dangling from the gallows, which Hitler had erected swiftly and quickly by emergency decree. The Reichstag fire trial *, which was conducted before the eyes of the world public, was a breakneck audacity that brought little fame. Hitler was not yet completely sure of his judges. For the president of the senate, Dr. Bünger, there were still low points which he did not commit; he could not be persuaded to do so even by his assessor Parisius and the Reichsanwalt. He might have opened the trial in good faith, but the abyss of official infamy that opened up before him could not remain hidden from him for long. He made sacrifices for the sake of the state: he was careful not to track down the really guilty person; he did not get to the bottom of the strange procedures by means of which van der Lubbe was kept in a state of permanent unconsciousness; he finally pronounced the demanded death sentence on van der Lubbe, since he had been caught with the incendiary torch: but he did not extend his hand to the judicial murder that Hitler had wanted to commit on the other four communist defendants. This bourgeois judge was not yet at the height of that unprecedented fascist depravity: to abuse the law and the legal institutions on behalf of the obvious criminals and the truly guilty in order to condemn completely blameless people to death; he still had a feeling for the gruesomeness of the process of seeing the culprit himself at work, as he called the obvious innocent to account with frivolous-conscious audacity and charged her with the responsibility for his own misdeed.

While the Reichstag building was burning, various ministers and their aides had gathered; Papen, Hugenberg and the Secretary of State Bismarck were also present. Agitated, Hitler pressed his fists to his upper lip, and once and again he repeated, "Now I get my ji percent." The majority of votes was the first yield to be cooked in the flames of the burning house. What citizen could refuse to vote for National Socialism after Hitler had brought Bolshevism under such grave suspicion with such cunning?

On j. March, the National Socialists received 44 percent, the "National Front" a total of 51.8 percent of all electoral votes. In view of the hellish effort that Hitler had cost himself, this result was still small enough; whoever did not vote for Hitler now - and that was still almost half of the entire people - was at the same time expressing the opinion that he was blaming the Chancellor of the Reich himself for the arson. Nevertheless, Hitler now had the legal basis to be able to carry out any violent coup in the forms of legality from now on. The beacon had lit up, the caesura was there, which impressed upon everyone that a new era had really dawned.

XII. Gangster

The essence of political Machiavellianism perhaps consists in the fact that one must be capable of anything and, as a rule, even so much as to make very careful use of this ability. Machiavellianism proves itself in the long run only as long as it remains dosed; it wants to be practiced as a secret doctrine with taste and subtlety, and if it once takes it upon itself to disregard all limits, then the "great passion" and the "high goal" must already be ready, for the sake of which everything is forgiven, indeed in the face of which hardly the thought arises that anything at all is to be forgiven. A statesman who is discredited as a Machiavellian has his fingers on the pulse; it is good for his business and his successes if everyone who has to do with him fears that he will pull a fast one on him. Great empires cannot act against each other like horse-deceivers; their weight is too heavy for them to get entangled in fine meshes of cunningly-spun fabrics. "For great empires like ours," Prince Gorchakov said to the English ambassador Lord Augustus Loftus in December 1871, "openness and truth befit great empires like ours. Machiavelli wrote only for small Italian states." Gortschakow certainly did Machiavelli an injustice; the Florentine would have given the same advice to the two great powers to be frank, insofar as it would indeed have been the most expedient in the existing balance of power and in the given historical situation. To do what is absolutely necessary in every situation, and to do it with precisely that balanced emphasis which guarantees that neither the goal will be overshot nor missed at all, but that it will be achieved: that is genuine political Machiavellianism.

Macaulay once said, "The principles of politics are such that the meanest robber would be ashamed to even hint at them to his most trusted henchman." The policy of a country may well occasionally take forms that the meanest robber would be ashamed to be held responsible for; but in so far as its face, which it shows, gives rise to feelings of shame, it is not a Machiavellian policy. The political-Machiavellist principle of the strictest expediency and soberest Sadino necessity is by no means naturally assigned to the element of moral badness, of moral evil; if political action must at times unavoidably submerge itself in this element, it does so, if it wishes to maintain the level of Machiavellism, with so much suppleness, safeguards, and camouflage measures that "nothing will stick to it." It strives to not let its distance from evil be forgotten in spite of everything.

Democratized Machiavellianism, however, is embarrassing; it is not good when it is teeming with people who make no secret of the fact that, as wise guys, they are out to find stupid people who will let themselves be duped. Democratized Machiavellianism no longer has the pure relation to the matter; it credits itself with the freedom to immorality and takes a special pleasure in cultivating it. If it is the peculiarity of Machiavellianism to be capable of anything, then it is the ambition of democratized Machiavellianism to prove this every day; for him, after all, politics and political perfidy coincide in one. If Machiavellianism has become the affair of the little man, then it is regarded as a characteristic of politics to be able to catch a political villainy. The masterpiece by which one acquires the political certificate of competence must be a juicy political scoundrelry.

The liberal epoch of the bourgeoisie does not yet allow the little Machiavellis to come up; it is distinguished precisely by the fact that here the appearance of right and honesty is still preserved to the fullest extent. In the liberal-democratic epoch, however, the little Machiavellis make their public attempts - in the fascist epoch, however, their time dawns.

There it shows up that between a small Machiavelli and a gangster there is hardly a difference. The democratized Machiavellism ends in political gangsterism; when Machiavelli penetrates among the people, he inevitably falls among the robbers.

The gangster is by all means a phenomenon of the bourgeois age. He is not a fundamental opponent of the bourgeois-capitalist social order; he only feels himself disadvantaged within its framework and is determined to make submissive by force the fortune which voluntarily denied itself to him. He knows that a man is respectable only so far as he has private property; he is not opposed to the principle of private property, but merely wants to correct in his favor the existing distribution of property in which he has come away emptyhanded. He is a strong individuality who fights through his rights to life; since wealth is power and gives power, it is intolerable to him not to be also rich himself. Since the free path which the "capable" may demand does not normally open to him, he forces his way into it against all rule. He works, like the citizen, into his own pocket and takes, like the latter, every business that brings in something.

Admittedly: the gangster has other methods. The bourgeois business is always a robbery; somebody has to bleed when the bourgeois earns. The consumer is fleeced as often as he meets his needs, and the worker is cheated out of the full equivalent of his performance as long as he produces.

But bourgeois business wants to keep the nature of its real essence in the dark; it has the ambition to be ascribed to a higher moral plane. It takes place and unwinds in the tracks of an artfully constructed system of legal forms. The citizen always wants to have a right to what he snatches; the civil code gives him the rights and legal titles that he needs in order to be able to enforce with nice decency the tributes of the economically weak, whom he extorts as the economically strong. He wants to conceal from everyone that he is exercising the power of his wealth; he only insists on the right to which everyone is bound. The formal generality of the right is supposed to disguise the fact that one can only assert it in each case if one stands in that economic situation in whose favor it is cut to size. The citizen, when he takes advantage of his private property, plays out his right; he has the principle of justice on his side in this. He strictly observes his right; this makes him the "moral personage," that honorable man who need not reproach himself. If colonial peoples, out of whom the rent he collects is being squeezed, die of starvation, if masses of workers are harmed in body and soul because of the level of wages he sets by contract, he need have no conscience: he need not answer for the consequences of the law to which he is entitled to adhere. He is a man of the law and only of the law; the constitutional state which he creates provides the private owner with all the legal means he needs to get something out of his private property.

The gangster does not originally move in that economic situation which makes it so easy to trust the law and its rights. He is initially one of those dispossessed people who get to know the right only in the sole function of striking out against the have-nots. He does not advance a step with the law; he is too low down, he reaches too little to the levers, to be able to set the legal mechanism once in motion for himself and his cause. He cannot engage in any legal process; he would draw the short straw. Civil law is designed to conduct the cause of private property against anyone who wants to ignore or touch it; he who has no private property stands from the outset in the line of those against whom decisions are made in every case. To the extent that even the have-not relies on the law, he has accepted his pitiable fate.

The gangster is the man who does not accept his fate. He is not a revolutionary; he does not want to overthrow the bourgeois order at all; he only wants to improve his personal lot. The gangster and the communist live not only in quite different zones, but within their zones at different altitudes. The gangster has nothing at all in common with the communist, but he has a lot in common with the bourgeois. The citizen defends and increases his wealth with the help of legal forms; he reaches his goal with the legal forms because his violence is behind them. His legal process is nothing less than a renunciation of violence; it is the politeness, the cultivated polish, the good manners of civic violence. It does not replace violence; it merely moves it discreetly into the background.

The gangster keeps to the fact that, in spite of everything, it remains violence with which the citizen gets on his green branch. The humanity of the bourgeois constitutional state is a wonderful aesthetic achievement; but under all the appetizing froth and sugar coating, the bitter core of violence that one has to bite into emerges in the end. The gangster pursues the same individual enrichment as the citizen; but he pursues it without legal gloss. What the citizen takes from his neighbor with paragraphs, the gangster takes by cracking with his revolver. The gangster practices a direct procedure and makes short work of it; he openly throws the violence into the scales that the citizen wraps up in legal texts. Both the citizen and the gangster want to get something individually; the gangster takes directly what he wants; the citizen appropriates it by obtaining legal titles. A skillful gangster who has come to property without "going up" can live on as an exemplary citizen. The gangster is the citizen who catches his fish not with the paragraph net, but with explosives or the bare fist; he is the citizen without legal fluff, the citizen who no longer cares for appearances. The gangster is the self-important individual who, without ideology, protects his interests with cynical openness. The underworld trumps the citizen by doing with blunt nakedness what the citizen practices only behind legal fig leaves. The gangster is the capitalist citizen without the mask of respectable legality. The underworld traces the essence of the complicated capitalist society in coarse, simple, rough, but transparently clear lines; a gangster king, a industrial duke and a bank prince look confusingly similar. The gangster is the bourgeois as the latter is when one looks at the deepest bottom of his soul and catches him in his most secret thoughts. He is the citizen in the negligee, the citizen who gives free rein to his impulses and replaces the good tone with the impulsive deed. The bourgeois is as unscrupulous as the gangster; only, of course, the bourgeois takes measures which cause all the world to impute scruples to him. The proletarians who are brought to misery by ,

The proletarians who are hurled into misery by his business dispositions cost the citizen as few sleepless hours as the victims cost the gangster, whom he has shot down in his raid; the only difference lies perhaps in the fact that the citizen sometimes sheds crocodile tears. The gangster is the enfant terrible of the citizen, who acts as shamelessly brutal as the citizen basically thinks and would prefer to act. In the pursuit of money, the Citizen is the licensed hunter, the gangster the poacher: the craft is the same and from the location of the hunted game, it does not matter whether his killer had a hunting license or not. The more ruthlessly the capitalist impulse is at work within a people, the more luxuriantly the gangsters flourish among them, but at the same time the more obviously the capitalist citizen approaches the gangster type there.

Bourgeois and gangsters

The destruction of the world market, which has been rampant since 1914, brought hardship especially to the bourgeoisie of those European countries which are blessed with only limited raw materials; there the capitalist order fell into serious crisis. International trade relations were too restricted for the bourgeois to earn enough from foreign peoples; to the extent that he had lost his colonies, he had also lost the craft of plundering colored peoples. But the capitalist bourgeois was by no means disposed to abdicate; if there was no other way, he adapted himself and changed his ways.

One's own working class, the consumer strata of one's own country were, after all, areas from which, in case of need, immeasurable things could still be extracted. Every lowering of the standard of living of the masses could be converted into enormous capital. If the worker got 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 percent less pay, the basin from which the citizen drew his profits was always filled up again.

But this conversion to plunder against its own masses had its difficulties. Liberal constitutions and institutions existed which the citizen had been able to grant without hesitation under other circumstances. The worker made use of his freedom of association and organized his opposition in the trade unions. Social legislation gave him protection. The judiciary, bound by the ruling constitution and the existing laws, did not abandon him. Through Parliament, it exercised a control that made the use of crooked ways risky for the citizen.

In this way, the citizen's taste for a free constitution, humane law, impartial institutions, parity in the distribution of power, was nauseated from the bottom up. They had become inhibitions to his capitalist undertakings. Thus they no longer counted for anything to him. He wanted to smash them to rubble, he wanted to use open violence against the workers who did not patiently surrender to him. The legal strings had lost all meaning for him if they prevented him from reaping profits. He did not make a murderer's pit out of his heart, and the figure that rose from it and entered the political space was the gangster. The gangster became a political figure. But the political gangsterism was fascism.

Fascism wiped away the conventions, the good forms, the beautiful appearances; where it had power, it seized, extorted and raped without asking long for legal titles and legal pretexts. He no longer relied on legal deductions, but on fists alone.

The classical Machiavellianism, which stands at the entrance of the great bourgeois epoch, describes and teaches the high art of saving face while doing what is necessary; it gives a concept of how the most wicked, insofar as it has become undelayable, is to be accomplished without offense. It is the political philosophy of the rising, the advancing, the liberal bourgeoisie; in this style England acquired its world empire. The sinking, rotting bourgeoisie no longer asserted itself on that height which is according to classical Machiavellianism. Mussolini breaks into Abyssinia like a robber chief and does not even want to hide the fact that he strangles the Ethiopians exclusively because he feels stronger than them and because he is hungry for booty. The fascist does his politics like the gangster does his burglary, his arson, his bombing. The fascist is the citizen for whom, in his capitalist misery, there is no longer any commandment; he makes the methods of the "underworld" fruitful for his capitalist politics. Fascist theory translates the wisdom of gangsterism into the language of politics. The fascist citizen chooses for political use the jargon of the dives; but he learns his political art in the school of the "heavy boy".

XIII. The Ground of

Injustice

Since 1917, Bolshevism has been challenging the bourgeois order for the victory it won over feudalism in 1789. Bolshevism wants to strike at the bourgeois order as radically as it once struck at feudalism. A new social class hurls its new principles against the existing state. The new collectivist polity is not founded by God, not established by contract, but created by revolution; it exists by virtue of the right of social revolution. Since state and nation are bourgeois creations, it can be neither one nor the other: it opposes the state to the "dictatorship of the proletariat," the nation to the "class." Lenin is its state theorist; he is the Machiavelli, Hobbes and Rousseau of the proletarian social stratum; he formulates its bourgeois-strategic principles and rule-political rules of organization.

The citizen lives in the feeling that again the war of all against all has broken out; everywhere he sees wolves who want to snatch away his private property. Ready for any obedience, he looks out for the dictatorial overlord who will again provide him with protection and security of property. The bourgeois order does not yet capitulate; it puts itself in a state of highest alarm and defense. It draws on the rich treasure of its experience gained in centuries of struggle against feudalism: it consults Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau. Since the big bourgeoisie not only has the most to defend, but also wants in the future to exploit immeasurably its positions of social power at the expense of the middle and small bourgeoisie, it directs the measures that are taken, it determines the principles that are retrieved. Hobbes's omnipotent state, which had proved itself against feudalism, is tested against Bolshevism; the Leviathan is to destroy anyone who takes it up with Bolshevism. Rousseau contributes the democratic façade with which one keeps the petty-bourgeois masses in good humor, those masses which will incurably burn their fingers while they pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the big bourgeoisie. With Machiavelli, however, one washes oneself clean when one instigates vulgarities and is base and wicked.

Bourgeois necessity justifies being taught even by the enemy; Lenin, the master of civil war, finds in the strategists and tacticians of bourgeois defense students eager to learn. They use Bolshevik war wisdom for their anti-Bolshevik actions.

The Third Reich is Hobbesian omnipotent, big-bourgeois state with Rousseauian petty-bourgeois structures, Machiavellian lists and Leninist flinter holdings. It is a fortress in which the garrison is drilled for all the refinements and chicaneries of defense and with which the fate of the entire bourgeois world stands or falls.

Hitler's "Mein Kampf" is the system of dodges with which the rotten bourgeois world wants to snip at the newly rising Bolshevik world; it bears all the characteristics of that desperate rashness which has already risen to the neck. Hitler's book picks up, as it were, the straws to which the bourgeois world still clings; it translates the proud language of bourgeois ascendancy coined by Machiavelli, Hobbes and Rousseau into the dubious jargon of bluffing bankrupts, and finally, in order to pull itself out of the swamp, it also abuses the borrowings it has made from Lenin.

The totality of the state of these desperate citizens is based on the fact that the state, without having a formal legal title, may surcharge where it perceives a tendency inimical to the bourgeois interest. It is no longer a "state of law"; it is a state of war; it no longer needs laws if it settles the proletarian enemy of the state. The state emergency and the state of emergency are equally manifestations of the legal life of the

The end of

bourgeois people. It is precisely "true law" that is satisfied when the proletarian enemy of the state is exterminated even without the power of law; one halters the outlived state of law in order to arrive at the "true state of law". The totality of the National Socialist state bends around the area of interest of the big bourgeoisie just as the omnipotence of Hobbes' Leviathan did; the omnipotent state pushed the feudal enemy of the state against the wall; the total state prepares this lot for the proletarian enemy of the state. The uniformity of this state action is guaranteed by strict centralization of the state apparatus. The traditional state bureaucracies were not all of the same spirit; they showed the coloration of the social space in which they had arisen. In some places they were adapted to a rural environment, in others to an urban one; here they felt more closely connected to peasant or petty-bourgeois interests, there to feudal or big-bourgeois interests; here their attitude was democratic, there it was authoritarian. The aversion to Hitler's "dictatorship" in the period between January and March 1933 had almost conjured up a monarchicalWittesbachian restoration. The traditions of the rule of law, the feeling of legality in general, the respect for law and constitution had not yet died out in the bureaucracy of many regions; not everywhere, as a result, were the civil-war-like measures of violence and arbitrariness carried out against the proletariat; not in every countryside was it understood equally well that the interest of the upper middle class had now become the exclusive axis around which the whole existence of the state revolved. All friction arising from the peculiar idiosyncrasies and capacities of the Länder bureaucracies was to be eliminated; an imperial bureaucracy was to be created which, from the municipalities to the central offices, was completely uniform and moved in the same way by one impulse. This impulse came from the top of the Reich; it became all the more omnipotent the better the bureaucratic instrument functioned. Germany became a "Führer state"; the will of the Führer became supreme law. The "Führer" was given the right of unlimited legislation; the executive became a will-less, blindly obeying tool in his hands. In this way, the dictatorial head of the Reich was the lever by means of which the big bourgeoisie set the entire state apparatus in motion. The principle of separation of powers was adopted with defiant premeditation; precisely because it has been celebrated and practiced as a civic, even human, advance throughout the civilized world since Montesquieu, the Third Reich turned away from it with ostentatious disregard.

The Enabling Act had handed over legislative power to the Führer; he was also empowered to make constitutional changes. "The Reich Government will," Hitler said in his Reichstag speech, "take those measures which will ensure from now on and forever a uniformity of political intentions in the Reich and in the Länder." The Reich Governor Act of April 7, 1933, transformed the Länder into provinces of the Reich; the Caesar delivered them to his creatures. The last semblance of an independent life of the Länder was abolished by the Law on the Reconstruction of the Reich of January 30, 1934; the popular representations of the Länder were abolished here, sovereign rights of the Länder were transferred to the Reich, and the Länder governments were subordinated to the Reich government. Special laws destroyed the autonomy of the municipalities; the German mayor became podestà. The concept of municipal self-government took on a new meaning; the mayor became leader of the municipality; being a National Socialist creature, he made the municipality dance as its supreme chief whistled.

Through this legislation, Germany became a centralized bourgeois nation-state - admittedly, a bourgeois nation-state of its very own character.

The unheard-of penetrating power of the big-bourgeois action of 1933 is based on the fact that it succeeds in harnessing the national elementary feeling for itself with the same passionate fanaticism with which the French bourgeoisie had succeeded in 1789. In the fervent heat of this bourgeois activity, the national instinct melds so intimately and indissolubly with the bourgeois ideas of order and institutions that none of these components appears without the other. The bourgeois order appears as the natural body of the basic national instincts and needs. Whoever touches the bourgeois order is regarded as an enemy of the national

elementary sphere: everything is permitted against him, he has no claim to any protection. The great national pathos covers the bourgeois order; there is no community of the people, of the nation outside the bourgeois order. As in the days of Robespierre, the opponent of the bourgeois order is cursed with being a traitor to the people, a corrupter of the nation, an enemy of the state; there is no discussion with him, he is existentially destroyed. He is "criminal" in the worst sense of the word; it is the most thoroughgoing political action against the bourgeois opponent that his opposition is no longer recognized as a political matter, but is branded and punished as a criminal case. He enjoys no chivalry, his convictions are not respected. He is ostracized: a murderer and robber is still placed above him.

The national state puts all the power and authority of the state in the hands of the bourgeoisie; the state becomes a mere apparatus for bourgeois purposes and interests.

Of course, did this National Socialist state still rest on the ground of law? The appointment of Hitler as Reich Chancellor respected the limits of legality, but soon thereafter Hitler stepped out of the state of lawfulness and constitutionality. He unconstitutionally restricted the electoral freedom of the Social Democrats and Communists; after the election he prevented the elected Communist deputies from exercising their parliamentary activity. He put the Reichstag under extortionate pressure through his gangs and raped the parties. His Enabling Act was not passed under constitutionally valid forms. After the March elections of 1933, he perpetrated a continuous chain of coup d'états. He ceased to be a lawful chancellor; his government acted on the fragile ground of continued constitutional breach.

As a result, all orders, regulations, decrees, measures, acts of the Hitler regime were unconstitutional and illegal. They were never binding law, obligated to nothing and are criminally punishable acts. Every official who supported Hitler was guilty of aiding and abetting.

In every comprehensive political arrangement the depth, fullness, richness and inadequacies of the nature of that people which accomplishes it are betrayed. Just as every people has the government it deserves, so it also has the constitution, the administration, the police, the judges, the political freedom and the civic dignity that are due to it. The German nation-state is German down to its last ramifications: at the moment when the German founded his nation-state, it had to appear in the form and the inner structure which it now exhibits; there was no possibility for it to turn out better or worse. The German nation-state owes to inner factual and biological necessities precisely that political rank, that extent of mental spaciousness, that spiritual height, that moral character, that coloration and temperature of emotional explosions, and not least precisely also that human representation which secretly distinguishes it. In this national state the highest degree of political efficiency is inherent, which the German has at his disposal as soon as he appears on the historical stage as a type of citizen.

This bourgeois national state is a total state, because it finds everywhere organs which feel themselves bound to the bourgeois interest; the poorest starving people bring it to bear as party comrades, SA and SS men even in the lowest social circles. The National Socialist Party becomes the pure and immediate organizational form of the bourgeois class; one openly embraces it when one joins the party. In the party, the bourgeois class will appears naked; the SA and SS men are equipped by the party as bourgeois class soldiers. The law "for securing the unity of party and state of i. December 1933" explicitly calls the party the "leading and moving force of the National Socialist state." By commanding the state, the party directs the state according to the intentions of the bourgeois class will. The Marxist view that the state is the instrument of domination of the bourgeois class is meaningfully confirmed by the victors over Marxism.

Class-conscious labor and Jewry, which has been declared its accomplice, have no place in this bourgeois nation-state. They are without rights. The government, Hitler said in the Reichstag on March 23, 1933, sees it as its duty in principle "to keep those elements from influencing the shaping of the life of the nation who

Coups d'état and breaches of the constitution

consciously and deliberately negate this life. Theoretical equality before the law cannot lead to tolerating fundamental despisers of the laws and of equality, even to handing over to them in the end the freedom of the nation out of some democratic doctrine." For class-conscious labor, this bourgeois nation-state is a "conquering state" in the Hobbesian sense. "A conquering state is one in which supremacy is acquired by force in such a way that either individuals or all by majority vote have contracted to obey one person for fear of gangs and death." Class-conscious labor lives as if in occupied territory; the civil war victor forces it to obey with the brutality Hitler loves so much.

However, this state of conquest is subject to a strange dialectic. The petty-bourgeois masses may have created it, but they had something quite different in mind. To the extent that they come to realize that they have only performed stirrup-holder services for the big bourgeoisie, they become ill-tempered; they feel that they have been hoodwinked and are disillusioned. Meanwhile it is too late for them: they are caught in the same noose that they have thrown around the neck of the class-conscious working class. If they turn their backs on the total bourgeois nation-state which is their "work, then they immediately become victims of the same disenfranchisement and "arbitrariness, lawlessness and violence to which they have delivered the class-conscious working class. Then suddenly they, too, find themselves without freedom of speech and writing and without basic political rights; then they, too, are high traitors when they gather in their discontent; then they fill prisons, penitentiaries and concentration camps as enemies of the state. This total bourgeois national state finally weighs as heavily on those sections of the petty-bourgeois masses who rebel against the dictatorship of big-bourgeois class egoism as it does on the class-conscious working class. The civil war law of the big-bourgeois national class state strikes the petty-bourgeois refuser of obedience as inexorably as the proletarian "enemy of the state." The petty-bourgeois masses, while depriving the classconscious worker of freedom, had deprived themselves of all freedom: the big bourgeoisie had got involved in the demagogic spectacle only because it expected this end of the song.

The petty-bourgeois masses were living in the dream of having made a revolution; in truth, only a bigbourgeois coup d'état had taken place. The "revolution from above" is at home in Germany; when the Germans take hold and become rebellious, an upper class gets its sheep in the dry. The reformist people's movement around 1 500, like the national people's movement after 1815, was more to the liking of the ruling upper classes than of the people in motion.

XIV The Total Arbitrary State

It will probably remain forever memorable that the bourgeois masses of the German people accusingly raised the accusation against the Weimar Republic that it was a "law state. The law, according to Aristotle "the pure desireless reason", is the impersonal order, before which no respect of the person is valid. Human freedom is based on the fact that all are equal before the state law, that there is no exception before it, that it comes into force with the consistency of a rational norm and rules with the exclusivity and unbreakability of a natural law.

It constitutes the content of the bourgeois-liberal epoch to have ensured the unbreakability of the rule of law. This is how the free citizenship came into being. The free man is the man who is subject to the universal law and to no one else. The consciousness of this freedom is the crowning of his moral dignity and his manly pride. His freedom, says Hegel, is "the only true thing of the spirit"; the freedom of the spirit constitutes its

The petit bourgeois in the noose as well 71 very nature. "The history of the world is progress in the consciousness of freedom." The Orientals would have known only "that one is free, but the Greek and Roman world that some are free," but we know "all men in themselves, that is, man as man is free." The rule of law is worthy of man, because it is the rule of reason; "but whoever," Aristotle remarks, "wants to have man as ruler, adds the animal. For lasciviousness is something animal, and anger sets even the best men among rulers in confusion."

It was precisely "man" that the German bourgeois masses wanted to have as their ruler when they rebelled against the Weimar constitutional state; it was as if they had been animated by a deep, instinctive aversion to the "reasonable" and had missed the animal touch in the normative order to which they bowed. They were tired of the rule of the impersonal law and despised the freedom it granted; they wanted to serve a "man", a personal authority, a dictator, a "leader". With the impersonality of the rule of law they threw aside their freedom; they senselessly surrendered their legal security and surrendered their destiny to a dark, incomprehensible, nameless, irrational "justice" embodied in the leader. They preferred the fluctuating whim and erratic arbitrariness of a personal "leader" to the strict predictability and firm rule of an inviolable lawful order. They did not want to be freemen under the law, but servants of a master, will-less followers, docile subjects, sad subjects.

This was the renunciation of the idea of the state in general. The state, like the modern forms of the state, is the creation of the bourgeois class. The absolute prince, who seemed to shape the state, was here only the tool of modern bourgeois tendencies. As far as the generally binding nature of legislation advances, as far as the modern forms of law (subjective and objective, private and public law) assert themselves, the state takes root; the bureaucracy, which applies the laws to everyone in the same way, comes for the most part from the bourgeoisie. A political entity is a state only to the extent that the law prevails universally. The "absolute" state still contained spaces filled by feudal arbitrariness and police discretion; it had not yet assimilated these spaces. The lettres des cachets and the Bastille were residues of pre-state times; therefore they fell victim to the rage of the third estate. Although the Prussian king Frederick II appreciated the pleasure that the state spoke through him alone, his formula of being the first servant of the state contained a strong sense of the bourgeois need to transform every state organ into an instrument of the all-embracing objective-valid law.

To turn away from the law-state is to turn away from the state itself, is to revert to the political world of forms of the Middle Ages, which must necessarily become anarchic again insofar as it is feudally tinged. "The dissolution of the state," wrote Hegel in his extraordinary youthful pamphlet "The Constitution of Germany," "is recognized exquisitely when everything goes differently from the laws." Personal leadership is feudal in character; it contradicts the spirit of the state, which by its nature cannot be other than impersonalobjective. In so far as it seeks to be an intended permanent state, a "normal case," it is quite different from republican dictatorship, e.g., that of ancient Rome; the latter by no means turns away in principle from the law-state. "The dictator," Carl Schmitt declared in 1921, "is not a tyrant, and dictatorship is not a form of absolute rule, but a means peculiar to the republican constitution of preserving freedom." True dictatorship consists only "in a temporary suspension of the entire bourgeois condition." Laws are temporarily suspended in order to create the condition for their later continuance unimpaired.

Every state carries within itself elements of its opposition; they belong precisely to its preservation, to the economy of its health, they are those portions of poisons which irritate and fire the organism to give its best; they do no harm as long as they are carefully dosed. Thus every bourgeois-liberal constitution has its dictatorship paragraph; in it it by no means departs from itself, but has in it its support for the hours of greatest need. Decay occurs when poison permeates the body in excess. Dictatorship as a permanent state is no longer the space released for the technical execution of a state operation that cannot be postponed, but the state-dissolving rule of personal arbitrariness elevated to a principle.

The state becomes historical baggage

The National Socialist seizure of power in January 1933 initiates the decomposition of the Prussian-German state; its foundations are already being undermined while it still seems to be completing itself as a centralized nation-state. The end of the state is sealed in Germany by the substitution of the personal authority of the "Führer" for the impersonal authority of the law. The centralist-national-state facade that persists conceals for a long time the completed turnaround of things.

The state and its law were fundamentally unhinged when they had to step back before the people and their "leader." The "people" becomes the point to which from now on all political events refer. The state becomes historical baggage that must not be shaken off in shame. The guiding principle of action is the will of the "leader," no longer the law. The state and its law are "alien to the people"; this makes both of them suspect, and thus they are basically already condemned. They must become "close to the people": this means that they cease to be what they are. The reforms by which they are to be brought close to the people destroy state and law in their special being. National Socialist modernization is bad for the state and the laws; the more they are adapted to the personal authoritarian needs of the time, the more they are undermined and destroyed. The "transformation" does not reshape, but makes the state and the rule of law disappear.

The "healthy popular feeling" has an institution in which it expresses itself purely, through which it becomes directly capable of action: the National Socialist party. The party takes the state under its magnifying glass, it looks at its fingers, it pushes it onto the track that leads to "closeness to the people". It is the voice of the people, against which there is no longer any objection for the state; even the wording of the law has to fall reverently silent before it. In its variations, the relationship between state and party denotes, on the one hand, the process of disintegration of the state, and, on the other hand, the emergence of a political entity living on essentially different principles.

Carl Schmitt, in a paper entitled "State, Movement, People," wanted to find a good side to this relationship, in such a way that the face of the state should be preserved. The party was "the political-dynamic element" in contrast to the "political-static part," the state; it was the "state- and people-bearing leadership body"; the connection between state and party was based mainly on personal unions. "In many cases these personal unions already bear in part an institutional character: the leader of the National Socialist movement is the German Reich Chancellor; his paladins and sub-leaders stand in other politically leading positions as Reich Ministers, Prussian Prime Ministers, Reich Governors, as Prussian, Bavarian, and other ministers." The party was neither state in the sense of the old state, nor was it non-state-private in the sense of the old juxtaposition of state and non-state spheres. The courts must not "interfere under any pretext in internal questions and decisions of party organizations and break through their leader principle from the outside." The party must develop its standards from within itself in the strictest self-responsibility. By preventing the state from crossing its threshold and, on the other hand, by imposing its guidelines on the state, which is no more than a dead apparatus, i.e., by the party commanding the state and drawing its boundaries, it becomes apparent that it has gained the upper hand over the state, that it is only a vague shadow. We stand, said Carl Schmitt, "before a completely new problem of constitutional law". The ruin to which the state is being handed over is to be made palatable by not explicitly stating it, but by interpreting it as a mere shift of emphasis in the interrelationship of things, as every newly emerging problematic inevitably brings with it.

The law "for the preservation of the unity of party and state" of December 1, 1933, elevated the party to the status of a public-law corporation, which had to watch over the fact that the entire state apparatus was permeated by National Socialist spirit. Soon the state proved to be an impotent machine; the party with its masses, Schutzstaffeln and Sturmabteilungen grew over its head. The institutions and laws on which the state bureaucracy had hitherto relied became powerless. The law "for the restoration of the professional civil service" was in reality a "purification law", which inculcated the Third Reich's rhetoric into the civil service. Any civil servant who had a "Marxist" past or who did not respond to the word in the present was

The party orders the state 73 dismissed. According to the principles of Reich civil service law, promotion was only possible for civil servants "who, in addition to fulfilling their general civil service duties to the full, and taking into account their previous political views, offer an unconditional guarantee and have proven since January 30 that they will at all times wholeheartedly support the National Socialist state and effectively represent it" - in other words, the state that had capitulated to the party. The "well-acquired rights," the "pensionable position in life" were suddenly questionable; for every civil servant, the sky he had thought unshakable thus collapsed. The official was hit at his most sensitive point; whoever caught him there could grind his character into atoms. The official hurried to cross over to the ground of the new facts. He did not let it come to any more conflict; he tried to guess the will of the party and to obey it before it had made itself explicitly known. Business was soon conducted automatically according to the "wishes and orders of the party, no longer according to the situation of the case. For administrative officials and judges alike, party interests took the place of the interests of the state. This corruption of the civil service continued to eat into the medical profession: eventually, no doctor could be found who could truthfully certify the cause of death when SA or SS men had been the murderers. Gradually, the party comrades penetrated the offices themselves. The high offices brought them in from the start, but they also settled down in lumps in the middle and lower regions. The state offices were a prey over which the "proven" old fighters pounced according to the level of their party book number. The spoil system took on fantastic forms; every American boss could now go to school with the Third Reich.

The Weimar Republic had also cultivated its own special civil service policy. It had retired monarchical officials who did too much; its most obvious enemies were still allowed to retire in a well-doped retirement. As long as it was not made excessively difficult for her, she gave preference to professional competence over mere reliability of opinion. Undeniably, even the union secretary who moved into a state office had become familiar with administrative business in the bullock ride of his organizational work. The party official of the Weimar Republic was absorbed by the bureaucratic machinery; within its framework he was no longer a party functionary but a tool of the reason of state; down to his fingertips he became a state official. In disputes he defended the interests of the state against the encroachments of the party that had helped him to his career. He filled himself with the spirit of statehood, he became a full-fledged public servant who put a stop to the presumption of any extra-state tendency.

The National Socialist party officials, however, do not subordinate themselves to the reason of the state. They push the state to the wall, and their mission is to deliver the state to the party. For the first time in centuries, the state bureaucracy, which was bound by law, conscientiously devoted to the cause, and committed to the reason of state, and which had been trained by Frederick William I, was systematically disintegrated and corrupted.

The National Socialist party officials penetrate the body of the state and dissolve it from within. At the same time, the party deprives it of numerous sovereign rights from the outside. The state had come into being by wresting sovereign rights in turn from the feudal-aristocratic landlords and monopolizing them. Now the National Socialist party breaks through the monopoly; it itself becomes the bearer of sovereignty. It develops its own party jurisdiction, the state authorities provide legal assistance; it has the right to take oaths. It becomes its own school authority; some universities enroll students only after they present a certificate of membership in a National Socialist organization. Civil service positions are filled in agreement with the party; appointments and promotions in the higher bureaucracy are overseen by party minister Rudolf Hess. Judges and soldiers wear the party's "insignia of sovereignty" on gowns and uniforms; it was bestowed on them "honorary"; the party distributes public honors, no longer the state. Party opinions and orders are authoritative for courts and administrative authorities; the state power goes a long way out of the way of

The National

party instances where they are broadly planted. The officials are public officials; sovereigns swarm like blowflies.

At the head of the party is the "Führer. He is obeyed blindly. His command supersedes the law. "Law, then, is today the act of leadership." * Insofar as this happens, the state is aborted in favor of the party. The "leader" did not step on the platform of the state; he came up as an opponent of the state, indeed as a "stateless person." The state is as repugnant to him at the bottom of his soul as the civil servant is, against whom he displays an almost unbridled resentment in his book. The state reaches only as far as the party has not yet penetrated; the "Führer" also controls the state and makes it dance to his tune. The state is "the organ of the leader, of the movement". The leader makes use of the state like one moves into an old building, which one later wants to replace by a completely new building. It had nevertheless his deep sense that Hitler did not want to become Reich president. His intention is not to be the head of a state; he represents a "new" that wants to replace the state. It is true that Hindenburg had allowed himself to be persuaded to all kinds of violations of the constitution; but he had never been won over to this before a sophistical interpretation of the constitution had convinced him that the ground of legality would not be touched; at least he wanted to have the "true and proper sense" of the law for himself. Primitive as he was, he nevertheless had a good Prussian instinct for the state; he needed jurists to calm his conscience, whose expertise read off the paragraphs what laymen could have had only by brute force. Although Hindenburg circumvented the democratic paragraphs as often as it could be done without scandal and sensation, he was careful not to publicly and verifiably break the oath he had taken on them. Hitler was not tormented by such scruples. He is the source and creator of law par excellence; the law, according to the declaration of the Reich Ministry of Justice, is only a means of law. The law is not above the "Führer"; he need not worry about remaining in accord with it: if he deviates from Him, the law is in the wrong. For Hitler, no "general norm of decision determined in advance gives the measure"; he, says Carl Schmitt after the June murders in a most notorious treatise, he "protects the law from the worst abuse when, in the moment of danger, by virtue of his leadership as supreme court ruler, he directly creates law". The law is an imperfect and defective embodiment of law; any judge or administrative official may examine the law to see if it still dates from the Weimar period. If this is the case, he need not take it exactly with him from the outset. The purest Ausdrodcs-form of the legal substance is the Führer's order. As the law is merely a means of the right, the state is only a means of the realization of the right and the enforcement of power. From now on, the state only comes into function where the party, its subdivisions and the leader's will do not directly bring themselves to bear in an ordering and guiding way.

In this way, the relations of rule all take on a personal character. Every official is a deputy of the Führer, a "little Hitler" who interferes with administrative and judicial officials, insofar as they are not party functionaries, just as the Führer himself interferes with state activity. People command and rule and their "arbitrariness runs riot instead of laws creating redit and the reason of state commanding. The free discretion is basically unrestricted, and the laws are in force only insofar as it imposes restraint on itself. Leadership does not exclude free action on the part of the subordinate authorities, as Huber, a student of Schmitt and a National Socialist teacher of constitutional law, proclaimed; on the contrary, it presupposes independent decision-making and free initiative on the part of the subordinate authorities. This discretion can no longer be compared with that of the legally bound civil servant, about whom Aristotle once remarked: "The law gives the necessary training and leaves the rest to the civil servants to decide and take care of as well as they can." For this civil servant, discretion is the unavoidable leeway left by the immovably valid law. Now, however, says Huber, discretion has completely changed its factual content; it now authorizes "free decision-making in accordance with the basic political values of the National Socialist legal and state order," or in other words, in accordance with party considerations.

This extension of free discretion into the unlimited makes the individual completely defenseless against the leadership, and that is what it is out for. The individual no longer counts for anything before the "people's community," which miraculously exists as a bourgeois community. The citizen is taken care of in it, and the fact that the proletarian no longer has a say here is the purpose of the whole anti-individualist cult that is practiced with the "people's community. One wants to get at the proletarian individual without being prevented from doing so in the future by laws. One spits poison and bile against the "normativism of the law" and the "presumption of norms"; one scorns the "constitutional state", which, because it can also let the proletarian prevail over the citizen in cases of conflict, is not a "just state" but an "unjust state". The "just" state, having freed itself from the technique of thinking in terms of the law * and having purified itself to the "ethics of the sense of right," strikes the proletarian on the head as often as this subhuman creature gets on the citizen's nerves. The "revolt" of the worker of 1918 "fights for power with force or law against law"; the "revolution" of the bourgeoisie in 1933 "fights with law against the injustice of power and law": whoever overlooks things from the standpoint of the bourgeois community interest "can justify the sacrifice of the individual, from harshness against him to his annihilation, for the sake of higher values of the community." Judicial murder is no longer judicial murder if bourgeois social anxiety makes examples of innocent workers. For this communal thought, the concentration camp is "just as much a form of legal preservation as protective custody, pre-trial detention, penal detention and preventive detention, because, in contrast to liberalism, it places safeguarding prevention before retribution and retribution after the fact."

The Third Reich was a constitutional state only insofar, Carl Schmitt explained to National Socialist jurists, "as it recognized a certain binding of the authorities to the law. It could be understood only from its function as an organ of the National Socialist movement. The National Socialist party program had become the basis of all legal thinking." The Reich Justice Commissioner, Dr. Frank, explained on one occasion that the jurist should not have the pride of "being absorbed in his law; he should be a leader in the social order of his nation." The binding social order is the bourgeois-capitalist one; with determination Frank emphasized: "While recognizing the principle that the common good takes precedence over self-interest, we want the struggle for the law in Germany to be conducted in such a way that it is clearly recognizable that we want the strong to be stronger, the free to be freer, and the weak and incapable not to be protected in such a way that the strong and free should suffer. The favored strong and free are the capitalist bourgeois; they are called Krupp, Thyssen, Kirdorff, Borsig, Bosch. The weak and incapable, however, from whom the strong and free are to be protected, is the class-conscious proletarian.

An institution came into being through which the arbitrariness that was to take hold against the proletarian was, so to speak, put into a state of uninterrupted capacity for action: the Secret State Police. The Secret State Police is the mob that is always after the "enemy of the state and of the people," that does not allow him any rest, that tracks him down under any camouflage, that may jump on him wherever it discovers him, that is not hindered by any legal formalities, any legal rules, and that is authorized to do absolutely anything that seems to it to be required by the situation of the case. It is the organ of power that dominates the space of the abrogated fundamental rights. The "enemy of the state and of the people" stands outside the law; he is outlawed: the Secret State Police treat him as the fair game that he is. It confiscates property, opens letters, listens to telephone conversations, spies, bans, dissolves associations, expels, searches apartments, imposes protective custody, fills the concentration camps, maltreats, tortures, beats to death, as it pleases. In the course of time, the "SS-Totenkopfverbände" grew out of the guards of the concentration camps; at the party congress in 1936, they opened the march of the SS past the "Führer". They are "immediate front troops"; they stand daily "in front of the enemy": this brings them honor. To have violated defenseless people and to have tortured them to death is their glory and their heroism. For this they are rewarded by their "Führer".

Extension of free discretion

There is no legal remedy against the Secret State Police, no protection against legal action; one is at its mercy and at its whim. It is omnipotent as soon as it takes the field to ward off anti-state efforts, to serve the protection of state security. In March 1936, the Prussian Higher Administrative Court ruled that orders and decisions of the police that fall within the sphere of the Secret State Police cannot be challenged in the administrative courts by the usual legal means of administrative action; administrative recourse against the Secret State Police was excluded by this court decision.

"The State Police," defined the head of the Prussian Secret State Police Office, Heydrich, "must, in closest contact with the Security Service of the Reich Leader of the SS, proceed from ideological knowledge, recognize the forms of organization and the tactical intentions of the overall enemy. to instruct the bearers of the ideological struggle, in order to create the tactical basis for the tactical and criminalistic apprehension and combating of the individual enemy of the state and the individual organizations hostile to the state. "

The Secret State Police, whose apparatus is staffed almost exclusively by the SS, is an instrument of power of the party; it appears state-like only because it uses the violent means of the state, and in addition in a deserved accumulation. It is already an institution of the new political form which replaces the old state; nowhere can one see more clearly what fate awaits the German people. It is the organ of a special kind of tyranny; it is designed to destroy without a second thought anyone who does not fit into the new style of the monopoly capitalist order.

The deliberate sidelining of "law thinking" has had the most serious consequences for the administration of justice. The independence of the judge is based on his commitment to the law; without this commitment, as Carl Schmitt himself declared in 1933, "judicial independence is arbitrariness, and political arbitrariness at that. However, it soon stood in the way of the party if the judge respected the law with real conscientiousness; it was not willing to take with grace the decisions that went against it and its intentions. The Party was no longer content that the principles of National Socialism should govern directly and exclusively only the application and handling of the general clauses by "the judge, lawyer, judicial officer or law teacher." Judges were intimidated; inconvenient judges were dismissed on flimsy pretexts. Already in the Reichstag fire trial, Göring and Heines had criticized the conduct of the trial. "Since the ferments of the old state," Hitler said at the party congress in 1935, "i.e., of the old party world, could not immediately be completely overcome and eliminated, the necessity arises in many places for careful supervision of the development that has not yet been completely secured in National Socialist terms." Threateningly, he continued, "It may therefore happen that the party is compelled to intervene in an admonishing and, if necessary, corrective manner where the course of government is obviously contrary to National Socialist principles."

When the Reichsgericht had difficulty concealing a faint reluctance to allow itself to be degraded unreservedly into a revolutionary tribunal, the People's Court was created, which established itself as an extermination machine against "enemies of the state" on the platform of the "National Socialist principle that a breach of faith in one's own people is the crime most worthy of cursing". It took from the Reichsgericht the task of "protecting the people in its entirety from corrosive internal and external attacks." In the Berlin collapse trial ** Goebbels, without being called to order, gave the court guidelines for the administration of justice. "If a case such as this," he said, "were to fall silently under the table, this would lead to a certain danger for the National Socialist reconstruction work." The Fuehrer, too, had expressed himself to the effect that action must be taken with all severity against those guilty in the interests of National Socialist reconstruction.

Gradually, the new principles were openly developed, and the judge was expected to follow them. Where the law had to benefit an opponent of the Third Reich, it was allowed to be set aside. "Anyone, however, who might believe that he could take a detour via the abuse of the administration of justice to oppose the

The secret state police 77

National Socialist Reich should abandon all hope from the outset," said Dr. Frank. "The guardian of the law and his power are not the protection of any anti-national socialist opposition, they rather serve to strengthen the national socialist legal and Reich authority." "Common sense" became an aid to law interpretation and application. It coincided with National Socialist party intent and bourgeois-capitalist interest and stepped in wherever the plain text or meaning of the law could not deal with an enemy of the state. In October 1936, Secretary of State Freisler wrote that judges and prosecutors should not look first to the law when judging a crime, "but should listen to the voice of the people's conscience, to the common sense of the people. Only when, after a complete clarification of the facts and after measuring the act and the perpetrator against the ultimate source of law, the people's conscience, he has determined the punishability and punishability, he must now turn his attention to the law in order to determine whether the law threatens the act with punishment. If punishment in accordance with the statutory offense did not constitute adequate atonement, then the judge would have to decide to pronounce punishability directly from the common sense of the people." The Hamburg senator Dr. Rothenfelder once, in 1936, summarized the guidelines of National Socialist jurisprudence in a revealing way. All laws, he said, were to be interpreted exclusively in accordance with National Socialist principles. Adolf Hitler's words, which did not take the form of law, were the most important source of interpretation. Orders of the Fuehrer were to be considered equal to the law as sources of law; their content was directly applicable law. If contradictions arose between a law from the time before 1933 and "folkishes Empfinden," a decision had to be made against the law. "The law and the will of the Fuehrer are one," Goering drove at the Attorneys General in the summer of 1934, "and from this it follows, therefore, that you must defend this law of the National Socialist state with all vigor. In the future, I will no longer exercise any leniency toward officials who fail to fulfill their duty in this respect."

The people, said even Dr. Schlegelberger, Secretary of State in the Reich Ministry of Justice, who was very adaptable, would not accept that a norm had proved its worth if the change of world view required a different regulation. The administration of justice therefore binds itself to the laws only for appearance's sake and with reservations: only insofar as they are in accordance with the "common sense of the people". The law ceases to be the actual guideline for determining crime, guilt and punishability; the "healthy popular feeling" feels what is wrong and therefore punishable, and it also feels how high the punishment should be. The new German criminal law explicitly instructs the judge "to determine the law when the law itself does not give an explicit answer to the question of whether it is right or wrong, by consulting the healthy popular feeling." The "healthy popular feeling" is the epitome of the bourgeois-capitalist class instinct; thus the administration of justice becomes its direct and unveiled instrument of war. Where the fascist order feels threatened or violated, the court delivers a damning verdict without much ado. "Criminal law," Freisler once told the Lessing College, "is one of the most essential means for the attacking defense of the life and labor peace of the people of the state." If the bourgeois order had hitherto hidden its will to assert itself behind the cumbersome machinery of the legal system of norms, it is now, in its fascist stage, throwing off all the ballast. It simply lashes out as the urge for self-assertion dictates; its administration of justice becomes a sum of desperately chaotic and mindlessly executed blows by which it wants to snatch itself from the approaching doom; it is not a rationally systematized, but a blindly instinctive happening. Thus the Third Reich, striking every truly healthy sense of justice in the face, enacts penal laws with retroactive force. Consequently, the fundamental theorem of every true state of law also falls: nulla poena sine lege.

If there is no punishment without law, rules of the game must be observed which allow the suspect to clear himself; he is innocent if no paragraph can be found which he has violated.

can no longer be magnanimous and chivalrous toward any suspects; those who are suspicious are not reliable: the suspect is capable of tripping them up unawares. Indifference, coldness toward those in power

People's Court as Revolutionary Tribunal

and criticism of them are indications of secret hostility to the state. Any kind of hostility to the state is a crime, but no crime can escape punishment.

It lies in the institutional logic of jurisdiction that 'arbitrariness' also wants to present itself in a judicial guise: the legal analogy is the rotten magic with the help of which it wants to do its mischief as "higher justice". If, in spite of all the efforts of the "common sense of the people," no paragraph can be stretched, twisted and stretched in such a way as to bring down a guiltless enemy of the state and the people in it, then the legal analogy renders its services. "If no particular penal law finds direct application to the deed, then the deed is punished according to the law whose basic idea best applies to it." This is what the Jurist brain is trained to do, to find out in the end a law which can be abused by means of a bold, law-breaking analogy for the downfall of every honest man. The legal analogy is the insidious event, in order to be able to send every steadfast opponent, who does not march along in rank and file, into the penitentiary, although there is no law, against which he would have ever transgressed. The legal analogy is for the judiciary what the Secret State Police is for the executive: the slap in the neck of those enemies of the state who have been careful not to get caught in the snares of the law.

The meaning of the crime changes; it is no longer in any necessary relation to the law. To turn against the law is everything that touches the capitalist system and its fascist apparatus of coercion, that cannot be brought into harmony with them. Every opposing tendency is criminal in principle. The punishment is only the crude, civil war-like act of destruction against any enemy. The courts are civil war commandos, which coldly eliminate the enemies of the fascist order of violence; they act according to the orders of the civil war leadership. The jurisdiction is the trap into which the enemy is driven, the judgment of the Stih in the back and the judge of the Bravo, which her was hired for the Shandtat. The German judgment was available for all mischiefs that were demanded of it: it sent class-conscious workers to the prison for a critical word, a passed-on leaflet, an appointment with friends of the spirit; against the few German men who had not become characterless sissies, it pronounced a loss of honor.

In this campaign of extermination, attitudes were persecuted; anyone who thought differently and did not conceal it had forfeited his freedom and often his life. The new German criminal law was a pure criminal law of the mind, even if it shamefully called itself a criminal law of the will; it was the criminal law of a secularized theocracy. The only question of guilt was whether one belonged to the recognized right-wing front, whether one shared the faith, whether one was not a heretic; the Inquisition had been revived on German soil. The courts had severed all relations with the law; anyone who sought justice before them was a fool; they came up with rogue plays; their "pronouncement of law" was always a servant-like souped-up form of denial of justice. The legal profession, under these circumstances, became an indecent and dishonorable trade; the advocate was not allowed to save the victim whom the ruling power handed over to the courts to dispose of; he was a creature of that power, as the judge was; he was merely advocatus diaboli. He mirrored to his client that something could be done for him after all. The endangered man clings to the thinnest straw: it is precisely from this spasm of hope that the lawyer makes his money; he lets himself be paid for giving sustenance to a few pathetic illusions. The legal profession needs a liberal climate if it is not to become corrupt; it needs a situation in which it can stand its ground against state power from the solid rock of legality.

Accordingly, the supreme power of leadership handles the judiciary and the executive with the same subjective discretion; it is no less master of the legislature. The will of the leader is supreme law; his command has the force of law. The Representation of the People, the Reichstag, the Prussian Council of State are mere flourishes, mere ornaments. They do not work; for representative purposes they are sometimes called together to listen to a speech, to say yes to a law that is to be specially accentuated, to sing the Horst Wessel song. "The State Council cannot vote," Göring decreed, "because that is the special

characteristic of parliamentarism. The State Council is supposed to advise, it is supposed to help, the State Council is supposed to cooperate, but, gentlemen, I alone bear the responsibility, and I have been appointed to do so by my Führer." Thus the Prussian Prime Minister impressed upon his State Councillors that they were only his political body hussars, janissaries, mamelukes, Goering's playthings and well-paid political court jesters. Reichstag mandate and State Council posts are sinecures for party comrades, who, because they cannot otherwise be allowed to get close enough to the manger, are to be given public money. The same party functionaries who had begrudged the parliamentary "diet swallowers" of the Weimar Republic the compensation for which, after all, a certain industrious activity had been performed, are now indulging in the same diets, although they do not even have to come up with a speech in the "chatterbox" for it.

The Third Reich thus put an end to the "separation of powers". It was a liberal-democratic principle that the power of the state emanates from the people; but since the people is not directly capable of acting, it requires the organs which "embody only a certain section of the total power within the framework of their competence".* That the organs endowed with a part of the state power are brought into a balance, that they are balanced against each other, that they are designed to control each other, takes account of the suffering experiences of the people and is an obvious requirement of political prudence. Bodin, Locke and Montesquieu had raised this prudence into the brightness of human consciousness. It is all too easy for every power to grow over the head of the people from which it emanates; its superiority is to be structured and mobile, but the people is the still unformed original substance. It is a condition, not merely, as the National Socialist crown lawyers say, a theory, that the power of the state rests entirely undivided with the people. Although a number of political powers visibly appear, the unified and closed power of the state consists par excellence in the existence of the people. The separation of powers had put a stop to the absolutism of the feudal-aristocratic upper class. Although this upper class controlled the executive, it was bound by laws that breathed the spirit of the bourgeoisie, and the judiciary, which had been invaded by the bourgeoisie, set limits and controlled it.

Now that the bourgeoisie no longer has a feudal opponent, it could itself be absolute, if the working class did not suddenly want to go its own way. Since 1918 it had gained access to the executive as well as the legislative, it was of little use to the bourgeoisie to be completely sure of the judiciary. The separation of powers worked against the bourgeoisie; it now put the same fetters on the bourgeois will to power that it had previously put on the feudal-aristocratic one.

This is why the National Socialist doctrine of constitutional law began to denigrate the separation of powers. Since the separation of powers gave consideration to proletarian interests in addition to the predominant bourgeois interest, it was accused of dissolving the unity of state power; the citizen understood this unity in such a way that state power had to yield exclusively to private capitalist tendencies. From this point of view, the unity of state power could be established only by eliminating the separation of powers; if the working class had hitherto made its presence felt through the legislative and executive branches, it was politically on dry land as soon as the special life of these two branches was cut off. The whole wealth of legislative, executive and judicial powers could be concentrated in a single hand: then legislation, administration and jurisdiction were subordinated to the one bourgeois-capitalist interest. "The political leadership reestablished in National Socialism is the total power which holds together all bourgeois functions and competences and vouches for the unity of state power in the face of all organizational separations and conceptual distinctions. "* From the political, bourgeois-bound leadership power all individual state functions emerge. "Leadership appears in the fields of legislation, jurisprudence and administration in the same way: the state will to lead determines and permeates all three functions." The "people's state" that thus emerges is a repugnant bourgeois police state.

Reichstag and Council of State only flourishes

This unified power of leadership is without control. Control is already a constraint for it, which on the one hand could paralyze its clout, and on the other hand can be misused as a camouflage for anti-bourgeois influences. Since the power of leadership is of a bourgeois nature, it moves in the element of acquisitiveness and the profit motive; the freer it knows itself to be from control, the faster it sinks into corruption. The Supreme Court of Audit has had its day; if it wanted to tamper with the power of leadership, its judges would have learned overnight that the Third Reich would like to have forbidden itself the old Prussian conscientiousness and cleanliness in matters of money. "It is inconceivable that an official can legally deny the Führer the means which the latter intends to use in his leadership of the people. "** The leaders, who decide from bottom to top within the framework of their sphere of responsibility, have no less free disposal of the state coffers; since they feel themselves to be public persons throughout, public money is of special attraction to them. They forget how to calculate; no one holds them accountable; they draw from the treasury; they represent, build, give subsidies as the whim takes them; when the money flows, they consider themselves part of the community to which it is destined. They give themselves gifts of objects from public collections and no longer realize that in doing so they are tampering with the property of others. Hitler took engravings and pictures from state and municipal museums. These leaders let themselves be "smeared" in truly grandiose proportions. When Goering got married, the industry had to come up with juicy wedding gifts. Hitler is the main shareholder of the Eher publishing house. The ruin of old newspaper enterprises and publishing houses, which all merged into Eher-Verlag, the forced sale of the book "Mein Kampf" increased Hitler's dividends: the pressure of public force made Eher-Verlag flourish. Behind the shiny exterior, the Third Reich turned into a monstrous swamp of corruption: the armaments industry fleeced the state, state functionaries pocketed spoils. They drew their salaries from numerous sources, including state salaries, parliamentary allowances, party income, daily allowances, salaries for service in the SA, SS or NSKK, and income from the labor front; they saved as little as they did for themselves for the expenses of the community; rarely have taxpayers' money been used more unscrupulously. Any kind of control fell under the category of "critical asterism"; the Third Reich did away with this - it wanted to build on the road without having to fear masters.

By embodying the unity of state power, the leading power at the same time wants to be the most direct organ of the state will; it claims to express the people's will in a purer, clearer and more unbroken way than the power-sharing state is able to do. "I frequently hear," said Hitler, "expressions of regret from AngloSaxon countries that Germany has departed from those very principles of democratic conception of the state which are especially sacred to those countries. This opinion is based on a serious error. Germany, too, has a democratic constitution.'" The National Socialist government, he said, was called by the people and felt responsible to the people. "Other countries assign 5000, 10000,20000, 60000 votes to a deputy." The German people, on the other hand, had elected a single representative, him, the Führer, as their representative, with 38 million votes.

The special peculiarity of the unified National Socialist leadership is to be probably the most civil-war sharpened instrument of power and rule of the upper bourgeoisie, but misleadingly to lead the "deepest people's solidarity" on the lips. The people's solidarity is demonstrated to the world through popular votes. The referendum, however, must not involve any risk. The government will not give way under any circumstances, the leaders of the Third Reich assured again and again. It is one of the political tasks of the leadership to organize the plebiscites in such a way that they give the world the impression of having recovered the consent of the people, that they give the people the feeling of having been consulted, but that in reality they leave no other choice than that of acquiescing and suffering with the existing state of affairs. It is true that the Führer nourishes the fiction that he is responsible to the people, but this is "not a responsibility in the sense that the German people could depose the Führer; that would be the parliamentary-democratic concept of responsibility. "* The upper bourgeoisie is the axis of the whole event;

the people is the statistery which, for reasons of expediency, is sometimes called into the foreground in order to produce, by its overwhelming massiveness, the optical illusion that it is the force which, at the deepest bottom, moves, enforces, decides everything. It is not the sovereign people who manifest their power in the plebiscite; they step forward as if for a commanded roll call and thus only betray how bleakly enslaved they are. The popular vote is a saturnal farce; the fascist ruling class is so sure of its power that from time to time it may dare the experiment of giving its slaves free rein for a day; these have respect so deep ' in their bones that they will do no harm. They are already drilled to show no resistance, even if they should feel like it. The popular vote must not bring to light any extended opposition; the fiction must remain that the people unanimously follow their rulers. Thus, an essential part of the referendum arrangement is to protect the ballot boxes from oppositional votes: they simply must not be counted.

A question is posed that stamps anyone who opposes it as a traitor; anyone who accepts the question at all must follow the leadership, has already gone into its yarn. Election propaganda puts the people under the strongest psychological and moral pressure; it cuts off the honor of the naysayers from the outset and frightens them with dark threats. The heavy artillery brought against them is meant to intimidate them; they are supposed to feel themselves as traitors to the people and the country, worthy of punishment. Public officials of all kinds announce that there are means to break through the secrecy of the ballot. Waves of wild mental terror flood the country until election day. No voter is supposed to be brave enough to say no; the people are driven to the ballot box like trembling runners bleating "yes". If the results are not satisfactory, they are falsified; the falsification procedure was already tested in the first elections on March 5, 1933. Gradually, it was practiced more and more brazenly; on March 29, 1936, it was no longer used at all. Anyone who cast a blank ballot at the ballot box in order to refuse to vote had to accept being counted as a yes-man. Millions entered the polling station as "enemies of the state" and left as "supporters of the system. This tyrannical regime would be shaken if it itself officially admitted to having opponents; the falsification of elections is a measure of its self-preservation. If it were to establish through conscientious counting of votes that it has the people against it, it would give the people themselves the signal for revolutionary revolt. Electoral fraud is a decisive means of asserting power; the electoral fraudster and the electoral cheat are important pillars of the regime. Officials become ex officio forgers; every referendum reveals that the Third Reich is at its core a cunning, rigged hoax and fraud. Where for some reason the forgery does not succeed, where the strength of the opposition really becomes visible, it is wounded in an exposed nerve; viciously it jerks up and unmasks itself. On August 19, 1934, the Düsseldorf Catholic Marienhospital had voted against Hitler by more than jo percent. In a circular letter to the medical profession, the Association of Düsseldorf Doctors wrote: "This election result represents a challenge to the profession, the city and, beyond that, the state. The Düsseldorf medical fraternity will try to make up for this out-of-state attitude by the harshest lockout of the hospital up to its economic destruction." The naysayer does not cooperate, so he is to be crushed: this wisdom of the Gestapo is making its mark everywhere. He is a "deserter", consequently he is subject to martial law. He does not stand in line at the muster of the army, he stands out unpleasantly: if he doesn't get used to discipline, he may perish. Thus, as Engels once said, universal suffrage became a "tool of the oppression of the masses."

Even worse than the naysayer, of course, is the one who stays at home. The nay-sayer still reports to the spot; the command mechanism at least seizes him; he responds to the question, even if opposing it. His "no", which can be faked at last, is a fist secretly clenched in his pocket; such a fist does no harm.

The non-voter, however, openly shows that he does not get involved in the regime's questioning at all, that he does not play along, that he stands apart and does not belong in any consideration; he betrays himself as a soldier of another front. Those who cannot be brought to the ballot box are no longer useful even as extras; they make it obvious where the system begins to faint. If large fractions of the people no longer show up at

The electoral forger a pillar of the regime

roll call, then the regime slides into bankruptcy: if the democratic facade falls, then the spell of the bigbourgeois grimace hiding behind it breaks. "The feeling of the cheap and fair-minded," says Professor Lange, "need not be represented by the majority": but as soon as everyone sees that the majority has nothing to do with the system, the diminished little group of the "cheap and fair-minded" will quickly be exposed as a clique of capitalist profit hags. The non-voter thus becomes one of the most dangerous enemies of the Third Reich; examples are made that deter; he is not to find followers. The national-socialist popular feeling already did its "duty" several times and the press spread the crime reports to the warning of all "bad-minded people". "Excited crowds" gathered in front of the homes of non-voters; here and there these enemies of the state were dragged through the streets; posters hung on their chests and backs with the inscription: "I did not vote out of infamy." The gendarmerie took them away in protective custody: that is how serious the state authority was about the freedom and secrecy of the vote, which it itself had expressly guaranteed. The non-voter set a dangerous example: he demonstrated that the National Socialist spell and magic had limits and was impotent when it encountered a man who did not lack civil courage; against so much character and manliness the Third Reich was implacable for reasons of its self-defense.

One wanted to see the total state realized in the Third Reich, because it eliminated the separation of powers, left the ground of strict legality, sharpened the rule of the leader, the monocracy, to omnipotent tyranny, pushed the centralization of the body politic to the extreme point, eradicated the subjective public rights and no longer ordered the relations between the state and the individual as a legal relationship. However, in doing so, one disregarded what, according to his concept, the state really is: an impersonal machinery that draws the narrowest limits to free discretion, that functions predictably according to the norms and laws to which it is bound, because it is an apparatus that also regulates the protection of subjective rights, and that itself, so to speak, leaves out the "state-free sphere. Accordingly, "total state" would be a state that would eradicate free discretion to the last remnant, that would leave no sphere of life that would not be seized by lawful regulation; it would abolish the state-free sphere, but not the subjective rights: these rights, legally underpinned and precisely formulated, would be as inviolably fixed as the overall legal order in general. This total state would not curb the administrative court's examination of perhaps unavoidable discretionary decisions of state policy; rather, it would be in its logic not to deviate from the spirit of indispensable legality in any point whatsoever. The Third Reich, in so far as it remains a state, is an arbitrary state; but it is by no means the nature of the total state to open the floodgates of arbitrariness in every way. The exercise of lawless despotism by overpowering rulers is total anarchic terror - not total state.

The party theorist Alfred Rosenberg was not without feeling for this. In January 1934, in an essay, he explicitly rejected the notion that the Third Reich was a "total state." It had been overlooked, he said, "that the abstract state was certainly an idea of the liberalist age, which, as a technical instrument of power, was presented alongside the economy and culture as existing in its own right, and was accordingly worshipped or passionately opposed by other currents." The "revolution of January 30, 1933" was not a continuation of the absolutist state with new omens. "The state is no longer something that is to exist alongside the people and alongside the movement, either as a mechanistic apparatus or as a ruling instrument, but as a tool of the ruling National Socialist worldview." It should not be "the concept of the state per se that should again take center stage." It is the National Socialist worldview and movement "which claims the right of totality." This worldview and movement "has the state as its most powerful and masculine tool at its disposal. It is therefore advisable "no longer to speak of the total state, but of the wholeness (totality) of the National Socialist worldview of the NSDAP as the body of this worldview and of the National Socialist state as the tool for securing the soul, spirit and blood of National Socialism as the epochal phenomenon which took its beginning in the 20th century." Total is the worldview, the secularized faith: the Third Reich is built according to the formal principles of a faith community organized in the form of a state. It is, according to its type of form, a secularized church. World views, beliefs whip up the soul forces; they call the zealot to the scene. By

anarchic

slipping into the sectarian shell of the national-socialist worldview, the bourgeois interest mobilizes for itself the zealotry of religious warriors, the fanaticism of missionaries. Against the feudal-aristocratic upper class the bourgeoisie operated with the legality of the state; the proletarian lower class it wants to beat out of the field with the intolerance of the church. The organizational form of the Catholic Church became a consciously chosen model. In his writing "The State in the National Socialist World View," the former government president Nicolai designates the Catholic institutions which the National Socialist state took as its model: "1. the sump scopate of the pope as a model for the supreme and exclusive power of the party leader; 2. the clergy as a model of the psychologically correct leadership of the people by the political leadership of the NSDAP; 3. the College of Cardinals and the Cathedral Chapter as a model for the establishment of advisory bodies." These Catholic institutions embody "the idea of the authority of the incumbent, which was exemplary for the National Socialist Führer principle." No less ecclesiastical-Catholic is "the idea of the immutability of a dogma, which was transferred to the party program of the NSDAP." Hitler's Catholic origin gives the stamp to the National Socialist "state idea"; the losses that Catholicism in its religious form suffered within Protestant Germany are now brought back by Catholicism in its secularized National Socialist form. Hitler feels himself to be the infallible political pope; his officials have themselves as ordained priests, the high state dignitaries as cardinals and provosts. "It is already pointed out," the supreme civil servant leader Neef once explained in a circular letter, "that the aggregation of the entire civil service is according to the system of the Catholic Church, which unites the entire faithful in one great congregation, but in which official acts may be performed only by ordained priests. These ordained priests are the members of the NSDAP in the large new civil service congregation to be formed."

The church does not grant the apostate any legal protection, no protection, no toleration; it curses and banishes him and mercilessly wants his extermination: this is how the Third Reich treats everyone who does not assimilate into the fascist order.

The value of every man, his abilities, his rank become irrelevant; only the right attitude is counted against him. If he lacks it, he is ripe for damnation. It makes good sense that this political entity gives itself an eschatological name; in the Middle Ages, the "Third Reich" was the epitome of the final hopes of religiously excited people. The swarm-mindedness of the Calabrian prophet Joachim von Fiore haunts the idea of the Third Reich, the same swarm-mindedness and boundless expectation of souls that had once stood at the cradle of the Roman coup d'état, with which Cola di Rienzo could inspire even Petrarch.

Meanwhile, the National Socialist Church of the Third Reich does not need to borrow the secular arm first; it belongs to it organically as its own limb. Where it banishes, it also burns itself; its fighters of faith fight as much in the spiritual as in the physical sense, fight with moral as well as with physical weapons. The "political soldier" is a kind of "Jesuit," a soldier of faith; but he is so to an increased degree: he directly wields the secular sword as well. The believer is at the same time also in the army service; the Third Reich is one immense field camp; if the civil servant and official is not a worldview priest, he is a military superior. There is no free citizenship anymore; as the captain without all legal forms sends the recruit to middle arrest, the Gestapo condemns him to protective custody. Shutting up is the great virtue and blind obedience the bitter misery that no one is spared. The National Socialist ruling class does not tolerate any backtalk; everyone is supposed to wear his external as well as internal uniform, so that he gets rid of the vice of wanting to be something special.

Thus the Third Reich is a gruesome synthesis of Rome and Potsdam, of church and field camp, of confessional and barracks, of pastor and sergeant, of priest and spatula button, of catechism and cane, of dogmatics and cadaver obedience. All believe the same and do the same. Rome and Potsdam increase themselves, while they unite, to their extreme consequence. The spiritual man is exercised like the physical man; gone is the Prussia of Frederick II, which at least still let everyone be happy after his own fashion. One becomes mentally

The Third Reich a secularized

as uniform as physically; one becomes spiritually as drilled as physically forced. Just as there is no longer any state-free sphere, so there is also, if one may say so, no longer any humane district; one is always being controlled or commanded, admonished or snubbed, one must always either kneel or stand at attention, worship or parry. One is no longer one's own free master for a moment, one is no longer a human being at all. The people are a bunch of dumbfounded, blindly believing, fanatical fools and subserviently groveling pussycats. The masses either grovel before the military boot or the party flag. Thus dutiful slaves and brainless "heroes" are bred.

The oath of the party and state functionaries is on the one hand a sacred obligation to the prophet of the new faith, the National Socialist world view, on the other hand an "oath of allegiance of the political soldier". One swears not to a fundamental law, not to the fatherland, but to the humanly highly questionable man Adolf Hitler; unshakable loyalty and unconditional obedience are supposed to be, and the oath is supposed to bind throughout one's life.

This state-churchism, this Caesaropapism are not Germanic and not Nordic; they are Oriental-Byzantine, Syrian, Near Eastern. Only an instinctless racial mishmash like the German people, devoid of all human pride and dignity, can be forced into such a political world of forms that violate human dignity.

The National Socialist Caesaropapism bears features of the Jewish theocracy and the Islamic empire foundations; the shadow of Mohammed, already invoked by Hitler in his "Kampf", hovers over the Third Reich.

One still speaks of state, freedom and law: but all these venerable words change their meaning. The unbearable atmosphere of dishonesty that fills the Third Reich stems from the deliberate concealment of this change of meaning. "Precisely for the sake of their concepts," writes Hegel, "the Germans appear so dishonest as to confess nothing as it is, nor to give it for no more or less than really lies in the force of the thing. They remain faithful to their concepts, to the law and to the laws, but the events do not tend to coincide with them, and so that side which has the advantage in this endeavors to adapt both to each other by words by force of concepts."'

The sore point of the Weimar legal state was its Article 48, which empowered the Reich President to take the measures necessary to restore disturbed security and order and, if necessary, to "temporarily" suspend a number of fundamental rights.

It granted the head of state discretionary powers that, as a result of the blurring of its boundaries, were a vicious temptation for statist tendencies. Ebert did not always resist this temptation; Hindenburg even treated this article, directed by Brüning and Papen, as the most important component of the constitution of all. Thus Hitler had "constitutionally loyal" role models who taught him how to free himself, true to form, from the burdensome binding of the Basic Law of the State. He made Article 48 "total"; in this allencompassing article the constitution of the Third Reich is exhausted. Thus the rule of law was replaced by the despotism of one man. Article 48 was, as it were, the gate through which conquerors burst upon the German people to subject them to tyrannical servitude.

As a conqueror horde, as a "leadership order," the party feels; the "old fighters" are the new nobility: by rallying around Hitler, their "noble Nordic" blood revealed itself. Hitler was the Magus who mystically made this blood surge when he issued his call. Whoever did not feel called immediately or at all is neither called nor even chosen; he is born to be a servant, not a lord. The National Socialist conqueror uses the state in the sense of Machiavelli's "Principe"; for him, the state is the apparatus of power that has fallen into his hands, with which he subdues and oppresses his subjects. In the defense of this machinery of power, with which he stands and falls, he may violate all the duties of loyalty, mercy, truthfulness, humanity and religion. Thus the

cycle completes itself and the ring closes: at the end of the bourgeois epoch reigning beasts of the nature of those who at the beginning of this epoch, in the Renaissance, had come to power by violence, robbery and murder and sought to keep themselves in power, reappear.

The party makes no secret of its gang character; "we have conquered the state," it says and assures that it will not let the robbery go. "Once we have," Goebbels confesses under August 6, 1932, in his notes "From the Imperial Court to the Reich Chancellery," "once we have power, we shall never give it up again, unless we are carried out of our offices as corpses." They must be beaten to death according to their own instructions in order to get rid of them. They are "founders of the state"; they found a new "basic order", they are not "heirs".

The education of the offspring is organized as the breeding of a master class; on "Ordensburgen" the select ones are to be taken into a hard school and prepared for their "Führer" office. The Ordensburgen are half novice, half cadet institutions. "I do not want in any way," Ley declared, "to train a new priesthood, but my ideal is the political soldier, who unambiguously unites in himself the concept of preacher and soldier." From the order, Ley's entourage was assured*, there was no turning back. "'He who leaves it maliciously will be destroyed, both he himself and his whole family.'" There should be, one could express it differently, nobody who could "talk out of the school".

XV. The Personage

There are world-historically inferior functions which can be carried out only by people who are inferior in the same sense and in the same direction. These men are born to the "lowly" thing to be done, as others in better times were born to "higher" things. "Every period," said Helvetius, "has its great men, and if it does not have them, it invents them." If the period sets disreputable tasks, then criminals or canaillas can become world political exponents.

The bourgeois social order has lost its natural authority, it is no longer in the flower of its strength. It no longer arouses enthusiasm and finds devotion. It is shaken by fevers, it is covered with pus, the cancer eats in its bowels. Only by vicious means can it still assert its authority; it must make itself up and camouflage itself, it must deceive and act in order not to be seen through in the unmitigated offensiveness of its rottenness; nevertheless, despite all the falsifying effort, it is not immune to betraying itself unawares in its filth and weakness. It needs depraved people who force obedience through the terror they spread, it needs impostors, deceivers, comedians who stage the hoax with which it throws sand in everyone's eyes, it must put up with the dark figures through which its decay is represented.

The Third Reich is the violent cure through which bourgeois society wants to regain its lost authority, the false facade with the help of which it tries to gain new prestige, the self-exposure through which it uncovers its most sinister abysses. In their humanity, the National Socialist rulers present what bourgeois society objectively demands from the Third Reich and how it, as the Third Reich, inevitably exposes itself in the process. If it is true that in world history, as Nietzsche says, it already depends in general on the great criminals, "including those many who were capable of a great crime, but by chance did not do it" - then the criminal natures had now in particular a "good time"; to them altogether formally now a happy coincidence

World historical inferior functions

came to their aid. National Socialism brought the most comprehensive counter-selection into flow: one had to be rotten in one's substance and morally cracked to be able to find admission into the ruling class.

Nothing perhaps testifies more strikingly to the mental insanity, the disruption of the moral sense, the confusion of all feelings and instincts, the delusional obsession and the skewed relation to the world of facts which afflicted the bourgeois strata of Germany as a whole, than this puzzling failure of the physiognomic gaze, this consistent blindness to the unambiguous language of the human face. The essence of the Third Reich is reflected in the faces of its rulers; in these flickering gazes, these skulls that are at times fantastic, at times ridiculously miserable, one becomes aware of the time that has come apart at the seams. The film has made it easier for contemporaries to get their "own picture" of the men of the day. It presents the responsible state leaders in the most diverse situations, alone and in groups, at rest and in motion, talking and acting. They are not posed, but caught in the open; all the deeper one looks at the "bottom of the soul" of them.

With cruel forcefulness, the National Socialist counter-selection makes itself known to the public. The "mockery of dirt and fire" is not an exception, not a mistake, not a "miscast," but the ruling type; with uncanny consistency they have all recognized themselves as "their own kind. There is hardly anyone who does not bear the mark of devastating passions, rejected attitudes, animal excesses, characterless inanity on his forehead; everyone is in some sense a "femicide": if he does not have a femicide on his hands, he would have been capable of it or would like to have committed it. This mark of lowliness is the secret sign that alone grants entrance into their ring. Where they are gathered, leader next to leader, paladin next to paladin, minister next to minister, functionary next to functionary, there, as in the ghostly round dance, larva after larva is lined up, a hellspawn that has risen from darkness to daylight. Every kind of rotten existence is represented: as in a panopticon, the gaze encounters criminal horrors, dull blood-drunk faces, demonic masks, the bizarrely distorted excrement and refuse of all human creatures.

Regardless of who seizes the basic public functions of a community: these basic functions want to be fulfilled under all circumstances. There are, however, differences: they can be performed either in a serious, knowledgeable, expedient, superiorly handling, magnificently circumspect manner, or in a frivolous, helpless, dilettante, ignorant, misconceiving, foolishly short-sighted manner. The priest can be a spiritual leader or a sectarian priest, the weapon bearer can be a protector of a holy cause or a murderous beast, the judge can be a servant of justice or a mercenary of power, the administrative official can be a conscientious trustee of general interests or a harassing scoundrel, the policeman can be a guardian of a lawful order or an agent, an informer, a tool of arbitrariness, an executioner of all freedom, the politician can be a lover of the fine Machiavellian game or a conscienceless gangster. The political man can feel himself to be the organ of an institutional rason, be it that of his rank, of his state, or of his class; a "cause" has him in its power, and if he becomes rich in the process, he becomes so with clean hands; but he can also be a mere robber baron, booty maker, and bag cutter. He can master all things par excellence, because he understands their nature, but he can also be a miserable cranker, who causes harm with curious magic potions, where he has been called to "cure". The National Socialist rulers carry out the social and political groundwork.

The most striking feature of these men is that their overall appearance, the apparent understatement of their figure, the sight they present, the meaning of their countenance, are all in stark 'contradiction to the traditional ethos of the responsible position they hold; they are, for their person and in terms of what they visibly are, in each case the opposite of what they wish to represent. The expression of their corporeality, their essence that shines through it, give the lie to the tendency and the very meaning of the office they hold. This contrast throws a treacherous light on the constitution of the social organism: its vital functions are in disorder, in the disobedience to their organic logic the decay of the whole body announces itself;

Failure

untruthfulness rises from its basic relations which have fallen into confusion/ and the National Socialist rulers are the lie-haze made flesh. In the Horst-Wessel-Lied, the National Socialist hymn, the melody moves into the depth, while the text, "The flag high, the ranks firmly closed," pushes upward; thus all "uplifting programs," all "saving measures and deeds" are only the upward pointing word-making to the real sinking life process of the bourgeois society of Germany. The basic functions of the overall economic organism turn against its continued existence and are its faltering expressions of life. That is why power fell into the hands of men who must abuse it out of the conditions of its nature.

"Men of the people" put the people in chains, while they flatter them and speak after their mouths; "prophets of liberty" lead them into bondage; "apostles of peace" organize war; "socialists" restore capitalism; "idealists" fatten themselves by corruption, and the same who promised bread conjure up famines. The highest men of the state are provocateurs who even set fire to public buildings in order to have excuses to kill innocent people; they celebrate themselves as dragon slayers when they have crushed a weak person who only opposed their weapons and their apparatus of power with his character; they always blame their victims for the crimes they themselves constantly commit. Just as before they seized power they blew up meetings of their political opponents in order to prove that their movement was in need of selfprotection, so now they unleash civil wars in foreign countries in order to convince them that they must intervene there to establish order. They cause disorder everywhere in order to create opportunities to establish themselves as order-makers.

In the physiognomy of the rulers of the Third Reich lies the reflection of the reversal of all conditions, and it becomes visible that the lowest is uppermost and that everywhere goats have been turned into gardeners.

The German youth, its dreams and longings, its love of adventure and its passion for questions, its purity and its ardor, its inexhaustibility and unconditionality find the "Richtmann" in a puffed-up and bloated bon vivant, a eunuch-like fatty who has made it his life's vocation to remain the eternal Hitler boy. The figure of Baldur von Schiradis is certainly a program: this is how the Third Reich thinks its youth, so harmless and so hackneyed, so lust-boyishly docile and so Byzantine-smoothed. But Schirath is surely already a symptom: if this youth, in which the vice of homosexuality is rampant, had not already rotted in the brand, it would have shaken him off, despite the Führer principle.

As little as Schirach is a German boy, so little is Darrés a German peasant. Darrés is a salon farmer, as there are salon Tyroleans; he does not cultivate the Scholle, but merely romanticizes it, and sees the essence of the farmer in the fact that he wears his old costume and dances folk dances. He has taken the blood and soil mysticism in lease and demands for himself the civil right in the Germanic prehistory, because he is a longskull with Nordic normal dimensions. Behind his "beautiful" face there is only emptiness, vanity and arrogance. In these features there is nothing of the heaviness and unfathomability of the earth, but only the lickedness of the mystery-less asphalt. Darrés is the monopoly capitalist syndic to whom the "agricultural department" has been entrusted; the vehicle he coaches ends in the capitalist serfdom of the peasant. He does not lead the village, but villainizes it; he evokes the peasant traditions in order to spoil the peasant future. The law of inheritance is not a lifeline, but a curb. The peasant leader Darrés symbolizes that the German peasant has already lost his safe orientation in the capitalist area and has fallen into the ominous clutches of false prophets.

It is a strange connection that Darrés Nordic blood, soil and race mysticism is shared and supported by the SS and its leader Himmler. The National Socialist renewed Scholle moves into the neighborhood of the Secret State Police. Darrés peasant romanticism and Himmler's police romanticism grow on the same Nordic manure; Darrés regulates agriculture like a policeman and Himmler scythes down upright men like a peasant scythes down his ears of corn. Himmler, the supreme police general, is a man without order instincts; he

Bucks were made gardeners

wants to purge the German people of all non-Nordic blood components by sterilizations and indulges in Bartholomew's Night fantasies. His face is inconsistent: below his eyebrows lurks a marten, above their spint a stuffy senior teacher. A marten plunges into the bloodlust, and the head teacher contributes insane ideologies.

A head, in whose mien no less bloodthirst smolders, is Hess, the deputy of the Führer. He looks like a man who walks over corpses, and his singing-pathetic tone of voice increases even more the distrust which he actually wants to appease with it. He brings into the surroundings of the head of state the atmosphere of Levantine criminal dens.

Ley is not the worker, but a work-shy dirty soul, and Rosenberg not the philosopher, but a crazy chicken, who raised a big cluck for a small grain. Goebbels would like to be considered the mouthpiece of the German spirit; he is a miseducated bastard who, with impunity and cynicism, engages in the bloodiest antics with German plumpness. Never, perhaps, has the Nordic delusion been abused to more pert mischief than when this miserable dwarf praised the happiness of the good race in front of highly trained, physically well-bred SS men.

Frick, the Minister of the Interior, who, with the expert administrative routine at his disposal, scatters the sand of the old fighters into every nook and cranny of the bureaucratic machinery, has the look of a pedantic monomaniac; Streicher, the guardian of German blood purity, grunts the pig out of every corner of his mouth, and Lutze does not stride out like an army commander commanding revolutionary armies, he pushes himself around like a commissar traveling in brown pants.

One can go through the signal statements of the National Socialist ruling class, the ministers and Gauleiter, the Obergruppenführer and police presidents, the Reichswalter and Reichskommissare man by man: hardly does one now and then encounter a truly human face.

The full extent of the lowly demonic that haunts the faces of all these "paladins" is once again condensed in two figures: in the Führer's best man, Goering, and in Hitler himself.

Göring belongs to those torturously driven people who are so common among the National Socialist rulers; Rohm had been such a one, Schirach, Blomberg strike into their kind, and Hitler himself is one of them. They display a consciousness of strong masculinity, of heroic power, but their forms dissolve into the blurred, into the feminine relaxed; in their masculine self-reflection a need for self-affirmation of their masculinity is satisfied; they are not simply men presenting themselves, but ostentatiously underlining themselves as "guys". In an almost somewhat feminine way, they occupy themselves endlessly with what constitutes the right man: as if they longed for the "true man," as a woman does. They puff themselves up in their masculinity, as if they didn't feel quite sure of it.

Goering has taken on the role of the berserker, the man of action, the man who can do everything, for whom nothing is impossible, who cleans out every Augean stable, on whom the Führer may burden the most difficult tasks. He does everything: he arranges fires and murders, builds the air fleet, gets raw materials from every hiding place, organizes the German misery, lets the little children come to him at Christmas. He has an enormous apparatus of power and uses it without inhibitions; he is not subject to any control and does not save any money. Of course, in this way he "puts something down". Although he is not a strong man, he behaves like one; at the decisive moment the morphine injection is at hand. Since it does not matter to him to beat the whole state machinery around the ears of an opponent, one must fear him. One must be prepared for everything with him: whoever advises him never knows whether he will be showered with favor or led away as an enemy of the state. What keeps him with Hitler is that he takes care of the business of industrial and military reaction. If the reaction were tired of Hitler, Goering would not hesitate to throw his

Führer out the door and take over his succession. This Landsknecht would have become nothing without Hitler; if he depended on himself, he would run away from every danger, as he did once before in 1923: now, of course, he still wants to get higher. He wants to be an idol, brought to his knees before himself; his pomp and luxury, his titles and offices, his uniforms and decorations, his buildings and projects, his Neronian extravagance are to give him the splendor with which he wants to dazzle the masses.

The power he wields has swept up into the colossal all the desert that lay hidden within him. Thus he has become more than just the German parvenu, made obnoxious by his booming braggadocio; he is not only crude and clunky, but also evil. He can be seen in gatherings where, with his pulpy body and hulking skull, he seems like a mythical creature, an antediluvian beast that has emerged from the mire and that turns every heart to ice. The large, deeply recessed mouth opens and closes like a trap into which the unsuspecting fall. Through the play of facial expressions, one now discovers the treacherous gaze of the witch who lures children to herself in order to devour them, then suddenly a hideous reptile that paralyzes the victims it wants to devour with its unsteady lurking gaze. Goering is not a radiant Germanic hero, he is a massive poisonous newt, who with the rehearsed sweetish eye-blink of Treudeutsche Biedersinn courts the trust he does not deserve.

The supreme lord of these ghastly hosts is Hitler. He claims to be the German par excellence, and the German people do not feel how they sully themselves by acknowledging this claim. He is neither Norde, nor Germane at all. Hans von Gruber already pointed out years ago "the spoiled racial image of this Dinaric-Balkanese halfbreed". The man whose picture hangs in countless German homes, from whom millions of German women "wish for a child," shows the physiognomy of a pimp. He is "Volk" only in the sense of "mob," as one encounters him in the "Tal" or the "Platzl," two locales of the Munich underworld. What makes him a pimp is that he nourishes his political existence by instructing the people devoted to him to wallow in the filth of self-abandonment and self-exaltation. After the failure of Brüning, Papen and Schleicher, the man from this milieu was the last bourgeois card. When Hitler realized that he had become the only hope of the German bourgeoisie, he really did not want to leave it any other hope; with brutal-boxing naiveté he knocked out anyone who wanted to be anything besides him; if he was already champion, then he wanted to be it exclusively. To the extent that the German bourgeoisie defected to Hitler, it accepted Hitler's horizon, his world view, his political doctrine of salvation, his dubious instincts, his ordinary mind, his crude methods; it sank to the level of his limited narrowness and lowliness. Hitler cannot imagine any other world than his own: that should be obligatory for the whole people. "Since he has been at the helm, springtime hope has been passing through the German lands": that is what German bourgeois society has come to, that it strolls through history on the lead of a vagabond.

German idealism had once risen to that boldness of Fichte that "the world is my deed". The free, spiritually great, cosmopolitan bourgeois self-consciousness felt in itself tremendous forces to proceed to the creation of its world, the bourgeois world. Fichte's idiom of the world was the bourgeois, who no longer accepted any order except that which he himself wanted to establish. The feudal past was relegated to the unreal, since only what was appropriate for the bourgeois ego could be real. In the meantime, this "world ego" has spent itself, it has become impotent. The absolute, overflowing, fruitful, magnificent solipsism of the bourgeois early days dried up into a no less absolute, but limited, envy-swollen and hostile to life. The bourgeois world-ego of these days thinks, feels and acts out of Hitler's puny brain-shell: it no longer creates a richness of reality, but impoverishes existence by thwarting the great things that would like to be done, it does not permit with heroic intolerance that what is necessary should happen. What remained of Fichte's idealism was Hitler's propaganda, for which the only real thing is not great deeds but advertising effects.

Since Hitler is nothing in himself, he makes himself something through the effects he produces; he is pure public existence. When he is alone for himself, he knows nothing to do with himself and, in order to kill

Hitler is pure public existence

boredom, sits down in his home cinema. He believes in himself no more than others believe in him. That is why he is intolerant of unbelievers: they leave him nothing. He is haunted by the urge to take everything quickly to the extreme and to push it to the extreme; he feels that he does not have time to let things mature organically. Everything is just being plucked out of the ground, sucked out of the fingernails: the armament, the colossal buildings, the war economy industry arise in a few years. The bang effects are supposed to help over all embarrassments for a certain period of time. In economics, technology, politics, diplomacy, the record achievements increase; one feels, as it were, permanently on the arena of the Olympic Games. One wants to take the cake everywhere, to be the world champion, to prove oneself the master of every situation like an omnipresent Karl May. Since the ground on which one operates is fragile, one takes a risk in every enterprise; but like an adventurer one throws oneself into every danger; one whistles so hopelessly from the last hole that nothing remains but to be a foolhardy gambler.

Only a nature that has no relationship to the objective and that is consequently "unbound," to which things dissolve into propagandistic scenery, into props for the duping of the masses, which, when the propaganda trick ignites, happily rubs its hands together without asking what burns in the process, only such a nature, conscienceless in the deepest sense, can bring a sixty million people into play as mere extras of a pathetic stage play: the stage play is called "The Third Reich. Because it is in no respect a personality, a human being at rest in itself, it is able to deliver human dignity and freedom to the mockery of every peeping Tom, every whippersnapper. Hitler, who is used to prostitute himself before the masses he deceives, does not know what dignity is. Because he has only himself in mind, he sees only his own kind all around him. He is exclusively the prophet of himself; there has hardly ever been a people that has elevated a figure of such tyrannical and intolerant emptiness and devaluation to its throne.

All lowly human modes of existence suddenly rank at the top; they are the troop befitting Hitler.

The police agent, the cheat, the liar, the defraudant, the impostor, the safecracker, the heavy boy, the swindler, the adventurer, the quack, the sectarian, the kitschy athlete of the mind, the actor, the gossip, the torturer, the belly-slitter: this is the personage of the Third Reich, which bourgeois society has called to its aid from its darkest holes; this is the menagerie of wild animals, to which it throws the anti-fascist witnesses of faith to the maw.

This world ghosts in Hitler's swollen face, on his ordinary forehead, along his simple-minded nose, above his mean mouth, in his devious look, around that brazen strand of hair, in those wrinkles which are engraved on his features like mysterious signs of a criminal alphabet. In his physiognomy there is no light, free, noble, wide, large form, no humorous rogue is hidden in it. His cheeks are like a dirty wall, over which shadows of violent deeds, conspiracies, treacheries, unworthiness, assassinations against the humane have scurried, to which the traces of dark thoughts, evil plans and of blood, of very much blood, stick.

This is the Lord of the German citizens! He is the truth and the life of the German bourgeois society, a secularized Messiah, on whom the spirits and the fronts divide. He is the evil one, to whom the German bourgeoisie has dedicated its soul and who, supported by his subservient spirits and subdevils, keeps it in possession of the golden treasures of this world until the midnight hour strikes, when it must inevitably go to hell.

Discussion by no means deserves the ass-kicking it is now given; the face of whole epochs is determined by how they stand for discussion. He who discusses must feel very secure and very well grounded; he must trust his cause unshakably. He gives the opponent equal chances, he tolerates being questioned, he lets it depend on whether he is not refuted in the premises and foundations of his existence. Every discussion is a risk; if one deceives oneself about one's reserves, the hold one has, one's power of resistance, one runs the risk of having to give oneself up. One does not seek one's protection by not letting anyone touch one's sidi hcran; one exposes oneself to every attack. One does not hide behind any sanctuary that is taboo, behind any absoluteness that is no longer worth talking about. One does not forbid any thrust and relies on one's art to parry it. The discussion demands magnificence of attitude: one is so superior that one allows the opponent any lunge; one is so rich that one can live and let live at the same time.

Donoso Cortés called the bourgeoisie the "debating class"; he did it out of the bitterness of the repressed feudal lord. Nor does the bourgeoisie discuss any longer than it derives advantage from it; it has the same relation to discussion as it has to liberalism and humanitarianism. As long as it was in the attack and ascendancy, as long as all things fell into its lap, it could unhesitatingly enter into any dispute with the feudal cause; it always had the better, more convincing and more valid reasons. In the discussion the bourgeois cause was so much carried by the circumstances and tendencies of the time that the feudal opponent always drew the short straw. The discussion with feudalism necessarily always ended well for the bourgeois; it shook and disintegrated the feudal state. It is understandable that the feudal man hated the discussion, into which he was drawn to his disadvantage and against his will, as fiercely as the bourgeois, to whom the victories flowed, loved it passionately.

Since the middle of the 19th century the discussion between the bourgeois and the worker has been opened. From decade to decade it became clearer that in this dispute the worker came into the forefront; he had the consequence of all bourgeois principles of freedom and humanity for himself. The bourgeois succumbed: he got fed up with the discussion to the extent that the worker's enthusiasm for discussion increased. Suddenly the discussion was discredited; it was made contemptible, because for the citizen there were no more honors to be won in it. The citizen pushed discussion aside as haughtily as the feudal Donoso Cortés had once done.

Italian fascism gave an example of how to end the discussion: a rough fist had to be provided, which immediately hit anyone on the mouth who wanted to open it for discussion.

German National Socialism shared the conviction of the "survivability of the discussion": it showed early on that it too knew how to stop the discussion. It happened in its assemblies: no opponent was to have his say there anymore; they were raised as rallies in which no objection and no interjection was allowed. The educators for the new assembly style were soon on their feet.

Since the summer of 1920, a National Socialist group of organizers was formed. They prevented dissenters from speaking, shouted them down, beat hecklers, threw them out of the hall. The engineer Ballerstedt, a Bavarian separatist leader, was removed from the hall in a Munich National Socialist meeting "by the outraged company, not without first having been given a little lesson". These stewards invaded other people's meetings in order to break them up; led by Hitler himself, they disrupted a meeting of the same Ballerstedt and conjured up wild tumults and brawls there. On January 4, 1921, Hitler announced in the Kindlkeller in Munich "that in the future the National Socialist movement in Munich will ruthlessly preventby force if necessary - all events and lectures that are likely to have a disintegrating effect on our already sick comrades of the people." The stewards practiced the terror that Hitler had ordered; where they appeared, there was noise and brawling. Their hooliganism was so rampant that even the "Folkisher Beobachter"

could not initially keep up with so much crudeness; on June 20, 1920, it complained about the troublemakers who "give some of our meetings such an unattractive image by shouting down the opponents." In their presence any kind of discussion ceased; with chair legs they put an end to any intellectual skirmish.

From these orderlies was recruited the Turn- und Sportabteilung, which was founded on August 3, 1921; two months later the Turn- und Sportabteilung was transformed into the Sturmabteilung, the SA. The SA is already attuned to undertakings that extend beyond the perimeter of the meeting halls; it is the first formation of the Civil War army toward which one is heading. "The SA is not only," Hitler decreed in the new force's first ordinance sheet, "to be an instrument for the protection of the movement, but it is to be first and foremost the preparatory school for the coming struggle for freedom within." In a circular dated September 17, 1922, the SA is characterized as a force "which not only unconditionally secures the gatherings of its own party against any foreign act of violence, but which also puts the movement in a position to take offensive action itself at any time." The command of this civil war force was soon entrusted to the hands of Göring. "The fresh, carefree bravado of this proven German aviation officer," Rohm reports in his memoirs, "always enlivened the already combative mood in our circle. He brought a fresh streak to the SA under his command, even if he perhaps increased their self-confidence too much."

The SA instigated skirmishes and civil war skirmishes everywhere. They attacked Jews in the streets at night and beat them up. They perfected their combat training in mass meetings. The warrior's dream is battle: here he gets his turn, here he is in his element. Initially, only National Socialist gatherings had been purged of a few hecklers; all too easy were these victories. It was a step forward when, at the end of 1921, Marxists attempted the demolition of a National Socialist meeting in the Hofbräuhaus. Until then, the opponent had been passive, although he was constantly challenged: now, at last, he turned himself in. Now it was possible to compete with him, to give him a real battle in the hall. The "Hall Battle at the Hofbräuhaus" became legendary. Between mugs of beer, the 'consecration of the fighter' was obtained; between beer benches, tactical and strategic operations were carried out; Nordic heroism shone in the tobacco haze; the large assembly cannons developed into true marshals of the hall battles. The glory of the front-line fighter faded; the hall-battle fighter rose to higher honors.

Now that the enemy was fighting back and even counterattacking here and there, it was possible to attack roughly; now one had the opportunity to draw the knife as well. If one scuffled now, one was also allowed to stab. The first blood flowed and finally brought the right seriousness into the matter.

The roar of each hall battle reached the broadest public. The National Socialist movement could no longer be ignored. If one attracted the attention of the police and aroused the ire of the press, then one had at the same time accomplished a fine piece of propaganda. Whom every head tempted to parry him with his fist; whom every thoughtful man tempted to trip him up, whom the knife sat loose: opportunities beckoned. Plier came into his own; here "men of action" were needed. Here, there was no "chatter" and "talk"; here, there was no hesitation; here, they "killed right away". Ehrhardt's henchmen from the O. C. *, who had already killed countless workers and had many a femicide on their conscience, poured in. Here they were allowed to continue "killing" as they were used to from the "Captain". Every knife-man, every adventurer who liked to go over corpses, every dangerous brother to whom other people's lives were cheap, every man with murderous instincts and sadistic desires was in the right place in the SA. The more brutal one was, the more respected one was; here one was allowed to be a beast to one's heart's content. Bestiality was ennobled as the most fiery expression of national passion.

The SA gradually swelled into entire regiments. After 1923, however, it suffered a serious setback; but from 1926 onward it reformed and grew into brigades, divisions, and entire army corps. The civil war army marched up.

Marshals of the hall battles

Before even the SA could be rebuilt, since 1923 small, absolutely reliable, Hitler-loyal departments were formed, the Schutzstaffeln, the SS. "The party leadership proceeds from the principle that a small band of the best and most determined is far more valuable than a large mass of fellow travelers without decisiveness. The guidelines for the formation of Schutzstaffeln are therefore very strictly drawn, and the numerical strength of the Schutzstaffeln is limited to the narrowest possible extent." The SS continued to exist as an elite, as a "guard," when later the advertising drum was again beaten to replenish the SA from the "great mass of fellow travelers."

After the SA had been brought up to brigade, division, even army corps strength, the assembly halls were no longer sufficient as battlefields; it needed a more expansive terrain in order to be able to unfold warlike. The SA took to the streets; it undertook propaganda marches into the suburbs; it showed its uniform in the Communist quarters. The brown shirt, the brown pants, the brown monkey cap showed the color of the desert sand. These uniforms fell by cut, like color from German tradition like German landscape. Like bought African foreign legionnaires, like foreign conquerors, these columns appeared in the German environment. Their purpose was to challenge the workers or, if they evaded, to humiliate them. The workers certainly understood the meaning of the marches. Clashes broke out; "street battles" developed; here, in the open air, one could also reach for the revolver: deaths fell by the wayside. The civil war, which the SA started, thus found the battlefield most suitable for it.

Discussion was now banished from all public life; the SA put an end to every peaceful dispute between strata of the people and classes. Wherever it perceived the enemy, it immediately sought to get into a scuffle with him.

In the dead, the National Socialist movement got its martyrs; it had the human blood from which it could stir its myth. Hooligans, who were overtaken by the fate that was natural for them, were garlanded with laurels.

At the same time, however, it became clear from what abysses of human inferiority the movement and its storm detachments were fed. The SA incited, challenged, attacked. As long as the workers did not pay back in kind, the SA men still got off lightly. But when the working class bet one and a half on one rogue, the SA not only suffered losses; it was also frequently put to flight. Any kind of chivalry and honesty was alien to it. They accused: they had been attacked; they had only defended themselves; the victims, who were carried away from the pavement, were the fault of the "murderousness of the communists". The SA men had the not very dignified ambition to pass before the scrutinizing eye as "innocent lambs" after every dicey affair. They always put the blame on the "commune"; never had they wanted to muddy the waters or even really muddy them. With the pitiful voluptuousness of the Kanaille, they cut off the honor of those attacked; whoever stood up to them was denounced by them as a peacebreaker. Their thirst for revenge was fueled; they made plans to bloodily repay anyone who stood up to them. They dreamed of the "Night of the Long Knives.

The SA was a counter-selection; it attracted all those existences in which something was rotten and rotten. In the SA, all criminal tendencies were given free rein. The SA barracks were dens of vice; work-shy people, drunkards, bankrupts, homosexuals, ruffians, manslayers hatched here those sinister plots with the help of which Germany was to be "awakened". In the streets their "Juda verrecke" resounded; their standing phrases were as depraved and vulgar as their songs were: one was immediately clear as to what kind of wretch one was dealing with. Just because they were gallows birds themselves, they threatened every opponent with death on the gallows. In the quality of the brown piles, in which the sons of the German bourgeoisie were drilled to the style of the underworld, the dismal human decline of this bourgeoisie was represented; because the bourgeois cause could no longer be helped by decent means, "Germany's renewal" also had to be laid out like a great bandit's coup.

From the student Horst Wessel came the song worthy of the SA and later of the Third Reich. "Camrades who shot Red Front and reaction, march in spirit in our ranks." This is the poetry of the criminal cellar. "The flag high before dead who still live": the German language was to be raped no less than the political opponent became. Horst Wessel was a dubious figure; he did not end up as a political martyr, but as a victim of jealousy: a pimp shot him because he had enticed the prostitute away from him. He paid with his young life for having sunk to the milieu of the "hoodlums". By incorporating this Horst Wessel into its Valhalla, the Third Reich made it clear what kind of deeds it expected from its model heroes.

The National Socialist cartoonist Schweizer-Mjölnir created the ideal type of the German Sturmabteilungsmann. The advertising SA man has no forehead; he needs no thinking organ, since he blindly obeys the command of his leader. As little brain he has, as much chin he has; here condenses the masculine energy with which he throws himself on every opponent, on which one he is sicced. The cheeks are angularly chiseled: the spasm that is his element marks his face. The skull is strictly Nordic: the SA man claims to be the flower of the "Nordic being"; he claims it at the risk of exposing the Nordic being for all time as the plague of humanity. The arms are bent and the fists are clenched: whoever does not get out of the way as quickly as possible will get his punch in the pit of the stomach or his blow in the "face". The "tightened" posture leaves no doubt that the SA man is constantly in shape for any scuffle; he is ready at any moment for it to "go off". His pants are tucked into enormous boots: he is marching. The SA always marches "with a quietly firm step". It takes life with the soles of its boots; it never thinks, it never discusses, it always only treads firmly. It gets rid of every problem, not by racking its brains over it, but by giving the one who raises it a kick in the butt with the heel of its boot. She does not measure herself against the spirit, but she tramples on it. In his three noble overall appearance, this ideal type self-confidently and aggressively displays the pride in his crudeness, lowliness, narrow-mindedness, his manic fanaticism; he feels born to greatness because it is so easy for him to go for everyone's throat.

Even before the seizure of power, Hitler, as the supreme Sturmabteilungführer, as "Osaf," confirmed that he was serious about the obligations imposed on him by the ideal type of SA man.

In the Upper Silesian village of Potempa, the worker Pietrzuch, who was both a communist and a Pole, had incurred the hatred of a neighboring SA man. The SA man dinged himself a pack of cronies to wipe out Pietrzuch; he entertained them, got them drunk until one of the henchmen poured a full glass of beer over his back to baptize the deed, developed before them the plan of a murderous enterprise, and fixed the place, time, and circumstances of the attack. At the appointed hour, the horde entered Pietrzuch's house; he was in bed and asleep. Five SA heroes attacked the defenseless man and raged against him in front of his mother until he died. The official coroner's report read: "The corpse showed a total of 29 wounds, especially severe ones on the neck. The carotid artery was completely torn. The larynx had a large hole (kick). The death was caused by suffocation, because the blood flowing from the carotid artery entered the lungs through the larynx. Apart from these injuries, Pietrzuch is bruised all over his body. He received severe blows over the head with a blunt axe or a stick and other wounds that look as if the tip of a billiard cue had been thrust into his face."

The SA murderers were caught and brought before the court in Bytom in the fall of 1932. There they behaved pathetically and cowardly. They denied, shifted the blame to absent persons, excused themselves with drunkenness. The facts of the case and the legal situation required the death sentences to atone for the animalistic deed, which were also pronounced.

However, the time was already so morally confused that this judgment aroused excitement among the bourgeois masses and met with bitter rejection. The bourgeois masses already felt themselves in the midst of the civil war that justifies every atrocity; as a communist, Pietrzuch was outlawed.

At that moment Hitler spoke up. In a public rally, he lashed out at the people against Reich Chancellor Papen: "Herr von Papen, I now know your bloody objectivity." Although the verdict was not yet fully spoken, he solemnly declared: "Herr von Papen has thus inscribed his name in German history with the blood of national fighters." To the murder boys he sent a telegram: "My comrades! In view of this most monstrous judgment of blood, I feel bound to you in unlimited loyalty."

At the last hour, so to speak, before Hitler made his decisive effort to usurp the power of the Reich, he showed his real face. The German bourgeoisie was not to buy a pig in a poke: it was to be shown drastically to whom it wanted to entrust the management of its political affairs. The excuse that it had been deceived and had been mistaken in the man who demanded unlimited violence was to be cut off for all time. Everyone should know that this coming dictator was a leader of murderous gangs, that his henchmen would spread themselves as "national fighters" and that he himself would stage the bloody attacks and acts of terror he was up to as "Germany's renewal".

This self-disclosure by Hitler was not without shock for the upper middle classes, however; the cold horror ran down their spines, even if only in a flash; Papen and Schleicher considered whether they should not get rid of this conspirator of murderers. But they refrained from doing so. Potempa's murderers were pardoned. Potempa anticipated the style in which the "national revolution" took place; as one of its own and its head at the same time, Hitler felt himself bound in "unlimited loyalty" to those who stomped defenseless workers with boot heels. Potempa was the prologue of the Third Reich.

XVII. Terror

At the beginning of the National Socialist movement there is a political trash book, at the entrance of the Third Reich a knave play. Hitler had uncovered in his "Kampf" the "very correct principle" that "in the size of the lie there is always a certain factor of being believed"; the great masses would "with the primitive simplicity of their minds" fall victim to a big lie more easily than to a small one. They could not "believe in the possibility of such a tremendous impudence of the most infamous distortion even in others."

The crime of the Reichstag fire had been raised with such cynical impudence that the bourgeois masses, defying both the compelling logic of common sense and clear sight, listened to the guilty government and fell for the National Socialist "impudence of the most infamous distortion." Luther had sanctified the authorities; the German bourgeoisie resisted letting sit on its authorities a diabolical outrage which it had even witnessed itself; it breathed a sigh of relief when the authorities pulled out all the stops to shift the blame to forces which for other reasons had long since been repugnant and odious to it. Hitler had counted on this; so the coup succeeded. Now he had the occasion for those constitutional breaches with which he had long been pregnant. The Stahlhelm and the German nationalists could no longer insist on those remaining safeguards for themselves from which they had not yet wanted to let go, and the Reich President Hindenburg had formal pretexts with which he could appease his conscience if he now perjured himself against the constitution which he had solemnly sworn to uphold. Neither in 1932 nor at the beginning of 1933 was there a German state emergency that could have justified lawlessness and constitutional violations by the authorities; only the Reichstag fire had to fill the bourgeoisie with a sense

of catastrophe and thus convince it that a state emergency had occurred. Whoever still wanted to defend the Weimar constitution appeared as a henchman of "communist criminals": this was a brilliantly twisted banditry.

Thousands of German citizens kept silent against their better knowledge: since then there is no more bourgeois man of honor in Germany par excellence, since then the whole German bourgeoisie is in the same pot with the National Socialist riffraff. When Hitler, in the Reichstag on March 23, 1933, had the forehead to blame the "Marxist heresy" for the "decay of the nation," he found no opposition. He dared to say: "Starting from the liberalism of the last century, this development finds its end by natural law in communist chaos. The mobilization of the most primitive instincts leads to a connection between the views of a political idea and the actions of real criminals. Beginning with looting, arson, railroad bombings, assassinations, and so on, everything receives its moral sanction in the communist idea." At that time, when Hitler, the supreme leader of the Reichstag arsonists, cut off the honor of decent people, the German people lay on the scales on which it was decided what was left in them: whoever agreed with Hitler or covered for him sank to garbage.

Hitler made the class-conscious worker outlawed. Already on the day after the Reichstag fire the decree for the "protection of people and state" appeared, namely "for the defense against communist acts of violence endangering the state". The fundamental rights of the German people were suspended; the inviolability of the person, the inviolability of the home, the secrecy of correspondence, the freedom of the press, of association and of assembly were abolished; the protection of property was eliminated for "enemies of the state". The death penalty was introduced for high treason, poisoning, arson, explosion, flooding, damage to railroad installations, poisoning dangerous to the public; the applicable penalties were increased for assassinations of persons in authority, serious sedition, serious breach of the peace, and deprivation of liberty. The decree provided the National Socialist government with terrible weapons against the political opponent; the SA gangs set out to use these weapons. The dream of the "Night of the Long Knives" was realized: the brown men murdered, maltreated, looted; no proletarian home was safe from them. The "awakening nation" practiced savage terror; with the arbitrary deprivation of freedom of the proletarian opponent they celebrated their "regained freedom". The "Law for the Redress of the Distress of the People and the State" completely broke the neck of the Weimar Constitution; it placed Hitler's dictatorship on a "legal" basis. It was submitted to the newly elected Reichstag for approval by a two-thirds majority. The Communists were not admitted to the Reichstag; their presence would have given the Center Party the opportunity to "tip the scales" and impose conditions on the National Socialists. Before the vote, Hitler had crowds of people and SA squads directed to Königsplatz in front of the Kroll Opera House to shout threateningly, "We demand the Enabling Act"; this was intended to frighten recalcitrant bourgeois deputies. With the adoption of the law, the people's representation castrated itself: the parties committed suicide *

With an unparalleled hatred of annihilation Hitler pounced on all opponents who in any sense made the handiwork of the big-bourgeois restoration more difficult. The organizations from which resistance could be expected were smashed; the people were dissolved into a shapeless mass of atoms. The Communist Party had already voluntarily vacated the battlefield; the Social Democratic Party had tried to obtain clemency through good behavior; it was of little use: it, too, was wiped away. The civil service was purged of confidence men from the working class. Jewry, which was closely connected with the cause of the spirit, of liberalism, of humanity, of Marxism, and whose economic positions promised rich booty, received the first terrible blows. The intelligentsia was humiliated; it was taught that it had to eat out of the hand of the brutal power if it did not want to starve. The Christian churches were taught that their doctrines of love and social welfare were corroding bourgeois class morality. The bourgeoisie opened the class war by

The parties commit suicide

defaming the idea of class struggle. The free press was eradicated, every free word was punished with brutalities. Opposition per se was stamped as a crime; whoever made a critical reflection was an agitator, whoever was found with his own kind was a conspirator. The anti-bourgeois attitude was depravity worthy of punishment, the anti-bourgeois ideals were delusions. Anything that wanted to escape the bourgeois template was knocked out in a class-struggle manner. The Secret State Police set up hunting squads that seized anyone suspected of anti-bourgeois tendencies. The bourgeois class power was so tremendously strengthened that no counter-power could dare to express itself; it was boundless and could no longer be prevented by anything from destroying morally and physically what did not bow to it.

Chivalry never ranks high in civil wars. The upper class rages mercilessly among the social rebels; it knows no extenuating circumstances for the fact that the foundations of its social rule have been shaken. It wants to make an example, and in doing so it commits every cruelty in order to paralyze the lower class through terror; the intimidation of the lower class is to suffice to nip in the bud any new inclinations to revolt in the future. It takes terrible revenge; its social standard of living is so comfortable and pleasant for it that it is without mercy against anyone who offends against it. It destroys ice-coldly and relentlessly; the white terror freezes the blood everywhere. The lower class is never cruel with premeditation; it practices violence only when it is provoked and challenged to do so: it acts in the heat of the moment. But it has always been part of the civil war propaganda of the upper class that the lower class is slandered as a bloodthirsty beast; when the upper class wades in blood, it carries out a "deserved judgment"; when the lower class beats a provocateur to the ground, it commits a "bloody atrocity. But those who expose the inhumanities of the upper class tell "atrocity tales.

* The Social Democratic Reichstag faction considered whether to emigrate to Prague altogether and from there denounce Hitler as a war arsonist in a proclamation, or whether to effectively destroy Hitler's foreign policy credit from Berlin. On the morning of the day on which the Enabling Act was to be presented to the Reichstag, the Reich Minister of the Interior, Dr. Frick, sent for former Reichstag President Paul Lobe. Frick said that Germany stood between war and peace. If the Social Democrats did anything, the Reich government would not hesitate to intervene in the strongest possible way, and human lives could not be spared. This was a massive threat, which did not remain without effect on the Social Democratic members of the Reichstag. Nevertheless, they persisted in their decision to reject the Enabling Act. This determination was made easier for them by the fact that Hitler did not expect the Social Democrats to agree to the Enabling Act.

The bourgeois parties failed completely. The former row chancellor Dr. Brüning was looking for accomplices. He came to the Social Democratic faction and tried to persuade them to accept the Enabling Act as well. At the decisive meeting, Dr. Kaas spoke for the Center, Ritter von Lex for the Bavarian People's Party, Dr. Maier for the State Party, and Deputy Simpfendörfer for the People's Service. According to the minutes of the meeting, Ritter von Lex, Dr. Maier and Simpfendörfer were the most vocal in their approval speeches. They even showed enthusiasm despite some weak objections. Apart from these personalities, the yes-men also included Dr. Bolz (Stuttgart), Dr. Dessauer, Imbusch, Jakob Kaiser, Mrs. Teush, Dr. Wirth and Dr. Horlacher. The men who had been elected by the people to defend the cause of democracy did not even think of risking their lives. They renounced to prove themselves as intrepid and brave democratic characters in a historically significant moment and to fall as martyrs of democracy. By agreeing to the Enabling Act, they legalized Hitler's dictatorship; they mowed themselves down to become accomplices of Hitler, who was a state rioter. (1946)

When, after the National Socialist coup d'état, numerous workers had been arbitrarily arrested and horribly maltreated, the General Federation of German Trade Unions, the leading organization of the free trade unions, had these victims of the white terror conscientiously interrogated by a lawyer, insofar as they had been restored to freedom and were still capable of their senses. The protocols were handed over to the Reich Ministry of the Interior and to Reich President Hindenburg; the bland trade union men lived under the illusion that they would earn the gratitude of the new authorities if they drew their attention to the shameful abuses of their organs and supporters.

However, these bestialities were not abuses; they were a system. The Reich Minister of the Interior, Frick, replied to the unions: the protocols submitted were components of the atrocity propaganda directed against National Socialist Germany; threateningly, he forbade the continuation of this kind of atrocity propaganda. One saw men at the top of power who belonged to the scum; they were now polluting the German air from above. The truth was indeed gruesome: women were beaten to death in SA barracks, men were put into sacks and drowned; sadistic excesses raged on the defenseless in state prisons. Those who escaped from hell had to sign a pledge never to speak of their experiences; they had to confirm that the treatment they had received had given them no cause for complaint: thus the tortured had to dishonor themselves. State organs behaved like blackmailers. Because the truth was atrocious, their voice was stifled; the establishment of facts was an act hostile to the state. The National Socialist state was based on lies; it had to shun the light. Whoever called things by their name was necessarily an accuser; the Third Reich could not bear to have its account of guilt, which lined up countless murders alongside the Reichstag fire, exposed.

The atrocities of the "national uprising" were all the more reprehensible because they were committed against people who had renounced all resistance.

The heat of the battle forgave much; however, the battle had not actually taken place. The class-conscious workers had voluntarily disarmed themselves; the "old fighters" performed their heroic deeds on people from whom they were no longer threatened. It was not a battle, but a slaughter; they did not test their bravery, but slaughtered. They were victors over an opponent who had not entered the battle at all. They were not "soldiers" but torturers and executioners.

In this civil war it was not difficult to bring in prisoners; they were locked up in the concentration camps. The establishment of the concentration camps was the admission that one was fighting a civil war; in the concentration camp one cooled one's chin on the prisoners of the civil war. These prisoners were seized not on the battlefield, but in their homes and beds; it did not take courage, but only a warrant from the Secret State Police to get hold of them. It was demonstrated that there were German people who were outside the law and were outlaws. On the basis of sheer "arbitrariness, thousands were deprived of their liberty; without proof of guilt, without court judgment, they were torn from their families and their professions. There was no legal remedy against the orders of the Secret State Police; those who were targeted by the police had no salvation. For the police brain and the police boot, all legal bonds fell away; they were allowed to crush without hesitation anyone who had become a nuisance and a stumbling block to them.

The concentration camp was not an institution in which, for reasons of expediency, suspects were temporarily put out of action, but otherwise respected as comrades of the people and bearers of a conviction. The national "inventors" and "liberators" were without nobility; whom they had between their fists, they also let feel it. It was revealed what mud, what brute cruelty, what barbaric instincts rested at the bottom of the German soul.

The concentration camps

Communists who had put SA men to flight somewhere before 1933 were arrested; in the concentration camp, the same SA men were eager to take revenge on their former enemies as guards. The prisoners were tortured to the point of bloodshed, humiliated and degraded to the limit of what a human being can endure. The prisoners' human pride was desecrated; they were the objects on which all the wild urges of the National Socialist gangster could feast. As late as the fall of 1935, the prisoners of the Esterwegen camp, where the pacifist Ossietzky was imprisoned, were forbidden to leave their barracks in an upright posture; like slaves, they had to move about at a run, with their arms crossed over their chests and their heads bowed to the ground. They had to perform the most senseless tasks; at the fastest pace they carted gravel from one corner of a square to the other in an eternal cycle. If they tired, they were shot at. Immature boys carried out corporal punishment on men for whom the deprivation of liberty was in itself a grave, inexcusable violation of their personal dignity. Clergymen were ordered to form churches out of human excrement, and the former Social Democratic member of the Reichstag, Dr. Leber, was even forced to eat human excrement. Dehumanized SA and SS men performed their needs on prisoners. The Jew Heilmann was trained to bark like a dog one time and to call like a cuckoo the other. Intelligent prisoners could no longer hope to leave the camp alive; their memoirs were feared. They were ruined physically, mentally and spiritually, here driven to lay hands on themselves, there, like Erich Mühsam, calmly murdered.

With disgusting hypocrisy, however, the authorities declared to the public "that the concentration camps were established for the purpose of instilling in the inmates the qualities necessary for the spirit of the new age. They were to be accustomed to industriousness and to an understanding of the primacy of the common good. The establishment of the concentration camps was thus clearly an "educational institution" of the highest order.

The wickedness of the Reichstag arson and the horror of the concentration camps determine the moral quality of the Third Reich. Every ruling state has its cloaca; the difference, however, is whether the cloaca is the inevitable tribute to the elemental chaotic or whether it directly represents the state. The cloaca of the Third Reich is at the same time its representation; the whole of Germany is a concentration camp in which the creatures of the big bourgeoisie indulge their sadistic lust at the expense of the working class. Since the Reichstag arson, crime has been the normal means of National Socialist governmental art; the civil war situation that exists gives welcome pretexts for flouting all human, moral and legal barriers.

XVIII. The persecution of the Jews

The emancipated Jew was the most obvious manifestation of the essence of the 19th century: so liberal and humane had this era been that it had even liberated the Jew and given him equal rights. "The emancipation of the Jews is not the work of Jews," wrote Kurt Tucholsky to Arnold Zweig shortly before his suicide. "This liberation was given to the Jews by the French Revolution, that is, by non-Jews - they did not fight for it." It happened because the bourgeois-capitalist spirit felt its deep agreement with the Jewish one and because the Jew, due to his life situation, was the born ally where the flag of liberalism and humanity was unfurled. In so far as the Jewry was oppressed as a minority in its ghetto, the appeal to human feelings and liberal impulses was natural to it; where one thought humanly and was liberal-minded, it had to win, the fetters under which it groaned were loosened. It had to be fundamentally liberal and humane, because it was itself

The Jew must return to the ghetto 100 in urgent need of sparing. The more the principles of liberalism and humanity permeated a community, the more completely the barriers erected around minorities fell, the more thoroughly the ghetto was cleared away. When the bourgeois wanted to finish off the aristocrat with the weapons of liberalism and humanity, the Jew, as their specialist, naturally came into play. It could not be otherwise than that now also the change of circumstances again touched deeply on the Jewish fate. If, as Goebbels once said, the year 1789 was erased from history, then the Jew had to return to the ghetto. The Third Reich, in the general course of the intellectual fastidiousness and primitivization of its intellectual household, cultivated the most drastic sense; the things it wanted to bring home had to be written down with a broomstick. The expulsion of the Jew into the ghetto was consequently brought up as a process of memorable emphasis and crudest fisticuffs. The ghetto became a desert to which the Jew was sent back as a scapegoat, when the burgher wanted to cleanse himself of his liberal and humane "stain". The way in which the bourgeois dealt with the Jew was to show how thoroughly he was willing to depart from liberalism and humanitarianism.

Judaism could not so light-heartedly consign the liberal and humane principles, after they had fulfilled their duty against the corporative society, to the junk room as the bourgeoisie did when they had become the armament of the ' class-conscious working class; it would have sinned against the necessities imposed upon it by its minority existence, it would have handed itself over with bound hands to the 'host people in the midst of which it lived. But the loyalty which it maintained to these principles was also fatal; insofar as these now benefited the proletariat, the Jew became its ally and got into the line of class struggle, whether he wanted to or not.

The Jewish intellect helped the proletariat to become aware of its situation. He knew the capitalist order and legality like no one else; he initiated the industrial workers into its deepest secrets. Thus the worker got behind the sore points and weak spots of capitalist society. His outrageous impulses no longer exploded blindly into the aimless, but took aim at the lifeblood of the capitalist order. The Jew had given eyes to the revolutionary hatred of the industrial worker. Marxism had made the capitalist order vulnerable by exposing it. It had needed the worker to bow before it as an objective, eternal, unassailable destiny in order to continue; but now the worker saw that it was mortal and that he could help hasten the disintegration of its rule. The bourgeoisie abhorred Marxism not because it was "Jewish" but because it handed over to the worker the keys to the overthrow of the capitalist order. The Jew was the "high traitor" of capitalist society. It was a bourgeois attempt at salvation: to make Marxist doctrine so objectionable that the rebellious masses were ashamed to use it. It was done by branding it as a Jewish-swearing tool against the "noble Aryan blood." Marxism was based on a sober, coldly and mercilessly penetrating scientific analysis which capitalism had to fear; capitalism protected itself by discrediting this dangerous analysis as a wickedly dirty speculation with which the Jew wanted to poison the honest straight sense of the Aryan man. If Marxism was regarded as a poisonous spawn of Jewish racial hatred, then it no longer had any effect; one was a Jew mercenary if one got to the heart of the capitalist order with the Marxist-scientific dissecting knife. The more drastically the "Jewish depravity" was brought to light, the less tempting it became to appear as a Jewish mercenary. The bourgeois found himself in the favorable position of being able to render the class-conscious worker without rights, not because he was a social revolutionary, but because he was a "Jew. Julius Streicher, with his ritual murder stories in the "Stürmer," thus provided the logs for the woodpile on which the revolutionary Marxists would one day be burned. The Jew seemed all the more suitable as a whipping boy, since he had been guilty of obvious ingratitude and had disappointed his bourgeois "benefactors. The bourgeoisie had given the Jew liberation; it could take it away from him again after he refused to go along with the turn to anti-liberalism and inhumanity. The Jew was not a renegade - this was rather the bourgeois - but he was treated as a renegade.

The Jew responsible for Marxism

The estates' forms of rule, which finally found their "emergency constitution", their "dictatorial" condensation in absolutism, had weighed on the Jew as well as on the citizen. Liberalism and humanity had been principles of decomposition and dissolution in the face of the coercion of this rule. The bourgeois society had wanted to develop autonomously without being violated at every turn in its vital needs by feudalestate interventions of force; therefore it had been anxious to determine the limits of the state. These boundaries were to be drawn very narrowly so that society could be the cook in its own kitchen. The doctrine of society had become more important than political science; it was the doctrine of the state and theology in one. Sociology was the theory of that society which had soaked itself like a sponge with the spirit of liberalism and humanity. Here the Jew was in his element, who, as the predestined victim, is the born hereditary enemy of authoritarian rule and for whom, for this reason, the self-assurance of the political power drive of the Volk, in whose power he is, must be a thorn in his side. In his fascist-national-socialist epoch, in which no feudal-estate authority is to be broken, but proletarian insurrectionists are to be subdued, the citizen wants to rule as the aristocrats have shown him. Since the political apparatus now belongs to him, it no longer needs to adhere to any measure. It is to intervene everywhere and without delay wherever proletarian resistance makes itself felt. The society in which the proletarian class movement had spread must no longer be left to itself; it must be brought into shape anew by measures of political violence. The Jew stood alone with his sociology: suddenly, after the bourgeois had lost all interest in it, it was a purely Jewish science, although it had been brought to its highest flowering by the non-Jew Max Weber. The Jew was to atone for not wanting to drop the social self-importance which the bourgeois had abandoned since the emancipation movement of the worker had been able to spread under its umbrella.

The Third Reich's rude recourse to the feudal world of forms was not an escape from bourgeois-capitalist society. After the latter had suffered shipwreck with all the forms of life it had produced itself, it thought to rehabilitate itself with the help of the forms of life of the estate society, without, of course, wanting to accept its rural substance in the process. The bourgeois-capitalist, money-economical spirit threw on the coat of the estate-feudal society; the German citizen wanted to refloat himself with his historical-medieval traditions. The bourgeois-economic-capitalist economic order remained fundamentally untouched, but it disguised itself in such a medieval way that it seemed to make sense, if it now denounced the hitherto existing community to the Jew.

As long as feudal landlordism had relied on the immobility of property in land, bourgeoisie and Jewry had agreed to mobilize all values; there should no longer be a thing that did not have its price and could not be bought. Now the bourgeoisie, having taken possession of the whole world, wants to make the economic basis of its political rule firm and inviolable on the model of the estates order; property, all too mobile, allied to no master, aroused in the have-not the desire to expropriate it; the change of ownership takes place too easily not to be taken lightly. The more bound property is, the greater the respect for it. Respect for it, however, is to be taught again to the working class. Industrial capital tended to be tied to the soil; the peasant hereditary farm suggested that a counterpart should be created in the industrial hereditary farm. The vagabond financial capital lost all prestige, the foreign exchange, stock exchange and banking laws, tied the net in which it was caught: but to catch it was to ruin the Jew. Through the ruin of Jewish finance capital, immobile industrial capital got rid of a rival against whom it had always had to be hellishly on its guard; furthermore, it no longer needed to be so strained on the qui vive.

However, the bourgeoisie did have a guilty conscience toward its former companion. He knew too much not to have seen through the bourgeois transformation as a mere capitalist hypocrisy. Idealism is lost on the depressed who understands his situation correctly. The idealism of the stepchildren of life is the stupidity from which, as long as they commit it, the ruling snappers draw rich tributes. The Jew had too much spirit, he was not stupid enough to be an idealist. In the ghetto he had learned skepticism; he had first learned that

disguise 102 in the clash with the strong the weak, the "Jew," would always be hanged. The cry for authority that the bourgeois suddenly uttered, the new national faith, the gospel of the bourgeois common good did not mislead the Jew for a moment. What was grandly called moral and national renewal was a backdrop behind which the clique of economic leaders was busily at work repairing the machinery of capitalist exploitation and reconstructing it to suit the times: the Jew knew what to make of national socialism and folkish idealism. Since he felt that the logic of these ideologies must turn against him, it was natural that he should continue to sting the star for the working class, as Marx had done earlier. The bourgeois had to fear the Jewish enlightenment and skepticism here all the more, because it was a truly sleazy comedy, in which he wanted to grab his audience as a folkish hero, in order to be able to fool them all the more thoroughly afterwards. The Jew was as disturbing as a clear-sighted spectator as he was sinister as an interpreter of the ambiguous play; he had to be beaten over the head so radically that he lost sight and hearing, and that he also abandoned the pretension of bringing his wisdom to the proletarian man.

In order to intimidate Jewry completely, the bourgeois upper class gave way to the crude petty-bourgeois emotional anti-Semitism of bread envy.

Ever since the economically generous Jew outstripped the middle class after the fall of the guild food security, hatred of Jews has been at home in the petty-bourgeois classes. For the craftsman, the grocer, the humble merchant, the "department store" became the vicious beast that sucked the marrow out of their bones. In the upwardly mobile sons of the middle class, anti-Semitism won new gladiators when they encountered Jewish competitors in the intellectual professions as well; they found that the bread that the Jewish doctors, lawyers, journalists and artists ate was actually theirs. The bourgeois upper class was able to fish in the doldrums, while the petty bourgeoisie became absorbed in the Jews and vented all its anticapitalist rage on them.

What made this anti-Semitism so monstrously massive was that it could base itself on the foreignness and otherness of Jewish blood; the props that it repeatedly brought out to draw new impetus from their view were the crooked nose, the bulging lips, the black curly hair, the flat foot. The Jew's physical image was chalked up to spitefulness, as if it were culpable to look the way he did. His blood ostracized the Jew, and for murky reasons nourished the cruel judgment that to be a Jew was a ghastly curse, approved by the very depths of the universe. The Third Reich stamped the Jew as a leper to be banished from the German community. He contaminated the creation by his mere existence. Whoever mixed with him defiled pure blood; the union with him was "racial defilement". Racial defilement violated cosmic laws just as the crucifixion of the Son of God violated the heavenly plan of salvation. The National Socialist felt against the "racial defilers" the same metaphysical-profound abhorrence that the medieval man displayed against the Christ-slayer. The "racial diande" was committed in sexual intercourse: thus it came to a head as a "sexual crime". The "racial desecrator" was a sex criminal, and the mask was torn off the Jew's face when his bedtime secrets were aired. The more foul-smelling and dirty women's stories one hung on the Jew's coattails, the more meritoriously one proved oneself to be an Aryan park keeper of the order of creation.

The purpose of the human ascent from barbarism is to restrain the chaotic-instinctive and to form the material-primordial. In so far as one may make a distinction between culture and civilization, culture designates the visibly becoming tense process of this restraining and forming, civilization, however, the completed state, the inventory of all its results. The chaotic-instinctive and material-primordial is an eternal given, is the material which is taken into culture, which is civilized; it brings itself with the inexhaustibility of its primordial energies and primordial dynamics again and again to the fore. Culture and civilization are the epitome of all efforts to regulate the eruptions of these conditions, to deny them to break loose wildly like nature. It is more convenient to give in to them than to keep them in check. Culture and civilization are achievements; the breakthrough of the elemental reveals that one is no longer capable of them. As soon as

Petty bourgeois sentimental anti-Semitism

the elements are no longer conquered, they dominate the field; the primordial formlessness triumphs where the form-giving power has become lame and tired.

The blood is an elementary, it is a fact, not a principle.

Where one "raises" it to the principle, one may be sure that the will to sink has its hand in the game. The blood is declared to be the "principle" if one does not want to admit openly that one has capitulated before his blood instincts. The eye has turned to the depth, to the chaotic, and no longer looks into the high and free; for this reason it has no more horizons and discovers everywhere it hits the chaotic element of blood. Blood thus becomes the sole key to all mysteries, the sole cause of all effects. However much culture and civilization are rooted in blood, it is their very essence to grow up above this primordial ground, to strive away from it into the ether. The blossoms of culture and civilization are all the finer, more delicate, more precious, the less they smell of the blood of their origin, the more broadly they span all tribes, differences of peoples and races, the more universally valid they are. The "natural" is just not, as the Aryan prophets of faith proclaim it, the "highest and best"; the "four-thousand-year stream of faith" of the Aryan blood is a very turbulent bubbling water. If one lets the blood run free, it washes away the structures of culture and civilization. The primal, instinctive, the immediate and naked is always the animal raw; culture and civilization cover it. The exposure of the physiological-elemental realm of life is always shameless. "How much mendacity and swamp does it take to raise questions of race in today's mongrel Europe?" remarks Nietzsche, setting up the maxim: "Deal with no one who has a share in the mendacious racial swindle." When the coverings and disguises are washed away, the beast emerges. Culture and civilization calm and pacify the chaotic primordial ground; if one stirs it up, then the barbaric elemental grudges, the green envy and the bloodthirsty hatred immediately break out with a hiss.

The racial hatred which the Third Reich unleashes against the Jew sets in motion all the reserves of hatred which the bourgeoisie would like to use in its class struggle against the working classes.

The man who most obsessively whipped up the anti-Semitic racial hatred was Julius Streicher, the Gauleiter of Nuremberg. This former elementary school teacher was a dangerous sexual pathologist who had already been convicted of moral offenses. He presented the gruesome picture of a mean, low nature seized by an overstretched political ambition. A man who made no secret of the filth of his soul, he exercised authority. He was a half-crazy man, who was drawn to all conceivable crankiness: he sheltered the quack doctors, he favored the scientific swindle, which the "discoverer of the carcinogen", a doctor, put into the world, he looked after the occult manure, with which the spirit seers wanted to stimulate the reform of mankind from the field. The resentment of the elementary school teacher against the noble society and the academically educated class still worked in him; he loved to humiliate them. It could happen that in the eyes of the public he gave preference to a scrubwoman over a president of the government or put an entrepreneur behind the least of his workers: of course, it did not happen because he wanted to honor the scrubwoman or the worker, but only because he intended to do evil to the president of the government and the entrepreneur. He wanted to enjoy his power as the darling of the common people: he courted popular popularity when he spoke vulgarly and scurrilously. Since he possessed power, he was completely unhinged; he, too, resembled the foolish figures that declining Rome had seen in such abundance, whether on the throne or near it. As a high party and state official, he would invade a prisoner's cell and beat the defenseless man with a riding whip; then he would go and boast in a public meeting of this abuse of power, which was as contemptible as it was cowardly. He was a man of orgies and feasting, a man who reeked of all vices while celebrating Germanic purity.

The "Jewish racial shame" was for him the treasure trove from which he satisfied his pornographic needs. The "Stürmer" was written by pigs, and one became a pig, if one was not already, by reading it. It poisoned

The blood is declared the principle 104 the imagination of men, women, boys and girls, it accustomed children to the atmosphere and jargon of the brothel. The "Stürmer," which enjoyed Hitler's special patronage, betrayed by its huge circulation that it was part of being a good National Socialist to be as addicted to the folkish delusion as to indulge in sexual filth. At the tenderest age, Hitler boys and Hitler girls were accustomed to probe the Jewish bedroom secrets through the keyhole with burning eyes.

For years, week after week, Streicher filled his paper with the perverse slurry that was his personal lifeblood. He stirred up racial hatred with the sexual scandal chronicles he served up; his anti-Semitism simplified to the formula that the Jews had to be beaten to death because they loved to distress breed blond virgins. The Jew was denounced as the devil, creeping around to defile the clean Germanic blood, the blood hatred against him was whipped up, the physical disgust against him was nourished. He was branded as the primeval evil and as the primeval filth, so that every German would look upon him only with distaste and become aware of the unbridgeable gulf towards him. Thus the Jewish expulsion into the ghetto was mentally prepared. Whoever went through the school of the "Stürmer" ended up detesting the Jew as a stinking excrement, whom one avoided for "reasons of cleanliness," whom one did not allow to come close to one and whom one by no means placed on one's own level. As soon as the masses got there, it was over everything that, like proletarian-Marxist socialism, collectivism, was coupled with the Jew; this thing was the same filth and festering pus.

Anti-Semitism is, in general terms, the state of mind and soul of a war situation. One fights with an enemy, one stands in the midst of the fight with him. By placing the Jew in monstrous perspectives, by seeing in him not only the decomposer of bourgeois society, the instigator and originator of class hatred, but even the cosmically ostracized destroyer of the world and of mankind, the obsessive rage with which one throws oneself upon him is justified. *

The Jewish policy of the Third Reich was of repulsive wretchedness in its immodesty and unchivalry.

Jews, too, had defended Germany in trenches during the war of 1914 to 1918. Fritz Haber, through his chemical inventions, Rathenau, through the organization of the war economy, had enabled the German people to hold out for four years. Whoever spoke of Jewish species alienation and wanted to draw political consequences from it, had to value such Jewish merits all the higher: that Jews, who were to be robbed of their fatherland, had laid down their lives for this country, was more "heroic" than when "species-own" Germans did it; for the "German-blooded" man it is natural to shed his blood for Germany. No German was allowed to despise the Jew before he had honored his achievements, before he had paid his debts to the latter: otherwise he was a kujon.

Originally, the feeling was not entirely absent that the Jewish front-line fighter had earned the right to equal rights with the "Aryans." He was to be spared in the intellectual professions as well as in the economy. Gradually, however, all concessions of this kind were circumvented: the party organizations, for example, forbade their members to consult Jewish doctors and lawyers, who had in principle still been tolerated in the profession because of their war honors. This was a shabbiness of which the German people will be ashamed for decades to come.

In the fresh momentum of the National Socialist initial successes, Streicher had called for a general boycott of the Jews; the petty-bourgeois masses were already licking their tongues at the booty they expected to gain from this. The echo, however, which resounded above all from England and America, deprived Hitler of courage. He wanted to stand before foreign countries as well as before his masses: a one-day boycott was to indicate what the Third Reich was capable of, without at the same time offering reason to doubt the realpolitik moderation of Germany's new masters. With pitiful feints, the boycott was staged as a "warning" directed against the atrocities of international Jewry. After this scare, Jewry was to be given another

The boycott of the Jews

probationary period; only if it did not improve was the full National Socialist wrath to be unleashed upon it. "In order to give the Jews," said Goebbels, "a longer period to think things over, we will have a boycott break from Saturday evening until ten o'clock on Wednesday. We will wait during the break to see whether during these three days the atrocity incitement will fall silent. If so, we are prepared to return to normal conditions, but if not, then the boycott will be taken up in such a way as to destroy German Jewry." This was how the Third Reich thought of getting out of the loop with the masses who wanted to "wade in the blood of the Jews"; out of fears of foreign countries it was glad to have broken off the boycott, it did not think of repeating it. The Goebbels threat was the unworthy lie of an unscrupulous demagogue. The Jew was not to be massacred in open pogroms, he was to be strangled gradually; as in many other cases, the Third Reich sought to achieve its goal by dilettante vulgarity instead of undisguised violence. On Boycott Day, SA men stood in front of the houses of Jewish businessmen throughout the Reich from early morning until late in the evening; they dishonored themselves while they thought they were humiliating the Jews. In concentration camps, disliked Jews were inhumanly tortured, not infrequently maltreated to death. In Nuremberg, Streicher had about a hundred Jews rounded up in a meadow and forced to throw themselves on the ground and eat grass. As late as 1935, the SA leader of the Ostmark group confirmed to an Obertruppführer in an official letter that he had "occasionally shown himself to be a brave SA man in a brawl with Jews in the Augustinerkeller in Anhaltstraße. In spite of the superior strength of the pack of Jews, he did not retreat, but dealt out powerful blows, as was customary with the SA man of the fighting days."

Step by step, the Jewish legislation drove the Jewish minority into a corner. Mixed marriages were allowed to be contested by the Aryan part; it was implied that only the Third Reich had spread the insight into the importance of the racial question. Jews were forbidden to use the public baths. It was to enter into the general feeling that the Jew was spreading a pestilential air about him. Racial segregation was ordered for the public schools. The cultural professions were closed to Jews; research departments were established to detect and eradicate Jewish influence in the various sciences. Intercourse with Jews, shopping in Jewish stores were brought into disrepute. Jewish merchants were taken into protective custody because their behavior caused the population to take action against them. Jewish employees became unprotected, their well-acquired rights no longer applied; no Aryan could be expected to work with them. The Nuremberg Laws placed "racial defilement" under threat of imprisonment. The Jew who had sexual intercourse with an Aryan woman defiled German blood; the Aryan who "slept with a Jewess" violated German honor. Even conditional intent was punishable, and it was presumed if the partner's first name or surname or mere appearance could have suggested that he was of a different race. If a Jew embraced a Jewish woman in the belief that he loved an Aryan, he was liable to the judge; the attempt on the unfit object was already punished.

The courts made themselves the tools of anti-Semitic mob instincts. Tax-privileged charitable status was denied in the case of Jewish foundations; in the Third Reich, a purpose that was in itself arguably charitable and did not do justice to the racial point of view could not enjoy preferential tax treatment. The inheritance of a Jew by an Aryan was declared immoral and void. A sixty-year-old Jew was convicted of offenses against the law for the protection of German blood because an "Aryan" homeless and unemployed girl, to whom he had given shelter out of charity, had occasionally helped with housework despite his express prohibition: it was not enough merely to forbid, he really should have seen to it that the girl did not lift a finger in his household. If a Jew sought justice, it was usually denied him; if he was accused, the paragraphs were contorted until a reason for condemnation was found.*

Of the 530,000 Jews who had lived in Germany in 1933, over 100,000 had fled abroad or emigrated. The emigrants were deprived of enormous assets: if they remained in the hell of the Third Reich, they were trampled underfoot, but if they turned their backs on Germany, they were robbed.

The Third Reich had opened hostilities against Judaism; but in the style of that usual Jesuitism, first to set fire and then to accuse the injured party of the crime, it acted as a persecuted innocent as soon as it encountered the counteraction. It howled at the Jewish atrocity after it had provoked the Jewish war against itself, it raged because the Jews it had mauled openly showed their wounds to the world. "Our boycott," Goebbels said, "was only an act of self-defense."

World Jewry was defending liberalism, the humanity of European bourgeois parliamentary democracy, against the Third Reich. In the end, the National Socialist way out was also viable for the bourgeoisie of the Western countries, but it was not for Jewry. That is why world Jewry was in the front line of the liberaldemocratic battle lines, why it was not stingy with martyrs. It wanted to bring down the Third Reich before it had made its mark in the Western democracies. It organized the global economic isolation of the Third Reich, the economic and credit freeze, in order to drive it into collapse. It dodged Hitler's assaults with elasticity, reckoned with time and set out to slowly bleed the Third Reich to death. No matter how pompously it acted, it was to die of exhaustion.

David Frankfurter, who carried out the bloody deed in Davos, was the first Jew to compare like with like. Frankfurter was not yet a part: for that Gustloff was a highly inferior subject, much too little a Geßler. But it did not put the men of the Third Reich in a mild fear when they saw that also a Jew knows how to handle a revolver: their courage vanishes the moment they are shot at.

When the Third Reich began to measure itself against world Jewry, it raised the latter again to the height of a world power; it brought the Jew into reputation that the whole dynamic of the Third Reich turned against him. He gained from the fact that he had become the terror of every National Socialist; he swelled to the dimensions of the Third Reich when it chose him as its opponent. In the Third Reich, one Jew outweighed almost 120 "Aryans" who feared him as the "general cause" of their misfortune, and even on a world scalethere are about 13 million Jews in all - he still held the balance to the four Hitler Germans who wanted to scare him with their "Juda, verrecke". By elevating the Jew to its No. 1 enemy, the Third Reich inflated him to the status of a world figure. The Jew embodied the thesis against which the Third Reich became the antithesis. The Jewish spirit was offered a chessboard by the "Nordic blood", the Jewish horizon was offered the inherent crowing, the Jewish liberality was offered the dungeon death of the Gestapo, the Jewish humanity was offered the bestiality of the SA and SS men. The Third Reich answered every superior move of Jewry with a clumsy counter-move, which was an extortionate ultimatum. The Third Reich was that Germany which had become so modest that it wanted only to be an anti-Judea. As soon as it lost sight of the Jew it was persecuting, it no longer knew how to interpret itself, it could only define itself from the Jew. It did the Jew perhaps the highest honor that had ever been bestowed upon him by existing as the state-organized 'contradiction against him.

* The threat of Goebbels to exterminate the Jews was terribly realized since Kristallnacht 1938. The Star of David made the Jews recognizable to the public at first sight; it was not long before the extermination of the Jews was then systematically organized and set in motion. The Jews were shot, hanged and burned in gas ovens in Germany, as in all the territories occupied by Germany; the whole German people, who stood by quietly, were sullied by these atrocities. (1946)

A frenzy of "Gleichschaltung" gripped the entire nation. All public and private institutions, organizations and corporations, all economic enterprises and cultural societies, all associations and clubs "switched themselves into line". The purpose of the "Gleichschaltung" was the establishment of the "Volksgemeinschaft". The "Volksgemeinschaft" is not a social state of order of a higher kind. Nowhere are appearances more deceptive than they are here. Nowhere does a pretentiously formulated "idea" conceal a more unworthy reality than it does here; waste products, refuse from all social strata, dark, declassed, and failed trash from everywhere meet on the same ground of a vengeful despair that is ready for every adventure and every crime, because it has only _to win and absolutely nothing more to lose. In the same social cesspool they learn, whether they were formerly officers, civil servants, businessmen, artisans, merchants, clerks, or laborers, that they are all rotters of the same disreputable nature. The most gruesome act of their revenge is now to raise the community of their lost existence to the obligatory norm: in the "Volksgemeinschaft" the whole people is to be brought down to the formlessly chaotic mode of existence of human scum. Sense and content of the people's community is only the solidarity of the lumpenproletarian rabble.

Some subordinate organs or employees suddenly pulled out of their pockets their National Socialist membership book, which they had hitherto carefully concealed, and trumped with it; sometimes it was the porter who surprisingly turned out to be the confidant of the national revolution and rose overnight to the position of the most important and first man. The membership book and the brown shirt were credentials by which the holders considered themselves authorized to grab the reins and take charge. The will of the voters, which had hitherto found expression in the composition of parliament, no longer counted for anything; the personalities of their trust cleared the field. The mouthpiece of the people's will was now only the man with the membership book or the brown shirt. The most deserving and proven experts, who had put their life's work into a work, were shamefully and carelessly thrown aside and replaced by party people whose only merit was that they had stuck party badges on time. Thus, universities received new rectors, associations new chairmen, cooperatives, chambers of commerce, cultural societies, foundations, supervisory boards new presidents, professional associations new heads, workforces new chairmen.

Soon after the March elections of 1933, the tendencies broke through to break the back of the two henchmen of National Socialism, the German National People's Party and the Stahlhelm; they no longer impressed Hitler and were to make an end with themselves.

The upper middle classes had gone over to Hitler; Helfferich's spirit had entered the National Socialist movement. In the German National People's Party, only the instinct for self-preservation of an empty organizational shell was still alive. Hugenberg wandered helplessly in it as a ghost; his party friends abandoned him one after the other in order to still sidier good places in the Third Reich. At last he was the reactionary bogeyman in the face of which every old militant felt himself to be a social revolutionary. Hitler, however, could talk his way out of it: whoever was burdened with this minister of economics probably had to step short. Thus Hitler got over the first agitated 'weeks; when later Hugenberg resigned, the "socialist" expectations of the old fighters received new nourishment: a pillar of reaction had fallen.

The German National People's Party dissolved itself; the guard of black-white-red monarchism made do with Hitler and his swastika. It had once proudly wanted to provide the political "officers": now it begged shamefully not to be completely forgotten in the distribution of booty. With the German National People's Party, the Stahlhelm also disappeared; it had shared its "ideals," it now also shared its fate. The leader of the federation, Seldte, took the same step with an agility that took his followers' breath away. The Stahlhelm had been the federation of front-line soldiers; it cannot be said that these "front-line pigs" had known how to go down with honor. Seldte was a flat, meaningless man, of that average which needs to hold nothing because it promises nothing; he stands out by nothing, not by spirit, not by temperament, not by character. His ambition was in glaring, screaming disproportion to his small stature. When the front-line fighters chose this meager man as their leader, they let it be known that they did not think much of themselves in terms of domestic politics. They had nothing to say about domestic politics of their own accord, so their leader was allowed to be as vacuous as Seldte was. The Stahlhelm had not developed any political weight of its own; therefore, it necessarily sailed in the wake of other political powers. Seldte was the man who attached himself easily wherever he was taken. The Stahlhelm was a warriors' association that rested on former laurels; its members wanted to tell of former deeds, not accomplish new ones. Seldte was a good narrator; in his three-volume war book, he recounts his "heroic past" in the style of Skatbrüder. He was smoothly overrun by Hitler; the élan of the war veterans had to capitulate before the élan of the hall battle veterans. The front-line fighters cowered when the hall and street fighters mouthed off. They betrayed loyal comrades in the most disgraceful way; it was frightening how quickly they found their way in the bad air of National Socialist gangsterism. Seldte acted on Düsterberg like a worthless knave; when the anti-Semitic Radaubrüder wanted to put away the former second federal chairman and presidential candidate of the Stahlhelm, Seldte gave him the final push that made him disappear. The dissatisfied front fighters grumbled, but did not lift a finger.

On July 30, 1935, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, General Fritsch, wrote in a letter to Seldte: "Today the Army is no longer interested in retaining the Stahlhelm as one of the representations of the front-line soldiers of the old army. I do not in any way deny the great merits and the great importance which the work of the Stahlhelm has had in the past. With the reintroduction of compulsory military service and the structure of the army determined by the Fuehrer, that has been achieved for which the Stahlhelm also fought in the past in tenacious, often self-sacrificing work. National Socialism brought the final victory. Whether rightly or wrongly, the fact is that today the Stahlhelm is often regarded as being in opposition to the National Socialist state. But the greatest unity and unity of the people, quite apart from anything else, is what matters to us with regard to national defense."

The Stahlhelm bowed to this logic. After National Socialism had "made it" and even the army had pinned the party's "emblem" on its uniform, it resigned; it took off its gray tunic and slipped into the brown garb. The front-line fighters, who in the meantime had remembered their obligations against j'enes bourgeois property, against which they had become almost indifferent in the trenches, had allowed themselves to be convinced that the weight of the world war did not reach that of the "national revolution"; thus they submerged without resistance in the great brown mass.

Everywhere the pressure for "Gleichschaltung" was felt; millions of people abandoned their previous convictions and received from the party the prescribed plate of opinions. They themselves were tired of every peculiarity; they hurried to become a National Socialist standardized human being. Just as the French aristocracy sacrificed its privileges on the altar of the fatherland on the famous fourth night of August 1789, so now the bourgeois masses offered their personal characteristics and their special individuality to the leader of the "national uprising. Everyone wanted to be like everyone else, because he suddenly stood out alarmingly if he was different. The German subject appeared, who unquestioningly puts on any

DNVP and Stahlhelm join forces

uniform when the authorities snap at him; never is the boot too small, which the Kammersergeant hands him: his foot is too big. After the National Socialist authorities had made a sharp move, the German subject was in line in no time; no one wanted to provoke a thunderstorm over himself by breaking the rules. The equalization of the National Socialist "revolution" was the German version of that equality which had been proclaimed by the French Revolution in 1789. Equality was equality of law; so there was no place left for feudal privileges. The Gleichschaltung is the unification of points of view, the uniformity of attitudes.

It is like a technical process: one presses a lever, and the whole human stock is simplified to a unitary model; nobody deviates from the neighbor. Man behaves like a mechanical element, which is aligned and brought into shape from the outside. Up to the daily greeting, he reacts according to a pattern decreed by the authorities: whoever sees his neighbor at day and night time, stretches his arm in the air and shouts "Heil Hitler".

The point at which the lever is applied, which makes man equal, is the question of existence. If the man is not right, he gets no more fodder. More undisguised has never been pressed on the stomach to squeeze out the right attitude. The civil servant trembled for salary and provision; the "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service" brought down the solid tower of his "well-acquired rights." If he displayed more personal idiosyncrasy than was in keeping with the times, the disfavored chorus of the pettybourgeois crowd crowed how he could justify taking money from "our National Socialist state. Like hungry wolves, "old fighters" who hunted for positions gathered in front of the offices; they lay in wait for any nakedness that an official might show; they ostracized him as soon as the extent of his conformity could be doubted. The National Socialist indignation about Marxist "party book officials" was revealed as pure bread envy; the "restoration of professional civil service" consisted in flooding all offices with National Socialist party book officials. The bureaucratic Gleichsschaltung was a large-scale event of general "Umbonzung". White-collar and blue-collar workers fared no better; they lost their jobs when their Gleichsschaltung zeal disappointed. If a worker refused to obey the orders to march, he was summarily dismissed: as an "enemy of the state," he was not worthy of economic security. The compulsory organization to which the members of the liberal professions, tradesmen, craftsmen, merchants and entrepreneurs were subjected provided them with means of reprimanding them; if they were removed from their "professional chamber," they were deprived of the right to practice their profession; they were unemployed and cast into economic oblivion. The National Socialist worldview drew its persuasive force from the concern for the feeding place; because the National Socialist master had monopolized the breadbasket, everyone sang his song

The Gleichschaltung put people on a new, a "better" track; they converted. Those who were too finely organized to want to admit openly that the common fear of bread had induced them to join the big pile, could save their self-respect by deriving their fall from spiritual and "higher" motives. He could argue that the educational example of the Führer and the educational effect of his writings had won him over to National Socialism. After his National Socialist transformation, he preferred to be a product of education rather than a paragon of cowardice.

The Third Reich took this human weakness into account; "education" was the proposal for goodness it made; one was to accept reason by being taught; thus one escaped the raw kick on the stomach. The Third Reich preferred to educate all the more because the bourgeois masses have always paid homage to the pedagogical passion. In addition to the Contrat social, Rousseau also wrote the "Emile"; Emile, however, was the bourgeois model boy who haunted the whole century. It pleases the citizen to expect success from talking someone down; the appeal to insight is supposed to do wonders. Certainly, National Socialist pedagogy is more primitive than liberal democratic pedagogy was, but the schoolmaster's tools of the trade include the stick. The old fighters also want to be educators; it gives them pleasure to inculcate in

Everyone wants to be like everyone

other minds what has dawned on them as wisdom. Hitler has not only the ambition of the father of the nation, but also the talents of the people's teacher, and every official would like to be both patriarch and schoolmaster as "little Hitler" in his close circle. The Fichtean "educator of mankind" has become a simple, intolerant right-winger who cannot bear that there is still someone who does not join in the Horst Wessel song. Every erring person is to be brought onto the path of National Socialist virtue; if leniency fails, Robespierrean severity completes its work. The Third Reich is a gigantic educational enterprise; the German is educated, not dominated. Not only the school, but every public institution is an educational institution: the party, the SA, the SS, the Hitler Youth, the Labor Service, the Labor Front and Kraft durch Freude, the government and the bureaucracy, the police in particular, the barracks, the penitentiary, the concentration camp. Wherever he moves, at every turn, wherever he acts or is inactive - everywhere the German is educated; he is not to be what he is, but what his National Socialist teacher wants to make of him. His educator is omnipresent; the German of the Third Reich no longer has free rein. He is under constant supervision; in the most private sphere of life, regulations, orders, threats of punishment lead him by the scruff of the neck.

The educational fast-breeding apparatus of the Third Reich is the training camp. Here the Gleichschaltung is systematically pursued and "scientifically" fortified. Lecturers and university lecturers, court and administrative officials, clerks and labor functionaries, working girls and women are imbued with the "spirit of National Socialism" and, through National Socialist retreats, are mentally and character-wise trimmed to the dimensions of the Third Reich. They are immersed in that dull atmosphere in which one loses once and for all the taste for intellectual and political freedom, in which one forgets to ask questions and in which one becomes accustomed to intoxication in every form. There one learns that one gets further with baggage marches than with problems, and that one all too easily slips from any kind of intellectual level into the regions of political and social disrepute. In the training camp one speaks and teaches in a comprehensible way; the most limited head experiences that its horizons are generally binding. The "Midwifery Association of Germany" expressed its gratitude after a "midwifery training camp" that the course had contributed to making an ardent champion of the Third Reich out of every midwife. The honor and pride of the 25,000 midwives, he said, was to serve not the Red or Black Internationals, but the great Mother Germany. "Servants of the German people, recruiters for the tremendous work of building up the new Reich, helpful wives of the Führer Adolf Hitler, we all want to be."

Only the conformist German is the decent German; where there is a lack of conformity, a moral crack is hidden. The Gleichschaltung also makes the character; it is linked to the National Socialist attitude. One is full of character if one thinks, feels, speaks and blindly obeys, as every other National Socialist does, if one bleats with the National Socialist sheep and howls with the National Socialist wolves. If you dance out of line and go your own way, you are a characterless rascal. It has become comfortable and profitable in Germany to have "character": one runs after the leader and is consequently economically promoted in every way. The outsider and loner has basically no character anymore; if he dies of hunger, deservedly only that "lack of character" is atoned for with which he had given the well-meaning and decent a severe annoyance. In the Gleichschaltung Germans naturally the "healthy national feeling" embodies itself.

The Gleichschaltung proceeded with astonishing speed and ease; it required only a slight impulse to have the National Socialist unified German before him en masse. Hitler did not have to create him first; he only had to blow away the dust under which this normal man lay concealed. The diversity and multiformity of the German appearance, the richness of personality and the charm of individuality, the eccentric obstinacy and the magic of the invader had already since 1871 gradually become a mere outward appearance; behind it the submissive subject came to the fore, as he had been formed by the German authoritarian state. He is not an imposing figure; one sees how he has been deformed and bent under the kicks and

Every institution is educational blows of his authorities. Basically, however, for no nation are its great intellectual men so little representative as for the German people; these men regularly fared badly as long as they lived; the people felt them to be foreign and distant. Their achievements were accomplished in spite of this nation of political and intellectual subjects; the people took no part in them; they left the authors to languish. Winckelmann's curses against Prussia, Nietzsche's scorn of the Germans are spoken from the soul of all great men. When this nation flaunts those men, as often as it has to give an account of its value, its quality, it commits deception and fraud. It presents these men as a sample of quality in order to be accepted as precious metal, although it itself is only rotten scrap and burnt out slag.

The Gleichschaltung takes place on the level of the utmost spiritual, human, moral lowliness. With the differentiation one gives away the height which one had climbed. One forces oneself to spiritual fastidiousness; one supports every propaganda swindle and at the same time falls for it; one loses the feeling for the fact that there are things that one simply does not do; one admires banalities when they are only gigantic; one feels good about being redeemed from 'freedom and its heavy obligation; one no longer distinguishes where politics ends and heinous crime begins. National Socialism is like an enormous digestive apparatus: of the most delicious morsels, of the most wondrous fruits of culture, once it has swallowed them, only heaps of brown filth remain. In the process of Gleichschaltung, man is defoliated down to his lowest level; he must have become yeast and dregs if he does not want to remain a foreign body there.

This also determined the overall political style of the Third Reich; the rabble set the tone, from the street to the rallies and measures of the authorities.* Denunciators had great days; the police followed every lead that a braggart had shown. The police chief of Düsseldorf had been annoyed by communist leaflets and stickers. He decreed "that in the future such posters and graffiti would have to be removed by protective custody prisoners of the political persuasion engaged in such evil activity. In order to prevent further incidents, he had also decreed that in case of recurrence, automatic coercive measures would be taken against the prisoners in custody, namely by imposing the harshest possible detention". The "Essener Nationalzeitung" (Essen National Newspaper) published a detailed report with pictures about the treatment of the former Prussian Minister of Welfare, Hirtsiefer. Hirtsiefer was summoned to police headquarters; as he left, SS and SA men gathered around him and hung a sign around his neck, attached to a red cord, bearing the words: "I am the Hungerleider Hirtsiefer." The reason given was that he had complained about not receiving his pay and claimed that he was suffering from hunger. Thus he was eventually led through the streets of the city. This was not an isolated case; countless former high Weimar officials were denounced in this way. The report in the "Schlesische Tageszeitung" about the case of the former chief president of Silesia, Lüdemann, is symptomatic of the spirit of the times.

* In 1928, the lawyer Dr. Edgar Jung had published a book against the Social Democratic government class: "Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen" ("The Rule of the Inferior"); in it he indicated that the "counterselection" was at the helm. Nothing happened to the author; the Social Democrats did not feel affected. On the other hand, later National Socialist "old fighters" were irritated to the core; they went up in arms because Jung had put the phenomenon of "counter-selection" and the ruling inferiors on the agenda in the first place. At the end of June 1934, Jung, as a confidant of Herr von Pa- pen, was murdered by SS men; although he had aimed wrongly, National Socialism had been wounded by his bullet.

It reads:

"After Lüdemann had been subjected to a thorough interrogation in Berlin, he began his journey to Breslau, accompanied by the Breslau officials, where he was taken to the police headquarters. Here he was taken to the office of the police chief, Pg. Heines, where the deputy police chief, Oberregierungsrat Pg. Dr. Patschowsky, officials of the state police and some higher SA leaders were also present. In words that left nothing to be desired in terms of explicitness and clarity, the police chief denounced the criminal activities of Lüdemann, who had bludgeoned the awakening Germany with all the means at his disposal and had always issued the slogan in the fight against Adolf Hitler's freedom movement: 'Beat them where you meet them/ Especially the police chief pointed out Lüdemann's shameless suppression of the Silesian Gaupresse and then declared: 'You, who have harassed the new Germany, are considered the enemy of the German people and will be treated as such. You will be sent to the concentration camp where those who have seduced you are sitting. I hope that you will distribute among all these little Social Democrats the pension that you still receive. In addition, you will once again be led through the High Presidium under the escort of SA men, so that you will remember even better what you have committed, because in the course of time one forgets some things. Step down, prisoner of war Lüdemann!"

Accompanied by ten SA men, Lüdemann left the police headquarters. The deputy police chief, Dr. Patschowsky, followed in a car. The small procession marched along the Schweidnitz moat and then turned into Graupenstraße. No wonder that this march through the busy streets caused considerable sensation. On the Ring and on Schweidnitz Street the masses jammed. Hundreds walked alongside and broke out in imprecations against Lüdemann. In front of the Kaiser Wilhelm Monument, the Standartenkapelle II had taken up position. Thousands had gathered here. Police chief Obergruppenführer Heines commanded 'Halt' and said a few words to the crowd, which then sang the Horst Wessel song. Then they continued through Neue Schweidnitzer Strasse and Sadowastrasse in the direction of Dürrgoy to the concentration camp. When the news of Lüdemann's arrival at the concentration camp became known, the prisoners had to line up in the center aisle of the camp in front of the housing barracks.

Shortly after Lüdemann's arrival, the chief of police, Obergruppenführer Heines, also appeared and addressed the following speech to the prisoners:

On the occasion of the arrival of the man who, as chief president, took most of the measures in Silesia to stop the march of the National Socialist Freedom Movement, I will release ten men from the camp, namely small workers who have been seduced by their bigwigs. Lüdemann has agreed to provide food for the remaining camp inmates with his high pension, which he unfortunately still receives, though not for a long time. Isn't that right, Lüdemann? '

Mr. President, I cannot dispose of the money to the disadvantage of my relatives.

Well, with the thousands you have pocketed! Just a few weeks ago you were feasting at Kempinski in Berlin! We know that too, Lüdemann! Only manual workers come to be laid off. The leaders continue to stay here. How are the rations?"

Good," the people answered as if from one mouth.

Well, and when the lido is finished, I'll let some of you go again! Heil Hitler!"

Lüdemann was now first led to the clothing store, where he received his new clothes and was then directed to his place in the camp. The next day Lüdemann was already helping to shovel at the lido!"

When occasional discontent among the masses caused the government concern, Goebbels organized "people's anger rides." He took aim at a figure of the better society who could be tinkered with. National

Socialist mobs were paraded in front of the house of the witness. Chants shouted invectives. The police did not drive away the offenders, but took the offended into protective custody. Such "actions" against fine people were to keep the masses busy: this street socialism was to appease them by giving them a man of good breeding. Goebbels himself finished off Reichsbankrat Koppen by an "action" of this kind. Koppen had taken advantage of the legal provisions against a querulous tenant. Goebbels did not raise a storm against the law, but against the man who made use of it. Koppen was arrested: the "arbitrariness perpetrated on him testifies to the demagogic depravity of state power. When he was later set free again, not a word could be said about it in public; he was not given satisfaction. The circulars in which the Reichsbank president Schacht covered up for his blameless subordinate were confiscated by Goebbels.

The petty-bourgeois mob resentment against the educated classes was also satisfied. An event in Heidenheim a. B. was of exemplary importance. Near Heidenheim, in the fall of 1933, a number of intellectuals had gathered for a conference. Because they were discussing philosophical questions in an uncontrolled manner, the Third Reich felt alarmed; a police raid rooted them out. The Kreisleiter publicly declared: "The suspicions of the Württemberg political police are fully confirmed. A 'fine' intellectual society, 41 ladies and gentlemen from the most diverse regions of Germany, had come together as spa guests in the castle in question, taking advantage of the hospitality of the owner, in order to educate themselves for a week about their 'high-minded' world view, which is opposed to the present National Socialist conception of the state, through programmatic lectures and discussions, and in this way to work in a secret manner against the national and social people's state built by our leader Adolf Hitler. To our greatest astonishment, there was in this company a high state official with his family who had been well known in Heidenheim for years, just as the clique in general was composed only of high school, court and administrative officials as well as from aristocratic circles."

The concept of voluntariness got a new meaning, had to get it, because the canaille cannot have a relation to freedom. In the face of collections of money and donations, marches, party demands, public elections, there was a difference between those who participated without having previously invoked coercive measures upon themselves and the others who looked the coercive measures partly recklessly, partly courageously in the face. Voluntariness consisted in being allowed to forestall the coercive measures by one's performance; it was based on a probationary period which, if one passed it, saved one from the torment of the thumbscrews. Voluntariness was the decision to set oneself in motion at the right time, before being set in motion by the concentration camp. Many communities decided to brand citizens who refused to subscribe to the expected amount at "voluntary" collections on the community board as saboteurs, to recommend them to boycott, to protest in public meetings; sometimes the "saboteurs" were taken away to protective custody. Membership in the Labor Front was voluntary; but the worker who wanted nothing to do with this dubious "front" was thrown into the street. If one was invited to voluntarily join the National Socialist People's Welfare Organization, one risked position and income if one remained hard-headed. Civil servants were urged to send their children to the soul-destroying Hitler Youth; if they did not understand, they were threatened with dismissal from their jobs.

The petty-bourgeois rabble made revolution as they had always imagined it: they could be properly infamous, vent their rage on the defenseless, occasionally harass unpopular mayors, put themselves in the limelight and boastfully show how unmolested they could be illegally when they were in charge. She straddles as if she has world history to perpetrate at any moment. If she had ousted a salaryman, she had again "cleaned out an Augean stable." If she commented on world events in her foolish or adventurous way, then she threw herself into a pose: she was sure that the whole globe was listening.

The Kanaille was on the most intimate footing with "morality"; she had the moral leased. Everything she did was good; whoever distanced himself from her was a worthless scoundrel. She pushed anyone who did

A fine intellectual

114 not want to be beaten down by her up against the wall with the thunderous and brightly oiled pathos of her moral indignation. Morality is similar to law: without power, little can be done with them; but if one has power, then one can harness both for oneself. After the petty-bourgeois rabble had the power to do so, it annexed all morality without further ado: it dripped with morality, even when its face was still blackened by the soot of the Reichstag fire and its hands were reddened by the blood of the murdered workers.

This scoundrel was never to blame for anything; it was always the weak and helpless opponent who had it in for her. She went to school with the wolf; each time the lamb to be eaten muddied the waters. She boldly denies and denies any infamy, even if she has been caught in it; she does not shy away from meanness, but she is never at a loss for a shoulder on which it can be shifted. So depraved is she, so cowardly is she; in order to wash herself white, she always blackens innocent people.

The National Socialist movement had benefited from the weakness of Weimar democracy; it was able to flourish because the Republic had not denied its liberal principles even to its despisers. The National Socialist movement had been harassed, but never actually persecuted. After his treason, Flitler was treated more lightly than he could hope. When "old fighters" emigrated, they fled because they trembled even before mild and merciful judges; their lives were never at stake, not even their honor: at worst, custodia honesta, fortress imprisonment, was in prospect for them. Their dead and wounded had themselves instigated the clashes in which they had to bleed. The National Socialist movement was close to the life of the Weimar Constitution, but it basically acted as the persecuted Unshuld. Hitler shnaubte spiteful rahe, because even the little resistance he found had cost him Angstshweiß.

Rarely noh had a hohverräterishe movement reached its goal so smoothly; the few hairs they had had to let down were hardly worth mentioning. Nevertheless, on March 23, 1933, in the Reichstag, Reich Chancellor Hitler truthfully hurled the following at the Social Democratic deputy Wels: "We were outlaws as long as you were in power. You talk about persecutions. There are few among us who did not have to pay for your persecutions in prison. There are few among us who have not felt the persecutions from your side in the thousandfold harassment and thousandfold oppression. And apart from us here, I know of hundreds of thousands who have been subjected to a system of persecution that has often been degrading and downright vile. They seem to have completely forgotten that for years the shirts were even torn off because the color was brown ... Since 1918 you have turned against those who have done nothing to you. We control ourselves to turn against those who tormented and tormented us for fourteen years." To the point of weariness, the meritless victors of 1933 repeated the untrue, sentimental lament: what did we have to suffer when we fought for fourteen years! One remembers de Maistre's words: "There is something more intolerable than the executioner, that is the martyr." This National Socialist canaille behaved as executioner and martyr in one breath.

The "national socialist uprising" wanted to make itself credible by its blaring self-adulation as a national miracle. Actors, magicians, sectarians, impostors, liars and swindlers found in this homogenized rabble the audience that was just right for them and that paid rapturous applause to the most daring sleight of hand. Where the rabble meets a higher being, which cannot be brought down to its level by any of its means, it calls for the public prosecutor. It makes laws for everything and anything in order to be able to punish what does not like to be brought into line. A veritable frenzy of legalism broke out; laws invaded spheres in which man had hitherto been protected from the intervention of the authorities by divine, natural or directly human law. It was not enough, for example, that the concentration camp itself was an unspeakable crime of state power against man: even the attempt to escape was still frivolously punished. Next of kin and spouses were to be punishable if they did not denounce each other in certain cases. The

The Kanaille has leased the morals

marriage reform provided for separating marriages by prosecutorial application if the spouses carried on communist propaganda. "It is a morbid trait of our time," Reich Chancellor Hohenlohe wrote in February 1900, "to want to make people virtuous through penal laws." This "morbid trait" had become a plague in the Third Reich. Every opponent was to be relegated to the realm of criminality; respect for the subjective honesty of sentiment was fundamentally denied. Offenders of conviction received loss of honor, and imprisonment was abolished. Although Hitler had been a beneficiary of honor imprisonment, he was imprudent enough to eliminate it; anyone who was recalcitrant against him was to be wiped out from the ranks of men of honor. Whoever was not of the same opinion and belief with him could only be animated by evil and bad will. Men who were politically inconvenient were hunted down by corruption trials; if there was no corruption, it was maliciously engineered by the police and the courts: the authorities supplied propagandistic material and stirred up popular sentiment against the unfortunate who was to be destroyed.

Every unpunished German was to find his judge; this too was an act of Gleichschaltung. The fantasies of the "old fighters" of rogues and murderers were inexhaustible in inventing new crimes: in this way, anyone could be made to stumble criminally whom one wanted to bring down politically.

The Gleichschaltung, an orgasm of masculine wretchedness, took place so quickly because all strata of the people had become citizens in their substance, whipped by social fear and deprived of all reason and attitude. If one uses symbolic language, then National Socialism, through its Gleichschaltung, really accomplished the synthesis of Rome and Potsdam, South and North, of South German Catholic urbanity and North German Protestant barbarism, of Rhenish Jesuitry and East German barracks yard spirit.

XX. Job creation

One can find that Hitler's economic program was calculated to immediately pay the debt of gratitude to the classes that had helped the National Socialist movement to power. All doubts about the basic bourgeoiscapitalist character of the new regime were immediately dispelled. "In principle," Hitler said in his March speech to the Reichstag in 1933, "in principle, the government will pursue the protection of the economic interests of the German people not through the detour of an economic bureaucracy to be organized by the state, but through the strongest encouragement of private initiative and through the recognition of property." Above all, Hitler felt an obligation to the farmers; their "rescue" had to be carried out at all costs. Customs and import policies had to keep the prices of agricultural products at such a level that the German peasant got money in his hands. The consequences were to be accepted: "Restoring farm profitability may be hard on the consumer." The farmer deserved the tribute that now had to be paid to him all the more because he had decided the fate of the German citizen: "Without the counterweight of the German peasantry, the communist madness would already have overrun Germany and thus finally destroyed the German economy. What the economy as a whole, including our export industry, owes to the sound sense of the German peasant cannot be compensated at all by any sacrifice of a business nature."

The middle class, which worshipped Hitler as its messiah, could not be helped with equally lasting sustainability, but it was by no means to be forgotten. "Here," Hitler said on May 1, "a great mighty work will be started this year, a work that will put German buildings, houses, back in order." The stimulation of

construction activity through state subsidies spread mild ointments on the economic wounds of small and medium-sized tradesmen.

The pivotal point of Hitler's economic program was, of course, the creation of jobs, through which millions of unemployed people were brought back into the production process. "Leaving millions of hours of human labor idle," Hitler had said in the March speech, "is a madness and a crime that must lead to the impoverishment of all. No matter what values would have been created by a use of our surplus labor, they would represent indispensable life goods for millions of people who today are wasting away in need and misery." In his May Day speech of 1935, he had proclaimed the second of the viewpoints "which dominate our revolution": "Solving the most serious social problem by returning the army of millions of our pitiable unemployed to production." Immense government orders were to stimulate the economy. "We will strive to realize great public problems this year, first and foremost a giant program that we do not want to leave to posterity, but which we must realize, a program that requires many billions: the program of our new road construction!" Road construction, however, was to be only a beginning. "This will start a series of public works which together will help to push down the unemployment rate more and more."

The unemployed could find themselves rewarded; they had filled Hitler's meetings and had sought shelter in the ranks of the SA; now, it could be said, Hitler was fulfilling his promise and providing them with "work and bread." Their psychological situation was a stroke of luck for Hitler; the privations of their past years, the bitterness of their alms existence had educated the unemployed to modesty; they were crouched; they no longer expected much from life. They had lost their world-revolutionary ambition; they preferred a piece of meat in the pot. If Hitler could only get them a job again, they would have everything they desired. They were sick to death of the Marxism they had experienced in Germany. They had had to go on the dole: that had been the success for them when "the people had won all along the line."

Thus it came about that proletarian quarters hoisted the swastika flag and that convinced National Socialists now also penetrated the factories. The creation of jobs blinded millions of proletarian eyes; they only saw the pay packet, which they were allowed to receive again after a long period of time, they no longer saw what was going on around the pay packet.

For the bourgeoisie, the unemployed had been an object of deepest concern, a hundredweight burden on the soul. Their existence was a meaningful indictment of the bourgeois-capitalist system. If the bourgeois order could not employ and feed millions of the working population, then it was a dead end; then private initiative was a bungling and private property a brazen theft. Since the plight of unemployment could not be remedied in the capitalist way, it was difficult to turn away the urgent counselors who were promoting the communist way out. Unemployment was the rotten spot of the bourgeois-capitalist order from where the communist overthrow could one day start rolling.

Certainly, Hitler had already neutralized the danger threatening the unemployed to a large extent since 1930; hundreds of thousands of them placed stronger hopes on the swastika than on the Soviet star. However, even in Hitler's entourage they were uncertain cantonists; at any moment they could swing over to the Communists. They had to be taken off the streets and put into firm conditions; then the proof was given that the bourgeois-capitalist order was still at the height of its task.

However, the economic revival through state orders was not a genuine and natural adjustment of the unemployment crisis; artificial events stood in for what capitalist society itself owed. Nevertheless, one had made some progress. People had appearances to themselves; those who collected their wages or salaries on payday asked little about whether or not their businesses needed the crutches of state subsidy. He was under the impression that capitalism was working again and that he himself was benefiting from it. He was able to conclude that the worker was best off with the capitalist order.

Job creation dazzles millions

As the factories reopened to the army of the unemployed, the bourgeoisie's heart became lighter; the tensions that had made the social atmosphere so sinister disappeared; the communist clouds receded before the dreaded discharges occurred. The bourgeoisie unhesitatingly reached for state aid; it hoped to trigger the economic "initial spark". The artificial conjuncture it created with state funds was supposed to set in motion the real capitalist conjuncture, which, without tutoring, sucked up the unemployed from its own conditions.

Now, however, this job creation showed a strangely ambiguous face. It seemed to be a solution to the burning social question; however, it turned out that the social side of all measures only concealed their real essence: this essence was of a military-armament nature. The creation of employment was a comprehensive process of mobilization of the whole people. The peasant was "saved" because the idea was to ensure food self-sufficiency in case of war. The highways were laid out along strategic lines. The Volkswagen was to create a reserve of motor vehicles on which the army could fall back; the National Socialist Motor Corps organized the civilian car owners militarily already in peace. Barracks were built everywhere and airfields were established. The armament was started on a large scale. Warships, engines, airplanes, guns, tanks, rifles, ammunition, and uniforms were produced, and iron and coal were mined to supply the armaments factories. The economy was basically just an armaments economy; it was the big business of heavy industry. The big bourgeoisie made the biggest cut; what had fallen off for peasants, the middle class and the working class were only crumbs, small commissions and percentages, pills for occupation and shweige money. The big bourgeoisie and the army had festive times; for them it was high time: the money, which had been put into Hitler's undertakings before 1933, flowed back abundantly, and the alliance between the Wehrmacht and Hitler, which Rohm had once founded and Hindenburg had solemnly sealed in January 1933, showered the Wehrmacht with an abundance of blessings, which even for it had to come as a surprise after its defeat in the World War.

It had lost its war in 1918: it had failed in its purpose. The German, who had subjected himself with tolerant self-sacrifice to the hard constraints of the Prussian casemen's drill, had allowed his civic and human dignity to be senselessly offended. The officer corps had enjoyed its high social prestige, without then having to justify it in the decisive hour by the expected, tacitly presupposed performance. The tax money that had been poured into the army budget for decades had proved to be a misinvestment in 1918.

Hitler spared the Wehrmaht from having to wipe its disgraceful slate clean again. He restored the lost social prestige and provided the Wehrmaht with uncontaminated funds. The army was socially, politically and financially restored to its former status, without having been forced to take a critical look at itself. The bankruptcy of 1918 could not have been more painlessly and tactfully eliminated. Hitler had not disappointed her; she owed him the gratitude and devotion that Generalfeldmarshall Blomberg later displayed in Hitler-boy fashion. Total mobilization took place; Germany's war potential was developed to the highest degree.

Brockdorff-Rantzau had wanted to bring Germany into the ranks of the proletarian peoples: not to commit it to a proletarian way of life, but to make the owning peoples jump in the frying pan with its revolutionary discontent. Mussolini had occasionally made use of the same tactical feint for Italy. The proletarian peoples of this type did not want to be Bolshevik. They posed as proletarian peoples only in order to teach the owning peoples that it would not be good to eat with them if they were driven to extremes; they made use of this diplomatic demagogy in order to be able to use it for blackmail.

Since 1930, the German bourgeoisie disdained to show itself in the miserable garb of the proletarian people; it felt that it had recovered so far in terms of power politics that it no longer wanted to take refuge in this self-abasement. The political wartime ruse of posing as a "proletarian people" was now found to be

Job

process of mobilization 118 compromising. One was no longer a proletarian people, but still a prevented master people. The total mobilization was the attempt which the German bourgeoisie took in order to rise to the imperialist rule to which it aspired.

Total mobilization subordinates the entire life process of a people to the aspect of the future war; every expression of life is preparation for war. Total production is the manufacture of war supplies; the worker is a soldier who is employed to bring in war equipment. The factory is a small fortress in which production takes place on command, just as in the barracks people drill on command. People marry to produce soldiers. Education becomes an endless lesson in military instruction. Literature and philosophy kindle warlike sentiments; science either lays the theoretical foundations for the technical perfection of the means of war or creates propaganda material in place to confirm the righteousness of its own cause, to reveal the depravity of the enemy's cause. Every organization, corporation and institution is incorporated as a component in the total war machinery and every gathering of masses is arranged as a small trial mobilization. Battles are fought even in the midst of the most peaceful activity: Wheat, butter and production battles in general. At every moment one is standing in a front: in the labor front or in the front of "all decent Germans" and moves, if one only lifts the foot, on a war path.

Total mobilization is a process within the war zone; once it is under way, one no longer lives in a civilian manner in any respect, as one does in peace. In the drive of total mobilization all arts, institutions, forms of life which need the air of peace in order to flourish die; for humanity and liberality the death knell rings.

The fascist total mobilization works only when the working class participates; it must be forced to participate. They must not remain under the spell of the view of their own life situation; they must not hold on to an independent principle and meaning of their social existence. It must fall into the unconditional dependence of the big bourgeoisie. Enslavement is achieved partly by ideological deceptions of the kind of "German socialism," "national socialism," the "national people's community," partly by brute force, partly by both of these working together. The fascist revolution, the total mobilization, is, according to the nature of things, always initiated with a victory over the class-conscious working class. The gagging of the working class is the first success towards which the fascist action is heading.

Fascist action could not reach its goal until the trade unions had first been eliminated.

The trade unions had been liberal institutions. They gave a twist to bourgeois-capitalist business principles, on the basis of which suddenly the industrial worker could also benefit from them. Labor power was treated as a commodity, wages as its price: the trade unions were anxious to influence the market situation in such a way that the commodity "labor power" obtained the highest price that could be obtained under the given general economic conditions. In addition to the natural products and raw materials of wheat, cotton, rubber, iron, coal and petroleum, there was now the new natural raw material of labor. The trade unions proceeded in the same way as the trusts, cartels and syndicates on the world market with monopolized raw materials. They moved strictly in the space of peace, and the element of life appropriate to them was negotiation and contract. Far from the idea of waging class warfare, their pacifist sentiments were unswerving. The strike was always more of an embarrassment to them than a welcome weapon.

At its core, every strike was a self-help attempt of primitive human passion to break up the order; the trade unions could not prevent it if, at times, the bitterness of the workers was unable to vent itself in any other way. But they never poured oil on the fire. They intervened to channel and civilize it; in every strike, labor felt betrayed and sold by its unions in the end. The strike was not to be understood as a social power struggle, not as a class struggle, but as a purely economic struggle; the commodity of labor power temporarily disappeared from the market, supply was blocked to drive up its price. No strike was unleashed by the unions themselves; it broke out because labor had refused to be restrained. The only responsibility that the unions

bore for this was that the workers felt strong enough to join forces with the employer only because they knew they were organized in unions; the feeling of strength that the unions gave the workers made it easier for them to decide to shut down all the wheels. In any case, the unions urged to meet again soon the entrepreneur at the negotiating table and to appease the revolt of the elements. The strike was not to be given a political top: otherwise it would inevitably have been class war action. "General strike is general nonsense," Legien had gruffly remarked to Rosa Luxemburg's class-struggle propaganda.

During the World War of 1914/18, the trade unions were the most loyal supporters of the truce; they did not want the overthrow of the bourgeois-capitalist system to which they had incorporated labor; they did not want world revolution. When the German collapse had taken place, the trade unions concluded the agreement of ij. November 1918 with the employers' associations; next to Legiens' name was Stinnes'. This agreement declared social peace; labor renounced its revolution in the hour of the great weakness of the German bourgeoisie; the agreement saved the German bourgeois order. The unions were recognized in it as the "appointed representatives of labor"; the restriction of the workers' freedom of association was declared inadmissible; the equal administration of the labor certificate was agreed upon; the right of collective bargaining with equal arbitration committees and settlement offices was approved in principle by both sides; the eight-hour day was introduced: these were the meager morsels that the bourgeoisie threw to labor at a moment when the latter could have chased its class adversary forever from the table and taken his seat at the table as master for all the future. The meaning of the agreement was that the trade unions, as the trust which held the monopoly on labor power, were expressly admitted to the circle of the other trusts as equals. Now the Weimar Republic could be established as a bourgeois state and the bourgeois-capitalist bound labor force could share in its rule. "Freedom of association for the preservation and promotion of working and economic conditions is guaranteed for everyone and for all professions," stipulated Article 159 of the Weimar Constitution; after the November agreement on labor unions, there was no longer any need to talk about the fact that the only issue was working and economic conditions within the framework of the bourgeois-capitalist order.

However much the trade unions remained on the ground of the bourgeois-capitalist order, their existence nevertheless violated the spirit of this order in a profound sense. Capitalism lives from the surplus value it extracts from labor power; it puts fetters on capitalism and goes against its principle if its exploitative tendencies are to tread short. As soon as the German bourgeoisie had caught its breath again, it sought to get away from the November labor-union agreement. If the trade unions, on an equal footing with the commodity of labor power, did the same price economy as the bourgeoisie did with coal and iron, then the whole capitalist order was out of kilter; the bourgeoisie stumbled over collective agreements where, in the face of unemployed reserve armies, it would have wanted to advance to the storm against the wage level; it had to negotiate where it would already have been strong enough to dictate. The same Stinnes who had shown himself arm in arm with Legien in 1918 forgot to sign when the big bourgeoisie had recovered from its November fears; he wanted to override the November agreement, to snatch back from the unions their equal rights. The collective bargaining agreement and the eight-hour day became the red rag in front of which every bourgeois was frightened; Stinnes himself, Helfferich and Hugenberg ran blindly against them. Suddenly, the bourgeoisie took on moral and humanitarian tendencies; it rebelled inwardly against seeing the worker as a labor commodity. It came down on the trade unions with moral arguments, after they could no longer be met legally; the wage of the worker should not be set according to the same principles according to which the entrepreneur regulates the price of iron and coal. The worker should rely on the human feelings of his employer. Men like Seldte and Hitler were the moral trumpeters who edified the ears of the big bourgeoisie with sounds of painful indignation at the "degradation of the worker to a commodity labor power"; the capitalist acquisitiveness became more and more sensitive to the union wage policy, which was

conducted according to price policy rules that applied to monopolized raw materials: what was right for the big bourgeois Jupiter was far from being cheap for the proletarian ox.

Hitler's hatred of the trade unions arose from the needs of the upper middle classes; after Hitler came to power, the trade unionists were left with no hope. The industrial entrepreneurship was not content with any labor-union agreement where it could clear the air. For decades, the unions had had a reputation for invincibility; this reputation was now gone. They had not defended the democratic Prussian government in July 1932 and had not gone to the barricades for the Weimar Republic. In so doing, they had abandoned the constitutional foundation on which their position of power rose in the first place. After they had refused to stand up for these foundations, there was nothing left for which their efforts would have been worthwhile in the future. It was known that they were avoiding any serious struggle; since they were no longer resisting, one could set to work without worrying about blowing out their lives. They were hopelessly isolated; the bourgeoisie and the peasantry had allied themselves, and the unemployed performed Judas services against them. Having developed in the habits of legality, they were immobilized as soon as the state power took a stand against them; in the realm of illegality they could not breathe.

The unions stood helplessly before the new situation; for a long time they did not understand that their last hour had come. Could they not claim the right to be spared, after they had once kept the truce and kept the world revolution from German soil? Awkwardly they gave to understand that they were willing to provide a supporting function also in the Third Reich, if only a golden bridge was to be built for them. Jewish employees were hurriedly disposed of; they wanted to buy Hitler's mercy by displaying anti-Semitic zeal themselves.

But the trade unions did not notice that they had to stand in the way of the fascist drive for totality as long as there still lived in them a residue of the will to assert themselves. They might be ready for the most thoroughgoing adaptation: with their own leadership, their property, their finances, their traditions, their international connections, they were on fascist soil an army that remained filled with foreign spirit. They might be loyal to it, and they might be honest enough to keep it sacred, but times of crisis could come when they sensed an opportunity for themselves and when they would return to their original cause: in this case, they would turn away just when the fate of fascism depended on whether they would remain loyal to it even in this situation. From the National Socialist point of view, the trade unions inevitably remained disguised Bolshevik auxiliaries in the fascist field; Hitler could not make a pact with them; he had to exterminate them.

As against an enemy army, Dr. Ley broke against the trade unions on May 2, 1933; he had Hitler's approval. He had no legal title in his hand; he used naked force, as criminals or soldiers do. The union halls were occupied like fortified points; the union assets were confiscated like the captured war chest of an enemy headquarters; the union executives were led away like prisoners of war; the union organizations were broken up like defeated units of troops. The state power did not lift a hand to protect those who were attacked; it let run as a wild revolutionary action what as a legislative action could not have concealed its bourgeois-class militant character. The houses, offices and coffers of the employers' and employers' associations remained untouched; Ley did not lead his troops against them: it was from those houses and offices that the campaign against the trade unions had been instigated, from those coffers that it had been financed.

The Labor Front was the construction in which the worker was still allowed to maintain the feeling of his collective power, but which emasculated this collective power and dissolved it into mere hollow semblance. "I have been reproached," said Dr. Ley in September 1933, "for leading the existing trade unions into the German Labor Front and for not yielding to the desire to smash them. We recognized that the best part of the German labor force was organized in the trade unions, along with the SA and SS, and recognizing this

Hitler's hatred of the trade unions

valuable material we took over the trade unions. They had to grow, if one understands the word organization correctly, into the German Labor Front."

This German Labor Front became the "organization of the creative Germans of the forehead and fist"; it unites members of the intellectual professions, high and low employees, entrepreneurs and workers, the upper, middle and lower middle classes on the one hand, and the proletarian masses on the other, as "equal" members. It is a gathering of the most diverse and opposing elements; it is not a fighting organization. The big bourgeoisie itself has moved into it in order to checkmate the worker. "The aim of the German Labor Front is the formation of a real community of the people and of all Germans." Each individual is to "take his place in the economic life of the nation in the mental and physical condition" that will "enable him to perform at the highest level." Up to now, every businessman had accused the trade unions of thwarting the highest performance in the enterprise by giving the worker aberrant ideas. The German Labor Front, in the sense of the upper middle class, secured industrial peace by "creating understanding among the managers for the justified demands of their followers, and among the followers for the situation and possibilities of their enterprise. In the spirit of this labor front, Alfred Krupp had already written his "General Regulations" decades earlier: "Yes," he had written in it, "yes, I want to work with undemanding people who prove to me that they are willing to assert themselves out of nothing and without means. Loyalty is the highest commandment. Therefore, I want to have only faithful workers who are grateful in heart and in deed for the fact that I offer them bread. I will treat them with all philanthropy and care for them as for their families." The "Law on the Order of National Labor" branded the entrepreneur as the leader of the enterprise, and the employees and workers as his followers. "The leader of the enterprise shall make decisions to the followers on all matters relating to the enterprise insofar as they are regulated by this law. He shall take care of the welfare of the followers. The latter shall remain loyal to him as established in the company community." The Council of Confidence is formed by the men of the company; however, the manager draws up the list, which consists of selected creatures. The followers have to give their opinion on the list only "by secret ballot". This Council of Confidence has the duty to "deepen the mutual trust within the company community". Labor trustees" are appointed to monitor labor peace in larger economic areas; bound by the guidelines and directives of the Reich government, they are to intervene in an appeasing manner where friction between the entrepreneur and his workforce threatens to expose the entire social system. They have to proceed according to the devious tactics that are characteristic of Third Reich politics in general, the tactics that reconcile the workers with the richness of cheap compliments to the fact that in reality they only promote the interests of the upper classes. When at times the unambiguousness of the language of the facts requires an extraordinary effort to throw sand back into the eyes of the working class, a "reactionary" entrepreneur is pilloried, that is, an entrepreneur who refuses the owed reverence to the National Socialist circumlocutions. Since he is not loyal to Hitler, he is sent to the desert as a scapegoat; the whole burden of capitalism's sins is dumped on his shoulders. The worker sees that a distinction is made between good and evil capitalists. With the good capitalist the welfare of the worker is excellently taken care of. "Pure people, pure principles, justice, goodness, these must prevail with us, then everything will go well and always better," says Alfred Krupp's general regulations; the evil capitalist, however, is punished. Many an entrepreneur whose family tree lacked Aryan authenticity, many a Junker who refused to introduce the Third Reich on his estate, was thus called to account for "lack of social conscience. The social court of honor, which held harmless the worker who carelessly displayed his class consciousness in the company because of "gross violation of the social duties established by the company community," at the same time hovered as a sword of Damocles over the head of such employers who stubbornly wanted to remain capitalists according to their own individually shaped fashion.

Capitalism must tread softly; every entrepreneur who appears too coarse and too rough makes the workers, whom National Socialism wants to put to sleep, listen suspiciously again: if he shows himself to be obstinate

The Labor Front not a fighting organization 122 and unteachable, he is threatened with the "deprivation of the qualification to be leader of the enterprise. If necessary, capitalism must be saved against capitalists who do not want to accept reason.

This had been the psychological error of the "pure nationalists," that one need not trouble with the pettybourgeois and proletarian masses. "National Socialism," wrote Captain Ehrhardt in 1930, "must from the outset have the courage to say things which may at the moment be unpopular with the masses." His swashbuckling brain did not understand the significance of National Socialist subtleties. "The National Socialist movement," he remarked, "is the result of a propagandistic move that was extremely clever at the time, but thus the child of a compromise. A new slogan was created which, purely in terms of advertising, was very attractive, and which had a particularly large field of activity at its disposal, because it was to have an effect in both decisive camps of political Germany. But a slogan with an inherent cuteness is not a solution to the problem, which can only be fought out in a straight struggle."

The undisguised plumpness of the Papen government had driven the petty-bourgeois and proletarian masses almost into the arms of the Communists. If at times the National Socialists were also, as Ehrhardt says, "regarded by the generality of the working classes as a kind of impostors," they accepted it.

"Honor the work and respect the worker," Hitler said on May 1, 1933. "We took over the trade unions," he explained a few days later, "in order to let the German worker participate in the shaping of the new conditions as an equal, in order to give him the opportunity to act as an equal." The worker was not to have the feeling that "he was to be regarded here as ostracized, disgraced, and outlawed."

Thus, with bold sweep, all facts were turned upside down: the worker was to believe that the trade unions, his own self-help organizations, had raped him, that equal rights had been given to him by driving out his self-elected leaders, plundering his organizational coffers, destroying his political rights and liberties.

With jaunty insouciance, the worker's ideology was taken away and a new, entirely capitalist meaning was imposed upon it. "Socialism," said Goebbels, "means that money is forced to serve the economy and the economy to serve the people." Goebbels called the beggar-thy-neighbor socialism of the Winterhilfswerk "socialism of action." Ley, on the other hand, asserted, "With book wisdom and speeches, with manifestos and proclamations, one cannot work out the concept of socialism. It is not a matter that can be fathomed intellectually. It must be experienced with the heart: socialism means nothing other than comradeship, than community, loyalty and blood ties." Every word, every definition, every interpretation is a sleight of hand with the help of which the worker is bluffed. Such a trick of the greatest magnitude had already been the declaration of May i as a national holiday. The worker was accustomed to his May Day; he was to keep it, but he was also to experience his wonder what was made of it. He had always marched on this day: he should continue to do so. But he was no longer to take to the streets as a fighter against capitalism: he appeared there in endless columns at the command of the bourgeois dictatorship that subjugated him. Hitler presented to the big bourgeoisie the prisoners he brought in from the civil war enterprise he had won for them. May i, which had hitherto been for the class-conscious worker the day of his greatest class-struggle pride, now became for him the day of his deepest humiliation and disgrace.

That the bourgeois, too, had to costume himself on this day as a "worker," whether of the forehead or of the fist, was the small expense with which he had to allow himself to be burdened. The worker was forged into the bourgeois order.

It will always be significant whom the Third Reich appointed as the actual workers' leader. From the bourgeois point of view, Dr. Ley was a highly worm-eaten personality; he was an utterly lumpen existence. He was a bourgeois rotten product; every class-conscious worker soiled the hand he extended to the leader of the Labor Front. But this is the esteem in which the bourgeois holds the proletarian: that he regards him

May 1 Day of humiliation

as trash on the fringe of bourgeois society. Precisely because Ley was bourgeois scum, he seemed the right man for the working class. He was at home in the tobacco haze of the tavern, in the sultry air of the brothels; he drank, whored, and was a clown: thus he could make himself common with the "proletarian rabble." He was a man without distance; all the better he fulfilled his purpose in the regions of social depth.

Ley was a commander who led the army at whose head he stood to its doom with cold consciousness; he commanded it with the intention of ruining its fighting value. He squandered the war treasure against the workers' battalions that had raised the funds. He realized Hitler's basic strategic ideas in immediate tactical operations. He was allowed any mass-psychological falsehood, any deception of the workers, if the masses could be bamboozled with it without them getting behind his tricks. As long as he was believed, he was allowed to lay it on as thick as he liked; if the masses were taken in by it, his kitschy sentimentalities were looked down upon. His idealism was pure fraud; he despised the masses to whom he presented it so deeply that he was not afraid to appear before them in a drunken stupor. He lied to them while he flattered them; he mocked them while he betrayed them. "The ultimate goal must be to create from the present concept of the proletarian, of the servant, of inferiority, a class that is proud, that wears its neck raised, whether its face is sooty, whether its hands are calloused, whether it comes from the pit or from the plow." Ley was imbued with the conviction that anything may be offered to the masses par excellence; he dared the most foolish experiments in mass deception. "There will be no more entrepreneur, worker, employee," he lied boldly to the masses, "there will be the concept of the working man, the German working man." He swept the masses along to pay religious tribute to Hitler; he hammered into their heads, "Hitler is always right." His speeches not infrequently lost themselves in the slurring of a man who is no longer with himself; his words were meaningless phrases: he speculated only on the feelings of his listeners and sinned on their not being of critical mind. "If the victory of the National Socialist revolution is to be properly characterized," he said in the Berlin Sports Palace, "it is the victory over the unreasonableness which ruled Germany at the time, the victory over the small ego of the individual. The time is now over when man was reduced to a number, when the time clock gave man a feeling of value. Now man is allowed to be aware of his value again. The struggle of the new Germany is about giving people the feeling of worth. "Ley was like a fairground magician who abuses the credulity of his audience and performs his miracles with the cheapest means. The Labor Front, through its leader Ley, became an event of creating immeasurable swaths of lies and deceit, in which the masses lost sight of facts, the eye for clarity and probity, the feeling for human dignity, and the instinct for the direction in which their real interest lay. It was, after all, a social circus in which, for the amusement and benefit of the big bourgeoisie, the masses were trained to make manikins, to shine with tricks, to turn in at the sign of the whip, and to move in closed formations only according to the directives of the dubious figure who headed the labor front. In this figure the whole misery of the workers was symbolized: after their defeat it had become their fate to be led by a disreputable bourgeois subject and to become a futureless mob from class warriors committed to the future.

The upper middle classes had a new constitutional form in mind. It remembered medieval forms and consulted the Middle Ages; industrial feudalism was the harbor in which it hoped to find that social peace which would allow it to enjoy its prerogatives undisturbed. It wanted to establish for itself in the industrial enterprise the same lordly position that the feudal landlord had established for himself on his landed property. The "old German pride of lordship" rose from the grave. People said goodbye to progress, which offered only "Bolshevik aspects," and turned to the past, which was after all the epitome of the better times, the golden age.

This industrial feudalism had once been the social recipe of Alfred Krupp and Herr von Stumm; the National Socialist revolution amounted to their patriarehalism. The worker is immature; he has neither a say nor a fight, he has no enforceable right; he must gratefully receive what is assigned to him and otherwise obey.

He is a "servant"; a service law regulates his position in the enterprise. There is no negotiated collective bargaining agreement: "If, for the protection of the employees of a group of establishments within the district assigned to the labor trustee, it is urgently necessary to establish minimum conditions for the regulation of labor relations, the trustee may, after consultation in a committee of experts, issue a collective bargaining order in writing." The wage awarded is at a fixed level on the subsistence line; the worker's claim to share in cyclical industrial profits is rejected. In the future, the capitalist entrepreneur alone will fill his pockets with the cyclical profits. The worker receives "performance wages", not "cyclical wages"; thus the ugly child has a beautiful name.

The freedom of movement of the worker is restricted, and later perhaps abolished altogether; he gradually becomes bound to the enterprise in a way that corresponds to the old binding to the clods. This factory bondage destroys him as a free individual; it is no longer up to him whether he wants to work; his performance of work is a public duty which he owes to his industrial-feudalist employer. Refusal to work is already a violation of rights, mutiny. The honor of the class-conscious worker was completely beyond the bourgeois standards of value; it was precisely his honor to prove himself in the struggle against the bourgeois order and to spare no effort in it. The labor honor of the industrial feudalist era is the honor of servants and lackeys; it consists in being a faithful, willing follower of the industrial feudal lords. A modern servant and serf relationship announces itself for the industrial worker.

The medieval feudal lord was also a war leader; his manor was a soldierly unit. His war servants came from his male servants. He moved into the field with them when the emperor had issued the martial muster. The modern industrial enterprise is a component of the war economy; it is here that armaments are forged. The industrial feudal lord becomes war producer, war economic leader; as officer of production he creates the motor-machine apparatus which modern war requires. His workers perform war service; they are subject to war discipline and martial law; they stand before the enemy as soldiers of production. "Masses of workers, crowded together in the factory, are organized soldierly," says the Communist Manifesto. "They are placed as common industrial soldiers under the supervision of a complete hierarchy of non-commissioned officers and officers. They are not only servants of the bourgeois class, of the bourgeois state, they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overseer, and above all by the individual manufacturing bourgeois himself." They no longer receive wages, but wages. They perform military service before their machine; the order of their employer becomes supreme law for them. "In the future there shall be no more working apart," Dr. Ley assured us, "no more class-struggle, but workers, employees and entrepreneurs belong together. And if they do not want to, we will weld them together with chains." Indeed: the social policy of the Third Reich puts workers and employees on the chain of the entrepreneur.

Compulsory labor service gives a foretaste of where the journey is headed. There were war profiteers, infation profiteers, deflation profiteers, reparation profiteers; compulsory labor service produced the labor service profiteer. Labor service could not create an anti-capitalist oasis in the capitalist "desert. The Arbeitsdienst compulsory labor service becomes compulsory labor; it accustoms the German man to slave labor; it is reversion to slavery.

The labor service camp is the model on which the factory is gradually to be transformed; the industrial worker becomes a lifelong labor servant. The military tone penetrates into the factory; the "spade drill" shows how a right-handed spatula button is able to wrest a barracks yard usability even from the working tool.

The compulsory labor service is an experiment; a new social constitution is being tried out. The laborer is a slave and a soldier; he works and exercises according to military commands. In addition, there is always a private entrepreneur who profits from.

XXI. guns instead of butter

Since the Third Reich was gearing up to fight against two fronts, the Eastern Bolshevik and the Western Democratic, it did not escape isolation; no one helped it, so it had to help itself.

From the standpoint of the liberal-democratic world view, it was a mystery for a long time how Germany financed its rearmament. Every finance minister, even those of the richest liberal-democratic states, has difficult hours when the state budget wants to see unusual demands satisfied. It is an inviolable basic law that the people's standard of living must not be lowered; he must raise money without making the people feel it. The liberal-democratic, Western European observers were prepared for a Hitler miracle: they wanted to learn from National Socialism how to finance enormous events without plunging the people into poverty. The expected Hitler miracle failed to materialize.

The standard of living of the German people was depressed; the margin by which it was lowered could then be capitalized. If the people's standard of living was reduced by ten percent, the government had billions in cash on hand. As often as the contents of the financial pot thus gained ran out, the information remained to tighten the people's hunger belt even more: this brought in new billions every time. The standard of living of the German people was originally so high that it could in principle be lowered by 35-50 percent, if only it was done carefully and gradually enough.

The economic and financial policy of the Third Reich directly attacked the existing level of the German standard of living; it was deliberately reduced, the longer the more mercilessly. For years the German upper middle class demanded that the industrial labor force be pushed down from the "beefsteak standard" to the "rice standard"; the Third Reich set about to meet this demand.

Germany is arming to be able to blow up the natural treasuries of other peoples; it is offensive. It speculates on its fortune in war; it must become poorer and poorer the longer the fortune in war is delayed. As long as it has made no conquests, as long as it has not succeeded in plundering, it must maintain its offensive apparatus out of its own misery; the longer this lasts, the more desperate feats it must wrest from its weakness. It must consume itself until a prey has fallen into its hands. The weapons, which it starves itself of, cannot be defensive weapons. It perishes miserably with them, if it does not first attack a better equipped people in order to devour it.

The Third Reich organizes the impoverishment of the people with German thoroughness. It taps living substance of the people and transforms it into cannons and ammunition, tanks and airplanes, barracks and monumental buildings, sports fields and highways, corruption funds and giant salaries and - not in the least - into fabulous profits for the big bourgeoisie. The dictatorship got rid of any financial control by the people; the people have to bleed, but they do not learn what happens with their lifeblood. The petty-bourgeois masses had mutinied against the mild pressure of the Weimar state; now they are stuck in a wheelwork that squeezes the last drop of their blood from their bodies.

The process of the people's impoverishment, however, is veiled by distracting, misleading and meaningconfusing events; the masses were not to become aware of what was happening to them.

Inflation had once made no bones about it; it carried out its raids on the income and savings of the people with each progressive devaluation of money. The Weimar Republic was never forgiven for not having been able to effectively put an end to the inflationary handiwork of the big bourgeoisie; it finally perished because

Real purchasing power declines of it. The Third Reich was careful not to burn its fingers on the fire of open inflation; it preferred more subtle and devious methods of plundering.

As one of its most unshakable socio-political principles, it proclaimed that wages should not be raised, lest the price edifice be shaken. Despite the increase in production output and the extension of working hours, it adhered to this principle. As so often, Ley handed the workers a theory with which to fill their heads while their stomachs remained empty. "The wage," he said, "is not, after all, a cash question alone; the cash wage is only a part of the wage. Wages are the total position of man in the social order of a people in itself. What did the soldier receive for a wage? Twenty-one pennies and the lieutenant seventy marks, that was his wage, and no lieutenant and no soldier would ever have wanted to exchange places with the highest paid general director, because they were soldiers, because they wore a dress of honor, because the term 'soldier' had a common honor. And so you have to look at the whole thing in that framework. For the first time, and in Germany as the only country, there is today the concept of social honor, as embodied in the law on the order of national labor." Thus the laborer was prepared for the soldier's daily pay of twenty-one pfennigs; this was the ideal and just wage which no great bourgeois would want to deny his laborer. If the worker left the cash to the general managers and kept to the beautiful froth of social honor himself, all parts were helped.

Of course, then, in spite of everything, the price structure began to falter; the items of daily use became more expensive. Insofar as goods held their prices, their quality deteriorated; the worker received trash and substitutes for his good money. His wages remained behind the prices: to reduce his purchasing power, that had been the aim.

By stopping the import of foodstuffs and industrial products from abroad in order to gain foreign exchange for the supply of raw materials to the armaments industry, the people's supply of goods was simplified and made poorer; the beautiful things of life became rarer and more precious. The masses were accustomed to do without many things; in the end, they willingly let Goebbels tell them that grenades were more important than even butter and eggs.

The shortage of raw materials burned on the nails of the armament-fevered empire; it had to export at all costs in order to accumulate foreign currency credits. German goods were exported below cost price; they were sold for any amount of foreign exchange. The exporter was compensated by the Reich; the masses were responsible for this compensation. Basically, they were charged for the fact that the foreign buyer bought German goods dirt cheap. Thus the mass purchasing power was gnawed and squeezed from all sides. Perhaps nothing had frightened the capitalist bourgeoisie more deeply than the radicalization of the village. If the peasant flared up in rage against capitalism because it was crushing him with interest burdens, then bourgeois society was finished. The peasant had to be bound more intimately to the capitalist order than ever before; his social and economic fall had to be absorbed, and again he had to be given a sense of security and well-being.

The difficulty, however, was that the rural economy was not viable on a private capitalist basis in Germany, whether it existed as large, medium or small holdings. If it gets caught unprotected in the world economic mechanism, it will be crushed in it; it cannot hold its own against the price-squeezing rationalized farm economy of America and Australia. It needs remedies: Protective tariffs, tax rebates, cheap loans, subsidies. Thus it leads an artificial existence; the rest of the population must support it. Its own economic strength is not enough to keep it afloat. In principle, the privately organized peasantry in Germany has outlived its usefulness. Large-scale landownership has been for a long time: only insofar as both parasitize, they do not collapse. The "sin" of the Weimar Republic had been to expect the private capitalist calculating agriculture to find its way independently according to the consequence of its economic principle. It was not up to this challenge; it fled to National Socialism because it held out the prospect of new aid money. The Weimar

Republic came too late with its "aid to the East"; the Junkers took it, squandered it and planted themselves before Hitler with their hands opened once again.

The National Socialist peasant policy initially helped peasant property with debt relief measures. Agricultural price, market and customs policies fleeced the consumer. To make it easier for the farmer, it created a favorable market situation for agricultural production. Nevertheless, the farmer was not to get off cheaply; he was helped, but it was not to be in vain. He was to enjoy newly won security, but in return the capitalist order wanted to insure him for all future. With the Erbhofgesetz it clipped his wings; he was never again to have the ability and freedom to flutter over the enclosure of the capitalist terrain.

The Erbhofgesetz takes the peasant under control; the district peasant leader and the Erbhofrichter look over his fence. The farmer must farm sparingly and knowledgeably; the Third Reich does not want to pour subsidies into a Danaid barrel. The regulations of the Reichsnährstand are binding for the farmer; he is subject to both a cultivation and a delivery obligation. One knows the yields of his property; according to this, one estimates the standard of living that is appropriate to him: all the more precisely, after the relief that one first granted him, one now collects from him the taxes, interest and duties. In the future, any oppositional fling is blocked for him; he is hopelessly at the mercy of the organs of the Third Reich. If he is a "bad landlord" or an enemy of the state, he will be "flogged off.

In this way, he is incorporated into the agricultural production battle as a production soldier. He no longer farms according to his own mind, but according to the command given from above. The goal is selfsufficiency in supply in the event of war; the hereditary farm is the peasant estate converted to wareconomic purposes according to the rules of total mobilization.

Several birds are killed with one stone; the hereditary farmer is rehabilitated, but at the same time he is placed under wartime economic guardianship. He is guaranteed a certain degree of social security, but he must nevertheless reach for the ceiling; his brothers and sisters are relegated to the ranks of the servants. It is no longer he who determines the way of life that suits him: the Reichsnährstand dictates it. This way of life is primitivized if taxes and duties cannot be squeezed out of him in any other way. The tax squeeze is cut off from him, and the breaking of the bondage to interest remains an unfulfilled dream. The subsidies that this switchover still gobbles up are pumped out of the urban consumers: they have to pay the food prices dictated to them by the Reichsnährstand. "The German field, the whole German farmland is dedicated to the service of the whole people", was formulated at the Nuremberg party congress in 1936 in the usual idealizing "convoluted" way.

The big landowner does not become a hereditary farmer; he is a big bourgeois and has in himself what the big bourgeois interest demands; he will never break out into communism. Only when he becomes troublesome through feudal idiosyncrasies will he be made an example of. "Where the individual large landowner manages by his own efforts on a healthy farm," said Darrd, "this property should be maintained. On the other hand, however, large holdings that can no longer be maintained economically must give way to an "economic structure that is viable."

The government astonished by the inventive events to empty the pockets of the masses. It also knew how to make use of the charm of variety. Taxes and price increases never lose their bitter aftertaste; but it is heroic when the people "voluntarily" lay down their possessions on the altar of the fatherland.

A whole system of "voluntary" donations was concocted. "Winterhilfswerk," "Eintopfgericht," collections for air raid protection, for youth, for the downcast cottage industry, for mother and child alternated Sunday after Sunday; not a weekend passed without the collection tins rattling in the streets of towns and villages and in front of the doors of homes. The beggar had become an arm of the state like the bailiff. Appeals were

The collection tins rattled

made to the sense of social responsibility in order to be able to morally judge anyone who skimped. Only a small portion of the sums raised in this way was spent on the social purposes that had been proposed; most of it was directed to "job creation." With ambiguous and unintentional self-irony, Goebbels was once able to say at a meeting of the National Socialist People's Welfare Organization: "The poorest part of our people has today become the most fanatical representative of our worldview. This is really the greatest miracle of our socialist and propagandist activity." It was a miracle: for these poorest comrades of the people were indeed left with their mouths clean from the millions that had been scrounged up in appeal to them. The donations were a kind of war tax in disguise; therefore, he who, invoking voluntarism, showed the "national beggar" the door, immediately appeared as an anti-state tax resister.

Everyone was forced into more than one organization; high contributions had to be paid into the coffers of the professional associations, the party and its branches, and the people's welfare. Workers and employees were let to bleed in the labor front. These millions, too, flowed largely into "job creation"; they, too, were a form of taxation. Anyone who did not allow himself to be organized made himself suspect; anyone attracted the state's displeasure, which slipped out through a gate as soon as they wanted to shear him. State and municipal taxes were collected with rigor; the tax screw was constantly tightened. Wherever the government had made the economy afloat by means of state orders, it did not find it difficult to take back fractions of it through the tax office. Tax revenue increased to the same extent that the government had previously poured money into the economy. The money extracted from the masses was not nearly enough to finance the government's "job creation" to its full extent. The government drew bills of exchange; it burdened the future of the people with immeasurable sums of debt. The circulation of bills of exchange swelled enormously. Banks, savings banks and insurance companies surrendered their capital reserves and took Reich bills of exchange in exchange. Since the armaments are not productive, there is no increase in national income from which the bill of exchange debt could be covered. Whether the bills of exchange are one day summarily burned or whether they are fraudulently absorbed by inflationary paper money creation makes no difference: one as well as the other will be a form in which the lowering of the general standard of living will be realized; the bills of exchange are only bonds and advances on this future lowering.

The artificial stimulation of the economy drew the unemployed into the factories. After the government squandered billions, it was no witchcraft to get on top of unemployment. Welfare benefits turned into wages; they barely exceeded the level of previous benefits. More than once, observers calculated how millions of people had been put to work, but how, in proportion, the total wage bill had increased only insignificantly. The proletarians worked, but they earned nothing. The more unprofitable production sites were opened up, inferior materials were used, poor substitutes were produced and processed, the harder and more deprived life became for the masses. The reconstruction work of Hitler's four-year plans was matched by the fate of social degradation that mercilessly fell upon the masses. German armament had no equal and the substitute industries flourished: the masses of the people, however, went to the dogs.

The worker was not only condemned to hunger: he also lost his freedom of movement and the rights of disposal over his labor power. The little man became Kujon, with whom the authoritarian trustees of the capitalist order dealt at will. The petty-bourgeois and proletarian masses were regimented down to the most private spheres of life and put under military discipline; they lost the last vestiges of a political, social and economic sphere of freedom. They were no longer to be able to stir; like the soldier at the front, they were no longer even to be allowed to grumble.

Germany organized its war economy as a giant business of a paper-thin upper class. The restrictions on the standard of living, on personal freedom, on economic self-determination affected only the petty-bourgeois and proletarian masses. The state became the driver of big-bourgeois profits. It organized the war economy,

but in such a way that the big bourgeoisie did well out of it; it was so preoccupied with the gagging of the masses that it was no longer interested in checking the calculation bases of its suppliers.

The Wehrmacht itself felt itself to be a monopoly capitalist gendarme and soldier. In April 1936, the chief of the economic staff in the Reich War Ministry, Colonel Thomas, examined the question of whether it was expedient to nationalize the armaments industry. He strongly advised against being so presumptuous. If you first stirred up the spirits of nationalization, you would not be able to get rid of them; if you only gave them a little finger, they would already seize the whole hand. If one were to accept it at all, one would have to extend nationalization over the entire economy; one would have to include heavy industry, the optical and chemical industry, the aircraft and motor vehicle industry, the textile industry, the entire metal and machine industry, and even agriculture in nationalization.

The masses, registered and controlled, bear the whole burden of social production; they have to give their small happiness of life for the weapons which they produce by their art, which they finance with their misery, and which are finally pressed into their hands in order to plunge, armed with them, into "heroic" death.

XXII June 30, 1934

The trade unions had been smashed, the socialist parties had been wiped out lock, stock and barrel. The anti-capitalist tendencies were to have no more organ of power, not even a mouthpiece. Hitler's ambition was to purge Germany of them. Capitalism alone and exclusively was to dominate the German field.

The goal seemed to have been achieved by the end of 1933. Surprisingly, however, a hotbed of anti-capitalist tendencies had meanwhile emerged within the victorious movement itself. Certainly they were without all Marxist decisiveness; they were petty-bourgeois moderate, romantically ambiguous, utopian hazy, and loaded with strong resentment against the rich people. The bearers of such tendencies saw themselves as the appointed bodies that wanted to take the National Socialist program seriously; they regarded themselves as the true core of the National Socialist movement.

Laborless and effortless income had not yet been abolished, the bondage of interest had not yet been broken. Not a finger had yet been lifted for the "complete confiscation of all war profits". Nothing had been done to nationalize the joint-stock companies; the promised profit-sharing in large enterprises was a long way off. The "immediate communalization of large department stores and their renting at cheap prices to small tradesmen" was unduly delayed; land reform was a long time coming; the law "for the gratuitous expropriation of land for charitable purposes" had not yet been created, land speculation had not been prevented, the usurers and racketeers had not been punished by death. It is true that Hitler's "Mein Kampf" had never held out the prospect of these measures; but it had been read, after all, only by a selection of people who were equal to the intellectual demands of a theoretical book. The little people adhered to the "Party Official Program of February 20, 1920." They had believed in it; they had taken its twenty-five points literally; from this they had taught themselves what National Socialism wanted. They based their devotion to Hitler, their trust in him, on the unbreakable nature of these sacred articles.

But as openly as Hitler had played his cards in his book, so consciously did he mislead his followers through the program; to him it seemed less harmful "to retain a version, even if it should no longer correspond

Failure to comply with the program

completely to reality, than by improving it to deliver up to general discussion, with its worst consequences, a fundamental law of the movement hitherto regarded as granite". The socialist components of the program were merely to be tacitly swept under the table. They had been the bacon with which the petty-bourgeois and proletarian mice had been caught.

However, these mice did not want to be satisfied so easily for the time being. They did not need it either, they had their merits. It was they who filled the ranks of the SA. The SA had done the main work; it had grabbed the most crudely when Marxism had been put to death. It had strangled Marxist socialism to make room for national socialism. The Communist Manifesto was burned so that on the ground of the February program the socialist nation would realize its unity and community. The SA men were for the most part poor devils who were by no means green to capitalism; they had not intended to finish off Marxism in exchange for capitalist restoration. After Marxism had been rendered mute, they wanted to punch capitalism in the mouth; they were gruff and given to any wild action against citizens who were already too carelessly and defiantly mounting the high capitalist steed that Hitler had saddled them with. The SA had fundamentally misunderstood its own revolution; it was still dreaming of socialist castles in the air when monopoly capitalism had already established itself in highly massive fortresses. The SA men felt themselves to be soldiers of the revolution, who had to give it meaning. What had been made of it for the time being they disapproved of; but still their regiments and brigades stood. If the capitalist bourgeois wanted to reap where they had fought in the sweat of their brow, then the second revolution was due, which would finally put a stop to it.

Had not the National Socialist Revolution in general remained questionable insofar as it had not yet played the monopoly of military power into the hands of its particular army? The Cromwell Revolution had produced its iron sides, the French Revolution its Jacobin armies, the Bolshevik Revolution its Red Army. In the Third Reich, however, the Reichswehr still had the big word; it was closely allied with the same big bourgeoisie which wanted to cheat the SA out of national socialism and against which the second revolution, as soon as it became necessary, had to be directed. The Reichswehr was as reactionary as the capitalist bourgeoisie; it stood by the big bourgeoisie, which resisted national socialism. The armed force that the National Socialist revolution needed was only the brown army of the SA; only when the brown army had supplanted the Reichswehr had the National Socialist revolution basically succeeded. The brown army had to take the place in the Third Reich that the Red Army had taken in Soviet Russia; it, not the Reichswehr, had accomplished the revolution. If the soldier of the revolution did not master its political creation, the whole revolutionary work had failed.

Almost all organizational entities that the Third Reich still tolerated had a leadership that was deployed against the followers. The organization was not allowed to bring to bear the self-will of the masses it united; it was, as it were, the wall that threw back the echo of what Hitler had shouted into the wind. The tops of the organizations were the appointed guardians who basically told Hitler what to say and cut off from the masses at their mercy any possibility of making themselves heard in a dismissive sense. The top of the organization stifled in the masses all their own impulses that were not entirely in harmony with Hitler's guiding principles. By speaking for the masses under its control, it virtually prevented them from actually having their say. In Captain Rohm, the SA still had a "chief of staff" who did not incapacitate them in the same way. He sensed their heart's diligence and fell into its rhythm himself; their impulses of will became his own. What moved the SA also moved him. He wanted above all to be on the closest terms with the brown millions of whom he was the commander and then wanted to see how he got along with Hitler; if necessary, he wanted to champion the cause of the SA men before Hitler in the hope of finally finding his ear and applause.

The disappointed SA 131 Rohm was one of Hitler's few friends. He had almost as many years under his belt as a National Socialist as Hitler himself. He had launched Hitler as a national leader, made him interesting to the Reichswehr and to financiers. He was privy to the initial secrets of the movement; he had also peered into the soul of Hitler the man. Once he had hung up his uniform to serve the movement. Even when he had wanted to build up the SA as a military unit, it may have been in his mind to create his revolutionary army for the coming empire. By cultivating ties with Hitler as a Reichswehr captain, he had engaged in illegal experiments. The atmosphere of illegality attracted him; self-confidently he called his memoir "History of a High Traitor". It gave him pleasure to cheat the existing order; he professed to be a high traitor out of passion. He was not afraid of being an adventurer; he satisfied his adventurism when he went to Bolivia and entered military service there. In his "History of a High Traitor" he shows himself thoroughly biased by the bourgeois-national slogans and points of view of his time; but he avoids the pathetic pomposity; his simplicity asserts itself amid the patriotic idioms to which he pays tribute. At times a genuine independent feeling flashes up, an independent, self-willed judgment expresses itself. He was touched, he assures us, sympathetically by the fact that the Communists in 1919 never betrayed weapons caches to the enemy, as the Social Democrats did; they never ran to the cadi or "to big brother in Berlin" to denounce; for them, the armed patriotic units were "all the more reason for the proletariat" to "wage the struggle in unison. He could not help himself: "this attitude has always pleased me from the communists". He would have had means of power at that time to have communist arms depots seized: "Mostly I have been content to know about the depots and to keep them under surveillance." His brain, as you can see, is by no means gelatinized by patriotic phrases; he is still capable at times of a personally shaped view of a matter. He tells simply and soberly; perhaps one finds that now and then he touches the border of childishness. In his reflections he is nowhere significant; he never sees to the bottom of the driving forces, but it is nevertheless possible to hear what he thinks of things. He is not narrow-minded; even if he does not know any better at the moment, he gives hope of being teachable. His style is definite and clear; he is characterized more by straightness than richness of expression. Quotations are frequently interspersed; the author knows his classical literature. He has the ambition to be cultured; he is not without understanding in matters of art; he even writes poetry. In his book he gives samples of his distich’s and rhymes. Although the distich’s are not witty, they are not entirely devoid of spirit. The verses betray that he knows what a poem is; he even gets involved in elegies. There is something humanly touching in seeing how he shows off, not without vanity, the wooden and clumsy children of his muse. He stands out in his environment; his mental agility, his emotional sensitivity and his unambiguous character, although they remain within the bounds of the average, still exceed the measure of human qualities that are characteristic of the rest of the National Socialist leadership class.

Admittedly, he has a morbid homosexual disposition; his sophistication and sensitivity are, as is so often the case with officers, the mental and spiritual emanation of homosexuality. His morbid inclination has been a public secret all these years. Hitler knew about it; the rumors would not die down for a long time that his relationship with Rohm was not free of erotic touches. Hitler never takes offense; private matters of his proven leaders do not concern him, he declared one day with striking sharpness. In 1932, Röhm's love letters to the neurologist Heimsoth fell into the hands of the Prussian police; a member of the Republican Schutzbund, Helmut Klotz, threw them on the market in brochure form. They caused no small sensation. Rohm complained in the letters from Bolivia that he longed for young boys of notorious German night clubs; he hinted that he had given his vice an entrance in the Bolivian army.

This revelation did not break Rohm's neck within the National Socialist movement. Hitler turned a deaf ear. The party press called Klotz a slanderer. In 1933, Klotz escaped assassination just in time by fleeing abroad. Heimsoth, who was accused of having played Röhm's letters into the hands of the police, was mysteriously

killed in the spring of 1934. Everyone knew that, following the example of the chief of staff, large circles of the SA and the Hitler Youth were paying homage to homosexual vice.

But Rohm remained chief of staff. Hitler allows Rohm to accompany him to Hindenburg in 1932; the field marshal growls in offense, but he appoints Rohm Reich minister without portfolio on December 1, 1933. Rohm initially finds himself in full agreement with Reich Chancellor Hitler. October 1933 he told the Berlin correspondent of the "Allgemeen Handelsblad": "The Reichswehr is the sole arms bearer of the Reich, the SA is the will and idea bearer of the National Socialist German revolution." The SA, he said, was protecting not only all of Germany but also Europe from Bolshevism. Its discipline, he said, was not warlike. Rohm had become Reich minister to ensure the SA's closest cooperation with public authorities.

Meanwhile, Rohm was stuck in a crooked position. He was the man with the "moral defect"; in bourgeois terms, things smelled bad around him. The Reichswehr remained cool toward him, and the big bourgeoisie exercised measured social restraint. The same forces of reaction that wanted to deprive the simple SA man of the fruits of his revolution gave him the cold shoulder. He was irritated by the pride of virtue of the upper ten thousand, who were obnoxiously spreading themselves everywhere; he felt declassified because they shunned him. He understood the SA man; he had really come up short.

Gradually, Rohm sought to push himself into the foreground. One could hear him ironizing the prudery of the moralists; he took sides with the coarse SA man who got on the nerves of the moralists. He strengthened the SA's sense of self; it should not allow itself to be pushed into a corner. He wanted to enlist SA leaders as officers in the Wehrmacht; finally, he no longer hid the fact that he was seeking the office of Reich Minister of Defense, to whom all armed troops and units would be subordinate. The Reichswehr could no longer be eliminated immediately; he wanted to decompose it slowly. The SA was to penetrate it, then later absorb it.

The Reichswehr became restless and suspicious. It objected to the replenishment of the SA that Rohm was carrying out; it saw through what the chief of staff was up to.

The big bourgeoisie shared the concerns of the Reichswehr; as soon as the SA became the nation's weapons bearer, the protection of the treasury was in trouble. Tensions between the SA and the Reichswehr grew. The Reichswehr was openly discredited as a hotbed of reaction. A violent confrontation between the two power structures seemed inevitable; the word "second revolution" began to circulate. Rohm allowed illfeeling to develop between the party and the SA as well; the SA began to speak contemptuously of the party's officials. The SA went along with the idea that it still had to fulfill a special revolutionary task. It was clear that Rohm "consciously contributed to the alienation of the SA from the party as well as from the other state institutions." The most important of the "other state institutions" was the Reichswehr.

In the SA at that time, the will for recognition of the petty bourgeoisie was still condensed; it did not want to be degraded to a mere extra, it wanted to be the main character of the revolutionary play. This pettybourgeois desire for prestige suits the lansquenets with a "past," with criminal records and amnestied femicides. Reaction continues to make them feel that they are actually a heavy burden; they know that they will be sent to the desert as soon as the big bourgeoisie is firmly in the saddle and the Reichswehr has finally taken over. The socialist sentiments of the petty bourgeois still leave a door open to the industrial proletariat; that is a card the SA does not want to let out of its hand. Rohm becomes the bearer and administrator of these currents.

In the eyes of the upper middle classes, they are "national Bolshevik"; in the eyes of the Reichswehr, they corrode the people's military strength.

The man with the moral defect

133 Hitler wanted to balance out the differences, which were becoming more pronounced from month to month. He found the behavior of individual SA leaders, who were ready to clash with the reaction, "unnational socialist", sometimes "downright repulsive" or "highly detestable". They become all the more a source of disquiet to the movement "as its lack of practical National Socialism sought to disguise itself in very inappropriate new revolutionary demands." He points out to Chief of Staff Rohm "these and a number of other grievances, without any fruitful remedy, or even any recognizable response to my exhibitions." Very serious arguments ensued, in which Hitler "for the first time had doubts about the loyalty of this man. Warnings are brought to Hitler's attention; they begin to instill in him "misgivings that, with the best will in the world, I was no longer able to refute." From the month of May 1934 on, Hitler is convinced "that Chief of Staff Rohm was engaged in ambitious plans which, if realized, could only lead to the most serious shocks." The intrigue against Rohm, to whom Hess lends his hand, has succeeded; Rohm feels that the Reichswehr and the big bourgeoisie have gained the upper hand with Hitler. He no longer doubts that the revolutionary fighting strength of the SA is to be broken; he writes vehement letters to Hitler; he fears that the SA might be dissolved altogether. Rohm has a conversation with Hitler that lasts almost five hours. Hitler opposes plans for a "national Bolshevik action"; he calls the claim that the SA is to be dissolved a "scurrilous lie"; he complains about excesses by SA men and demands that these elements be weeded out. "The Chief of Staff left this conversation with the assurance that the rumors were partly untrue, partly exaggerated; he would, moreover, do everything in his power to see that everything was now in order."

In the speech in which Hitler justified the June massacres to the German people and the world on July 1, 1934, he concealed the fact that he had arranged with Rohm for a meeting of all high SA leaders in Wiessee on June 30; in passing, he merely remarked that he had suddenly decided "to go personally to a meeting of SA leaders scheduled for Wiessee. It was because of this leaders' meeting that Rohm and Heines were in Wiessee at the end of June; it was to this meeting that the other SA leaders set out. Hitler's adjutant Brückner had still ordered various SA leaders, such as Heydebreck and Killinger, to appear in Wiessee by telephone on June 28 and 29; no excuses were to apply. Hitler himself organized the SA leaders' meeting in Wiessee; the SA in the Reich was to be leaderless everywhere on June 30. He did not fear any action by the Chief of Staff for that day and did not need to fear it. Rohm hoped to win Hitler over to his side in the meeting after all; he expected Hitler to speak with clarity about his intentions as to what should happen to the SA.

Rohm had not envisaged any undertakings against Hitler; his plans had not yet progressed that far, he had not yet made up his mind. So far, he had limited himself to seeking connections, clarifying the situation, strengthening his position. He was in contact with General Schleicher, but without having conspired with him; he drew devoted followers to himself. In the dark sense of the consequences of his preparatory deliberations, he had cautious relations established with the Soviet Union through intermediaries. But all this still hovered in the indefinite and intangible. Nothing had happened yet and no action was in sight. His thoughts were completely turned to the forthcoming discussion with Hitler. So clear was his conscience that he did not even smell mischief when Hess had uttered his threats at the Gau party conference in Essen on June 24. "The order of the Fuehrer, to whom we swore allegiance, alone has validity," Hess had said. ""Woe to him who breaks loyalty, believing that he can serve the revolution by revolt."" Adolf Hitler, he said, was the great strategist of the revolution. "Woe to him who clumsily tramples between the fine threads of his strategic plans, under the delusion that he can do it faster. He is an enemy of the revolution - even if he acts in the best faith." This was aimed at Rohm; but the latter did not notice it. He did not feel affected by it. He remained inactive in Weiessee, awaiting the arrival of the Fuehrer; calmly he slept there, while the crushing blow against him was already a done deal.

The big bourgeoisie and the Reichswehr did not adhere to what Rohm was planning at the moment, but to what he would have to plan and put into effect in the course of time, if the driving forces, of which he was

Röhm has no idea what he is worth an organ, were not caught in the arm. Rohm was too blind to see what he finally meant in Germany; he had no conception of the political function he was performing; he had no idea of the scope of the role that had fallen to him. Around him were gathered all the forces and powers that opposed the restoration of bigbourgeois imperialism, the transformation of Hitler's nationally misunderstood dictatorship into open monopoly-capitalist tyranny; he had become, one might say pointedly, the representative and trustee of serious social-revolutionary affairs on German soil. He was more dangerous than he believed himself to be; his intelligence was not sufficient to see through the historical sense which his existence had meanwhile acquired. His upper-class opponents did not credit him with this cluelessness as a mitigating circumstance. He is the man from whom the SA expects the signal for the second revolution; with that alone he has become guilty. From now on, only what he objectively represents will be attributed to him, not what he subjectively wants. He must fall, so that the second revolution is stifled before it can break out.

It was not difficult to convince Hitler that he had only to lose from the second revolution, nothing to gain. He is Chancellor of the Reich with dictatorial rights. Hindenburg is already marked by death. Hitler only needs to stretch out his hand, then he will be head of the Reich, commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht. The Reichswehr offers him what his heart desires, and the big bourgeoisie nods its approval. Painlessly and legally everything falls into his lap; he does not need a second revolution. There is no struggle price for him; the highest gives him the renunciation of struggle. The second revolution is directed against him; it wants to prevent him from taking the last step to the highest summit of power peacefully and safely. It exposes him to the danger of falling back into the liefe just before reaching the highest goal. The experience of fifteen years has taught him that he has always been lucky when he has been in league with the Reichswehr and the big bourgeoisie; it would be presumptuous folly to try to wrest from them by revolutionary effort what they offer him voluntarily. Hitler has as much to fear from the second revolution as the big bourgeoisie and the Reichswehr: so he must crush its head.

It is not possible to verify the truth of the rumor that in a meeting between Hitler, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, the Reich Minister of War, and the Chief of the Supreme Army Command, the question of how Rohm's activities were affecting German military strength was raised; after General Fritsch had explained the impossibility of entrusting Rohm with army power, a long silence ensued; at last Goebbels broke it with the words, "Then he must die." In any case, the decision to kill Rohm had been made long before June 30; it was then up to Goebbels to think about the effective direction. The SA was to be subjected to a violent cure that would drive out its revolutionary exuberance; with one blow it was to be hurled down into the abyss of political impotence. In the future, it should no longer frighten the big bourgeoisie with its national Bolshevism and no longer challenge the Reichswehr with its military ambition.

It was not acceptable merely to depose and arrest Rohm; nor was it to be assumed that he would escape in time. As a prisoner he would have become a martyr of revolutionary thought for the SA. As an emigrant, he would have known too much. When Rohm wrote memoirs, Hitler's human and political reputation was at stake.

One could not be more merciful against his closest followers than against him. There was more than one among them who could tell how to set fire to a Reichstag and who would have been capable of disclosure. There were too many conspirators in the February crime; since most of them were psychopaths, one could not be sure of their permanent secrecy. The reason of state had long since demanded a clean-up among them; before Hitler became head of state, the tools of the National Socialist Reichstag arson had to be eradicated. As in February 1933, a process was arranged that branded the victims, whose destruction was in prospect, as culprits in a capital crime. The recalcitrant SA leaders were not blamed for arson, but for acts of terror, assassination preparations against the Führer, treason and treason against the country.

The SA was given leave of absence for the month of July; they felt it was a disguised reprimand and a trial of cold treatment. She complied, however; up in Wiessee, Rohm was to represent her cause with the greatest vigor. The strange scatterings of dark origin did her an injustice; they reported on the gathering of SA formations: the raiding of barracks, the raising of Reichswehr formations were imminent. In contrast, the Reichswehr troops were on the alert. One sensed that someone was at work to charge the atmosphere with vicious tension.

No SA leader was preparing a storming of barracks; most had been disturbed in their travel plans had been unpleasantly disturbed by the invitation to the Wiesse meeting. Hitler had still visited a labor camp in Westphalia on June 29.

The surprising enterprise he intended had been concocted in deepest secrecy with Goering, Himmler, Heydrich, Goebbels, and Wagner, the Bavarian Minister of the Interior; Hitler's tour of inspection in the German West was intended to prevent Rohm from becoming suspicious.

Still in the night of June 29-30, while Hitler and his entourage were approaching Munich in airplanes, the Minister of the Interior Wagner began the action.

He arrested the Munich police chief Schmid, a confidant of Röhm, and issued orders on the basis of which the SA leaders arriving in Munich from the Reich by train or in cars were arrested and sent to Stadelheim prison. SS men were the organs who, in the "name of the law," reminded the SA leaders of the transience and fragility of political greatness. Rohm was not hatching terrorist high treasonous plots in Wiessee, but was lying peacefully in bed when SS gangs occupied the house and seized him. He did not resist because he did not understand the situation. Heines was also seized here. Göring carried out a similar action in Prussia.

Immediately the shootings began. No proceedings were initiated, no proof of guilt was provided, no court was set in motion. Apparently, the murder squads worked according to a list that had been drawn up beforehand. "I gave the order to shoot the chief culprits in this treason," Hitler said in the Reichstag, "and I further gave the order to burn out to the raw flesh the ulcers of our internal well poisoning and the poisoning of foreign countries.

And I further gave orders that at any attempt by the mutineers to resist their arrest, they should be put down at once at gunpoint." There was no law and no authority according to which Hitler would have been authorized to deal with the lives of German people in this way. "In that hour," he well remarked, "I was responsible for the fate of the German nation and thus the supreme judge of the German people." But at all times even the supreme court ruler was bound by legal norms; he could condemn, though perhaps according to exceptional law, but not simply shoot down. Apart from the fact that the SA leaders had not come to Wiessee to stage a high treason, but to talk with Hitler, and that therefore there was no state emergency and no imminent danger, the arrested persons had been harmless since the moment they were under lock and key; they could now be tried in peace. "If the opinion is held against me," Hitler explained, "that only a judicial trial could have resulted in an exact weighing of guilt and atonement, then I most solemnly protest against this opinion.

Whoever rises up against Germany commits treason. Whoever commits treason should not be punished according to the extent and magnitude of his deed, but according to his revealed attitude. He who presumes to instigate a mutiny within, in breach of loyalty and faith and sacred promises, can expect nothing but that he himself will be the first victim." These are the views either of an executioner whose profession is to shed human blood, or of a criminal who has never possessed a sense of order or justice, or those of a Caesar-mad tyrant who has had that sense destroyed.

Arrests and shootings

The murders of June 30 are worthy of late Roman history; in new history they find a counterpart only in that abomination of Sinigaglia, where Cesare Borgia had the Orsini and Vitelli summoned to him in December 1502, then imprisoned and murdered. Hitler had fallen in the style of Cesare Borgia: "Messer Rimino," reported Machiavelli to Florence on December 20, 1502, "was found this morning in two pieces in the marketplace, where he still lies, and all the people have been able to see him. One does not know exactly the causes of his death, except that it so pleased the prince, who shows that he knows how to raise and destroy at will, according to merit."

Since the arrangers of the bloody deeds were not sure how far they had already succeeded in stifling the German people's sense of justice during the period of their rule, they invented a true crime novel. Their victims had been immediately turned around the corner, so the truth did not come to light so soon. They did not dare to hold a second trial of the kind of the Reichstag fire trial; they practiced "summary justice" so that their web of lies could not be torn by anyone.

The first official announcement, for which presumably Goebbels was responsible, already shows the basic lines of that criminal novel, which was later expanded into a rounded whole by Hitler in his Reichstag speech. But because it could not yet be foreseen how the SA would respond to the slaughter of its leaders, the moral feeling of the people was mobilized against it as a precaution; it was cast in an evil light; if it moved, the brown uniform was discredited overnight as a symbol of repulsiveness and stinking ejection. "The execution of the arrest," it was proclaimed, "showed such sad pictures morally that every trace of compassion had to vanish. Some of these SA leaders had taken pleasure boys with them. One was startled in the most disgusting situation and arrested." Only later, when the SA had remained quiet, was an attempt made to dispel the foul odor that had been deliberately spread around the SA.

The next day, Goebbels was already spinning the first threads of Hitler's heroic legend. At 7 a.m. Hitler had arrived in Wiessee with him, Brückner, Schaub, Schreck and Dietrich. "Without finding any resistance, we are able to enter the house and surprise the conspirators' guild while they are still asleep and arrest them immediately. The Führer himself makes the arrest with a courage without equal."

With the crime novel that Hitler presents to the Reichstag in mid-July, he continues to work on his heroic legend. Now he is seething with indignation over Röhm's homosexuality, over which he had held a protective hand for years. Goebbels' heroic report is confirmed: he himself had sought out the monster in the cave. "It was finally clear to me that only one man had to confront the Chief of Staff. To me he broke faith, and I alone had to hold him accountable for it."

Those murdered had been conspirators who had also engaged in questionable negotiations with FrancoisPoncet. The elimination of Hitler had been decided, the murderer had already been hired; "Standartenführer Uhl confessed only a few hours before his death that he was willing to carry out such an order." A confrontation of the bloodiest kind lasting several days had been planned by Rohm in league with Hitler's adversaries. "Only a ruthless and bloody intervention was perhaps still able to stifle the spread of the revolt." One hundred mutineers had been annihilated so that "10000 innocent SA men would not have to bleed to death on the other side." He had saved the German people from the suffering "that might have befallen tens of thousands of German women if this deed had succeeded." He was again savior and savior, as he had been so often before.

In Rohm and his followers, tendencies were suppressed that Hitler, having allied himself with the upper middle classes and the Reichswehr, could feel directed against him. These tendencies had not yet developed into concrete actions, which should have been countered "in a flash". Hitler himself basically admitted that he had avenged the attitude, not an accomplished deed. Thus the SA was intimidated, bent, rendered incapable of action, its sense of self broken.

In 'reality, this was a civil war operation; like a quick-witted general, Hitler singled out the careless and nonchalant Generalissimo and the staffs of the enemy forces; they had fallen into his trap and now he was eliminating them. For the Reichswehr and the big bourgeoisie, the SA had become the enemy, the "Marxist" front; it was "communist-infested"; it was no longer reliable for the capitalist citizen; it had become as dangerous as Bolshevists were. The civil war situation made it possible to fall upon the SA by force of arms; one was a civil war soldier if one put the SA leaders up against the wall, not a simple murderer.

The Reichswehr, which had instigated the emasculation of the SA and coolly ordered the assassination of the SA leaders, exercised wise restraint; it did not interfere in the civil war executions. It was the most important principle of the National Socialist revolution that capitalist reaction should nowhere allow itself to be caught in the act; it was a condition of success that only its National Socialist straw man should ever appear. In this case, the straw man was the SS.

The SS had a different composition than the SA; it was of better, more distinguished origin. It included the jeunesse dorée, the educated circles, well-off bourgeoisie, prosperous peasants. Their rivalry with the SA also had a social flavor; the possessive instincts of the SS men felt troubled by the SA's proletarian tinge, tinged with National Socialism. The SS marksmen practiced their murderous craft all the more devotedly because they knew themselves to be in solidarity with the property order with which the revolutionary SA had wanted to tie themselves. They were commanded to the bloody reckoning as "Aryan selection"; they understood themselves so well on it, as in 1933 the executed had understood themselves on bestialities against class-conscious workers. In this respect, the SS was, without intending it, the arm of balancing justice. The revolutionary spark that had smoldered in the SA was thoroughly extinguished. The radical left, which every revolutionary process brings up, was crushed. Thus the Anabaptists, thus the Levellers had been burned out; thus Cavaignac had raged against the French workers, thus Noske against the German Spartacists. The idea of a second revolution was dead; undisturbed, the National Socialist revolution now fulfilled its original purpose: to put the big bourgeoisie and its Wehrmacht in charge.

The SA was not dissolved; it was allowed to continue in disgrace. It had not offered the slightest resistance; it had behaved no better than the socialist workers, their parties and trade unions had behaved in 1933. As late as June 30, when Hitler appointed Lutze, one of his vacuous creatures, as Obergruppenführer, he expressed his expectation "that your faithful and obedient work will succeed in creating out of my SA the instrument the nation needs." At the subsequent party congress in Nuremberg, he enumerated the qualities needed by the SA as an instrument of capitalist-restored Germany: "The SA man and the SA leader can be nothing but loyal, obedient, disciplined, modest, willing to sacrifice - or he is not an SA man." The socialrevolutionary aberration is for him, that is the lesson of June 30, a crime worthy of death. k

While the "socialist" wing within the SA was cleared up in such an exemplary manner, the repercussions for the petty-bourgeois masses could not be ignored. It would have been alarming if these masses had suddenly understood the big-bourgeois function of National Socialism and the Third Reich. They had to be thrown into confusion and led on false tracks. This was done by the acts of murder committed against "reactionaries".

The "reaction" had indeed forgotten the necessary caution in the past months. It had thought that it was completely over the hill and had already firmly re-established itself. She made no secret of her disdain for the "little Hitlers"; she hinted that the time had now dawned when she could once again take care of her own political business and when she would no longer need the demagogic cover-up. It no longer wanted to pay the price that had been agreed upon and that had been collected by the old fighters who had risen overnight to fabulously high offices. This had given fuel to the SA's National Bolshevism, that the National Socialist upstarts felt threatened in their posts and positions by "reactionary professionals." Even

138

The SS exercises the office of executioner

monarchists stirred; the political spoils that the old fighters had brought home in 1933 attracted envious, greedy glances all around, by which they felt harassed.

Vice-Chancellor Papen had become the epitome of reaction. All reactionary varieties were united in him. He was a Catholic and wanted to create a community of interests between the Catholic Church and the Third Reich. He was the confidant of the upper middle class. He was backed by the Reichswehr. In his hands lay the cause of feudalism. Monarchism could count on him.

It was not hidden: the "socialists" of the Third Reich hated him. In his famous "Marburg Speech" he had ventured very far; here he had registered the demand of the reaction for a normalization of the conditions. Goebbels forbade the dissemination of the speech; he felt that the upper middle classes were doing themselves the greatest harm by already letting the cat out of the bag. Papen deserved a lesson for his exuberance; it was given to him on June 30.

If Herr von Papen had not been warned in time by the Reichswehr and taken into protection, he, too, would have fallen by the wayside; for several days he was taken into the custody of a security detachment in his apartment. But his co-workers did not escape the fate that had also been intended for him. Edgar Jung, the author of the Marburg speech, fell as Papen's liaison to the upper middle classes, Captain Bose as his liaison to feudalism and monarchism, Ministerialrat Klausener as his liaison to the Catholic Church. Audi in the provinces, the assassination squads cooled their chops on numerous "reactionaries" who had too boldly brought themselves to the fore. The entire reaction should know: although the Third Reich chased all the rabbits into its kitchen, its founders, founding fathers and directors did not allow anyone to interfere with them; they demanded that they be allowed to do so. They delivered their reactionary performances solidly and promptly; but in return they defended their political tools, which they knew how to use more skillfully than anyone else, with claws and teeth.

The corpses of the "reactionaries" were a truly ideal alibi for the petty-bourgeois masses. Now they no longer doubted that the blow of June 30 had been directed against reaction. With a sure instinct for propaganda, Goebbels had officially disseminated: "The Fuehrer gave orders to the Prussian Minister-President Gö- ring to carry out a similar action in Berlin and there, in particular, to root out the reactionary allies of this political plot." Never had these reactionary allies of Rohm existed. But still Rohm was marked as a stirrup holder of reaction; again white was black and black was white. The battle that Hitler had fought for the big bourgeoisie against the last bodies of power of socialist tendencies on German soil took on the meaning for the pettybourgeois masses of having been a battle for socialism against capitalist reaction.

Late in the afternoon of June 30, Goering had invited the foreign journalists to the Reich Propaganda Ministry. Goering, "bursting with energy" and showing not the slightest nervousness from the first word to the last, told the pressmen the "story" he had wrought together with Hitler, coquettishly assuring them that he was known to strike "hard and vigorously" when he struck. When he had already reached the tower, he turned back again and spoke with dramatic emphasis: "To make everything clear, General Schleicher, the former Reich Chancellor, resisted when he was arrested - he is dead."

Schleicher had not "resisted; he would not even have found the opportunity to do so. Minister Goering had deliberately told the untruth. The assassins entered Schleicher's house and shot him down together with his wife. They fled in a car to Berlin; since they were immediately signaled to the Berlin police from Potsdam, they could have been apprehended. The Berlin police took no action; they did not want to get their hands on the perpetrators.

Schleicher was in no conspiracy with Rohm or Papen; with him, a special National Socialist account was settled. He had once wanted to play with Hitler and National Socialism; National Socialism was to be made

capable of governing prematurely so that it would close the way to autocracy for itself. Schleicher was no enemy of the upper middle classes, but he did not want their trees to grow to the sky. He also intended to keep a tighter leash on the working classes, but he found it questionable to tie them hand and foot. This had given him the reputation of being the social general. He thought of the case of war: he resisted pushing the enslavement of the working class to the point that the proletarian in his despair had to welcome in every enemy of the country his savior, liberator and confederate. With the National Socialist party he had probably wanted to educate the Marxist parties and the trade unions to modesty; conversely, however, organized Marxism was to keep National Socialism in check. When National Socialism threatened to grow over his head, he wanted to blow it up with Gregor Strasser's help; after Hitler's Potempa Telegram, he had even considered rendering the entire National Socialist leadership harmless. In January 1933 he had engineered a coup d'état by means of which he intended to keep Hitler out of power; it was only because he did not act quickly enough that Hitler, with Papen's and Hugenberg's support, beat him to it. Schleicher did not hide the contempt he harbored for Hitler and his entourage; he could be heard calling Hitler an "idiot" in front of ear witnesses. He knew the background to the Reichstag fire; as Hitler's successor, he hoped he could still enlighten the people about it. He was a member of the Reichswehr from its pre-fascist period, in which it had been on good terms with Moscow and in which it had still known how to appreciate the importance of organized labor to its full value.

Schleicher died as a victim of National Socialist revenge. At the same time, with his death the Reichswehr cleansed itself of its last Weimar "sins": it atoned for having at times had some sympathy for the Marxist working class, for not having always pledged itself skin and hair to the reactionary big bourgeoisie and for playing the Russian card in foreign policy. From now on, there were to be no social generals, only fascist ones. Later, the military honor society of the members of the Third Guard Infantry Regiment demanded clarity about the Schleicher case in order to either erase the dead man from the lists as a high traitor or to rehabilitate him. The Reichswehr behaved miserably in this; it was content to let Mackensen make the vague statement in a closed meeting of the Schlieffen Society, a general association, that Schleicher had also fallen in the fight for the new Germany.

The speech in which Hitler gave his account to the nation began with an indictment of the Weimar system. In 1933, the National Socialist party had taken over a state "that was in full political and economic decay. The Weimar parties had "failed shamefully," he said. "A new regiment did away with an old and sick age." The June murders showed the mastery of the new regiment, and the man whose arms were still dripping with the blood of the guiltlessly slaughtered was in a truly strange position to set himself up as a moral judge of the Weimar past. The Times, certainly a most serious publication, had remarked after the atrocious events that Germany was headed by a gang of gangsters: this statement from such a serious mouth could no longer be dismissed.

The bourgeois Germany, however, had no more feeling for this horrible fact. On July 3, the Reich Cabinet met and passed a law, the only article of which read: "The measures taken to suppress treasonable and treasonable attacks on June 30 and July 1 and 2, 1934, are legal as state self-defense." General Blomberg, on behalf of the Reich Cabinet and the Wehrmacht, thanked the Führer "for his decisive and courageous action, by which he had saved the German people from civil war. The Führer had shown himself to be a statesman and a soldier of a greatness which had awakened in the Cabinet members and in the entire German people the pledge of achievement, devotion and loyalty in all hearts in this difficult hour." The Reichswehr acknowledged with gratitude that it had been freed from its inconvenient brown competitors. Writings were presented for the signature of the death-matted Reich President, expressing his gratitude and appreciation to Hitler and Goering for the "valiant deployment" of his own person, for the "energetic and

Murderers amnesty themselves

successful action." The murderers and their accomplices not only amnestied themselves, but sprinkled incense on top of it.

Bourgeois Germany had lost all moral standards in its boundless social anxiety. Hitler learned that there was no crime whatsoever by which he could attract the disgust of the German bourgeoisie. Nowhere did moral resistance arise; the bourgeoisie had the government it deserved and deserved. The 30th of June tore veils: before all eyes lay the ghastly extent of the mental disruption and rottenness of the German bourgeois masses.

XXIH. "Parties I see and celebrations..."

The existence of the Third Reich is bound up with the fact that a false conception of things remains alive in the minds of the petty-bourgeois and proletarian masses. The 'realities of the Third Reich are of a precarious nature; in the long run they would arouse disgust and repugnance against themselves if the unbiased gaze saw through them in their naked essentialness. The Third Reich seduces the masses to the intellectual vice of paying attention not to the things themselves but to their presentation. It has occasionally been said that a good cook prepares the most piquant fricassee with the help of his spices from an old leather glove; similarly, the political cooks of National Socialism understand the palate thrill, which makes one forget that one is being fed with indigestible morsels. The Third Reich serves exclusively unpalatable facts; but it brings them to the table in refined broths. It distracts the eye from the true core of every matter and captivates it by the captivating vapor it spreads in swaths. It handles the effort and trappings, the thickening and direction with mastery. While the trappings capture all the senses of the masses, they walk blindly and unsuspectingly into the traps in which they are crouched. While her limbs are still being twisted, she amuses herself with the shenanigans performed by the executioners of the Third Reich; she cannot grasp the seriousness of her situation.

The patriotic history is an inexhaustible rumble chamber from which the Third Reich supplies itself with historical dust, torches, banners, costumes and masks for its malicious mummery dances; it supplies the magnificent language of symbolism which always impresses where it sounds and with which the masses, who are to be hoodwinked, are always to be made stupid. The most miserable horse-deceiver still gains a glimmer of sublimity when he tricks his victim from the high historical cothurn.

The first stage effect of the Third Reich succeeded when the coups d'état of spring 1933 were staged as a "national revolution". The "Day of Potsdam" was contested by the Prussian tradition. Like a fireworks arrangement, it was burned out in a few hours; only empty shells and charred cardboard remnants remained. The upper-class dictatorship presented itself in the worn skirt of the Old Fritzen; this earned it the cheers of the masses, who are always moved when they are allowed to encounter their "great past," be it in the streets, be it in the circus, be it on the screen, be it on the boards. The coffin of the Prussian king, when Hitler paused before it in "reverent prayer," became a comedy prop, and the Potsdam Garrison Church a meeting place for dark men of honor. Hindenburg acted as a comic alter; his fee was the tax-free gift from Neudeck. Big-bourgeois imperialism celebrated the complete self-transformation of the free, selfdetermining people into subservient cannon fodder, which prepared itself mentally for the heroic deeds it needed for financial reasons.

From now on, Prussia was dead as a force of tradition. Hitler had sucked all symbolic marrow from its bones in a single day. The black-and-white flag was confiscated, as was the black-and-white-red one; as feudaljunior Prussia had been, it was no longer medieval enough for the needs of the upper classes. It had gradually yielded to the tendencies of serf liberation, and Frederick was a freethinker; the great personalities of the Napoleonic period were even liberalists. All this went against the train of the Third Reich. The Day of Potsdam paid Prussia the due reverence; but then one set out for the Middle Ages, which were still far behind Prussia. The Middle Ages: those were the centuries of the great feudal lords and the oppressive people, of mental gagging, of dogmatic faith, of torture and the Inquisition. The customs and traditions of the forefathers were refreshed, past costumes were ironed on, "folk dances" were rehearsed, and the "Master's Drink" was once again enjoyed. Henry the Lion became topical; the Guelph outranked the Hohenzollern. Otto the Great and Henry I were reverently approached at last; in Hitler these mighty Saxons had reappeared. When one looked to the bottom of the old German history, one discovered the physiognomy of the "Führer". The historical commemorations all suddenly took on National Socialist contours. European history since Charlemagne became the Old Testament of the German people; the German Bethlehem was Braunau, and the Christ to whom European history had been pointing from the beginning, Adolf Hitler. There was no longer any German historical symbol that did not have his swastika plastered on it. The soldier of the world war had died for the same National Socialist world view for which the three thousand Saxon noblemen had already bled in Verden an der Aller in the year 782. God had created the German as a National Socialist since time immemorial; whoever did not believe in Hitler had become unfaithful to his ancestors. Thus every historical commemoration became a National Socialist party event, and every National Socialist party event found a historical tradition with which it could give itself a mighty, time-honored relief. As often as the Third Reich wanted to drown the gloom of the masses in a festive intoxication, it annexed the cone of light of a great historical tradition; when the trumpets blared, the flags rustled, the speakers came to speak, every breast swelled, and everyone felt seized by the storm wind of world history directly by the shock of hair. The gray everyday life was bathed in the glow radiated by a glorious event of the past; the eye was dazzled and saw the sky full of bass violins, while it was covered by bleak veils of mist. In this way, in order to raise the spirits of the masses, national symbolism was scrapped piecemeal. Like Potsdam, the city of the Hohenzollerns, Nuremberg, the city of the Meistersingers, Goslar, the city of the Saxon emperors, Bückeburg, the countryside of Hermann the Cheruscan, were exposed for all time. No quiet and hidden corner of German history remained that had not been contaminated by National Socialism. Every honest man necessarily grew weary of his German history from the bottom of his heart; every period of the German past finally smelled with the same penetrance of the brown perfume. To whom the Third Reich went against nature, the whole of German history had to be given a wide berth.

It is in the blood of the bourgeoisie to put itself in the historical wardrobe; from the beginning it has envied the feudal order for its splendor. The masses parade best in front of skirts embroidered with gold and silver and trimmed with ermine. Although Napoleon I was a great plebeian, he threw on the imperial mantle; the crown of his Corsican administrator opened the noblest doors to the bourgeois interest. An emperor and a king are no longer enough for the Third Reich; it must literally amaze every day with another jewel from the treasury of the German past. The greatest plebeian of the 19th century, Napoleon, as emperor: thus the first act of the European bourgeois drama was opened. The most unrestrained underworld figure of the 20th century, Adolf Hitler as the savior in whom time was fulfilled after a thousand years of German history: this is the theatrical figure that dominates the last act of the same play. The mouthpiece of the conscienceless tribune produces the most pompous historical pathos: this is the last upper-class pied piper melody that has not yet lost all beguiling power over the masses.

The masses were not allowed to catch their breath; they had to remain in endless psychologically elevated states; the mass psychological problem is to prevent their disillusionment. In calculated intervals the whole

National symbolism is scrapped nation is involved in festivities of all-embracing extent; the flags, processions, solemn acts provide the feast for the eyes, the speakers the feast for the ears. Loudspeakers are set up in public places so that no one can escape from the noise and the buzz. May Day, the "national holiday," dragged everyone to the fairgrounds; "and so we," Hitler said, "have come together on this day not only to celebrate German labor, but thus also a new German man." Germany was a poor nation, Goebbels explained, "but although the national government under Hitler's chancellorship does not remotely 'think of dealing with the people's tax nest egg in a similarly reckless manner as was the case under the rule of the Social Democratic parties, the government has not allowed itself to be deprived of crowning the Day of National Labor on May 1 on the Tempelhofer Feld with a giant fireworks display on such a scale never before seen." Such a fireworks display has not yet been shown in all of Europe, he said. "These fireworks, too, are to contribute to fraternizing the workers of the forehead and the workers of the fist in an hour of celebration and joy according to the will of the national government and Reich Chancellor Hitler, to abolish the former class antagonisms and to unite the people into a unified national community which nothing can destroy." The party congress is the autumnal display that relieves the nation's boredom for eight days. Harvest Day follows in October; peasants and farmers are loaded into Büdteburg for "German Peasants' Day." The government declares that the Peasants' Day is "based on the fundamental recognition of the importance of the German peasantry and is intended to consciously put an end to an era in which the German peasant was condemned to play a subordinate role in the state on the basis of a liberalist idea of the state. On October 1, the entire nation should declare its support for the peasant, who represents the life source of the German people and guarantees the secure basis of nutrition". The flat countryside, like the city, must be swept into the mad whirl of the general big business. In between, the "landmarks of National Socialist reconstruction" provide the never-ending thrill. The opening of the Winterhilfswerk is a "ceremonial act of state". One Sunday the SA and SS begged the passers-by, the next the Schutzleute, the third actors and film stars, the fourth even ministers and highest state, municipal and party officials on the street corners; these were sensations that gave variety. The inauguration of the Reichsautobahnen has its uplifting significance every time. "Thus," exclaimed Hider in Frankfurt am Main, "I can think of nothing more beautiful at this hour than that it is not only an hour of initiation for the construction of this greatest road network in the world, but that this hour is at the same time once again a landmark for the construction of the German national community." The opening of exhibitions, congresses are occasions for the display of pomp and pageantry; cheap railroad trains bring the gawking crowds in droves from all parts.

"I see festivals and celebrations, I hear marches and songs. The city is colorful with flags, the swarm hums in unison. "*

Even from death, festive capital can be made; every National Socialist zero - even if he was only a dubious hooligan whom the jealous rival knocked down in the wine bar - captivates the masses when a state funeral is held for his corpse.

The leader of the Labor Front, Dr. Ley, coins the last keyword appropriate to this fantastic frenzy of uninterrupted festive excitement: "Rejoice in life!" The Third Reich inaugurated the dawn of the golden age; it reveals the enemy of the state if someone does not find the world more beautiful than it ever was.

* Friedrich Georg Jünger, Gedichte. (Der Mohn) Widerstandsverlag Berlin 1934.

The joy of life and the jubilation of life are organized by Ley himself. In November 1933, he founded the great Feierabendwerk "Strength through Joy." "Since working hours," he said, "demand maximum and top performance from creative people, one must offer the best of the best in leisure time as nourishment for the soul, the spirit and the body." The organization of leisure time puts the National Socialist functionary on the heels of the worker right into his hours of leisure. It is supposed to banish boredom, for from it "spring stupid, inflammatory, indeed ultimately criminal ideas and thoughts." The worker's pleasures, recreation, and hobbies are brought into line with National Socialism; the center of his social life becomes the "House of Labor. Even on his vacation he is not allowed to come to himself; his travels and wanderings are directed along party-approved lines. "Weekend trips and vacation trips must make it possible for the people to travel back and forth from east to west, from north to south, for cheap money, and everywhere there must be facilities to receive the traveling parties and show them the beauties." Camps will be built "where the Germans will spend their vacation time in breeding and comradeship." The worker, after all, is to have some cheap fun on the job; the workplace is "decorated." Radio conquers the machine shop so that the worker can hear his "Führer" on great occasions; dance music plays during breaks at work. The "beauty of work" compensates him for the insignificance of his wages.

"Strength through joy" expresses "that affirmation of life which pulses through us and which takes the place of the negation of life which in a past century dominated the world and our people." It is "our splendor in our social work." In 1936, six million workers participated in the trips, one million in the walks, five million in the sporting events of the Nazi community Kraft durch Freude. "Kraft durch Freude" organized trips to Madeira and the North; it built transport steamers to let proletarian vacationers see "distant lands." Five of its own seaside resorts for 20,000 vacationers each, thirty seagoing ships for at least 1,500 passengers each, new country recreation homes with 85,000 beds were announced in 1935 as the program of its "Three-Year Plan. 100 million Reichsmarks from the Labor Front were made available for this purpose.

The "Kraft-durch-Freude" (Strength through Joy) drivers flocked to the health resorts; they traveled cheaply and were fed for little money. Herds of them were driven to natural beauties and artistic monuments; they came to enjoy life as they would otherwise have done for work.

"Strength through Joy" deforms the world of proletarian leisure, of proletarian leisure, into a fairground; there the worker is supposed to lose the memory of the social battlefield. In the trade union coffers he once stored up his social war treasure; now he finances fairground spectacles and coarse, gang-like globetrotting with his dues. The class-conscious worker has his vocation; he leads a meaningful existence; he has his pride, his honor, his life's content. With class consciousness the worker loses his human nobility; he becomes mob. The mob has only bread and games in mind. "Strength through joy" gets the games going, as ambitious politicians did in ancient Rome, courting the favor of the masses. Just as National Socialist foreign policy seeks to turn the Russian people into colonial slaves, "Strength through Joy" seeks to fleece the classconscious working class. "Kraft durch Freude" creates a green lawn in the National Socialist labor prison; by drawing the eye to it, it should no longer notice the gray walls and the bars. The Hanswurstiaden, the frippery, the mass hustle and bustle, the travel magic with which "Kraft durch Freude" fills the worker's free time are supposed to bribe him to resign himself to being a lawless creature of capitalism during his working hours. "Strength through Joy" is his substitute for democracy; because he is allowed to poke his nose into all parts of the world at reduced prices, because he is allowed to sleep in beds in West and East, South and North, where hitherto only rich people lay down to rest, because something is always set in motion to entertain him, he is supposed to feel himself a free man; because he is allowed to pass the time when he has nothing to do at the moment, he is supposed to carry his head higher and to feel himself equal. Meanwhile, not free men, but intoxicated servants, who are also supervised in their pleasures, perform the festival and vacation noise on the open stage. Tyranny sees to it, said Aristotle in his "Politics," "that the

citizens who are at home always show themselves in public and stay before their tiir, because in this way it is least concealed what they do, and they are accustomed to low-mindedness as constant slaves."

With the 1936 Olympics, German festivities, celebrations, and displays grow into world horizons; the organization of sports competitions becomes the axis of the entire German state drive for months. It becomes a central issue for the people, the bureaucracy and the head of state who achieves the record in running, jumping and swimming. Germany becomes the arena of the globe; audiences and stars flock from everywhere. The Third Reich shows its subjects how important foreign countries take the German amusement park; this is an awareness that must help the "well-meaning" German get over the worst misery. The National Socialist Circenses want to be understood as an element of German world politics; the German kettledrums and trumpets are more useful than diplomatic notes. What causes headaches for foreign statesmen is solved "playfully" by Hitler.

But also here the two-facedness of all German things suddenly breaks out revealingly. The civilistic dalliance suddenly appears as a preliminary stage and training of the bloody craft. The rabble is on the wrong track if it thinks that the great commotion happens exclusively for its amusement; it does not see the dreadful seriousness that spreads under the cover of the festive noise. In the enormous rallies, the crowd is drilled to agree on slogans; the German halls and sports fields are terrains where mass psychology is exercised. In the event of war, the masses will react to the familiar signals as they have practiced in peace. In the case of parades, it does not fall out of the habit of marshaling. If it obeys blindly even in its merrymaking, any noncommissioned officer can get along with it. The railroad transports thousands and thousands to the great events of the nation; thus it gains experience for mobilization in how immense masses are to be conveyed from one place to another in days, even in hours. The masses, who camp in tents and eat from field kitchens, adapt to the life of a field camp. General staffs make accommodations for hundreds of thousands from one day to the next and supply them with provisions with improbable rapidity; their gaze, their judgment becomes accustomed to disposing of millions. The seaside resorts and country recreation homes are future military hospitals, the ocean liners the coming troop ships. The Olympic village provides shelter for the war academy, the Wehrmacht tests its organizational skills in the realization of the Olympics. All the games are war games in disguise.

Thus, it in no way destroys the uniformity of style when the Wehrmacht itself enters the ring and performs its acts in front of the on looking public. Since the nation's holidays are military maneuvers in disguise, it is all right for the Army to intervene with tanks and air squadrons. Whether the masses are on Army duty, working or celebrating, they are always on military duty; the lines between civilian and uniform are blurred. Even when the masses go to Madeira, they are under the thumb of the sergeant; on the "Days of the Wehrmacht" the real director steps in front of the ramp every time for a moment, who has all the strings in his hands on behalf of his upper-class money men.

The scenery, in front of which man marches up in his masses, are the pompous and monumental buildings. Here, vast complexes, pompous halls, amphitheaters and coliseums are built, there, gigantic airfields, monstrous symbols of military rule. The eye is gripped by the immense; it becomes a general feeling that one lives in the extraordinary. Stone and concrete are piled up in masses, just as people are rounded up in masses. The individual, who once made a great being of himself in the salon, is crushed in the "Congress Hall," which gives room to tens of thousands; there is no longer conversation, debate, or discussion, there is only applause, the national anthem is sung, the salutes are performed, the slogans are obeyed - there the individual is so thoroughly extinguished that afterwards, when he is called to arms, he throws away his life senseless for every folly and folly. In monumental buildings, the spirit of the intoxicated mass celebrates its victories over the spirit of the prudent, pondering, critical and personalized individual. Man creates an "aesthetic" framework for himself in which, if he wants to go into action, he can only do so as a mass. Thus

The masses

he no longer goes his own way, thus he no longer clings to any particular idea. To every tyranny belong its gigantic buildings; they are symbols of the fact that man lost for his sociability as for the seriousness of life the last intimate space in which he cultivated his own life. Aristotle recalls the pyramids in Egypt, the consecration monuments of the Cypselids, the construction of Olympium by the Pisistratids, the works of Polykrates in Samos; all these, he says, "pursue the same purpose: the incessant occupation and impoverishment of the subjects."

The spirit of the lie

The Third Reich established a new ministry soon after its victory, the Reich Propaganda Ministry; the "born" minister for it was Dr. Josef Goebbels. Goebbels had been educated by the Jesuits, and there he had acquired a concept of the "propaganda of the faith". The Reich Propaganda Ministry was, as an institution, the secularized Congregatio de propaganda fide, which had been founded in 1621 under Gregory XV.

The Jesuits were already notorious as masters of lies; National Socialism, as secularized Jesuitism par excellence, no longer has any relationship to truth. For Jesuit propaganda of the faith, the end often justified the means, but there was still for them a control by firm traditions and a sure moral feeling. The unscrupulousness of the National Socialist propaganda may be boundless, because the traditions have no more weight and therefore also the confusion of the moral feeling has taken place everywhere. In the cause which National Socialist propaganda serves, there is no advertising power; it must almost shamefully deny this cause: it would fizzle out ineffectively if the connection between it and this cause were to become conspicuously apparent. Its success consists in the fact that the petty bourgeois fall victim to a misleading interpretation of things, the proletarians to a pretense of false facts. Its efforts and events must be all the more feverish because it has to prevent the masses, whom it fanatizes, from getting to the bottom of reality; it inspires the masses only to betray them. In the end, it is a pure technique of deceiving the masses. The more perfectly it handles this technique, the more deeply it despises the masses who let themselves be led astray. Every propaganda campaign that succeeds gives food to its contempt of the masses. Hitler and Goebbels are deeply imbued with the idea that propaganda alone can win over the masses and lead the worst cause to victory. Propaganda, if it is skilful, makes everything good for which it works. Propaganda is all-powerful; it never depends on the quality of a cause, but exclusively on the quality of propaganda.

Thus propaganda has emptied itself into a form of advertising; the propagandist is an advertising expert who has the task of selling every piece of trash. What he says about the product no longer has anything to do with its real qualities; every word is calculated solely to incite purchase; every deception is justified if it achieves its goal.

The propaganda of the bourgeois restoration sets itself the task of spreading false consciousness. Race, people, national community are the swindling coins it puts into circulation. It wants, at any cost, to give entrance to the false consciousness just where the correct consciousness had already penetrated into the heads.

National Socialist propaganda feels its shaky foundations. It has to shy away from any analysis of the facts, any critical examination of its concepts and ideas, even the simplest discussion. Even the sober ascertainment of facts tears apart its fantasies and breaks its spell. That is why it allows no objectivity, no criticism, no discussion; it tolerates only rallies and marches. Every enlightenment is for it a kind of acid, which it would not be able to withstand for a moment, by which its ideological effort would be etched away without further ado. The scrutinizing look already makes them restless. She grips people only when sobriety gives way to intoxication, clarity to fog, pure air to turbid vapors. It cannot tolerate a sharp mind, it must not take a chance on a confrontation with it; if it does not give in and does not grovel, it must have its dangerous brain rendered harmless by a bullet. In this propaganda, one can only stand one's ground if, as a daring pirate, one does not drop one's sails before any fact, does not capitulate before any better insight, and stands up to the most obvious appearance with cold-blooded impudence.

The propaganda is able to do everything

As the medieval church had kept the human mind dull, so National Socialist propaganda was now to dull it again; it was to cloud the minds that had hitherto been enlightened and fill them with an impenetrable haze. Propaganda hammered into the brains those superstitious ideas by which the petty-bourgeois and proletarian masses, in the face of the capitalist order of rule, were filled with the same timid awe that the common man of the Middle Ages, under the spell of his ecclesiastical ideas, felt before the feudal order. Criticism was put down with a truly medieval intolerance; the critic suddenly found himself publicly denounced as a decomposer, a vole, a grumbler, and a complainer.

The greatest propagandists that National Socialism has produced are Hitler and Goebbels. Both are convinced of the omnipotence of propaganda: propaganda can do everything, it could even have won the world war. It can, in Hitler's opinion, be "seemingly insane in the impudence of its claims" in the beginning, become unpleasant later, but finally find belief. However, Hitler and Goebbels nevertheless differed in one most important point.

From the very beginning, Hitler devoted himself to the imperialist big bourgeoisie, made its cause his own. Whoever read his "Kampf" carefully knew that he was never a socialist, always a drummer in bourgeois service. He had sworn by the monopoly capitalist calfskin. He never wanted to lose touch with the big bourgeoisie and the Wehrmacht; he had taken up a firm social position on which he remained immovable. Despite all the propagandistic hysteria, there was something solid and confidence-inspiring in this unambiguousness. Although Hitler had only adopted the monopoly capitalist cause, he nevertheless looked after it as "his own child"; he saw more deeply into the essential affairs of the big bourgeoisie than the latter itself did. The monopoly capitalist interest and Hitler's propagandist passion had entered into an indissoluble union. Hitler had begun as an agent of the Wehrmacht; he remained an agent of the imperialist big bourgeoisie in the Brown House as in the Reich Chancellery. He fanatically proselytized to the false consciousness; although he was a bogus prophet in this, he still retained the light veneer of a missionary. Goebbels was not bound to a cause in the same way. He entered the market with his propaganda talent, so to speak, in order to extract the best price for it. He had temporarily sold out to the Deutsch-folkishe Freiheitspartei; even when he had joined Hitler, he still checked again and again in critical times whether he was really right. He had been discovered by Gregor Strasser and initially kept up with him. He gave Otto Strasser hope that he would "leave the party with the Socialists"; he suddenly changed his mind after he had seen through that any party rebellion was futile. He abandoned his original protector and avoided Strasser's opposition. Even in his notes, "From the Imperial Court to the Reich Chancellery," he flattered Chief of Staff Rohm. Until June 1934, he was unsure whether to side with Rohm or with Hitler. Then, however, when he gives Rohm up, he joins Hitler's entourage in the assassination action, and he himself stylizes that poisonous communique which, like a colportage, parades before the ears of the breathlessly listening people the "morally sad pictures," the "lust boys," the "most disgusting situation" from which Rohm had been "flushed out and arrested" with his cronies, and reports on the "ruthless extermination of this pestilence." Goebbels, who at the Nuremberg Party Congress in 1936 disregarded every measure in his zealotry of Bolshevism, had expressed himself in the "Folkisher Beobachter" on November 14, 1925, almost like a national Bolshevist. Russia, he had said then, was today more Russian than ever. What is called Bolshevik internationalism is PanSlavism "in the clearest and most marked form." He was not thinking of "singing along in the chorus of bourgeois liars and ignoramuses" that Bolshevik Russia was on the verge of collapse. The Russian council system is holding on because it is national. No tsar had ever grasped the Russian people in its national instincts as Lenin had. Lenin had given the Russian peasant freedom and property and Russia freedom. The Russian Jew, too, he said, had adjusted himself early and wisely to the "compelling necessity for the Russian national state." He thus "spoiled the cantus" of the capitalist Jews of the West, hence the furious hatred of

"I

the West against Soviet Russia. The Jewish question, even in Bolshevism, is more complicated than one thinks. "It will probably not be the case that the capitalist Jew and the Bolshevik Jew are one and the same." This essay had appealed to the Communist youth. In the magazine of the Strasser publishing house, Goebbels had also expressed himself at times during these years with a social-revolutionary radicalism before which it could take the breath away of any Communist. It was as if he wanted to keep open the way to the Communist Party in case it made the political race

Thus Goebbels let his propagandistic talent play without having already committed himself skin and hair to the imperialist big bourgeoisie. Hitler had chosen a cause and remained loyal to it while propagandizing it; Goebbels did not enter into an indissoluble commitment to the object for which he staged the advertising campaign. On the contrary, he shone all the more brilliantly as an advertising artist, the more he himself was convinced that he had to make an irresistible hit out of mere junk and kitsch: thus he was the unsurpassable jack-of-all-trades who stirred every froth in such a way that it seemed bite-sized for all the people.

Goebbels was a pure virtuoso and artist of propaganda; for him propaganda was l'art pour part. In this sense the propagandist is the absolute liar. Not a single one of his words can be relied upon; one is basically taken in if one relies on them. Nothing is seriously said and seriously meant, every sentence is a fishhook, every event an ambush for man-catching in the small and in the big. The ideas that move mankind, the great concepts, the moral values, the sublime feelings are for him only welcome equipment for propagandistic antics. His world is of the kind of that about which Taine once wrote: "The crooks talk of morality, the hetaeras of civic virtue, and the most depraved subjects of the dignity of the human race." Those sanctified principles had formerly lived in firm, legitimate, clean relations with existing orders; they had been "married," if this image is permitted, to existing states of rule. That has been over for centuries. They changed their relationship frequently in the course of time; the "ideology suspicion" was the receipt they received for it: it made their "moral" crack visible. Goebbels dropped all consideration for the great ideas and treated them as mere coquettes, who could be had for a small hand money for any fornication; he immediately got along with them in the best possible way. For Goebbels, people are merely fools who are lured onto the ice by grandiose words, and the joke of sport lies in making as many as possible tumble.

History has already allowed itself the pretty sdierz of labeling Goebbels as a court-notorious liar. He had insulted Hindenburg around 1930 and had been indicted. In the Geriditssaal he claimed to have been thrown into prison by Belgians during the Rhineland occupation and to have been maltreated with a whip; thus he claimed for himself the honors of the nationalist martyr. Not a word of it was true; he had made up the story and had the misfortune to be caught immediately.

In his books no feeling is genuine, no insight original. His intelligence is nimble and polished, but it clings to the surface and has no access to the depths. He has nothing of his own in him, and therefore he has nothing of his own to say. In serious intellectual matters he judges like a primanera. "The giant Wagner," he writes in the diary on August 1, 193z, "stands so elevated above all modern incompetents that a comparison with them must already seem insulting to his genius." He thinks template thoughts and feels standardized feelings; the only thing that distinguishes him is that he knows how to put them decoratively in the shop window. Sometimes he has been overestimated or even considered important. In terms of his human and intellectual content, however, he is as trivial as the petty-bourgeois masses who hang on his every word. Anyone who has ever discussed with him has understood why he, like Hitler, is a fundamental enemy of all discussion. It is not the weight of personal points of view and insights, but only the unleashed mass instincts flowing to him that give him impetus. If he is left to his own devices, he is immediately exhausted, and the intellectual polish he picked up from the Jesuits and from his Jewish teacher Gundolf does not cut it. His intelligence is a mechanism that converts the dullest mass passions and instincts into clever formulations. If

The fright before the expert the influx of mass sentiments is missing, it runs dry; there is nothing in Goebbels himself to feed it. At times he decucrates himself with a naiveté that would be cynicism if he possessed enough distance from himself to be able to become aware of his own comedy with humor. "I stand between the deputies of the middle parties and let my suada flow," he remarks confidently on May 12, 1932.

His novel "Michael" is the revealing confession of a burning vain soul, which, however presumptuously it turns itself inside out, can only produce the sentimental kitsch that lies at its bottom. His "historical account in diary pages "*' is not what it pretends to be; it is a retroactively written political intrigue novel in diary form. This novel is more a key to the character Goebbels than to the events. No human sound is heard in the book; every record is calculated for effect; nowhere does one encounter the color of the immediate moment; everywhere one sees makeup and artificial hairstyle. Byzantinisms against Hitler pile up in brimming, even unbearable abundance. Of course, they are constructed according to a single recipe: the Führer is, as always, clever, of crystal-clear logic, tough, determined, great, ravishing, of eternally unchanging tenacity, unshakable, strong of nerve, overflowing with eternally new thoughts, suggestions and ideas. As soon as Hitler leaves the room, those left behind remain in awed silence. "He is and remains our Führer after all," he writes in the tone of a baked fish. It is not the only outpouring in "album style": "Whoever has the good fortune to be often with the Fuehrer wins him dearer day by day; not only does he always decide correctly in all matters, he is also personally of such indescribable kindness and such hearty comradeship that he captivates every person who enters his circle of vision." Goebbels expects something from working on the Hitler legend, from being Hitler's Homer. The deeds of the National Socialist heroes are rallying journeys, rallying flights, rallying speeches; the brown heroes want to enter eternity having shouted their throats hoarse. In between, they engage in a brawl: in front of the Lehrter train station, an SPD deputy "immediately gets a few well-aimed slaps in the face and seems to calm down," or they stage a bloodshed: "The following day, bombs burst and guns bang in Königsberg. Two local KPD leaders are shot in the street. This is the only way to bring the Reds to their senses; anything else no longer impresses them. We will see more such cases in the near and far future." Political secret negotiations with opaque intermediaries are more hinted at than revealed. The dictates of an election poster or a newspaper article are accomplishments that want to be closely registered and fastidiously appreciated. The shadows of dark backers flit across the stage unrecognized, and relationships with reaction are partly revealed, partly blurred. These power-hungry people challenge the whole world. There is only one opponent they fear: the expert; they avoid him, he is scary to them. "Especially with the experts, it's such a peculiar thing. The expert is always the one who knows a matter inside out."

The tremendous propagandistic spectacle, because all of Germany echoed from it, was a "world-historical event," and Goebbels, who put on the noisy machinery, was a great man. He misses nothing to emphasize how much he feels like a great man; again and again he finds mountains of work on his desk, always he is rushed; "only to breathe in sun, light, air and rest" and to be able to "sleep, sleep, sleep" remains his permanently unquenched longing. He is the prudent propagandistic battle leader; should it be only by chance that his profile reminds from afar of the profile of the great Prussian king? "At midnight everything comes to an end. The noisy hubbub is over. I read in the letters of Frederick the Great." The cue has come; Goebbels is fighting as Frederick II did in the Seven Years' War. On September 16, 1932, he writes: "Frederick the Great endured a war seven years. At Kunersdorf he lost almost the entire Prussian army. All his friends fell away from him, and he was left entirely to his own devices. If he had lost his head at that time and signed a cowardly peace, Prussia would never have risen to world power.* The Frederician character and courage has been resurrected in the National Socialist propaganda heroes.

All sorts of unexplained events form the background of these "Tagebuchblätter*; important figures of the time such as Brüning, Papen, Schleicher, Hindenburg cross Goebbels' path. It is astonishing how devoid of

Revenge of the cripple

150 plasticity the depiction is; one does not learn what is going on beyond the mass activity, not a single apt remark sheds light on the persons. They remain shadows, Goebbels has no image of them. He hardly sees the skin: his gaze does not penetrate into any depth, neither into the depth of things, nor into the depth of the heart. He lacks the eye for the characteristic, the individual; as a mass leader he grasps only the heap, which is faceless. He is delighted by the surging teeming masses crammed one upon the other; he notices only the very largest outlines, which lose themselves in the unshaped.

He owes as much in the intellectual as in the sensual; the book does not contain a single sparkling insight into political conditions. It is as sententious as it is tendentious, but the aphorisms are dull commonplaces, hackneyed banalities. Not even about his own "specialty," propaganda, does he know how to say a clever and special word; he repeats Hitler, that's all. Even in the speeches in which he wanted to amaze with his propagandistic insights, he did not get beyond the propaganda chapter from Hitler's "Mein Kampf". "The essence of propaganda," he told the Berlin press on March 16, 1933, for example, "is the simplicity of making the thoughts clear to the people in their primitiveness by throwing off all arabesques, every accessory, but then also of carrying these thoughts into the public arena with such force and penetrating power that in the end even the last man in the street knows what it is all about." If Hitler is the demonic nothing, Goebbels is the civilized and academically educated nothing; he is overwhelmed by the feeling of his inner lack of content as often as he is not in operation. "So there is nothing left for me but to try to get over this emptiness with work." He can't be alone with himself. "If it were not for the movement now, and if one did not have the hope and faith that it would come to victory, life would have become devoid of all content." Without the National Socialist mass hype, Goebbels wouldn't know what to do with himself. "Our whole life," he says, "is now a hunt for success and power."

Thus his diary pages are monotonous, arid, charmless, even boring, without color and fullness. Only where he hates and snorts revenge does Goebbels become credible; perhaps vindictiveness is his only natural emotion. He has a club foot; according to the sterilization law, if it were carried out without regard to the person, he would have to be emasculated. He does not forgive the world and humanity that he goes through life as a repulsive cripple; he tramples on the masses with his clubfoot to make himself forget that he is beaten with it. He defies his clubfoot; the frenzy of this defiance presents itself in his consuming ambition, in his devouring vanity. He rages at the masses, as Otto Strasser once said, the "revenge of the cripple." He talks "all hatred and rage off his chest" in mass meetings, he shouts his "whole rage into the grave" in the cemetery; he yells the "Marxist police creature against the wall" and incites "the masses against the system." When journalists irritate him, he wants to decide one time to "simply shoot down such a creature," the other time he wants to "have such a scribal creature taken out of the editorial office by an SA squad and publicly beaten up." Threateningly, he once noted: "Revenge is a dish that is enjoyed cold"; he is the man to enjoy it when the hour comes.

Of course, he wants to enjoy it without endangering himself, because he is a coward, as is only natural with such abominations. An editor had "most infamously" attacked the honor of Goebbels' wife. "An SA man lets himself be reported to him and beats him with a riding whip until he sinks to the ground covered in blood." Goebbels dings himself this bravo; he himself is not knight and man enough to settle accounts with the insulter of his wife. Where he achieves nothing with his suada, his bravado is at an end. He speaks of riding whip and pistol so fondly because he would make it cost something to be the man for it, too. When he whips, he does it with hateful phrases, and when he shoots, they are mere poison darts from ambush.

He shows in his diary how he hunts down a victim. Systematically, he destroys Gregor Strasser's nimbus. Strasser is a defeatist, a vole, a compromiser; again and again one comes across his traces, again and again he offends the noble leader. The entries about Strasser pile up: in every action one must be on one's guard against him. He mines and sabotages: "Just be careful that Strasser doesn't make any flings." Gradually

151

What he reviles, seems to be himself

Strasser's picture rounds out: he is the Judas of the party, the Segestes of the movement; finally his apostasy is revealed. Loudly Goebbels cries out, "I have never believed anything else." The Führer is deeply wounded by this disloyalty; for hours he walks up and down the hotel room "with long strides." "Our minds all stand still before so much perfidy."

Gregor Strasser's end is thus propagandistically prepared. Goebbels gives here a prime example, a cabinet piece formally, how to hunt down a man with the weapons of propagandistic fine work. The anger against Gregor Strasser, which the diary sheets had stirred up, came to action on June 30, 1934; the SS men were on the spot to "kill" the marked "traitor". The death of Gregor Strasser was on the conscience of the propagandist Goebbels.

Goebbels' propagandistic seductive power is all the more astonishing because a stoop to him could be enough to warn against him. It is obvious to take this small, limping, puny man for a clerk from the advertising department of a department store. All that he reviles seems to be himself: he looks like a "Jew," he is branded like a hereditary patient, he is psychopathic like a subhuman, he unites in himself all the physical and mental characteristics of the "lower race"; he is insubstantial like an intellectual, rootless like an asphalt literate and faithless like a Welshman. It is precisely in this that his propagandistic virtuosity is most brilliantly confirmed, that his existential meaningfulness stands in screaming contradiction to the "Nordic" ideas he proclaims, and that one believes him nevertheless. While promoting Siegfried's light figure, he stands before his audience like an ejection of Acheron; it is almost shuddering to witness how he intoxicates the crowd, even though he refutes the National Socialist worldview by the appearance of his existence and the appearance of his existence by the National Socialist worldview. He can be proud of this achievement, and he is. He is no longer content with merely leading the masses around by the nose and having them dance to his tune; at the same time, by coolly observing the success of his oratorical formulations, he displays a diabolical complacency about the fact that no deceptive maneuver fails him. He is a Machiavellian who misses even to appease the distrust he arouses by the vanity he openly displays while gloating over the folly of his duped listeners. The masses are puppets whom he mows to think, to feel, to believe, to laugh and to howl as he is moved by lust; what is a sacred matter to them is only an occasion for him to test his virtuosity and to apply his mowing. What moves the masses, what they want and believe, has hardly taken hold of him himself; he lets it be enough that he gets them into his hand, because they are moved, because they want and because they believe. Therefore he formally weaves with the wholeness of his person in the element of untruth, dishonesty and impurity: he lies in how he chooses the words and pronounces them, how he emphasizes them and how he pursues his mouth, how he rolls his tongue and stirs his throat, how he turns his head and opens his eyes, how he laments and how he darkens his countenance, how he smoothes his forehead and wrinkles it, how he turns his body and bends his arm, how he spreads his fingers and clenches his hand, how he stands on his tiptoes and how he stamps his foot - he lies in all of this, admiring himself and mocking the masses he affects with it.

Only when Goebbels speaks of the masses does one become aware of the socially uncanny function he fulfills. Wide and wide gapes his mouth, the whole chinless man is only a sounding mouth. It opens like a crater, from which the masses are flooded with that filth which until now had been held down in the bottom of their being. The all-too-human, which they had never been allowed to show before, now bursts forth undisguised and shamelessly from the rift screaming words, behind which the face and the figure of the man himself disappear. The masses see themselves understood and encouraged in their worst impulses and urges; that is why they hang on to this mouth through which they are allowed to let themselves go. It is a hell-mouth around which they gather in thick clusters; it elevates lowliness and depravity, by flinging them out into the public with presumptuous patheticness, to the measure of all things: thus Goebbels has all evil

The upper middle classes distrust Goebbels 152 and poisonous instincts for himself. He is their liberator and idol; his slavering mouth is the "sacred gate" through which these instincts, stripped of all bonds, shoot forth to flood all the world from now on.

Although Goebbels draws the masses, whom he fanatizes, onto a path on which they run blindly into the arms of monopoly capitalism, the big bourgeoisie does not overcome its distrust of him; it suspects that he does not belong to it inwardly, that he would, in the event of a crisis, sell it to the masses just as easily as he has now sold the masses to the big bourgeoisie. It considers him to be an insecure cantonist who, under changed circumstances, could also do well with communism. Certainly he remarks in August 1932: "If we are not given the opportunity to settle accounts with Marxism, then our seizure of power is completely futile." But no sooner does the Papen government let the National Socialist movement feel its power in September than he immediately writes in his diary: "In an editorial I make sharp outbursts against the noble people. If we want to keep the party intact, we must now appeal again to the most primitive mass instincts." Before the November elections of 1932, he wants to show the world once again "that our anti-reactionary course is really meant and wanted from within." He is immediately captivated by the demagogic possibilities of the Berlin streetcar strike; he recommends the strike slogan because it allows him to approach the masses of workers. "If we had not acted in this way, we would no longer be a socialist and a workers' party." When the strike fails, he is quick to take a swipe at the Social Democracy and the trade unions; he accuses both of the blame with tortured wit and by using transparent contortions. "The SPD has betrayed him. As the cat does not let go of the mouse, so Marxism does not let go of the stab in the back." From the standpoint of the big bourgeoisie, Goebbels appears as a demagogue who wears water on all his armpits; his propagandistic achievements are indispensable for monopoly capitalism, which cannot escape mass deception; but his pure artistry nevertheless raises doubts about the sincerity and unconditionally of his loyalty to the bourgeoiscapitalist cause.

His propaganda works against the background of a world view that knows only the opposition of black and white, decent and wicked, friend and foe. The period before 1933 is the time of decay; at that time, people were on the verge of moral, political, economic, and financial bankruptcy; the epitome of this bankruptcy was Bolshevism. In retrospect, the Weimar Republic appears as the Satanic empire in which Bolshevism heated the boilers in order to boil the good citizens in them; by evoking the memory of it, one spreads fear of hell. The National Socialist propagandists cannot do without the ghosts of hell any more than the Christian priests can do without theirs. January 30, 1933 is the day of the miracle; from then on the redemption dates. Satan lies shattered on the ground; the Third Reich is the community of the saints. Admittedly, the devil still rumbles in fallen and hardened souls: the enemies of Hitler, the enemies of National Socialism are infernal spirits; they must be tracked down, cursed, tortured to death by SA and SS men.

Goebbels places his propagandistic actions in this world view scheme; they are crusades against heretics, against infernal-luciferous forces. In April 1933, he organized the boycott against the Jews as a campaign against the power of international Jewry, as an enterprise in the great anti-Jewish war. He organizes the Winter Relief Fund as a "fight against hunger and cold*. For October 1933' he announces a "great propaganda campaign": "We will hold 150 000 public meetings in two months." In massive speech battles he wants to crush the complainers and know-it-alls; "ruthless struggle" is announced against the "unscrupulous goings-on of the complainers and naggers present here and there". The great rallies and marches are displays of power intended to shake the last lukewarm and cold ones who still offer inner resistance; their model are the pompous processions of the ecclesia triumphans, whose splendor and demonstrated force want to crush the aloof heretic.

The propaganda campaign for the referendum of March 29, 1936, took on almost fantastic forms. There was no opponent of whom one could have been aware. Nevertheless, the whole nation was stirred up. Propaganda created fictions of an opponent; it succeeded in making these constructions of mere imagination

Mock attack with combat pathos

so present that the feeling of a real warlike mood arose; with the holy earnestness of Don Quixote the whole people ran against misty figures that were not even as real as the windmill wings of the Spanish knight. The speakers were not laughed at as they made their mock attacks with the highest fighting pathos, aiming their brave thrusts into the empty air. It was a dress rehearsal: the masses were already so far in the faith that they had lost touch with the real; they no longer asked for facts; already the fictitious and invisible figures of National Socialist metaphysics were more plausible to them than the whole world of the sensible. The real things no longer had any weight at all against the new beliefs: even the medieval church had never worked better. Propaganda was trained into an almost irresistible form of spiritual terror; the slogans that were about to come into fashion were issued, and whoever did not immediately take them up and let them serve as a guide for himself was revealed as an "infidel". Since the latter knew that the whole nation was against him, it was natural that he became frightened. It could never be foreseen to what extent the state power would pounce on the loner who did not let himself be caught by any propaganda order and by any advertising trick, who neither returned the "German salute", nor hung the swastika flag "spontaneously* in front of the window at the appointed minute, nor read the recommended party newspaper, nor put the winter relief badge in his buttonhole, nor ate the stew on the marked Sundays, nor marched along on May Day, nor took part in the "1. Mai", nor did the "1 Mai". May, nor turned on the loudspeaker for the communal reception, nor read the book of the day, nor traveled with "Strength through Joy," nor joined the Volkswohlfahrt, the Labor Front, the Luftschutzbund, nor appeared at the polling station on referendum day, nor received the block leader in a friendly manner whenever he appeared with the intention of informing.

In view of the uncertainty that prevailed here, it took an unparalleled steadfastness not to succumb to the propagandistic pressure that commanded in all these matters. "In the long run," Goebbels once said, "only the development of strength and discipline impresses the man of the people"; that was what his propaganda was geared to, that was what it wanted to impress. The propagandists were like priests, forcing the believer under the yoke by filling his conscience with the fear of offending heaven, God Himself, if he evaded the instructions of his church. The God of the parsons of the Third Reich is the "people," the nation, the race: those who close their ears to the National Socialist propaganda are to feel themselves traitors to the people, the race, and the country.

As much as propaganda seizes every process, every institution, in order to put a National Socialist cloak around them, it naturally entered into a particularly intensive relationship with three institutions that seem to be destined to be means, weapon, instrument, organ for the spirit of propaganda: the press, the cinema and radio.

From its origin, the press was the mouthpiece of bourgeois tendencies against the feudal-medieval state; this is not altered by the fact that initially it expressed its "dissenting view" only with extreme caution and caution. The bourgeois subject had his say against the feudal authorities; where bourgeois sense lived, this word was taken up: thus slowly and gradually the bourgeoisly determined public opinion was formed. The freedom of opinion was the freedom to cherish one's bourgeois opinion, the freedom of the press was the freedom to proclaim this bourgeois opinion also through writing. Every Junker hated the newspaper, because he felt with good instinct that it was basically only taking aim at him. The spirit that exercised its wit in the newspaper and glossed over men and events was a bourgeois spirit. The press accustomed its readers to look at the course of the world through bourgeois eyes and to judge it by bourgeois standards. Prudently and gradually, hardly noticeable at the moment, it destroyed the credit of feudal institutions and ways of life and created legends around personalities and events that were in the current of the bourgeois advance. This was a process that lasted for centuries. The press could never have been called the fifth great power if the dissolving effects with which it had everywhere worn down the basic feudal orders had not finally come to light. Nothing could stop the Holy Alliance here. As conservative as publicists like Gentz, Adam Müller and

Burke were, with them, precisely because they were publicists, the bourgeois fox had been turned into the feudal gardener. Freedom of the press was a bourgeois mine against feudalism; the dispute between conservative and liberal publicists was only about how far to drive the mine and how big to take the charge; without all freedom of the press, no conservative publicist would have been able to write either. It was in the nature of things that the press was "capitalist"; its dependence on its financial backers did not therefore limit its intellectual freedom, because it was at the same time calculated for bourgeois-capitalist readers and written by bourgeois-capitalist-minded journalists. It had entered the world as the fruit of the marriage between spirit and money and felt quite free when it was allowed to champion money with spirit. The accusatory pathos that fills Upton Sinclair's book "Money Writes" hardly ever made an impression on bourgeois journalists; if money only put its honor in expressing itself spiritually, then everything else was in good order.

Freedom of the press became a problem for bourgeois society only since the proletarian class struggle will created a mouthpiece in workers' newspapers. When the spirit separated from money, the bourgeoisie, which clung to money, lost all interest in the spirit; if it even began to become vicious in alliance with the class-conscious working class against money, to stir up and agitate against money, it had to be run into the parade. Freedom of the press made sense to the citizen only as long as it made life sour for feudal society; freedom of the press that interfered with bourgeois order was rank abuse, was an obnoxious scandal.

In so far as, in National Socialism, the bourgeois interest gained the most straightforward, direct and brutal validity, he became the executioner of the "freedom of the press" : the gazettes were to be vultured from now on. In the final stage of the Weimar state, he still used the freedom of the press to put an end to the same political condition that had guaranteed it. "This paper was allowed an almost unbelievable freedom to say what it wanted," one can read in the introduction to those collected essays that Goebbels had published in the "Attack."

The Third Reich immediately wiped out the entire working-class press; the proletarian point of view was no longer to be allowed to be heard at all. Insofar as bourgeois newspapers had shown benevolence to proletarian-socialist tendencies, they too were throttled. Magazines were similarly sifted. The purpose of the press became to speak after the restored bourgeois order, to glorify it, to win its friends, supporters, defenders. Journalistic achievement in the new state, said Reich Press Chief Dr. Dietrich, was completely unthinkable without National Socialist conviction, and the journalist had to be educated to become a National Socialist. The press was thus subjected to "denominational blinkers"; the newspapers were transformed into tracts in which the events of the day were viewed exclusively in the spirit of the worldview that wanted to be the only one that would bring salvation.

Every day, the Ministry of Propaganda issued precise instructions prescribing the content and view of things to the newspapers. "The word German-Austrian union should no longer be used," read one of these orders. Another time it was decreed: "The Reich Ministry of the Interior has issued a circular to the state authorities calling attention to the fact that individual newspapers and magazines still portray or depict the SA or SS in a military manner, both in words and pictures. In the future, strict action will be taken against such activities, and the persons responsible will face charges of treason. The same applies to the labor service." It was made a requirement that "In reports on the events in which foreign diplomats participate, their names are to be given special prominence. Careful mention of names is urged; general phrases should be avoided." When the German pilot Poß crashed, the regulation guarded that nothing should be reported beyond the mere announcement. "The accident must not be mentioned in a headline or in a multi-line headline." In 1936, Eckener had refused to allow one of the Zeppelin airships to be misused for National Socialist propaganda purposes; as a result, it was forbidden to ever mention his name in the newspapers.

Blinkers are put on the press

The newspapers had to suppress, shorten, invent, misleadingly comment on and misinterpret reports; they had to spread tall tales about famines and uprisings in the Soviet Union and about Communist atrocities in Spain; They had to administer the National Socialist "Weltanschauung" and party-approved attitudes, encourage terrorist sentiments, work on the myth of Hitler and his "paladins," win respect for the "national economic leaders" and their "national capital," arouse revulsion before proletarian desires for wage increases and thoughts of strikes, disguise, gloss over and rewrite the sad consequences of the National Socialist dilettante policy. To the extent that they still dared to take critical courses, even these were officially supervised: "It is desired," the Ministry of Propaganda announced to the newspapers, after the radio's loss of listeners had been tackled with increased dance music, "that criticism of the previous type of radio presentations be made in a cautious and benevolent form and that the new arrangements of the radio hour be described as a welcome advance." Even when the press organs grumbled, they did so because the government had given the order to do so.

This kind of press required journalists trained for it. The law of October 4, 1933, on the appointment of editors, provided the Third Reich with the means to breed the creatures it needed. The editor became a civil servant who had to eat only as long as he enjoyed the favor of the Ministry of Propaganda. He had to be on the list of scribes in order to practice his profession, in order to find employment. Journalists of Jewish origin or with a Marxist past, but also publicists whose intellectual independence aroused suspicion, were not put on the list of editors: "Let them go begging when they are hungry." Only "those who have the qualities required for the task of influencing the public intellectually" became editors; admittedly, these were very bad qualities with which alone one could hold one's own before the National Socialist public. The German journalist became an intellectual musketeer who did his duty without any responsibility of his own; he repeated what his superior told him to do; he carried out every order literally; he fired his intellectual ammunition only on strict orders and at the specified target; he swept clean every National Socialist latrine and trimmed every National Socialist canaille in such a way as his propaganda sergeants wanted to present it to the public. He wrote his articles and glosses like the prisoner glues his tutes: all according to the same pattern and in accordance with the instructions issued. Article 13 of the Schriftleitergesetz was the life lie that journalists clung to when they wanted to console themselves about their humiliating situation: "Schriftleiter have the task of truthfully presenting the subjects they cover and judging them to the best of their knowledge." No editor was so breakneck as to run into the pit of this article: everyone saw that at its bottom lurked the fate of the concentration camp or death by starvation.

Even though the spirit is chained to money, it does not want to be held too short by it; it needs leeway to make leaps, to do capers, to engage in ventures and to advance into the realm of ambiguities; only in this way does it give its best. Within the framework of the bourgeois-liberal press, the spirit had been allowed to go to the extreme limits. There it had finally broken free from the chain and had swung over into the camp of the proletarian class opponent. The Third Reich intervened; it not only brought the spirit back to the chain of money, but immediately tightened it so tightly that he was no longer able to take a step at his own whim. Thus the German press ceased to be what it was; the newspaper still had its outward appearance, but its content had become something quite different. One could smell from afar the intention it was pursuing: It was a monitor for brown officials, a thundering voice of swastika church fathers, a "Goldene-Worte" collection of hereditary racial chaplains, a trumpet for the Hitler Youth, a club organ of the old fighters, an army order of the supreme leadership, an ordinance sheet of the sovereigns, a political moral mirror of the "decent" Germans, a party-officially controlled view of the times, ministerially purified colportage from all over the world, a guide to the Third Reich. The bottom line was that Karl May acted as an SS man and CourthsMahler as a BDM girl. The "Stürmer" became the representative newspaper organ of the Third Reich; it was its most genuine intellectual flower: so profound, so witty, so clean it was, just as fragrant. In its anti-Semitic monomania, its pornographic filth, its gutter odor, its pathological stupor, its sectarian madness, its moriatic

The weapon of the press became chippy 156 idiocy, its stylistic platitude, its revolver-journalist meanness, but also its unhesitating business acumen, it served up the intellectual and moral extract of the Third Reich week after week; The intellectual "luminaries" of Carl Schmitt's and Alfred Baeumler's ilk had in him the level from which they could always read off to which intellectual level they had to lower themselves.

One had to be a party comrade with a very low membership number to be able to open his newspaper with eager anticipation. Only the "Frankfurter Zeitung", the best example of the liberal press genre, continued to eke out a meager existence; it was the curiosity with which the foreigners were to be satisfied and amused. It was the convincing argument with the help of which the "abomination fairy tale" about the bondage of the German spirit was refuted abroad. She was not spared the National Socialist stable fodder, but in the meantime she was allowed to pluck off a few flowers and blades of grass to her taste in the free pasture

The press had blossomed in the liberal climate and on the tense soil of Manchestertum. It was a means of bourgeois propaganda, but its strongest "effects were based precisely on the fact that the propaganda was not laid on thick. It was not up to the Third Reich to keep propagandistic moderation. The more propagandist Goebbels brought in, the more charmless, monotonous, colorless became the press that grew on it; it decayed since it had to wave fence posts and was written with broomsticks.

National Socialism had produced no newspaper of distinction, no important publicist; its intellectual sergeants, who only pricked up their ears to hear the Führer's slogans, filled the columns with attacks, moral sermons, anti-Semitic horror stories, instructive applications of utility, heroically flavored history, pious Tatar news, and the usual fiery appeal to action when they wrote a newspaper. When Goebbels finally monopolized the weapon of the press, it became chippy; by overworking it propagandistically, it went to the dogs. While Goebbels put it on propagandistic high, it disappointed the expectations that the Third Reich had placed on it. True, her docility was boundless - but since this was a public secret, everyone knew how they were with her and were on their guard.

While outside the liberal sphere the press no longer remained what it had once been, it lost its propagandistic usefulness at the very moment when it was speculated upon. To a certain extent, the Third Reich had the same distressing experience with the cinema.

Hugenberg had acquired Universum Film-Aktiengesellschaft (UFA) because he regarded the cinema as the "channel to the brain of the masses". Every film work is an excerpt from a social environment and conspicuously embodies an entire system of social valuations. The store girl and her stand-up cavalier, who with epicurean devotion accompany their film heroes swimming in money on love adventures and in the sorrows of their idleness, fall prey to the "ideal" of wanting to climb up the capitalistically sanctioned ladder to wealth and well-being; they close themselves off to social revolutionary impulses. The patriotic films, however, when skillfully shot, seduce the masses into accepting the ideology of the capitalist bourgeoisie. The weekly reviews popularize the authorities that are the pillars of the capitalist order; the powers, institutions and personalities, on the other hand, that the bourgeois upper class distrusts, can be alienated from the hearts of the masses. Already in the selection of the pictorial material a foresight is at work that knows how to dig the bed for the flow of mass sympathies and antipathies.

It goes without saying that Goebbels was on the scene with increased vigor where even Hugenberg had already smelled a propagandistic rat. The Third Reich also wanted to overwhelm souls through the image. Admittedly, excess destroys the effect of the instrument instead of increasing it. Where newspaper and film become too clear, the audience goes on strike.

The film industry of the Third Reich never succeeded in producing a work of the propagandistic delicacy and artistic power of the Potemkin film. The power of capital cannot show itself as openly and naively as the

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The Führer was the highest cinema authority

power of the revolutionary masses is allowed to present itself; it would be embittered against itself where it had wanted to advertise itself. The power of capital must use surreptitious ways, must be deceitful, must mask itself, must plunge into the element of dishonesty in order to be able to cast its spell; it must captivate through secondary things, so that no one looks too closely at its core. But the secondary things are the sentimentalities and the kitsch. The films of the Third Reich were a mash of Ley's cheerfulness, Goering's brashness, Goebbels' esprit, Hitler's sentimentality; they were trivial, dull, provincial. However, since these films were not very successful, the way had to be cleared again and again for foreign and propagandistically neutral films: the "Triumph of the Will "* was a disaster at the box office.

Sometimes the audience was not content to stay away from screenings; they voiced their disapproval of officially sponsored films in loud protests. The Reich Minister of the Interior indignantly turned against these disturbers of the peace. In a decree to the state governments, he said, attempts had been made to disrupt films "even though these films had been approved by the official film inspection authorities," and even though in some cases the Führer and Reich Chancellor himself had approved of the films. "Such rallies are thus directed, even under certain circumstances, against the explicit and publicly expressed will of the Führer and are highly likely to endanger the authority of the state and to spread unrest among the population." Police authorities had to intervene against the protesters. The audience's film criticism was rebellion against the propaganda wisdom of the National Socialist authorities; the "Führer" was the highest cinema authority. Even in front of the screen, no one had the freedom to want to understand it better or even be allowed to mousy. The officially approved film was a government product that enjoyed the protection of the police baton.

The film newsreel, however, could be forced on anyone whom the main film had lured into the cinema. Here, propaganda had a free field; here, it could reproduce National Socialist contemporary history in any form. However, it suffered from a misfortune of a most peculiar kind. The camera is cruel, and there was nothing to be done with the National Socialist Führer elite. Whoever looked at them discovered bourgeois heads, gallows faces, evil demons, rogue figures, and ham-fisted comedians. One was personally convinced that everywhere it was the same ambiguous rabble that kept the whole empire in suspense with the same theater. These characters were so sinister that even the most excellent propaganda with them could only produce deterrent effects.

In contrast to the press and cinema, which had been taken over as firmly formed heirlooms from the stock of the past, radio was that access to the brain of the masses which the Third Reich was allowed to develop according to its needs and its fortune. Here it could start from scratch, here it almost hit virgin territory. The Weimar Republic had stood helplessly before the microphone; it treated this technical achievement somewhat disdainfully as a flattening and therefore not unobjectionable means of mass instruction and mass entertainment; only with a guilty conscience and only belatedly did it open the broadcasting room to political personalities, and even they had to strictly maintain the appearance of party-political neutrality and utmost objectivity. Broadcasting was not to be "politicized": the Weimar Republic had a feeling that it would get the short end of the stick otherwise, that broadcasting was ill-suited to its liberal air.

Broadcasting did not presuppose the more or less educated contemporary. In the past, the latter had critically chosen the newspaper in which he found daily what he had actually "also thought" and what had been "his personal opinion" at the bottom of his heart. In the tabloids, the press had then adapted itself to the democratization of public conditions, unpretentious strata of the people had penetrated the political sphere; still, of course, democracy had retained its liberal character. The intelligentsia press had been replaced by the sifted parliament of the electoral census, the tabloid press by the parliament of the mass parties. The cinema had been at the same time the theater on the level of the tabloid press and the mass parliamentary democracy.

The voice of Caesar becomes omnipresent

Broadcasting can even cope with illiterates. The environment of Caesarist democracy is natural to it; only it equips it with the technical equipment without which it can never reach the level of its highest perfection. Now the voice of Casar becomes omnipresent; it penetrates into the most deserted area and the most hidden corner; no dwelling closes itself to it anymore. When it sounds, it immediately has the ear of the whole people; the people is one listening mass. It hears nothing more than what the Caesar wants it to hear; it hears at the same minute his thoughts, resolutions, exhortations, appeals, his reproofs, his praises, his promises, his threats, his orders. The Caesar seizes the entire people at the same moment when he wants to whip them up, frighten them, inspire them; he unites them in a single frame of mind and direction of will. At the microphone he takes the command post from which he rules the mass of the people, he mounts the pulpit from which he edifies them as the preacher of the nation, as the high priest, as the divine representative. The radio shuts out any contradiction, any counter-speech, any discussion; one has to keep one's mouth shut, as in the barracks yard and in church, while the Caesar speaks. In front of the loudspeaker, the tininess of the subjects becomes apparent: the objection of the listener is not received, it fades away as if it had never been spoken.

The radio does not differentiate; it brings every "people's comrade" into play as the same shubiak; before the leader, as before God, there are no differences. According to the radio is a language that everyone understands; the head that does not want to hear this language must feel. Through the radio the Fuehrer approaches everyone, he pursues everyone to the furthest private corner with his commanding terror. The radio breaks the peace of the "quiet chamber"; even into this silence the Fuehrer blares his slogans. The Third Reich immediately understood that the loudspeaker was the throat of its propaganda. Goebbels had longed to become the master of broadcasting as the best reward for taking power. Radio was to become political and only political, right down to light music, which excluded jazz and Jewish composers. The bashfulness of the Weimar Republic was thrown overboard in an instant. Immediately, the propagandistic excesses of the Third Reich polluted the airwaves. In order to make it easy for them to reach their subjects, the Volksempfänger (People's Receiver) was foisted on them; communal receptions were organized, which no civil servant, employee or worker could miss; loudspeakers were installed in public places; in the workrooms of the factories, they were not silenced. Those who did not turn up their own sets heard the blare of the Führer's speeches, the howls of the heated masses, and the reports on the festivities from their neighbors' homes or from the street. Through the radio, the masses were held in the suggestion of the Third Reich. One had to take very sensible escape measures to escape from these satanic events for the achievement of mass psychosis.

The Propaganda Ministry was the general staff that directed the propaganda battles; it "won over" the masses to the policies of the Third Reich and to the "National Socialist worldview." It devised the templates in which the spiritual and mental functions of the masses were unified, it constructed Procrustean beds in order to bring the spiritual diversity to a uniform normal level, it poured the National Socialist world view into the most marketable formulas. It developed an unsurpassable system of advertising that spurned no means of overpowering: neither mild persuasion nor the most ruthless pressure of conscience, neither the lightest nor the coarsest intimidation, neither flattery nor insult, neither the lure of honors and social advancement, nor the threat of higher hanging in the breadbasket or even of complete economic ruin. It accelerated the process of general massification: anyone to whom a slogan became a spiritual experience sank into the masses; but anyone who had sunk into the masses had become like the zero that could be attached to any National Socialist bigwig par excellence. A true Köhlerglaube had to darken the brains. Propaganda had to produce this belief in charcoal burners; it would never have succeeded with it if it had not first beaten the masses before the head in such a way that they had become narrow-minded like charcoal

One flock for one shepherd burners. Thus she turned the masses into a herd for the one flirt, that herd which runs trustingly after the leader wherever he leads them. "Führer command, we follow."

XXV. Struggling Science

From Kant's epistemology to Hitler's "folkishe Weltanschauung": this is the path of the German bourgeois spirit from the beginning of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century.

When the bourgeoisie proclaimed its open class rule organized in civil war in fascism and National Socialism, it also proclaimed its new idea of science. The imperious rule over the spirit, which in the Middle Ages had been exercised by the Christian ecclesiastical dogma, is newly erected by the National Socialist race dogma. The presuppositionlessness and value-free nature, the objectivity and autonomy of science were stoutly thrown overboard. "National Socialism is rightly accused of being hostile to science," Rust said in Heidelberg in 1936, "if presuppositionlessness and value freedom are in fact essential features of science." The ideology of a value-free and presuppositionless science had given the Marxist opponent opportunities against bourgeois society: it had become too dangerous to be allowed to continue cultivating it. "It was not we," Rust asserted, "who offended the dignity of free science when we confronted the political opponent even where he wrapped himself in the cloak of intellectual authority. We expelled him, not because he stood up for the freedom of science, but because he abused its name." It was necessary to remember, declared Walter Frank, that nerdy feuilletonistic historian who in his "Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschland" (Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany) chose official falsification of history as his trade, "that National Socialism was not created for slaves, but for masters." Therefore, the Third Reich was willing, also in the intellectual sphere, "to break the neck of the slave revolt of Spartacus wherever we encounter it." Insofar as presupposition less and value-free science grants acquiescence to Marxist research, it is complicit in the intellectual "slave revolt of Spartacus"; therefore, National Socialism no longer recognizes presuppositionlessness and value-freeness as essential characteristics of science. "National Socialism recognized," said Rust, "that science without presuppositions and without value foundations is not possible at all."

Now science was tied to presuppositions and value-based foundations. "Science, then, has its root ground in worldview," Ernst Krieck formulated in 1936 in his Heidelberg commemorative address. There was, it was added from another side, no presuppositionlessness "that searches for truth beyond the folkish-political reality". With full awareness, one swung into a new intellectual middle age; what had been an organically grown condition there, now became a recipe. Science was to be "handmaiden" again. In the face of medieval Christian theology, however, it had served voluntarily; now, however, it was subjected to genocide. As this happened without her fighting back with the courage of despair, she became a harlot. It was not difficult for medieval science to be the handmaid of theology, since its own inner impulses were themselves Christian. Modern science, on the other hand, was degraded and defiled when it lost its freedom to the National Socialist worldview.

As the core of that worldview, from which the Wissenhaft was taken in duty, the Arteigenheit was proclaimed, which is the blood-materialistic image of the spiritual God-childhood. The spiritual movements

Sciences must bend the neck

160 have to be based "on a humanity corresponding to them in their basic direction as carrier", Rust demanded. Those who do not belong to the German people "by blood and nature" do not have the ability "to form science out of German spirit." "The direction of the self-understanding and self-interpretation of science is marked out by the substrata of life of the German people," to which every act of thought must pay its tribute. "We demand," says Kriech, "from science not only distinction, but decision." The only truth is that which is useful to the German people. Truth, like law, becomes a matter of folkish utility; where the folkish will wants something to be true, science is on hand to prove it to be true: thus it becomes "fighting science."

In his Nuremberg cultural speech of 1933, Hitler defined as the content of the folkish-racial worldview the "heroic doctrine" of the "valuation of blood, race and personality as well as the eternal laws of selection".

No science was spared from having to crawl under the yoke of the National Socialist worldview. As development progressed, it was said in November 1936 at the conference of the "Reichsstelle zur Förderung des deutschen Schrifttums," not only the historian, but also the philologist and the theologian would adhere more closely to racial science in their scientific observations. Even the natural sciences had to bend their necks. Lenard wrote a "German Physics", in which neither Einstein nor any other Jewish discoverer comes into his own: German is the descriptive physics, Jewish that which uses mathematical speculation. Only original knowledge, he claimed, could also bear fruit in physics. The Berlin professor Biberbach suddenly brought to light an "original mathematics", the same Biberbach who, shortly before January 1933, had loudly declared that he would return to Switzerland, where he had come from, if a man like Hitler became head of government.

The humanities became the most depraved whores of the National Socialist world view; they had to make short propaganda for the folkish-racial dogma. History took over the role of the medieval philosophy; it became, as it was, earthly flame next to the heavenly light. History affirms the National Socialist worldview; the rightly understood past reaches out to Hitler's racial-folk enlightenment. "Five words," said the Brunswick Minister President Klagges, "should illuminate history like searchlights: Kampf, Führer, Nationalstaat, Volksgemeinschaft, Rasse." Their application to the course of history, he said, must result in a new way of looking at things, one that no longer depends on merely imparting knowledge. Historiography, Frank demanded, must "create its marching song" for the fighting people - that is, be poetry that one sings when one's legs reach out. The folkish-rassische Weltanschauung thus became the jewel of faith with which the German people had been pregnant in the depths of their minds since the days of Widukind and which they were only able to give birth to on January 30, 1933. The National Socialist seizure of power thus becomes the summit event toward which German history has been drifting since Otto the Great and from which the entire past only receives its right meaning; Hitler is the man in whom all-German history is completed. One becomes downright happy to have lost the world war, since only at this price Hitler was to be had.

The National Socialist idea of science had serious consequences for the fate of the German universities. The medieval university was based on the fundamental view that truth was of divine nature and revealed to man by divine grace; the student had to approach it reverently and humbly receive it within himself. The educated man was the one who carried the revelation in abundance in his head. The systematic unity of knowledge was the spiritual reflection of the structured order of the divine work of creation. Scholarship was almost exclusively based on memory, man had to passively acquire the material of education, he climbed the higher on the ladder of the intellectual hierarchy, the more versatile and complete he had acquired knowledge: the highest rungs were reserved for the encyclopedist, the polyhistor, the all-knowing. Leibniz had still been a polyhistor in this sense. Human judgment had to be silent before the abundance of the treasure of knowledge; if it interfered or even pushed itself forward, it was banished as an outburst of sinful

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The researcher displaces the polyhistor arrogance: the devil wanted to twist the truth in order to use it against God. The knowledge was a charge for the memory, not dynamite, with which, if it was mastered actively judging, the cellars and treasure chambers could be blown up, in which the creation had hidden its secrets.

With the strengthening of the bourgeois currents, the fight against the old university began. The polyhistor was ridiculed for thinking and speaking everything to the young people; he behaved as if he wanted to chew the food and put it in their mouths. The memory blindly swallows the given and the over-loved: this is exactly what the citizen is fed up with. He wants to change, and for this purpose he must understand criticism and must have a judgment. The sharpening of judgment is more important to him than the cultivation of memory. The polyhistor no longer impresses him; he wants the researcher and discoverer. "Locusts and caterpillars and other vermin are not such a plague on the land as the people who call themselves scholars and yet are not." "Common sense" is valued more highly than "all verbosity and book learning." Since the university no longer met the needs of the time, vocational and technical schools were founded: the Mining Academy, the Tierarzneischule, the Pepinière for military doctors, the Academy of Arts, the Bauakademie, the Ackerbauinstitut.

Gradually, the bourgeoisie developed its own idea of education in contrast to the medieval Christian-feudal one. Since it was interested in the formation of judgment and understanding, it rebelled against the "material mania. It demanded self-activity of thinking, unity of theory and practice, creatively self-responsible research as the only fruitful method of teaching and learning. The unity of knowledge now resulted from the natural connection of things. From the thought of this unity sprang the drive to penetrate and master the world as a whole; the laws of the cosmos were all accessible to reason. Whereas professors had hitherto read from textbooks written by others or dictated them, free lecture now came into practice in lectures.

The bourgeois spirit of reform found its strongest personality in Fichte; he worked out university plans for Erlangen as well as for Berlin. In the university he saw all separation between the supramundane and the mundane abolished; it was, he said, "the visible representation of the unity of the world as the appearance of God and God himself."

Just as the church was the castle of faith, the university was to become the castle of reason; that is why the bourgeoisie grasped such a high concept of it. Civic education became a substitute for religion, the professor a priest of the spirit.

The spiritual atmosphere of the feudal land was the inviolable faith; the mobile capital, on the contrary, drew its circles in the progressive element of enlightenment. The enlightened intellectual became for the citizen what the priest was for the nobleman. The intelligentsia managed the intellectual capital as the citizen managed the material capital. The bourgeois conceded to intellectual capital the rights of the material, because he understood that the rule of the purse was not properly established until it had also taken control of the heads. The boldness of the intellectual speculation kept pace with the unscrupulousness of the financial same: education and property worked understandingly into each other's hands. The supreme earthly symbol of the feudal order was the throne. As closely as throne and altar had been conspiratorial, now stock exchange and university conspired. The more intellectual "values were brought out as "material" at the university, the more industrial and financial capitalist values flowed to the stock exchange: a single chair, if properly filled, could boost a new branch of industry. The bourgeoisie clung to its university, because from this castle of reason, from this objectification form of the positive sciences, the whole world view of feudal society was laid in ruins.

The friction between university and state power, which did not abate throughout the 19th century, was understandable. The feudal powers did not want to capitulate without a fight, but from time to time they always delivered a rearguard action to the bourgeois spirit. The atheism controversy in which Fichte was

The university becomes school of thought 162 involved was such a battle, and the manliness displayed by the Göttingen Seven was a very bourgeois-proud manliness. When Wilhelm von Humboldt, out of mistrust of the Prussian state, wanted to make the nation the owner of the Berlin University, a bourgeois feeling guided him; the "nation" was the bourgeois society to which he felt more kinship than the Junkerish Prussian state bureaucracy.

The National Socialist idea of science does not merely initiate a university reform: the university is moved to a completely new level.

In the Middle Ages, the university lived in the shadow of the Christian church; it was the intellectual luxury that the church afforded itself. For itself it was nothing; against the church nothing was allowed to it.

The university is to sink again into this position; it gets into the same relationship to the National Socialist party as the medieval university had to the church. The stock exchange, parliamentarism, the university decay at the same time. The economic dictator, the Führer, the Weltanschauungspapst are the contemporary figures of the monopoly capitalist situation. National Socialism replaced education, which liberates all forces, with the attitude, which captivates all forces. To have the spirit of the National Socialist "fighter" outweighs the whole academic education. It is no longer education, but attitude that one gets at the university; possession and attitude took the place of possession and education. The unity party rises to the rank which the church had occupied in the Middle Ages. The university is put on mercy. It becomes a National Socialist confirmation school, a National Socialist lesson in instruction. In so far as it still saves a remnant of practical meaning, it happens in that the faculties are transformed into high professional schools; but even here the specialized knowledge is still served in National Socialist Weltanschauungstunke. The medieval university strained the memory, the liberal one the mind, the National Socialist one rapes the will.

With the university the type of the university teacher changes. From his instinct for the coming needs of the time, Nietzsche had already opened the attack both on the liberal professor and on the liberal university.

Henceforth, the university teacher is neither a polyhistor, a scholar, nor a researcher and free confessor: he is a political soldier who, on orders, performs the prescribed feats of thought and interprets the cosmos in National Socialist terms before his listeners. "From now on," Hans Schemm had told the Munich university professors, "what matters to you is not to determine whether something is true, but whether it is in the spirit of the National Socialist revolution." The professor is a "court poet" who reforges the 'world into rhymes on the cues of his leader. His brain exercises according to the command of superior officials. One must be firm not so much in science as in marching, shooting and obeying, if one wants to become a Dr. habil; before one acquires this degree, one is drilled in the camp for that stupidity in which one must later maintain one's students. If there were still brave "Göttingen Seven" anywhere, their mental and physical backbone would be broken with rubber truncheons.

The professors had, on the whole, been warned by a dark feeling what fate lay ahead of them; they provided only a few "old fighters". Unlike in 1848, it was now lagging behind events. It is true that its thinking had long been at home in the fascist apron; the moods by which it was filled, the points of view and ideas to which it was directed, the standards of value which it applied, the intellectual elements in general, in the midst of which it moved, were thoroughly fascist in nature. Somehow all bourgeois professors are godfathers of fascism. It is as true for Heidegger as for Freyer. After the National Socialist turnaround, men like Spranger took pains to make their alignment with National Socialist orthodoxy in a way that was not too exposing. After an intermediate period of exhaustion, since about 1928, as Spranger pointed out before the Prussian Academy of Sciences, the positive moments contained in the World War reach a decidedly fruitful aftereffect. The new idea of the people, connected with the development of a new down-to-earth, interwoven, activist-heroic type of man, was dominant; both were born out of the war experience. Both are associated with a new idea of the state, a res publica militans, which is no longer the result of an "integration" of the

Professors godfathers of fascism

manifold wills in society but, conversely, represents the will of the state through the charismatic leader who thought the new idea of the people and imprints it hierarchically on society in the form of an "emanation. In the economy, too, the political will was given primacy; through planning in the interest of the people as a whole, it strove to achieve the highest possible degree of national economic self-sufficiency, as it had been preformed in the war. In the technical field, the sentimental view, for which technology is the enemy of the soul, is giving way to a "heroic affirmation of technical means, on the one hand, and a planning technocracy, on the other.

This was certainly National Socialism, but it was a high-sounding National Socialism: these men still wanted to preserve the traditional level of liberal science and philosophy. The material fascist content was to be presented in a liberally polished version; the high form was to make the dull delusion digestible. They failed to realize that fascism has its natural elevation just as liberalism has its own; one falsifies fascism liberally as soon as one raises it above its proper level. Sooner or later the professors aroused suspicion by their formal rank. As willing as they were to stand in National Socialist ranks, their heads, which towered above all others, were unpleasantly conspicuous. Exasperation ensued: they were treated, despite their best intentions, as dubious fellow travelers; they were monitored rather than consulted. Thus pushed back, they took revenge with ironic glosses for the fact that nobody wanted to hear their opinions anymore.

Some professors, however, had understood in time that one could be a fully valid National Socialist only within the framework of the format that was appropriate to fascism, and with a determined stroke they chopped off the intellectual excess that from now on would only have disturbed them. Thus they established full contact with the party movement; they merged with it and as a result were allowed to speak for it. Only these professors were National Socialist to the core; only for them was National Socialism more than the brown coating prescribed by the circumstances of the time.

The constitutional law teacher Carl Schmitt, the philosopher Alfred Baeumler, the pedagogue Ernst Krieck were probably the most remarkable figures of this kind; they jumped into the breach in the twinkling of an eye when the Third Reich was in need of academic "judges." It happened in the twinkling of an eye: Schmitt and Baeumler were "born in 1933", and Krieck was, at best, a "veteran" of the year 1931. The "Märzgefallen" Schmitt and Baeumler had also been lying in wait for some time before, so as not to miss the Anschluss, and had sought their connections in a roundabout way; however, they did not fall until they were sure to land in a warm nest.

In Carl Schmitt, National Socialism gained its undoubtedly most brilliant spirit; the acquisition was precious enough for him not to let the ambiguous past of this head spoil his pleasure in it. Schmitt is, according to his words, "Roman by language, origin and law"! This is how he himself interpreted his Romance descent and his Catholic religious confession, his preference for Latin and French literature, his profession as a teacher of Roman law. His social buoyancy is immense. He was not immediately successful; there is a paltry juvenile book "Schattenrisse" by him, which does not yet show the "claws of the lion" in any respect. But already his little book "Roman Catholicism and Political Form" captivates with feuilletonistic charm and an elegance of style unusual for Germany. Jews, who seldom miss a treat, took to him; the national economist M. J. Bonn became his friend and procured for him first the call from the lost Greifswald to the University of Bonn and then to the Handelshochschule Berlin. Schmitt dedicated books to Jewish patrons and nowhere refused to thank Jewish authors for citing them where they had taught him.

He is a Latin-schooled austere and austere mind and has a strongly developed sense of the importance of the great form. He gave political Catholicism cause to place great hopes in him; as a devout son of the Church, he kept close contact with the Catholic Center Party. Nevertheless, against the dictates of his church, he dissolved his first marriage; when she refused to grant him a dispensation, he, another Henry VIII, was

overcome by a demonic desire to get even. The religious Catholic became a secularized Catholic: he remained faithful to the forms of Latin thought, to the anti-Germanic affect and barbarian hatred of the Roman, because they were in his blood.

In these years his dazzling mind unfolded its highest fertility. What Hitler had in his instinct, Schmitt grasped with the sharpness of his intellect: namely, that Germany was in a class war situation. From the ground of this realization, all concepts and ideas, the scientific, philosophical, artistic as well as the directly political ones, suddenly appeared in a completely new light - they were camouflaged weapons of civil war, they were disguises of the will to civil war. It was unusual how here a bourgeois scholar no longer questioned the concepts and ideas for their factual-contentual, intellectual-abstract meaning, but solely for their politicalcivil-war ulterior meaning. Schmitt's eye for this view of things was probably opened by the Spaniard Donoso Cortes.

The conservative aristocrat Cortes had seen the social conflict between the European bourgeoisie and the European feudalism under the meta- .physical image of the cosmic struggle between Satan and God. It was Schmitt's flash of insight that this theme held the key to the German situation. In his most effective writing, "The Concept of the Political," he defined the political as a friend-enemy distinction.

Here, from his bourgeois Catholic starting point, he met Karl Marx in the same insight. For a moment he wavered as to which front he should practically take. He read Marx and also Lenin and forbade himself the obstinate German nationalist chatter against Marxism; one should consider, he occasionally said at that time, whether one should not become a Marxist oneself. However, he was born for Rome, not for Moscow; he was already attracted by the magnet Hitler. Only slowly and gradually, of course, did he move toward the place for which he was predestined. Like Hitler, he sought to gain a firm foothold in the Reichswehr; he established personal relationships with generals. The authoritarian government so bribed him that he sided with the authoritarian Chancellor Brüning despite his falling out with the Catholic Church. He entered the National Socialist outside works when Otto Strasser and Ludendorff temporarily captivated him. Otto Strasser was the cultured demagogue; he was a rung down from Hitler, but he was more socially serious. Schmitt went to Ludendorff's school when he was determined to descend from the high level of liberal and Catholic-Humanist spirituality into fascist primitiveness. As a Catholic he was prepared for the sacrificium intellectus, and the supranational powers, Jew, Freemason, and Jesuit, were only the absurdities peculiar to the folkish faith similar to what the Virgin Birth, the Assumption, and papal infallibility are to the ChristianCatholic. Whom his Christian confession has accustomed to the credo quia absurdum est, he finally does not deny the same fearlessness of faith to a folkish-racial world view, as soon as he has reasons to turn to it.

Even before he finally entered the National Socialist harbor, Schmitt sailed under the authoritarian wind of the German national leadership. He represented the Papen government against the plaintiff states of Prussia and Bavaria before the State Court. No sooner had Hitler made it than Schmitt was ready: he slipped through the gates of the Third Reich in such time that he could not be overlooked when it needed a crown jurist. In an amazing way, Schmitt was always just a nose ahead of political reality. As a result, he was an intellectual quartermaster who, by his precaution and prudence, earned the gratitude of every single stage of the great bourgeois restoration movement and who was able to place himself advantageously every time. However, as often as a new advance was due, he set off before day to the next goal; he thus remained a trailblazer. By regularly announcing the course of events through his "changes of place," he was less a soldier - he had kept as far away from the battles of the world war as he had from the hall battles - than he was a diplomat who was not surprised by anything and had his hand in everything.

Schmitt had seen through the civil war situation when, with the shaking of the balance of class forces, the Weimar Republic began to slide. He noticed that the Third Reich had an inherent tendency to organize itself

The Friend-Foe distinction

as a secular church and felt how much he was the right man for it. Rome also lives in secular Catholicism. A Roman church can be built on the basis of a popular as well as a Christian dogma, without the difference having to show itself in the basic lines and outlines of the construction. Rome was the great model in whose contemplation and reverence Schmitt had grown up; a Roman-Latin church structure was to become the empire to which he put his legal mind. He knew what the dogma meant for a church; chm was not tormented by any folkish folly, since he was too much of a Catholic not to have it in him for all times that it does not matter what one believes, but that one believes. The church stands all the more firmly the more tangible, literal and massive the faith is; the spiritualization of faith is already a half apostasy. That is why Schmitt joined the direction of the most blatant and harebrained anti-Semitism.

As far as his influence reached, it was a Latin ecclesiastical influence. He gave his legal advice to endow public officials with the character indelebilis, to organize criminal justice inquisitorially as heretic jurisdiction, to elevate the Führer to the status of infallible pope, to fortify devotion before sacred institutions, to break the freedom of conscience, to subject science to folkish dogma, to force youth to blind obedience: he turned into a folkish cardinal of the curia, who wanted to see the studying youth delivered to the discipline of the strictest novitiate.

The Roman-Christian-Catholic Church got its no less Roman-Folkish-Catholic competition in the Third Reich; the Latin Schmitt could also feel at home in it and get over the excommunication.

Admittedly, it spoils every spirit if it firmly possesses the truth instead of seeking it. It becomes full and sluggish, its inner suspension slackens and loses its tension.

The charm of Schmitt's writings before 1933 was that they always revealed a surprising side of things, that they brought to light something that had been hidden until then. They unearthed what had been hidden and brought what had been obscured into the sunlight. Schmitt was a hunter who usually brought home a rare game from the stalk: one could always be prepared for surprises. Although he "unveiled" for the ultimate benefit of the coming Third Reich, he was nevertheless thanked for the effects that never fail to occur when veils fall.

Since the dawn of the Third Reich, Schmitt's adventurous spirit settled down and became a serving spirit. He no longer roamed with the suppleness, agility, and grace of the predator on paths he had blazed himself, but accustomed himself, as a pet of National Socialist dogma, to the chain. He no longer went after prey on his own responsibility and at his own risk, he only carried out orders. He became uninteresting, as any spiritual stooge of the rulers is.

The folkish dogma has by far not the spiritual rank as it belongs to the Christian dogma steeled in the fire of the Greek philosophy. Just as the deepest foundation of the Christian church, despite all the excesses of priestly power, is humanity, that of the folkish church is bestiality. Into the same spiritual lowland, to which this church and its dogmas are assigned, the spirit is dragged down, which here takes its vows.

Schmitt disowned the Jewish friends of his past; he erased the names of his Jewish informants in the new editions of his writings; he placed himself at the head of the movement for the purification of legal literature from Jewish traces. He penetrated every Jewish hiding place like an Inquisition servant. The former intensity of his mind had turned into the intensity of a delusion; like a poor, insane sectarian, he saw the Jewish specter behind every stone and shrub. The history of Judaism on German soil and, for that matter, in other European countries as well, he said in October 1936 at a conference of university professors, was most closely connected with criminality. Jewish criminality had reached its peak around 1800 in the armed bands of robbers who, often mounted by fifty or more, had made the Rhineland unsafe. Only the improved police conditions after the wars of liberation and the greater profit opportunities in capitalist society would have

Schmitt's spirit becomes a serving spirit

166 caused Jewish criminality to switch to more inconspicuous and more lucrative methods of racketeering. The next generation of Jewry would have engaged in speculation or swindling during the founding period, or continued the association with criminality in Marxism on an extended level. The Jewish "Baal Massematte", the burglary leader around 1800, was the forerunner of the later Bolshevik agitating Jew and Commissar, who merely continued the "poking" of his Ahns at the property of the gentiles on an enlarged scale. It will be the task of genealogical research to determine what has become of the numerous descendants of the old Jewish criminal gangs. At the same time, it will have to be established that all tendencies carried by Jews into criminal jurisprudence for the protection of the criminal represent nothing but the old continuation of the unity of Judaism and criminality; furthermore, the Jewish tradition, above all of the Old Testament, will have to be emphasized in its fundamentally criminal basic attitude without tactical considerations. Only when one recognizes Judaism as a crime that has become a people and its Yahweh as the heavenly Baal Massematte without shyness, the riddle of this people will be solved.

After Schmitt had thus found the trail of Baal Massematte, he crawled as a sharpened National Socialist Weltanschauungsspürhund into the den of legal science in order to flush out the Jewish monster inside.

Schmitt understood the folkish dogma almost exclusively as anti-Semitism, and the Arteigenheit had for him the meaning: not to be a Jew. It contained no positive Germanic elements; Wotanism provoked him to laughter. In certain 'historical times also pious Catholics were vernichtungswürige Judenhasser; completely in their way Schmitt was folkisher anti-Semite. German anti-Semitism can be the revolt of Germanic barbarian blood against the superiority of the Jewish spirit: but then one must have such blood in one's veins. Schmitt has not a drop of it. Schmitt's anti-Semitism is an opinion in the secular, ever-burgeoning struggle of Rome against Judah. Schmitt does not defend Germanic purity and unbrokenness, but he besieges Jerusalem. He is whipped by hatred because the Jew decomposed the great Roman form and not because he outwitted the Germanic barbarian.

This is what separates Carl Schmitt from Alfred Baeumler. Baeumler was originally an Old Catholic of Sudeten German descent; a small spiny lobe, a weak Germanic rebellion against Rome was his hereditary dowry. But he was still Catholic enough to be addicted to the affect against Luther and Bismarck, against Reformation and Prussia. He always wanted to go back to Potsdam and Wittenberg, and he always felt that he had never gotten over Königgrätz. Not from the beginning was he completely clear about where he should stop in his historical canker. At first, his reactionary impulse could not do enough; the dark days of the Mother Law lured him; he wrote the introduction to the Bachofen edition at that time, the best thing he ever succeeded in doing. Germanic and Greek prehistory blurred into one for him there. After this cleansing and relieving leap into the historyless millennia, however, he was overcome by a longing for the solid land of patriarchy. From Bachofen he switched over to Nietzsche. The pagan gods of the ancient as well as the Germanic upper classes were at the same time the gods that Nietzsche's blond beast worshipped: historically and philosophically, being a man could hardly be rooted deeper. With pathetic-comic earnestness Baeumler proclaimed his doctrine of heroism and the male alliance. When Baeumler perceived that the bourgeoisie was covetously looking towards the feudal-medieval forms of rule, he overcame the aversion he had hitherto felt towards Christian historical space and drew the great emperors of early German history into his calendar of heroes. Zeus and Wotan accepted Heliand, Achill and Arminius Otto I as their equals. Germanic resentment against Jewish spirit and Roman power, antique-Greek gentlemen's romanticism, Bachofen's myth-rich chthonic, Nietzsche's Zarathustra hysteria, Platonic-Georgesque love of boys, old-Austrian imperial mysticism, Catholic-universalist memory horizons flowed together and mixed into a special folkishracial world view. As single-track and incisive anti-Semitic, as logical, cold and clear Schmitt's "folkish" worldview was, as motley and manifold, as imaginatively stirred together, as intuitively illogical was that of Baeumler. The contrast, however, was not based solely on this: Schmitt stood immovably at the Latin-Roman

Alfred Baeumler

pole; Baeumler, on the other hand, constructed the dazzling unity of a Greek-Germanic counterpole, which in the end also incorporated the Catholic-imperial idea of universality.

For Schmitt, the Third Reich was to be the exact image of the Catholic Church; the folkish element was merely the worldly-material substance placed in the shell of dogma in place of the Christian-spiritual one. The strand into the supersensible, one might say, had been cut off and connected to a this-side power network. A Germanic distrust, of course, always remained awake against Schmitt's variety of the folkish dogma, which National Socialism never completely overcame against its crown jurist. Baeumler prevented such distrust, which could also have arisen against him, by burying the Catholic-universalist tendencies of his folkish worldview under northern mythology and Germanic historical legend. Baeumler's "folkish" Catholicism satisfied the most sensitive Germanic needs; here Baeumler walked arm in arm with Rosenberg.

If Protestantism was the Germanic form of remaining Christian, folkish Catholicism is the Germanic form of becoming Christian-Catholic again. Schmitt thereby pursued the restoration of the Catholic-medieval world of forms, agreeable to the big bourgeoisie, like a Latin-Roman legate, who outwardly carries out every adaptation, but who strictly and unshakably holds on to the essence of the matter; Baeumler, on the other hand, was an alchemist who presumed to cook Germanic gold out of every chthonic-pagan original substance.

About the man Baeumler is not much to say. He is a volatile spirit, not a good and not a brave character. He has the appearance of a gnome and is neither heroic nor manly for his person. Among the Nordic-radiant Siegfrieden, to whom he supplies the faith that flatters their racial image, he stands like a dwarfish, gloomy Nibelung. In uniform he is a caricature; he celebrates the soldierly being because he does not have it. He doesn't think systematically, only ideas come to him. He resents anyone who does not cooperate, who does not "believe"; it is as if he senses in him, in case of a later change of circumstances, a judge before whom he could not stand. He wants to see only accomplices around him; those who are not accomplices weigh down his conscience. After the March elections of 1933, he barked in word and writing against Oswald Spengler, without this incomparably greater and cleaner reactionary even taking notice of it. Baeumler was entrusted in Berlin with Fichte's national legacy by being appointed to the chair of political pedagogy. His first was to have a funeral pyre erected and "undesirable literature" burned: in the atheism controversy he would have drooled alongside the Pfaffen against his predecessor. At the end of the liberal age he grew as a small poisonous autumn timeless on the same place where at its entrance the great, loud Fichte had blossomed. Against Fichte and also against Hegel he trumped Jahn; this flowing Germanic beard had already guessed that gymnasts are easier to govern than thinkers. He denounces the writers whom Baeumler cannot throw into the flames like their books. While Schmitt is a strategist of the folkish-katholische Weltanschauung, Baeumler is its sniper. From his shotgun position, he looks out for unbelievers in order to then hunt them down: he could hardly get over the fact that he never quite got Ernst Jünger's "Arbeiter" into the field of fire.

A methodical spirit can make it to a Thomas Aquino despite faith commitment and modernist oath. A man of improvisations, as Baeumler is, thrives only in liberal noncommittalism. All faith is serious and heavy; with its solemnity the hiss of the rocket is not compatible. A flash of inspiration does not sparkle when seen through the spectacles of faith, and ideas shaken from the wrist are not elated when it is a shackled wrist. Ordered bon mots fall to the ground because they are too weighed down by the grain of sentiment for whose sake they were commissioned. "Where there is freedom to think," notes the divine Lichtenberg, "one moves with ease in one's circle; where there is compulsion of thought, even the permitted ones come forth with a timid mien." The wit that has a dogmatic hook becomes stale, and the irony that goes proselytizing ways sour. It ill becomes an inquisitor to set off fireworks of the spirit; if he does, he cannot avoid being suspected of playing cat and mouse: one does not trust the harmlessness of the explosions and the spray. The curses that Baeumler hurled against liberalism pollute the very air that alone is agreeable to its spirituality;

Baeumler turned off the oxygen supply that his flame needs if it is still to shine. If an "igniting" spirit only wants to illuminate truths of faith bengalically, it loses the ignition power. But if a spirit ignites no more, which is, like Baeumler, only so far something, as it sprays itself, then alone a heap of insipid and boring catheter ash remains.

From the outset, Ernst Kriech was intellectually far poorer and more inconsequential than Carl Schmitt or even Alfred Baeumler. Krieck was a former elementary school teacher; he had earned his scientific spurs with pedagogical investigations; his diligence and sweat, which he applied to pedagogical questions that interested no one else, aroused the prejudice that it was not merely empty straw that he had threshed. His books were pedantic, dry, and of barren scholarship; but since the stony subject matter was blamed for the drought, Krieck was finally credited with having saved the honor of "science in a field around which everyone else gave a wide berth. Gradually he transcended the boundaries of his pedagogical field and developed a folkish philosophy whose abstractness did not obscure the fact that it practically resonated with Hitler's revolutionary conservatism. "If the master," Krieck wrote, "understands his relationship to the slave primarily as an obligation, the latter can come more to the natural development of his individuality and selfdetermination than if, for example, in the case of civic formal equality of rights, free labor contract and private economic absolutism, the worker, as a result of actual weakness and need, must allow himself to be exploited to the death, whereas he is granted only the right to starve as a supplement. Under an absolute king, the subjects can gain more possibilities of development, if the lord understands his office primarily as an obligation, than under a formal democracy, which serves the ulterior powers as means and pretext for coercive rule, for veiled slavery and exploitation."

The bourgeois upper class did not hesitate to affirm that it regarded its position as an obligation: if one gave it that authority to enslave the worker, the latter would lose nothing; the loss of his freedom would actually benefit his independence and self-determination. Here it becomes apparent how Krieck could become the actual school philosopher of the Third Reich.

Krieck comes from elementary school teacher liberalism; he was once an upright Protestant and a bitter Catholic-eater. Freedom of conscience was a precious commodity to him, and he knew that the social advancement of the elementary school teacher could only take place in the course of liberal enlightenment. His conversion to the National Socialist worldview was necessarily a break in his intellectual lineage; he was a true renegade. This was less because he abandoned the real people while he discovered the "idea of the people" - all national liberals became folkish socialists in this sense - than because he abandoned the radical defiance of the self-responsible man against any kind of patronizing church. The folkish-church catholicity of the Third Reich contradicts Krieck's past just as abruptly as the subjugation of conscience under dogma, the gagging of science and the free word. Krieck feels the ambiguity of his situation and tries to master his uneasiness by closing his eyes with wild determination to the violence of the facts and by the way longs for the day when "true socialism" will allow him to be an honest man again. Until then, of course, he still empties the cup of the dubious renegade fate to the full: he is department head of the cultural department of the security service; as an intellectual criminal investigator he supervises the National Socialist orthodoxy of the German university professors and is all the more ruthless against them, the more questionable he feels himself to be.

If Schmitt forged the far-reaching legal instruments of destruction for the National Socialist Inquisition, Baeumler practiced his denunciatory craft within the framework of the highest National Socialist "Index Commission", Krieck became a police agent against his colleagues in the gown of the university teacher. These three are the human fruits which inevitably had to ripen on the tree of the National Socialist scientific and university idea and on which the studying youth now has to quench its thirst for knowledge.

Ernst Krieck

The movements of the time are necessarily reflected in the educated youth; in their receptivity they take them up and give them the emphasis of their temperament. The division of the student corporations into corps and fraternities had formerly sprung from deeper causes than mere accidental youthful whims. The fraternities united in themselves the young people of the liberal bourgeoisie. The cry: "Boys out!" rang out against the feudal powers, and the "free lad" was the listener that the unprejudiced 'scientist' needed. The authorities were not mistaken about the fact that the enthusiasm of the lad for freedom and fatherland, for the honor and greatness of the nation was bourgeois explosive against the feudal social order; in every lad there was a Jacobin. The police persecutions were by no means directed against childishness and silly boy pranks, but against the spirit of the bourgeois revolution. The "philistine" was the lad of old who reaped economically what he had sown spiritually and who now wanted to be as unabashed in monetary acquisition as he had been in intellectual research. As a lad, one acquired the right to become a philistine; it was only reprehensible to be one prematurely. One should have paid one's cultic tribute to the spirit before one was allowed to turn to the cult of money with a clear conscience.

The student corps were, as they proudly said of themselves, more "feudal" than the fraternities. Originally they took in above all the scions of the aristocracy, who were not blind to the fact that through freedom and fatherland the inherited aristocratic prerogatives were to be wrested from them. Later, when the big bourgeoisie had conquered economic and political power and no longer needed to wrest anything from feudalism, it too sent its offspring to the corps. There, their sons learned the ropes of distinguished society and procured the aristocratic connections through which the daughter of industrial magnates were married in keeping with their station. The sound of money, strangely enough, improved when it was allowed to write itself "of".

The feudal 'economic order had in the meantime been dismantled to such an extent that even the middle bourgeoisie no longer had any reason to be aggressive; what had formerly been bitter seriousness for the fraternities now became tradition and dallying symbolism. Liberalism made itself, no one needed to stake a stake for it anymore. The fraternities enjoyed the goodwill of the police; gone were the days when they were their terror. Their political task was solved; they could rest on the laurels of their ancestors. Like the corps, they became purely social associations: those who had a lot of money became corps students, those who had less, Burschenschafter.

The political change of weather around the year 1933 touched the Burschenschaften earlier and more strongly than the corps. As bourgeois-liberal crystallization phenomena, the fraternities were immediately affected in their entire existence as soon as they were immersed in the acid of the all-filling anti-liberalism. Anti-liberalism was the current in which bourgeois liberalism abolished itself, it was the last decision taken by the bourgeoisie "in freedom" - it included in itself for the fraternities the necessity to dissolve themselves as well. In an anti-liberal epoch, the youth could no longer be allowed to cultivate liberal tradition. The Burschenschaften were as outdated as the bourgeois parties had been. They were all the more so because the nation-state, which National Socialism accomplished, was undoubtedly the ultimate practical consequence of the nation-state idea, but nevertheless in its Caesarist form had never been within the burschenschaft's sphere of vision. As factually impossible as it was that the Burschenschaften could exist national-socialistically, so consequently correct was it that the Burschendschafter became nationalsocialists. When this happened, they themselves had to lay hands on their corporations; as anti-liberal citizens they themselves dug the grave of the liberal sanctuary they had looked after. With the liberal era, the German fraternities had to fall.

In contrast, the corps resisted Gleichschaltung and dissolution. Their resistance was not political but social. They did not want to let people forget that they were "something better" than the tribunes of the people who were allowed to go about their business. The Heidelberg Saxo-Borussians, who had carelessly let the

corps-student cat out of the bag, were not revolutionaries; they had sabotaged the radio reception of a Hitler speech and raised the foolish joking question of how the Führer might eat his asparagus. The National Socialist upstarts were deeply affected by this act of social disrespect; the police of the Vormärz had been more tolerant of such childish trifles. Various Saxo-Borussians were placed in degrading protective custody: the snootiness was to be ducked. The Hitler Youth fumed: lost Old Heidelberg romanticism and anti-workingclass feudalism were the ideals of these corporations, "which owe their continued existence solely to the generosity of the Third Reich." They were outside the national community and were enemies of the socialist nation. The Reich Youth Leader exaggerated the tactlessness of the corps students to the extreme; he declared with Caesar-mad magnanimity that they gave "a terrible picture of the brutalization and lack of discipline, indeed of the abysmal meanness of a small clique of corporate students who make noise and drink while Germany works. If such elements in their depravity do not even stop at the person of the Führer, who is sacred to us, they judge themselves."

Thus the Third Reich had the convenient pretext to strangle the corps as well; under state pressure, they decided soon after to make an end with themselves.

In the future, young students were to be subjected only to National Socialist influences. One does not study anymore, one does not think anymore, one bravely does party service. Party service is credited in examinations: it closes gaps in knowledge. The National Socialist Student Union had become the "fraternity" of the anti-liberal epoch of the bourgeoisie. In the Third Reich, it claimed to be allowed to incorporate the entire student body. He wanted to take the studying youth by the scruff of the neck, in order to be able to supervise and direct them in their work as well as in their recreation. A new "student community type" was to be created; the "free student," it was proclaimed, "who is not bound, no longer has a place at the new National Socialist university." By transforming the university into a National Socialist seminary, the National Socialist Student League wanted to ensure that the sophomores walked in the fear of the brown lord even outside of academic instruction. In regular courses, they were to be endlessly introduced to the folkishe Weltanschauung, via "basic political training work" the path led to Führer training. From one partypromoting retreat to another the young man was chased - one learned as much from the pedagogy of the Jesuits as from their propaganda. The comradeship house, to which one would have liked to draw every student, was the monastery, in which one lived from morning till night under the rule of the party and in the pious view of the leader.

But the university was as much a cadet institution as a seminary; the student was to be as nimble with the rifle as with the folkish party program. Physical training became obligatory. One was not allowed to study until one had been trained in spade drill for half a year in the labor service; one could continue only after one had tested oneself as a boxer and shot the prescribed number of points as a marksman. Any student who did not submit to the soldierly discipline of the SA, SS, NSKK, or HJ was a thorn in the side of the Bund; "and in the future," a student body leader once said, "only those who have proven themselves in this community should be allowed to enter German universities and acquire 'sciences.'" During the vacations, the student was ordered off by the Bund for rural or factory service or sent to a training camp. The body was exercised until the mind went limp and weaned itself from dangerous curiosity. The student entered the lecture hall as a dispensed folkish prayer brother and as a political soldier on leave; science was the pastime between the state-political-racial devotion and the baggage march. That was the necessary logic of things, which could not be changed, although sometimes a mild warning against so much exaggerated scientific abstinence was sounded. Goebbels, for example, warned that the necessary rejection and contempt of intellectualism should not ultimately lead to contempt for education itself. He coined the meaningful key phrase: "Book and brown shirt must complement each other." Rust finally issued the slogan "Science" at the end of 1936 and gave the order: "Into the laboratories."

Neither Goebbels nor Rust initiated course changes with such "understanding" words. The course, which goes to blind, spiritual-party-church and physical-military obedience, is fixed; the Third Reich would give itself up if it deviated from it or if it even turned back. What seemed to be a concession was only a tactical feint. To their not insignificant surprise, the National Socialist authorities encountered signs of unmistakable reluctance among the student youth; only a small part did voluntary party work, and the National Socialist Student League had a weak following. It could not be denied that for the relationship of countless young men to the Third Reich, career considerations were more decisive than inflamed hearts, and that the folkishe Weltanschauung really convinced quite few. It was a problem how this youth could be gripped from within and tied to the National Socialist delusions; the forced converts could not be relied upon. One experimented and tried every semester from a new side. Student body constitutions replaced each other; the goal they unspokenly pursued was to no longer open the university to anyone who was not a National Socialist.

At the bottom of the souls of these bourgeois youth who attended the universities gnawed the dark and sinister feeling of being stuck in a hopeless situation, in a dead end.

Thus, one understands the death mysticism of this youth and why they want to live to die. The death mysticism is a hardship made into a virtue. In the depths of one's being, one has come to realize that the quality of one's existence has become too questionable to do anything better with it than to throw away one's entire life. One of these boys, Heinrich Anacker, confesses:

"What is your happiness and mine?

And what is our suffering?

We know only one thing:

Marching in the dress of honor.

Sunk and forgotten

Is all that we despised,

When they clench their fists

Around the bare paddock lock.

Whether tomorrow we'll still be alive?

Whether today death will break us?

We hardly ask - we lift Our heads into the cool light.

That is the bitter consecration

That beautifies our way:

Magic of the row of four

When the drum booms in front."

So rotten became for the sons of the bourgeoisie even the bourgeois cause that they are only able to hold on, as if to a last straw, to the marching stupor; but every finer organized head must get the "magic of the row of four", which has become an end in itself, so over that he runs away from it with enthusiasm to his

Magic of the row of four

death. It does not work, however, without the self-satisfied vanity of a little bluff. One does not admit that one is tired of one's life, because one almost suffocates at its social futility. The voluntary expression of one's life provides oneself with the accent of heroism; one leaves as a bankrupt, but shows the pose of the hero. This heroism is the escape into a deadly stage effect, which should at least secure a good obituary for a sad creature.

"Just as certain principles must be upheld in order to maintain every human society," Hitler once said in Nuremberg, "without regard to whether all individuals agree with them, so too the cultural image of a people must be formed according to its best components. But what those born to it then lack in inner understanding, what they are not able to grasp with heart and soul, that must be put into respect by conscious education."

The Third Reich systematically put this pedagogical rape program into action. Where the school did not grasp the child, the Jungvolk, the Hitler Youth, the Bund Deutscher Mädel took hold, into which boys and girls were forced by law. Elementary and secondary schools became schools of thought, "church schools"; the Christian denominational school was eliminated and made way for the National Socialist confessional school - for nothing else was the "secular community school" that now came into being. The party became the third educational power alongside school and home, and it spared no state-supported effort to get the lion's share. The Hitler Youth leader interfered with the teacher; he mobilized the Pimpfe when the latter defended the sovereignty of his schoolroom. This tripartite division of educational power particularly depressed the position of the elementary school teacher; he was more and more confined again to mere drill in reading, writing and arithmetic. The enlightened unleashing of intellectual powers violated the Third Reich's rhetoric. The elementary school pupil needed for life, apart from a little orthography and arithmetic, only the ability to read the National Socialist Bible, Hitler's "Mein Kampf. The elementary school of the liberal era had put too many raisins in the heads of the common people. The Frederician corporal, who had not seduced a simple mind to the lust of intellectual debauchery, came to new prestige; but once one appreciated his pedagogical merits, then nothing stood in the way of one day commanding storm trooper leaders in need of care into the schoolroom. One could rely on the fact that the blindly obedient storm troop leader understood the intellectual standard of the Third Reich and had it in his fingertips how much "education" was needed by a fit follower of Hitler. The elementary school teachers overestimate themselves if they think that the Third Reich still needs them. They are sitting on a dying branch, which, no matter how comfortable they may be at present, will pull them down with it as soon as it breaks.

XXVI Degenerate Poetry and Art

If liberalism is to be liquidated, one must not proceed weakly against the whole literature of the 19th century, which, as far as it has rank, is loaded with it to the bursting point. It offers a true leporello list of decomposing excesses. Even Schiller is disreputable reading. In view of the one Geßler hat on the marketplace in Altdorf, the tortured creature of the Third Reich remembers all too easily the countless Geßler hats erected by National Socialism in all towns and villages, and the hollow alley in Küßnacht makes every little Hitler shudder, not to mention the big one. The "Apostasy of the Netherlands" arouses desires to shake off the brown yoke; the applause that the Marquis Posa finds makes it inevitable to cut him his best punch line: "Give freedom of thought, sire," and the tyrannical hatred of the "Robbers" is a sacrilegious game with fire. One should honor the classicist Schiller, but no longer read the freedom poet Schiller: it could be forgotten the difference to be made between an absolutist aristocrat and a dictatorial citizen.

However, Schiller gave to the citizen what is the citizen's; he sang the "Song of the Bell" at the citizen's price. The citizen looked forward to his future with joy and confidence, it lay rosy before him; the citizen's pleasure in himself had not yet been spoiled.

This changed in the later decades. Disrespect for the bourgeois authorities spread rapidly. Literature unmasked the bourgeois in such a way that he virtually lost his good conscience in the midst of his wealth. The "impudent Jew" Heine was already inciting class hatred:

"We want to be happy on earth and no longer want to live in want;

Lazy bellies shall not waste What industrious hands have wrought."

Gerhart Hauptmann's "Weavers" exposed capitalism. The envy of the back house against the front house was stirred up: "Why do I have to clean boots, when the gentlemen eat pineapples?" Holtei has one of his theater characters ask. The ingenious criminals find goodwill, and the most representative pillars of society are exposed as rotten brothers. The ironization of the citizen finally crosses the border of the tolerable: "And you were a hero?" the mayor asks the front-line fighter in Brecht's "Drums in the Night". "It will be in the history book. But there is nothing in the ledger. That's why the hero will go to Africa. Period."

The citizen, who protected and promoted this kind of literature, cut his own flesh. It hurt, not surreptitiously, but openly and bluntly, his interests and paved the way for "Bolshevism." That is why it was hunted down the moment National Socialism came to power. The "decomposition literature" was relentlessly confiscated, banned, secreted, burned, stomped on; the Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police) brought the ostracized literature into their cellars in whole truckloads; old fighters, who could only decipher book titles with difficulty, cleaned out the libraries; their punishing gaze rebuked the person caught, saying that it made

the good man better not to have read a book than an unauthorized one. All the anger that he had had to choke down his throat in silence for years came up in the citizen: now he settled accounts with the authors, with the dead and the living, with the old and the young. The authors who had mocked and challenged him he called "rootless literati"; they soon became for him the red cloth against which he ran senseless. Even higher subtleties of artistic form and unusual extent of creative power were no longer mitigating circumstances.

A nameless martyrdom of the German writer began. The "most disreputable decomposition literati" emigrate in the pardonable concern that their brain substance would lose out under the boot heels of the "splendid" SA and SS men. The rest are silenced in a very thoroughgoing way. No writer will be tolerated any longer who is not registered in the permanent roll of the Reich Chamber of Culture. The number creates the pen hero, not the skill. Marxist and liberalist pasts weigh as heavily as a Jewish grandmother does: one is not "enrolled." Thus one is eradicated; no newspaper, no magazine brings any more a line, no publishing house takes any more a book. One no longer exists in the realm of the spirit, and whoever has not been born with a second, more stable professional skill may see where he remains. The numbered writers are committed to the folkish-church commandment board and the party-soldier regulations: "I will at all times," reads the vow, "stand up for German writing in the sense of the national government." The expulsion from the Reich Chamber of Culture is the writer's fall into nothingness.

While still in a state of stagnation, liberalism triumphed over those right-wing "national" writers to whom the classical intellectual tradition was a natural possession, but who, in the blindness of their desperate bourgeois instincts, had provided nurturing services to the National Socialist movement until it had grown to the point where the Third Reich could do its executioner's work on them, too. Day by day they felt more and more strongly that they themselves had to suffocate, while the dying liberalism was gasping for breath. Where they were jointly responsible, they suddenly wanted to cover the tracks; they put on expressions of suffering before the consequences of their deeds. Hans Grimm, who had committed an unspeakable betrayal of the spirit, Carossa, Wiechert - to name only the best - saw the black fog that descended over all spiritual creativity and felt the cold breath of the Third Reich, which froze every truly spiritual impulse before it could blossom and bear fruit. They became "complainers" when Germany was in the doom into which they had lured it by writing poetry, singing and talking; through the tears with which they mourned the German misfortune, they wanted, when it was too late, to wash themselves clean of their guilt.

Strangely enough, the Third Reich did not have so much courage for its barbarism and its stupor that it did not feel the need for a justification before the spirit; it recognized in a final sense the standards of the liberal epoch by wanting, plagued by curious feelings of inferiority, to compete with it spiritually by artistic and poetic achievements.

In doing so, it became entangled in a web of contradictions. The spirit was supposed to lay cultural eggs, but it was not allowed to be a liberalist cud-chewing egg. He was kicked now and showered with crude flattery the next moment. Frederick William I beat subjects who tried to flee from him and shouted, while his cane maltreated their backs: "You shall love me, not fear me." Likewise, the Third Reich touched the spirit. The Reich Chamber of Culture held office as the institution of German "cultural leadership". The cultural leadership, however, was carried out in no other way than that every creative man who danced out of line was cast into the impenetrable darkness of anonymity, but mediocre gifted louts of spirit and ungifted spirits were showered with fame and money. Goebbels, who let himself be celebrated as the "representative of the contemporary artistic and cultural conscience of the nation," immediately called in the state authorities when he caught sight of a remarkable head outside the National Socialist enclosure. The "Reichsstelle zur Förderung des deutschen Schrifttums" (Reich Office for the Promotion of German Literature) carried out the systematic destruction of this literature; its editors were informers who denounced to the Secret State Police

The vow of

every work that extended beyond the horizons of the National Socialist worldview. The "Cultural Senate" was set up as a "body of self-responsible men of artistic creation"; however, its jurisdiction was immediately set narrow limits: it was not allowed to make any decisions, it was told, but only, through noncommittal talk, to "increase the leadership's great store of opinion and experience." While the carrot was handed out, the stick was always cracked as well. The spirit was promised golden mountains in case it served the swastika; it was the state's business, Goebbels said, "to lend its protecting and encouraging hand to art, to track down talent and to ease its way to the top." The state was the patron of artists.

But the real talent cannot be bribed. It was puny figures who were awarded the state prizes; little club poets received the laurels. The National Socialist "Olympians" were intellectual triplets. It is hardly worthwhile to mention one of them by name. Hanns Johst, the "President of the Reichsschrifttumskammer," was a very moderate talent who had already had his best time before 1933. During the World War water had been an unheroic shirker, and in the first years of the November Republic an "decomposition mad expressionist". He soon no longer trusted his own strength and felt that he needed the crutches of official support if he wanted to remain fashionable. He adapted to National Socialism, and thoroughly. "When I hear culture," he has a Landsknecht say in his Schlageter drama, "I take the safety off my Browning"; so one hundred and fifty percent bramar-based even Goebbels never was. Johst was furious with the better heads who did not succumb to the temptation to become his accomplices, and like a rabid femicide he rumbled against them who were too proud, like him, to eat out of the hand of the Third Reich, devoid of all dignity. "Whoever does not joyfully create the outlines of the new planning, the new goals," he declared, "may be as great as he thinks himself, before the people and our time he is found too small. This time and its empire no longer recognize egoism. He who withdraws into himself, from him also withdraws the cherishing hand of the people."

Another star of this poet's heaven, Richard Euringer, let the evil spirit cry out in his prize-winning "German Passion":

"That too! It's about to burst!

So that's what there is: a Third Reich!??!"

It was meant seriously; one should gauge how deeply the horror of Hitler's work had gone into the bones of the evil spirit. The humor that nevertheless hovers over these lines was not the poet's intention: it is involuntary.

The poetic yield of the sums of money given away by the state to breed geniuses "who would stamp their artistic face on this time in stirring verse, pictures and ions" was disappointing; Goebbels reaped chaff instead of wheat. His impatience grew more urgent with each passing year; he disgraced himself utterly, as often as he contrasted the whole host of his protégés with the one Thomas Mann. "The great geniuses of the new age are not yet here, but they will come one day," he said at the end of 1936. "Perhaps they are already marching somewhere in the ranks of our Hitler Youth or the Labor Service; perhaps they are already here, but they have not yet spoken out. Perhaps one day they will begin to sing and to write poetry; then the great fulfillment will come. There can be no more ardent wish for all of us than to live to see that hour. I am convinced that in that hour the nation will listen to them with devotion. Happy is he who will share in the hour when God will speak in our people."

The essence of great poetry is to be true, to illuminate reality into all its folds. In doing so, it never hides how the gravest seriousness of life touches the ridiculous and the ridiculousness touches the bitterest seriousness. Every idealization is flat, and where it walks in the robe of solemnity, mendacious.

The Third Reich braces itself against the tide of things, it wants to commit once again, like Germany in the Renaissance period, "a cultural crime"; that is why it is suspicious and uncertain, it has a guilty conscience, it sits incessantly on bayonets, it lives in a perpetual state of emergency.

The genius that Goebbels expects must have no relation to truth. It would have to cast into figures what its world lying mouth could only put into fading demagogic words so far, it would have to be a pathetic Münchhausen. A genius of this kind will probably remain an unsatisfied propagandistic need: To be a genius means from the outset to have to go beyond the National Socialist framework on all sides.

The cultural policy of the Third Reich was not content with putting the author of "liberalist and Bolshevik" literature, the poet and writer, under control: with methodical pedantry, it also watched the "disseminator," the publisher and bookseller. Publishers and booksellers, like writers, were compulsory members of the Reich Chamber of Culture and were economically destroyed if they were deleted from the list there. Publishing production was closely monitored, and inconvenient books were immediately taken away by the police, not infrequently without official order or justification, in their entirety. These police raids were worse than censorship, the establishment of which was rejected on hypocritical pretexts: the aim was to preserve the appearance of a freedom that had long since been strangled. The publisher who kept his business clean of National Socialist writing was never certain to be hunted down economically by loss-making compulsory expropriation.

An index of books was drawn up that was more extensive, more petty, more insidious than that of the Catholic Church, but which only initiates and the elect were allowed to look at. Goebbels feared the sneers of the world, and he had reason for this fear. No one suffered more from this secrecy than the bookseller, who no longer knew what he was allowed to sell; if he made a mistake, his store was closed. Fear and cowardice were to move him to display and offer only National Socialist literature and to talk his customers into it. "I will," Johst threatened the booksellers, "no longer tolerate the phrase about the dictatorship of the buying public, because the buying public is the people, but the people want to be convinced. The world did not wait for Christian art either; it was forced upon the world by loving force."

The publishing house and the book trade were forced into situations in which they must gradually wither and die of their own accord: one day they were to fall into the lap of the Eher publishing house as ripe fruit, without being worthy of any payment: this publishing house, as a state publishing house, with its main shareholder Hitler, wanted to monopolistically and unrivaled seize the control, satisfaction and exploitation of all German intellectual needs.

Genius in every respect was to be commanded by the Third Reich, the artistic as well as the poetic. Just as Goebbels was on the lookout for the genius poet, Hitler was on the lookout for the genius artist.

Because Hitler had handled a paintbrush in his youth, he felt himself to be the son of the Muses, who, having come to political power, was called to inaugurate a Periclean age. In 1930, he had said, "If German artists knew what we would one day do for them, they would not fight us, but fence with us." He had the "art craze," which became all the more loquacious the less anyone was allowed to dare to counter it with irony. Hitler did not want to let his artists paint, form, build with the freedom with which the bird sings in the branches. The medieval painter had taken his motifs from the Bible; the painter of the Third Reich was to draw his own from "Mein Kampf". Hitler drew up the regulations for the artist, for whom the National Socialist worldview was as binding as for any civil servant trainee.

In the hereditary material of the Aryan-Nordic man, that was his basic conviction, was rooted just as much the ancient ideal of beauty as that which was due to the awakened German people. "Greeks and Romans then suddenly become so close in the Teutons, because all their roots are to be sought in one basic race."

The great geniuses are not yet here

The Nordic idea alone continues to have domiciliary rights in German art. That which cannot stand before it is ruthlessly exiled. The "Cubist-Dadaist cult of primitivity" is Marxist nihilism; it is a sign of degeneration, of a "thoroughly corrupt and morbid depravity". No naive and unspoiled soul is expressed in the paintings and sculptures of "our Dadaists, Cubists, and Futurists or imaginary Impressionists"; the "fabricators" of these works are "incompetents, impostors, lunatics". It was not the task of art "to remind man of his degenerative symptoms, but rather to counter the degenerative symptoms by pointing to the eternally healthy and beautiful". The artist is characterized by the ability "to rise above the primitive and to ennoble the mean features of life." In principle - Hitler drew this lesson from his experiences - the artist is a painter who colors the filth of existence beautifully. This is the artistic attitude of all prigs, and Hitler is a "Nordic" prig.

The museums were purified, the works bearing the signature of the coming centuries were banished to the magazines. In the "liberalist-Bolshevik" artists against whom Hitler hurls his lightning bolts, the feeling for life of the post-bourgeois era is already at work. In the dissolution of forms, a tradition sinks back into the chaotic womb from which a new world is born; foreshadowings of this world in the making resonate in the formless symphonies of color. Nolde's art has burned the bourgeois ships behind it, and Barlach is the herald of that eastern infinity which throbs at Germany's gates.

"All of us," says Hitler, "have therefore only one anxious wish to fulfill, that Providence may bestow upon us the great masters who may make our souls sound in clays and immortalize them in stones." But the great personality may only translate Hitler's dogmas into clays, colors and stone. She must go to school with Schulze-Naumburg and must be corrected into the concept Nordic runes. Then Hitler and Goebbels beat the advertising drum for her; she will have no freedom of creation, but a lot of money.

Even in modern music the "art Bolshevik" demons had been rumbling; this music tormented the horrified bourgeois ear, as Rosenberg complained, "with constructions that contradicted the whole rhythm of life of the German." The new tones were sounded with the authoritarian vigor with which the Third Reich ruthlessly boxed down what did not fit its style. Richard Wagner was invoked to overpower them. At the same time, all Jewish composers, virtuosos, conductors, and even librettists were chased out: Richard Strauss was ultimately shown the door as president of the Reich Chamber of Music because Hugo von Hofmannsthal had written the libretto for his opera "Die Frau ohne Schatten” .

The eminent Kapellmeister Wilhelm Furtwängler was the only "famous" man who rebelled against this "cultural policy"; he was driven by his temperament to take up a lance for Hindemith in particular. "Only one dividing line do I ultimately recognize," he wrote to Goebbels on April 9, 1933, "that between good and bad art." This dividing line was neglected. One could not contingent music like potatoes and bread. The rootless and destructive spirit also had Germanic representatives. The fight against real artists is not in the interest of cultural life, "if only because artists, wherever they may be, are far too rare for any country to afford to do without their work without cultural loss. Men like Walter, Klemperer, Reinhardt, etc., Jews in other words, must "continue to have their say in Germany with their art.

In his reply, Goebbels developed his theory of art. "I am therefore unable, as a German politician, merely to recognize the one dividing line that you want to admit, that between good and bad art." Art, he said, must also "appear conditioned by the people." Art in the absolute sense, as liberal democratism knows it, should not exist. Art must be good, he said: "But beyond that, it must also be responsible, skillful, close to the people, and combative."

None of these demagogues had a genuine relationship to art; they saw it merely as a special field for propagandistic effects. Insofar as it aesthetically polished up the restorative tendencies, its "masters" were honored; insofar as it was in league with the opposing social revolutionary tendencies, it was "art Bolshevism. Art was appreciated according to its National Socialist usefulness; the good National Socialist

Art must be close to the people 177 will weighed fully when it stepped into the breach where skill was not enough. Even if the critics turned a blind eye to the "works of art" that had blossomed in the sun of grace of the Third Reich, these changelings still did poorly; they could not be helped with leniency.

Goebbels had observed with displeasure that, after direct political criticism was dead, the entertainment industry saw a business opportunity in creating a free space for people to safely lighten their hearts with criticism. He was not willing to grant comedians and humorists privileges; the Third Reich did not even tolerate "freedom for fools." When witty conferenciers in two Berlin cabarets, "Katakombe" and "Tingeltangel," tried their hand at joking at the Third Reich and its beneficiaries, the police stepped in. The official statement was bulging with indignation: "The new state cannot tolerate its institutions, which serve only the people, being subjected to corrosive and vicious criticism by a small but all the more insolent and presumptuous clique." National Socialism would not repeat the mistakes of pre-war Germany, which could not stop the mockery of its great supporting institutions, such as the army, the school, etc., and therefore collapsed even in the hour of danger. Since, as the Minister of Propaganda announced in a tone of dripping, lying hypocrisy and hypocritical infamy, a part of the contributors, as it had turned out perfectly, had been informed either only very superficially or not at all about important institutions of the new state on which they were cooling their heels, these people would be given the opportunity to make up for what they had missed all too long by doing decent and solid work in a camp.

Criticism is by its nature "liberalistic"; the man who criticizes asserts a free district of his own, in which he gives more credit to himself than to the authorities. Criticism limits the power of authorities: that is why it is inexorably suppressed by every church that speaks in the name of an Almighty, by the Christian one no differently than by a popular one. Jokes, jokes and irony are not allowed to touch "sacred" things. The folkishracial dogmatist can be brought down by a joke just as much as the Christian one. The dogma which imperiously cuts off conversation, discussion, and wants to stop the dialectic of development without further ado, is by its very nature witless and humorless. That is why Goebbels fired sharply against the "Tingeltangel" and let loose the brutality of SA and SS men against witty bravery with lawless arbitrariness.

Since the Third Reich regulated the entire existence of the nation, it was responsible for every manifestation of political, social, spiritual life; whoever violated one part wounded the whole. The arrows shot by art critics, since any work of art could not start without official blessing, hurt the Third Reich itself. Its art sense was in doubt: so there was a point where it was mortal. Works of art appeared in which the Third Reich saw itself symbolized to a particular degree: it was an anti-state excess if criticism did not leave a good hair on them. Today, the Third Reich still writhes in hatred under the scathing pranks that the Viennese art critic Hanslidc had dealt to Richard Wagner's music around 1876. Art criticism became the shield of political opposition; the laughter that rose at the work of art was in truth directed at the Third Reich, its institutions and its worldview. It is the price that every despotic-total system of rule has to pay, that in the end not a single area remains to it in which it is not sensitive to pain to the highest degree. The slightest touch hurts it, and it howls as soon as it discovers a finger pointing to one of its innumerable sore spots.

Just as the Third Reich had destroyed all independent organizations - with the exception of the Catholic Church - because even the most harmless could one day become the focal point of an opposition movement, so it finally banned art criticism, which, in due course, could have become the starting point of an all-out critical campaign against the Third Reich. Art criticism had been a legitimate loophole for the "Bolshevik spirit of revolt. Here there was still murmuring, but nothing is more contagious than boldly displayed renitence. A word of power established the reverent silence befitting believers and soldiers.

XXVII. Civic opposition currents

It is worthwhile for systems of rule to place themselves under the patronage of God; they are well founded in this case because rebellion against them may be atoned for as sacrilege against the divine majesty.

The Third Reich did not miss the grant of authority that the idea of God, diluted to a template of thought and value, could grant it. It knew how to strike unexpected sparks from this formula by unceremoniously incorporating it into its everyday life as a tangible component, instead of, as previous centuries had done, delivering this everyday life to it, as it were. The Third Reich did not want to live in God, but God was to live in the Third Reich; it did not want to merely participate in God, but to be of divine essence itself. In its sense of self, it ascribes to itself the exclusive merit for the "miracles it has accomplished": one must be divine if one is capable of such achievements. The "divine" is a standard that can only be met by what is beyond human ability: the Third Reich sees its own deeds as so great that they surpass all pure human work; through them it has confirmed its divine character to itself and to the world. But the Third Reich is Hitler's creation; only a divine man or an incarnate God could succeed in it. The deification of Hitler betrays that the Third Reich wants to last forever: ten, twenty, thirty, fifty thousand years say the National Socialist leaders themselves. What men build crumbles, only the work of the gods endures.

Shy old maids began to build Hitler home altars; later his images even appeared on some altars of Protestant churches. In a protest letter of the Protestant confessional church to Hitler, it was complained that his (Hitler's) knowledge was being made more and more uninhibitedly the norm not only of political decisions, but also of morality and law in our people, "and he himself was being clothed with the religious dignity of the people's priest, indeed of the mediator between God and the people". In public speeches, Goering, Goebbels and especially Ley led the people to worship a religious figure in Hitler. The Lord's Prayer was recast as the Hitler Prayer. It was heard to say that the Thingstätten would not be useful until the cult of the divine Hitler had become established: for that they were the holy places. "I do not want to be guilty of any blasphemy," declared the Pomeranian SS-Obergruppenführer Schulz at the Ordensburg Crössinsee in the summer of 1936, "but I ask, who was greater, Christ or Hitler? Christ had twelve disciples at his death, but they did not even remain faithful to him. Hitler, on the other hand, today has a nation of 70 million behind him."

The Third Reich holds it with the ancient Rome against the Christian one. Hitler, in contrast to the Christian Catholic Pope, is the Divus Augustus, he is greater than Christ, he is God. Before him the knees bend, he is above any criticism. Against a divine person there is no right of resistance, opposition is sacrilege, is blasphemy. Before God one is always wrong, and it is, Kierkegaard thinks, an edifying thought that it is so. The first opponent against God was Satan, since then one falls into hell or is, like Prometheus, forged on a rock and mauled by a vulture, if one opposes the Almighty. As implacable as God was against the outrageous Lucifer, Hitler may be against every rebellious know-it-all. Opposition to Hitler is a metaphysical crime, it is nefarious and violates cosmic orders; the opponent is not punished in the proper sense, he is condemned. The ruling upper class has it easy and comfortable here, it does not need to be just. The blasphemer is exterminated with pitch and brimstone, there is no other justice towards him than to torture him to death. If Hitler has spoken, the destruction meets everyone who does not want to hear. The Fuehrer is always right,

Who was greater, Christ or Hitler?

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repeat the National Socialist officials; before him one is wrong in every case, and one desecrates the earth if one is recalcitrant and obdurate against him. He demands an obedience without backtalk, an obedience which elevates man all the higher, the more it goes against his insight, indeed his true being and all his instincts. The opponent has no excuse and no justification, he is an apostate, a traitor to the people, an enemy of the state and does not escape the avenging angels, the SS men and secret state policemen.

The deification of Flitler is not natural, it is imitated from the ancient Roman example. Just as an artificial flag was designed, an unusual uniform was invented, Hitler's divinity is staged. One does it because one "draws the lesson from history" that the deified is withdrawn from the environment of insecurities, unrest, problems, that he becomes a fetish, that he becomes taboo, but with him also his priests and his church become taboo. One uses the power that one has suddenly acquired to equip oneself immediately with the whole defense system with which the power surrounded itself in earlier centuries. One does not build bastions only when one has already established oneself, but immediately, as soon as one has set foot on the ground of power. Hitler's deification is a hysterical arrangement; it betrays fear and weakness, not courage and strength.

It puts a stop even to that opposition which objects to obvious and sensible abominations and monstrosities, such as the concentration camps are and the June murders were. No more Voltaire should be able to make a "Calas case" out of the execution of an innocent man, no more Zola should be able to make a "Dreyfus case" out of the banishment of a disliked man; no more "j'accuse" should be allowed to set the subjects in armor against their authorities. Tolerating the meanness of justice is "sacrificial service to justice". Judicial murder does not exist; it is the malignant visual error of an enemy of the state; it is an "abomination" and a spiteful misinterpretation. Whoever appears as an accuser against a judicial murder or a "police crime" or an "official arbitrariness", marks himself as a stalking vermin, who best crushes the state power against the wall without much trouble. The protest of humanity is a highly treasonable act, one is dishonorable and ripe for the penitentiary, if one inconveniences the Third Reich in its bloody handiwork with humane phrases.

In justice, a ruling system displays its power over life and death ceremoniously and with great poise. The prestige, the authority of a ruling system are deeply injured when its justice shows a nakedness, even more when the nakedness is uncovered. The exposure of such nakedness is a real political struggle.

Since the judicial murders and police outrages were committed for the benefit of bourgeois society, the conscience of bourgeois "humanity" showed itself to be of astonishing robustness. Already the terrible acts of violence committed against workers during the period from 1918 to 1923 had caused the bourgeois no uneasy hour; here he was gleeful that his opponents had thus been driven to couples. The Heidelberg Privatdozent Gumbel, who had compiled statistics of the unpunished bloody deeds, was treated not, like Zola, like a hero of truth and justice, but like a mangy dog. The citizen closed his ears to this accusation, he clamored that state secrets had been betrayed with it. The pathos of the j'accuse made no impression on him where it was directed against him; he knew this keyboard and knew that altogether it was only false notes that were elicited from it. The "appeal to his tear glands" failed when he should have wept for his own misdeeds. Solely because the servants of the churches after 1933 were sometimes affected by the authoritarian abuse of power, the churches dared to remind now and then cautiously and reservedly of humanity. Thus that memorandum of the Confessing Church remarked: "The Protestant conscience, which knows itself to be co-responsible for the people and the government, is burdened most severely by the fact that there are still concentration camps and that the measures of the Secret State Police are beyond all judicial review."

Swastika here, Soviet star there

As little as one could protest against the inquisitorial tortures of the Catholic Church by invoking the Christian doctrines of love, one can oppose the civil war acts of bourgeois society, the human tortures of the Third Reich by invoking humanity.

The Third Reich stuffs, one could say, the whole of Germany into the party cage. Whoever does not want to be placed in it has ceased to be a German, because outside the cage there is no Germany anymore. Germany was forcibly narrowed, only national-socialist it should continue to exist. No one was spared the decision whether he wanted to become a National Socialist or no longer be a German. With truly generous unconcern, the Third Reich got rid of the ballast of that German diversity, which could not be captured in an overflowing way and could not be brought into line. It reduced all German things to the formula of a most simple polarity: here was the swastika, there the Soviet star. What stood in between had to show its colors. Mercy and pardon were not granted: whoever avoided the swastika was assigned to the Soviet star; thus he was an enemy of the people, an enemy of the state, a renegade German, a man without honor, a bird-free man.

The bourgeois strata, which still clung to the spiritual traditions of German idealism and held on to their liberal pride in education and property - to their "pride of status" - initially resisted being forced into this leveling alternative; despite everything, they still wanted to remain something special. National Socialism might fulfill its function vis-à-vis the petty bourgeoisie and the working class, but they themselves did not want to be sucked into its vortex; they intended to provide the "officers" who would lead the wild tumult of the initial exuberance back into orderly channels. Although there was no longer any place in the Third Reich for "black-red-gold," the "Marxist-sullied" flag of the Weimar Republic, black-white-red was by no means to be brought down; only reluctantly was the equality that the swastika had initially arrogated to itself perceived. The swastika flag has a broad, bloody red background; it flutters in front of a people's movement, it smells of revolution, of the sweat of the masses. The anti-democratic instinct found it unspeakably difficult to descend to the ground of Hitler's Caesarist democratism; the uneasiness that made itself felt in the face of this inevitability appeared as the opposition of the German Nationalists and the Stahlhelm - as the opposition of reaction. "Reaction encompasses everything that offers us positive resistance and does not go along willingly," the State Councilor Görlitzer once said. Reaction was what did not join in, what still wanted to have an "extra sausage roasted," what did not understand that the fine people could continue to remain only fine people if they behaved indelicately, "folksy, like any man of the street."

In his Marburg speech of June 17, 1934, Papen had given expression to the grievances of this reaction. The "purification process" that had begun in the spring of 1933, he said, had also produced dross from which he now had to purge himself. The rumors and whispers about these drosses would have to be pulled out of the darkness. In fact, the press should inform the government "where shortcomings have crept in, where corruption has taken root, where serious mistakes are being made, where unsuitable men are in the wrong place, where sins are being committed against the spirit of the revolution." But since the press does not clear up this mysterious darkness, the statesman himself must intervene and call things by their right names. In this way, the government shows that it remembers the old principle "according to which only weaklings do not tolerate criticism.

The necessity of the fundamental change of course had also been recognized by people "who shied away from the path of change via a mass party". This conservative-revolutionary movement had differed from National Socialism in its tactics. History had proved the National Socialist tactics right, which went the "way of democracy to the end, only to be confronted with the not easy question of how to realize the ideas of unconditional leadership, complete authority, the aristocratic principle of selection and the organic order of the people. The statesman must be clear that he can reform only the state, not life itself. Not all life could be organized, because otherwise it would be mechanized. The true revolution of the twentieth century is that of the heroic and God-bound personality against inanimate bondage, against suppression of the divine

spark, against mechanization and collectivization, which are nothing other than the last degeneration of bourgeois liberalism. The state could well favor a conception of history, but it could not command it. The meaning of the turn of time was clear: it was about the decision between the believing and the unbelieving man, between sanctification and secularization. Life must again be placed under the natural laws of creation. This results in clear demands: "The time of emancipation of the lowest class against the higher classes is over." The principle of popular sovereignty must be broken with. Finally, the German state must find an apex that is once and for all removed from the political struggles of demagogy. A new social order had to be established. First of all, National Socialism had restored contact with the masses. "A kind of direct democracy has thus arisen, to win back the masses who were slipping away from the state." Behind this necessity, he said, was a higher goal: "The foundation of a social order based on common organic forms and not merely on a skillful domination of the masses." Instead of parliament, there had to be a representation of the estates. The national consciousness, which sanctifies the nationalities, does not stand in the way of the creation of large economic areas. However, this imperial task requires an understanding of the nature of the ruling state, "which does not allow anything that goes against the state, but also does not claim that everything is done by the state.

Historical logic demands that the liberal secular state of 1789 be followed by the religiously based state of the German counter-revolution. We should be happy to have a uniform basis of faith in Christianity. There would be a struggle to decide whether the new empire of the Germans would be Christian or whether it would lose itself in sectarianism and semi-religious materialism. Imposed religious struggles would unleash forces against which any violence would have to fail. We cannot have an effect in the European area "if we voluntarily eliminate ourselves from the ranks of the Christian peoples". In the noblest souls and best minds of Europe germinate the thought of a new European Ghibelline party, "which, however, carries within itself the ideal of that aristocratic fundamental idea of nature of which the Führer speaks."

Arguably, a certain gap had opened up between the spiritual will and the daily practice of the German revolution. The spiritual conversion strives for the aristocratic basic idea of nature, the social upheaval, on the other hand, is influenced by the dynamics "which at that time already politically carried Marxism. The leadership had to watch over the fact that no new class struggle under other field signs would repeat itself. Even the bearers of the revolutionary principle must not become a privileged class. The division of the people according to the ancient Greek pattern into Spartiates and Helots should not be repeated. The merit of the party book had to be replaced by human probation and achievement. It is not acceptable to dismiss the spirit by the catchword intellectualism. "Lack of or primitive intellect does not yet entitle one to fight against intellectualism." Everything great comes from the spirit, even in politics. The most evil intellectualism, however, is the rule of the catchword. Humanity is a flowering of ancient Christian culture, freedom is ancient Germanic, equality before the judge is the prerequisite of every just sentence: one cannot discredit these concepts as "liberalistic". Such attacks are directed "against the security and freedom of the private sphere of life, which the German man has won in centuries of hardest struggles".

False personality cult is un-Prussian, he said. "Great men are not made by propaganda, but grow by their deeds and are recognized by history." Coercion ends at the will of self-assertion of the genuine personality. The application of military discipline to the overall life of a 'people must be kept within the limits that do not run counter to the human disposition. It would be reprehensible to believe that a people could be united by terror. The government knows "that every terror is the outflow of an evil conscience.

One should not speak so much of a coming socialization. "Have we had an anti-Marxist revolution to carry out the program of Marxism?" Marxism, he said, is any attempt to solve the social question by collectivizing property. Collective irresponsibility, he said, should not be elevated to a ruling principle. Collectivism, he

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Gap between spiritual will and practice said, is also the principle of a planned economy that does not allow for individual initiative and responsibility and "leads to ineradicable corruption."

No people can afford the eternal revolt from below if it wants to stand before history. "Once the movement must come to an end, once a firm social fabric, held together by an uninfluenceable administration of justice and by an unquestioned state power, must emerge." The government, he said, was informed of all that "selfishness, lack of character, untruthfulness, unchivalry, and insolence would like to spread under the guise of the German Revolution." The rich treasure of trust that the people placed in the government was threatened. The people had a fine sense of right and wrong; they smiled at clumsy attempts to deceive them by a false whitewash. The people's enthusiasm for action could not be raised by incitement, not by threats to helpless comrades. Every word of criticism should not be interpreted as malice, desperate patriots should not be branded enemies of the state. A disenfranchised people has no trust to give away. Doctrinaire fanatics must be silenced. "If we deny the great cultural heritage, if we disregard or maltreat the thousand-year history of our people, the three-thousand-year history of our part of the world, we will forget the great opportunities that the twentieth century once again offers to the core people."

Papen's Marburg speech is one of the most important documents of the Third Reich. It brought the reactionary tendencies of the Third Reich to a clear and pure expression, it formulated unambiguously and unmistakably what the bourgeois upper class expected from Hitler. Papen spoke as an appointee of the true commanders of the National Socialist upheaval; Hindenburg, Reichswehr generals, large-scale industrial entrepreneurs had been inaugurated beforehand. Hitler, having reached the most extreme point of democracy, was to turn back and clear the way for feudal forms of rule; he was to solidify the social hierarchy, the diversity of property relations in terms of estates. Feudal forms of rule culminate in a king and finally in God.

Papen indicated that the bourgeois upper class was tired of the demagogic facade. Certainly the development had proved Hitler's tactics right: but now it was enough of these tactics. The little Moors, who were puffing themselves up everywhere, were going to get their kicks. The upper class was impatient and stingy; it wanted to cut the expenses that demagogy was devouring. It made no secret of its contempt for petty-bourgeois demagogy.

However, Pope's speech was premature; things had not yet progressed so far that the upper classes no longer needed to make a murderous pit out of their hearts. The inevitabilities had neither been created nor had they been rehearsed, which should have left the people defenselessly at the mercy of the feudal-socially organized monopoly-capitalist system of rule. The upper classes wanted to escape their obligations too soon. The Papen speech was a breach of contract; every old fighter heard that they wanted to cheat him out of his wages. The fraudulent undertakings of the Third Reich were made more difficult when the masses were made prematurely head-shy with clumsy frankness; the veil was torn which the Third Reich needed to conceal from the masses the servitude into which they were staggering enthusiastically. It was not his program that stamped Papen a "reactionary," but the carelessness of blurting it out. The National Socialist leaders were outraged because Papen had uncovered the cards while fobbing them off too cheaply. Goebbels banned the dissemination of his vice chancellor's speech, and barely a fortnight later the upper classes got their nose punched; the assassination of Edgar Jung was to show Papen what he really deserved. The National Socialist movement was in the best course of carrying out the orders and commissions of the bourgeois upper class, but it demanded that it be given time. There is also a dependence of the master on the servant; if a servant commits sabotage, the master is powerless. The upper class had overstepped the mark: the lesson it had to take for this was that it was expected to kowtow fully to the demagogy that served it. It had to pay homage to the red cloth against which it spat venom; it had to take down its black-white-red flag, as the "Vorwärts" had already announced in 1918, and leave it in the lurch.

The National Socialist demagogy did not shy away from the trial of strength with the Reichswehr: and the Reichswehr bowed. When the swastika banner freed itself from the competition of the black-white-red flag, it was decided that the stubbornly anti-democratic strata of the bourgeoisie would abandon their reservations against demagogy; they, together with the Reichswehr, dismantled their clandestine opposition. By orienting and committing the masses, whom the bourgeois upper class feared, exclusively to the swastika, Hitler made it the epitome of all bourgeois interests. When the masses were beating themselves only for the swastika, the upper class had to entrust its affairs to the care of this symbol; otherwise there was no longer any security for them. If the bourgeois cause sought protection from the masses, it had to salute their emblem. This was an even bill, which the National Socialist party men insisted on settling. The rearmament, which went beyond all measures, broke the last reluctance of the officers; the demagogue regiment, which managed such a rearmament, was put into the right together with all its symbols. One became an "agent of the Soviet star" as soon as one ceased to be an obedient worshipper of the swastika: when the opposites had thus simplified, everyone became a pest of bourgeois society who remained an outsider, who continued to cultivate surviving traditions. From now on, the good and reliable citizen was recognized by the fact that he swore by the swastika. The bourgeois interest coincided so much with the swastika that there was no longer any bourgeois position from which to oppose the Third Reich. This had far-reaching consequences for the Christian churches.

For various general reasons, the Christian churches stood in the way of the Third Reich. They held to an authority which, they claimed, could claim man more deeply and more exclusively than the political community, which even in case of conflict justified resistance against it: one must obey God more than man. It was unbearable for the Third Reich to be relegated to the second rank in this way. Jealously, SS-Obergruppenführer Schulz said at that training camp in Crössinsee: "National Socialism claims in all seriousness: I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods beside me." The churches were also independent organizations that put a stop to the pulverizing and atomizing tendencies of the Third Reich: "We cannot tolerate that an organization exists beside us that is of a different spirit than we are." Different was indeed their spirit. The Third Reich wants to be a community of blood; the unity of the folkish faith grows out of the unity of the Nordic blood. The Church is a community of spirit; across all differences of blood and race, the bond in the spirit of Christ builds bridges. It dissolves the community of blood: "He who loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me." Its idea of the filiation of God is an element of humanity that must be in necessary tension with the National Socialist principle of Nordic pagan bestiality: the Christian saint is difficult to reconcile with the blond beast. The role of the Old Testament as divine revelation and the Jewish origin of Christ could hardly be reconciled with anti-Semitism.

Although the folkish-rassische 'Weltanschauung' developed in full opposition to the basic teachings of Christianity, and although, moreover, according to its inner dynamics, it had to aim at displacing Christianity, the Third Reich did not take up the open struggle with the Christian churches. Since Christianity also remained a useful instrument of bourgeois interest, it was not a question of eradicating it, but only of adapting it to the bourgeois warfare needs of the Third Reich. The pagan ideology was a pressure measure by which the churches were to be persuaded to give in. As unbridgeable as the gulf between the churches and the Third Reich seemed to be, there were transitions in hidden places that were not immediately obvious, but were no secret to those in the know. The introduction of Christianity into Germany was portrayed as an anti-Germanic alienation in order to imply that some of its tendencies and traditions were currently inconvenient: the spirit of its humanity was disturbing and its Jewish elements were an embarrassment. The autonomy of the Churches was intolerable until their servants were transformed into willing and reliable functionaries of the Third Reich. Charlemagne lost his historical reputation and was pilloried as Charlemagne the Butcher: thus it was made clear to Christianity that the general necessity of

Swastika in epitome of bourgeois cause reevaluating and reinterpreting old traditions was in the course of things, and that it could not be spared having to abandon many a saint and many a holy man. If Christianity no longer wanted to appear alien in the context of the Third Reich, it had to allow itself to be inoculated with that shot of barbarism and unspirituality with which the entire bourgeois society had inoculated itself. Christianity, in order not to have to capitulate to the folkish Weltanschauung, had to take a piece of it into itself; but in this way it got into that condition which was adapted to the war situation of bourgeois society. The churches were to become organs of the Third Reich, like the Reichswehr, the SA and the SS had been; as such they could then, after the Christian God and the Redeemer still had a place in many hearts, continue to cultivate the folkish leavened Christian specialty. The Christ of this church was, seen exactly, only a historical doll, which was injected with life by elitists.

It could not be avoided, however, that primitive souls took the folkishe Weltanschauung literally and rattled it, not to intimidate Christianity but to drive it out altogether. In some cases they dared to make open advances: in the fall of 1933, for example, the district president of Schleswig ordered the story of Isaac's sacrifice to be removed from the curriculum "because the view of God represented in it is un-German," or at the end of 1936 the Reich governor of Oldenburg ordered the removal of crucifixes from schoolrooms. Usually, however, they sought to reach their goal in a roundabout way. As cunning Machiavellians, the folkish fanatics wanted to slowly erode Christianity and, over time, take the wind out of its sails. The Machiavellian plans were hatched in training camps. There, "ideological shock troops" were to be formed. The National Socialist worldview, it was said, uncompromisingly excluded the Christian worldview. The National Socialist worldview was intended only for the Germanic race. The Christian error was harmful to the national community because it was of foreign origin. The National Socialist trinity: honor, justice and fatherland, is opposed to the Christian trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit and the Marxist one: Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. As one once counted the years from the birth of Christ, one will count in the future from the birth of the Third Reich. It is wrong to say that National Socialism wants to found a new worldview, it is such a worldview. "Preferably, however, do not say anything about it outside."

Influence was exerted on the SS men to leave the churches, they were to be devoted body and soul to their God Hitler. The supreme SS leader Himmler himself adhered to childishly naive, Nordic-Wotan views; his Catholic origins, however, drove him to dogmatize them.

On the wounds that Christianity had received in such a way, Hitler from time to time put soothing ointments to keep it from desperately fleeing into the catacombs and taking up a fight to the death from the underground hiding place. He recalled the party program, which professed positive Christianity, and affirmed that he had promised his protection to the churches if they helped in the building of nation and fatherland. He sometimes recalled that in his book he had recommended himself only as a political reformer, not as a religious one. He implored the blessing of the Almighty for his work before the believing peasantry and used the invocation of heaven as a beautiful pathetic gesture. Goebbels and Ley sometimes threw themselves into the breast as exemplary patent Christians with a pious look in their eyes, celebrating the Winterhilfswerk as the most gigantic act of love of the century.

Thus the Third Reich remained in a squinting ideological ambiguity. While it tried to make Christianity docile by flirting with pagan-Germanic ideas, it gave the impression of having taken the side of these ideas; in reality, however, Christianity was to be enabled by its mixture with pagan-folk elements to continue to exist as a religion of a civil-warlike state. If Christianity filled up sufficiently with folkish-racial components, the contrasts between it and the pure "national socialist world view" would gradually grind themselves down.

It was in the nature of things that the confrontation of the National Socialist worldview with the Catholic Church took different forms than that with the Protestant churches.

The Catholic Church immediately recognized behind the folkish-Nordic mask the Roman spirit of the Third Reich: there was the infallible papal mediator between the masses and the highest folkish good, there were the ordained political priests who secured privileges for themselves over the non-socialist laity, there was the dogma and the blind faith, the inquisition and the pious fraud, the index and the gagging of the mind, there were the standards, the processions, the rites, the pomp, the martyrs, there was the unconditional obedience and the grandiose propaganda, in short there was everything by which the Catholic Church had been raised to greatness and power. Within the Third Reich, the free Protestant conscience had to suffocate; thus, in a political roundabout way, the Reformation was liquidated. The Third Reich exterminated the Protestant-Reformation man in Germany by taking him into the Roman discipline of the national dogma. The secularized ecclesiasticism to which he was thus subjected gave the Catholic Church many a nut to crack, but it did not doubt that as soon as he was accustomed to dogmatic discipline again, he would find the ChristianCatholic dogma more nourishing, juicier and more digestible than the folkish-Katholische. The folkishKatholische heresy was more advantageous and promising for the Catholic Church than for the ChristianProtestant one. The Third Reich entered the order of Rome; it brought the Germans back from their Wittenbergian licentiousness into the Roman form. This was a victory of the Counter-Reformation, which basically decided everything for the future.

Thus, of all foreign powers, the Curia was the first to be found when Hitler needed diplomatic recognition: already on July 20, 1934, the Concordat was concluded. The Lateran Treaty, signed by Mussolini, served as a model; the Third Reich, only to demonstrate quite soon its diplomatic negotiating capacity, was lavish with concessions, which it intended to override in due course. In particular, it granted the Church rights over Catholic youth. The Catholic Church did not want to fight the Third Reich; it did not feel secure enough of its faithful based on the election results in Catholic areas. It wanted to come to terms with the Third Reich by largely withdrawing from secular affairs for the time being. Bishop Berning of Osnabrück became a Prussian State Councilor, and other bishops did not conceal that they were worthy of becoming such.

Admittedly, the Catholic Church could not then voluntarily vacate all positions. The faithful demanded a defense of the Christian-Catholic faith against the folkish-racial ideology, they wanted an honorary rescue of Charlemagne. Cardinal Archbishop Faulhaber delivered a series of sermons against the Nordic view of history, and in a major pamphlet I the Catholic clergy exposed the fragile foundations of the "myth of the 20th century." However, although Rosenberg was settled, certain folkish reinterpretations and bendings of Christianity should leave the door of understanding j open. Genuine Christian love, said Bishop Berning, is in touch with the genuine German national character, whose loyalty and truthfulness, whose readiness to help and willingness to make sacrifices have become as proverbial as the loyalty of the Nibelung. Such sacrificial love has a heroic quality about it. That is why it is fundamentally wrong to reproach Christianity for not being heroic, as Germanism demands. Christ does not make his disciples dishonorable, and when he once said in biblical language: "If someone strikes you on the right cheek, offer him the left as well, then he does not want us to abandon ourselves defenselessly to injustice, but that we should not lose our inner control.

The dissolution of the Center Party and the persecution of political Catholicism, the harassment of Catholic youth organizations, the destruction of the Catholic press, the denigration of Catholic doctrines violated so many customs and interests that fierce resentment accumulated among the Catholic people. The mouths of the lower clergy often passed over what the hearts j of their faithful were full of: here the priests refused to raise the swastika flag on the holidays of the Third Reich, there they dared from the pulpit j partly hidden, partly open attacks on the terror regiment; sometimes they confessed

j they confessed their disgust against the excess of political criminality. A small-scale war between

Liquidation of the Reformation

State power and the Church broke out. Catholic clergymen were arrested, convicted of "contempt of the Reich flag," of "spreading abominations," of offenses against the pulpit paragraph. A clergyman, who had to take care of the soul of a communist sentenced to death without guilt before his execution, had, according to the official report, "awakened in him the idea that he was a martyr, like the Savior, who could calmly go on his last path of suffering and had suffered like his Lord and Savior. The clergyman was immediately taken into protective custody and removed from his office. With truly dripping indignation, the "main press office" announced that with this last prayer, under the mask of a godly pastor, the clergyman had tried to incite the communist murderer against earthly justice. The comparison of a murderer with Christ, however, is also a vile blasphemy and tastelessness, which is capable of endangering the reputation of the priestly vestments in the eyes of right-thinking people and Christians in the most serious way. There was no place for such priests in the service of the Third Reich. The Christian charity wasted on the communist murderer would repel truly Christian people.

Now and then, even a bishop abandoned diplomatic restraint. Bishop Galen of Münster forbade his faithful to attend a Rosenberg meeting and thus caused the National Socialist officials up to Reich Minister of the Interior Frick to rage. "Restriction of external freedom," Galen said on another occasion, "even some kind of so-called serfdom may be somehow compatible with human dignity, which is thereby impaired but not denied and annihilated. But an obedience which enslaves souls, which reaches into the innermost sanctuary of human freedom, into the conscience, is crudest slavery. It is worse than murder, for it is a rape of the human personality." "God grant us," he continued, "discernment and heroism, that we may never, out of selfishness and cowardly fear of man, defile conscience in order to win or retain the favor of earthly rulers."

In such rallies, whether they were meant merely as chess moves or as serious declarations of struggle, buried feelings of freedom among the down-trodden people were revived. The petty bourgeois, the peasant, the worker, all of whom, despite the National Socialist programmatic soap bubbles, felt more and more strongly every day the noose tightening around their necks, were once again stimulated to get up their nerve and "resist" the rape by the Third Reich; right into the Communist ranks, people were ready for tactical alliances with such an oppositional church. The authority of the Third Reich suffered serious damage as the limits of its omnipotence became apparent. Although the church had never made pacts with communists, the latter sometimes saw in the priestly opponents a support for themselves.

Some pastoral letters of the Fulda Bishops' Conference were likely to stiffen the resistance of the Catholic population. The Third Reich looked with uneasiness to the Vatican City, whether from there an international movement against the German persecutions of Catholics would not be initiated. More than once, papal statements against the Nazi breaches of the Concordat were feared.

The Third Reich went on the offensive. Where it felt a blow approaching, it itself immediately struck. The Catholic Church should tremble.

One after the other, officials of the foreign exchange offices appeared in the monasteries. In the past years, the monasteries had borrowed from foreign co-religionists. They found the German foreign exchange laws immoral and predatory and hastened to repay their loans; they did not want to be dishonest debtors. The courts pounced on the violations of the law, which had not always been avoided; abbots and abbesses, monks and nuns, and finally even the Bishop of Meissen were brought into the dock for foreign exchange crimes. Voluptuously, the National Socialist prosecutors set to work to make pious brothers and sisters criminal; harmless, naive people who took contracts even more sacredly than the Third Reich did were brought down in the dirty, immoral meshes of German foreign exchange legislation.

At the same time, bed-sheet secrets were sniffed out. The National Socialist manly virtue had been homosexuality until 1934; in the Hitler Youth it could not be suppressed even later. It was strange for these

Christianity is "Heroic" too 187 hardened boy molesters to suddenly break into the monasteries as judges of splinters and morals. They discovered a few "cases," and their hello was not small. In the style of Corvin's "Pfaffenspiegel" they exposed the church; Franciscans were "pig priests" and all monks and nuns were currency pushers. The National Socialist judges were so keenly after their cowl-wearing game that they did not come to the awareness of how they themselves were performing pathetic political whoring services.

The Church understandably became nervous, for an institution such as the monasteries inevitably also harbors much that is all-too-human behind its walls, and those who unscrupulously lift the veils will always find a spot. She understood that, at least for the moment, she could not compete with the Third Reich, which ruthlessly used all means of power and knew no moral or human inhibition. So it retreated in order to save what could be saved; it submitted to the elimination of the monastic teachers from the public elementary schools, it gave up its rights to the Catholic youth, which it was entitled to on the basis of the Concordat. Spiritual educators spoke out, explaining that the Third Reich and the Church were descended from the same God and therefore did not need to be at enmity with each other. As great as the tension was between the folkish Catholic Church of the Third Reich and the Christian Catholic Church, the secularized and the holy state of God, as fiercely as the folkish priests were zealous against the Christian priests, there was no lack of preconditions for arriving at a mutually beneficial synthesis under special circumstances. It took place above all on the platform of anti-Bolshevism. *

Notwithstanding the foreign exchange and religious trials, the pastoral letter of the Fulda Bishops' Conference in the summer of 1936 warned against "Bolshevism." The Third Reich, intervening in Spain where the Church was in danger of losing its latifundia and privileges, suddenly became precious to the Curia. At the very present time, the bishops said, Communism and Bolshevism were striving with diabolical purposefulness and tenacity to advance from the East and West against Germany as the heart of Europe, to take it, as it were, in a fatal pincer. If Spain succumbed to Bolshevism, the fate of Europe would be frighteningly called into question.

The task that thus fell to the German people was self-evident. "May our Fuehrer, with God's help, succeed in accomplishing this tremendous task with the steadfast and faithful cooperation of all the people. The Christian faith in God forms "the granite foundation on which the powerful and victorious rampart against Bolshevism can be built. Not struggle against the Catholic Church, but peace and harmony with it, in order to conquer the spiritual precondition of Bolshevism."

No sooner did the Catholic Church begin to tremble for its Spanish property than it immediately extended its hand of reconciliation to Hitler; it encouraged him to send his lansquenets to Spain, promised him God's blessing, and at the same time inculcated into bourgeois society that it was the granite rampart against Bolshevik social overthrow. *

* The Lateran Treaty, the Concordat with Hitler, the Curia's favoring of Franco in Spain are expressive indications of how the Catholic Church was in fact striving toward a synthesis in which fascism could have merged with it; it felt fascism to be the state constitution appropriate to it. If the Church indulged in occasional demonstrations against fascism, these were never of a fundamental nature; in them only the competition of the spiritual hierarchy against the brown secular one brought itself to bear. They were rivalries of the kind that were fought out in the Middle Ages between the pope and the emperor, between the spiritual and the secular aristocracy. In addition, of course, the church also pursued the intention of evading any responsibility for the atrocities of the Third Reich, which it recognized. If it got into a quarrel with Hitler, it had an alibi before its faithful as often as they were outraged by the suffering that Hitler and his Gestapo inflicted on them.

Not to be compared with the situation of the Catholic Church is that of the Protestant churches in the Third Reich.

Protestantism begins religiously what liberalism brings to an end socially and politically. It is the first step to indignation and decomposition, the real fall of man; everything that follows has its origin in it. Man breaks the great traditional form, rebels against the objective order, breaks the generally binding discipline of faith, and in doing so invokes his conscience, the right of his self-responsibility, his self-determination. The religious reformation opens the series of all later social and political revolutions: in this respect Protestantism is also the religious ancestor of Bolshevism. Of course, Protestantism is not "guilty". It is a symptom of the fact that the avalanche has started rolling, which finally buries the whole feudal-estate society under itself. In the freedom of a Christian man the bourgeois rebellion still keeps a religious face, in the freedom of the capitalist economic man it rages without restraint, in the freedom of the proletarian man retribution follows on its heels. Liberalism is secularized Protestantism, as fascism is secularized Catholicism.

It is true, of course, that Protestant orthodoxy has always been ashamed of liberalism and has never wanted to admit that it was its legitimate offspring. Luther was a medieval man, and Protestantism is by no means as deep in modern times as it is said to be. As the first stage of the reformist rebellion became fossilized in Protestant orthodoxy, it no longer wanted to have anything to do with the later stages. Orthodox Protestantism does not want to be lumped together with the necessary consequences of its own principle of existence. It mistakenly considers the gap between itself and the Catholic Church to be narrower than that between itself and liberalism; it wants to deny that already in the beginning, in the first step, lies the whole decision. To the extent that Protestant orthodoxy was embarrassed by liberalism, it misunderstood the basic anti-liberalist tendency of National Socialism and believed that it was pulling in the same direction as the latter. Protestant clergy provided nurse services to the Third Reich in a much more effective sense than Catholic priests did. Liberal Protestantism behaved as did the liberal bourgeoisie, which saw in National Socialism its last reserves and turned head over heels to those reserves when liberalism's Bolshevik perspective could no longer be mistaken.

But no sooner was the Third Reich established than Protestantism realized that it had fallen into an unpalatable climate. Liberalism could not be brought to an end without also killing Protestantism; the free Protestant conscience had survived, just as free thought, free speech, free research, free citizenship had survived. The free Protestant conscience waf an ambush of the opposition, and no one could tell what would brew behind it. Protestantism contradicted the fascist situation of the bourgeoisie just as much as liberalism did; if the bourgeoisie sought its new Middle Ages in the Third Reich, Protestantism had to be cleared out of the way first. Violence was not necessary for this, because in the air of the Third Reich it was inevitable that it would succumb to the process of self-decomposition.

*After 1939, curial diplomacy was wise enough to see that Hitler's cause was lost. Now, of course, it was time to erase all traces of their earlier acquiescence to the Third Reich. As little as it was alarmed by the sins of Franco's regime, it now strove to show horror at Hitlerism. The church had to draw its line against National Socialism all the more forcefully, since the obviousness of essential affinity now began to become highly compromising for it. It could use the exposure all the less, since it could now hope to be able to offer motherly comfort in its Christian-church bosom to the disillusioned who had become secularized Catholics in the school of National Socialism. It was symptomatic that many SS men became clergymen after 1945. (1946)

The Third Reich encouraged this process to the utmost. Depending on the size of the folkish worldview portions, which the individual groups assimilated, more or less pagan varieties of Protestantism emerged. The whole "myth of the 20th century" almost had been swallowed by the "German Faith Movement". The "German Christians" left it at anti-Semitism enough and contented themselves with reservations against the Old Testament. The moderate confessional Christians tried to get away cheaply by letting their Christian teachings keep good neighborly relations with the folkish ones with feigned naiveté. The Protestant Church in Saxony abolished "Amen" and "Hallelujah" in its acts of worship and replaced them with "Das walte Gott" and "Gelobt sei der Herr".

Thus Protestantism crumbled into numerous sects. In addition, it lost its dignity through the bishops' quarrel and the squabbling of the clergy.

The East Prussian military priest Ludwig Müller, who had already felt attracted by National Socialism around 1930, had granted Hitler hospitality in Königsberg several times in the course of the years and had especially introduced him to the then military district commander Blomberg. Müller, a limited and simple-minded man, had in this way rendered an immeasurable service to the National Socialist party leader, and Hitler felt deeply indebted to him. Hitler, who as a thoroughly Catholic man had no concept of Protestantism, had in mind the plan of a single German church that would be the spiritual showcase of the Third Reich. Protestantism had to fill itself up with so much Roman Catholic spirit as to be capable of a strictly structured church formation and at the same time to satisfy the German Catholics who had to be drawn away from the international Papal Church: a kind of Anglican High Church was to come into being. Müller, who had never been more than a barely average church official, willingly made himself available to create the "German Church. He became bishop of the Reich and thought he could decree the foundation of the church from above. Bishops were appointed in all parts of the country, an unsavory race for the high offices of the spiritual hierarchy began, career-minded individuals corrected Luther. The pastors who ascended to the bishop's chair were mostly sinister, disreputable fellows, completely of the ilk of the National Socialist bureaucrats. It was everywhere the same type that the Third Reich carried from the dust to the heights: one was an unclean profiteer, the second a notorious drunkard, the third, the brown-Swedish regional bishop Beye, was acquitted only because of lack of evidence of the charge of having embezzled collection funds and of having charged the parish of Kassel with private car repair costs on the basis of a fictitious invoice. The bishop, the prosecutor said, "in his desperate mood, tried to use brutal means to extricate himself from the prosecution."

The Protestant congregations resisted both these objectionable spiritual superiors and their intentions; a struggle of all against all ensued. The imperial bishop, in his incompetence, committed folly upon folly; what he touched failed. Neither the arrests of pastors and the financial measures of violence, nor the mediation actions gave the brittle Protestant raw material that Catholic suppleness which should have been his own, if the casting of the one "German Church" should have succeeded. Hitler had to drop the Reich bishop, the chaos he had caused was too great; it was no longer mastered even by the "Reichskirchenminister" Kerrl, who was appointed spiritual peacemaker because he was the only one in the line of high paladins who "sometimes still read the Bible".

Kerrl had formed a Reich Church Committee that was supposed to reconcile all Protestant tendencies with each other. This work of reconciliation also failed. Now a "Federation for German Christianity" resumed the efforts to form a German national church: it wanted to gather all Christian movements "for a renewal of German religious life in the sense of Christianity, which takes its defining characteristics from German nature and German essence. The dean of Thuringia, Leffler, formulated the basic views of the Federation: "Two little words often burned daily in our souls: Germany and Christ." It is Christ, he said, who reveals himself above all in the National Socialist movement and in the present upheaval. The whole meaning of a new German

A guide! One people! One God! One Church! existence is concentrated in the prophetic figure of Adolf Hitler, who is at the same time the only savior of the cause of Christ in Germany.

The Federation took up again the slogan that had already been coined in 1933: "One leader! One people! One God! One Reich! One Church!" Here Protestantism had already given itself up, it had not only professed dogmatic and organizational uniformity, but had crossed over from the subjective-spiritual-spiritual realm of conscience into the objective-folkish-worldly realm of power-political institutions.

The Protestant remnants, loosely, loosely and nuancedly united in the Confessing Church, refused to take this step.

There was an ecclesiastical liberal standpoint, which, like Orthodoxy, was a halting stage of development, solidified into permanence, albeit a later one; just as Orthodoxy had not wanted to flow away into liberalism, ecclesiastical liberalism did not want to flow into fascism. These two directions, orthodoxy and ecclesiastical liberalism, now met in the confessing congregations.

The "Confessing Church" had to stand firm under the pressure of the Third Reich, the folkish worldview and the other Protestant tendencies infected by the spirit of the folkish ecclesiastical tendencies. In this atmosphere, the free Protestant conscience was not an asset to be defended, not an authority to be honored or even to impress; if one did not have a weightier, more massive and more objective backing, one was run over in one go. The "Confessing Church" tried to find an objective ground on which it could stand firmly, in which it could dig itself deep. It armed itself with the Gospel, defiantly put its finger on the revealed Word of God, and showed itself unshakable in its proclamation and witness. The congregations sang: "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott" (Our God is a Mighty Fortress) and said the Apostles' Creed loudly and challengingly in the choir. In the beginning, Karl Barth provided them with a theology: one had to take one's Christianity bloody seriously and prove oneself in one's religious decision before any concession to the worldly-earthly. Against the state power, barriers were erected here on the very narrow field where the individual soul, struggling and fear-laden, directly met its God. Since the Third Reich also interfered in this relationship, it came to a clash between it and the "Confessing Church".

This objective ground was almost only a rope on which one lost his balance if one was not strong in the art of the acrobat. Sophisticated minds could cope with it, but the simple mind had nothing in its hands. For this simple mind, the Gospel, proclamation and testimony were already little enough, because the Bible could be interpreted, proclaimed and testified to by anyone, as it suited him; an objective judge was nowhere to be discovered, since one did not want to be papist. If it had not been for the stubborn will at work behind the scenes to simply not bow to the pagan catholicity of the Third Reich, one would not have escaped capitulation. The gospel was also used by the folkish Christians - one of them had even threatened to "smash the gospel in the face" of all unrepentant people. The opposition of the "Confessing Church "* was fed more from the sources of masculine-character bravery than religious strength of faith, and the aristocratic-grandbourgeois-liberal aversion to plebeianism and leveling was more elementary in it than Christian orthodoxy. The "Confessing Church" continued the rearguard action that the "Stahlhelm*" and the "Deutschnationale Volkspartei" had been forced to abandon prematurely.

There is no doubt that this opposition did not lack admirable intrepidity. "If anyone," reads the confession of the Altona pastors, "at military, state or party celebrations wants the church only to heighten the solemnity of the festivities, he abuses the church. If the church is called to such feasts, then it also has nothing else to proclaim but judgment and promise, and not to others, but to those who are there." Whoever wants to subject the church in its proclamation to the influence of a political power, thereby makes the political power a religion hostile to Christianity. The belief in a national future state of complete justice and conformity to the nature denies the limit set by God, falsifies political action and teaches to disregard the

The professing church 191 redemption through Christ. Any deification of the state was reprehensible; if the state authority raised itself to the position of lord over consciences, it was unlawful.

In pulpit proclamations, the imperial bishop and his bishops were accused of having confused the consciences of the Protestant church people through heresies, and of having publicly desecrated and blasphemed the Holy Scriptures. The state was demanded to stop the continued spying on church work, to lift the bans on church meetings in public places, to loosen the fetters put on the church press and Christian charity, to refrain from state interference in the inner life of the churches in favor of those who by their lives and actions bring about the destruction of the Protestant Church, to stop scheduling marches, processions, rallies, political and sporting services on Sunday mornings.

That memorandum of the "Confessing Church" to Hitler was a reckoning which, in spite of its moderate tone, was highly severe in substance. It addressed the question to Hitler "whether the attempt to de-Christianize the German people is to become the official course of the government through the further cooperation of responsible statesmen or even just by watching and allowing it."

Goebbels had interpreted as positive Christianity what was merely humanitarian achievement. The damage of such statements was all the greater because the church was never given the opportunity "to refute the misinterpretations of the Christian faith made from high places under the same scope". Officially, any interference in the inner structure of the church is denied, but in reality, one intervention follows the other. The official work of pacification was aimed at keeping the church administratively and financially dependent on the state, depriving it of the freedom of its proclamation and order, and forcing it to tolerate heresy. Under the slogan "overcoming the denominational division," the church would be made incapable of public work. The church's own youth organizations would be taken away from it, and the Christian faith of the youth would be undermined. At the universities, the training of young theologians was entrusted to false teachers, and de-Christianization was spreading in radio, the daily press, and lectures. The glorification of the Aryan man was not compatible with the sinfulness of all men as testified by God's Word, and the Christian commandment of love for one's neighbor was opposed to the hatred of Jews which was publicly promoted. A morality foreign to Christianity is penetrating our people and disintegrating it. The principle that "right is what benefits the people, wrong what harms them" stems from the spirit of a national utilitarian morality that disregards the commandment of truth. The oath, as an oath of allegiance and obligation, has experienced a frightening accumulation and, at the same time, a frightening devaluation. "Already cases are accumulating in pastoral care of people declaring that they do not feel bound by an oath, the refusal of which would have threatened their existence." The "evaluation of the ballots" - the falsification of elections, that is, in the March election of 1936 - had caused many Christians distress of conscience. Protestant Christians who had confessed their "no" vote had been ridiculed and maltreated. Arbitrariness in legal matters was a repudiation of God, as was the denial of justice. "The evangelical conscience, which knows itself responsible for the people and the government, is burdened most severely by the fact that in Germany, which calls itself a constitutional state, there are still concentration camps and that the measures of the Secret State Police are beyond any judicial review." Protestant Christians could often find no protection of honor.

Perhaps most audaciously, Berlin pastor Niemöller hurled his "anti-state" charges in the face of the Third Reich. He had been a submarine commander during the war; his actions had made him a figure of national legend. This protected him from arrest until 1937. At times, his fellow officers filled the prisons and concentration camps by the hundreds.

Of course, after it became apparent that the congregations could not be worn down by the pastor arrests, the Third Reich turned a deaf ear to the angry Protestant zealots. The congregations would tire of their opposition, the government felt, if nothing more happened to the clergy. If the pastors were not given the

Martin Niemöller

honor of martyrdom, they were likely to be left alone in their pulpits at the end of the day as boring bickers. Protestantism, shattered into countless shards, would die if left to its own devices; persecutions would only revive the rump, the "Confessing Church.

In this calculation there was a cleverness of a deeper kind. As soon as "Bolshevism" appeared at the gates, the "Confessing Church" also took up its position in the fortress of the Third Reich, as did the Catholic Church.

There is a circular letter of the confessing Christian regional bishop Marahrens, in which the grotesque egg dance, which the opposing Protestantism is not spared in the face of the emerging Bolshevik specter, comes to a striking view. Marahrens complains there in November 1936 about the existence of an SA group order according to which the uniform may not be worn at weddings and baptisms and the flags and standards may not be shown at funerals "as long as representatives of the church are present". He sighs, "What will our sons say who are wholeheartedly in the SA? What will young theologians feel who, precisely as theologians, felt committed to SA service - despite everything they encountered at times, unwavering in their will to our Führer and people and to their church. Must we really first bring testimony to the sincerity and determination of their devotion?"

The ambiguity of this whole opposition comes to light: the church receives kicks, it also cringes, but it nevertheless cooperates and is incapable of a full break with the Third Reich - it stands under the feeling of a commonality that unites all. "In the difficult spiritual struggle which the Church has been fighting against Bolshevism since it came on the scene, it has been given experiences by God which make it a truly thorough and deeply grounded confederate in this struggle," says Marahrens.

The opposition of the monarchists and German nationalists, the Reichswehr generals, the Stahlhelm, the Protestant and Catholic Churches to the Third Reich remains highly conditional; it is a family quarrel, nothing more. Basically, they are all the same bourgeois brothers. They are jealous of each other, but they do not fall over each other. They are all in the same boat. The quarrel dies down at the moment when Bolshevik thunderstorms rise in the sky. Then they hoist the swastika on churches and palaces, on barracks and factory chimneys, and in the unity of this symbol everything is submerged that was sacred to them until then: the crown, the Christian cross, their black-white-red traditions and all the blood-sanctified signs of their frontline fighting. As a Legitimist, a German nationalist, a Stahlhelmer, as a Protestant or Catholic, as a bourgeois, one can occasionally quarrel with the swastika, but if one is mindful of one's bourgeois interest, one cannot break with it. If one nevertheless decides to do so, then one can only do so for the sake of mere fantasies.

Two strange bourgeois opposition groups had the courage for such fantasies and were immune to any inclination to compromise: the German Believers and the Serious Bible Students.

The German believers push Protestantism to its extreme, they are the only completers of the Reformation. They make their ideological system out of the pure Germanic indignation against the Roman alienation. Their völkisch impact is not a kind of secular dogmatism, but an immediate unleashing of the barbaric elemental. Ludendorff stands next to Hitler like Luther next to the Pope. In him, on the general basis of a man of the upper class, the Protestant-barbarian instinct is formally embodied in crystal purity; therefore he represents no social group and remains a mere comic sectarian. Since he is the "commander" and former crony of Hitler, the Third Reich lets him have his way and is content to harass his followers and refrains from exterminating them.

As exclusively as the German believers weaved the pagan thread of Protestantism, the Serious Bible Students clung to its Christian Bible-believing yarn. They regard the Bible as the Word of God, which they have to take literally, they do not interpret and water down, as Protestant pastors tend to do. They consider themselves the "Jehovah's Witnesses"; besides Jehovah, there is no power to which they may be subject and obedient.

They are secretly

They ignore the Third Reich: since the Gospel there; forbids bloodshed and commands charity, they refuse to serve in the army. They consider the penal code as presumption and the judicial proceedings against them as legally invalid acts of violence. They do not recognize the authority of the Third Reich.

The "Jehovah's Witnesses" are petty bourgeois who immediately felt that the Third Reich would certainly leave them empty-handed. Their doctrine is the theoretical pretext of a stubborn and obstinate backbone, which has only a limited brain and spiritual poverty at its disposal. They are irreconcilable as the German believers are, their fanaticism is unbending, and they go, men as well as women, to prison for many years;* they reveal in a whimsical way that one must be a great fool as a bourgeois man in the declining capitalist society if one wants to prove oneself a strong character. The German believers and the Bible scholars are the meager bourgeois residues who, in the pride of their free Protestant conscience, choose the God who agrees with them and interpret the Holy Scriptures as they make sense to them; By insisting on their "Here I stand, I can do no other, God help me, amen" with upright imperturbability to the Third Reich, it becomes their fate, because they refuse to tread the ground of the new political facts, to perish as whimsical saints.

*Later they go fearlessly to the scaffold and die like heroes. (1946)

Third Part

The path to war

Revisionism and anti-revisionism faced each other in two fronts; the question of Germany's attitude to the Versailles Treaty dominated the attention of Europe. Germany was revisionist; the world had come to terms with that. However, the only revisionism permitted was that which sought to amend and mitigate the treaties through peaceful negotiations and bilateral agreements; the Weimar democracy had committed itself to this revisionism through its Volkerbund entry.

The German national opposition was suspected of indulging in violent revisionism. It detested the League of Nations as much as a dam against its tendencies toward revisionist violence as a guardian of democratic thought and institutions. But it was misjudged if it was thought to want to endanger bourgeois-capitalist society at all by its revisionist impetuosity.

While the foreign policy operations of communism were designed to destroy the bourgeois order in the struggle against Versailles, the German national opposition tried to convince the European consciousness that the defense of the Versailles Treaty was not worth putting the bourgeois order at risk. The German national opposition wanted to mate the Versailles Treaty from the point of view of the better understood bourgeois interest; the more endangered the European bourgeois society became, the more irrelevant it would become. Precisely because Communism obviously wanted to set the bourgeois order on fire with the fire arrows it hurled against the Versailles Treaty, the Western European powers should understand that the best thing to do was simply to let the dispute over Versailles gradually peter out. By seizing this idea with vehemence, National Socialism outstripped the old German nationalist right, for which Versailles had been too shattering an experience to be suddenly regarded without inner inhibitions as a fact of only secondary importance.

At the same time, slow changes were taking place in the bourgeois states of Europe themselves, which gave some resonance to the surprising reflections of the German national opposition. In the past, communism had been only an idea; an idea had not been able to prevent the imperialist powers from carrying out their antagonisms; they had never been afraid of ideas. Only belatedly did they realize that this idea had created an enormous body of power in the Soviet Union. The "anarchic" Russia had not purified itself democratically; an order of a completely new kind had come to rule there. It was as alien to the bourgeois world as the latter had once been to the feudal world. "The world revolution" was no longer a "figment of the imagination of degenerate literati and uprooted agitators"; it was the epitome of all those emanations which unmistakably emanated from the Russian-Bolshevik power structure and were painfully felt in the social body of every bourgeois state. The psychological, political and economic after-effects of the world war had made themselves felt as crises in all states; but the crisis situations increased the sensitivity to the Bolshevik emanations, without Russia having to consciously and systematically envisage interference in foreign conditions. Russia was made responsible for the social pains suffered because its own organism was no longer healthy.

Italian fascism was the first bourgeois defense against Bolshevism; it did not, like German National Socialism later on, turn into an unrestrained bourgeois offensive that lost all measure because the German bourgeoisie was constantly kept in suspense by the feeling of the dubiousness of its position.

Initiation of the fascist solidarity

Fascist sympathies now grew everywhere; even where people did not yet feel so threatened socially as to need to abandon liberal democracy, they nevertheless encouraged political-authoritarian movements. All the European states became cautious; Bolshevism was now no longer a mere idea, it had become, as a great power, an aloof third party which had to profit where the bourgeois states had come too sharply to blows; in spite of their deep antagonisms, they nevertheless began to feel, from year to year, an increasing solidarity with Bolshevism; between themselves there was no gulf so unbridgeable as that by which they were all separated from Bolshevism.

This was the moment when Hitler could come to power in Germany, "Western Europe had feared only violent anti-revisionism at the Hague in 1930; now embarrassing Bolshevik fears were already weighing on its heart. Fascism gave him food for thought; it was no longer merely a reef on which liberal democracy failed, but was already becoming an island that promised salvation to the bourgeois order. The contrast between fascism and Bolshevism seemed more vital and decisive for the latter than that between revisionism and anti-revisionism, Versailles and anti-Versailles. If National Socialist Germany stood guard against Moscow, it had to be forgiven for many things. The Third Reich was a loss of ground for European liberal democracy, but not for the bourgeois order. The Third Reich transformed Germany into a fortified glacis against Bolshevism; this was even more bearable for Western European democracy than if Germany had been flooded by Bolshevism. France refrained from sanctions after Hitler's rise to power; it thus acknowledged that it had misgivings about thwarting Germany's anti-Bolshevik mission. It was paralyzed; it was confused by the realization that the vital necessities of bourgeois society and the forms of liberal democracy no longer harmonized under all circumstances. It felt that it would be shaken to its foundations if liberal democracy and the Versailles Treaty lost their European binding force; but it felt at the same time that Hitler had nevertheless been carried aloft by the elementary bourgeois interest. France's way out was inaction; it waited, it did not have the certainty of action because it did not possess the key to the situation. It was precisely this key that the National Socialist leaders possessed; they not only obeyed dark instinct, but also had a clear awareness of the situation. Soon after the coup d'état, Goebbels explained to a small circle of writers, journalists and publishers how the Third Reich intended to proceed in foreign policy. The Third Reich would first assert its claim to equal rights in armaments matters, Goebbels said. In view of its democratic basis, the Geneva League of Nations was defenseless against it; in the long run, it would have to retreat before Germany. The Weimar state had been outwitted by National Socialist legality insurance; on the basis of its constitution, it had had to let its mortal enemy have his way as long as the latter prepared for the final battle on the legal ground. Whereas legality insurance had been a matter of domestic policy, the claim to equal rights would now be a matter of foreign policy. The bloc of the Versailles powers would be disintegrated and one day overrun just as it had happened to the stupidity of the Weimar parties.

Indeed, the Third Reich could hope to enter into the same relationship with the bourgeois states of Europe as the National Socialist movement had with the bourgeois parties of the Weimar Republic. National Socialism often got on the nerves of the latter; they not infrequently winced woundedly when it trampled on their liberal principles. But they did not give Social Democracy the authority to destroy it; they secretly protected it, however much they openly rebuked it. He was a bourgeois ultima ratio that they kept warm against the industrial workers. Because they did not want to let him fall, his advance was unstoppable, if only he was tough enough; insofar as they were not prepared to destroy him, it could not be prevented that step by step he created a fait accompli where he had been refused voluntary concessions. For the European democracies, the Third Reich was regarded as the last reserve against Bolshevik Russia, just as National Socialism had been regarded by the bourgeois Weimar parties as a reserve against socialism and communism. Therefore, the Third Reich was allowed to dare a lot; after all, it was a European tool which, under the prevailing circumstances, no one seriously intended to destroy. If it defiantly insisted on its equal

Hitler not a world revolutionary 197 rights, if it took them against the wording of the existing treaties, then no one could be found to impose sanctions on it, which would inevitably have led to a war of despair.

Hitler's May Day speech in 1933 had been designed to instruct foreign countries that he was not a world revolutionary. It was a mistake to anticipate the tearing up of the Versailles Treaty everywhere; his political psychology was not that primitive. He did not conceal that he was dealing with revisionist intentions; he described the intolerability and untenability of the consequences of the treaty in the blackest light. "Nevertheless," he said, "no German government will of its own accord carry out the rupture of an agreement which cannot be eliminated without being replaced by a better one." He was careful not to give himself a nakedness where one was lying in wait to be able to strike him fatally at once. What he needed above all were weapons; only when he possessed them would a new chapter of European politics begin. The worst effect of the Versailles order rested "in the enforced defenselessness of one nation against the excessive armaments of another." He gave the impression that the Versailles Treaty concerned him less than Bolshevism: "A Europe sinking into Communist chaos would bring on a crisis of incalculable extent and duration." If he was able to seduce Europe into confirming him as the savior from Bolshevism, to hand him a European proxy to invade the. If he could seduce Europe into confirming him as the savior from Bolshevism, into handing him European authority to invade the Soviet Union, the Versailles Treaty would dissolve into dust; the revisionist fruits would fall into the lap of anti-Bolshevism. Hitler's instinct found out that the social fear of the European citizen was the weak point of the European political power order; here he started, from here the whole edifice began to shake. Once this happened, the pillars of Versailles crumbled without having to be rammed.

France calmed down when Hitler refrained from openly breaking the treaty; Germany was to be given its probationary period. The probationary period was a breathing space, and Germany knew how to make use of it. Immediately, German rearmament began; by the fall of 1933, Hitler's self-confidence had strengthened to such an extent that he dared to make a move designed to find out how much the European powers were already willing to accept.

The negotiations of the Geneva Conference on Disarmament, in which Germany also took part, had finally reached a point where a plan was submitted to the German Government on which England, France and America had agreed. Germany was to be given a short serving army of 200000 men; only for this army was she to be allowed to possess arms. A control was to watch that Germany did not violate this agreement. When Germany had proved herself for four years, the other states were to proceed to her disarmament; in this way German equality was to be realized.

This plan was received with indignation in Berlin. It constituted an "undiscussable defamation," its justification was an "insulting slander of the German government" and a "completely groundless suspicion of its political intentions," Neurath told representatives of the foreign press on October 16. It was an "outrageous accusation" to accuse the new Germany of endangering European peace. Two days earlier, on October 14, Germany had left the disarmament conference and declared its withdrawal from the League of Nations. The official representatives of the other states had communicated, the Hitler government announced, "that the present Germany could no longer be accorded this equal status at the present time." This procedure was an "equally unjust and degrading discrimination against the German people"; under these circumstances it would no longer take part in the negotiations "as a nation without rights and second class." On the same day Hitler produced himself before the Reichstag in the role of the great misunderstood. "The German people and the German government did not demand arms at all, but equal rights." The German people, he said, were filled with a sincere desire "to eradicate an enmity which in its sacrifices bears no relation to any possible gain." After the return of the Saar region, "only a madman could think of the possibility of war" between Germany and France. There would then be "no morally or reasonably justifiable

The great misunderstood reason for it." Germany only wanted to help in the reconstruction of a world that was not very happy today. "This world, however, to which we do no harm, and of which we wish only one thing, that it may let us work peacefully, has been persecuting us for months with a flood of lies and slander." The German youth were not marching and demonstrating against France, but only against Communism; the latter was the only enemy of the National Socialist organizations. Germany, he said, had been on the brink of disaster before 1933. "If the red turmoil had first raged as a firebrand over Germany, one would probably have learned in the western cultural countries of Europe that it is not indifferent whether on the Rhine or on the North Sea the outposts of a spiritual-revolutionary-expansive Asiatic world empire stand guard or peaceful German peasants and workers in sincere solidarity with the other peoples of our European culture want to earn their bread in honest work." The National Socialist movement not only saved the German people, "but also earned a historical merit for the rest of Europe." Solely to protest the "perpetuation of an intolerable discrimination," Germany had left the League of Nations.

Germany, as Hitler interpreted Germany's departure from the League of Nations, had removed itself from an unworthy situation; no challenge had been in his mind; he had only wanted to stimulate general selfcontemplation in order to finally create the healthy preconditions for a general European understanding. Again, as on March 17, 1933, Hitler's words were oil on running waves. The Versailles powers came to terms with the accomplished facts before which Germany had placed them; it was as if Hitler's declarations had miraculously blown away the implications of these facts. The European powers thanked Hitler that, while brutally slapping their interests in the face, he did not immediately take the Versailles bull by the horns, but ran as St. George against the Bolshevik spectre: thus he spared them from having to rush in and call him to account as protectors of broken treaties. They were allowed to continue to leave everything to time and a lucky star.

When Germany slammed the Geneva door behind her, contemptuously acknowledging the withholding of equal rights, she made it known that she was already beyond the point of needing to fight for them on the democratic soil of the League of Nations; sooner than she had originally hoped, she could throw the tools of democratic ideology into the scrap heap. It took equality for itself; it was no longer a problem. The states that had let Hitler go unpunished on October 14 no longer inspired terror. Since they could not be provoked to any warlike action by this political chinwag, it could be assumed that they were all the more unwilling to notice Germany's arms policy arbitrariness. Since they did not want to wage war, it was easy to convince them that there was no compelling reason to do so. Hitler affirmed his love of peace as often as they needed to be appeased. The Third Reich had reached a new, promising stage; it no longer trusted European democracy, it already considered it a stinking corpse. It was devious enough to ignore it until the hour came to finish it off, as German democracy had been finished off. The Third Reich turned away from Geneva so as not to be suspected of somehow still paying homage to European democracy. The Third Reich removed itself from the community of democratic nations, whose triumph in 1918 had consisted in having finally imposed its rule on Germany. The testimony of democracy had gone bankrupt when Germany suddenly abjured the democratic faith with open and scornful contempt and lined up her victims on the altars of dictatorship. By turning its back on Geneva, the Third Reich wanted to rub the democratic nations' noses in the fact that their joy of victory had been short-lived. If they knew the language of symbols, they had to see that their entire world war victory was being called into question. If Germany today flew from the proximity of democracy because she felt it to be a disgrace, it was no longer difficult to guess that she was preparing to settle accounts with it tomorrow. Geneva was the guardian and guarantor of the Versailles Treaty; since the kick that the Third Reich gave to the League of Nations must necessarily hit the treaty, it could deny itself the opportunity to take aim at it. The Third Reich no longer litigated with European democracy, it only piled up the explosives with which it could one day blow it up. "Equality" was no longer a serious argument, but only

the cheap formula that put to sleep the distrust of the diabolical activity with which Germany was organizing the certain destruction of all democratic institutions.

When European democracy had been destroyed everywhere, imperialist Germany had its "revenge for 1918".

It is astonishing how France hardly noticed that the policy and the successes of the Third Reich touched the French position of power in its foundations. Liberal democracy is France's historical achievement; it is the necessary form in which the French people's will to power and political urge for recognition is most naturally and fully expressed; it fits France like a glove and is the gift with which she bestowed the world. Across continents, it has thus committed the world to itself; it was the leading cultural nation because it had brought forth liberal democracy from its blood. For other peoples, liberal democracy is a garment that one can take off, an apparatus that one can change when expediency dictates; for France, it is the doldrums with ' which one is born and from which no one is able to slip. As soon as liberal democracy falls in the courses, France's prestige, prestige and power also fall. France marches in the lead only as long as all the people are still eager and passionate about liberal democracy. If liberal democracy is discarded, then France's appeal and splendor are also gone. As the Weimar Republic, Germany had drawn the constitutional consequences of the fact that the Treaty of Versailles had established France's European supremacy. By becoming a liberal democracy, Germany had incorporated itself into the new European state of power that had been established by the Treaty of Versailles, guaranteed by the League of Nations, and in which France had the decisive say.

The breakthrough of the Third Reich had been a loss of French power; the destruction of German democracy was directed against France; in its detachment from Geneva, Germany freed itself from Paris. To the extent that the Treaty of Versailles lost compelling force and immediate convincing significance in the face of the Fascist-Bolshevik confrontation, France fell behind; when the struggle against Bolshevism became more imperative and important than the defense of Versailles, Germany's weight outstripped that of France. It was a bad sign for France when voices increased admitting the obsolescence and outlived nature of the Versailles Treaty; those who abandoned Versailles favored the undermining of France's position of power in Europe. This position of power crumbled all the more inexorably because France made no effort to defend it seriously.

The state that first saw through this was Poland. National Socialist Germany was seen by Warsaw as the rising star that promised more than France could ever give. Because France did not forcibly stop the German violations of the Versailles disarmament paragraphs, the opinion soon spread that it was no longer capable of doing so at all; one ceased to fear France.

France demanded "security" again and again and ever more urgently; this was an admission of weakness. It did not spread terror, it made itself the object of pity: it became a general German conviction that France would never again wage war under any circumstances, that the French people could never again be brought onto a battlefield. It was tempting for the Third Reich to sin bravely on the unconditional love of peace of the French people. Liberal democracy, sanctity of treaties, League of Nations were components of the French ideology of power; they were already outshined by the German ideology of power, the content of which was the mission against Bolshevism. Thus it appeared that the German power was in the ascent, the French in the descent. The Third Reich was no longer afraid to let it be known that it saw in liberal democracy a transitional stage first to anarchism, then to Bolshevism; anarchism and Bolshevism would only be mastered if liberal democratism were first cleared up everywhere. Hitler's foreign policy program came to the fore: first to destroy France, in order later to conquer Russia uninhibitedly, to assemble "for a final active confrontation with France" under the condition "that Germany really sees in the destruction of France only a means, in order to be able afterwards to give our people at last the possible expansion elsewhere".

200

Liberal democracy is crumbling

France closed its eyes to the revisionist gauntlet thrown down by Germany's anti-democratic and antiGeneva policy; it closed its eyes to it in order not to have to pick it up. It did not want to pick it up because it did not feel quite sure of English support.

The British Empire had been greatly loosened in its joints by the world war; for England, Bolshevism was much more the sum of all the revolting tendencies of colored peoples than the epitome of the proletariansocialist subversive movement; for London, it was especially a problem of foreign policy and world domination, less a problem of domestic social policy. The Empire felt the hand of Moscow much more disturbingly in Asia than in its industrial enterprises. Not because the Soviet Union, as a communist type of state, was stirring up class-conscious workers, but because, as a desperately struggling power state, it was backing colonial peoples, England needed a counterweight against it. If the Third Reich set itself up for an offensive Ostpolitik, it was assured that the Soviet trees would not grow to the sky. It was in England's interest not to turn a deaf ear to the German cry of terror over the Bolshevik danger; thus the other Versailles states could be persuaded to grant extenuating circumstances to the feverishly arming Germany. Lloyd George resorted to moaning to the world from time to time the expedient English fears of Bolshevism, with which the Versailles States, which in spite of everything obstinately distrusted Germany, were to be infected. "If Germany," he said, "crumbles before Communism and Communism seizes Germany, Europe will follow, because the Germans would accomplish it best."

England prevented any vigorous move by France against Germany. France felt too weakened and intimidated by the war to fall into Germany's arms on its own responsibility. From time to time, London rebuked Berlin's violations of the law; this put ointment on French wounds and kept the French people from becoming completely misguided about their English friend. For the rest, however, England provoked an endless exchange of notes between Berlin, London, Paris, and Rome; memoranda were exchanged, ambassadorial demarches ordered, ministerial trips made, conferences held. The months passed thus, and Germany had time to arm herself. The stronger it became, the less to be feared in the future were French extratours against Germany. The purpose of the Anglo-French alliance was, after all, to be able to pacify France again and again when she wanted to take hostile action against Germany; it was the cloak behind which England provided the Third Reich with the opportunity to rearm by enticing France to do nothing by putting off collective action.

It was advantageous for England that in the strengthening Third Reich grew up both a full-fledged counterweight against, the Soviet Union, and a reinsurance against the French federal friend. France is so close to the English coast that London must not allow it so much freedom of movement as to join England's enemies at the most. It must be driven, for better or worse, into the arms of England; it must be so inescapably dependent on English aid that it remains in British tow under all circumstances; it must be ruined in terms of power politics to such an extent that nothing more than a second Spain or a larger Belgium remains of it. German rearmament should put France in the predicament of being able to continue to exist only as a client of the British Empire, as a client living under English protection and, when it fights, doing so only for British interests. From the decline of European liberal democracy, England drew the conclusion that France was no longer legitimized to lead an independent, autonomous great power existence. If England's frontiers had been pushed up to the Rhine with French consent and acquiescence, then France had become a British province; the Third Reich, rearmed, was the bogeyman ready for the English wave as often as France stiffened its ambition for independence. Hitler had a fine feeling for the English needs; he did not disregard any chance on land, water and air that England offered him.

XXIX. The French Counterplay

Once again, however, France tried to escape the power-political descent that England had planned for it and that Germany wanted to prepare for it. Barthou was the man who fell into the spokes of the wheel of fate to which France already seemed to have fallen. In him rose once again the spirit of the great French Revolution, of the bold, intrepid Jacobin tradition; Barthou was French in the sense in which Clemenceau had last been. Barthou was imbued with the awareness that since 1918 France's position in the world had been based on the strength of liberal democracy, on the authority of the League of Nations, on the inviolability of the Treaty of Versailles; in these fields he wanted to stand his ground in order to defend France's greatness and to make up for the loss of prestige that the lack of vigilance had already earned France since Hitler's seizure of power. He saw through the English dodges and was determined to thwart them. Always England had first shared France's indignation at German treaty violations; always it had declared itself in favor of the principles France wished to defend; always it had guarded France against "precipitate steps"; always it had thus prevented any decisive action against Germany and in the end, to Germany's credit, had allowed all the French agitation to fizzle out without result. "There are," Barthou said across the Channel in the French Chamber on May 25, 1934, "there are two ways in diplomacy of contemplating the solution of problems. One says no when it is no, but not a no followed by a yes; it says yes when it is yes, but not a yes which then becomes a no. That is a policy of clarity. There is another policy that adopts a principle and then reserves the right to destroy the principle in the details. We didn't want to pursue that latter policy. "We told England." With devastating clarity England's diplomatic method was thus illuminated; Barthou put an abrupt end to English guardianship of France.

Barthou does not tolerate the shifting of the subject of European politics; it is "Versailles," not "Bolshevism." When the world deals with the Bolshevik problem, it has nothing left for Versailles; it then sees more through German than through French glasses. Barthou treats Litvinov in Geneva with striking "warmth. "Litvinov - I say it in order to judge him fairly - is not a man who wants to please all the world; he has told truths with a brutality not lacking in skill, as he sees them and as they did not appear as such to the General Commission. Litvinov has put himself forward as a practical man, about which I have no doubt. He is a man who turns to reality. If there are passages in his speech to which I could with difficulty give my assent, on the other hand I had to acknowledge that there is also with him one thought which dominates everything, but everythingyou understand me correctly - and which, I suppose, dominated his whole speech: the thought of security."

Hitler has announced in his book the invasion of Russia and the defeat of France; both states have, towards the Third Reich, the same security concern. Liberal democratism and Bolshevism have the common enemy in National Socialism. Again a defensive alliance was due between Russia and France; the threatened found themselves against the sacrilegious German aggressor.

Barthou and Litvinov sought a northeastern European pact; all members were to vouch for each other's security by assuming obligations of assistance; Germany was also invited to join. Those who stayed away were suspected of peace-disturbing intentions. The North-East Europe Pact was intended as a stiffening of the Versailles system; by showing itself ready to offer its hand to this end, the Soviet Union made its final transition from the revisionist front to the anti-revisionist one.

Entry of the Soviet Union into the League of Nations

Barthou traveled from Geneva to Bucharest and Belgrade. The Little Entente was to learn that the feeble French policy of concessions was over. The successor states were built on the ground of the Versailles order; revisionism threatened their very existence. Barthou's spirited offensive against revisionism strengthened the confidence of the Little Entente in France. Confidently, on July 2, 1934, Benesch declared, "A regrouping of European forces is in preparation, a regrouping which in the last few weeks, it may be said, has become abruptly and unexpectedly apparent to everyone and seems likely to upset to some extent all previous relations on the Continent." In Paris, Barthou said, "This revisionist policy is not only unjust and contrary to the wishes of the people, it is full of dangers and carries within it the seeds of war."

The anti-revisionist bloc, as Barthou had in mind, was not solidified enough until the Soviet Union was admitted to the Geneva institution. In , June 1934, under Barthou's pressure, Czechoslovakia and Romania diplomatically recognized the Soviet Union. On September 18, the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations.

As the anti-revisionist French-Seminentist-Soviet-Russian combination emerged and, enlivened by Barthou's fire, became weighty, National Socialism lost the law of action. Under France's leadership, liberal democratism went on the offensive; the Soviet Union gave it its support. Europe took on a new face since Barthou, aware of all the consequences, relentlessly opposed the Third Reich. "The idea of war is in the air," Mussolini said on August 24. Barthou wanted to bring Germany to her knees without having to resort to war; but he was also prepared, if there was no other way, to go to war. Versailles was no longer a trifle that could be disregarded in anti-Bolshevik zeal.

Italy had often bungled the French game; like England, it had not infrequently helped Germany out of the noose just when France was preparing to tighten it. Barthou considered how Italy could be satisfied and thus lured away from the revisionist camp. The opportunity was not unfavorable. The Franco-Soviet-Russian rapprochement had also brought Turkey and the Balkan bloc closer to Paris; if Mussolini did not get along with France, he could be pushed out of his entire Near Eastern and Balkan zone of influence. The contrast with Yugoslavia became precarious as soon as Belgrade's back was stiffened by Moscow in addition to Paris. If Barthou mediated between Belgrade and Rome, he provided Mussolini with the relief he needed right now. For at this very moment Mussolini and Hitler were at loggerheads.

In mid-June, the two dictators had met in Venice; although they had no personal inclination for each other, it seemed to Barthou that a newly-formed German-Italian fascist bloc was to be "rolled into the way. "We have met," Mussolini announced, "to make an attempt to disperse the clouds that darken the political horizon of Europe. Let it be said again that the conscience of Europe is faced with a terrible alternative. Either Europe will prove capable of realizing a minimum of political understanding, economic cooperation, and social understanding, or its fate will be irrevocably sealed." Fascist peace, he said, is a manly peace; it dwells not with the weak but with the strong. "We are not against the weak, but against the unjust." This was a revisionist threat calculated for Paris.

Just over a month later, the bridges between Germany and Italy had been burned.

In Venice Mussolini had demanded restraint from Hitler in Austria; he was convinced that it had been promised to him. On July 25, however, with the cooperation of the Third Reich, the Austrian National Socialists rose up; Dollfuß was assassinated. The putsch wanted to solve the Austrian question; under the swastika Austria wanted to return to the Reich. The putsch failed. The Austrian Nazis met stronger resistance than they had expected. Mussolini mobilized troops and occupied the borders; when Germany was tempted to make a careless move, he invaded Austria. He did not flinch, as French democracy had hitherto done; he was not easy to deal with; he did not write indignant notes when Italian interest was touched, but immediately drew blank.

Barthou agreed that Germany was held in check on the Danube. By giving Mussolini the undisputed lead there, he flattered the latter's ambition. Mussolini was at the same time France's trustee; he was allowed to show off against Germany as he pleased. It was only a quid pro quo when he approved Barthouse's Eastern Plan.

Although he stood at the Brenner, he did not forget his African aims. Barthou encouraged him; he was to be diverted to Abyssinia and hold himself harmless there. The Mediterranean Pact was to guarantee the status quo in the Balkans, on the Danube, and in the Mediterranean; Mussolini was to provide anti-revisionist gendarmerie services there. If he seized Abyssinia for this purpose, no French sphere of influence was threatened; nothing more needed to disturb Franco-Italian cooperation.

Admittedly, this diversion of Italy to Ethiopia was not without embarrassment for England. Mussolini was placed on the flank of England's line of communication with India in a most troublesome way; the Nile country was taken into Italian embrace, the land connection between British East Africa and Egypt was unpleasantly interrupted. Mussolini's imperial ambitions could be dangerously inflamed by an Abyssinian success.

It cannot be said that these prospects made Barthou unhappy. He wanted to show England his teeth; if he favored Italy in Africa, he was paying England back for the disloyalty she had committed with Germany to France. But England was to be intimidated to an entirely different degree. A Franco-Soviet-Russian alliance could also have consequences in Asia. In so far as Germany was bound by France, Soviet Russia had its hands free in the Near and Far East. Sauerwein appeared in Tokyo and advised the Japanese to see their real enemy in the British, not in the Russians; the British dominion of Australia was more suitable as a colonization area than Eastern Siberia for climatic reasons. Barthou aimed against all weak points of the British Empire; London should know that the British existence was at stake if it continued its secret affairs with Germany directed against France. It understood and backed away. In Berlin it favored the Eastern Pact and the idea of collective peace in general; it submitted to the fact that the diplomatic initiative had passed into Barthou's hands.

It was a great position that Barthou finally took. The ring around Germany was forged. Soviet Russia, the Little Entente, the Balkan League and the Balkan Bloc were directed from Paris, and Rome was also in agreement. If Poland, annoyed by France's policy toward Russia, had not yet allowed itself to be pushed away from Germany, it was neutralized; in the event of war, it would have considered tying its fate to that of the Third Reich. England put a good face on the bad game; Barthou's world political strategy had paralyzed it; it had to let the French statesman have his way. Barthou had become the master of Europe; once again the French people had taken possession of the leadership of nations in him; his diplomatic style was of admirable élan, of inimitable elegance. Germany was in a mousetrap; having declared herself against the "Ostlocarno" on September 10, an ultimatum hovered in the air.

Four 'weeks later, on October 9, Barthou was shot in Marseilles; his death was as convenient to England as to Germany.

Barthou had raised France to a height on which she no longer strode free of vertigo; it was beyond the powers of the French people to stretch themselves to the measure of their great past. The prospect of war, from which Barthou's policy of encircling Germany did not shrink, was more than the French heart was able to endure. France was frightened by the harshness and relentlessness of that cut of life to which every nation must prepare itself that indulges the ambition of an extraordinary destiny. Laval, the man with the suspicious physiognomy of a Levantine, wanted to cheat fate of the stake that was due for Barthou's policy. He wanted to take over Barthou's inheritance without paying for the liabilities and debts.

Laval squanders Barthou's legacy

The background to the Marseille attack was not revealed. Laval did not want to trace the authors and instigators, so that they would not have to be held responsible. Hungary was dealt with lightly, and the threads that ran to Berlin were not pursued. Laval left for Rome as early as the beginning of January with the intention of laying the foundation stone of the Italian-French friendship. He had no malice against England in mind. Surprisingly quickly, he came to terms with Mussolini. The Duce affirmed "that no country can modify by unilateral action the commitments concerning armaments"; he rejected violent revisionism, took up, together with Laval, the independence and integrity of Austria, and made all this pay by French backing for his planned Abyssinian campaign.

The Pact of Rome seemed to be politics from the mind of Barthou, but appearances were deceptive. Barthou had shuffled the cards in such a way that Italian Fascism had to render services to French democracy; Laval, himself guided by quiet Fascist sympathies, allowed French democracy to be harnessed to Italian Fascism. Mussolini's declaration against the German violations of the treaty, which was in fact highly noncommittal, was enough for him to see the German question in a milder light; having Italian friendship in his pocket, he believed he could be nonchalant against Germany. Barthou had still demanded German guarantees of freedom of the vote in view of the forthcoming Saar decision; he favored the status quo supporters. Laval evaded this escalation of Franco-German relations; he dropped the status-quo movement and placed the whole Saar matter confidently in the hands of a three-member committee appointed by the League of Nations Council. By loosening the pressure of the pincers with which Barthou had embraced Germany, France itself, Laval suddenly saw himself on the road to Franco-German détente. What was merely the flip side of a French weakness, Laval interpreted as an achievement of his own political ingenuity.

Laval and his prime minister, Flandin, were close to the Comitd des forges. The French big bourgeoisie was no longer as staunchly liberal-democratic as Barthou had been; its position on liberal democracy was for it a matter of mere expediency, not of life. She could exist without Jacobin traditions; Italian fascism and German National Socialism were not unconditionally unsympathetic to her; she could still cope with them better than with Bolshevism. It would have been the collapse of an entire foreign policy system if France had suddenly moved away from Soviet Russia again; since the scope of this collapse could not be estimated, France was not allowed to conjure it up. But it was not hidden that France was reluctant to honor the bills of exchange that Soviet Russia had received from Barthou and was now presenting. It took until May 2, 1935, for the Franco-Soviet-Russian mutual assistance pact to be signed, and it was not until the spring of 1936 that it was confirmed by the French Chamber. The delay in its conclusion was to devalue the pact. It was to be understood in London and Berlin that it had only defensive significance, that nothing of the offensive spirit that had animated Barthou was inherent in it. It was intended to give France a feeling of security while she was not yet likely to be unconditionally sure of English assistance in every case; it was also intended to damp the fire of the German will to revise. There was no lack of indications that Laval was secretly more inclined toward a Franco-German reconciliation against Bolshevik Russia than toward a Franco-Soviet-Russian alliance against the Third Reich

Laval was correctly assessed in London. One breathed a sigh of relief there and without hemming grabbed the reins that had slipped from Barthou's dead hands. England encouraged Laval to be blind to the fact that, while Laval was again negotiating and stylizing notes, Germany was further upsetting the European balance of power from week to week; it lulled France to sleep with hopes of British support so that it would not notice how Germany was meanwhile making inroads into the French hegemonic position. Laval was no longer upsetting England; he was thinking of clearing out all the inflammables that Barthou had piled up. The French people were to have their peace; the Third Reich was allowed to add the French desire for peace to its foreign policy calculations as the most fixed item.

The Third Reich proclaims compulsory

Now Germany, probably in secret agreement with England, struck the first blow against the Versailles Treaty; on March 16, 193 j it promulgated the "Law for the Establishment of the Wehrmacht".

It wiped the fifth part of the treaty under the table out of its own sovereignty and restored universal conscription. It had never shown so much contempt for the treaty before; it was finished with its sanctity and inviolability once and for all, if it had luck and success with it. In order not to be stamped as the accused, it came forward as the accuser; the Western powers were treaty-breakers, because they had not yet disarmed to the level of Germany; the Geneva powers, not Germany, had torn up the treaty, to which from now on it would not turn back.

England, France, and Italy presented notes of protest in Berlin; the Italian government felt obliged to declare "that in any future deliberations it will not be able simply to take such facts for granted." The senior ministers of these three countries met a month later at Stresa and expressed regret "that the method of unilateral denunciation adopted by the German Government at a moment when steps had just been taken to reach a freely agreed settlement of armaments questions had shaken public confidence in the firmness of a peaceful order." They noted their full agreement in the will "to oppose by all appropriate means any unilateral denunciation of treaties by which the peace of Europe might be endangered. To this end they will act in close and friendly cooperation." The Volkerbund Council passed a sharp resolution against Germany on April 17, saying that Germany had acted contrary to the main principles of international law, had violated the "duty incumbent upon all members of the international community to observe obligations assumed"; such a denunciation of treaties must "lead to the taking of all appropriate measures." A Committee of Thirteen was appointed to establish provisions for the application of sanctions. The tone of the resolution was so sharp that Germany vehemently opposed it. It denied the right of the members of the League of Nations "to set themselves up as judges of Germany"; the resolution was an attempt "to discriminate again against Germany" and was therefore most emphatically rejected. England and Italy did France the favor of reaffirming their Locarno obligations; they then later expressed that they could not regard the Franco-SovietRussian Pact as a violation of the Locarno Pact. England gave its assent to the Franco-Russian thesis of the indivisibility of peace and gave the French government all the diplomatic assistance it desired. All the Versailles powers were indignant, as France might expect, and morally quite in agreement with Paris.

But - it was not marched, and France was appeased not to do it. Peace was maintained, not because Germany righted her wrongs, but because France sent herself into the circumstances. Solemnly, the French government left to Germany "the burden of responsibility for the state of unrest thus created in the world and the consequences resulting therefrom," and resolutely assured Germany that "under no circumstances will she accept in any negotiations that measures taken unilaterally in violation of international obligations be recognized as rightly existing." Meanwhile, Germany did not fear the "burden of responsibility" and the French reservation of rights; the army of millions which she immediately proceeded to build up had broad shoulders and no sensitive legal conscience. If France confined herself to protesting, to indignation, to defending herself, Germany had won. If it got its army undisturbed, then all the French noise was no longer even a test of nerves. The Treaty of Versailles had become a ghost, not because Germany had torn it to shreds, but because France did not want to pull out all the stops in its defense. From now on, France could not put on the "Versailles roll" without the whole world getting bored with it; the moment was right to update the anti-Bolshevik hit song again.

Hitler did it in his Reichstag speech of May 21, 1935. The international atmosphere was tense at that time; he again fought one of his "peace battles" with his speech. England and Italy indirectly gave him every assistance, only they demanded of him not to commit any folly and not to involve himself in an adventure towards France, Lithuania, Danzig, Austria and Czechoslovakia, which was bound to cause an international explosion. The psychological and military power situation in Europe was still such that any great power would

Laval squanders Barthou's legacy

have been forced to stand by France in case of emergency, in order not to fall under the wheels itself. The trustworthiness of the Third Reich still left much to be desired; one would have exposed oneself to a highly uncertain future if one had tied one's fate to that of the Third Reich. The Third Reich had to fortify itself in a completely different way before one could openly profess to be its ally in life and death. Hitler was to accumulate arms as much as he desired: only he was not to make use of them prematurely.

Hitler was sensitive enough to sense the line he must not cross, and shrewd enough to give his undertakings that innocent face which could deceive anyone who wished to be deceived. He kicked the peace treaty, certainly: but only because it was an obstacle to peace. He rearmed, very well: but only for the reason to be strong for peace. The world feared war from him; he offered it a peace plan which, with its thirteen points, could be used as an infallible recipe. "National Socialist Germany wants peace from the deepest ideological convictions." Everywhere the Third Reich was reproached for resisting collective cooperation; it was accused of tending toward bilateral treaties in order to keep a free hand against Soviet Russia. What injustice was inflicted on it with so much distrust! What a terrible lot had arisen for Germany from the "collective cooperation" which had been organized according to the idea of President Wilson! Was it not every time only a "pretext for constructions", "which serve not so much the collective siding as intentionally or unintentionally the collective preparation for war"? Must not those who love peace reject the "obligations of assistance"? They would have the absurd consequence that in the end National Socialist Germany would have to rush to the aid of its mortal enemy, the Bolshevik power state. "A combat aid from Bolshevism we ourselves do not desire and would not be in a position to give." The Third Reich does not protect Bolshevism, but strikes it where it meets it. It is with this, not with the Third Reich, that Europe should concern itself, he said. The whole Bolshevik "register of sins" Hitler enumerates again. National Socialism has "pulled Europe back from the most terrible catastrophe of all time." Because Europe has not yet grasped Hitler's historical achievement, he can "appear only as a man perhaps derided by the rest of the world."

Since March 16, the one pillar of French hegemony in Europe, the Treaty of Versailles, had been shattered; no one asked about it in any real earnest. It was no longer an object of real European concern. Hitler rose to fill Europe again with horror of the "Bolshevik grimace." The more he succeeded, the more he became the man Europe needed. Laval was no match for him who could still have kept up with him. After Versailles had become European old iron, Fascism of both Italian and German color was allowed to set its sights further: it was now allowed to go on the attack against Geneva, the League of Nations itself.

The fascist offensive against the League of Nations began with Italy's invasion of Abyssinia.

XXX. Collective surrender before the attack

Germany had been admitted to the League of Nations after signing the Locarno Treaty; by voluntarily assuming those treaty obligations, she passed the test to which the peacefulness of her disposition was subjected. It thus made itself worthy of the community of democratic nations. Since Germany's withdrawal from the League of Nations, the Locarno Treaty had lost its meaning; it was a foul-tasting memory. It was not compatible with the Third Reich's sense of itself as being tried and tested in an attitude which it fundamentally abhorred. It is no coincidence that since 1933 the question of when Germany would renounce its Locarno obligations has arisen again and again. Precisely in so far as Locarno had given Germany's

Versailles document voluntary recognition, it was intolerable for the Third Reich; nor could the appearance be allowed to persist that the Versailles Treaty was in force with Germany's own consent.

No sooner had the Franco-Soviet-Russian treaty been signed in May 1935 than the European discussion of the Locarno Pact was opened. The cue was given by England; in the House of Commons, inquiries piled up about the effects of the Franco-Russian mutual assistance pact on the "British guarantee case arising from the Locarno Treaty." The British government repeatedly assured that it would faithfully fulfill its Locarno obligations "if the worst came to the worst." On May 14, the German Government had not yet raised any ideas concerning the demilitarized Rhineland zone; but having been made aware of the problematic nature of the subject by England, it submitted a memorandum to the Locarno Powers on May 25. It confronted the Locarno Powers with the serious question "whether the treaty obligations now entered into by France toward the USSR hold the boundaries established by the Rhine Pact of Locarno." The French reply rejected the German objections; the Rhine Pact, it said, "as an element of collective security, constitutes too essential a basis of the general policy of France for any French Government to expose itself, from any act of its own, to the danger of having it called in question." The British Government professed the view that "nothing in the Franco-Soviet treaty is either in "contradiction with the Locarno Treaty or in any way alters its procedure." The Italian Government announced that, "so far as it is concerned, it shares the point of view set forth by the French Government on the scope of the Franco-Russian treaty in relation to the Locarno Treaty." Finally, the Belgian Government did not believe "that the Franco-Soviet-Russian Treaty was in conflict with the provisions of the Rhine Pact."

The Third Reich was anxious, despite these reassuring assurances from the Locarno Powers, to allow the Locarno matter to continue as an open question. Therefore, at the end of July, it informed the individual governments "that it would still have to maintain its objection to the Franco-Soviet-Russian pact in its entirety and that it could not regard the matter as settled".

Even during the French chamber negotiations in February 1936, the decisive blow that Germany now intended to strike against the Locarno Pact was announced. Herriot had claimed that the German government itself had acknowledged that it was not affected by the Russian treaty. This assertion, the German Government had it declared, was in direct contradiction with the facts. Not only was there a legal violation of the Locarno Pact; even more obvious was the incompatibility of the two pacts "emphasized from the outset by Germany from general political points of view." Warningly, Hitler said to Bertrand de Jouvenel: "Are you in France aware of what you are doing? You are allowing yourself to be drawn into the diplomatic game of a power which wants nothing more than to bring the great European peoples into a confusion from which that power alone derives the advantage." In his speech to the Chamber, on the other hand, Foreign Minister Flandin, who had in the meantime replaced Laval, again emphasized that the Russian Pact "could not provide a pretext for any unilateral repudiation of earlier agreements." Ironically, he continued, "Incidentally, to impute to the German Government a desire to bring about a serious conflict with the signatories of the Locarno Pact, after it has not tired of declaring its peaceful intentions, would be to inflict an utterly wanton insult on it."

A few days later, on March 6, Hitler lectured the world that his "peaceful intentions" would not prevent him from bringing about a serious conflict with the Locarno Powers.

At the same hour that German troops had received orders from their government to move into their future peace garrisons in the western provinces, Hitler explained to the Reichstag that the French-Soviet agreement had brought the threatening military power of a giant army into Central Europe. This destroyed any real European balance. Not only in letter, but above all in spirit, this giant mobilization of the East against Central Europe was contrary to the spirit of the Locarno Pact. It was undisputed that the Franco-Soviet treaty was

208

Entry into the demilitarized zone

directed exclusively against Germany. Thus it was established "that France had entered into obligations towards the Soviet Union which practically amounted to acting, if necessary, as if neither the League of Nations Statute nor the Rhine Pact, which referred to that Statute, were in force." Thus the Locarno Pact had lost its inner meaning and had practically ceased to exist. "Germany, therefore, for her part, also no longer regards herself as bound by this extinct pact." In the interest of the primitive right of a people to secure its frontiers and preserve its means of defense, the German Government had therefore "restored as of today the full and unrestricted sovereignty of the Reich in the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland."

France, the Locarno Powers, the League of Nations were called before the bars. Again they were confronted with a Hitler who added to violence the cynical sneer: while showing them his teeth, he had thrown on the skin of the pacifist lamb. To "put beyond doubt the defensive character of these measures," he said, Germany was ready to "make new arrangements for the establishment of a system of European peacekeeping." On condition of perfect parity, he said, Germany wished to negotiate the formation of a mutual demilitarized zone; a new nonaggression pact was to be concluded for a period of twenty-five years with France and Belgium and perhaps the Netherlands. Nonaggression pacts were also proposed to the states bordering Germany in the east; an air pact was suggested. Germany was ready to rejoin the League of Nations; however, she expected colonial equality in the course of a reasonable time. It was a moment of the kind in which the historical destiny of nations is decided for decades. Never for a long time had the French nation as a whole been thus put to the test with a single grasp as to whether it might still be considered full or whether it would be found too light. The whole system of treaties since 1918, on which the French postwar position had been built, lay in ruins; it was as if France had never won a war. Never before had Germany played more boldly va banque; now she had put all her eggs in one basket. If the French government let the fait accompli stand, if Germany hastily fortified its western frontier and packed the Rhineland with troops, France's alliance system was devalued. It could no longer invade Germany to bring aid to Poland, the Little Entente, or Soviet Russia. With a limited armed force, Germany could continue to defend its western border and in the meantime develop its full strength against the East. The world political rank that France would still have in the future was in question: whether it would be a power of the first rank or only of the second or even third rank.

Hitler did not deceive himself that he had advanced to the brink of war. He called for an oath "not to retreat from any power or force in the restoration of the honor of our people, and rather to succumb honorably to the most severe hardship than ever to capitulate to it." It later leaked out that the German generals had been reluctant to follow Plitier; they did not feel up to a war. If France remained intransigent, if it took steps to drive German troops out of the demilitarized zone by force of arms, and if the German generals decided to withdraw rather than go to war, Hitler's glory was over. Perhaps for the first time since 1935, everyone saw the possibility of his overthrow. France could not hesitate; if it did not give the order to advance against Germany in the first minute, then it was defeated, then the German coup had succeeded.

France did not give this order; it is said that the French General Staff, guided by fascist sympathies, resisted it. France was not stingy with pathetic declarations and solemn reservations: however, all these were mere hollow words. The French government, "without anticipating any action, had contacted the other signatories to the treaty in order to jointly oppose the unilateral denunciation of the treaties." By not anticipating any general action, Germany gained time; Germany needed nothing more than gaining time to establish a military presence in the Rhineland zone. Germany turned the handle and asked why France had created a fait accompli by concluding its Russian Pact without first invoking international arbitration.

In the style of noble great classical rhetoric, French Prime Minister Sarraut brought the French complaint before the ear of the world. There was no lack of lofty phrases: the French government was determined "not

France's political standing is in question

209 to negotiate under the pressure of threat." We are, he said, "not inclined to let Strasbourg come within range of German cannon." But he did not announce that the demilitarized zone would be cleared of German troops by force of arms; he merely called the Volkerbund Council. That was all. The French chamber declaration of March 10 did not go beyond that.

She spoke of the "sudden and brutal reoccupation of the demilitarized zone", of the "violent coup d'état", of the "attack on international confidence", but she too was content to offer the material and moral forces of France to the League of Nations "to avert an irreparable calamity for European civilization".

France accepted the German slap unmoved and congratulated itself on having kept the peace with its coldbloodedness. Since its vital rights were not important enough for it to fight for them quickly and resolutely, the League of Nations had to take them even less seriously. It was too much to ask of him to be more French than France was. On March 12, the Locarno powers met in London. "Unanimously" it was recognized that Germany's reoccupation of the demilitarized zone was a clear violation of Articles 42 and 43 of the Versailles Treaty. However, the Locarno Powers omitted to refer immediately thereafter to Article 44, on the basis of which Germany's breach of the treaty should have been considered and responded to "as a hostile act toward the signatory powers of that treaty and as an attempt to disturb international peace." Only Flandin recalled this article. He clearly and firmly brought into the light the fundamental side of the matter: "The question is whether the practice of fait accompli, whether the unilateral abrogation of obligations voluntarily and solemnly assumed is to become a political system in Europe." He asked "how this method is compatible with the existence of the League of Nations" and demanded that the governments of the guarantor powers fulfill their obligations of assistance.

Germany was invited to appear before the League of Nations Council in London on March 16. Germany was spared the application of Article 16 of the League of Nations Statute; France had failed to push it through.

Morally, the League of Nations Council delegates meeting in London on March 16 gave France every satisfaction; politically, however, it received sufficient support only from Litwinow and Titulescu. "Yes," exclaimed the Romanian foreign minister, "yes, we consider that the Versailles and Locarno treaties have been violated." He agreed to an understanding if the violated law had first been restored. Ribbentrop repeated Hitler's line of thought and sought to convince how Germany was serving peace by destroying treaties.

Insofar as the League of Nations powers were determined not to force Germany to restore the status quo, however, they had to buy their way out: empty-handed, they could not let offended France go out, lest they drive her to despair. The resolution adopted by the Council offended the Third Reich by stating that the German Government had not acquired any legal rights by its unilateral act, and that this same act must appear as a threat to European security, by further recommending, in the spirit of Article i r of the League of Nations Statute, that the members of the League "take such measures as are appropriate for the effective protection of the peace of nations." The "measures" remained a subject of discussion for the future; the more time that passed, the less France could insist that anyone should still incur special expenses on behalf of old Kohl. England and Italy assured both France and Belgium that they still felt bound by the aid and border guarantee obligations of the Locarno Pact; they also announced general staff meetings. But at the same moment they also opened peace talks with Germany. They wanted to discuss the amendment of the Rhineland Statute, collective security, arms limitation, the organization of "economic relations and trade with Germany. The British government gave France the appearance of anxious intimacy; it treated the French people as a patient who must be protected from stupidity and must not realize that devoted care is only a form of vigilant control. Well did France admit to herself that full satisfaction had been denied her. "The French Government would have wished," Flandin set forth in a chamber speech on March 20, "to have fully

210

England appeases France

satisfied international law by restoring the situation as it existed in the Rhineland before March 7. This could undoubtedly have been achieved if the signatory powers had agreed to exert sufficiently energetic pressure in Berlin. Meanwhile, I have had to convince myself quickly enough that no agreement could be reached on this point." Flandin administered to himself the deceptive self-consolation: "Our efforts, however, at least succeeded in bringing about the adoption of a solution which for this time did not leave victory to the method of accomplished facts." He feels sure of English friendship: "If on some side it had been imagined that a loosening of relations between London and Paris could be brought about and taken advantage of, on the other hand it can be stated that our common relations for the preservation of peace have tied the bonds between France and England more firmly." Under what not altogether unobjectionable conditions for France this had taken place, Eden hinted in a House of Commons statement of March 26: "It is," he said, "vital to England that the integrity of France and Belgium should be preserved and that no foreign power should overstep her borders." Here was quite revealing outline at what point only England would assist France. Very definitely Eden added what he expected from France from the point of view of English interest: ""I want to say to France that we cannot secure peace unless the French government is prepared to approach without prejudice the problems which no currently separate it from Germany."

Paris complied sidi; cs participated in the harmless exchange of peace plans. Germany, which had "the deepest desire" to "make a great contribution to European peace by restoring the independence and sovereignty of the Reich," had first begun "the practical work of a true pacification of Europe" in this literary way. England, for whom it seemed expedient to put a weak damper on the Third Reich's exuberance, concluded the contest of German and French fantasies of peace with the presentation of a questionnaire in Berlin, which confirmed to the Third Reich, with as much abysmal malice as select politeness, that London had the worst possible conception of its credibility and businesslike respectability, its ability to make treaties, and its fidelity to treaties.

Thus the whole great diplomatic effort came to nothing. Germany failed to take the action to restore confidence that Eden had urged her to take; she never answered the English questionnaire. It did not come to the "re-establishment of a European security system," not to an "agreement on a clear and reasonable organization of European peace." Germany did not return to the League of Nations and sabotaged the World Conference as long as it could. It extended its line of defense against France and produced war materiel on a limitless scale. France had lost the game on every point; although England, as Eden had said, denied "neither the gravity of the breach of treaty committed nor its consequences for Europe," France had lost out. The resolution that was thrust into its hands did not outweigh the heavy loss of power that had been inflicted upon it. Strasbourg was now within the range of German cannons; the entire League of Nations had crawled to its knees before the Third Reich. The platform on which France had established itself as a great power had been pulled out from under its feet. After the Treaty of Versailles, no rooster crowed anymore, and the League of Nations basically only washed the European fur soiled by fascism without wetting it. Whoever sought help from it against fascism was, before he knew it, sold to fascism. The curses of the Geneva World Council of Democracy faded ineffectually into the wind. When Fascism, be it in its German or in its Italian variety"', called the bluff, Geneva bowed to the fait accompli; it answered the march of advancing Fascist columns with paltry and ridiculous resolutions.

Hitler had militarily occupied the Rhineland zone because, since the ratification of the Franco-Soviet-Russian treaty, the Soviet Union was working through France and thus pressing on Germany from the West as well. The weakening of France was thus also a weakening of Soviet Russia.

No one had looked the state of affairs more realistically in the face during the London League of Nations Council meeting than Litvinov, who was not required to take Hitler's evasions and diversions more seriously than they deserved, according to diplomatic custom: "The manner in which Herr Hitler allows himself to

speak publicly about the country I represent relieves me of the necessity of taking my recourse to circumlocutions and diplomatic niceties." Astutely and penetratingly, the Soviet People's Commissar had exposed German peace hypocrisy. He had invoked Hitler's political testament; he had revealed that the nonaggression pacts presented by German diplomacy lacked the special clause according to which all obligations cease "if the other party commits an act of aggression against third states." He peeled off as the meaning of the German principle of localization of war: "Any state which has concluded such a pact with Germany would have to sit still if Germany attacks a third state." He exposed as the essence of the newly suggested Rhine Pact: "By depriving (Hitler) France and Belgium of certain guarantees contained in the Locarno Pact, he aims at preserving for Germany the totality of the advantages which that treaty could confer upon her." To the ears of England he stated with irrefutable definiteness that one could not fight for the collective organization of security without applying collective measures against the breach of international obligations. Among these measures he did not include collective surrender to an aggressor, much less a collective agreement which also rewarded the attack by being acceptable or advantageous to the aggressor. The League of Nations could not be maintained if it closed its eyes to breaches of treaties or confined itself to verbal protests without taking effective measures to defend international obligations, and if it did not carry out its own resolutions but, on the contrary, accustomed the aggressor to ignore its recommendations, warnings, and admonitions.

Litvinov felt that the defeats of the League of Nations were at the same time defeats of the Soviet Union, which had joined it in using it as a tool against Germany.

XXXI. Interference in Spain

After England, out of power-political concern about the Soviet state, had preferred to give up Abyssinia rather than to become entangled in a bloody conflict with Italy, after it, by tolerating the rearmament of Germany and its strengthening on the Rhine, had counterbalanced the appearance of the Soviet Union in Western Europe and in Geneva, after it had even made a mockery of the League of Nations, lest the Bolshevik Soviet Empire should benefit from the energy-sapping confrontation with bourgeois fascism: After all this had happened, the Third Reich felt all the more certain that it was on the right track when it drove against "Bolshevism" even more furiously than before.

In Germany, Hitler's hour had dawned in 1933, when the antagonisms had reached their highest culmination with the utmost simplification, when only the choice between the swastika and the Soviet star was open. The warlike tension of the situation was expressed in this; there was no longer any neutral terrain of blackwhite-red or black-red-gold intermediate shades into which anyone could have escaped who did not want to exist precisely in the extreme and in the sharpest consequence. Now the whole of Europe is entering the epoch of the decision between God and Satan, superhuman and subhuman, fascism and Bolshevism, swastika and Soviet star; the tricolor as a symbol no longer has any connection to the time-determining ideals, it no longer divides the minds; whoever still puts up with it is in cahoots with the Soviet star and must be forced to show his colors: the tricolor itself is no longer a slogan and no longer a confession.

It is fair to concede that Hitler is routine in the way he makes the Bolshevik spectre appear and disappear: before he suddenly introduces the two-year service period in September 1936, he orders his press a few

Europe in the epoch of decision

weeks earlier to instill abrupt horror of Soviet Russian rearmament in Europe; his journalistic hacks are to cannibalize a yellowed propaganda brochure of the "Anti-Comintern" in the process. He is such a master that whenever he needs to fuel a Bolshevik psychosis, he does so with material that is not valid in any respect. Not coincidentally, the English favoring of the National Socialist offensive against Bolshevism and its liberaldemocratic "satellites," the European leftist mass currents, coincides with the formation of Popular Front governments in France and Spain. The French elections that took place in 1936 brought a significant shift to the left; Léon Blum became president of a "Popular Front" cabinet.

The Popular Front movement renews the liberal democratism of 1789; it draws from the sources of former French greatness to arm itself for political deeds that the present demands. It lives the feeling that France will be unfaithful to its mission if the fundamental symbols of 1789 are thrown to the dustbin of history. It defends the historical sense of French existence; it evokes the glorious traditions of the French Revolution, so that France may be filled with the consciousness that it has something to defend. The power that wants to alienate France and force it to historical abdication is fascism; behind it hide all the enemies of the French Revolution: domestically, the big bourgeoisie, the aristocratic right, the Legitimists, Orleanists, Bonapartists, the clericals; externally, German militarism, the Italian rival, and, though with cautious restraint, the English neighbor. Therefore, the Popular Front movement must necessarily be anti-fascist. The petty-bourgeois and petty-peasant masses of France resist going along with the contemporary departure of the European big bourgeoisie from its liberal-democratic past. They feel that to do so would be to hunt down France itself. The proud Jacobin memories keep these masses from being persuaded to flee to fascism just as easily as it happened in Germany, through social panic-mongering. They still showed a liberal-democratic backbone when the bourgeoisie all around was already fawning fascistically.

In view of the world situation, France rendered the highest service to the Soviet Union against fascism when it remained entirely liberal-democratic in its original manner; the Bolshevik interest dictated that France should not be disturbed in its democratic form and rule. This great tolerance sprang from the rightly grasped logic of the defensive into which both France and Soviet Russia were forced back.

The idea of a popular front also made its mark in Spain; there, however, it showed a distinctly national coloration.

Spain had not yet gone through a bourgeois revolution. It lived in semi-feudal conditions up to the present. The land was for the most part the property of large owners of latifundia and of the church: the peasant was in the overwhelming majority only a miserable tenant farmer, whose social situation resisted the development of a bourgeois attitude to life. He tended, like the Russian serf peasant before him, to associate himself with anyone who opposed the ruling powers; if he found an opportunity to settle his accounts with the dead hand and the owner of the latifundia, the worker might at least jump the blade of the big bourgeoisie. Thus Spain was in a Bolshevik situation: workers and peasants were pulling together against the bourgeois, rural and clerical upper classes. The upper class struggled to win over the venal masses who would wear their skin to the market for them.

Nowhere, perhaps, has the Catholic Church acted more conscientiously and irresponsibly against the population than in Spain; it was anxious that the lower classes should remain imprisoned in ignorance and primitiveness, in order to be squeezed to the bone by it, the dead hand. But nevertheless the day came when these deplorable masses escaped their fatal tutelage; even the most narrow-minded tenants saw through the fraud perpetrated on them. Primo de Rivera's fascism was a makeshift dam that offered only a short time of protection; the dictator was driven out and the king sent away. Another interlude intervened: a rightwing government wanted to reverse the course of history at the last moment. But it was no use; the peasants

213 and workers, the majority of the population, were tired of the yoke of their parasitic upper class; they voted left in 1936, as the French had done.

It was in the nature of things that the French popular front movement had a more harmless character than the Spanish; the French petty bourgeoisie and small farmers clung to the heritage for which their fathers had shed so much blood, and the workers wanted, at worst, a few reforms, the cost of which the big bourgeoisie was willing to pay.

The Spanish Popular Front movement, however, was in the most violent contradiction to the ruling order of its country; if it did not want to be swept away again immediately, it had to destroy this order in an unintentional way. It had to catch up, as it were, by peaceful and legal means, with the bourgeois revolution that had broken through victoriously everywhere else in Europe.

The French Popular Front movement was fundamentally socially conservative; the petty-bourgeois and petty-peasant masses had reason to be more suspicious of the monopoly-capitalist big bourgeoisie than of the social-revolutionary workers. The Spanish Popular Front movement, however, could not avoid a socialrevolutionary confrontation; it could not get along with the latifundia owners, the dead hand, the parasitic aristocrats and generals, if it did not want to immediately cut its own throats. In so far as it forced an upper class to abdicate, it was an action of the world revolution; it did not even need to have communist experiments in mind. If it was lucky and successful, it was to the advantage of Soviet Russia's prestige: on the far western edge of Europe, the restoration had failed, and Lenin had predicted it correctly. It was only from the connection of the French popular front movement with the Spanish that the idea of the popular front acquired that revolutionary accent which had a tempting and stirring effect on the working classes of the fascist states. Liberal democracy and the European freedom movement no longer seemed to be on their last legs; they appeared to be on the road to recovery, even to counterattack.

Fascism felt irritated; it was not inclined to let liberal democracy get over its head again. German and Italian agents sat down with the adventurous figures of the Spanish upper class, trembling for their parasitic existence, with grandees, generals, clerics, financiers and big smugglers, to hatch with them their dark plans of conspiracy; they offered money and weapons. Here, fascism, while performing shear services for the darkest, most medieval and crude bloodsuckers, did not need to feign popular friendship; here it could openly wield its scourge over tormented workers and peasants. He agreed to call in Moroccans and foreign legionnaires against the native people; his racial conscience suddenly did not rebel against seeing Europeans chastised by Africans. Hitler became a beneficiary of the "black ignominy" in Spain.

Hitler and Mussolini equipped the "Francists" with airplanes, tanks, guns, machine guns, bombs, grenades, officers and pilots. Nevertheless, Franco's military rebellion did not reach its goal with one blow. In the Spanish people, a free impulsiveness always erupted of which the Italian, broken in Habsburg servitude, and the submissive German subject were incapable. A bloody civil war broke out; the lower classes of the people fought heroically, but the mutineers were equipped by Italy and Germany with superior technical means. German and Italian Fascism regarded the Francoist popular rape as their own affair: Franco's declaration of war on the Popular Front movement deliberately sought to tie in with the liberal democratism of France as with the Bolshevism of Soviet Russia.

The Blum government felt that if it manipulated carelessly in Spain, it could bring to discharge as much a world war as a French civil war. In its embarrassment and weakness, it invited the authoritative European powers to pledge non-intervention in Spain. Germany and Italy also pledged nonintervention.

The legal Popular Front government of Spain thus came up short to its fascist rebels. It was blocked; it also received no cannons for its gold. But while the liberal-democratic governments had long since stopped

214

Social Revolutionary Situation in Spain

supplying arms to the Republican troops, German and Italian ships were still hauling in plentiful army equipment for the Francists via Portugal and Morocco. Western European governments turned a blind eye; the Dynamiteros, the determined Asturian miners, were scary to them. They thought they could get along better with the butchers Franco and Mola. Thus it happened that the Francists, thanks to their superiority in arms gained with the help of fascist Portugal, conquered Bajadoz, but that the government militias, although separated from Popular Frontist France only by a bridge, lost Irun due to their lack of ammunition.

The spirit of 1793 had become vacuous, the missionary zeal of Jacobin France was dead; it no longer brought "war to the palaces and peace to the huts"; it guarded its revolutionary tradition not like a living flame, but only like a cold glow flashing into the present as a solemn reminder of a great time. The League of Nations treaded on the same fascist-restorative ground; it barely listened to the justified complaints of the Spanish Republican Foreign Minister and hovered in endless fear of being drawn into a conflict with the fascist powers by Spanish events; it was so suspicious of the Spanish Popular Front government in Bolshevist terms that it was reluctant to be greeted by it "Unter den Linden."

Blum did not want to offend his big bourgeoisie or the English conservatives; every day he formally applied for an English good conduct certificate with which he could shut the critical mouth of his big bourgeoisie.

Popular-front Spain was experiencing the fate of Abyssinia. France's sympathy -had been as barren for the Spanish peasants and workers as England's sympathy for the Negus. Fascism broke its way with right-wing despising brutality and proved to the whole world that it only needed to have courage in order to drive all liberal and Bolshevik counterpowers into a frenzy.

It was precisely in Spain that the scheme of fascism's triumphant march over the whole of Europe became clearly apparent. It wants to make liberal democracy stumble where it still exists by saturating it with a network of fascist bases from the outside; if, at the appropriate time, a fascist counter-government rises up, supplied with money and weapons from Berlin and Rome, it will immediately find good ground on which it can gain a firm foothold. The National Socialist and Fascist leaders in Switzerland, Holland, France, and Czechoslovakia are the secret ambassadors who do the preparatory work for the Fascist countergovernments and who, when the hour is ripe, give the signal for the outbreak of civil war. As long as the great operations are not yet due, they organize - think of Vormis, Lessing and Jakobs - murders and kidnappings and practice lace-making and espionage.

Since Spain, due to its feudal-medieval social constitution, was the weakest and most endangered point in Europe, it was here that fascism dropped its mask earliest; here, where there was more to harvest for Bolshevism than anywhere else, fascism had to be there in time to do violence to the logic of things.

XXXII The Will to War

Hitler felt most deeply and preached most passionately the necessity of the bourgeois conversion from freedom to authority. As hotly as the masses once clamored for freedom, he now taught them to desire authority. He also, like the Bolsheviks in 1917, addressed "To All." The middle classes of all nations became his audience, whose ear he reached through the radio. He did not speak to Germans, but to citizens; the French bourgeois was more akin to him than the German non-citizen; for the German "Bolshevist* not even

the "Voice of the Aryan Blood" put in a good word. When Hitler spoke in the Reichstag or at the party congress, the whole bourgeois world became his mass assembly; the images and arguments, the invectives and the insults, the rhetorical artistry and the dubious jargon, with which he had made people race in his beer halls before, he now introduced into the vocabulary of high politics. He spoke to the international bourgeoisie in the same Kashemmenton that had gone down so well with his German citizens - and he met with no less approval here. The German bourgeoisie had found it right that Hitler should not leave a good hair on either Communism or the Communist; any slanderous, slanderous, besmirching debauchery was permitted Hitler against Communism. The international bourgeoisie soon took a liking to Hitler's adopting the same tone in his dealings with the Communist state, the Soviet Union. To the extent that he made the struggle against Bolsdiewism the main object of international policy, Hitler imposed the Gossenton as a diplomatic style. Hitler became what he might have been already in 1918: world propagandist. The antiBolshevik world propaganda was effective because all citizens feared Bolshevism: it had become a useful tool of German foreign policy. Hitler found the world situation that was right for him: since it still needed a propagandist, the most skillful propagandist could grow into a world political figure.

All the tricks and "Machiavellianisms" with which National Socialism had successfully contested its domestic civil war actions were now transferred to the level of international politics: falsification of the truth, hypocrisy of innocence, cynical provocation, misdirection, breaking of words, duping, were brutally practiced without intellectual subtlety and cultivated polish. The dividing line, which after all still exists between the real politician and the criminal, was blurred without hesitation. The chaotic unleashing, the desolate formlessness, the rampant savagery, the brutal elementality, the animal inhumanity, all of which in times of civil war characterize the fighting and the display of antagonism in general, now made the Third Reich at home in the sphere of high politics and diplomacy.

Since the Third Reich handled the "most modern methods" of international politics best, since it was really far ahead of all others in this, it became "supremacy," just as the France of the Great Revolution had been supremacy for over a century. The Third Reich became the hope, the guiding star, the model country of the international bourgeoisie. This was a favorable wind for the German imperialist big bourgeoisie: it had always striven for the European order to break into Russia; as the anti-Bolshevik supremacy, Russia had to be released to the Third Reich one day as a "hunting ground".

For this day the Third Reich wanted to be armed to the teeth. Almost the entire fortune of the German people was gradually invested in armaments. When the bourgeoisie invests, it wants pension. This investment is profitable only after a happy war. The German big bourgeoisie has misinvested if it does not get the war against the Soviet Union. Mentally, organizationally, armament-wise, militarily, diplomatically, the Third Reich is preparing it. In his May 1935 speech, Hitler had said: "As far as Bolshevism is a Russian matter, we are completely uninterested in it". May of the same year had assured that the case of an unprovoked attack by Germany on Russia would never occur, "since Germany is not thinking of acting aggressively against the USSR": but these were diplomatic red herrings, which on the one hand contradicted Hitler's foreign policy testament, and on the other hand had already been pushed aside by the Nuremberg party conference speeches. The existence of the Third Reich can last only if it fulfills its purpose by smashing the Soviet Union and escapes the bankruptcy of its own forces by resupplying itself with foreign forces from the colonized Russian empire and people.

Ranke remarks on the European situation around 1793 in his French Revolutionary History: "Politics sought peace; universal antagonisms held out the prospect of war. "* Contemporary Europe has already left this stage far behind; not only do universal antagonisms hold out the prospect of war, but politics has also already ceased to seek peace. The European "world war", the war of the international big bourgeoisie against workers, peasants and petty bourgeoisie, the war of fascism against liberalism, popular front and

The world propagandist

Bolshevism, the war of the German-led European coalition against Soviet Russia is in the logic of things, and, moreover, people are already willing to obey this logic. Lenin is the symbol of that moment in world history when imperialist war turned into general civil war. Russia at that time escaped from the grip of the imperialist victors by opening the civil war first and fighting it to the utmost consequence.

Hitler would like to be the symbol of the equally world-historical moment, in which the European civil war situation leads again into the imperialist war. If Germany is at the point of transition, if it is the driving force of the transition, if it brings the hearth of victorious Bolshevism under its control, if it cleans it, if it keeps it occupied: then the German big bourgeoisie will be unassailable by the weight of its successes, by the overwhelming splendor of its conquests; it will "establish internal peace, tranquility and order" within the circle which it dominates, by mercilessly crushing the social-revolutionary elements. In the imperialist war the big bourgeoisie diverts the agitated energies, which flared up against it in the civil war, from itself to the "external enemy*; in the bloody wrestling match with the latter they are consumed.

These are outlooks which inevitably tempt to break off the imperialist war from the fence. "Out of the chaos of the French Revolution," Hitler said at Nuremberg in 1936, "rises a genial war god and storms over the European world already inwardly disintegrated by the precipitating idea." The Corsican was the commander of the bourgeoisie against feudalism; Hitler wants to be the commander of the bourgeoisie against Bolshevism. Only then, when he proved himself no less than a "genial god of war" in the process, would his world-historical greatness be truly assured.

XXXIII. General view of the Third Reich

Hitler, like Lenin, stood at a point of intersection where, for one historical moment, countless decisive and even substantively contradictory tendencies of a universal nature converged; he grasped impetuously, as Lenin had done, and thus became both exponent and master of a particular world-political constellation. As an "antilenin," he led the bourgeois reactionary movement against Bolshevism; but in that his antiBolshevism was not confined to the purity of an economic formula, but appeared as a swirling pool of incalculable irrational, emotional, and instinctive ideological elements, it possessed from the beginning a range of vibration commensurate with that of Bolshevism. Hitler attracted to himself everything that was in the European air. His rise to power was a "people's revolution," because he exploited all the emotions that were stirred up in the German people.

No one in Europe, like Hitler, had such an alert and lively feeling for the war situation in which bourgeois society was far from; in the yeast of his feelings he surpassed even Mussolini. He had instinctively grasped the class-war sense of Bolshevism, and in him burned the passion to throw the proletarian class opponent into the dust. Even the bourgeois, who found Hitler annoying, could not lose sight of the fact that this drummer might one day become of supreme importance; as soon as bourgeois society set itself on the war footing, Hitler was the man of the hour. He had always said it, he had trained himself for years to wage civil war expertly.

His movement fanned the sparks of the front experience into blazing flames, it was a front fighter action; all the warlike passions of the German people were roused anew and thunderously. The social content of this

front experience was, however, only a precautionary gimmick: one patted the comrade, by whom one did not want to be left in the lurch during the fight, affably on the shoulder; in this way one wanted to make the poor devil, who had also had to be given a rifle by necessity, not to attach any importance to the differences in size of the money bag and to use his weapon only against the enemy of the country, not against his class enemy. But the very anti-communist orientation of the National Socialist action revealed that it was about defending the hierarchy of property. The core of the front experience, which came back to honor, was the desire to shoot, stab, destroy, murder; the bourgeois upper class 'needed lansquenets who were ready for anything for pay. The pay was the political offices to which the party comrades were let. Since the oath had been taken in the interests of the bourgeoisie from the outset, the bourgeoisie had only the advantage of being ruled and administered in a rough, coarse lansquenet manner, and of having a short trial with all opponents. The Landsknechts as political functionaries transformed the whole of Germany into a barracks yard; since then orders have been given, punishments have been inflicted, fusilages have been imposed; all measures are no longer taken according to the wording of paragraphs, but according to the momentary "situation of the matter. The "situation-bound interpretation of the law" is the euphemistic principle for all those who from now on want to whistle about the law. No civil sphere and no private sphere is tolerated anymore; everyone has to be a capitalist lansquenet and nothing else. For the lansquenets, the shooting club is the key to the kingdom of heaven, and woman and booze the epitome of their earthly pleasures.

The bourgeois-capitalist society favored the abbreviated procedure of landsknecht rule because it no longer felt sure of itself. The petty-bourgeois masses cling to a false bourgeois consciousness, although their bourgeois being was destroyed by war, inflation, deflation, war economy. Out of the dull feeling of the discord between their proletarian being and their bourgeois consciousness they develop reform thoughts, the purpose of which is to provide them again with property, the basis of their bourgeois being. Thus they want to go back and are reactionary by instinct. Those reform thoughts are the content of their "socialist system". It is enough for the bourgeois upper class that the petty-bourgeois masses do not lose bourgeois consciousness; as long as they remain slaves to it, they shoot at class-conscious proletarians. To the extent that they are left with the hope that they will regain ownership with their reform plans and their strange socialist theories, the bourgeois upper class wraps them around its finger. They serve the big bourgeois interest precisely by being left free to indulge in a "socialist" colored bourgeois consciousness. They do not know what they are doing; they must not have the very consciousness of that big-bourgeois cause into whose hands they are working. The belief in reform, in which the petty-bourgeois strata are encouraged, is, as it were, the string on which the big bourgeoisie pulls in order to make them dance like puppets for them. The National Socialist petty-bourgeois masses are deceived people who run after a delusion, and only as long as they remain true to the delusion do they fight for the upper class.

Out of the mists of the National Socialist delusion develop the anti-proletarian civil war actions. Delusion becomes the touchstone of bourgeois reliability. Whoever does not believe is a vicious enemy, who is best immediately brought around the corner. The church of the Third Reich is organized on the basis of delusion: it is a belligerent church, an ecclesia militans, which knows no mercy for the heretic. The National Socialist Landsknechte were at the same time soldiers of faith, inquisitorial "Jesuits". Hitler was the leader of the Landsknechte and the Pope of delusion, he was commander and prophet, Cromwell and Mohammed in one. National Socialism reacted against Bolshevism as Islam had reacted against Christianity; Germany, poor in raw materials, was the desert from which the old fighters wanted to burst forth like frenzied dervishes to found a great bourgeois empire that would encompass Europe with all the oases of its raw material deposits from the Atlantic Ocean to the Urals.

It corresponds to this war situation, in which one is completely submerged, that the sense of all cultural, domestic and economic policy is exhausted in rearmament and mobilization: the moral, organizational,

weapon-technical; the National Socialist petty bourgeois languishes as "political soldier" and the big bourgeois rakes in money as rearmament and mobilization profiteer. Public life becomes rough as in the field camp; where the weapons clang, the muses are silent. Human life is held in low esteem; the rifle is ready at any moment to shoot down the enemy of which one becomes aware. Nothing more distinguishes a man than to know how to handle a weapon and to be a good warrior; personalities are ducked because they cause friction in the military machinery.

The delusional National Socialist Landsknechtstum finds good ground everywhere where one feels one's bourgeois existence endangered; the more fragile the social basis of the conventional bourgeois way of life becomes, the more unconditionally one is a desperate National Socialist Schlagetot. Even those socialdemocratic and trade-union workers who had always understood the class struggle in such a way as to be able to conquer a home of their own with a bathroom and a small garden and a small upper bourgeois position in general are on the spot with anti-Bolshevik fury. The entire stock of the bourgeois substance, which was shaken by social anxiety, no matter in what mixture it might embody itself, finally presented itself in Hitler's uniforms. The one-hundred-percent bourgeois wore his shoulder strap as ostentatiously as did that consumptive marginal existence of bourgeois society that lived on the airy webs of bourgeois memories, hopes and ideals. The weakest bourgeois ambition, which at no price wanted to feel as proletarian as it had long since been proletarianized, allowed itself to be put into brown pants by Hitler so that it could proudly display its bourgeois esprit de corps. By forming the bourgeois masses together with their followers into conspicuous army heaps, Hitler turned the senseless bourgeois social fear into an equally senseless antiproletarian hatred of destruction. The same teeth that had rattled before the class-conscious worker were now mercilessly bared against him.

The bourgeois-capitalist social structure is the last great form of life in Europe, which unites in itself all the occidental values and basic human orders handed down by Hellas, Rome, Judea, and which Germanicism helped to create. The old heritage has certainly been popularized, watered down, coarsened, corrupted, made common, dragged through the gutter and through the excrement: but in its elements it is still present. What was once the cherished and guarded treasure of thinly educated classes now runs through the fingers of the petty-bourgeois mob as a worn-out sheath coin. In the vulgar barking and low verbiage of Hitler, in his logically unclean, papery rant, Homer, Plato and Aristotle, Caesar and Augustus, Ezra and Nehemia, Christ and Paul, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, Charlemagne and Otto I, Luther and Hegel still haunt. If what was once noble is only grimacing today, the origins cannot be hidden. The pearls that were thrown before the swine have been crushed to a swinish pulp, but still in their splinters sparkles at times a strange brilliance.

The National Socialist imagination of history, consulting not so much the facts as the needs of its politics, constructed a legend that did not skimp on broad perspectives and bold combinations. Since 1917, as this legend interpreted the course of events, it is the Slavs and Tatars who, with their Bolshevism, threaten the overthrow of bourgeois-capitalist society, the destruction of the Occident; once again the Huns, Hungarians, Mongols and Turks are surging against Europe's borders. Germanicism has rediscovered its sacred mission, its crusading mandate. In the midst of the Slavic territories, German ethnic groups tremble for their property; they are the wealthy, the "citizens" there. Here, the bourgeois solidarity becomes a folkish one, underpinning itself in terms of blood; the idea of nationality takes blood and capital under its protective wing. The Slav flames with blood-hatred because he threatens property; he is a robber, a bandit, a subhuman whom one must exterminate physically in order to maintain the economic foundation of the better Germanic species; the terror which the Slav inspires can only be atoned for by covering him with force and iron and by snatching his possessions from him.

The fight against Bolshevism thus became a fight of heroic Teutons against servile Slavs. One wanted to ride against the East, as the German Knights of the Order had done centuries ago - Hermann von Salza had also

East driver dream 219 been resurrected in Hitler. Hitler's party was the return of the Teutonic Order; it was not by chance that it sent its offspring to "Order castles".

The anti-Bolshevik crusading zeal and the anti-Slavic Ostfahrer dream drowned out the feelings of inferiority from which one had suffered since one had been defeated in 1918 and then had had to put up with the Versailles humiliations. Versailles had plunged Germany into impotence; the German imperialist citizen no longer had equal rights on the world market and in world politics. The bourgeois self-confidence, which had not lost the feeling of its industrial efficiency, rebelled against "discrimination" and "dishonor." AntiBolshevism was supposed to create a European merit for the German citizen and grant a claim to revision; at the same time, it was supposed to give a pretext for rearmament. One needed army and war equipment to be able to break the Bolshevik power in the East. However, if one got weapons against Bolshevism, then one did not let oneself be pushed into the corner anywhere; one then also pushed oneself forward again in the circle of the imperialist powers to the place which was due to one. These powers were cautious because they had too little to gain, everything to lose. Therefore, they did not declare war for a long time when tattered treaties were thrown at their feet. If Germany did not take revenge for 1918 for the time being, it had it bought at such a high price that in the end it had made up for all losses by "peaceful" means. Since one always played va banque and let it come to a war, which all other bourgeois nations feared, one snatched one concession after the other from the cowardice of the Versailles treaty states. War was not waged, but since it was constantly prepared to break out of the fence, successes were achieved as if after victories. Since the German people had become the most active bourgeois contingent, every bourgeois power, as soon as it insisted on its Versailles promissory bill, had to fear that it would paralyze Germany's anti-Bolshevik drive and thereby do the greatest harm to the bourgeois European cause.

The German bourgeoisie wanted to break the fetters imposed on it by Versailles. If it succeeded in doing so, the German people would again become a "Herrenvolk," regardless of the fact that the petty-bourgeois and proletarian masses were enslaved in the process. It was the comfortable tradition of the bourgeoisie to equate itself with people and nation without further ado. The German people were Herrenvolk enough as soon as the big bourgeoisie had risen again to a master class.

But precisely by doing so, it lived in the conviction that it was fulfilling an urgent European task of the most comprehensive kind.

The world war had shaken all relations of domination, the class relations as well as the colonial ones. The masses, who had suffered in the field, insisted on acquired rights; they no longer wanted to obey unconditionally. Bolshevism was the revolt of the hitherto oppressed classes and peoples against their outmoded masters. The bourgeois upper class of each country was harassed by the covetousness of the masses, and the British Empire even had to deal with the mutinous colonial peoples. The petty-bourgeois masses, the class-conscious workers, the colonial peoples had to be accustomed to the whip again. "The time of the emancipation of the lowest class in each case against the higher classes is over," Herr von Papen had declared. The petty-bourgeois masses could be well disciplined by luring them into military and militarylike associations; whoever gave them uniforms flattered their vanity and could oblige them to blind obedience. In them one had in droves the executioners one needed to terrorize the rebellious masses. But if one took such sharp sides against the lower classes in one's own country, one could no longer have the decency to cure the discontent of the colonial peoples with powder and lead. The Soviet Union had to be encircled as a hotbed of general anarchy, sealed off and one day restored to bourgeois capitalism. This was a campaign of order against the general dissolution; the drill regulations and the folk catechism were the primers which taught the masses submissiveness again, and the soldierly command and the pacifist dogma were the medicines which exorcised the rebel bacillus from the social body. The anarchic socially disrupted consequences of the world war were fully overcome in this way. The bills of exchange that the masses had

The time of emancipation is over drawn on the bourgeois upper class in the trenches were not redeemed, but burned like empty, worthless paper.

The German big bourgeoisie thus set an example and lived an example that wanted to be rewarded; from Germany the bourgeoisie of all countries, the English upper class were to learn how to teach discipline to unruly masses and peoples; but whoever learned from Germany bowed to its leadership.

Nothing was better suited for this disciplining than the use of the feudal forms of rule which the basic nobility had developed and which were now to serve the big bourgeoisie. The "new Middle Ages" were to educate for the discipline that capitalism needed. The German national economist Lujo Brentano had already sighted the coming "industrial feudalism" before the war. The bourgeois breathed the Germanic air of his father’s when he had turned the workers into servants over whom he was allowed to command in the manner of feudal lords.

Hitler played a socio-political role akin to that which Luther had played in the 16th century; both were revolutionary mirror fencers and betrayed German revolutionary liberation movements to reaction. But the fraudulent maneuvers perpetrated on the people were not decisions; the unspoken continued to smolder under the cover. In the Thirty Years' War the German people atoned for the evasive cunning of the Reformation; in a great war no less disastrous, sooner or later will come to light what they had wanted to leave in the dark through the Third Reich. In its alliances with medieval-feudal Japan, with the rebellion of the Spanish latifundia owners, the basic world-reactionary intention of the Third Reich was revealed, which wants to extend spatially over all continents and temporally to master all dissolving tendencies up to the Renaissance movement.

All newly emerging historical currents find their first echo in the youth. The youth of a people is living matter which has not yet congealed and solidified into fixed forms; it is so pictorial that it is already subject to the formative power inherent in the dawn of approaching destiny. In times of social decline the young generation is not the better and healthier, but the more worn down and sickly "material"; in it a more advanced stage of decay announces itself. The freshness of its expressions, the vehemence of its temperament, the passion of its commitment lend driving and accelerating momentum to the general process of decline.

The bourgeois youth was tired of the freedom that spoiled their fathers' business; they demanded the strong authorities to inculcate again frugality and obedience in the petty-bourgeois and proletarian masses. Their ideal was no longer freedom, but the slave pen and dog pound into which the German people were to be beaten. Just as the bourgeois youth had formerly marched with shouts of freedom against the feudal powers, so, guided by the bourgeois class instinct, they went with clubs and shotguns against the social-revolutionary impulses embodied in the proletarian masses. One witnessed the strange spectacle of the youth of a people reaching enthusiastically for chains, of their hearts beating impatiently toward servitude.

The bourgeois youth acted fundamentally under the compulsion of the instinct of self-preservation and selfassertion of bourgeois society. Of course, at the same time their individual personal concern was in full harmony with the general bourgeois class interest. She lacked the feeding grounds. The bourgeois youth became anti-liberal because, in the event of a reversal of political conditions, it could put the liberal holders of offices and posts out on the street as "political enemies" and then seize the "purged" places for itself. It operated to provide for itself and to secure its life while strutting along on ideological stilts; it lifted the "antiBolshevik" Hitler on its shoulders because it could not enjoy its life again as a "jeunesse dorée" until the bourgeois order had eliminated all "Bolshevik elements of decomposition.

The bourgeois social fear stirred up everything chaotic-dark, gloomy-objectionable, everything barbaricbestial and low-vicious, which rests hidden at the bottom of the German being. National Socialism was the

World reactionary basic intention 221 epitome of this stirred Germanic dregs. There is a passage in Balzac in which it is expressed what the citizen is capable of in his social anxiety. In "Birotteau's Greatness and Decline," Balzac has the judge Popinot say to his nephew: "My dear nephew, your former principal may find himself in such a dire situation with his business affairs that he would be forced to file for bankruptcy. But before they decide to do so, even people who have forty years of honorable life behind them, who are models of honesty, for the sake of preserving their honor, do it like the wildest gamblers; they are capable of anything; they sell their wife, they bargain their daughter, they cheat their friends, they pawn other people's property; they go gambling, they become comedians and liars; they know how to show you something. I have seen the most incredible things there." National Socialism pursues this bourgeois self-pollution, this desperate self-prostituting determination to dive into every puddle, with the primal crudeness, vehemence and ferocity of which Germanic nature is capable.

The bourgeois-capitalist, anti-Semitic-Aryan-folkish, Germanic, violent-unspiritual, barbaric-youthful, mystical-irrational, rebellious, delusional elements flow together into one body of water, and Hitler appears as the man who dug the Bert for them all. His "greatness" and demoniacity is to be, despite his emptiness and nothingness, a sounding board that resonates in the face of the totality of these swirling elements and thus comes into contact with them all; he can represent each of them in his particular way and all at once. He is as class-hateful, as brutal, as cruel, as delusional, as bloodthirsty, as intolerant, as ignoble, as unchivalrous, as low, as mendacious, as unpredictable, as hostile to the spirit and as comedic as the defense of the bourgeois order demands in the given situation; he performs the depravities from which the bourgeois instincts still promise themselves a salvation.

Hitler is the "Herrenmensch" against the "Untermenschen" and at the same time the "Volksmann" against the "Kastendünkel", the "Auserlesene" against the "Minderwertigen" and the "Aristokrat" against the "stupid Vielzuvielen", but nevertheless also the "Liebling der Masse" against the "volksfremden Einzelgänger", the "Arier" against the "racial Auswurf", the "Nordic nobleman" against the "Eastern bastard," the "youth" against the "old age," the "bourgeois man of honor" against the "Jewish horse-deceivers," the "front-line fighter" against the "shirkers," the "soldier" against the "civilian," the "Prussian" against the "Jacobin," the "hero" against the "coward, the "man of action" against the "talker", admittedly also the "revolutionary" against the "reactionary", but equally the "strong man" against the "mutinous slaves", the "authority" against the "indignation", the "hard fist" against the "liberalism", the "barbaric harshness" against the "humanitarianism", he is "blood" against "spirit", "instinct" against "education", "Scholle" against "asphalt", "country" against "city", he is "property fanatic" against "expropriation", "individualist" against "collectivism", "occidentalist" against "Asian unculture", admittedly also "priest of the common good" against "self-interest". He is "heathen" and "positive Christian", "anti-Roman rebel" and "infallible pope", "savior" and "executioner", "soul doctor" and "soul corrupter", "political miracle worker" and "whisker": in short, he is the German "commonplace factotum", whose shenanigans work because the German bourgeoisie wants to be deceived with the fervor of faith of a kind of religious madness.

Hitler offers the whole German history as an imposing spectacle in order to pretend reserves that are supposed to provide unlimited credits to the bourgeois society still in the twinkling of an eye of its bankruptcy; the activity of the called-up ghosts of the past is supposed to disguise the fact that the bourgeois society has no more future.

For every period of German history, there are situations in the course of the Third Reich in which it repeats itself; like heroic dreams, the "images from the German past" emerge from the darkness of oblivion. Here Wotan and the wild army emerge from the scenery, there Hermann and the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest; Widukind rebels once again against Charlemagne, Henry I stands once again "at the Vogelherd", so to speak; Otto I., who subjugated the Slavic East, defeated "Asiatic hordes" and elevated the empire to a world power,

The Third Reich a satyr play

recently calls for succession; the Crusades flit across the stage; ideas of a new Mediterranean policy stir; all parts of the world regard German master consciousness as its predetermined heritage; a German faith wants to get away from Rome; Frederick William's whipping stick and Frederick II's Seven Years' War are before everyone's eyes; the war of liberation is fought through as a repertory piece. Wilhelm II's imperialism is suddenly resurrected, and the war of 1914-1918, with its war economy, its total mobilization, its hunger and its sacrifices, its cult of heroes, its dreams of world domination, its tactical masterpieces and strategic bungling, is performed again as a ghostly shadow play. In the "Eighteenth Brumaire" Karl Marx had taken up the thought that every historical process takes place twice: once as a tragedy, the other time, after the decisions that cannot be postponed have already been made, as a satyr play. The Third Reich is the most fantastic satyr play, which - in the midst of peace - satirizes the tragedy of the world war as a sequence of civil war and police-state processes; but not only that. It is at the same time the gruesome satyr play that repeats the entire feudal and bourgeois history of the German people, distorted into the grotesque and criminally low. The satyr play stands at the end of the feudal-bourgeois epoch like the ghastly-terrific retrospective of the past that flashes before the eyes of a desperate man whom the fear of death has driven into madness. The Third Reich does not make an epoch anymore, it is not a change of fate of feudalbourgeois Germany, but it is the sudden dream before its inexorable downfall, in which the entire content of the experienced past flashes up for the last time in leaps and bounds and in bizarre contours. A dehumanized existence wants to justify itself by the highlights of its past, which it remembers. What the German people has failed at again and again: this intemperance in violence, this insufferability in happiness and contemptibility in defeat, this lack of dignity and poise, this cowardly brutality that never stands by its committed atrocities *, this sentimentality that wants to cover the traces of its bloodlust with false feelings, this bestial lack of restraint towards the weak and whimpering servility towards the strong, this mendacity rooted in the deepest depths of its being, which has no idea whatsoever of what truth, honesty, moral courage are, all this returns, heightened to the point of perversity. Hitler insinuates that the historical collapses occurred because the German people did not display these qualities to a sufficient extent; it would have become a world nation if it had been even more violent, unrestrained, brutal, sentimental, groveling, mendacious, morally unworthy, it collapsed before the highest historical peak because it did not possess the strength for the extreme extremes of its dark dowry of nature. The Third Reich trusts itself with this power, it wants to shrink from nothing and to consecrate to virtues through historical success what hitherto, as was confirmed by the fact that the German people fell over it again and again, was considered a vice. The will to power sets as its goal the revaluation of all values; if the vices, swollen to the point of being utterly inhuman, procure world domination, they will immediately attain high historical fame as ruling elemental forces.

The abysmal mendacity of fascism is already based on that hypocritical and falsifying misinterpretation of its basic function: that it wants to be understood as a defensive system, whereas it is in fact a system of harsh exercise of violence and unhesitating violation of the most primitive human rights. Its domestic and foreign policies are predatory: it lusts after prey, stalks the unsuspecting, assaults weak victims. Japan, Italy, Germany are wild beasts in the Nietzschean sense, leaping at the throats of any people not wary of them, drinking the blood of those classes they have struck down with their paws. Japan has pounced on China, Italy on Abyssinia, Germany for the time being on Spain, and insatiably they are on the lookout for new game to maul.

As helplessly as the working class endured the bestial fascist-national socialist class policy, so helplessly did the democratic states behave for a long time in the face of fascist-national socialist foreign policy. The liberaldemocratic powers are not at ease with war; they still shudder at the thought of the world conflagration of 1914-1918. They do not shy away from the most extreme concessions in order to avoid war, through which they see the spirit of their civil existence called into question. They want to appease the fist that threatens them by offering accommodating negotiations; they cling to the belief that, if one is only patient, reason and

human feeling will ultimately prevail over the adventurous recklessness that fears no catastrophe. They put up with a lot and swallow a lot before their bile overflows; one can sin abundantly on their long-suffering and peaceful disposition. They even still control themselves when you stomp on their essential life interests; they don't want to slam the door behind the peace room. Thus the United States and England were lenient when Japan seized Manchukuo; thus England let the fascist Italy accept the Abyssinian challenge; thus France resigned itself to the fact that the Third Reich tore up the Versailles Treaty, rearmed, occupied the Rhineland zone, broke into Spain. The fascist-national socialist dictators continued to risk war because they finally no longer doubted that no parliamentary-liberal power was capable of declaring it.

"Is it not a shame," Voltaire once asked, "that fanatics have zeal and that the wise have none? One must be cautious, but not fearful." The zeal of the fascist-Nazi fanatics was spurred by the fact that they gradually came to regard the "wise" democracies as far more fearful than merely cautious.

When Soviet Russia had fortified itself internally, it ceased to be an international troublemaker. It lived in its Bolshevik anti-bourgeois way and put up with letting the other powers live in their capitalist-antiproletarian way. It went to Geneva, and Litvinov unfolded all the arts of his realpolitik.

The mass political consequence of his realistic foreign policy was the popular front idea.

As soon as the parliamentary democracies no longer needed to perceive Bolshevism and the Soviet Union as an immediate threat, the fascist-National Socialist war noise became unbearable to them. They stubbornly valued butter more than guns. It was no longer Bolshevism but Fascism and National Socialism that disturbed the "world peace. The fascist-national socialist powers, which wanted to remain forever in the war zone, were to be stopped; coalitions of peace-loving powers were formed, and Soviet Russia belonged to them. Litvinov had coined the formula of the indivisibility of peace; it allows world revolutionary actions as little as the unleashing of class struggles.

The Western democracies, however - and this is what makes their world policy so ambiguous and opaqueare not principled enemies of fascism and National Socialism. They are secretly aware of the commonality of the bourgeois cause. It was only because National Socialism went too far that the liberal-democratic powers came to a tactical interplay with the Bolshevik Soviet Union. Of course, this world-political constellation, through which Soviet Russia was led to the side of England and France and into the circle of the Geneva League of Nations powers, was only one stage within the great, world-wide process, in which the opposition between bourgeois-individualistic-capitalistic and planned-economistic-collectivistictechnical order, between world reaction and world revolution, is being fought out.

But their conflict goes on. Even if the fall of the dice has finally sealed the fate of the feudal-bourgeois Occident, this Occident is still an organism of highest vitality; its decay extends over decades, even centuries. This decay has its pauses and setbacks, its periods of apparent health. In the general depletion of substance, secret forces sometimes accumulate in hidden places; suddenly they burst forth and feign recovery, new blossoming and "resurgence. Soon, however, the reservoir of energies is exhausted and in depths the crash tears, from which the organism thought itself protected for all eternity. The Third Reich was a spasmodic reorganization of this kind, no more; the deficit of strength of the bourgeois social body which it leaves behind will only be revealed by the balance sheet which the future still has to draw up.

Fourth Part

Closure (written

1948)

The Provocateur

The balance Hitler was able to draw at the end of 1937 was extraordinarily favorable for him. He believed that he no longer needed to shy away from war; the weapons he had accumulated at such a rapid pace were now to prove themselves to be magic powers that threw political successes into his lap. The day of "revenge" for 1918 was approaching. Hitler had "democratized" the all-German ideas, had made them a concern of the masses. Only, of course, the mistakes that had been made in 1914/18 were not to be repeated. The unions and parties had been destroyed, which could have led a new "stab in the back". The psychological mobilization of the masses could no longer be reversed by any power in the world. The Schlieffen Plan had to be honored in its original form; perhaps there was even a possibility of avoiding the war on two fronts altogether. The war economy could be prepared in time down to the smallest detail; what had failed in 1918 was now to succeed. Hitler felt certain not only of the coming war but also of victory.

The course of the Spanish Civil War strengthened his self-confidence and encouraged him to the boldest undertakings. He attributed the successes achieved by the fascist Franco to German assistance and foresaw that fascism would triumph over democracy in Spain. He was all the more certain of this because both England and France had rudely abandoned the republican-democratic government of Spain.

The two dictators, Mussolini and Hitler, had reaped cheap laurels on Spain's soil. They had organized their Spanish War as a "model war" in the course of which the latest types of weapons and aircraft could be tested. A fascist Spain completed the pincer in which France was politically stuck almost motionless. England favored Italian-German interference in the Pyrenean peninsula. It claimed that it could perceive neither Italian nor German troops in Spain, and in the London Spain Committee its head, Lord Plymouth, sympathetically supported the German representative Ribbentrop when the latter brazenly denied obvious facts with which the Soviet ambassador Maisky came up.

For the time being, Hitler still considered it expedient to keep the German people in the dark about German interference in Spain. He made the German people believe that Germany was not sending any soldiers to Spain; only volunteers were fighting there who had come to Franco's aid against Hitler's will. The participation of the German Wehrmacht was to be kept secret from the German population because it would have been "unpopular." So it happened that the German soldiers who fell on Spanish soil died their "heroic deaths" under exclusion of the public *. In 1939 Franco was firmly in the saddle; with Hitler's support Spanish democratism had been crushed; fascism had conquered a new position in Europe.

* As late as January 1939, a grotesque incident took place before the People's Court. Dr. Joseph Drexel was charged not only with preparation for high treason, but also with treason, because he had passed on news about operations of German soldiers in Spain. In his expert opinion, a Wehrmacht expert denied that German soldiers were in Spain, so statements about this could not be judged as "secret or treason." The charge of treason was dropped. (1946)

There is a document from 1937 that proves how purposefully Hitler was heading for war: it is the so-called Hoßbach Minutes. On November 5, 1937, a meeting was held in the Reich Chancellery from 4:15 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at which, in addition to Hitler, Blomberg, Fritsch, Raeder, Göring, Neurath and Colonel Hoßbach were present. Hoßbach acted as minute-taker. Hitler gave a programmatic speech; he revealed his intentions. In his "manner he spoke of Germany's lack of space and indicated that he wanted to remedy it in Europe itself, since England and France refused to give up anything of their colonies. Germany, he said, would in the end be reduced to the possession of weak nations, such as Angola. "If the security of our food supply were in the foreground," Hitler said, "the space necessary for this could only be sought in Europe, but not, on the basis of liberal-capitalist views, in the exploitation of colonies. It was not a question of the extraction of human beings, but of arable space." Hitler continued: "That any expansion of space can only take place by breaking "resistance and at risk has been proven by the history of all times - Roman "Empire, English Empire." With some cynicism he declared: "Neither in the past nor today has there been masterless space; the aggressor always meets the owner. For the solution of the German question there could only be the way of force; this could never be without risk." Hitler then considered the time most favorable for the invasion of Germany's neighbors. The time after 1943 was too late; after that time only a change to our disadvantage could be expected. Warningly, he remarked, "If we did not act by 1943/45, as a result of the lack of reserves, each year could bring the food crisis, for the remedy of which sufficient foreign exchange would not be available." Hitler then discussed the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The timing of this, he said, would depend on the internal situation in which France found itself. If the social tensions in France should grow into such a domestic crisis that the latter would absorb the French army and disable it for war use against Germany, the time would have come for action against Czechoslovakia. It was also possible that France would be so tied down by war that it could not act against Germany; that was the other favorable opportunity. Hitler was thinking of an Italian-French Mediterranean war, which he saw close at hand if Mussolini did not vacate the Balearic Islands. How correctly Hitler assessed the weak policy of the democratic Western powers at that time was shown by his prediction that in all probability England, and probably also France, had already silently written off Czechoslovakia and had resigned themselves to the fact that this question would one day be settled by Germany. Hitler was already thinking of genocide; he wanted to create space for Germans in Czechoslovakia as in Austria. He calculated that a forced evacuation from Czechoslovakia of two million people, from Austria of one million, would guarantee food for five to six million Germans. Military intervention by Soviet Russia would have to be countered by the speed of our operations.

In the debate it was obvious that both Blomberg and Fritsch raised objections to Hitler's plans from a military point of view. They said that Germany should not take the risk of having England and France as enemies. Hitler expected war between Italy and France in the summer of 1938, as the minutes show; he was convinced that England would not participate. At one point the minutes tell how Hitler did not want a clear and unequivocal Franco victory in Spain; the tensions in the Mediterranean were not to be eliminated, they would benefit the Third Reich. One can see from the transcript how Hitler chooses Austria and Czechoslovakia as his first victims. Poland remained in the background for the time being; it was still to be kept in neutrality. In a flash, Hitler thought of breaking ahead. From Mussolini's aggressive Mediterranean policy he hoped to profit in Eastern Europe.

Immediately in March 1938, the action against Austria was set in motion. Chancellor Schuschnigg, under Germany's thumb, had taken National Socialist ministers into his cabinet. They were in cahoots with Hitler and worked into his hands. National Socialist gangs instigated riots in many Austrian places. The German envoy Papen bought Austrian business leaders.

At Papen's instigation, Schuschnigg had gone to Berchtesgaden for a visit by Hitler. He was treated badly; temporarily he feared being arrested there. He realized what Hitler was up to. Nor did he want to venture a

countermove. He asked in London, Paris and Rome if he could hope for assistance. On March 6, he announced a referendum in a speech: as a counterweight against the National Socialists, he wanted to bring the Social Democrats into a government coalition to support him and have this policy confirmed by the people. This referendum was to take place as early as March 15.

The National Socialists howled: they called the announcement of the referendum an overreaction. They provoked clashes with Social Democrats, claimed that rivers of blood were flowing and that the Schuschnigg government was no longer in control. Hitler used his tried-and-true recipe of first wreaking havoc and then imposing himself as a force for order. It was arranged that the National Socialist Minister of the Interior, Seyß-Inquart, would ask for the Reich's help; the ultimate demand was that President Miklas dismiss Schuschnigg.

Since England, France and Italy refused military support to the Schuschnigg government, it was defenseless in the face of Germany's onslaught. In view of the National Socialist contamination of the country, it could not risk an armed clash with the Reich.

In a radio address on March 11, 1938, Schuschnigg informed the Austrian people of what was happening. He said, among other things: "The German Reich Government has given the Federal President a limited ultimatum to appoint a candidate proposed by it as Federal Chancellor and to appoint the government according to the proposals of the German Reich Government, failing which the invasion of Austria by German troops is contemplated for this hour. The President instructs me to inform the Austrian people that we are yielding to force."

The next day the German troops entered Austria, received with jubilation by large parts of the population. Briand had once threatened: "The Anschluss is war" - neither France nor any other League of Nations power stood by this word. Austria saw itself abandoned, as Abyssinia had been abandoned after the Italian attack, as Spain had been abandoned after the fascist interference, as China had been abandoned after Japan's invasion of Manchuria in July 1937.

England and France protested in Berlin about the coercion applied to Austria, but they calmly accepted the German rejection of this protest. Hitler treated the Anschluss as an internal German affair that did not violate any foreign interest. Since Washington also recognized Hitler's act of violence, Hitler was able to enjoy a great success in foreign policy.

The League of Nations powers were no longer thinking about Austria; they were already troubled by another concern. They distrusted Hitler's more distant intentions. Already on March 14, France assured Czechoslovakia of its support against Hitler. It was, of course, a bad omen when, on March 24, England refused to join this pledge of support. Chamberlain had declared in the House of Commons on the Austrian affair: "If we are to judge recent events, it is necessary to look the facts in the face. However we may judge them, and however we may estimate their influence on the international situation as it is today, it is a hard fact-and of this truth every member of the House can convince himself-that nothing would have stopped this act of Germany unless we and others had been prepared to use force to prevent it."

The immediate result of these events must be an intensification of the sense of uncertainty and insecurity in Europe. However, it is not the moment for hasty decisions or for careless words. One must look at the new situation clearly and with cold judgment. He had always emphasized that the British defense program was flexible and that it would be revised at any time in the light of changing international situations.

In favor of Czechoslovakia, however, England did not venture too far ahead. In England a direction was predominant which was subject to momentous considerations. Czechoslovakia had long ago moved closer to the Soviet Union. It had followed the example of France in 193$ and had signed a Czechoslovak-Soviet

treaty of mutual aid on May 16, 1535. Compared to the Soviet-French treaty, it contained a special feature that worked to Czechoslovakia's disadvantage in 1938. This peculiarity consisted in a clause appended to point 2 of the protocol of signature, the wording of which was: "At the same time, the two Governments recognize that the obligations of mutual assistance will apply between them only to the extent that assistance is given by France to the attacked party under the conditions provided for in this treaty". , -

The matheartic policy that France subsequently pursued against Germany plunged the Little Entente into a serious crisis. Yugoslavia had already been intimidated by Germany since Goering's trip in 1936; at that time Goering had threatened in Belgrade that in the event of war Yugoslavia would be overrun in one attempt by the German Wehrmacht. On March 25, 1937, Yugoslavia concluded a treaty of friendship with Italy, by which Belgrade was wrested from the French alliance system. Mussolini had won Yugoslavia by assuring that he would no longer lay claim to Dalmatia; through a Bulgarian-Yugoslav friendship pact, Bulgaria was also drawn into the fascist force field. Under Polish influence, the Romanian government was persuaded in April 1937 to promise not to enter into an aid treaty with Czechoslovakia or France. Soviet Russia, moreover, was not to be granted the right of passage through Romania if it wished to come to the aid of Czechoslovakia The immediate result of these events must be an intensification of the feeling of uncertainty and insecurity in Europe. However, it was not the moment for hasty decisions or for careless words. One must look at the new situation clearly and with cold judgment. He had always emphasized that the British defense program was flexible and that it would be revised at any time in the light of changing international situations.

In favor of Czechoslovakia, however, England did not venture too far ahead. In England a direction was predominant which was subject to momentous considerations. Czechoslovakia had long ago moved closer to the Soviet Union. It had followed the example of France in 193$ and had signed a Czechoslovak-Soviet treaty of mutual aid on May 16, 1535. Compared to the Soviet-French treaty, it contained a special feature that worked to Czechoslovakia's disadvantage in 1938. This peculiarity consisted in a clause appended to point 2 of the protocol of signature, the wording of which was: "At the same time, the two Governments recognize that the obligations of mutual assistance will apply between them only to the extent that assistance is given by France to the attacked party under the conditions provided for in this treaty". , -

The matheartic policy that France subsequently pursued against Germany plunged the Little Entente into a serious crisis. Yugoslavia had already been intimidated by Germany since Goering's trip in 1936; at that time Goering had threatened in Belgrade that in the event of war Yugoslavia would be overrun in one attempt by the German Wehrmacht. On March 25, 1937, Yugoslavia concluded a treaty of friendship with Italy, by which Belgrade was wrested from the French alliance system. Mussolini had won Yugoslavia by assuring that he would no longer lay claim to Dalmatia; through a Bulgarian-Yugoslav friendship pact, Bulgaria was also drawn into the fascist force field. Under Polish influence, the Romanian government was persuaded in April 1937 to promise not to enter into an aid treaty with Czechoslovakia or France. Soviet Russia was also not to be granted the right of passage through Romania if it wished to come to the aid of Czechoslovakia.

The Little Entente had been blown up, Czechoslovakia had reason to feel isolated and to fear for its security. Only from the Soviet Union, it realized, could it still receive help. With the rapprochement of Czechoslovakia with the Soviet Union, Soviet influence had penetrated far into Central Europe. The high capitalist circles which determined English policy did not desire this advance of Soviet Russia in Europe. They expected greater advantage from reaching an understanding with Hitler against Soviet Russia at the expense of Czechoslovakia.

For years, English policy had been averse to the Soviet Union and had aborted that country where it was able to do so. Soon she thought it possible to use Hitler as a condottiere in her game against the Soviet Union. Only with half a heart did she participate in the measures of the League of Nations to put a rein on Hitler's

aggressiveness. Time and again she opened a loophole for him when he seemed to be surrounded by his fearful border neighbors. The Prince of Wales approved the decision of the British front-line units to send a delegation to Hitler. For the right-wing circles, Lord Allen of Hartwood visited Hitler in Berlin; both sides made friendly and cordial statements. Contrary to the efforts of France and the Soviet Union to give effect to the principle of collective security, England demonstratively opted for the principle of bilateral treaties in Hitler's favor. On June 18, 1935, an Anglo-German naval agreement was signed, granting Germany a fleet strength of 35 percent of the naval power of the entire British Commonwealth. Lord Lothian, later British ambassador to Washington, was virtually agitating for Hitler in the most distinguished clubs in England during these days. In a note from the German Foreign Office of November 19, 1937, reporting on the visit of the British Minister Lord Halifax to Hitler, reference is made to the uneasiness which existed among the English public in view of many unusual occurrences within the Third Reich. It then says: "In spite of these difficulties, he (Lord Halifax) and other members of the English Government would be imbued with the belief that the Fuehrer had not only accomplished great things in Germany itself, but that by destroying Communism at home he had also barred its way into Western Europe, and that therefore Germany could justly be regarded as the bulwark of the West against Bolshevism." In the same conversation Lord Halifax had admitted that Danzig, Austria, and Czechoslovakia were among those points of the European order which needed revision. "England," he remarked, "was interested only in seeing these changes brought about by peaceful evolution." The German Ambassador to England, Dirksen, wrote to his Government on July 10, 1938: "The present English Cabinet is the first post-war Cabinet to have made conciliation with Germany one of its most essential items on its program; it therefore shows the highest degree of understanding toward Germany.... It has approached in essential points the guiding principles advocated by Germany: the elimination of the Soviet Union from participation in the destiny of Europe; the elimination of the League of Nations from the same task; the expediency of bilateral negotiations and treaties. It brings growing sympathy to Germany's demands on the Sudeten German question. It would be prepared to make great sacrifices to satisfy the other legitimate German demands - on the one condition that these aims be pursued by peaceful means."

With this benevolent attitude of the British government toward Germany, Czechoslovakia had nothing to hope for from London. It stood in the way of Anglo-German understanding and was therefore cold-bloodedly written off by England.

That message from London, which was published on ij. May 1938 in the New York Herald Tribune, which said that England was not inclined to take up arms in defense of a Slavic republic, was based on reliable information.

Hitler was not the man to let such opportunities pass him by. He gave free rein to his infernal spirits in the Sudetenland. His creature there, the gymnastics teacher Henlein, all at once became a politically significant figure. Clashes were organized, atrocity stories about Czech violence were invented, demands were made. From month to month Henlein became more demanding. England sent only one observer to the Sudetenland instead of troops, Lord Runciman, who soon got along better with Henlein than with Benesch. First, for the Sudetenland, extension of self-government, finally self-determination was demanded. Benesch negotiated with Henlein like power to power.

France called up its reserves on September j, 1938, Czechoslovakia imposed martial law: but Hitler did not need to be intimidated by this, since he knew that England was behind him. On September 7, The Times backed him up when it wrote: "If the Sudeten Germans are now demanding more than the Czech Government is evidently prepared to give in its last group of proposals, one can only conclude from this that the Germans are no longer satisfied with the removal of mere grievances, but are not at all comfortable in the Czechoslovak Republic." In this case it might well be worthwhile for the Czech Government to consider

230 England favors Hitler

whether it would like to exclude altogether the project favored in certain circles of making Czechoslovakia a homogeneous state by ceding that fringe of foreign population which borders on the nation with which they are connected by race. In any case, it would seem that the wishes of the population concerned would constitute a decisive important element in any solution which might hope to be regarded as a permanent one. The advantages to Czechoslovakia of becoming a homogeneous state would perhaps considerably outweigh the obvious disadvantages of losing the Sudeten German districts of the borderland."

Hitler was allowed to presume to challenge France and Soviet Russia and to undertake the breakup of Czechoslovakia. The danger of war did not frighten him: he himself wanted to light the war torch.

England, of course, did not want it to come to that at this moment. Hitler was to reach his goal in Czechoslovakia without the necessity of armed clashes. A major diplomatic action was to force Czechoslovakia to surrender, secure a decent retreat for France, inflict a severe humiliation on Soviet Russia, and move Hitler into a starting position from which he could carefully organize his attack on the East.

The British Prime Minister Chamberlain unexpectedly flew to Obersalzberg on September 9, 1938, in order to set in motion from there the diplomatic action he intended to take. Hitler was gracious enough to receive the unexpected arrival; he savored the unheard-of triumph of having the Prime Minister of the Empire knocking at his gates. This was an unparalleled gain in prestige for Hitler. Hitler's domestic political opponents were checkmated and his foreign political opponents were silenced. The situation had come to a head when Chamberlain took his flight to Obersalzberg. German troops had begun to move against the Czech border. At the Nuremberg Party Congress, Hitler had called for a referendum in the Sudetenland. Mussolini, in an open letter to Runciman, had called Czechoslovakia a questionable state and supported the demand for a referendum for the Sudetenland.

In a record of the remarks of one of the authoritative men in the Foreign Office, which the German representative in London, Kordt, passed on to Berlin on September 1, 1938, it was said: "When we two, Britain and Germany, have agreed on a settlement of the Czech problem, we shall simply brush aside the resistance which, say, France and Czechoslovakia themselves might give to this solution."

The attitude of France, however, was not much different from that of England. On September 12, 1938, the French Cabinet deliberated on the position it would take on the Czechoslovak question. After the cabinet meeting, Daladier informed the English ambassador in Paris of the outcome of the deliberations. France, Daladier said, was unable to fulfill its alliance obligations toward Czechoslovakia. Only the Soviet Union, which had long had a clear idea of the danger posed to the small states by Hitler, showed itself willing to stand up for Czechoslovakia. Moscow recognized that the destruction of Czechoslovakia would mean the beginning of European anti-Bolshevik action. It was therefore in the Soviet interest that the treaties of assistance entered into with Czechoslovakia should now be fulfilled. On September 20, 1938, the Soviet envoy in Prague was instructed by the Foreign Commissariat to tell Benesch that the Soviet Union would provide Czechoslovakia with immediate and effective aid in accordance with the treaty if France remained loyal to it and also came to its aid. This was precisely what both Chamberlain and Daladier feared, that the treaty loyalty which the Soviet Union held out to Czechoslovakia might stiffen the Prague government and thereby challenge Hitler to take military action. As a result, Chamberlain saw his mission as persuading Czechoslovakia to surrender. He wanted to make Hitler stand still until Czechoslovakia surrendered. After France broke its mutual assistance pact, the Soviet Union had no choice but to abandon Czechoslovakia to its fate.

The conversation between Chamberlain and Hitler was friendly and cordial after the English Premier's explanation. Hitler was considerate of Anglo-French peace needs and would not refuse to pocket the Sudeten territory without first firing sharply. Daladier recommended moderation to the Prague government.

Chamberlain flies to Germany 231

A proclamation by Konrad Henlein revealed what Chamberlain had arranged with Hitler: no longer a referendum, but a return to the Reich was now demanded. Benesch reshuffled the government.

After Chamberlain returned from Berchtesgaden near London, he invited Daladier and Bonnet near London. The result of the meeting was the note that England and France jointly sent to Prague on September 19, 1938, which was basically nothing more than an ultimatum. The Czechoslovak government was advised to immediately cede the Sudetenland to Germany in order to avoid a European war. On September 20, 1938, the Czechoslovak government replied with a request that England and France revise their position and submit the German-Czechoslovak dispute to arbitration. Chamberlain became vicious and sent word in Prague that the English government would cease to be interested in the fate of the Czechoslovak if the Czechoslovak government did not bend. The French Government joined in the threat of the British Government. The British Government's reply note of September 21 to the Czechoslovak objections stated "that in the opinion of His Majesty's Government the reply of the Czechoslovak Government is not equal to the critical situation which the Anglo-French proposals are intended to remove, and if it remained so, an announcement, in the opinion of His Majesty's Government, would lead to the immediate German invasion." Czechoslovakia was also warned against leaning on the Soviet Union; in that event a crusade against Bolshevism might ensue in which, it was suggested, England and France might be found siding with Germany.

The pressure exerted on the Czechoslovak government was irresistible. On September 21, 1938, the Czechoslovak government capitulated as well. In its reply note to London it lamented, "Compelled by circumstances and at the extreme insistence of the French and English Governments, the Government of the Czechoslovak Republic accepts with bitterness the Franco-English proposals, on the assumption that both Governments will do their utmost to secure the vital interests of the Czechoslovak Republic in the realization of the proposals mentioned." As a plaster for the humiliating loss of the Sudetenland, England and France offered the maltreated country the guarantee of the new frontiers; Czechoslovakia was hypocritically assured that England and France appreciated the magnitude of the sacrifice demanded of the Czech people.

A second meeting had been arranged between Chamberlain and Hitler at Berchtesgaden. On September 23, 1938, it took place in Godesberg. Hitler ruthlessly exploited the nakedness that England and France had given themselves with their ultimatum to Czechoslovakia. The territory he claimed cut deeply into the body of the Czechoslovak state, cutting railroads and roads and even breaching Czechoslovak defenses. Defenseless, Czechoslovakia was to be at the mercy of Germany. But this was not enough. Unexpectedly, Hitler now made the claims of the Hungarians and Poles to Czechoslovak territory his own. He expected England and France to immediately violate the promise of guarantee they had made to the Czechoslovak government. It took Chamberlain several hours before he was able to swallow even this bitter pill. Temporarily, on the night of September 23-24, it had seemed that Chamberlain would rather accept war than give in to German insolence. England and France informed Prague that they could not advise against preparing for resistance. In fact, Czechoslovakia mobilized in response.

The Godesberg Conference ended with Chamberlain offering to have a German memorandum summarizing Hitler's claims delivered in Prague. Czechoslovakia, however, declared that it could not accept it. Open rupture between Germany and Czechoslovakia seemed inevitable. Chamberlain announced that, despite everything, the path of negotiation was still open and that England, France, and Soviet Russia would stand by the Czech people if Hitler used force. In a speech at the Sports Palace Hitler let it be known, amidst all the threatening bombast, that he still hoped for English mediation. On September 26, an appeal from U.S. President Roosevelt arrived in Berlin and Prague, urging Hitler and Benesch to settle their dispute peacefully. The following day the British Government sent word in Berlin that it, together with the French Government, wished to urge Czechoslovakia to cede immediately the territories demanded by Germany. Hitler acted in close consultation with Mussolini. On the basis of telephone communication with Rome, Hitler invited

Conference in Godesberg

Chamberlain, Daladier, and Mussolini to a conference in Munich on September 28. It took place in the Bavarian capital as early as September 29.

It was agreed in what forms the detachment of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia should take place. After about eight hours of negotiations, an agreement was reached. The extent of the land theft committed against Czechoslovakia was fixed. Czechoslovakia was to cede to Germany not only the Sudeten area, but also the German-speaking districts that lay on the former Austrian border. On October 1, the German Wehrmacht was allowed to cross the border; on October 10, it was to have completed the seizure of the entire spoils. Czechoslovakia had to hand over all military installations to Germany intact. But it was not enough for Czechoslovakia to suffer: only after the Hungarian and Polish territorial claims to Czechoslovakia had been satisfied would Germany and Italy join in the border guarantee proposed by England and France for the benefit of Czechoslovakia, which had been so badly diminished.

The German robbery was carried out in full agreement with England, France and Italy. Czechoslovak representatives were not admitted to the Munich negotiations. A Czechoslovak delegation led by Dr. Mastny was ordered to Munich to receive the conditions that were to be agreed upon at the conference. A memorandum from the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry on the delegation's stay in Munich recounts the undignified treatment the Czechoslovak representatives received. "Our reception at the airfield was about the same," the memorandum reports, "as is accorded to persons suspected by the police. We were taken in a police car, accompanied by Gestapo men, to the Hotel "Regina," where the English delegation had also stayed. The conference was already in full swing, and we found it difficult to make any contact with leading members of the British or French delegations." In a conversation with the British diplomat Gwatkin, the Czechoslovak leader of the delegation once again raised all Czechoslovak objections to the act of violence that was to be perpetrated on his fatherland. Gwatkin replied that "I do not seem to realize how difficult a stand the Western powers would have and how unpleasant it would be to negotiate with Hitler." Threateningly, Gwatkin said: "If you do not accept, you will have to settle your affairs with the Germans all by yourself. The French will perhaps express themselves more amiably, but I assure you they share our views. For their part, they will retreat."

At 1:30 a.m. the Czechoslovak delegation was summoned to the hall where the conference had taken place. Chamberlain and Daladier were present in person. The Czechoslovak delegation felt that a verdict was now to be pronounced. Chamberlain presented the memorandum to the Czechoslovak delegation. The Czech representatives asked a number of questions, some of which were answered by Chamberlain. "Chamberlain yawned continuously, without any sign of embarrassment." The Czechs were told that the decisions of the conference were unalterable: "It was stated rather brutally, by a Frenchman to boot, that this verdict could not be appealed and that there was no possibility of any amendment." Czechoslovakia was the sacrifice made by the Westerners to get Hitler off their own backs and divert him eastward.

A report of the Polish envoy in London to his foreign minister, dated December 16, 1938, expresses in stark terms how the real key to the whole English policy of those days lay in Chamberlain's hostile feelings toward the Soviet Union. "One is convinced," it says, "that the Prime Minister (if one wishes to apply the not too apt comparison with sport) defended the English goal and thus moved the game to the East of Europe." Correctly, the Polish envoy observes, "The discords in Eastern Europe, in which Germany and Russia threaten to become entangled in one form or another, are here, in spite of all the declaration of active elements of opposition, everywhere and subconsciously regarded as a lesser evil, capable of averting the danger from the Empire and its overseas parts for a longer period. Chamberlain's attitude toward the Soviets remains cool. The truth is that he is all too consistent and avoids completely openly anything that might cause his political partners to turn away from cooperation.... But truth is also that the Prime Minister generally avoids speaking out against Germany's aspirations in the East."

Before leaving Munich, Chamberlain had visited Hitler; the result of the hour-long discussion was an unusual document. Its wording was: "We have had another meeting today and are united in the recognition that the question of Anglo-German relations is of the very first importance for both countries and for Europe. We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never again to go to war against each other.

We are determined to deal with other questions of concern to both our countries by the method of consultation and to continue our efforts to remove any causes of disagreement, thus helping to secure the peace of Europe."

This peace declaration hinted at secret special arrangements; it sealed the unspoken authority for Hitler to strike out against Soviet Russia as England's rapier. France was then taken into confidence and joined the clean alliance. Chamberlain had himself celebrated in England as a peace-bringer and peace-multiplier. In a speech he said, "Now peace is assured for generations to come." The criticism that the Munich Agreement received in the House of Commons could not change the accomplished fact. Both Eden and Churchill failed to give Chamberlain their allegiance; they had a more correct judgment of Hitler, and they warned against giving Hitler any confidence. Churchill declared, "England had a choice between war and disgrace. Its ministers chose disgrace and then got war."

Hitler was at the height of his power in Munich. The Prime Minister of the Empire and the Prime Minister of France had rushed to him to beg him to remain peaceful. Both had made themselves accessories to his Czech banditry. They had also incited him to pounce on Soviet Russia sooner or later, either to crush it or to expend his strength in this adventure. If he remained prudent and restrained, guarded against the appearance of an open breach of word and contract, then his position of power was secured for a long time.

However, did the internal dynamics of the Third Reich allow the "Führer" to be prudent, moderate, faithful to the contract?

In the open letter which Mussolini addressed to Lord Runciman on September 15th to Lord Runciman, it had been said: "If Hitler demanded to annex three and a half million Czechs, Europe would be right to get excited and to start moving. But Hitler is not thinking of it."

In the Sports Palace on September 26, Hitler had declared that he had assured Chamberlain "that when this problem is solved there will be no more territorial problem in Europe." Emphatically he exclaimed, "We don't want any Czechs at all"; on another occasion, too, he had stressed that he did not want any Czech minority within the German borders, that only the liberation of the Germans was his concern.

Chamberlain and Daladier had built on these solemn assurances. Since Soviet Russia was not counted as part of "Europe," Hitler's eastern war plans meant no violation of his given word. Hitler seemed to be inserted into the occidental bloc; it only suited Europe if the whipped-up German energies exploded under English direction exclusively against the Bolshevik state.

However, Hitler's appetite had come with the meal. After he had bagged the Sudeten Germans, suddenly even the Czechs did not go against his taste. He corrected himself and, despite his previous reassuring pronouncements, cast an eye on them after all. The ethnic point of view, which had previously made the Czechs seem unpalatable to him, was pushed aside and replaced by the historical one. Had not Bohemia and Moravia belonged to the old empire for centuries? Hitler felt himself to be the restorer of old imperial glory; thus the Czechs could not be spared being swallowed up by the Third Reich. It had to happen all the more inevitably, as Hitler was already thinking about invading Poland and taking control of Romania for the sake of the oil fields there. If Czechoslovakia, oriented towards the East, had been the bridge on which Soviet

England chooses the shame

Russian influence was carried into the heart of Central Europe, Bohemia and Moravia were now to become, conversely, the fallback position from which Germany intended to roll up the East.

In the meantime, the Czech President Benesch had resigned from his office. He saw the creation for which he had once worked in exile with Masaryk in ruins; once again he chose voluntary exile. A dubious figure who did not find it humiliating to become Hitler's creature, Hacha, became Benesch's successor.

Some islands of German nationality remained in Czechoslovakia. With their help, Hitler again staged riots in his own way. Thus, Germans in Brno were instructed to raise swastika flags; the understandable Czech resistance to such challenges was a welcome occasion for Nazi propaganda to clamor about the rape of German people.

At the same time, Hitler had contacted the Slovak opposition and was furnishing them with money and advice. In the two men Tiso and Tuka he found willing tools.

By March 1939, Hitler had made his preparations to the point where he believed he could blow up Czechoslovakia completely. On March 14, the world was surprised by the announcement that Slovakia had broken away from the Czech Republic. SA and SS gangs, following Hitler's instructions, caused riots in Czech towns. German troops began moving toward the Czech border. The German Propaganda Ministry circulated mendacious rumors of Communist conspiracies within Czechoslovakia. When Czech President Hacha was asked to come to Berlin, he did not dare to refuse. Ribbentrop and Hitler frightened him with threats; he offered "after an all-night parley on ij. March 1939 his hands to an agreement by which the Fuehrer took the Czech people under the protection of the Reich while guaranteeing an autonomous development of its völkischen life." Hacha had been persuaded, not without violence, "to place the fate of the Czech people and country confidently in the hands of the Führer of the Reich." Hitler proclaimed the legal opinion that with the detachment of Slovakia from Prague the Czechoslovak Republic had ceased to exist; Hacha was not strong enough to protest this effectively. Czechoslovakia was transformed into a German protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and Neurath became the first Reich protector.

England and France presented notes of protest in Berlin; the German government, with its customary moral indignation, rejected these protests and expressed its "displeasure above all with England's attitude toward the solution of the Czechoslovak question." England was trying to create an anti-German attitude among the English people. Germany, he said, was forced "to revise its fundamental attitude toward England." The USA, whose former President Wilson had been revered in Prague as a co-founder of the Czechoslovak state, expressed its rejection of the German coup d'état only in muted terms. Only the Soviet Union decided to make an emphatic objection. The Soviet People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, in a note delivered in Berlin, disputed the legal validity of the Berlin document of March 15. March, which Hacha had signed. The occupation of Czechoslovakia by German troops and the transformation of Czechoslovakia into a German protectorate could "not be judged otherwise than as arbitrary, violent and aggressive." The Soviet Government, it was further stated, found that the actions of the German Government "not only did not avert a danger threatening the general peace, but, on the contrary, created and increased such a danger and thus disturbed the political stability in Central Europe, increased the elements of the troubled condition already created in Europe earlier, and dealt a new blow to the feeling of security of the peoples."

A few days later Hitler used similar methods to bring the Memelland "home to the Reich". The Lithuanian Foreign Minister Urbsys, in transit from Rome to Kovno, was detained in Berlin on March 31 and, under the usual blackmailing pressure, was coerced into conceding to return the Memelland to Germany by treaty. The Lithuanian government saw no other way out than to submit to German coercion.

While Hitler felt triumphant, the British government took a turn that was fatal for Germany. Even Chamberlain now realized that Hitler's signature could never be discounted. In the British House of Commons, as late as March 15, Chamberlain had declared that what was happening "had been done with the consent of the Czechoslovak Government, but the manner in which the changes had been brought about could not be regarded as in accordance with the spirit of the Munich Agreement." Finally, Chamberlain accused Hitler of breaking his word. It was evident how Chamberlain was already thinking of the eventuality of war. He asked whether the developments of the last few days were a step on the way to an attempt to dominate the world by force. Chamberlain's speech was under the impression of the challenges that German diplomacy had allowed itself everywhere since the Munich Conference. The German government had proposed to England an air pact that would grant Germany the right to build an air fleet that would have outnumbered the English air fleet by a factor of two to three. Soon after, the German government declared that Germany intended to create a submarine fleet the size of which would equal the English submarine fleet. Disturbing news arrived in London from Warsaw. During a meeting Ribbentrop had with Polish Ambassador Lipski in Berchtesgaden on October 24, 1938, Ribbentrop urged Poland to negotiate the return of the Corridor and Danzig to Germany. Poland, Ribbentrop thought, should hold Lithuania harmless. To sweeten the Poles' German plan, Ribbentrop offered to build an extraterritorial highway and an extraterritorial double-track railroad through both the corridor and the Danzig area, as well as a free port on the Danzig coast. The Polish sense of self was wounded. The Polish government refused to give in to German insistence and insolence. It wanted to conclude the negotiations by a final "no*. In a memorandum, which it had handed over in Berlin on March 2, 1939, it expressed this "No". The memorandum categorically stated that the Polish government did not want to agree to the cession of the corridor, to the annexation of Danzig to Germany, or to the construction of extraterritorial railroads and highways. On the other hand, it wanted to do everything that would facilitate the connection between Germany and East Prussia. The situation came to a dramatic head. Ribbentrop threatened that Germany would never give up its claims to Danzig. Ambassador Lipski replied that he had the unpleasant duty "to point out that any further pursuit of these German plans, especially insofar as they concerned a return of Danzig to the Reich, would mean war with Poland." The Polish government had to recognize that its policy of reconciliation and alliance with Fascist Germany had completely failed. It had resisted the Ostlocarnopakt; it had made itself available, hungry for booty, to the plans of plunder which Hitler was forging against the Soviet Union; it had participated in the annihilation of Czechoslovakia. In short, she had gone through thick and thin with German imperialism without reservation and now had to experience that she was not only to be cheated out of the reward, but that she had been chosen as the next victim by her former ally. The danger of Poland's situation was aggravated by the fact that Romania, brought to her knees by a German ultimatum, submitted to Germany and allied herself economically with her.

At that moment, England and France came to Poland's aid. Chamberlain said in the House of Commons on March 31 that in the event of a German invasion England would give Poland assistance if Poland wished it and offered resistance. France also offered Poland its help. Polish Foreign Minister Beck came to London for negotiations in early April. On April 6, Chamberlain informed the House of Commons that a mutual aid agreement had been reached between England and Poland. Poland placed its fate in the hands of the Western European powers. The Polish government did not consider the obvious, annexation to its Soviet neighbor. It was so much involved in the circles of Bolshevik politics that it did not consider this most effective and only promising way out to be viable.

The international situation was unmistakably drifting toward war. In the Far East, Japan, Germany's antiComintern, fanned the flames of discord, as did Germany and Italy in Europe. American President Roosevelt wanted to make one last attempt to save the peace. Roosevelt, seeing American interests in China and in the East Asian region at all compromised, addressed Hitler and Mussolini on April 15, 1939, demanding that

they refrain from invading thirty countries he enumerated over the course of ten years. An international conference, he suggested, should be convened to deal with the questions of international disarmament and the regulation of the world economy. Both Hitler and Mussolini gave no official answers to Roosevelt's message; in speeches they shouted to the world that they would never tolerate American interference in the internal affairs of their countries. War was the great card on which Hitler had staked; he would not let any power in the world knock it out of his hand.

XXXV The German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact

The English Government, which for years had been anxious to cooperate with Germany against the Soviet Union, saw to its surprise that it had been dangerously overplayed by that Germany and that it could no longer hesitate to procure confederates. In spite of the good Anglo-French relations, the English Government had hitherto evaded the obligation to guarantee the security of France. Only now, on March 22, 1939, was an aid treaty signed in haste, head over heels as it were, in which the two countries, England and France, promised to assist each other in the event of an invasion. Agreements on mutual aid were quickly concluded by England with Poland, Romania and Greece. France joined all these treaties.

The big question was how England's relationship with the Soviet Union should be shaped. Did Chamberlain, in view of the growing danger to his country, want to take the liberty of a "canossagang" to Moscow? Churchill had called for leaning on the Soviet Union in the Daily Telegraph on March 9, 1939. He wrote: "We are perhaps not yet in a position to weigh and judge the full strength and power of the Soviet Union; but there can be no doubt that the USSR is a formidable state steadfastly pursuing a policy of peace." Under pressure of public opinion, the British Government sent a request to Moscow on March 18 asking whether the Soviet Government would consider signing a declaration jointly with the Governments of England, France, and Poland against attack and including in the declaration a commitment to mutual consultation. Although the Soviet Government probably did not attach much weight to such a declaration, it held out the prospect of acceding to it. But not even this declaration came to pass. The Poles were deluded enough to try to thwart it. The Polish government calculated that in the event of a European clash with Germany it would have to grant Soviet troops the right of passage. But it did not want to grant this right of passage. By the way, Romania took the same attitude. Neither England nor France tried to make the short-sighted Polish government see reason. Yes, even the French Foreign Minister Bonnet was no less averse to such a declaration; he did not want to see France publicly in a front with the Soviet Union. Such misgivings and sensitivities were, of course, soon rendered absurd by the German government. It terminated the AngloGerman naval treaty on April 28 with the reproachful remark that England had given Poland a promise of aid. Then it cancelled the friendship pact with Poland of January 16, 1934. Hitler, it was now understood in London, had dropped all consideration. The British government now found it advisable to strive for closer cooperation with the Soviet Union. It hoped to intimidate Germany by making a bridge between London and Moscow visible. Hitler had once said in his book "Mein Kampf" that Germany must never again allow itself to become embroiled in a two-front war; but an Anglo-Soviet rapprochement raised the specter of a twofront war.

At last Chamberlain decided to have a preparatory conversation with Moscow recorded. On March 22, 1939, the head of the Department of Overseas Trade, Hudson, appeared in Moscow. He was to pave the way for an understanding. However, no progress toward closer cooperation between the two governments -was made. Negotiations were then continued by the British ambassador in Moscow, Seeds, assisted by his French counterpart, Naggiar. After some time, the Foreign Office entrusted Sir William Strang with their continuation. However, they proceeded sluggishly. The House of Commons, feeling the growing threat to England, became restless. Opposition members of parliament, in several sessions, pestered the prime minister to provide information about the negotiations. As a rule, Chamberlain evaded or gave only inadequate answers. But always recurring in his answers was the idea that consideration must be given to other governments in discussions with the Soviet Union. He had Poland, Romania, and sometimes France in mind. This consideration for "other governments" caused England to reject the Soviet proposal of a threepower pact to include England, France, and Soviet Russia. The Soviet Union wanted such a three-power treaty to include a unilateral guarantee of the inviolability of Poland and Romania. Attacks by the House of Commons did some good; both British and French negotiators in Moscow were instructed to speed up negotiations. In view of Hitler's breathtaking preparations for war, the English and French diplomats submitted new proposals to the Soviet government. England, France, and the Soviet Union were to provide mutual assistance in the event of an attack on one of the treaty partners. Disagreements arose because England and France wanted to exclude the Baltic countries and Finland from the promise of assistance. The Soviet Union was justifiably suspicious. Hitler was capable of launching an attack against the Soviet Union across the Baltic states. It was understandable that the Soviet government should feel disadvantaged if the treaty mechanism did not come into force immediately Hitler crossed the borders of Soviet Russia's Baltic neighbors. Churchill felt that "The demands of the Russians to include these states in the guarantee pact of the three powers are well founded. It would be senseless for the peace fastness to show a rift."

But the British and French delegations in Moscow were as reluctant as ever to include in the text of the proposed treaty an obligation to come to the aid of the Soviet Union both if it were attacked directly and indirectly.

In the Soviet Union the impression was growing that England and France were not serious about the pact negotiations. In an essay by Shdanov, "The English and French Governments Do Not Want an Equal Treaty with the USSR," of June 29. June 1939 in "Pravda," it was summarized: "All this testifies to the fact that the English and French do not want a treaty with the USSR based on the principle of equality and reciprocity, although they swear day in and day out that they, too, are in favor of 'equality,' but a treaty which would condemn the USSR to the role of a servant bearing the whole burden of obligations on its shoulders."

It took until July 25, 1939, for the British and French governments to send military missions to Moscow. The German ambassador in London, Dirksen, wrote to the Foreign Office in Berlin under August 1, 1939: "The progress of the pact negotiations with Russia is viewed skeptically in spite of - or perhaps because of - the dispatch of a military mission. This is indicated by the composition of the British military mission: the admiral, hitherto commander of Portsmouth, is practically retired and has never been on the admiral's staff; the general is also a pure front-line officer; the aviation general is outstanding as an aviator and flight instructor, but not as a strategist. This speaks to the fact that the military mission is charged more with determining the combat value of the Soviet Army than with making operational arrangements."

In fact, it soon became apparent that the military mission had come to Moscow without authority to conclude treaties and arrangements of a practical nature. In particular, the British and French military missions resisted securing for Soviet troops the right of passage through Romania and Poland in the event of war with Germany. The Soviet government's objection that English and Americans had also had to operate on French soil during World War I was not heard.

Military commissions without authority

While the negotiations were going on in Moscow, the British Government was careful not to let the threads to Berlin break completely; the British Ambassador in Berlin, Henderson, tells of the tense diplomatic activity he was engaged in during those days. The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, in a speech on June 30, 1939, virtually made an offer to the German Government. He said, "In such an atmosphere we could discuss the colonial problem, the raw material question, the trade barrier, the Lebensraum, and all other questions touching Europeans."

Admittedly, as Hitler strengthened his challenging measures against Poland from day to day, the British government nevertheless thought it advisable to wrap up the military convention with the Soviet government. On August 21, the heads of the two military missions appeared before Voroshilov and declared their readiness to sign a military convention. To their no small surprise, Voroshilov told them it was too late; the Soviet government had reached an understanding with Germany.

What had happened?

Hitler had heard about how England and France were trying hard to find a platform on which their cooperation with the Soviet Union would be possible. He had the Soviet ambassador in Berlin summoned to the Foreign Office and the Soviet military attaché to the General Staff Building. The openings which had been made there to the two Russians had the consequence that they traveled immediately to Moscow.

Hitler applied, this had been the sense of the openings, for the friendship of the Soviet Union.

The German ambassador in Moscow, Count von der Schulenburg, was still attached to the ideas of Maltzan that had led to the Rapallo Treaty; he had followed the course of Hitler's policy with sorrow. He felt himself to be the heir of Bismarck's insight that Germany should not allow itself to sever its ties with Russia. With zeal he now took up the task assigned to him of realizing the idea of a German-Russian non-aggression pact. In order to buy the Soviet Union's neutrality, Hitler agreed to recognize Finland and the Baltic states as Soviet Russian spheres of influence and also offered a revision of the Soviet western border against Poland. Furthermore, he addressed the Soviet Russian request to be allowed to take back Bessarabia, which had been granted to Romania in 1920 without Soviet Russia's consent.

The Soviet-German Nonaggression Pact was signed on August 23, 1939. In the first article, the contracting powers undertook to refrain from any act of violence, aggression, or aggression against each other, both individually and jointly with other powers.

According to the second article, no third power was to be supported by one of the contracting parties if it proceeded to attack the other.

The third article stipulated that the governments of the two contracting parts would henceforth keep in touch with each other on an ongoing basis through consultations in order to keep each other informed on matters affecting their common interests. The governments further promised each other in the fourth article that neither of the two contracting parts would take part in any grouping of powers directed directly or indirectly against the other.

If, according to the fifth article, disputes or conflicts arose between the contracting parts on questions of this or that nature, both parts would settle such disputes or conflicts exclusively by friendly exchanges of views or, if necessary, by conciliation commissions.

The duration of the non-aggression pact was set at ten years.

The announcement of the German-Soviet pact was a world sensation. Sir William Strang had already returned to London on August 11, and on August 25 the British and French military missions left Moscow.

It cannot be denied that the question arises as to what Hitler's motives were when he made the unexpected turn in his policy which the non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union represented. For years he had challenged the Western powers by destroying the Versailles treaty system; there had been protests from the Western powers, but the provocations had always gone unpunished. In the end, he had been let off the hook. The leniency he experienced was granted to him because they saw in him the man who would one day free the capitalist-bourgeois world from the nightmare of Bolshevism. Hitler exploited this credit, which he enjoyed as an opponent of Bolshevism, usuriously.

One may find that he had fallen into the error of judgment which had once governed Holstein, the "Gray Eminence." Holstein had considered it, one knows, an immutable axiom that the whale and the bear, England and Russia, could never come together. Audi Hitler believed that imperialist England and Bolshevik Russia could never join hands. He did not doubt to sin on the irreconcilability of the British-Soviet discord

Then the arrival of the British and French delegations and military missions in Moscow seemed to upset all his calculations. The specter of war on two fronts suddenly appeared before his eyes. Hitler welcomed any means by which this spectre of war on two fronts could be banished. He, the most fanatical of all antiBolshevists, decided to knock on Moscow's door.

When, in addition to the Anglo-French discussions with Moscow, secret German-Soviet negotiations had got under way, the policy of the English and German governments fell for some time into a most whimsical limbo. Chamberlain, who had not yet completely given up the idea of an Anglo-German agreement, wanted to force Hitler to give in through his contacts with Moscow. For this reason, he repeatedly evaded the formal conclusion of treaties with the Soviet government. Hitler, on the other hand, had become suspicious of England; it seemed possible to him that the English government, by continuing to maintain relations with him, wanted to stall him only until it was in the clear with Moscow. England and Germany were in the position of two competitors who do not really want to reach the goal they are running toward; they do not give up the race only because they do not want to be lapped by the other. Hitler signed the pact with Moscow only to get ahead of England, that England which probably had no serious intention of really chaining itself to Moscow. The German-Soviet pact offered a special incentive to Hitler in that it mowed Poland's situation hopelessly: if Hitler was loyal to Soviet neutrality, he did not mind provoking England and France by pouncing on Poland; he felt strong enough to be able to cope with both of them. '

The existence of the Soviet Union was continuously threatened as long as the relations between London and Berlin were not severed. The Soviet interest in life demanded that the Anglo-German relationship be broken so thoroughly and finally that no more British-German attack on Soviet existence was to be feared. Certainly, the Soviet-German non-aggression pact was a bold, even a reckless undertaking. But so entangled was the world situation that precisely in it lay the salvation of Soviet Russia. In his speech of July 3, 1941, Stalin said that by concluding the non-aggression pact with Germany, the Soviet Union had secured peace for its country for a year and a half, as well as the possibility of preparing its forces for defense, should Fascist Germany risk invading the Soviet Union despite the pact.

Soviet Russia could not escape the invasion by the Third Reich: it had to come one day; it necessarily arose from the conditions of existence and dynamics of the Third Reich. The only doubt was whether Soviet Russia was prepared for it or not. The Soviet-German non-aggression pact gave Soviet Russia the breathing space, the peredishka, to organize itself adequately and appropriately enough for the fascist attack.

XXXVI. Human extermination

Already in its first years the Third Reich shaped its essential forms of life and political methods and revealed the spirit by which it was filled and which permeated all its institutions and actions.

What manifested itself in the very beginning of its existence as a terrifying outbreak of vicious brutality swelled gigantically in the years that followed; the crimes with which it introduced itself did not change their type, but only increased in enormity. Murder as a means of politics was natural to the Third Reich from the first day on; it handled it more and more thoughtlessly and recklessly from year to year and finally waded in streams of blood without complaint. The terror with which it had entered the political stage finally exceeded all measure, until in the end the Third Reich had turned into a total torture chamber, into an executioner's state.

The National Socialist insanity raged over the years in a system of gruesome human extermination; it was precisely in this that its basic nihilistic trait came to light. The concentration camps, which had already been established in 1933, developed into true "human slaughterhouses". The mere deprivation of liberty, which alone inflicted a crying injustice on the prisoners, was soon no longer sufficient for the National Socialists. The prisoners were maltreated, exposed to hunger, driven to their deaths in quarries, shot, hanged, poisoned, gassed. Several camps were explicitly organized as extermination camps. Those whose papers bore the note "R. u." when they were brought in. - Return undesired - was condemned to death, and nothing could help him.

The extermination fantasy of the SS men was of gruesome inventiveness. In Mauthausen, prisoners were laid across tables, their legs and hands were tied together under the tabletop, and then the prisoners were whipped, with Protestants having to sing the chorale "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott" ("A Mighty Fortress is Our God"), and Catholics the hymn "O Head Full of Blood and Wounds". When the tortured were unconscious, their bonds were loosened, they were thrown under ice-cold showers until they regained consciousness, and then the procedure continued. Prisoners who had attracted the particular hatred of the guards were suffocated in latrines.

For large and famous heavy industrial firms, the concentration camps were welcome opportunities to obtain cheap labor. Here they were offered labor slaves; they, these honorable entrepreneurs, were unscrupulous enough to seize immediately. They set up branch factories in the concentration camps, in which the prisoners were pumped to exhaustion and beaten to the utmost working speed by sadistic supervisors. Krupp as well as the IG-Farben industry drew high profits from the tortures of the martyred.

After the assassination of the Jew Grünfeld against the Legation Secretary vom Rath in Paris in 1938, the persecution of the Jews degenerated into an orgy of extermination. This was initiated by the organized mass rage, the directed destructions and arsons of the "Kristallnacht". The Jews were considered outlawed. The "Star of David" was supposed to brand them as outlaws and marked, whom anyone could insult, humiliate and degrade with impunity. They were forbidden to use the streetcars and public baths, and were excluded from attending theaters, concerts, cinemas, and all cultural events in general. They were only allowed to go shopping during certain hours of the day. The higher schools were closed to their children; they were forced to do the most menial work. The Gestapo took men, women and children from their homes by night and fog, robbed their apartments, and took them to camps where they were rounded up. Through all these nefarious events, the public was to be led to feel and despise the Jew as the scum of the earth. Six million Jews were

Purposeful creation of fear and terror

exterminated by the SS - this "elite of the German nation"; the extermination of the entire Jewish people was their secret goal. It was a sea of blood that they shed; even today it cries out to heaven unpunished. In the first months of National Socialist rule, concentration camp prisoners came from communist, socialdemocratic and left-bourgeois strata of the population. In time, however, no citizen was safe from being taken away to a camp as a "Bolshevik enemy of the state" for "educational purposes. Workers, teachers, clergymen, high officials, officers, noblemen, and in the end even members of princely families met there. At the end of the war, the cells of Dachau and Flossenbürg housed men like Colonel General Haider, Admiral Canaris, Ministerialrat Dohnanyi, Professor Bonhoeffer, Pastor Niemöller, former Reichsbank President Schacht. Some of them had initially favored Hitler and now saw themselves deeply disappointed by him. Statesmen and leading personalities of the defeated Volker also suffered the fate of being transferred to camps. Thus Herriot and Daladier were politically "neutralized" and rendered harmless.

The purposeful creation of fear and terror was the wicked means of the Third Reich to gain blind obedience. In fear and trembling, the German people were to endure dictatorship.

It was not a mere idea, but a revealing symptom of the times, when the philosophy of existentialism, when above all the philosopher Martin Heidegger described fear as the "basic condition" of man. Already Sören Kierkegaard had uncovered fear as such a "basic condition" in a writing "Fear and Trembling". Only admittedly the concept of fear had religious coloring with Kierkegaard. Man sees himself, this was Kierkegaard's view, in his weakness, his vulnerability, his sinfulness before the eternal God.

There is an essay by Kierkegaard with the surprising title, "On Man's Happiness in Always Being Wrong Before God." Whatever man does or does not do, he is always wrong before God; he is always wrong, no matter how he does it. At the bottom of his existence, however, man must consequently always feel insecure and endangered; he must always live in fear of going wrong, of taking a wrong path, of doing it wrong. This means that he cannot get rid of his bad conscience. The great poet Franz Kafka also brilliantly portrayed this state of mind. In his gripping novel "The Trial", man is made aware of how he has reason to feel guilty in all situations and under all circumstances; the feeling of guilt is, as it were, the atmosphere of life that surrounds him and from which he is unable to escape. Simply by being there, he is already guilty, and death, temporal as well as eternal, is the punishment he inevitably deserves.

The modern counterpart of absolute religious fear is absolute political fear. One is no longer afraid of the hereafter, but one already trembles before this world. One is frightened not only by the eternal God, but no less by the merciless state. One no longer believes oneself to be hopeless and powerless in the hands of dark forces; the forces that one believes to be lurking around at every turn wear police uniforms, are police commissioners, are SS men and Gestapo officers. Even if one has not committed any concrete crime, if one does not belong to any conspiracy, if one has not written or said anything against the state: the bad conscience does not remain silent, one does not escape the feeling of being wrong before the dictator at any moment and of being threatened with terrible punishments.

Hell is no longer the fiery abyss in the afterlife, but the this-worldliness of the prison, the courtroom, the Gestapo cellar and the concentration camp.

It had been hard to be human in the face of religious fear. It is even more difficult to endure as a human being in the distress of political fear. One lives in constant unrest and is whipped by the tormenting fear of the catastrophe, the personal and family catastrophe. Every ring of the bell at the door of the apartment arouses images of terror: one sees oneself abducted and is convinced that one will never be allowed to return to freedom. With shaking bones one lies down to rest in the evening, with shaking bones one rises from the camp in the morning.

Military commissions without authority

Cruelly, as against the concentration camp prisoners, the National Socialist terror regiment also proceeded against the prisoners of war when the war broke out. In the course of the war, thousands of Soviet prisoners of war died of hunger and exhaustion.

In 1942, the Reich Ministry of Justice issued a decree on the basis of which "Gypsies, Jews, professional and habitual criminals, criminal offenders, political prisoners whose prison sentence exceeded six years" were to be extradited from the penitentiaries to the Reich Security Main Office *. These prisoners were called "asocial elements" and were to be "liquidated". Transports of such persons were formed in the penitentiaries and transported to extermination camps; only a few escaped the extermination camps alive. With ingenious trickery, such "asocial elements" were made free to report for labor service in Norway. On the high seas, the ships were drilled; they were sunk into the depths of the sea with their living cargo after the crew had saved themselves.

The extradition of prisoners to the Reich Security Main Office for the purpose of being murdered by the SS showed how, in the end, even the judiciary felt like nothing more than an enforcement organ of the Gestapo. In political trials, the judges pronounced the sentence that the Gestapo expected of them; in the end, almost only death sentences were handed down. Parey, one of the highest judges of the People's Court, publicly declared that the purpose of the People's Court was to destroy the enemies of National Socialism. But the civil and criminal judiciary had also renounced judicial independence. Wherever a National Socialist interest - or the interest of a leading National Socialist - was in question, the law was flagrantly violated; obvious opponents of National Socialism were no longer allowed to hope for justice before the bars of the courts, be it in any matter whatsoever.

The Minister of Justice, Thierack, had set a bad example as a bad judge as long as he was President of the People's Court. But this abused justice was taken to the extreme by his successor Freisler. Freisler no longer even maintained the appearance of impartiality; in his hysterical-psychopathic manner he cut off the defendants, prevented them from defending themselves and acted as an outspoken, spiteful enemy of the unfortunates whose fate he held in his hands. He shamelessly exposed how the judiciary wanted to be nothing more than a naked instrument of power of the dictatorship.

There are film and tape recordings from trials before the People's Court; Hitler loved to have them shown to him in his private cinema in order to enjoy them. In particular, such recordings were made of the trial of the generals of July 20, 1944. The film and tape strips that later fell into the hands of the Americans are for all time a disgrace for German justice as well as for the entire German people itself. The form of justice appears here as an evil theater in which the bloody acts of revenge toward which the trial was headed were to be staged effectively and for effect.

Like the judiciary, "scientific medicine" * also placed itself at the service of the National Socialist murderousness. "The Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring" of July 14, 1933, became the starting point of measures to which thousands and thousands fell victim. Under the pretense of promoting "public health" and vouching for "the safeguarding of German nationality," a large-scale extermination campaign was set in motion. The superfluous eaters who were in lunatic asylums and hospitals, the incurably ill, were to be done away with by a "mercy killing." Under the pretext of "euthanasia", lethal injections were given to the mentally ill.

* In February 1952, the Wiesbaden jury court acquitted the ministerial councilors responsible for the decree of the charge of aiding and abetting murder for "lack of evidence". (1912)

In Berlin, a "Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Hereditary and Congenital Serious Sufferings" was formed. According to the decree of August 1939 of the Reich Ministry of the Interior, newborn malformed and idiotic children had to be reported to this committee by nurses and doctors. The committee issued authorizations on the basis of which these children were granted "euthanasia"; morphine and hydrochloral and luminal were used for this purpose.

But even healthy children, if their descent was objectionable from a National Socialist point of view, i.e. if they were of Jewish or Gypsy origin, were "exterminated" by injections at the instigation of this Reich Committee; one of these places of horror was an institution in Hadamar.

In a letter of May 1, 1942, from the Reichsstatthalter in the Reichsgau Wärtheland, Greiser, to the Reichsführer of the SS Himmler, Greiser reported having eliminated 100,000 Jews by "special treatment"; then he asked to be allowed to free his Gau "from a danger which assumes more catastrophic forms with each passing week." In his Gau there were 230000 tuberculosis patients of Polish ethnicity. 3,000 of them showed open tuberculosis. Greiser's request was "to be allowed to eradicate cases of open tuberculosis of Polish ethnicity within the Warthegau." Heydrich agreed to the "special treatment" of these Poles. Himmler, in a letter dated June 27, 1942, concurred with the approval given by Heydrich. The action was extended to Danzig-West Prussia, the administrative districts of Ziechenau and Katowice.

Early on, the perverted National Socialist imagination was preoccupied with the idea of sterilization and castration of persons undesirable to the Third Reich. "Hereditary offspring", "asocial elements" were to be rendered infertile; soon it was also considered to exterminate "inferior races" by sterilizing them. The inferior races included Jews, Gypsies, and finally also Slavs.

After the Nuremberg Laws, which placed Jews outside the law, were enacted, castrations were carried out on Jews who could be reprimanded for having sexual relations with "Aryan" girls. Soon this madness became method. Doctors offered to find procedures according to which sterilization could be carried out without surgical intervention. The surgical procedure was unsuitable for mass treatment. Doctors dealt with the problem of achieving sterilization by means of medicinal sterilization, X-ray sterilization, or sterilization by intrauterine stimulation (injection). In various camps, especially in Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, victims were selected for experimentation; there is even evidence of experiments on young girls. A letter written by the physician Dr. Adolf Pokorny to Himmler in October 1941 informs about the intentions that were pursued. The letter states, among other things: "... If it were possible, on the basis of this research, to produce as soon as possible a drug which, after a relatively short time, would produce an unnoticed sterilization in human beings, we would have at our disposal a new and effective weapon. The very thought that the three million Bolsheviks currently in German captivity could be sterilized so that they would be available as workers, but excluded from procreation, opens up the most extensive perspectives."

During the war, experiments were systematically carried out on prisoners, the results of which were hoped to be exploited in warfare. The concentration camp Dachau was the main place where prisoners were used for such inhuman experiments, for "human experiments". On May 15, 1941, the physician Dr. Rascher had asked Himmler to be allowed to select concentration camp prisoners, habitual criminals or imbeciles who were to be made available for experimental purposes to the "Bodenständige Prüfstelle für Höhenforschung der Luftwaffe". He explicitly noted that the test subjects "could of course die." On Himmler's orders, Himmler's personal advisor, Dr. Brandt, answered Rascher's letter: "... I can inform you that prisoners will of course be gladly made available for high-altitude research."

On February 24, 1942, hypothermia experiments were conducted on humans. The Luftwaffe wanted to know how the icy sea water, into which airmen sometimes crashed, affected the casualties and what was the best method of rewarming them. The tests were carried out at water temperatures between 2,5 and 12° warmth.

"Human experimentation"

In order to rewarm the frozen bodies, the animal warmth of women was also used. A report says: "In eight cases the test subjects came to lie between two naked women in a wide bed. The women had to snuggle as close as possible to the cooled people. Then the three subjects were covered with blankets.... .*

In the Buchenwald and Natzweiler concentration camps, prisoners were infected with typhus bacilli; in Ravensbrück, test subjects were injured and "bacteria, tiny pieces of wood and glass" were sprinkled into their wounds to cause painful suppurations, which were then treated with sulfonamides.

In series of experiments dealing with transplantation and bone regeneration, in Ravensbrück the bones of the lower legs of the unfortunate victims were smashed into several pieces with a hammer and then set up again in plaster bandages with or without clamps.

In Dachau, prisoners were infected with phlegmone in order to test remedies on them. Other prisoners were poisoned with phosgene, and one report said: ... "The four subjects were placed in the chamber where an ampoule containing 2.7 g of phosgene was crushed. The subjects remained in this concentration for 25 minutes."

All these "human experiments" were based on a disregard for human life, an unparalleled cruelty of feeling. With astonishment one sees how physicians pushed themselves to such experiments. It is as if they had forgotten their duty to heal and help under the 'SS uniform.

In this frenzy of human misconception, the hatred against life in general, against everything human par excellence, broke through. In him raged the instinct of a deep hostility to life and the urge to death. Thus National Socialism drove inevitably toward the most terrible of all previous wars. Here he could let off steam his addiction to the destruction of life in a fierce and unrestrained way.

XXXVII. War and collapse

I n his book "Mein Kampf" Adolf Hitler had professed the idea of German world domination. In view of the German preconditions: the extent of the German territory, the central position and the lack of raw materials, this idea was a megalomaniac impulse. But it betrayed what cramped flights of fancy the German could be capable of. In fact, Hitler won many hearts with this idea; the enthusiasm with which he was cheered had its origin in the hope of thousands that Hitler would be the builder and creator of a German world empire.

Hitler's entire policy was aimed at the realization of this German idea of world domination. The "total mobilization" that Hitler stimulated was intended to provide him with the armaments and the weapons power necessary to subjugate the peoples of the world to the will of German domination.

How much Hitler's conception embraced the globe as its object was shown by the conclusion of the "Comintern Pact" with Japan on November 25, 1936.

The strange thing about this pact was that it did not seem to be directly directed against a state-organized power, but against a social and ideological movement that was international in character. The Comintern was the central organization through which the Communist Parties of all countries were united. It had its headquarters in Moscow.

It was not easy to find the right name for the child, this German-Japanese pact. By no stretch of the imagination could one speak of a non-aggression pact here, for Germany and Japan were too far apart to make the world believe that they needed to renounce mutual intentions of aggression. The idea of speaking of an anticomintern pact followed on from a declaration made by the Soviet government. After some states, such as England, had claimed to have discovered underground activity of the Comintern and had blamed Moscow for it, the Soviet Foreign Office stated that the Comintern was an organization in no way dependent on the Soviet Government; Soviet Russia disclaimed responsibility for any actions of the Comintern.

According to this official statement, it was reckoned in Berlin, the Soviet government had no legal ground for objecting if an alliance against the Comintern came into being.

The fascist states were encountering signs of Communist resistance work everywhere. This elusive decomposition activity was repugnant to them, and it was their intention to cripple it.

If the Anti-Comintern Pact seemed to be directed only against the Communist International and not against the Soviet Union, this was one of those ploys by means of which Hitler sought to gain the sympathies of the bourgeois-capitalist states.

With the annexation of Austria to Germany, Hitler broke into the Balkans; he shattered the Little Entente, moved closer to fascist Hungary, put pressure on Yugoslavia, and clutched Czechoslovakia. By destroying Czechoslovakia and taking control of Slovakia, he had not only gained access to Romania and the Black Sea, but also a base from which to advance to Ukraine. Poland was encompassed from the south.

Bismarck had mastered the art of unleashing wars. He practiced it with extreme diplomatic subtlety. Each time he almost succeeded in convincing the world that he had not been the aggressor. Hitler had understood Bismarck in such a way that it made the statesman to ignite wars. The how, of course, did not worry him; he thought he was a greater master of statesmanship and a stronger man the more clumsy and brutal he went after his bloody target.

The way in which he struck out against Poland on September 1, 1939, adhered less to the procedures of a statesman than to those of a robber chief.

After the defeat of Poland, Hitler was deep in the East and was able to make his preparations for the attack on the Soviet Union.

Great was the armament advantage that the Third Reich had gained over the other powers. The idea of a blitzkrieg seemed to be realized again, as in 1866 and 1870/71; how quickly Poland had been crushed, and how unexpectedly quickly France had also been devastated!

With Denmark and Norway, Hitler had gained control of Scandinavia and possessed outposts from which he was able to penetrate far into the Atlantic Ocean. After the defeat of Holland, Belgium and France, he had the whole of Western Europe at his disposal; after the conclusion of the alliance with Italy, he was in the middle of the Mediterranean area. Since Greece also fell into his hands, he could almost dominate the Mediterranean.

Even if Hitler did not succeed in directly involving fascist Spain in his war, the latter stood by him and favored his position of power in the Mediterranean.

In a run-up formally were the German tanks, after on zi. June 1941, tearing up the non-aggression pact of August 1939, Hitler had broken into the Soviet Union, advanced to the vicinity of Leningrad and Moscow.

Hitler seized Finland, the Baltic states, White Russia, the Ukraine, areas of Great Russia as far as the Volga; he could now command almost the whole of Europe.

Hitler's plans for world domination

He was not content with conquering these countries, but organized them all for his war needs. He made the industries subservient to his armaments, he exploited the sources of raw materials for the benefit of his armies and the German population, the agricultural areas had to supply him with food. He deported the native population to Germany; people were taken, as they walked and stood, directly from the fields. Openly and frivolously Goebbels declared that in the Russian area they wanted to "push themselves back to health*. The whole European continent was to be shaped as a single economic area, plundered by Germany and put into service for Hitler's plans of world domination.

Hitler's governors sat everywhere and were harsh masters. The Ukrainians, who originally welcomed the German successes because Hitler had promised them autonomy, soon became irreconcilable enemies under the pressure of the German fist, determined partisans against the German troops. The Frank, Kube, Greiser, Koch, Rosenberg saw in the Slavs people of inferior race who were allowed to be exploited, even exterminated. The Norwegians, Dutch, Belgians and French were also hounded into fervent hatred against German supremacy. As brutally as Hitler proceeded against the German people, so brutally did he proceed against the subjugated peoples.

Hitler's plans extended beyond Europe's borders. He had already established himself in North Africa; together with Mussolini he had appeared on the borders of Egypt. He already included the whole of Africa in his considerations. The European metropolitan area needed the African hinterland, the African products, the African raw materials and, as cheap labor, the African Negroes. Africa was to be regarded as a mere accessory of the European area directed by Germany.

Hitler's plans seemed so audacious that even America began to fear for itself. It was considered conceivable that he would invade South America across the ocean and from there one day also operate against the United States of North America. For the time being, however, other ventures seemed to be closer to his heart. If his troops succeeded in entering Armenia via the Caucasus and in overrunning Asia Minor from the south via Egypt and the Suez Canal, there were hardly any obstacles for him to advance to India via Mesopotamia and Persia. At the same time he could seize Siberia from the Volga position.

This conception was a dream; the more fiercely it was pursued, the more hopelessly, by gaining foreign ground, the ground of reality was lost beneath one's feet. The millions of the subjugated, since they were brought not freedom but slavery, became fierce enemies of the conqueror; the more successes Hitler had, the more he became the enemy of the world and of humanity par excellence, and the mobilization of all counterforces against him became a sacred duty. This very conception betrayed that Hitler's mind had become confused.

There was no lack of German generals who were dazzled by Hitler's plans and to whom his conception seemed feasible.

What was the meaning of the troops that Hitler had at his disposal for his plans of world conquest?

The Wehrmacht had accepted Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 without attempting any resistance. Since the supreme warlord, Field Marshal Hindenburg, had appointed Hitler to the Reich Chancellery, everything was constitutionally in order for them. Only some of the young officers felt sympathy for Hitler. The staff officers and especially the generals felt repelled by Hitler's demagogy and the atmosphere of mass movement by which Hitler was surrounded. In them still lived remnants of the old Prussian tradition, with which the "spirit of the masses" could not be reconciled and which was entirely concerned with aristocratic attitudes. Hitler, the man from below, was scary to these officers; he was regarded as a dark and not entirely clean figure. Moreover, in their heart of hearts they were still monarchist-minded; they wanted a king and emperor, but

The Wehrmacht in the Third Reich

not a tribune of the people. However, these officers were by and large apolitical and found it advisable for the time being to wait and see what time would bring.

The turbulent attacks of the SA that took place after the March elections of 1933 frightened many senior officers, but did not give them cause to intervene. In fact, they were not responsible; disturbances of order were the responsibility of the police. Attempts to persuade the city commander of Berlin, General Rundstedt, to stage a coup d'état failed. The Wehrmacht also complied when Hitler ordered the severance of its relations with the Soviet Union, which it had cultivated since 1924, even though this seriously affected its military training schedule. In Lipetsk, north of Voronezh, it had trained its airmen; near Kazan, German officers had been familiarized with the technology of the combat vehicle; near Saratov, it commanded a site where its officers could have studied the problems of gas warfare. In this way, the Reichswehr had circumvented the restrictive armament provisions of the Versailles Treaty. Its military training interest prevented it from opening itself to Hitler's anti-Bolshevik propaganda before 1933. Now all that was to change.

The function of Blomberg, the new Minister of War, was to carefully and gradually incorporate the Wehrmacht into the Third Reich. At the head of the Wehrmacht, Blomberg had the opportunity to intercept and muzzle any oppositional current among the officers, and indeed he left no stone unturned to fulfill the hopes that Hitler had placed in him.

Initially, the Wehrmacht was under the thumb of rivalry with the SA. The SA felt itself to be the real army of the brown revolution; in its eyes, the Wehrmacht was a backwater of the past, a stumbling block to the progress of revolutionary development. The Wehrmacht feared being transformed, disbanded, swallowed up by the SA. Thus, it was concerned not to enrage Hitler and turn him against itself. It seemed to be a great success to her that Hitler did not go along with the plans of Captain Rohm, but declared her the "sole weapon bearer of the nation". The butchery of June 30, 1934, suited her; she was the winner in the bloody action. So she obediently resigned herself to the fact that two generals, Schleicher and Bredow, fell by the wayside and were slandered as traitors to the country. A few months later, in August 1934, after the death of Hindenburg, she thanked Hitler for getting rid of her SA rival: she swallowed the open breach of the constitution that Hitler committed when he made himself "Führer" and succeeded Hindenburg. The Wehrmacht willingly took the oath of allegiance to Hitler.

Despite the service that Hitler had rendered her on June 30, 1934, she secretly became an element of persistent resistance. It was difficult for her to bear the "rabble-rousing" spirit that characterized the Third Reich. She made a distinction between "decent" and "National Socialist" Germans. She felt the danger that threatened the old order of property and the traditional social structure. It had blindly opposed Hitler's violations of the law as long as they affected only workers and Communists; but when the Secret State Police also harassed "people of good society," it no longer made any secret of its distaste for the National Socialist methods of government.

Thus it happened that men who were in opposition to Hitler or who felt persecuted by the Secret State Police virtually fled to the Wehrmacht, seeking shelter and protection there. They "emigrated" to the barracks. One could hear some sharp criticism of Hitler in the officers' messes; there were regimental commanders who refused to accept enthusiastic National Socialists into their officer corps; for a long time the officers resisted using the Hitler salute in the army, and only reluctantly did they endure the introduction of that badge which showed the Reich eagle with the swastika.

It did not reconcile the Wehrmacht to the fact that Hitler initiated rearmament. The introduction of compulsory military service and the intensive armament tempo fulfilled all the wishes that a militarist could have. It was said that the generals, as often as they presented a demand to Hitler, were downright dismayed

Opposition in the Wehrmacht

because Hitler, with lavish generosity, approved their plans in the form of a three- to fourfold increase. Officers never had better prospects for advancement than in those days.

Although the generals considered it their virtue to be "apolitical," they were worried by the suspicion that Hitler was heading for war. This suspicion increased the reservations they had about Hitler. Hitler sensed it. He had always distrusted the generals. Only with difficulty did he manage to conceal his dislike of these "haughty reactionaries". Conflicts between the Wehrmacht and its supreme warlord were looming.

At the beginning of 1938, the generals of the Reich War Ministry were convinced that Hitler was on the verge of annexing Austria to the Reich. They became anxious. Hitler as well as Göring felt the inner resistance, which Blomberg as well as Fritsch opposed to them. The generals possessed enough military judgment to foresee that the adventure Hitler was embarking on would have to end badly. Political as well as military sadism was an obstacle for the National Socialist leaders, who were tempted to remove it at any cost. Goering instigated an intrigue against Blomberg, Himmler one against Fritsch: Blomberg was made impossible as the husband of a woman whose past seemed objectionable to the officer corps, and Fritsch was slanderously branded a homosexual. Already on February 4, 1938, both had decided to resign, and on February 28 they left their posts. Hitler gave them an honorable letter of thanks and his picture to take with them on their way.

Only in the dark did the generals realize that the way in which Blomberg and Fritsch had been dismissed served the purpose of casting the entire Wehrmacht in a skewed light. The Wehrmacht, as became increasingly clear, was to fare no better than the SA had fared: it, too, was to be dragged through the gutter, sullied by "smut," deprived of its moral reputation. The Blomberg and Fritsch cases were an attack on the moral prestige of the Wehrmacht; the intention was to humiliate it.

With premeditation, the Wehrmacht had been brought into this evil situation by a man in the background; this man was Heinrich Himmler.

In the meantime, a new competitor had arisen for the Wehrmacht in the SS, and the plots that Himmler had hatched against the Wehrmacht were no less dangerous for it than the plots that Rohm had once had in mind.

In view of Hitler's operations against Czechoslovakia, the Chief of the General Staff, Colonel General von Bede, foresaw disasters and took his leave on October 1, 1938. Already the beginnings of a military conspiracy against Hitler had formed. Bede, General Thomas, and Admiral Canaris had established contact with London and were carrying on with the intention of overthrowing Hitler. The flight of the British Prime Minister Chamberlain to Berchtesgaden spoiled the enterprise they had wanted to venture.

Hitler had personally taken over the supreme command of the army after the departure of Generalobersten von Fritsch. He surrounded himself with creatures who could not be seduced by either their insight or their character to become troublesome admonishers and warners. The most unpleasant of these creatures was General von Keitel. Now SS officers were imposed on the officer corps. The Nazification of the Wehrmacht was systematically forced.

The Wehrmacht made no move to fall into Hitler's arms when he went to war in 1939. It obeyed when it was ordered to invade Poland; it obeyed as well when the signal was given to invade Denmark, Norway, Holland, France and the Soviet Union. She plunged into a war that was a war without ethos, an immoral war to be waged exclusively in the service of evil. It went against the moral conscience; one became bad oneself and took damage to one's soul by getting involved in it. The soldierly virtues here became vices, bravery compromised. Refusal to obey was a moral and national duty. The warlike successes of the first period had intoxicated even sober minds. When Hitler even dared to break through the Maginot Line against the advice

War without ethos 249 of the generals and succeeded in doing so, he had gained not only political but also military authority and exploited it ruthlessly. He thought he was a strategist and could take the direction of warfare into his own hands. The generals bowed and allowed themselves to be treated like corporals. They also carried out Hitler's measures, which bore the stamp of military dilettantism on their foreheads, held their ground in untenable positions in accordance with orders, and got involved in the military folly of squandering their forces in two simultaneous offensives: against Stalingrad and against the Crimea.

Wherever the Wehrmacht had advanced, SS units followed on its heels, making it their business to plunder, scorch, murder, turn lands, villages and cities into scorched earth.

Some generals were horrified; they tried to intervene and to restrain the murderous crowds; however, their objection was ineffective, within their area of command they had to let the atrocities happen, with which they wanted to have nothing in common. None of the generals had the courage to put a stop to the SS. Thus, the Wehrmacht was also burdened with the responsibility for the bloody excesses of the SS; the events of Lidice and Oradour cast dark shadows on it as well, and it by no means evaded the execution of the commissar's order, which was contrary to international law, in all cases.

The order which Kaiser Wilhelm II had once given to the Chinese fighters: to make the German name as terrible for centuries as the name of the Huns had been, this order was carried out in the most horrible way by the German armies between the Atlantic and the Volga, between the North Cape and Sicily. The Hitlerschen armies* and the SS formations committed outrages such as had not been committed since the days of Tamerlan - not even Tamerlan had twenty million people on his conscience.

During the impetuous advance, the Knight's Cross bearers kept a lookout for estates on which they intended to establish themselves after the war as newly risen knights of the order over the poor Slavic population in an imperious and merciless manner.

* General von Manstein issued an extermination order in November 1941 which stated, among other things:

"Since 22. 6. the German people have been engaged in a life-and-death struggle against the Bolshevik system.

This fight will not be waged in the traditional form against the Soviet Wehrmacht solely according to European rules of war ...

The Jewish-Bolshevik system must be eradicated once and for all. Never again must it encroach upon our European living space.

The German soldier therefore not only has the task of smashing the military means of power of this system, he also acts as the bearer of a national idea and avenger for all the cruelties inflicted on him and the German people ...

The nutritional situation of the homeland makes it necessary for the troops to feed themselves as far as possible from the countryside and that, in addition, as large a stock as possible be made available to the homeland. Especially in the enemy cities a large part of the population will have to starve. Nevertheless, out of misunderstood humanity, nothing of what the homeland gives under privation may be distributed to prisoners and population - as far as they are not in the service of the German Wehrmacht.

For the necessity of the hard atonement on Jewry, the spiritual carrier of the Bolshevik terror, the soldier must find understanding. It is also necessary in order to nip in the bud all uprisings, most of which are instigated by Jews ..." (1952)

"Silent" Uprising

Under the terror of the dictatorship, hardly any serious resistance had been able to develop. Large, comprehensive measures against the regime could not be taken; the Gestapo had its informers everywhere, and countless people did not shy away from performing informant services. There was resistance, "silent rebellion"; the churches practiced it, and widespread groups proved themselves in fearless conspiracy. But all this did not really add to the mowing of the Third Reich and did not shake its foundations. It was already a lot to dare small, even petty undertakings; even they demanded the risk of life. Listening to a foreign radio station, "bleating" criticism, refusing to donate to National Socialist causes, refusing the invitation to join a National Socialist organization demanded courage. Daring already was the distribution of leaflets, participation in whispering propaganda, weak attempts at acts of sabotage. Secret meetings, such as one could still occasionally risk until 1937, were finally impossible. A worried word discovered in an intercepted letter brought before the People's Court and not infrequently ended in a death sentence.

The large organizations that had been banned, such as the Communist Party, the Social Democratic Party and the trade unions, were almost completely extinguished. From time to time there were newspaper advertisers who cunningly used their advertising work to visit their former party friends and maintain a weak connection between them. Often, of course, they too ended up in the penitentiary. The emigration found no way to reach Germany. At the most, they were able to speak out via foreign radio, but as a rule they revealed their vague understanding of the German situation.

Strictly speaking, only one resistance group had a strong impact: it was the July 20, 1944, enterprise.

The military conspiracy that had first stirred in 1938 continued to smolder, although it suffered from the difficulty of the oath of allegiance to Hitler. German officers could hardly be induced to mutiny against the "Supreme Warlord" to whom they were bound by their oath. There was only one way out: to eliminate Hitler. Then the officers were released from their oath and could be made to liquidate National Socialism, the Third Reich.

Several assassination attempts failed.

After the beginning of the war, the military conspirators had come into contact with a part of the civilian resistance movement. They were mainly men like Goerdeler, Popitz, von Hasseil, whose basic political and social attitudes coincided with those of the rebellious Wehrmacht generals.

The conspiracy gained broader ground only after the general war situation deteriorated. Generals von Tresckow, Oster, Olbricht, Witzleben, Stief, Höppner, and Stülpnagel joined it. Field Marshal Kluge and even Rommel were in cahoots with her. All of them felt what a bad path the Wehrmacht was on. They had to realize that the efforts and sacrifices of the Wehrmacht had been wasted uselessly; their forces had been squandered by their supreme leader, who was a military ignoramus and whose blunders had cost entire armies. The operations of the Wehrmacht had lost all meaning: they no longer beckoned victory, they were only energy-sapping stations on the way to the most terrible defeat ever experienced by an army. Since Stalingrad, the commander Hitler was bankrupt, and everyone saw it.

If anything could still be saved, it could only be done by the Wehrmacht. By the course of events, the conspirators had become the trustees of what remained as the remnants of a great past. They were the last guardians of the dignity and honor which had once distinguished the Prussian-German army. Every officer, every general, who did not belong to the conspiracy, had hardly any part left in this vanishing great tradition.

However, the officers and generals who struck out on July 20 were not practical politicians; nor were they revolutionaries. At the most, they were capable of a coup d'état: but in the face of a mass movement and a recognized demagogue, a "favorite of the people," the coup d'état always fails. The 1920 coup d'état of Kapp had already failed because of a mass trade-union strike.

The uprising of July 20, 1944, remained without resonance among the German people; even the largest part of the army: the lower officers and the common man appeared unaffected. The civilian population did not raise a hand. They had approved of the dictatorship in the past years; they were enthusiastic for Hitler as long as he was victorious. They had looked bluntly at the concentration camp prisoners and Star of David bearers who cleared rubble in the streets of the cities after heavy nights of bombing.

The lack of response made the conspirators uneasy. The very fact that they had had to break their oath of allegiance had caused them bitter scruples. They did not take action, she wanted to stop the wheel of events after it had already started rolling. When they were not met by a flame of fiery approval from the people, they retreated and abandoned their cause. There was no lack of grotesque incidents: General von Stülpnagel had arrested all SS leaders in Paris; they had hardly resisted. The next day he let them go. The officers and generals did not understand how high treason legally becomes a crime by the fact that it does not succeed completely. He who stops halfway calls down ruin upon himself; he who leaves it at the mere attempt and attempt falls to the judge.

The future of Germany, the honor of the German people, was in the hands of the conspirators. These hands were not strong and not skillful enough to accomplish their historical task. The sense of these men was too childish, their political experience was inadequate. The defeat of the conspirators was at the same time the defeat of good and the victory of evil.

This evil did not fail to run riot with all its awfulness. German generals, even marshals, were treated as rejected evildoers: they were hanged under circumstances by which they were to be stamped as the discard of humanity. The entire Wehrmacht was branded and disgraced; the disgrace was increased to the limitless when Wehrmachtgenerals found themselves hurling an unmerciful anathema against their unfortunate and unsuccessful comrades.

One can find that a deep meaning was inherent in this end of the conspirators. Basically, the executed group of conspirators had become the embodiment of all that was honorable, noble and chivalrous, lawful, manly and morally brave in the German soldiery. The German Wehrmacht was rotten in the dull atmosphere of Hitler's favor: that group of conspirators was the last remnant of its former healthy substance. The absolute depravity of the Third Reich found a shattering expression precisely in the fact that the old soldiers of true honor had to end up on the gallows. The executed took what still lived of the "spirit of Potsdam" with them to the grave; it was natural that after the catastrophe of 1945 Prussia, which had become an empty shell, a bowl without contents, should be completely liquidated.

The acts and omissions, the logic of its internal development necessarily led to the fact that the Wehrmacht, in its responsible and representative personalities, was finally called to account and condemned for war crimes before an international tribunal.

It had become an instrument of the power of darkness; thus it broke - and thus it received the verdict of guilt of the world court.

Hitler had expected in 1940 and 1941 to quickly make the prostrated and frightened peoples ready for capitulation. But how mistaken he was! The material losses suffered by the British army at Dunkirk were incalculable, and temporarily the island kingdom was indeed in the most terrible straits. The wounds inflicted on Soviet Russia in the first months of the war were appalling. Nevertheless, the nation’s so badly shaken lacked the willingness to make peace with Hitler. The offer of peace that Hitler had made to London immediately after Dunkirk was scornfully rejected. Audi Moscow was far from giving up the fight. The change of weakness that afflicted France when it tolerated the Vichy government was of little use to Hitler; it was

Epitome of the Prussian tradition

not a decisive event, and besides, General de Gaulle was sitting in London preparing to call France to new resistance.

All the people perceived Hitler as the scourge of humanity. A crusade against the guilt-ridden German people, who gave allegiance to Hitler, seemed quite justified. It was felt that Hitler and his Third Reich had to be stopped by all means: the German people were to be fought down to the point of unconditional surrender.

The weapon of unrestricted air warfare also seemed to be permitted against him. Cities steeped in tradition were reduced to rubble; thousands upon thousands of men, women and children were buried under the collapsing walls or torn apart by bombs. .

The evidence of a thousand years of cultural development went up in flames. Hitler, who had recommended himself as the "savior of the Occident", became the gravedigger of Western culture; it was his fault that in horrible nights of bombing the heritage of a great past was turned into a gruesome field of ruins.

If the invaded and so badly afflicted people did not despair, it was because it was obvious how time was working against the Third Reich and for its opponents. Far away, unassailable for Hitler, lay the USA from a weapons factory of the greatest dimensions. Once production had started there, England and Soviet Russia could be amply supplied with weapons in all theaters of war. This was an addition to all that these countries were able to produce on their own.

The armament advantage that the Third Reich had had in the beginning was soon caught up, and it was not long before it was outflanked by its opponents. The days were gone in which the Third Reich had prescribed the law of action to its enemies. It no longer performed the miracles of great offensives; it was forced onto the defensive everywhere.

At Stalingrad, the backbone of the German army was broken. From now on there was no stopping it. The great flight from Russia began, and hard the Soviet troops stayed on the heels of the fugitives. The great Russian space swallowed the strength of the German army; Clausewitz was right, who had predicted that Russia, in view of its immense space, could not be defeated militarily. They had all failed in the vastness of Russia, those unbearable idols of war: Charles XII, Napoleon I, and also Hitler. All their arrogant plans came to nothing within the endless expanses of Russia.

After the Soviet army had dealt a crushing blow to the German army at Stalingrad, the Western powers finally set the invasion in motion. They landed on the French Channel coast in June 1944. From East and West, Germany's doom was now inexorably taking its course. Hitler's great words sounded increasingly hollow. It was already possible to calculate when Germany's power of resistance would weaken, when it would inevitably have to sink to its knees, exhausted and bled dry. The foreign statesmen were no longer shaken by worries about being or not being; they confidently conducted business, organized the war effort, and filled their troops with unshakable confidence. Yes, their thoughts were already allowed to go beyond the time of war to the conditions of the approaching peace. The organization of the world already became the subject of planning considerations. Even before the United States had entered the war, England's senior statesman, Winston Churchill, had met with President Roosevelt on a ship in the Atlantic Ocean in August 1941 to announce to the world "certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries upon which they base their hopes for a better future for the world."

The war continued, but the Third Reich had nothing left to hope for. In Tehran, in the last days of November 1943, the "Big Three" met: Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. They discussed the upcoming war operations and also dealt with post-war problems.

When the collapse of the Third Reich was already clearly in sight, the three leading statesmen of Soviet Russia, the USA and Great Britain met in Yalta in the Crimea in February 194J. They could already be sure of their victory. New blows against the heart of Germany were decided, new plans were made. "Nazi Germany is lost," said the communique, "by their attempt to continue the hopeless resistance, the Germans will only make the burden of their defeat more oppressive." The three statesmen were united in forcing an unconditional surrender of the Third Reich. Agreement was reached on the joint measures to be taken after unconditional surrender: on zoning, on the Control Commission, on the destruction of Germany's armaments potential, on the punishment of war criminals, on German reparations in kind, and on the re-education of the German people. "It is not," the communique said, "our intention to destroy the German people, but only when Nazism and militarism have been wiped out will there be any hope for the Germans of a decent life and a place in the community of nations."

Thus, even before the war had ended, it was determined how the collapsed Germany would be treated and Europe rebuilt.

There was never any possibility for Germany to win this war. Since 1942, it took little expertise to see this. Nevertheless, the Third Reich fought on. It was as if the German people had been seized by the frenzy of its own destruction. It fought even when it had hardly a square meter of unoccupied land left. Thus it helped with its own hands to destroy absolutely everything that had come down to it as a legacy from its own past.

The years of total mobilization were now followed by the day of total collapse, the unconditional surrender. As little as the German people still possessed a piece of free land, in the end they still had their own sovereign existence. What every Hitler German in his arrogance would have refused even to think happened: the Soviets were standing in Berlin.

Goebbels had once declared that the National Socialists would never voluntarily relinquish power; if they were forced to relinquish power, they would slam the door behind them on their way out in such a way that the whole of Europe would be shaken by it. How could they have voluntarily retreated before successors! They had ruled the German people as a gang of murderers; every act of government was an atrocity, a crime. They foresaw that they would be like

They foresaw that they would be called to account like criminals. They trembled before it. They were people without conscience who wanted to drag the whole German people down with them when their fall was inevitable. The chaos which they had instigated and which swallowed them up in the end also buried the future of the German people.

This book has its fates, has its history. It was written in the years 1933 and 1936; I was under the immediate impression of all the atrocities and ignominies of the Third Reich. Anger and indignation boiled up in me daily; no work have I written in a state of such permanent emotion, inner agitation, combative freshness, such quivering protest. In addition, there was the ever-awake feeling of walking along the edge of the abyss. I knew that I was risking my life with this work. I knew that the Gestapo was constantly watching me: if they decided to search my house and found the manuscript, I was finished. As often as the apartment bell rang, I was prepared for disaster; from 1933 to 1937 I lived in constant expectation of doom.

The manuscript was in three pieces. One copy was stored in the cellar of a Nuremberg bank; as a result of an unfortunate chain of circumstances, it was tracked down by the Gestapo after my arrest in March 1937. The second piece, on which I was still working to put on the last file, I hid in my apartment. Every1 evening I slid it onto the closet of my bedroom. On the day of my arrest I was still in bed when the Gestapo creatures broke into my house. I managed to get my wife to understand in time to hide the manuscript among old linen for the time being. After I had been taken to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse and five Gestapo men had begun searching the front part of my apartment, my son hurried to burn the manuscript in the kitchen. He thus destroyed over five hundred pages by fire; the Gestapo intruders did not notice how the apartment filled with smoke. Later, even the examining magistrate expressed his admiration for my intrepid son.

I had given the third copy to a friend in the customs service with the order to take it abroad; in fact it was taken to Salzburg for the time being. From there it was to be forwarded to Zurich, to the publisher Oprecht. But this was not done; another customs officer took it back to Munich personally. Here it came into the hands of the excellent biologist Dr. Merkenschlager. Merkenschlager read it during a visit to his brother, who was the mayor of a village near Nuremberg; it was then hidden in an empty milk can on his farm. After my arrest, the Gestapo got wind of these events; they organized a house search on the farm of the village mayor, but failed to search the milk cans as well. After the Gestapo had left, Dr. Merkenschlager's brother burned the sheets.

All these events had remained unknown to me; I had no idea of the return of the manuscript to Germany. Only during my trial did I learn about the odyssey of the manuscript; the mayor stood as a witness before the People's Court and told how his brother had been excited, even emotionally shaken, during the reading and what end had befallen the manuscript. Triumphantly, after the hearing, the chairman, Dr. Thieradk, Hitler's later Minister of Justice, turned to me and said: "Thus your shameful pamphlet went as smoke through the chimney of a German hereditary farm into all winds." After all, the Gestapo still possessed a piece of my work. It was the most important incriminating material in the course of my trial. Numerous quotations were the bullets fired against me, intended to knock me to the ground. During my years in prison, I was sometimes tormented by the thought that my work had finally been wiped out.

However, after 1945 a miracle happened. One day a police employee brought me the only manuscript still in existence. It had been neatly arranged by the Gestapo and carefully stapled into a solid envelope. Numerous underlinings in red pencil showed which passages had aroused the indignation of the Gestapo commissioners and also of the judges. I was told that the manuscript had also been presented to Hitler and Goebbels himself.

My intention was to publish the manuscript now; I gave it to a Berlin publishing house, and it accepted it. The editor of the publishing house was the literary historian Paul Wiegier; in his expert opinion he came to the conclusion that the work had to be published immediately; in his expert opinion it says: "I may and must

History of the manuscript

repeat that I have the strongest impressions of it, that I find it intellectually and stylistically outstanding, and that according to its layout it can claim for itself the value of a lasting literary achievement."

That's when misgivings were raised about publication. It was said that the numerous verbatim quotations from National Socialist speeches and publications, which served as the basis for my analyses, could be misunderstood, perhaps the National Socialists would reach for them in order to be able to read their Führer again. The publisher suggested factual changes to me. I rejected these interventions and withdrew the manuscript.

Nothing was added to the manuscript; only deletions were made which eliminated broadeness, rambling, digressions and repetitions. The content and character were not changed as a result.

Former Reichswehr generals and incriminated men such as Hans Grimm have meanwhile circulated the excuse that one must strictly distinguish the Hitler before 1938 from the Hitler after 1938. Hitler before 1938 had been a great national leader; only afterwards had he entered the path of crime.

The present work, which is based exclusively on facts that occurred before 1937, not only proves that the Third Reich displayed its criminal character from the very beginning; it also testifies to how easy it was to recognize this character in time. Above all, it revealed itself on June 30, 1934; after that day, everyone who could see must have known about Hitler.

The final part was written mainly in 1948. Of course, it has a completely different character than the work that was written around 1936. The "Third Reich", the detested object of the passionate attack of yore, was shattered; its leaders, the torturers of the German people, had been deprived of power, were dead, had fled or had been arrested. One no longer had to fight irreconcilably, one could look on calmly; it was no longer necessary to contribute to the downfall of the Luciferian entity; the downfall was complete and one could be content with registering it and its stations.

This - and only this - is what the "conclusion" wants. It serves to round off the work. While the actual work is a contemporary document, the "Conclusion" is a sketch that permits a summary overview of the whole of the "Third Reich" and hints at the way in which the overall course and catastrophe of the Third Reich would have to be traced.

Berlin-Wilmersdorf, March 22, 1953

Ernst Niekisch