A HOUSE DIVIDED and REVOLT IN BAVARIA

A HOUSE DIVIDED

From that day on Germany became a house divided.

The conservatives would accept neither the treaty of peace nor the Republic which had ratified it. Nor, in the long run, would the Army – General Groener excepted – though it had sworn to support the new democratic regime and had itself made the final decision to sign at Versailles. Despite the November ”revolution,” the conservatives still held the economic power. They owned the industries, the large estates and most of the country’s capital. Their wealth could be used, and was, to subsidize political parties and a political press that would strive from now on to undermine the Republic.

The Army began to circumvent the military restrictions of the peace treaty before the ink on it was scarcely dry. And thanks to the timidity and shortsightedness of the Socialist leaders, the officer corps managed not only to maintain the Army in its old Prussian traditions, as we have seen but to become the real center of political power in the new Germany. The Army did not, until the last days of the short-lived Republic, stake its fortunes on any one political movement. But under General Hans von Seeckt, the brilliant creator of the 100,000-man Reichswehr, the Army, small as it was in numbers, became a state within a state, exerting an increasing influence on the nation’s foreign and domestic policies until a point was reached where the Republic’s continued existence depended on the will of the officer corps.

As a state within a state it maintained its independence of the national government. Under the Weimar Constitution the Army could have been subordinated to the cabinet and Parliament, as the military establishments of the other Western democracies were. But it was not. Nor was the officer corps purged of its monarchist, antirepublican frame of mind. A few Socialist leaders such as Scheidemann and Grzesinski urged ”democratizing” the armed forces. They saw the danger of handing the Army back to the officers of the old authoritarian, imperialist tradition. But they were successfully opposed not only by the generals but by their fellow Socialists, led by the Minister of Defense, Noske. This proletarian minister of the Republic openly boasted that he wanted to revive” the proud soldier memories of the World War.” The failure of the duly elected government to build a new Army that would be faithful to its own democratic spirit and subordinate to the cabinet and the Reichstag was a fatal mistake for the Republic, as time would tell.

The failure to clean out ’the judiciary was another. The administrators of the law became one of the centers of the counterrevolution, perverting justice for reactionary political ends. ”It is impossible to escape the conclusion,” the historian Franz L. Neumann declared, ”that political justice is the blackest page in the life of the German Republic.”92 After the Kapp putsch in 1920 the government charged 705 persons with high treason; only one, the police president of Berlin, received a sentence – five years of ”honorary confinement.” When the state of Prussia withdrew his pension the Supreme Court ordered it restored. A German court in December 1926 awarded General von Luettwitz, the military leader of the Kapp putsch, back payment of his pension to cover the period when he was a rebel against the government and also the five years that he was a fugitive from justice in Hungary.

Yet hundreds of German liberals were sentenced to long prison terms on charges of treason because they revealed or denounced in the press or by speech the Army’s constant violations of the Versailles Treaty. The treason laws were ruthlessly applied to the supporters of the Republic; those on the Right who tried to overthrow it, as Adolf Hitler was soon to learn, got off either free or with the lightest of sentences. Even the assassins, if they were of the Right and their victims democrats, were leniently treated by the courts or, as often happened, helped to escape from the custody of the courts by Army officers and right-wing extremists.

And so the mild Socialists, aided by the democrats and the Catholic Centrists, were left to carry on the Republic, which tottered from its birth. They bore the hatred, the abuse and sometimes the bullets of their opponents, who grew in number and in resolve. ”In the heart of the people,” cried Oswald Spengler, who had skyrocketed to fame with his book The Decline of the West, ”the Weimar Constitution is already doomed.” Down in Bavaria the young firebrand Adolf Hitler grasped the strength of the new nationalist, antidemocratic, anti-republican tide. He began to ride it. He was greatly aided by the course of events, two in particular: the fall of the mark and the French occupation of the Ruhr. The mark, as we have seen, had begun to slide in. 1921, when it dropped to 75 to the dollar; the next year it fell to 400 and by the beginning of 1923 to 7,000. Already in the fall of 1922 the German government had asked the Allies to grant a moratorium on reparation payments. This the French government of Poincare had bluntly refused. When Germany defaulted in deliveries of timber, the hardheaded French Premier, who had been the wartime President of France, ordered French troops to occupy the Ruhr. The industrial heart of Germany, which, after the loss of Upper Silesia to Poland, furnished the Reich with four fifths of its coal and steel production, was cut off from the rest of the country.

This paralyzing blow to Germany’s economy united the people momentarily as they had not been united since 1914. The workers of the Ruhr declared a general strike and received financial support from the government in Berlin, which called for a campaign of passive resistance. With the help of the Army, sabotage and guerrilla warfare were organized. The French countered with arrests, deportations and even death sentences. But not a wheel in the Ruhr turned.

The strangulation of Germany’s economy hastened the final plunge of the mark. On the occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923, it fell to 18,000 to the dollar; by July 1 it had dropped to 160,000; by August 1 to a million. By November, when Hitler thought his hour had struck, it took four billion marks to buy a dollar, and thereafter the figures became trillions. German currency had become utterly worthless. Purchasing power of salaries and wages was reduced to zero. The life savings of the middle classes and the working classes were wiped out. But something even more important was destroyed: the faith of the people in the economic structure of German society. What good were the standards and practices of such a society, which encouraged savings and investment and solemnly promised a safe return from them and then defaulted? Was this not a fraud upon the people? And was not the democratic Republic, which had surrendered to the enemy and accepted the burden of reparations, to blame for the disaster? Unfortunately for its survival, the Republic did bear a responsibility. The inflation could have been halted by merely balancing the budget – a difficult but not impossible feat. Adequate taxation might have achieved this, but the new government did not dare to tax adequately. After all, the cost of the war – 164 billion marks – had been met not even in part by direct taxation but 93 billions of it by war loans, 29 billions out of Treasury bills and the rest by increasing the issue of paper money. Instead of drastically raising taxes on those who could pay, the republican government actually reduced them in 1921.

From then on, goaded by the big industrialists and landlords, who stood to gain though the masses of the people were financially ruined, the government deliberately let the mark tumble in order to free the State of its public debts, to escape from paying reparations and to sabotage the French in the Ruhr.

Moreover, the destruction of the currency enabled German heavy industry to wipe out its indebtedness by refunding its obligations in worthless marks. The General Staff, disguised as the ”Truppenamt” (Office of Troops) to evade the peace treaty which supposedly had outlawed it, took notice that the fall of the mark wiped out the war debts and thus left Germany financially unencumbered for a new war.

The masses of the people, however, did not realize how much the industrial tycoons, the Army and the State were benefiting from the ruin of the currency. All they knew was that a large bank account could not buy a straggly bunch of carrots, a half peck of potatoes, a few ounces of sugar, a pound of flour. They knew that as individuals they were bankrupt. And they knew hunger when it gnawed at them, as it did daily. In their misery and hopelessness they made the Republic the scapegoat for all that had happened. Such times were heaven-sent for Adolf Hitler.

REVOLT IN BAVARIA

”The government calmly goes on printing these scraps of paper because, if it stopped, that would be the end of the government,” he cried. ”Because once the printing presses stopped – and that is the prerequisite for the stabilization of the mark – the swindle would at once be brought to light . . . Believe me, our misery will increase. The scoundrel will get by. The reason: because the State itself has become the biggest swindler and crook. A robbers’ state! . . . If the horrified people notice that they can starve on billions, they must arrive at this conclusion: we will no longer submit to a State which is built on the swindling idea of the majority. We want a dictatorship . . . ”

No doubt the hardships and uncertainties of the wanton inflation were driving millions of Germans toward that conclusion and Hitler was ready to lead them on. In fact, he had begun to believe that the chaotic conditions of 1923 had created an opportunity to overthrow the Republic which might not recur. But certain difficulties lay in his way if he were himself to lead the counterrevolution, and he was not much interested in it unless he was. In the first place, the Nazi Party, though it was growing daily in numbers, was far from being even the most important political movement in Bavaria, and outside that state it was unknown. How could such a small party overthrow the Republic? Hitler, who was not easily discouraged by odds against him, thought he saw a way. He might unite under his leadership all the anti-republican, nationalist forces in Bavaria. Then with the support of the Bavarian government, the armed leagues and the Reichswehr stationed in Bavaria, he might lead a march on Berlin – as Mussolini had marched on Rome the year before – and bring the Weimar Republic down. Obviously Mussolini’s easy success had given him food for thought.

The French occupation of the Ruhr, though it brought a renewal of German hatred for the traditional enemy and thus revived the spirit of nationalism, complicated Hitler’s task. It began to unify the German people behind the republican government in Berlin which had chosen to defy France. This was the last thing Hitler wanted. His aim was to do away with the Republic. France could be taken care of after Germany had had its nationalist revolution and established a dictatorship. Against a strong current of public opinion Hitler dared to take an unpopular line: ”No – not down with France, but down with the traitors of the Fatherland, down with the November criminals! That must be our slogan.”

All through the first months of 1923 Hitler dedicated himself to making the slogan effective. In February, due largely to the organizational talents of Roehm, four of the armed ”patriotic leagues” of Bavaria joined with the Nazis to form the so-called Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Vaterlaendischen Kampfverbaende (Working Union of the Fatherland Fighting Leagues) under the political leadership of Hitler. In September an even stronger group was established under the name of the Deutscher Kampfbund (German Fighting Union), with Hitler one of a triumvirate of leaders. This organization sprang from a great mass meeting held at Nuremberg on September 2 to celebrate the anniversary of the German defeat of France at Sedan in 1870. Most of the fascist-minded groups in southern Germany were represented and Hitler received something of an ovation after a violent speech against the national government. The objectives of the new Kampfbund were openly stated: overthrow of the Republic and the tearing up of the Treaty of Versailles.

At the Nuremberg meeting Hitler had stood in the reviewing stand next to General Ludendorff during a parade of the demonstrators. This was not by accident. For some time the young Nazi chief had been cultivating the war hero, who had lent his famous name to the makers of the Kapp putsch in Berlin and who, since he continued to encourage counterrevolution from the Right, might be tempted to back an action which was beginning to germinate in Hitler’s mind. The old General had no political sense; living now outside Munich, he did not disguise his contempt for Bavarians, for Crown Prince Rupprecht, the Bavarian pretender, and for the Catholic Church in this most Catholic of all states in Germany. All this Hitler knew, but it suited his purposes. He did not want Ludendorff as the political leader of the nationalist counterrevolution, a role which it was known the war hero was ambitious to assume. Hitler insisted on that role for himself. But Ludendorffs name, his renown in the officer corps and among the conservatives throughout Germany would be an asset to a provincial politician still largely unknown outside Bavaria. Hitler began to include Ludendorff in his plans.

In the fall of 1923 the German Republic and the state of Bavaria reached a point of crisis. On September 26, Gustav Stresemann, the Chancellor, announced the end of passive resistance in the Ruhr and the resumption of German reparation payments. This former mouthpiece of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, a staunch conservative and, at heart, a monarchist, had come to the conclusion that if Germany were to be saved, united and made strong again it must, at least for the time being, accept the Republic, come to terms with the Allies and obtain a period of tranquillity in which to regain its economic strength. To drift any further would only end in civil war and perhaps in the final destruction of the nation.

The abandonment of resistance to the French in the Ruhr and the resumption of the burden of reparations touched off an outburst of anger and hysteria among the German nationalists, and the Communists, who also had been growing in strength, joined them in bitter denunciation of the Republic. Stresemann was faced with serious revolt from both extreme Right and extreme Left. He had anticipated it by having President Ebert declare a state of emergency on the very day he announced the change of policy on the Ruhr and reparations. From September 26, 1923, until February 1924, executive power in Germany under the Emergency Act was placed in the hands of the Minister of Defense, Otto Gessler, and of the Commander of the Army, General von Seeckt. In reality this made the General and his Army virtual dictators of the Reich.

Bavaria was in no mood to accept such a solution. The Bavarian cabinet of Eugen von Knilling proclaimed its own state of emergency on September 26 and named the right-wing monarchist and former premier Gustav von Kahr as State Commissioner with dictatorial powers. In Berlin it was feared that Bavaria might secede from the Reich, restore the Wittelsbach monarchy and perhaps form a South German union with Austria. A meeting of the cabinet was hastily summoned by President Ebert, and General von Seeckt was invited to attend. Ebert wanted to know where the Army stood. Seeckt bluntly told him. ”The Army, Mr. President, stands behind me.”

The icy words pronounced by the monocled, poker-faced Prussian Commander in Chief did not, as might have been expected, dismay the German President or his Chancellor. They had already recognized the Army’s position as a state within the State and subject only to itself. Three years before, as we have seen, when the Kapp forces had occupied Berlin and a similar appeal had been made to Seeckt, the Army had stood not behind the Republic but behind the General.

The only question now, in 1923, was where Seeckt stood.

Fortunately for the Republic he now chose to stand behind it, not because he believed in republican, democratic principles but because he saw that for the moment the support of the existing regime was necessary for the preservation of the Army, itself threatened by revolt in Bavaria and in the north, and for saving Germany from a disastrous civil war. Seeckt knew that some of the leading officers of the Army division in Munich were siding with the Bavarian separatists.

He knew of a conspiracy of the ”Black Reichswehr” under Major Buchrucker, a former General Staff officer, to occupy Berlin and turn the republican government out. He now moved with cool precision and absolute determination, to set the Army right and end the threat of civil war.

On the night of September 30, 1923, ”Black Reichswehr” troops under the command of Major Buchrucker seized three forts to the east of Berlin. Seeckt ordered regular forces to besiege them, and after two days Buchrucker surrendered. He was tried for high treason and actually sentenced to ten years of fortress detention. The ”Black Reichswehr,” which had been set up by Seeckt himself under the cover name of Arbeitskommandos (Labor Commandos) to provide secret reinforcements for the 100,000-man Reichswehr, was dissolved. (The ”Black Reichswehr” troops, numbering roughly twenty thousand, were stationed on the eastern frontier to help guard it against the Poles in the turbulent days of 1920- 23. The illicit organization became notorious for its revival of the horrors of the medieval Femegerichte – secret courts – which dealt arbitrary death sentences against Germans who revealed the activities of the ”Black Reichswehr” to the Allied Control Commission. Several of these brutal murders reached the courts. At one trial the German Defense Minister, Otto Gessler, who had succeeded Noske, denied any knowledge of the organization and insisted that it did not exist. But when one of his questioners protested against such innocence Gessler cried, ”He who speaks of the ’Black Reichswehr’ commits an act of high treason!”)

Seeckt next turned his attention to the threats of Communist uprisings in Saxony, Thuringia, Hamburg and the Ruhr. In suppressing the Left the loyalty of the Army could be taken for granted. In Saxony the Socialist-Communist government was arrested by the local Reichswehr commander and a Reich Commissioner appointed to rule. In Hamburg and in the other areas the Communists were quickly and severely squelched. It now seemed to Berlin that the relativelyeasy suppression of the Bolshevists had robbed the conspirators in Bavaria of the pretext that they were really acting to save the Republic from Communism, and that they would now recognize the authority of the national government. But it did not turn out that way.

Bavaria remained defiant of Berlin. It was now under the dictatorial control of a triumvirate: Kahr, the State Commissioner, General Otto von Lossow, commander of the Reichswehr in Bavaria, and Colonel Hans von Seisser, the head of the state police. Kahr refused to recognize that President Ebert’s proclamation of a state of emergency in Germany had any application in Bavaria. He declined to carry out any orders from Berlin. When the national government demanded the suppression of Hitler’s newspaper, the Voelkischer Beobachter, because of its vitriolic attacks on the Republic in general and on Seeckt, Stresemann and Gessler in particular, Kahr contemptuously refused.

A second order from Berlin to arrest three notorious leaders of some of the armed bands in Bavaria, Captain Heiss, Captain Ehrhardt (the ”hero” of the Kapp putsch) and Lieutenant Rossbach (a friend of Roehm), was also ignored by Kahr. Seeckt, his patience strained, ordered General von Lossow to suppress the Nazi newspaper and arrest the three free-corps men. The General, himself a Bavarian and a confused and weak officer who had been taken in by Hitler’s eloquence and Kahr’s persuasiveness, hesitated to obey. On October 24 Seeckt sacked him and appointed General Kress von Kressenstein in his place. Kahr, however, would not take this kind of dictation from Berlin. He declared that Lossow would retain the command of the Reichswehr in Bavaria and defying not only Seeckt but the constitution, forced the officers and the men of the Army to take a special oath of allegiance to the Bavarian government. This, to Berlin, was not only political but military rebellion, and General von Seeckt was now determined to put down both.

He issued a plain warning to the Bavarian triumvirate and to Hitler and the armed leagues that any rebellion on their part would be opposed by force. But for the Nazi leader it was too late to draw back. His rabid followers were demanding action. Lieutenant Wilhelm Brueckner, one of his S.A. commanders, urged him to strike at once. ”The day is coming,” he warned, ”when I won’t be able to hold the men back. If nothing happens now, they’ll run away from us.” Hitler realized too that if Stresemann gained much more time and began to succeed in his endeavor to restore tranquillity in the country, his own opportunity would be lost. He pleaded with Kahr and Lossow to march on Berlin before Berlin marched on Munich. And his suspicion grew that either the triumvirate was losing heart or that it was planning a separatist coup without him for the purpose of detaching Bavaria from the Reich. To this, Hitler, with his fanatical ideas for a strong, nationalist, unified Reich, was unalterably opposed. Kahr, Lossow and Seisser were beginning to lose heart after Seeckt’s warning.

They were not interested in a futile gesture that might destroy them. On November 6 they informed the Kampfbund, of which Hitler was the leading political figure, that they would not be hurried into precipitate action and that they alone would decide when and how to act. This was a signal to Hitler that he must seize the initiative himself. He did not possess the backing to carry out a putsch alone. He would have to have the support of the Bavarian state, the Army and the police – this was a lesson he had learned in his beggarly Vienna days. Somehow he would have to put Kahr, Lossow and Seisser in a position where they would have to act with him and from which there would be no turning back. Boldness, even recklessness, was called for, and that Hitler now proved he had. He decided to kidnap the triumvirate and force them to use their power at his bidding.

The idea had first been proposed to Hitler by two refugees from Russia, Rosenberg and Scheubner-Richter. The latter, who had ennobled himself with his wife’s name and called himself Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, was a dubious character who, like Rosenberg, had spent most of his life in the Russian Baltic provinces and after the war made his way with other refugees from the Soviet Union to Munich, where he joined the Nazi Party and became one of Hitler’s close confidants.

On November 4, Germany’s Memorial Day (Totengedenktag) would be observed by a military parade in the heart of Munich, and it had been announced in the press that not only the popular Crown Prince Rupprecht but Kahr, Lossow and Seisser would take the salute of the troops from a stand in a narrow street leading from the Feldherrnhalle. Scheubner-Richter and Rosenberg proposed to Hitler that a few hundred storm troopers, transported by trucks, should converge on the little street before the parading troops arrived and seal it off with machine guns. Hitler would then mount the tribune, proclaim the revolution and at pistol point prevail upon the notables to join it and help him lead it.

The plan appealed to Hitler and he enthusiastically endorsed it. But, on the appointed day, when Rosenberg arrived early on the scene for purposes of reconnaissance he discovered to his dismay that the narrow street was fully protected by a large body of well-armed police. The plot, indeed the ”revolution,” had to be abandoned.

Actually it was merely postponed. A second plan was concocted, one that could not be balked by the presence of a band of strategically located police. On the night of November 10-11, the S.A. and the other armed bands of the Kampfbund would be concentrated on the Froettmaninger Heath, just north of Munich, and on the morning of the eleventh, the anniversary of the hated, shameful armistice, would march into the city, seize strategic points, proclaim the national revolution and present the hesitant Kahr, Lossow and Seisser with a fait accompli.

At this point a not very important public announcement induced Hitler to drop that plan and improvise a new one. A brief notice appeared in the press that, at the request of some business organizations in Munich, Kahr would address a meeting at the Buergerbraukeller, a large beer hall on the southeastern outskirts of the city. The date was November 8, in the evening. The subject of the Commissioner’s speech, the notice said, would be the program of the Bavarian government. General von Lossow, Colonel von Seisser and other notables would be present.

Two considerations led Hitler to a rash decision. The first was that he suspected Kahr might use the meeting to announce the proclamation of Bavarian independence and the restoration of the Wittelsbachs to the Bavarian throne. All day long on November 8 Hitler tried in vain to see Kahr, who put him off until the ninth. This only increased the Nazi leader’s suspicions. He must forestall Kahr. Also, and this was the second consideration, the Buergerbraukeller meeting provided the opportunity which had been missed on November 4: the chance to rope in all three members of the triumvirate and at the point of a pistol force them to join the Nazis in carrying out the revolution. Hitler decided to act at once. Plans for the November 10 mobilization were called off; the storm troops were hastily alerted for duty at the big beer hall.

Source: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William Shrirer, pp. 55-63

THE SHADOW OF VERSAILLES

THE SHADOW OF VERSAILLES

Before the drafting of the Weimar Constitution was finished an inevitable event occurred which cast a spell of doom over it and the Republic which it was to establish. This was the drawing up of the Treaty of Versailles. During the first chaotic and riotous days of the peace and even after the deliberations of the National Assembly got under way in Weimar the German people seemed to give little thought to the consequences of their defeat. Or if they did, they appeared to be smugly confident that having, as the Allies urged, got rid of the Hohenzollerns, squelched the Bolshevists and set about forming a democratic, republican government, they were entitled to a just peace based not on their having lost the war but on President Wilson’s celebrated Fourteen Points.

German memories did not appear to stretch back as far as one year, to March 3, 1918, when the then victorious German Supreme Command had imposed on a defeated Russia at Brest Litovsk a peace treaty which to a British historian, writing two decades after the passions of war had cooled, was a ”humiliation without precedent or equal in modern history,”90 It deprived Russia of a territory nearly as large as Austria-Hungary and Turkey combined, with 56,000,000 inhabitants, or 32 per cent of her whole population; a third of her railway mileage, 73 per cent of her total iron ore, 89 per cent of her total coal production; and more than 5,000 factories and industrial plants. Moreover, Russia was obliged to pay Germany an indemnity of six billion marks.

The day of reckoning arrived for the Germans in the late spring of 1919. The terms of the Versailles Treaty, laid down by the Allies without negotiation with Germany, were published in Berlin on May 7. They came as a staggering blow to a people who had insisted on deluding themselves to the last moment. Angry mass meetings were organized throughout the country to protest against the treaty and to demand that Germany refuse to sign it. Scheidemann, who had become Chancellor during the Weimar Assembly, cried, ”May the hand wither that signs this treaty!” On May 8 Ebert, who had become Provisional President, and the government publicly branded the terms as ”unrealizable and unbearable.”

The next day the German delegation at Versailles wrote the unbending Clemenceau that such a treaty was ”intolerable for any nation.” What was so intolerable about it? It restored Alsace-Lorraine to France, a parcel of territory to Belgium, a similar parcel in Schleswig to Denmark – after a plebiscite – which Bismarck had taken from the Danes in the previous century after defeating them in war. It gave back to the Poles the lands, some of them only after a plebiscite, which the Germans had taken during the partition of Poland.

This was one of the stipulations which infuriated the Germans the most, not only because they resented separating East Prussia from the Fatherland by a corridor which gave Poland access to the sea, but because they despised the Poles, whom they considered an inferior race. Scarcely less infuriating to the Germans was that the treaty forced them to accept responsibility for starting the war and demanded that they turn over to the Allies Kaiser Wilhelm II and some eight hundred other ”war criminals.” Reparations were to be fixed later, but a first payment of five billion dollars in gold marks was to be paid between 1919 and 1921, and certain deliveries in kind – coal, ships, lumber, cattle, etc. – were to be made in lieu of cash reparations.

But what hurt most was that Versailles virtually disarmed Germany (It restricted the Army to 100,000 long-term volunteers and prohibited it from having planes or tanks. The General Staff was also outlawed. The Navy was reduced to little more than a token force and forbidden to build submarines or vessels over 10,000 tons.) and thus, for the time being anyway, barred the way to German hegemony in Europe.  And yet the hated Treaty of Versailles, unlike that which Germany had imposed on Russia, left the Reich geographically and economically largely intact and preserved her political unity and her potential strength as a great nation.

The provisional government at Weimar, with the exception of Erzberger, who urged acceptance of the treaty on the grounds that its terms could be easily evaded, was strongly against accepting the Versailles Diktat, as it was now being called. Behind the government stood the overwhelming majority of citizens, from right to left. And the Army? If the treaty were rejected, could the Army resist an inevitable Allied attack from the west? Ebert put it up to the Supreme Command, which had now moved its headquarters to Kolberg in Pomerania. On June 17 Field Marshal von Hindenburg, prodded by General Groener, who saw that German military resistance would be futile, replied: In the event of a resumption of hostilities we can reconquer the province of Posen [in Poland] and defend our frontiers in the east.

In the west, however, we can scarcely count upon being able to withstand a serious offensive on the part of the enemy in view of the numerical superiority of the Entente and their ability to outflank us on both wings. The success of the operation as a whole is therefore very doubtful, but as a soldier I cannot help feeling that it were better to perish honorably than accept a disgraceful peace. The concluding words of the revered Commander in Chief were in the best German military tradition but their sincerity may be judged by knowledge of the fact which the German people were unaware of – that Hindenburg had agreed with Groener that to try to resist the Allies now would not only be hopeless but might result in the destruction of the cherished officer corps of the Army and indeed of Germany itself.

The Allies were now demanding a definite answer from Germany. On June 16, the day previous to Hindenburg’s written answer to Ebert, they had given the Germans an ultimatum: Either the treaty must be accepted by June 24 or the armistice agreement would be terminated and the Allied powers would” take such steps as they think necessary to enforce their terms.”

Once again Ebert appealed to Groener. If the Supreme Command thought there was the slightest possibility of successful military resistance to the Allies, Ebert promised to try to secure the rejection of the treaty by the Assembly. But he must have an answer immediately. The last day of the ultimatum, June 24, had arrived. The cabinet was meeting at 4:30 P.M. to make its final decision.

Once more Hindenburg and Groener conferred. ”You know as well as I do that armed resistance is impossible,” the aging, worn Field Marshal said. But once again, as at Spa on November 9, 1918, when he could not bring himself to tell the Kaiser the final truth and left the unpleasant duty to Groener, he declined to tell the truth to the Provisional President of the Republic. ”You can give  the answer to the President as well as I can,” he said to Groener.91 And again the courageous General took the final responsibility which belonged to the Field Marshal, though he must have known that it would eventually make doubly sure his being made a scapegoat for the officer corps. He telephoned the Supreme Command’s view to the President. Relieved at having the Army’s leaders take the responsibility – a fact that was soon forgotten in Germany – the National Assembly approved the signing of the peace treaty by a large majority and its decision was communicated to Clemenceau a bare nineteen minutes before the Allied ultimatum ran out. Four days later, on June 28, 1919, the treaty of peace was signed in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles.

Source: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William Shrirer, pp. 53-55

Adolf Hitler in Photographs

PRACTITIONERS AND TECHNICIANS OF TOTALITARIAN RULE

By Joachim Fest, a synopsis of his "The Face of the Third Reich."

HERMANN GORING: NUMBER TWO

The top leadership of the party can be divided into two types according to the way they came to adopt a self-sufficient, completely unideological dynamic: those who were born National Socialists and those who became National Socialists. Joseph Goebbels was the prototype of the latter. . . . In contrast to this type there were the ‘born’ National Socialists, men with a spontaneous urge to prove themselves in struggle, and an unreflecting, elemental hunger for power. Such men had never had any theoretical conceptions to give up. They were ‘fighters’ and in most cases marked by their experiences at the front during the war, modern mercenaries who would change flags and views for an appropriate ‘reward.’ For them there was now an opportunity extending beyond the war and the chaos of the collapse to use their military talents in civilian life, coupled with the promise of power.

Ambitious, straightforward and ruthless, they did not suffer at the hands of the world like the ideological type, but wanted to possess or enjoy it. They did not, like the ideologist, think of future generations, but at best of the next day, or even the next hour. Their prototype was Hermann Goring; a contemporary called him “the great representative of the national Socialist movement.” He said himself, “I joined the party because I was a revolutionary, not because of any ideological nonsense.”

Hermann Goring was true to type. What governed him from the beginning and led him to follow Hitler was simply his absolute will to power. He made his name and acquired his status because he knew how to fight resolutely for power as almost no one else did, and he almost lost them both because he enjoyed them as almost no one else did: shamelessly, naively and greedily, always in too large draughts. Pompous and on the verge of ridiculous, he was a mixture of condottiere and sybarite. He was as vain, cunning and brutal as any other follower of Hitler, and yet he was more popular than any of them and for a time actually more popular than Hitler himself.

By the end of the war in 1918 he was commander of the Richthofen Fighter Squadron, which was rich in tradition. He combined the romantic aura of the much-decorated fighter pilot with the rough unaffected intimacy of the boon companion, at one and the same time hero and hail-fellow-well-met. And although as an orator he lacked both propagandist subtlety and a feeling for the undefined emotions at work in a mass audience, he nevertheless knew how to take a crowd as it wants to be taken: roughly, humorously, without beating about the bush. His aristocratic background, which he emphasized with the deliberate intention of setting himself apart from the rest of Hitler’s followers, spared him any feelings of inferiority, the feelings of petty bourgeois who had come down in the world which were so characteristic of the men who later became the leaders of the National Socialist Party.

The backbone of his personality gradually disintegrated under Hitler's influence and he lapsed into undignified subservience. This, to begin with, he celebrated in wildly emotional terms. “I have no conscience! Adolf Hitler is my conscience!” he once exclaimed. On another occasion he said:

"If the Catholic Christian is convinced that the Pope is infallible in all religious and ethical matters, so we National Socialists declare with the same ardent conviction that for us too the Fuhrer is absolutely infallible in all political and other matters. It is a blessing for Germany that in Hitler the rare union has taken place between the most acute logical thinker and truly profound philosopher and the iron man of action, tenacious to the limit. [And again] I follow no leadership but that of Adolf Hitler and of God!"

Goring’s energy was also responsible for certain important interim successes on the way to power. Hitler's reward for the “movement's diplomatist” was a seat in the cabinet and the portfolio of Prussian Minister of the Interior. While outwardly Goring continued to use his stout joviality to increase his popularity, he showed from day to day the most brutal energy in seizing power, blustering, terrorizing, crushing opposition, and creating order in accordance with his own ideas. His was the task of ruthlessly applying force, and hence that part in the National Socialist revolution which was concealed, with a profusion of words and gestures, behind bustling pseudo-legalities and Hitler's protestations that this was “the most bloodless revolution in world history.”

Wherever his moderating influence might have been executed, Goring failed and increasingly left the field to the more radical Goebbels. He proved his aggressive brutality once again when, at the conclusion of the seizure of power, he appeared as an ambitious principal in the Rohm affair. Together with Heinrich Himmler he took control of the murders in North Germany and Berlin and, on his own admission, expanded the “circle of duties” entrusted to him in order, as he thought, finally to ensure for himself that position as Second Man blocked for so long by Rohm. There is a revealing story that shows the sort of reputation he had at that time. It happened shortly after 30 June 1934. Goring arrived late for dinner with the British Ambassador, Sir Eric Phipps, explaining that he had only just got back from shooting. Sir Eric replied: “Animals, I hope.”

One of the “giants of jurisdiction” of the Third Reich, he performed or assumed in the first two years alone the duties of President of the Reichstag as well as of Reich Minister for Aviation; he was Prussian Minister of the Interior, head of the Gestapo, President of the Prussian State Council, Reich Forestry Commissioner and Controller of the Hunt, Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe and Commissioner for the Four-Year Plan. Yet in each of these positions, which formally gave him enormous power, he was soon interested only in the decorative side. After a few fitful efforts at the beginning he generally left his duties to their own devices, with the result that there was “paralyzing disorder.” What had been intended as a concentration of forces turned out the exact opposite, and his hunger for office began to look like nothing more than an eccentric extension of his mania for collecting. He yielded himself ever more extravagantly to the enjoyment of power, which he understood mainly as a source of wealth; he organized feasts, state hunts and birthday celebrations of almost oriental splendor. . . .

His first press officer at the Prussian Ministry of the Interior has recalled that Goring quickly began to hate the irksome routine of the ministry and rarely turned up there. A biography published in 1938 by one of his closest colleagues nonchalantly lists the tailor, barber, art dealer and jeweler (in that order) as Goring’s first visitors in the morning of a working day. With a love of luxury like that of some voluptuous courtesan, he was always changing his suits and uniforms - as often as five times in a day.

What he was looking for now was not power but theatrical effect. As a result the areas of his influence were eroded away: the Prussian position, control of the police, and later also the authority which he tried to build up for himself over the economy and the Wehrmacht. In comparison with Hitler, his well-fed joviality did have the advantage of drawing attention away from the gloomy and neurasthenic obsessiveness of his partner in the leadership, and his popularity, which was at its peak shortly before the war, owed much to his weaknesses, behind which people imagined they could sense human warmth. In a last acknowledgement of this popularity, which no longer represented his real influence, Hitler appointed him on 1 September 1939 his first successor and later President of the Reich Defense Council as well as Reich Marshal.

By the end of 1942 he found himself in a position of complete isolation and had lost to the steadily advancing Bormann such territory as had been left to him by his rivals Goebbels, Himmler and Speer.

When General Galland informed him in 1943 that enemy fighters were accompanying the bomber squadrons further and further into German territory, Goring forbade him to report the matter. He rarely took any part now in strategic or other conferences and was often sought in vain when his chief of staff required instructions. Instead he devoted himself as before to his pastimes and private passions. The Essen Gauleiter Terboven tells of a visit to Karinhall: “It was Sunday and the sky over Germany was once more black with American bombers.” Goring merely made sure from his duty adjutant that there was no air-raid warning in force for Karinhall and then remarked, “Fine, let's go hunting.”  In the final phase of his life he suffered from profound illusion. In April 1945 he had been dismissed with ignominy from all his posts, arrested, and bequeathed a curse. But when he heard of Hitler's death, he was, his wife recalled, “close to despair” and exclaimed, “He's dead, Emmy. Now I shall never be able to tell him that I was true to him till the end!” In much the same way as Himmler, he hoped to be accepted by the Allies as a partner in negotiations. As General Bodenschatz has testified, soon after his capture by the Americans his main concern was the proclamation which he intended to make to the German people as soon as he had reached a satisfactory agreement with Eisenhower.

His claim to the leadership of the Reich after Hitler’s death was indisputable in his view.  All his utterances in the Nuremberg cell were pervaded, in a final act of illusory self over-evaluation, by the idea that he would one day be celebrated as a martyr. He was glad he had been condemned to death, he stated shortly before the end, because the man condemned to life imprisonment had no chance of becoming a martyr. “In fifty or sixty years there will be statues of Hermann Goring all over Germany,” he remarked, and added, “Little statues maybe, but one in every German home.”

JOSEPH GOEBBELS: ‘MAN THE BEAST’

The majority of the ideological elements absorbed into National Socialism were nothing but material, assessed at varying degrees of effectiveness, for a ceaseless pyrotechnical display of propagandist agitation. Flags, Sieg Heils, fanfares, marching columns, banners and domes of searchlights - the whole arsenal of stimulants, developed with inventive ingenuity, for exciting public ecstasy was ultimately intended to bring about the individual's self-annulment, a permanent state of mindlessness, with the aim of rendering first the party adherents and later a whole nation totally am enable to the leaders' claim to power. . . . This flight into the irrational, into regions where politics became a matter of faith, of Weltanschauung, answered a vehement need of the disoriented masses; nevertheless, there was a purposeful Machiavellian guidance behind the direction and forms it took, so that on closer inspection the apparently elemental demand proves to be the planned and repeatedly reawakened irrationalism to which the modern totalitarian social religions owe their support and their existence.

Joseph Goebbels was the brain behind this manipulation of minds, “the only really interesting man in the Third Reich besides Hitler.” One of the most astonishingly gifted propagandists of modern times, he stood head and shoulders above the bizarre mediocrity of the rest of the regime’s top-ranking functionaries.

Goebbels described his feelings for the Fuhrer as “holy and untouchable.” He stated after a speech by Hitler that he had spoken “profoundly and mystically, almost like a gospel,” and affirmed in a protestation of loyalty: “An hour may come when the mob rages around and roars, ‘Crucify him!’ Then we shall stand as firm as iron and shout and sing ‘Hosanna!’” In one of his regular birthday addresses on the eve of 20 April, Goebbels declared, “When the Fuhrer speaks it is like a divine service.”  That the son of a strictly Catholic working-class family from Rheydt in the Rhineland should have found his ostensible certitude of faith, after years of agonizing indecision, in the National Socialist movement is a stroke of historical irony. Highly gifted, he was subjected from an early age to a tormenting feeling of physical inadequacy; he had a weak constitution and a crippled foot. When he appeared in Geneva in 1933 as representative of the Reich, a caricature in a Swiss newspaper showed a crippled little man with black hair. Under it was written: “Who is that? Oh, that's the representative of the tall, healthy, fair-haired, and blue-eyed Nordic race!”

He found Hitler’s talk on Bolshevism, foreign policy, redemption of the rights and holdings of the princes and private property ‘terrible’ and spoke of “one of the greatest disappointments of my life”; but when Hitler publicly embraced him shortly after a speech, Goebbels called him in gratitude ‘a genius’ and noted emotionally in his diary: “Adolf Hitler, I love you.” Six months earlier he had asked himself who this man really was. “Christ or St John?” Now, notably under the influence of a generous invitation to Munich and Berchtesgarden, his last doubts vanished, while simultaneously his ambition recognized the outlines of the role he might play. If Hitler was really ‘Christ,’ then he wanted to be the one to take the part of the prophet; for “the greater and more towering I make God, the greater and more towering I make myself.” In this sense it really was apt when he wrote that the days in Munich with Hitler had shown him his ‘direction and path’: the organizer of the Fuhrer myth had found his mission. During his stay, he wrote in his diary:  “The chief talks about race problems. It is impossible to reproduce what he said. It must be experienced. He is a genius. The natural, creative instrument of a fate determined by God. I am deeply moved. He is like a child: kind, good, merciful. Like a cat: cunning. clever, agile. Like a lion: roaring and gigantic. A fellow, a man. He talks about the state. In the afternoon about winning over the state and the political revolution. It sounds like prophecy. Up in the skies a white cloud takes on the shape of the swastika. There is a blinking light that cannot be a star. A sign of fate?”

From this point on he submitted himself, his whole existence, to his attachment to the person of the ‘Fuhrer,’ consciously eliminating all inhibitions springing from intellect, free will and self-respect.

“To unleash volcanic passions, outbreaks of rage, to use masses of people on the march, to organize hatred and despair with ice-cold calculation”: this was how he [Goebbels] saw his self-imposed task. And he succeeded. With diabolical flair, continually thinking up new tricks, he drove his listeners into ecstasy, made them stand up, sing songs, raise their arms, repeat oaths - and he did it, not through the passionate inspiration of the moment, but as the result of sober psychological calculation at the desk. Once he had got the reaction he wanted he stood there, small but erect, generally with one hand on his hip, above the tumult, coolly assessing the effect of his stage management. In truth, the ‘little doctor’ with the tormenting feeling of physical inadequacy was capable of bending the masses to his will and making them available for any purpose; he could, as he boasted, play upon the national psyche ‘as on a piano.’  

Immediately after 30 January 1933 he boasted that his propaganda had not only operated directly by winning over millions of supporters; equally important was its effect in paralyzing opponents. Many had become so tired, so fearful, so inwardly despairing as a result of his onslaughts that in the end they regarded Hitler’s Chancellorship as fated. His reward came in the middle of March 1933 when Hitler openly broke the coalition agreement to bestow upon him the long-planned Ministry for National Enlightenment and Propaganda. On taking office Goebbels cheerfully announced that “the government intends no longer to leave the people to their own devices.” It was the task of the new ministry “to establish political coordination between people and government.” . . .

The very essence of totalitarian government always lies in the combination of propaganda and terrorism. It is these two together that alone make possible that thoroughgoing psychological and social organization of man which reduces the scope of individual freedom to the point of immobility.

Everything seems to indicate that in Goebbels’s anti-Semitism, over and above individual motives, we must see an example of that dialectic common to all totalitarian propaganda: the need for a barbarically exaggerated image of the opponent. This helps to harness the aggressions within a society while attaching the latent positive energies to emotional idealizations of its own leader figures. Only in this way could propaganda regain that vehemence which had once brought it such success, even if there was always an obvious element of strained artificiality about the demonized figure of the Jew as presented by Goebbels with ever more breathless efforts. All his attempts to paint the universal enemy as a wirepuller at work from Moscow to Wall Street were shattered by the reality of the frightened and harassed human beings wearing the yellow star, who for a time wandered the streets of German cities before suddenly vanishing forever.

The astonishing effect of his ideas once more confirmed Hitler’s assertion “that by the clever and continuous use of propaganda a people can even be made to mistake heaven for hell, and vice versa, the most miserable life for Paradise.” Preoccupied as he was with propaganda, it was, as one of his colleagues confirmed, “almost a happy day” for him when famous buildings were destroyed in an air raid, because at such times he put into his appeals that ecstatic hatred which aroused the fanaticism of the tiring workers and spurred them to fresh efforts.

Unhesitatingly he accepted Hitler’s end as his own. Unlike the former comrades in arms who ignominiously fled - Ley, Ribbentrop, Streicher - but also without the naïve self-deception of Goring or Himmler, he had no illusions as to how intensely they had provoked the world. “As for us,” he wrote in Das Reich of 14 November 1943, “we have burnt our bridges. We cannot go back, but neither do we want to go back. We are forced to extremes and therefore resolved to proceed to extremes.” And later: “We shall go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all time, or as the greatest criminals.” He was level-headed enough to accept responsibility for the final verdict. . His remarks in his farewell conversation with Hans Fritzsche, in which, following Hitler’s example, he ascribed the collapse to the failure of the German people, and at the same time the way he strove to intensify the process of destruction, were like a final seal set upon his contempt for humanity. “When we depart, let the earth tremble!” were the last words with which, on 21 April 1945, he dismissed his associates. What he seemed to fear more than anything else was a death devoid of dramatic effects; to the end, he was what he had always been: the propagandist for himself. Whatever he thought or did was always based solely on this one agonizing wish for self-exultation, and this same object was served by the murder of his children, on the evening of 1 May 1945. They were the last victims of an egomania extending beyond the grave. However, this deed too failed to make him the figure of tragic destiny he had hoped to become; it merely gave his end a touch of repulsive irony. A few hours later he died, together with his wife, in the gardens of the Reich Chancellery.

REINHARD HEYDRICH: THE SUCCESSOR

He was a man like a whiplash. In his Luciferian coldness, amorality and insatiable greed for power he was comparable only to the great criminals of the Renaissance, with whom he shared a conscious awareness of the omnipotence of man. In his case this took the form of the conviction that by the methodical application of technology and organization everything was possible: the construction of a government, the establishment of an empire, the re-creation of a race, the purification of blood over wide areas. And he intended these means to be directed to one simple end: power. . . .

He seemed the epitome not merely of National Socialist totalitarianism but of modern totalitarianism as a whole; and if he left the world a legacy before he had come fully into his own, it was that he taught man to fear man more comprehensively than ever before. The traditional idea of evil, which is linked with the concept of possession by spirits, uncontrollable outbursts of emotion, and an attachment to the dark instincts, breaks down before the transparent sobriety of this type. So does the concept of the demonic, which has metaphysical overtones inappropriate to the unwaveringly realistic conception of power of this totally secularized phenomenon.  Heydrich was tall, blond, athletic, and combined high intelligence with a metallic streak in his nature which was regarded as the proof of a special racial grace. “A young, evil god of death,” as Carl Jacob Burckhardt said after meeting him, he was sometimes called by his subordinates, with a mixture of fear and admiration, “the Blond Beast,” while Das Schwarze Korps wrote of him: “Even in his outward appearance he was an SS man as the people picture him, a man all of one piece.” The coldness and contempt with which he viewed human beings and human life may give us a hint of the way in which, during hours of solitary self-confrontation, he treated himself. Only alcohol and the pleasures of night life enjoyed with forced intemperance - outings on which he ordered his subordinates by turn to accompany him - could bring him brief respite from a life in which he was constantly being tested to breaking-point. . . .

One of his colleagues has described the haunting and profoundly revealing occasion when Heydrich came home at night to his brilliantly lit apartment and suddenly saw his reflection in a large wall mirror. In an attack of cold rage he “whipped his pistol from his holster and fired two shots at this double,” the ever and tormentingly present negation of himself, from which he could free himself in liquor and in the splintered glass, but not in reality. He was the prisoner of this figure of negation, he lived in a world populated by the self-created chimeras of a hostile distrust, scented behind everything treachery, intrigue or the snares of hidden enmity, and thought only in terms of dependence - the most impressive embodiment of that vulgarized Darwinist principle in whose light the world was revealed to National Socialist ideology: life seen exclusively as struggle. Himmler said of him that he was “the embodiment of distrust - the ‘hyper suspicious,’ as people called him - nobody could endure it for long.”  As no one else among his colleagues and rivals, he was a master of indirect methods of gaining influence, of bringing about the almost imperceptible shifting of power which only became visible at the moment of the rival’s downfall. With the exception of Bormann, who thanks to his personal position of trust with Hitler felt unassailable, everyone feared him, however high above him they might stand in the official hierarchy, and they watched his apparently inexorable rise with a mixture of fascination and impotence, like an approaching doom.

Heydrich clearly saw that in a modern totalitarian system of government there is no limit to the principle of state security, so that anyone in charge of it is bound to acquire almost unrestricted power. Within a year, always in agreement with Himmler, he gained control first of the Munich police, then of the Bavarian, and in turn of each of the political police of the German Lunder. The last was Prussia, whose chief, Rudolf Diels, was astute enough and had enough friends in high places to resist until 20 April 1934; then he and Goring had to yield. Heydrich himself became head of the Secret Police (Gestapo) as well as of the SD, and in 1936, when Himmler became Chief of the German Police, Heydrich was also given control of the Criminal Police. He was then, at thirty-two, one of the most powerful men in the country. After Heydrich had given such an impressive demonstration of his cunning and adroitness in the elimination of Rohm and the destruction of the power of the SA, he became almost indispensable wherever any dirty business had to be arranged. He had a hand in the Tukhachevsky affair, which led to the liquidation of the top military leaders of the Soviet Union, and in the dismissal of the traditionalist Army leaders Blomberg and Fritsch following fabricated scandalous ‘revelations.’ His work behind the scenes helped to prepare the way for the Austrian Anschluss and the piecemeal incorporation of Czechoslovakia. In some way that is still obscure he was behind the attempt on Hitler’s life in the Munich Burgerbrau; he organized the nation-wide anti- Semitic demonstration that came to be known as the ‘Crystal Night,’ conceived and staged the ‘attack’ on the German radio station at Gleiwitz which was to provide a pretext for declaring war on Poland, and finally was the initiator of Project Bernhard, the attempt to undermine the British currency by means of forged Bank of England notes.

He probably received with somewhat divided feelings the order for the so-called Final Solution of the Jewish Problem, which was given to him on 24 January 1939 (and, with the further order to supervise the “zone of German influence in Europe,” again on 31 July 1941). True, he never shrank from any task, and to this he immediately devoted himself with that tendency to perfectionist, large-scale solutions and the apocalyptic thoroughness typical of the organizational thinking of National Socialist officialdom. But cunning was more in his line than brutality, and for an opponent to step unsuspectingly into an artistically constructed trap gave him a satisfaction he never derived from any aggressively brutal act. . . These scruples found no outward expression, however, and with an inflexibility that gave no hint of inner conflict, Heydrich set about seizing and herding together the Jews of Europe and sending them to their death, partly by ‘natural reduction,’ that is to say by hunger, exhaustion, or disease, and partly by physical destruction, either with the aid of murder squads or by the so-called ‘special treatment’ of mass gassing.

He conceived the overall plan which, over and above extermination of the Jewish race, was to make vast areas of the East available as ‘experimental fields’ for eugenic breeding.

The attack which cost him his life was planned and prepared by Czechoslovak exiles in London, who had noted the success of Heydrich’s pacification measures with growing disquiet; not the least of their purposes in ordering the assassination was to provoke the regime into taking such brutal counter-measures that a more widespread resistance would be sparked off. The three young men who waited for Heydrich’s car near the city boundary on 27 May 1942 had been dropped by parachute shortly before not far from Prague. As the car slowed down to take a sharp bend one of them, Jan Kubis, threw a bomb which exploded under the vehicle. Heydrich was seriously wounded. He managed to jump out of the car and fire a few shots at his fleeing assailants, but then collapsed. Doctors were sent by Hitler and Himmler, but he died a week later.  

In the punitive measures that followed no fewer than 936 people were condemned to death by court-martial at Prague and 395 at Brno. Although no connection was established between them and the assassination, all the inhabitants of the village of Lidice were sacrificed to the manes of Reinhard Heydrich. And as if to make the terror emanating from his name live after his death, the circumstances of his death provided the final impetus for the experiments with sulphonamides on human beings at Ravensbruck concentration camp. Operation Reinhard, by which the property of murdered Jews was sequestered, was named after him. Heydrich was far more than a leading henchman of Hitler remarkable for intelligence and extremism. He was a symbol and perhaps the representative figure of the Third Reich at the peak of its internal and external power. In this sense it was entirely apt when in the inner circle he was spoken of as Hitler’s successor, who “sooner or later” would have become Germany’s ‘Fuhrer.’ He had already entered into this succession in the background through his place in the growing SS state which was mercilessly asserting itself.

HEINRICH HIMMLER: PETTY BOURGEOIS AND GRAND INQUISITOR

Widely identified with the SS state and the extermination factories, Heinrich Himmler seems like the civilized, or at least contemporary, reincarnation of a mythical monster. The feeling of menace, of omnipresent yet intangible terror, which once emanated from him has become attached to his name and to his personality, which is all the more sinister for its lack of personal color. Even in his lifetime there was a Himmler ‘myth,’ which distorted the features of the Reichsfuhrer of the SS in a way that made him all the more terrifying and turned into an abstract principle the man who was unrecognizable as a human being. Entirely in this sense Himmler said of himself that he would be “a merciless sword of justice.” The methods of his terrorism, based upon modern principles of organization, and the rationalized, ‘industrial’ extermination processes which he employed, the whole businesslike practicality of his fanaticism, have curiously intensified the aura of terror surrounding his person, beyond all actual experience.  In the light of the million fold terrors he inspired, there was a temptation to search for ‘abysses’ in which at least a pale gleam of some ‘human’ reaction might be visible, and it was that that misled people. In reality Heinrich Himmler was exactly what his appearance suggested: an insecure, vacillating character, the color of whose personality was grey. His lack of independence was concealed by a desperate and stupid overzealousness. What looked like a malignity or brutality was merely the conscienceless efficiency of a man whose life substance was so thinly spread that he had to borrow from outside. No emotion either carried him away or inhibited him; “His very coldness was a negative element, not glacial, but bloodless.” A capable organizer and administrator, he possessed that inhuman mixture of diligence, subservience and fanatical will to carry things through that casts aside humane considerations as irrelevant, and whose secret idols are closed files of reports of tasks completed; a man at freezing point.

It is only in a hopelessly disrupted society that a figure like Heinrich Himmler can acquire political influence; and only under a totalitarian form of government offering universal salvation could he come to hold the power that offered some prospect of putting his ideas into practice. His sobriety and apparent common sense, which deceived outsiders, were precisely what made his career possible. “I am convinced that nobody I met in Germany is more normal,” an English observer wrote in 1929. The basic pathological characteristic of the National Socialist movement, so often and so erroneously sought in clinically obvious psychopaths like Julius Streicher, showed itself rather in the curious amalgam of crankiness and ‘normality,’ of insanity and sober administrative ability. Thus Streicher was pushed further and further to the sidelines, while Heinrich Himmler, who possessed the arcanum imperii of this system of government, quickly reached the highest power, a calculating man of faith who without doubt or challenge trampled over millions, leaving behind him a trail of blood and tears, the most dreadful combination of crackpot and manipulator of power, of quack and inquisitor, that history has ever known. Concentration camps and herb gardens, such as he had planted at Dachau and elsewhere: these are still the most apt symbols of his personality.

On 6 January 1929 Himmler, at the same time running a chicken farm at Waldtrudering near Munich, was appointed head of the then barely three-hundred man- strong SS. He proved his abilities as an organizer by expanding the force to over 50,000 men by 1933. . . . When on 17 June 1936 Himmler was finally appointed head of the now unified police forces of the Reich and confirmed as Reichsfuhrer of the SS, he seemed to have reached the peak of an astounding career. He now controlled a substantial portion of the real power and also, thanks to the terror that he spread, an even greater part of the psychological power.  Himmler's comprehensive and unitary organization provided the totalitarian government with the systematic control that now enabled it to operate to its fullest extent. No sooner had Himmler, in the course of capturing power, seized control of the police than a perceptible tightening of the regime could be felt.

It was entirely consistent that the moral status of the SS rose with the number of its victims. As Himmler declared to the officer corps of the ‘Adolf Hitler’ SS Bodyguard on 7 September 1940: “Exactly the same thing happened at forty degrees below zero in Poland when we had to carry off thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands, when we had to be so hard - as to shoot thousands of leading Poles. When we had to be so hard, because otherwise vengeance would have fallen upon us later. It is a great deal easier in many cases to go with a company into battle than to operate with a company in some region suppressing a rebellious population at a low level of culture, carrying out executions, transporting people away, taking away howling and weeping women.”

However, it was not merely the ethos of hardness that gave such utterances by Himmler their decisive twist, but rather the vulgar and calculating pride in his own capacity for inhumanity with which the pedant and the former model pupil of the King Wilhelm Gymnasium in Munich sought to establish his leadership among his murder-and-battle-hardened subordinates.

The human experiments in the laboratories of the concentration camps, which displayed a horrifying amateurism, yielded not the slightest useful result because their real purpose was merely to act as a blind; in the words of one of the doctors involved, Himmler wanted to prove “that he was not a murderer but a patron of science.” Any remaining feelings of guilt were removed by the assertion, delivered with the pseudo tragic pose of provincial demonism, that it was “the curse of the great to have to walk over corpses.” Behind this, conjured up more zealously than ever, lay that concept of a Greater German post-war empire which, beyond the extermination which he carried out with routine conscientiousness, he was planning and preparing.  He greeted the representative of the World Jewish Congress, who came to see him on 21 April 1945, with the unbelievable words: “Welcome to Germany, Herr Masur. It is time you Jews and we National Socialists buried the hatchet.” He indulged in speculation upon what he would do as soon as he came to power, and seriously hoped, up to the day of his arrest, that the Western allies would greet him as a partner in negotiations and even as an ally against Soviet Russia.  

During these weeks of the collapse of the Third Reich the SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler was an opportunist fighting stubbornly to delay the end. In vain did those around him press him to declare himself and assume responsibility for the SS. On 19 March he was still conjuring up apocalyptic visions of a last-ditch stand to the last man “like the Ostrogoths on Vesuvius”; now he thought only of disguise and flight. “One thing can never be forgiven among us Germans: that is treachery,” he had assured his followers a few months earlier. No small number of the SS, especially members of the elite groups, committed suicide when they realized Heinrich Himmler’s treachery.

MARTIN BORMANN: THE BROWN EMINENCE

From too great a distance, as from too close, a totalitarian system of government looks like a single tightly knit block whose massive structure towers over society, as vast as it is impenetrable. However, this impression, based upon the determination and the merciless energy with which such governments achieve their purposes, is an illusion.

When Hitler appointed him executor of his will, Bormann attained his ultimate ambition of complete identification with the central will of the National Socialist power structure. Sober, calculating and coldly diligent, he had always sought power alone, never its insignia. The latter seemed to him mere foolishness and evidence of misdirected cupidity that clung to externals.

Almost unnoticed, with his characteristic silent persistence, he had risen step by step within a short time. He was never called more than ‘Director of the Party Chancellery’ and ‘the Fuhrer’s secretary’, and yet during the declining years of the Hitler regime no one was more powerful.

No one was more hated. The contempt aroused by the Neronic pomposity of Goring, Ribbentrop’s absurdity, or even Himmler’s bloodthirsty reputation, all the mutual antipathies that built up within the top leadership through years of rivalry, were of a different kind and not to be compared with the intensity of the bitterness his countless enemies felt towards this Machiavelli of the office desk. Hans Frank, who called him an ‘arch-scoundrel’, remarked that the word ‘hate’ was “far too weak”, and even his personal colleagues and secretaries - who in every other case, without exception, could find a good word for their superior - expressed only aversion [toward Bormann] at Nuremburg.

Within the smooth-functioning mechanism of his bureaucratic apparatus, man was the only element not entirely calculable, a latent deviation, the element of an unreliability that he knew he alone did not share. According to the available evidence he did not smoke, did not drink, ate with moderation, and possessed no inclination of his own, no interests, no hobbies, but probably there was here, not a consciously austere attitude of renunciation, but merely the puritanism of an impersonality that was without needs because it knew no needs. His peculiar advantages derived from just this lack of personality-forming factors. He was eager to serve, unobtrusive, down to earth, and even his enemies have always stressed his unparalleled diligence.

Through his supervision of the lists of Hitler’s visitors he kept a suspicious watch over the Fuhrer's contacts with the outside world and, in the words of an observer, “erected a positive Chinese wall through which people were admitted only after showing their empty hands and explaining in detail to Bormann the purpose of their visit. By this means he had absolute control over the whole machinery of the Reich.”

Towards the end of the war Hitler positively thanked him for, in effect, closing the doors more and more tightly against everyone who tried to bring the cold air of reality into the musty world of insane delusions and fantasies that prevailed in the Fuhrer’s headquarters. His intimate knowledge of Hitler’s weaknesses and personal peculiarities gave him an advantage over all his rivals. Even Goebbels, when early in 1945 he sent an album of photographs of ploughed-up streets and shattered architectural monuments to the Fuhrer’s headquarters, received it back from Bormann with the comment that the Fuhrer did not want to be bothered “with such trivial matters.”

His directives on policy towards the churches refer repeatedly to “diminution of power,” “possibilities of exercising influence,” and the “right to lead the people”; and when, in his famous order to the Gauleiters of 6-7 June 1941 on the “relations between National Socialism and Christianity,” he tried with dreary impertinence to place an ideological cloak around ideas relating purely to the acquisition of power, he could not avoid eventually revealing the true cause of this hostility: “National Socialist and Christian conceptions are incompatible. The Christian churches build upon men’s ignorance; by contrast National Socialism] rests upon scientific foundations. When we [National Socialists] speak of belief in God, we do not mean, like the naive Christians and their spiritual exploiters, a man-like being sitting around somewhere in the universe. The force governed by natural law by which all these countless planets move in the universe, we call omnipotence or God.

The assertion that this universal force can trouble itself about the destiny of each individual being, every smallest earthly bacillus, can be influenced by so-called prayers or other surprising things, depends upon a requisite dose of naivety or else upon shameless professional self-interest.”

Only then does Bormann pass over to arguments based upon the crucial considerations of power. Since Adolf Hitler himself has the leadership of the people in his hands:

“All influences which might restrict or even damage the leadership of the people exercised by the Fuhrer with the aid of the NSDAP must be eliminated. The people must be increasingly wrested from the churches and their instruments the priests. Naturally the churches, looking at matters from their point of view, will and must resist this diminution of power. But never again must the churches be allowed any influence over the leadership of the people. This must be broken totally and forever.

Only then will the existence of nation and Reich be assured."  It was his declared intention largely to crush the churches even while the war was in progress. In 1941, when he found himself in tactical opposition on this point to Hitler, who considered such a clash inopportune in view of the stains and stresses of the war, he continued to pursue his plans in secret; for the war seemed to him a suitable opportunity, which would never recur, for carrying the regime's ideological aims to their logical conclusion. Here as always Bormann was resolved to go to extremes, the “advocate of all harsh measures”, as he has been called.

In a memorandum of 19 August 1942 he wrote:  “The Slavs are to work for us. In so far as we do not need them, they may die. Slav fertility is undesirable. They may possess contraceptives or abort, the more the better. Education is dangerous. We shall leave them religion as a means of diversion. They will receive only the absolutely necessary provisions. We are the masters, we come first.”

He signed Hitler’s political testament, acted as witness to his marriage, and stood in the courtyard of the Reich Chancellery, along with Goebbels, General Burgdorf and a few others, under the fire of Russian shells as Hitler’s corpse went up in flames. . . . Since then he has vanished. Between the Weidendammer Brucke and the Lehrter Station all trace of him was lost behind fountains of dust and crashing walls in that anonymity which he always sought.

ERNST ROHM AND THE LOST GENERATION

Once power had been achieved the ambitions of the SA for independence previously smouldering more or less underground, strove for open expression. Hitler solved the structural problem of the ‘double party’ with bloodshed. On 30 June 1934 and the following two days he arranged the liquidation of his old follower and friend Ernst Rohm, together with the homosexual element within the SA that had lent not merely the brown terrorist army but the whole of Hitler’s movement some of its most striking and repellent features.

Death before the firing squad against the walls of Stadelheim prison and the Lichterfeld Military College meant for most of the high SA leaders, from Ernst Rohm through Edmund Heines down to August Schneidhuber, the identical conclusion to identical careers. Service as an officer in the war and in the Freikorps or the right-radical defense associations had in most cases been followed by half-hearted attempts to get a foothold in civilian life, as a traveler, commercial employee, estate manager or simply head of household. At intervals they cultivated the old contacts; there was a deeply ingrained longing for male companionship, for the trade of arms, for the unconstrainedness of the soldier’s life, and finally, for unrestrained indulgence in eating and drinking. These men were merely hibernating behind a bourgeois facade which they felt to be alien and ‘civilian’; meanwhile they conspired, joined in enterprises that amounted to high treason, in the assassination of Republican politicians, in vehmic murders.  Rohm was a fanatical soldier and officer, though without the arrogance and strained intensity that put a touch of martial demonism into the blank face of the General Staff officer of the old school. Although from childhood he had had “only one thought and wish, to be a soldier”, and towards the end of the war was actually on the General Staff and a magnificent organizer, he was much closer to the type of the field officer.

He was a daredevil who had come out of the war with numerous wounds and even in his memoirs he expressed a curiously exalted aversion for the word ‘prudent’  (besonnen). He divided men simply into soldiers and civilians, into friend and enemy, was honest and without guile, coarse, sober, a simple-minded and straightforward swashbuckler who liked “the noise of the camp and of the quartermaster's stores.” Wherever he appeared, one of his comrades of the period of illegal military activity noted, “life came into the place, but above all practical work was done.” His robustly practical Bavarian mind, to which all brooding was alien, had no time for profound cults, for emotional enthusiasm for the Nordic ideal, or insane race fantasies, and he openly mocked the complex philosophical mysticism of Rosenberg, Himmler and Darre. . . .

At the same time, Rohm was a brutal boss, who gathered around him a dissolute crew who did not shrink from a bad reputation and actually prided themselves on their corruption, perverse debauchery and crimes of violence.  From 1923 onwards Rohm succeeded more and more openly in imposing his ideas, so that the NSDAP visibly developed into a ‘double party’ made up of two rival blocs: the SA, or Storm Troops, as Hitler had christened them after a beerhall battle that became a party legend; and the Political Organization, abbreviated to PO and contemptuously dubbed ‘P-Zero’ by the SA. Hitler at this period was little more than an expert speaker recruiting for a movement whose true core was the paramilitary organization led by Rohm, and if everything indicates that the leader of the NSDAP was at this time content with such a distribution of roles, subsequent events proved that it had its effect on his desire for self-assertion. At the latest after the unsuccessful enterprise of 9 November 1923, which saw Hitler on his knees before the authority of the state on the steps of the Felderrnhalle, he realized that Rohm’s crude idea of a head-on conquest of power was hopeless and that consequently the building up of a great military party organization was fundamentally wrong. Whereas Rohm, released on probation immediately after the trial, at once tried to reassemble the shattered nationalist armed organizations, Hitler, even while still in Landsberg prison, began to dissociate himself from Rohm, to drop the military presuppositions of his plans for seizing power, and, as he proudly stressed later, remained “immune to advice.”

Various half-hearted attempts by both sides to reach an understanding came to nothing, so that soon after his release Hitler brought about the break that robbed Rohm of all further opportunities for activity.

Shortly after the NSDAP’s great electoral victory of 14 September, [1930] Hitler therefore recalled Ernst Rohm from Bolivia, though not without first himself assuming the post of Supreme Leader of the SA and demanding from every SA leader “an oath of unconditional allegiance” to his person, as an assurance against future insubordination. Rohm immediately obeyed the call, and the passion with which he devoted himself to his new task as Chief of Staff of the SA seemed to contain some conviction that, in spite of all contrary assurances, his former conception of the paramilitary organization and of direct action for the seizure of the state had gained ground. . . .

Nine months after Rohm had taken up his duties, the SA already numbered 170,000 men. He brought with him the whole notorious company of his friends, whose entry finally ensured the dominance of the criminal element within the SA. This left no more room for the selfless devotion to the cause, which had in any case been only a faint and fitful impulse. Rohm, it soon came to be said, was building up a “private army within the private army,” while Hitler rejected reports of criminal activities within the top leadership of the SA “utterly and vigorously” as an “impertinence”. . . . Confident in the knowledge of its ceaselessly swelling numbers, the SA now became for the first time the instrument of calculated mass terrorism which Hitler had intended. Battles in meeting halls and in the streets, propaganda trips, the blowing up of buildings and murder spread paralysis and fear, and caused a complete breakdown of morale among the Republican forces.

While the SA were winning the freedom of the streets for Hitler and thus opening his road to power, the question of what was to happen to its formations after the seizure of power was becoming ever more urgent. Rohm, his self-confidence immeasurably swollen by success, now returned more provocatively than ever to the old solution: a duumvirate with Hitler as political leader and agitator and himself as generalissimo of a vast armed force in which the whole nation was to be organized. Hitler at first kept his options open by giving the SA, after 30 January 1933, the most varied tasks in an unparalleled tangle of tactical directions. Within the framework of the double revolution from above and below, it was given the role of expressing the popular anger that could no longer control itself; some of its units were now permitted, free from all the restrictions of the preceding years, to hunt, torture and murder and, in the first unsupervised concentration camps, to give vent to all the sadistic ingenuity of inhibited petty-bourgeois feelings. The number of murdered within the first nine months of the regime has been estimated at 500 to 600, the number of those sent to the concentration camps already announced by Frick on 8 March at about 100,000.

He [Rohm] accused Hitler of being nothing but “a civilian, an ‘artist,’ a dreamer.” From the summer of 1933 onwards he demonstratively revived the SA’s old militaristic tendencies and organized huge parades all over the Reich, voicing his discontent in numerous critical utterances on foreign policy, anti-Semitism, the destruction of the trade unions, or the suppression of freedom of expression. He turned bitterly against Goebbels, Goring, Himmler and Hess and moreover, with his plans for amalgamating the Reichswehr and the SA into a Nationalist Socialist militia, antagonized the generals, who were jealous of their privileges. “The grey rock,” he would say, “must be submerged by the brown flood.”

Thus he gradually arranged the stage upon which his own fate was to be decided. Undoubtedly no revolt was in progress when on the morning of 30 June 1934, drowsy and bemused, he was arrested by Hitler himself.

There died with Ernst Rohm only those children of the revolution who, like himself, wished to achieve in a swift assault what Hitler, in his own words, sought “slowly and purposefully, in tiny steps.” Rohm's conviction, held to the last, that he was in full agreement with Hitler was entirely correct, as is shown by the evolution of the SS, the true victor in this bloody story. For its influence, its power, later attained that all embracing extension which Rohm had planned for his SA. And if his ambitious lieutenants had dreamt of an SA state, now the SS state became a reality.