Hitler and his God

A New World

The influence of Oswald Spengler and his Decline of the West was widespread, and the Nazi intellectuals did their best to make him openly chose their side. Their attempt was not very logical considering Spengler’s pessimistic view of the destiny of the West and of humanity as a whole, while the Nazis foresaw a golden future for the Aryan race. Hitler was quite aware of this incongruity and did not hesitate to put things straight after having given, as the new Chancellor of the nation, an audience to Spengler in Bayreuth. “I am not a supporter of Oswald Spengler! I don’t believe in the decline of the West. On the contrary, I consider it my task, conferred upon me by Providence, to contribute to its prevention.” For he, Hitler, was convinced that “the old Aryan culture, under the leadership of Nordic man, would experience a rebirth”. Moreover, Spengler made himself unpopular in Bayreuth because of his critical remarks about Richard Wagner, and was there henceforth referred to only as “the Decline”. 778

Hitler thought of himself as the prophet of “an entirely new Weltanschauung”, a word which may be translated as “world vision” or “ideology”. Comparing his world vision with the prevailing one in Europe, he wrote in Mein Kampf: “A philosophy of life which is inspired by an infernal spirit of intolerance [the “Jewish” Enlightenment doctrine of liberty, equality and fraternity!] can only be set aside by a doctrine that is advanced in an equally ardent spirit [i.e. his own] and fought for with as determined a will, and which is itself a new idea, pure and absolutely true … Political parties are prone to enter compromises, but an ideology never does this. A political party is inclined to adjust its teachings with a view to meeting those of its opponents, but an ideology proclaims its own infallibility … While the programme of the ordinary political party is nothing but the recipe for cooking up favourable results out of the next general elections, the programme of an ideology represents a declaration of war against an existing order of things, against present conditions, in short, against the established ideology.” 779

It was the task of a political organized ideology, in contrast with an ordinary political party, “to transmit a certain idea which originated in the head of one individual [Adolf Hitler by name] to a multitude of people and to supervise the manner in which this idea is being put into practice … The greatness of every powerful organization which embodies a creative idea lies in the spirit of religious devotion and intolerance with which it stands out against all others, because it has an ardent faith in its own right … The future of a movement is determined by the devotion, and even intolerance, with which its members fight for their cause. They must feel convinced that their cause alone is just, and they must carry it through to success, as against other similar organizations in the same field.” 780 For “an ideology is intolerant and cannot be satisfied with the role of being ‘a party among others’; it exacts peremptorily its own, exclusive and total recognition together with the complete adaptation of public life in accordance with its way of seeing things. Neither can it tolerate a survival of the institutions of the previous situation.” 781

Here the standpoint and intentions of Hitler’s National Socialism were fully spelled out in black and white; from this line Hitler never wavered. He steadfastly refused to compromise with any other organization, however rightist or völkisch, a standpoint he sometimes had to fight out with his closest supporters when the NSDAP was still small in numbers. Hitler was the prophet of a new ideology based on faith which implied, to his mind, the overthrow of all existing ideologies and faiths, and which would create a new world. The rank and file of the NSDAP perceived only the external shell of Hitler’s Messianic world view; rare exceptions had an inkling of the more profound meaning; and nobody knew the core of Hitler’s vision, for he kept it locked within himself.

It will be abundantly clear from the preceding parts of our story that Hitler’s vision, whatever its core, was anti-Christian and anti-Enlightenment. In the world which he envisioned the words “love”, “soul”, “individualization”, “equality”, “freedom”, “socialism”, “internationalism”, “liberalism”, etc. were frequently used, but in a rhetorical way and always meaning something different from their common significance. What Hitler wanted to create was a Spartan totalitarianism (quite similar to Stalin’s handiwork), with people who would be smiling, healthy, fanatical and soulless robots, totally integrated into the common body of the Volk and disdaining individual dignity as a kind of psychological leprosy.

We remember that Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that the greatness of the (fictional) Aryan consisted in “his willingness to put all his abilities in the service of the community”. In this Aryan the instinct of self-preservation had reached its noblest form, “since he willingly subordinates his own ego to the life of the community and, if the hour demands, even sacrifices it”. That the German nation had to be subjected to a rigid regimentation was established in Hitler’s mind from the very beginning. “I know that I have to be a strict educator”, he said to Rauschning. “I first must create the Volk”, which was to become the Führer’s sword. “We have to be cruel (grausam)”, he said. “We must again [as in the primitive past?] be able to be cruel with a good conscience. Only in this way can we eradicate the soft-heartedness and the sentimental philisterhood, the ‘cosiness’ and the bourgeois pettiness from our Volk. We have no time left for nice feelings. We have to force our people to greatness if it has to fulfil its historical task.” 782

“Together with the construction of tanks, cannons and airplanes the people in ‘the community of the Volk’ too were militarized. The dictator intended to wage the war for the living space with convinced National Socialists … The Germans were being re-educated. The Führer dictatorship did not stop at the front door. Its tentacles reached out to the whole family and the inmost thought of the individual. In Hitler’s words, there should not remain ‘any free space in which the individual belongs to himself’. The process of total penetration took place almost unnoticed. Its main instrument was the [omnipresent] Party.” (Guido Knopp 783) For Hitler had written in Mein Kampf that the state was “a means to an end”, and that the end lay “in the preservation and advancement of a community of physically and psychically homogeneous creatures”. 784

“A revolutionary conception of the world and human existence will achieve decisive success only when the new world vision has been taught to a whole people, or subsequently forced upon them if necessary, and when, on the other hand, the control organization, the movement itself, is in the hands of only those few men who are absolutely indispensable to form the nerve centres of the coming state.” 785 Henry Picker, the secret annotator (on Bormann’s instigation) of Hitler’s table talk, writes: “The NSDAP had de facto a complete control of every citizen … With his uniformization of the whole nation Hitler had almost formed a new type of man who put the will above the intellect, and toughness and faith above the natural feelings.” The daily life of the nation was “put under Prussian military discipline, the ‘community of the people’ was transformed into ‘a battle-ready fighting community’ in which every male from his youth to an advanced age was carrying weapons”. 786 “The sacrifice of the individual existence is necessary in order to assure the conservation of the race”, Hitler wrote, and later said the same in a less civil way: “The life of the individual should not be given such high value. A fly lays a million eggs, they all die. But flies survive.” 787 Burleigh calls this “an unfeeling form of neo-barbarism”, which may be an understatement.

Soon after the Hitler take-over their country became hermetically closed for the German people. This had to happen if Hitler’s “strict education” was to be effective, in other words if the propaganda, methodically planned to reorder the contents of the German brain, was to reach every individual in every corner of the Reich. Hitler had written a whole chapter on propaganda in Mein Kampf, camouflaging it under the title “War Propaganda”, where he says: “I soon came to realize that the right use of propaganda was an asset in itself and that this art was practically unknown to our bourgeois parties.” Ominous words at a time that the radio medium came into itself. “In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility”, 788 he wrote, thus stating his basic truth of the lie and giving his game away. But he should not have bothered. It is one of the object lessons of Hitlerian history and its aftermath to learn how compelling the art of the brazen lie was in gathering the nation behind its Führer.

For sure, Hitler did not invent all this; some of this psychological knowledge of the human being belonged to ancient or common wisdom, other insights were found in contemporary French authors. Hitler, though, acquired a clear idea of the psychological mechanisms and their effectiveness, and by means of them he would recreate the daily reality of a Germany which became an island of total irrationality in a semi-rational world. “Propaganda demands the most skilled brains that can be found”, he wrote. When Joseph Goebbels appeared within his field of vision Hitler somehow sensed his abilities at once, although the little doctor still thought of himself as a “socialist” who wanted to expel the reactionary Hitler from the Party.

Joseph Goebbels, appointed cultural czar of the Third Reich and working under Hitler’s close supervision, excelled in the comparatively new techniques of propaganda. His basic concept was plain and unencumbered by moral qualms: “The propaganda which produces the desired results is good and all other propaganda is bad.” 789 According to William Shirer, who experienced the Third Reich from nearby, Goebbels “completely isolated the world the Germans lived in”. 790 And Robert Gellately writes: “Hitler’s Germany became a modern mass society, in which there were not only millions of newspaper readers and regular consumers of the news at the movies but radio itself became enormously popular. Once radio overcame the mistake of spending too much time on obvious political messages, its attractions proved almost irresistible. Radio was listened to at home as well as in public places like restaurants and even at work. German broadcasters recognized that they had to provide the right mix of entertainment, news, and specials such as a Hitler speech.” 791

“In matters of propaganda our party comrades are the undisputed masters”, wrote Goebbels. 792 The source of their inspiration, and this from the very beginning, was none other than Hitler himself. He had realized the importance of propaganda; he had organized the first public marches and ceremonies, which would be imitated and elaborated upon in the following years; he had chosen the symbols, slogans and uniforms with an impressive effectiveness; he had built up the omnipresent party pyramid; and he had detected the slumbering propagandistic talents of Dr Goebbels. Hitler’s visionary shaping of the National Socialist movement was one of his great achievements. “At the end of 1926 the party set up a speakers’ school to give its followers the techniques and information needed for effective public speaking. By the end of 1932 this school had, according to its records, trained some 6000 speakers,” 793 who spread the word, evening after evening, in the smallest and most remote hamlets of the country. This too was Hitler’s initiative.