Hitler and his God

Hitler Was No Accident

How was all that possible: Hitler, Nazism, the Second World War, the Holocaust…? The major tragedy of the 20th century has remained an unexplained mystery with a thousand explanations, justifications and refutations, especially among the people who started it all, the Germans. Were they not universally considered, before their nation plunged into its delirium, to be a people of Dichter und Denker, poets and thinkers, and perhaps still more essentially musicians? The previous chapters may have shown some force lines leading up to the tragedy (and we are not yet at the end of our story). But the historical concatenations are hardly known except to students of history, and Hitler is mostly represented in the popular mind as a devil or a clown, or both. The unusual dimensions of the movement he created, the admiration and enthusiasm he evoked, and the slaughter he caused, made some Germans explain away their guilt by positing that his apparition on the political stage and the subsequent global tragedy in which he starred were something out of the ordinary, irrational, and therefore an “accident” of history.

Several knowledgeable people have pointed out that Hitler was not an accident. So for instance George Mosse, who wrote: “National Socialism was not an aberration; neither was it without historical foundation. It was, rather, the product of the interplay of economic, social and political forces on the one hand, and human perceptions, hopes and longing for the good life on the other. National Socialism was successful as a mass movement precisely because it was able to turn long-cherished myths and symbols to its own purpose.” 354 Sebastian Haffner, who had to flee from Nazi Germany, wrote: “We overestimate Hitler’s capacities enormously if we believe that he has been able to produce this mass [of supporters] in a span of twenty years from nothing. He must have found them ready. Hardly perceptible from outside, the raw material for the national-socialist leadership stratum must already have been available in such a way that it was only to be brought to the surface from the amorphous mass of German people.” 355 And Joachim Fest observes: “Ultimately everything terminated in Hitler; he was by no means a ‘German catastrophe’, as the title of a well-known book asserted, but a product of German consistency.” 356

Among the first to use the word “accident” in connection with Hitler seems to have been Thomas Mann, the great novelist, writing or addressing his radio messages from exile to the German people. He wrote in November 1939: “Hitler, wretched as he is, is no accident; he would never have been possible without the psychological preconditions which have to be sought much deeper than in inflation, unemployment, capitalistic speculation or political intrigue.” 357 In John Weiss’ Ideology of Death we find: “The two most popular intellectuals of late nineteenth-century Germany [Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn] were indistinguishable from Nazi ideologists. Given this cultural fact, it is amazing how many still think that National Socialism had little intellectual connection with the German past … The future leaders of Germany and their supporters were created long before 1914. It was never just Hitler and a few Nazis … By 1914 significant numbers of upper- and lower-class conservatives welcomed the ideas we call Nazi ideology, and they did so even though Germany had not suffered the traumas of a lost war, inflation, or depression. Hitler’s themes were well known before he ever spoke …” 358

It was also Thomas Mann who in 1934 pointed out the influence of Luther on the Nazi movement in general and Hitler in particular: “No, Hitler is no accident, no inexplicable misfortune, no derailment. From him ‘light’ reflects on Luther, and one has to recognise the latter to a large degree in the former. Hitler is a true German phenomenon.” 359 Another writer in exile, Hans Habe, expressed the same idea in one of his novels: “Everything has started with Luther … Luther is the inventor of National Socialism. The textbooks of National Socialism are no more than copies of the Wittenberg Theses … Luther’s Church is already the ‘German Church’ – and therefore no church any longer. The spreading of the Lutheran teaching started with a terrible war, and since then there has been no end to the splitting up of the world into two. Luther invented a church for one nation and he tried to hire the Lord God for his people. In all wars since then one finds the Lutheran germ – also in the [First] World War. The arrogant simplicity of Protestantism has gifted the German people with the delusion of their being the chosen people.” 360

“National Socialism is the fulfilment of what the Germans call their ‘being’”, wrote Joseph Roth. “A direct path leads from Luther by way of Frederick II, Bismarck, William II and Ludendorff to Hitler and Rosenberg … As to me, I can, with all respect for the Protestants, not see any difference between Luther’s writings, for example those to the German nobles, and the writings of Mister Rosenberg. [Luther’s] ninety-five theses accord exactly with [Rosenberg’s] Myth of the Twentieth Century. A straight line leads from the famous inkpot, with which Luther is said to have had a go at the devil, to the equally famous ‘scrap of paper’ [Hitler’s disdainful designation of the neutrality treaty with Belgium]. Who cannot see already in Luther’s betrayal of the peasants, the princes and the Jews an early example of the betrayal by the Prussian-Protestant officers of their Church and the world as a whole, is no more than a naïve fool.” 361