Hitler and his God

Hitlerism

The NSDAP programme, at the beginning of 1920 hastily concocted by Hitler and Anton Drexler, lost much of its actuality as the movement evolved, especially the more or less cranky articles concerning the state finances and the economy. Still Hitler refused to change one iota of the programme – except the point concerning the powers of the Party Führer, who in the original version remained under the control of a senior committee, but whose power of course had to become absolute once Hitler was accorded dictatorial powers.

“Hitler’s ‘Catholic’ streak seldom emerges so clearly as in his respect for rigid, immutable formulas. All that really matters is a political creed, he would say, ‘that is what the whole world revolves around’. And he would add that ‘no matter how idiotic’ a programme was, ‘people would believe in it because of the firmness with which it is advocated’. In fact Hitler declared the old party programme, in spite of its obvious weaknesses, ‘unalterable’. The outmoded, archaic features of the programme transformed it from an object of discussion to one of veneration. Moreover, its purpose was not to answer questions or define aims but to attract attention. Clarification would mean division, Hitler said. Faith was all. Once he had insisted on the identity of Führer and idea, the principle of the infallible, immutable Führer was equally established. One of his adherents put it in a nutshell: ‘Our programme can be expressed in two words: Adolf Hitler’.” 741

Hitler was the man who walked by himself. “Nothing is more misleading than to speak in the same breath about Hitler and such potentates like Goebbels, Göring, Ribbentrop and Himmler, and to consider Hitler as primus inter pares [first among equals], as sometimes happens. He is a phenomenon apart, a force which walks independently from the Party chiefs, who are put in their positions by him, whom he uses, and who are in no way capable to act independently from him.” 742

“We knew only the very least about him”, admits Rauschning. “His most intimate Party comrades had no idea of what he was planning, of what he intended to lay at least the foundations.” 743 We have seen that even Speer and Goebbels remained in the dark, not only about the big picture but about crucial decisions. “Never in my life have I met a person who so seldom revealed his feelings”, testifies Speer, “and if he did so, who instantly locked them away again. During my time in Spandau [prison, after the war] I talked with Hess about this pecularity of Hitler’s. Both of us agreed that there had been moments when we felt we had come close to him. But we were invariably disillusioned. If either of us ventured a slightly more personal tone, Hitler promptly put up an unbreakable wall.” 744

Speer also asserts that Hitler put up a different act in different circumstances, adapting himself to the people present. In connection with the “table talk” at the Rastenburg headquarters, Speer warns: “Hitler tended to falsify himself when he sat at the table in the Führer’s headquarters. I was always struck by the choiceness with which he would express himself in a group of officers and other cultivated persons, sometimes to the extent of using a distinctly stilted style. This was a different Hitler from the one I knew in the private circle; again, he must have been altogether different in the company of Gauleiters and other Party functionaries, when he relapsed into the jargon of the period of struggle and comradeship.” 745

Nazism is generally considered to have been a form of Fascism, after the First World War symptomatic in almost every developed nation on the globe. This is only partially true and in its most superficial features: the greatness of the nation, the integration of the whole nation into one body, its hierarchization and uniformization, and the heroic posturing towards its neighbours. All fascisms also had their “leader” – Führer, Duce, Caudillo, Netaji, or with whatever word “leader” was translated. Specific to Nazism, however, was the special character of its leader and the fact that the movement was identified with him, in a way even Italian Fascism and Mussolini could not be compared with. “Nothing is more misleading than to call Hitler a fascist”, writes Sebastian Haffner in his Anmerkungen zu Hitler (notes on Hitler), “his nationalism was everything except a fascism”. 746

“National Socialism was fundamentally and from the very start ‘Hitlerism’, and Hitler himself was, seen in this way, the first convinced ‘Hitlerite’”, writes Jochen Kirchhoff. He repeats Gottfried Benn’s question: did Hitler create the movement or did the movement create him? The answer of all knowledgeable people is unanimous: “There was and is no National Socialism without Hitler. Both are identical.” 747 If Hitler was Germany, as Rudolf Hess cried out in front of the brown battalions at Nuremberg, then he was a fortiori National Socialism. Therefore Fest can quote prominent Nazis as stating not only that “Hitler was the most radical Nazi of all”, but even that he was “the only Nazi” – just as Nietzsche said that Christ had been the only Christian. It was this way of seeing which allowed Konrad Heiden to entitle a chapter of his early Hitler biography “Hitler versus National Socialism”, in which “National Socialism” stood for the common view of fascism, while Hitler and Hitlerism were something different altogether, and much more extreme.

There are many testimonies to the fact that “Hitler’s plans and war aims never changed”, as Speer puts it. Fest writes about “the tenaciously pursued vision in the background”, and says that “the structure of [Hitler’s] thinking was such that he understood every phenomenon merely as a further argument for ideas fixed long ago”, which revealed “the continuity in Hitler’s thought”. 748 Hitler began his public life at the age of thirty, and wrote in Mein Kampf: “When a man has reached his thirtieth year he has still a great deal to learn. That is obvious. But henceforward what he learns will principally be an amplification of his basic ideas; it will be fitted in with them organically so as to fill up the framework of that fundamental Weltanschauung which he already possesses.” 749

The “amplification” in Hitler’s ideas is easy to follow. He started in Munich, under Eckart’s guidance, with the adamant conviction that the Germans were the Herrenmenschen; that he was the one come to lead them towards the fulfilment of their Volkhood and their highest aims; and that the Jews were the enemies of this fulfilment. The practical aspects of this task coincided for the most part with the political aspirations of that time. In the prison at Landsberg, and most probably under the influence of Rosenberg, Hess and Haushofer, the scope of Hitler’s aims widened. He now became the missioned Leader who had to conquer a firm and durable foothold in Europe for the Aryan race, and to ready his Aryan legions for world conquest. Then, as Chancellor of the Reich, he capitalized on the political situation to secure the foundations of the Aryan world empire, and to execute what until then had been unthinkable, the genocide of the Jews.

Hermann Rauschning¹ has already been quoted elsewhere as saying that Hitler could not proclaim his great, basic ideas openly from the start. He had at first to stick to the “fascist”, i.e. “national” and “socialist”, programme which the recruits of the movement could understand and accept. Because of his demagogic style and his Führer mentality Hitler was already considered by the realists among the Nazis “a clairvoyant and fantast”, even without the proclamation of his global ambitions. Only his quasi-miraculous internal and external successes as Chancellor will heat up the expectations to a point where the German Messiah could publicly formulate any ambition, however grandiose, and order its execution. What, then, were the differences between Nazism and Hitlerism?

Pure Hitlerism was the creation of the SS as a personal bodyguard within the SA. At the appropriate moment, after the SA had been beheaded in “the Night of the Long Knives”, the SS would become independent and directly responsible to Hitler alone. The Black Knights were intended to be the embodiment of Hitler’s racial ideal, and functioned like a religious order, “the Order of the Death’s Head”. Apart from and feared by all other National Socialist organizations, and acting as a ruthless police force only accountable to the Supreme Chief, they grew practically into a state within the State, and would after the successful completion of the war enjoy the status of supermen as the highest racial nobility among the Aryans.

However arrogant the Nazi attitude was towards Germany’s opponents, real and fictional, the average National Socialist could hardly take Hitler’s claims for “living space” in Eastern Europe seriously. The obvious reason was that such living space could not be acquired, given the system of European alliances and the presence of “arch enemy France” on its Western border, without a war on two fronts, doomed to be fatal for the fatherland. Hitler launched nonetheless “Operation Barbarossa”, the military plan for the invasion of Russia, immediately after his triumphant Blitzkrieg in the West, and sent General Jodl to inform the highest staff officers that preparations had to be made accordingly. John Toland relates the consternation of these experienced officers in his popular Hitler biography. “A chorus of protests erupted. This was the two front war which had defeated Germany in the First World War. And why this sudden change after the [non-aggression] Pact with Moscow?” But Jodl cut short the debate. “Gentlemen”, he said, “this is not a question for discussion but a decision of the Führer”. 750 Hitler reigned supreme and alone.

National Socialism in the mind of its adherents meant in the first place an internal revolution which would give them stability and order instead of chaos, employment instead of joblessness and desperation, and bread instead of hunger and poverty. True, a national feeling of superiority was part of the German character, and to avenge the Versailles Treaty was one of the main items on the National Socialist agenda, but it was secondary to the internal redress. World conquest and a final struggle with international Jewry were no more than fantastic ideas in the mind of “Adolf”, used to excite his audiences when he was somewhat carried away. “That these fantastic ideas of Hitler would allow him to go forward on his exceptional path and give the lie to all sceptics, was at the time clear to only a very few.” 751

There can be no doubt that “the final solution” was in Hitler’s mind from the beginning of his career and remained always present, even when circumstances forced him to agree for a while with the Madagascar plan or with the emigration of the German and Austrian Jews. The ultimate settlement of accounts between the false and the true Chosen People was, in Hitler’s vision, inevitable. The growth of the National Socialist movement, the regained prosperity of Germany, and the industrialization and regimentation of the German people never had any other aim than the war of the Aryans to conquer the world, which in Hitler’s mind was only possible by slaying the enemy, “international Jewry”. “Of what Hitler’s inner truth consisted, nobody knew”, writes Joachim Köhler, but the apocalyptic battle with the Jews was certainly part of it. “He clearly kept a secret in which he believed with ‘granite’ infallibility … Hitler has never revealed with a single word that he was planning the biggest autodafé in history,” 752 writes Jochen Kirchhoff. And he concludes: “What many thought to be National Socialism was only a façade or masquerade.” 753 It was fare for the disdained masses.