Hitler and his God

Nazism

“There was actually no ideology as such, no coherent, compact theory which could be called National Socialism. Even central concepts like ‘race’ or ‘Nordic’ were defined in quite differing and loose ways, or not at all,” writes the former Heidelberg Professor Klaus von See. 736 Heinz Höhne, historian of the SS, sees the National Socialist programme in the same way: “Hardly an article of the NSDAP creed was undisputed by its members.” 737 Hans Frank, in the early years Hitler’s lawyer and later a high Nazi dignitary, stated that “fundamentally there were as many National Socialisms as there were leaders”. And Ralph Reuth calls the Nazi movement “a hotchpotch of various ideological trends”. 738 Sayings like these might have surprised the Party’s rank and file, who lived not by bread alone but by the slogans which were inculcated into their brains, but they seem very credible to us now that we have acquired an idea of the varied background from which National Socialism emerged.

In National Socialism there was a Christian current represented by figures like Dietrich Eckart, an admirer of the mystic Johannes Tauler, Arthur Dinter, who wanted to bring the Reformation to a successful end, and Joseph Goebbels, the Catholic who projected his apocalyptic expectations on Hitler and his Third Reich. There was a pronounced tendency towards occultism in Rudolf von Sebottendorff, Master of the Thule Society, and Eckart and Rudolf Hess, both members of this Society; in Otto Rahn, the SS-man with a mission to find the Holy Grail; and in Heinrich Himmler and his Ahnenerbe (ancestral heritage), who relied for several years on the assistance of the Austrian seer Karl Maria Wiligut, alias Weisthor. Himmler made the SS into a combatant occult order.

There was a socialist tendency represented by the brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser, by Goebbels (till Hitler turned his mind), and by a considerable faction of leading SA-men, including Hugo Stennes, who will risk an open revolt against Hitler in Berlin, and also including the chief of the SA, Ernst Röhm, who will stubbornly hold on to his demand that Hitler launches a “second revolution”, more or less socialist. There was an outspoken völkisch vein mainly via the Artamanen, to whom had belonged Himmler, Walther Darré, minister of agriculture, Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, and Martin Bormann, Hitler’s scheming assistant. And there was even a strong oriental influence through Paul de Lagarde, an orientalist precursor, Sebottendorff, renowned astrologer and closely connected with the Turkish aspects of occultism and sufism, Karl Haushofer and his son Albrecht, well acquainted with the Eastern religions and spirituality, Hess, significantly born in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, an occult crossroads between East and West, and Himmler, with his interest in yoga and the Bhagavad Gita. This short list of names which have become familiar to us in the course of our story and which represent various groups of the German population, could be extended endlessly when following the ramifications and the diversity of Nazi interests, many of which were intertwined or overlapped.

The basics of National Socialism may be summarized as follows. The corner stone of the rather ramshackle ideological construction is the idea of the racial superiority of the Aryan-Nordic-Germanic people. Theoretically speaking, the Aryan was, in Hitler’s words, “the Prometheus of mankind”; practically speaking the Germans were the Herrenmenschen, a people above all others, worthy of lording it over them and being served by them. We have seen numerous examples of this fundamental and outspoken conviction in the previous chapters, more specifically in the one entitled “Superior People”. Every form of Fascism is a profession of exalted nationalism. In Germany the sense of superiority and of national Ego, imbibed with the mother milk, took on extraordinary proportions. From it resulted all the rest.

The backbone of National Socialism was the Führerprinzip, the leadership principle. This did not relate only to the Führer, Adolf Hitler, but also to the pyramid of all his underlings, from the heads of the Gaue, or provinces, over the leaders of the districts, localities and sub-localities, to those responsible for the neighbourhoods. It was Hitler’s declared intention to equate the Party with the State, and vice versa. As he said in a speech to one of his Ordensburgen, the highest Party schools: “Our democracy [sic] is built on the idea, firstly, that in every leadership position the responsibility has to be carried not by somebody elected from below, but by somebody selected from above, and this all the way down to the lowest rank; secondly, these persons have an undisputed authority downwards and an absolute accountability upwards … What we have in this way is the principle of absolute obedience and absolute authority.” 739 Quite absolute and absolutistic indeed. This totalitarian system Hitler called “true democracy”, in his opinion infinitely superior to the despicable political system commonly called as such, based on the masses and on vote counting.

However, at the top of the pyramid, and invisibly present everywhere else, there was the Führer, fervently awaited and, now that he had manifested himself as Leader of the German Volk, venerated as the messiah who would redress all injustices and lead them into a new golden age. “Hitler and his propaganda officials were fully aware that the Führer concept was the slogan which responded to the longing of the Germans to be led.” Children in the kindergartens sang a little song which went: “We believe in the Führer / We live for our Führer / We die for our Führer / Till we be heroes.” And the first oath, solemnly sworn by ten year olds, went as follows: “In the presence of the Blood Banner, which represents our Führer, I swear that I shall dedicate all my force and all my strength to the saviour of our country, Adolf Hitler. I am willing and ready to give my life for him, so help me God. One Volk, one Reich, one Führer!” 740

The third basic principle of National Socialism was Gleichschaltung, a term best translated by “integration” – integration into the body of the nazified Volk, that is. The existing order of society had to disappear, as had the existing structure of the German state. At that time, Germany still consisted of no less than 17 federal parts, which were states in their own right and possessed state prerogatives. In a matter of months Hitler effaced these remnants of the feudal age and replaced them with a structured totalitarian system in which ultimately everybody would become uniform and wear uniform. Hitler’s idea of “true democracy” turned out to be the rigidly structured hierarchy of the army, in which the insignia on the uniform mattered, not the person inside it. As a Nazi poet sang, they were becoming “the fist of the Führer”. Only the insight gained by analyzing the German “refusal to think” can make us, people of this post-modern age, understand not only that “democracy was surrendered without a fight” (Kershaw) and that “seldom a nation surrendered as readily all its rights and liberties” (Friedrich), but also that the loss of democracy was “very widely” felt as “a redemption and a liberation” (Haffner).

The fourth principle of National Socialism concerned the relations with the world outside Germany, in the first place the settling of accounts with France. Most of Hitler’s hottest propaganda in the years of the budding Nazi movement was quite simply an expression of the general feelings among the population about the war defeat, the false mythification of the causes of this defeat, and the humiliation of being forced to accept the Treaty of Versailles. The germ of Germany’s superiority complex had been the early feeling of inferiority of a backward medieval country towards “the South” and its cultural riches. Its hatred had focused more and more upon neighbouring France, especially when France became the culturally dominant nation in Europe whose language replaced Latin as the European lingua franca. Napoleon conquered and abolished the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in 1806. The shock of his presence and drastic reforms was, as we have seen, the direct incentive to Germany’s revival.

Hitler, if he meant anything at all, had to avenge Versailles; his carefully staged signing by a humiliated France of the armistice at Compiègne, in June 1940, carried him to the pinnacle of his prestige and power. Now he had to realize the rest of the pan-German “war aims”, create “a place in the sun” for Germany and conquer the “living space” which would provide his people of Herrenmenschen with their rightful possessions and resources. Justifications for such immoral Darwinist actions, be they theories, treaties or conquests, did not really matter. Whether erecting “a wall against communism” or signing a non-aggression pact with the same communists: the people would accept anything as long as they felt that it was for their glory and betterment.

This brings us to the fifth and last principle of National Socialism: anti-Semitism. John Weiss called the prevailing anti-Jewish atmosphere in Germany its “ideology of death”; Daniel Goldhagen caused an uproar with his 1996 book on “eliminationist anti-Semitism in modern Germany”. Both books were a necessary and very late reflection on the German responsibility for the Holocaust, as were the vehement reactions and comments following in their wake. Throughout our story we have seen the growth of the irrational anti-Jewish sentiment. There are numerous records of pro-Jewish gestures by German Aryans, but it is undeniable that the general atmosphere was inimical towards the Jews.

There is no doubt that Hitler did not have to push much to make a National Socialist kick a Jew, and harassing those “other” people was a lot of fun for a member of the Hitler Youth, as retaliation was out of the question. National Socialism wanted to discard the Jews from German society. Hitler wanted to eradicate them physically, sooner or later, from the body of humanity. Did a National Socialist realize this? Almost certainly not, although he could have guessed it if he had attentively read what his Führer had written, or if he had carefully listened to what his Führer shouted from the rooftops. But even if a “brownshirt” had known it, he would have repressed the thought. Thus he helped directly or indirectly to execute his Führer’s orders, and in so doing participated in the slaughter.