Hitler and his God

The First World War

“The tension of the present time must result in a discharge”, wrote Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the German general staff, a few weeks before the First World War began. When the explosion finally occurred, in August 1914, it was greeted in all concerned countries with jubilation, caused by an instantaneous inflation of the national egos. The Archbishop of Cambrai proclaimed in a pastoral letter: “The French soldiers feel more or less strongly and clearly that they are soldiers of Christ and Mary, defenders of the Faith, and that dying in the French way means dying in the Christian way. It is Christ who loves the French.” 408 And the English poet Rupert Brooke wrote on the occasion: “Now, God be thanked who has matched us with His hour …”

Nowhere was the enthusiasm greater than in Germany, convinced that, by way of a lightning-quick war, God was clearing its long-deserved and promised place among the peoples. Fritz Fischer quotes Max Lenz, his predecessor on the chair of history at Hamburg University, who wrote in the first days of the war: “Our youth, jubilant as if they went to a feast, submit themselves to the trial by ordeal of the battles. In our people the spirit of Siegfried has arisen in which the principal characteristics of all true religiosity are present: humility, loyalty, obedience, a sense of duty to the extreme, and the strength of our faith in the victory of a just cause … We will be victorious because we have to be victorious, for God cannot abandon his people.” 409

The military men were not the only promoters of the war; they were strongly supported, not to say pushed, by the great industrialists and by the Pan-Germans – in fact by the whole block of nationalist reactionaries. They were also supported by the Protestant Church, which since the times of its founder, Martin Luther, had always been a nationalist Church. This Church, addressing the faithful every Sunday from the pulpit, was a very influential voice in the concert of opinions, which was already essentially nationalistic and inimical to the rest of an inferior but threatening world.

“In those days hundreds of war sermons were published as testimonies to the German spirit and faith”, writes Fischer. “There one reads time and again that persevering will be possible only if ‘the spirit of 1914’ remains alive. Together with these ideas there was the conviction that the Germans were the chosen people. In sermons without number the Germans were presented as God’s people because God had entrusted them with the task of lifting up the world, by means of this war, to a higher cultural level. The reasoning follows that God has proposed to them to become victorious and powerful also on the material level; they have to accept this proposal because God’s intention is the well-being of the German people.” 410 And Fischer quotes the words spoken at a ceremony in honour of William II: “If anywhere in history, then it is in our history that the divine providence is palpably present. God has come to meet us, it is God’s will that acts in world history. Being one with our history means being one with God.” Which goes to show that Hegel’s way of seeing things was very much alive. “The German people are frequently mentioned as the instrument of God”, writes Fischer. “One often reads: we believe in the task our people have to accomplish for the world.” 411

As shown in the previous pages, the acme the German national ego reached in August 1914 was prepared throughout the preceding century, not as a vague sentiment but in clearly articulated thought and formulation. A time bomb had started ticking in the young, ambitious German nation. There were threats that it would light the fuse on several occasions in the first years of the twentieth century, for instance at the time of the Morocco crises and the wars in the Balkan. When in the end a handful of prominent Germans in sensitive political and military positions decided, somehow to their own perplexity, to do the decisive deed, the nation exulted.

Sharing in the exultation on the Odeonsplatz in Munich was a twenty-five year old painter of watercolours who had been rejected as unfit by the Austrian army, but who now volunteered to sacrifice his life for Germany in a Bavarian regiment. In Adolf Hitler’s later speeches and writings one can trace all the thoughts touched upon above, but fitted into his own peculiar frame of mind. The more one studies the two World Wars, the more one is intrigued by the parallels between the first and the second one: the drive for world hegemony in Germany, the intended conquests in Belgium and France, the unfulfilled hope of an agreement with Great Britain, the plans for a colonization of Russia, the two-front-war feared and nevertheless engaged into, the pretence of being the leading, superior people in the world … The First World War and the Second World war were actually two episodes of one and the same war.