Hitler and his God

The Leader and the Masses

In Mein Kampf Hitler left no doubt as to who was going to lead the Aryans in their struggle for supremacy. Although the book was written at a time when still several candidate-dictators were around, and Hitler never names himself, one does not have to cogitate much before finding out whom he means for instance in the following lines: “It is a characteristic feature of all great reforms that in the beginning there is only one single protagonist to come forward on behalf of several millions of people. The final goal of a great reformation has often been the object of profound longing on the part of hundreds of thousands for many centuries before, until finally one of them comes forward as a herald to announce the will of that multitude and becomes the standard-bearer of the old yearning, which he now leads to a new realization in a new idea.” 295

To dominate the masses, Hitler-the-Leader had been gifted with the power of the spoken word and was very much aware of its potential; he had been able to test out “the superior oratorical art of a man who has the compelling character of an apostle” on audiences of all kinds, small and large. “The force which has ever and always set in motion great historical avalanches of religious and political movements is the magic power of the spoken word. The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force. All great movements are popular movements. They are the volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotions, stirred into activity by the ruthless Goddess of Distress or by the torch of the spoken word cast into the midst of the people. In no case have great movements been set afoot by the syrupy effusions of aesthetic litterateurs and drawing-room heroes. The doom of a nation can be averted only by a storm of glowing passion: but only those who are passionate themselves can arouse passion in others.” 296 The passionately spoken word was, with the tenacity of his convictions and the influence which at times emanated from his presence, Hitler’s trump card in his climb to power.

“The psyche of the broad masses is accessible only to what is strong and uncompromising. Like a woman whose inner sensibilities are not so much under the sway of abstract reasoning but are always subject to the influence of a vague emotional longing for the strength that completes her being, and who would rather bow to the strong man than dominate the weakling – in like manner the masses of the people prefer the ruler to the suppliant and are filled with a stronger sense of mental security by a teaching that brooks no rival than by a teaching which offers them a liberal choice. They have very little idea of how to make such a choice and thus they are prone to feel that they have been abandoned … They are scarcely conscious that their freedom as human beings is impudently abused, and thus they have not the slightest suspicion of the intrinsic fallacy of the whole doctrine. They see only the ruthless force and brutality of its determined utterances, to which they always submit.” 297

What is so unsettling about Mein Kampf is the barefaced disdain with which Hitler wrote about “the masses” who were after all his own audiences – who were the German people. This may have been the main reason why in later years he expressed regret about having written the book, for on so many pages was set down that the leader of the German masses, their adored Führer, would not hesitate to use and abuse them, indeed that it was his intention to do so. He should not have bothered, though; the atmosphere created in a limited way at the meetings and afterwards in a general way when the whole of Germany had become his theatre and audience, proved prohibitive to the use of the faculty of reason. Hitler could write freely about “millions of German imbeciles”, “the dunder-headed multitude”, “the vacillating crowd of human children”, “the feebleness of their understanding and the quickness of their forgetting”: they would applaud him frantically nonetheless. This proved that his insight in the psychology of the masses was right, whether he got it from Gustave Le Bon or Georges Sorel via Eckart, from reading The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, or from his own intuition and experience. Hitler, the theatre man, was a genius at mass psychology, which made him a genius at propaganda; and when he picked out Joseph Goebbels as his right-hand man in these fields, his intuition was proved correct once more.

We are now at the heart of the German tragedy. Hitler sought not only to dominate the masses: his objective from the first to the last was to use them. “The readiness to sacrifice one’s personal work and, if necessary, even one’s life for others shows its most highly developed form in the Aryan race. The greatness of the Aryan is not based on his intellectual powers, but rather on his willingness to devote all his faculties to the service of the community. Here the instinct for self-preservation has reached its noblest form; for the Aryan willingly subordinates his own ego to the common weal and when necessity calls he will even sacrifice his own life to the community.” 298 Being against the acquisitions of the Enlightenment, Nazism was against all forms of individualism. The total uniformization of Germany, the forests of stiffly raised arms, the clicking of boot heels, the endlessly pulsating roars of Sieg Heil! – all of that was an unmistakable warning which was not heeded. “What Hitler had in mind”, writes Zentner, “was the inner unity of the nation, welded into a strictly organized marching column, prepared for self-sacrifice and ready at any time to execute any order of the National-Socialist leadership”. 299 Hitler compared the unified masses which were the nation to a sword, his weapon to wage war. “War and destruction were essential to restore the shaky balance of the world: that was the morality and the metaphysics of his politics.” (Fest 300) He formulated these objectives quite openly: “To forge this sword is the task of the interior political leadership; to secure the forging and look for allies in the battle is the task of the exterior political leadership.” 301

“One should seriously doubt if Hitler has loved the Germans”, ruminates Eberhard Jäckel. 302 “I know that I have to be a stern educator. I first have to create the Volk before I can think of solving the problems we as a nation are confronted with in the present time”, said Hitler to Rauschning. “We have to be prepared for the toughest struggle which a people ever had to wage. It is only through such a test of the will that we can grow ready for the overlordship to which we are called. It will be my duty to wage this war without concern for the losses. The blood sacrifices will be enormous. Anyone of us knows what total war means … Towns will become ruins, noble buildings will disappear for ever. This time our sacred soil will not be spared. But I don’t fear this. We will stand firm, we will not stop fighting. Germany will arise from these ruins more beautiful and greater than any country in the world, ever.” 303