Hitler and his God

The Quest for World Domination

“The Germans once held the whole world in their hands and they will do so again, and with more power than ever”, wrote that exalted anonymous German in 1510. Similar feelings were given vent in the following centuries (as we will see below), not in reference to the Book of a Hundred Chapters, which was discovered late in the 19th century, but expressing what had become a fixed emotional component of the German character. As Germany was a patchwork of principalities for centuries, also when constituting the basis of the Holy Roman Reich, and became a nation in the true sense only in 1871, there must have been some underlying ideological foundation for the feeling of “Germanness”, of belonging to a German Volk. It was this special sense of belonging which made them sing, long before they raised their right arm to Hitler: “Today Germany belongs to us, tomorrow the whole world”, and shout slogans like “Am deutschen Wesen wird die Welt genesen”, meaning that the rest of the world would regain its health if it shared in the German being.

The rest of the world could only become healthy on condition that all submitted to the Germans and polished their boots. Léon Poliakov calls this “the megalomaniac German delirium”, which would lead to “the Nazis’ dead-bringing delusion of being the masters of the world” (Rüdiger Sünner). “The German patriotism was the weakest point in the Germany of the pre-Hitler period”, writes Sebastian Haffner in 1939, “the spot where the toxin of National-Socialism could infiltrate. And that is still now the only point on which the Nazis and many civilized Germans agree.” 364 In this quotation everything depends on the meaning of the word “patriotism”, which can be no other, considering Germany’s fragmented past, than “völkisch ego” or, for the sake of convenience, “national ego”, in its numerous variants from “self-awareness” up to “feeling of superiority”. From the time of the Renaissance onward the Germans developed a chronically inflated or inflamed ego, which would in the end blind them to reality. This national ego was the main cause of the Hitler phenomenon and the disasters following in its wake. It made the Germans rally around their Leader; it made them go out and spill their blood for a Greater Germany to which the world would have to bow; it made them feel the true Chosen People, entitled and even missioned to exterminate the false pretenders, the Jews.

This development is rather surprising if one has a look at the history of the German master race. As a Volk they were a battered people for centuries, moving, in the words of H.R. Trevor-Roper, “from disaster to disaster”. The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), actually a series of wars between the Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist religions, but exploited by all participants to further their material interests, was fought mainly on German soil by mercenary armies. It was so devastating that at its end all German principalities lay in ruins and one third (in some places more than one half) of the population had fallen victim to the war. Some say that Germany never recovered from this scourge. The patchwork of principalities and “free cities” was perpetuated by the Peace of Westphalia (1648) which concluded the war; their particularities and rivalries, which Hitler tried hard to efface, live mutedly on to this day.

“The very real difference that separated Germany from the West” (Mosse) was caused by the political and cultural isolation resulting from the Thirty Years’ War. Germany as a whole did not participate in the philosophical movement of renewal which is called the “Enlightenment”, although some of its thinkers and princes were open to it and even contributed to it; the body of the people remained stuck in its “sacred” traditions, mainly superstitions deeply rooted in the dark ages. Even if the names of the old gods were practically forgotten, a certain mentality from olden times survived, especially in the countryside, and Christianity was, on the more popular level, no more than a set of additional superstitions added to the ancient beliefs. The German tribes, Christianized by force, had been “badly baptized”. Even Hitler will compare the Christian culture in Germany to a veneer covering a world of ancient fears and impulses still very much alive. These were the hidden realities Romanticism fell back on, as did, in its wake, the völkisch movement which built up an imaginary world fed by deep instincts. “National Socialism was a völkisch movement”, states George Mosse. “Yet Hitler would never have succeeded in demonstrating the political effectiveness of the völkisch world vision had this perception of reality not already been shared by a great many Germans.” 365