Hitler and his God

The Search for Meaning

The analysis in the previous chapters of the German mentality which lead directly to Hitler would not be complete without paying attention to the sincere longing behind even the most delirious extremes of national egoism, the historical and cultural fancies, and the aversion to everything “modernity” stood for. In the end the perverted fancies gained the upper hand, which was tragic when one considers the high cultural and spiritual values in Germany’s past which were also there in the decades of its ordeal, but which were stifled by forces which we have seen darkening and which we still have to identify.

In his book Hitler: The Führer and the People, J.P. Stern has titled one of the chapters which leads up to the Third Reich “A Society Longing for Transcendence”. There he writes: “What the Germans now seek is a religious solution – religious in the sense of being total and absolute and an object of faith rather than of prudential thinking. Since they are seeking a single, ‘total’ thing, their ‘idealism’ appears wholly incompatible with material satisfactions. What they are looking for is in fact not a solution but a salvation – not however as an alternative to and an unworldly substitute for material concerns and demands, but as the subsuming and validation of such demands.” 639

“The search for ‘a third way’, as an alternative to capitalism or Marxism, occupied much of German thought during the Weimar Republic”, writes George Mosse. “Even earlier, toward the end of the post-unification period [i.e. the years preceding World War I], men had raised similar questions – in a more theoretical manner, but just as seriously. Indeed, the search for a viable ‘third way’ was an integral part of the völkisch concern … Disenchanted with the world as they found it, German thinkers attempted to find some way to raise the Volk above its temporal restrictions. They were determined to liberate it from the shackles of a materialistic civilization imposed by a state that callously disregarded the essentially spiritual needs of the Volk. The postwar era thrust the ‘third-way’ alternative again into the foreground … Everywhere in Europe, Fascism was based upon the urge toward a ‘third way’, and völkisch thought here intersected with the mainstream of an international movement … Whatever the alternative presented by the advocates of the ‘third way’, the underlying basis was always metaphysical. During the 1920’s, intellectuals continued to view the coming German revolution primarily in spiritual terms …

“Möller van den Bruck, in his famous work The Third Reich (1923), which he first called The Third Way, considered Germany to be a ‘new nation’, as distinguished from the overripe ‘old nations’ of the West, a nation with a mission. It was a country of the future that had not yet developed its inherent peculiarities and greatness. What it had lacked until now, a shortcoming that accounted for the failure of the recent past [the defeat in 1918], van den Bruck declared, was a chiliastic ideal. The ‘new’ Germany, he asserted, had to be fired by the idea of the Germanic past and of Germany’s potential future greatness; it had to revive and make operative in a new age the traditions of medieval messianism. Contemporary materialism, contemporary society and science, had to be discarded and the German soul must take wing and follow the unrestrained course of the Geist … Van den Bruck was advocating a truly spiritual revolution.” 640

“To the liberal and peace-loving bourgeois, the product of European rationalism, the Fascists … oppose the cult of the feelings, of emotivity, of violence, duty and sacrifice, of the heroic virtues”, writes Zeev Sternhell. “Fascism develops to the full and applies to the realities of the postwar new ethics which had originated on the eve of the war: the yearning to serve, the cult of power, of commanding and obeying, of a collective faith and abnegation. Fascism means adventure and also, as in Sorel, ‘the deed and nothing but the deed’ … But what in the first decade of the [twentieth] century was nothing more than a theoretical aspect of Social Darwinism became after the war, to the generation which had survived the trenches, a concrete experience and a standard of behaviour. The former combatants considered themselves the bearers of a spiritual mission: they wanted to transmit their unique experience to the whole of society and imprint upon it the heroic virtues of the warrior, namely discipline, sacrifice, self-denial and comradeship.” 641

If one lets the character traits enumerated by Sternhell overlap, the result is a kind of robot photo of the ideal character of the average German at the time under our consideration, especially the need for order, discipline and obedience, and the dedication to loyalty and sacrifice. “The nation had a deeply rooted instinct for rules and discipline”, writes Fest, “it wanted the world orderly or it did not want the world at all … The German mind accords universal respect to the categories of order, discipline and self-restraint … Hitler was able to play on such attitudes and use them to further his plans for dominion. Thus he created the cult of obedience to the Führer or staged those military-like demonstrations whose precise geometry offered protection against the chaos so feared by all and sundry.” 642

“We had been rendered susceptible to such ideas from our youth on”, writes Albert Speer in self-defence. “We had derived our principles from the Obrigkeitsstaat, the authoritarian though not totalitarian state of Imperial Germany. Moreover, we had learned those principles in wartime, when the state’s authoritarian character had been further intensified. Perhaps the background had prepared us like soldiers for the kind of thinking we encountered once again in Hitler’s system. Tight public order was in our blood; the liberalism of the Weimar Republic seemed to us by comparison lax, dubious, and in no way desirable.” 643

“Many of [the Nazis], moreover, came from homes whose patterns were based on the rigid mores of the cadet schools. Hitler profited greatly from the peculiarities of an authoritarian educational system.” 644 The patriotic, rigidly authoritarian German teachers had sent “the Langemarck Youth” into the trenches of the First World War; the same kind of teachers, seconded by martinet fathers, are to be found in practically every biography of Germans in the Second World War, be they Hitler, Bormann, Speer, Goebbels, or whoever. This was “a nation literally schooled to admire such traits … the obedience to authority was intrinsic to the German character before and during Hitler’s time”. The Prussian tradition of Kadavergehorsam, obedience as of a corpse, was still very much alive, as was the saying of the drill sergeants: “We leave thinking to the horses, they have bigger heads.”

Where could a youth, endowed with or stiffened by such traits, turn to when it refused to accept the ways of worn out religious dogmatism as well as of a modern world it did not understand and dreaded? What could satisfy their longing for order, obedience and sacrifice, and most of all for a cause which would give meaning to life and death? Arminius’ Cheruscians and other Germanic tribes of yore had nothing to offer that could be called “spiritual”, and the Greeks, admired as creators of culture and the arts, had no tradition which exceeded the arbitrariness of a world as depicted by Homer or Sophocles’ tragic human destinies. However, true spirituality, fulfilling all the requirements, could be found where the great Romantics had looked for it and where “the new romanticism” followed in their tracks: in the (idealized) Middle Ages. The monastic orders, more specifically the military monastic orders, peopled the dreams of a youth riding in trains and working in a chemical laboratory, a bank, or a watchmaker’s shop.

On most crossroads in the imagination of a Germany thinking in the völkisch way we meet with the Knights Templar or the Teutonic Knights. Lanz von Liebenfels had started dreaming of becoming a Templar at the age of twelve and would found the New Order of the Templars, taking vows to fight for the final victory of the blond Aryans over the subhuman Chandalas. The poet Stefan George, who “appointed himself custodian of Germany’s spiritual and cultural future”, assembled around him an elite circle of young men who had not only to be esoteric initiates but also mystic warriors, “soldiers of the spirit engaged in a spiritual crusade. In this respect, they were heir to the knights in his poem entitled ‘Templars’, although George meant by the term something very different from the Ariosophist New Templars of Lanz von Liebenfels.” 645 Himmler’s organization of his “Black Order” is often said to have been inspired by the Order of the Templars or of the Jesuits, who, after all, were the Catholic Church’s warriors to fight the Reformation. And Hitler himself confided to Rauschning: “I shall tell you a secret: I am founding an order.” The top elite schools of “his” youth were the three Ordensburgen at Krössinsee, Sonthofen and Vogelsang. Even the ordinary Hitler Youth, obligatorily joined by all young Germans from the age of six, had to live up to the ideals of a military order, and took pride in it.

The backbone of the whole self-denying attitude in Germany was, of course, Prussian. Discipline, respect for the military rank, pride in the uniform, clicking of the heels, energetic saluting, shouting of orders and a ruthless training were as common in the twentieth century as they had been at the time of Frederick II. What for most “new romanticists” had been an exercise of the imagination turned into dire reality in the First World War. The ideals of total obedience, unconditional discipline and self-sacrifice became a matter of daily practice. The surviving generation will be indelibly imprinted with these ideals. The Templar and Teutonic Knight were replaced by Dürer’s Knight riding between the Devil and Death towards an unknown destiny. His sky was the sky of nihilism, adorned with the clouds of any ideal or empty. The undefeated German soldiers marched home and joined a Free Corps, where they kept on marching side by side with youngsters who regretted having been born to late for the war. These soldiers of fortune, these Landsknechte, had lost their ideals while keeping up the routine, and served as an example to the generation of the “birds of passage”. And none will know better how to fill up the emptiness in their heart and exploit their readiness to serve than Adolf Hitler. He will use them to build up his New Templar Order to defend “the Holy Grail of the pure blood”.