Hitler and his God

“The System”

The language Hitler used when he wrote or talked about the government of the Weimar Republic was even worse than the way he talked about the hated French. “November criminals”, designating all Leftists and Jews allegedly responsible for the armistice and related events, was used by him on uncountable occasions and became a sort of political concept in Naziland. But there was much more, and better, also in Mein Kampf; for if the war with France had to be envisaged in the future, the struggle with the Left and their centrist partners in government was happening in the present; it had to be won before the power could be gained and the revenge against Germany’s mortal enemy prepared.

Hitler called the government “the present Jewish-Democratic Reich, which has become a veritable curse for the German people”; they were “those ruffians of Jews who came into power in 1918 and were able to rob the nation of its arms”; they were “a gang of bandits”. 272 “According to the laws that govern human history, it is inconceivable that the German people could resume the place they formerly held without retaliating on those who were both cause and occasion of the collapse that involved the ruin of our State. Before the judgment seat of posterity November 1918 will not be regarded as a simple rebellion but as high-treason against the country.” 273

“On the most miserable of pretexts these parliamentary party henchmen filched from the hands of the nation and threw away the weapons which were needed to maintain its existence and therewith defend the liberty and independence of our people.” The Versailles Treaty abolished the German navy and air force, limited the army to 100 000 men and severely restricted its armament. “If the graves on the plains of Flanders were to open today the blood-stained accusers would arise, hundreds of thousands of our best German youth who were driven into the arms of death by those conscienceless parliamentary ruffians who were either wrongly educated for their task or only half-educated. Those youths and other millions of the killed and mutilated were lost to the Fatherland simply and solely in order that a few hundred deceivers of the people might carry out their political manoeuvres and their exactions or even treasonably pursue their doctrinaire theories.” 274

What actually happened in that fateful month of November 1918? We know that Ludendorff and Hindenburg realized that the war was lost, that Germany had to come to terms with its enemies, that therefore the Kaiser had to go – and that the Supreme War Lord and his Quarter-Master General managed to shift this whole burden to the ineffective and powerless government of which Max von Baden was the chancellor at that moment. Then “Prince Max bowed out, handing over the government to the moderate leader of the Social Democrats, Friedrich Ebert, a forty-year-old saddler and trade union leader.

“Like many other Social Democrats, Ebert favoured the establishment of a constitutional monarchy on the British pattern, but his hopes were scuppered by his deputy, Philipp Scheidemann, who proclaimed a republic almost accidentally. Scheidemann had rushed to the Reichstag to tell his colleagues of Ebert’s appointment. Having done so, he was eating lunch in the restaurant when he was told that Karl Liebknecht, the leader of the extreme left Spartacus Party, was setting up camp in the Royal Palace, from where he intended to announce a soviet-style republic modelled on Lenin’s Russia … There was no time to lose. Leaving his meal, he strode out on to the small balcony outside the Reich library. The vast crowd cheered his appearance, then quietened as he began an off-the-cuff speech … Needing a rousing finish, he cried: “The rotten old monarchy has collapsed. Long live the new [government]! Long live the German Republic!’ And so it was done, almost as an afterthought.” 275

The records are there to prove that Ebert the saddler and Scheidemann the journalist were men of goodwill who did their best to keep Germany afloat in stormy circumstances which were not of their making. The burden shoved unto their shoulders by the defeated and sneaky pin-helmeted warlords would have been too heavy for whomever. “Within Germany, the bitterness over the terms of the peace treaty increased the resentment against the republic, for it had proved incapable of sparing the country the distress and privations of this ‘shameful dictated peace’ … To a growing number of Germans the very term ‘republic’ seemed synonymous with disgrace, dishonour, and powerlessness. The feeling persisted that the republic had been imposed on the Germans by deception and coercion, that it was something altogether alien to their nature. It is true that in spite of all its drawbacks it held a certain promise; but even in its few fortunate years its was ‘unable to arouse either the loyalty or the political imagination of the people’.” 276

The Versailles Treaty “was a peace that was no peace in the eyes of most Germans”, writes Maurersberger. “All at once it had become clear, also to the last German in favour of reconciliation, that the European Allies of the USA did not want to negotiate, but that their only objective was to annihilate the political and economic power of Germany once and for all.” 277 Matthias Erzberger, the minister who accepted to sign the Treaty of Versailles and thereby solve an otherwise insoluble situation, became the scapegoat. The nationalist press wrote: “It is on the majority wanting peace and their leader Erzberger that rests the responsibility for the blood of the millions who died since the summer of 1917, for the thousands of millions marks which were lost to Germany and the culture of the world, and for the shameful peace under which the German people are now sighing.” 278 Erzberger would be assassinated by members of Organization Consul; Ludendorff would be fêted in Weimar as “the völkisch king” and Hindenburg would be honoured as the Ersatz Kaiser, substitute emperor, and elected president in 1925.

“The Weimar Constitution was felt as something superimposed on Germany by the Western Powers – which would make Germany like the rest of Western culture – something alien to German racial and national tradition, making it cosmopolitan and rational, something which was foreign to its history.” 279 This explains the term “the System”, denigratingly used for the Weimar Constitution and its form of government, which were directly inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment and therefore by Reason. The German rooted, traditional, völkisch, hierarchical sense of values and of belonging felt “the System”, the political contract, as unnatural and therefore inimical. “The fear of the bourgeois class for democracy and social change was so intense that it decided against the Republic and in favour of a new authoritarian state” 280 – which was to be the Nazi state.