Underpinning Hitler’s unchallenged authority in spring 1936 was the adulation of the masses. Large sections of the population simply idolized him. Even his opponents acknowledged this. ‘What a fellow, Hitler. He had the courage to risk something,’ was a sentiment frequently recorded at the time by the underground socialist opposition. ‘The spirit of Versailles is hated by all Germans. Hitler has now torn up this accursed treaty and thrown it at the feet of the French,’ was the reason given for the upsurge of support for the Dictator even among those who up to then had been less than enthusiastic about him.9 In 1936, the German people — at any rate the vast majority of them — revelled in the national pride that Hitler (almost single-handedly, it often seemed, in the relentless trumpetings of effusive propaganda) had restored to the country.
The backing of a huge mass movement, the mainstay of his plebiscitary support, guaranteed that the flow of adulation was never stemmed. But the support for Hitler was genuine enough, and massive in extent. Most Germans, whatever their grumbles, were at least in some respects Hitler supporters by summer 1936. Unquestionably, the foreign-policy triumphs had united the overwhelming majority of the population behind his leadership. Admiration for the Fuhrer was widespread. Indeed, at the level of humdrum daily life, too, many were prepared to credit Hitler with bringing about a change in Germany that seemed to them little short of miraculous. For most of those who did not belong to a persecuted minority, remain firm adherents of the suppressed Social Democrats or Communists, or feel wholly alienated by the attacks on the Churches, things seemed incomparably better than they had been when Hitler took over. Unemployment, far from increasing again (as the Jeremiahs had predicted), had practically been wiped out. Modestly, but noticeably, living standards were beginning to improve. More consumer goods were becoming available. The ‘people’s radio’
In a mere three years, Hitler appeared to have rescued Germany from the miseries and divisions of Weimar democracy, and to have paved the way for a grandiose future for the German people. The demagogue and political firebrand had apparently been transformed into a statesman and national leader of a stature to match that of Bismarck. That the the national revival had been accompanied by rigid authoritarianism, loss of civil rights, brutal repression of the Left, and intensifying discrimination against Jews and others thought unfit to belong to the ‘national community’ was seen by most as at least a price worth paying — by many as positively welcome.
Few at this stage had the foresight to imagine what would come — that Germany’s new international standing in spring 1936 would prove the prelude to boundless expansion, world war bringing slaughter on an immeasurable scale, unparalleled genocide, and the eventual destruction of the Reich itself. ‘That this new deed of Hitler is another milestone on the way to the hell’s jaws of destruction,’ the same perceptive report of the exiled Social Democratic movement added, ‘seems hardly to have entered the consciousness of anyone.’13
II
For most dictators, the acquisition of unrivalled power over the state would have been enough. For Hitler, this was no end in itself. In his thinking, power served a twin ideological purpose: destroying the Jews — for him, Germany’s mortal enemy; and, through their destruction, acquiring mastery over the entire continent of Europe — a platform for subsequent world dominance. Both interlocking aims, resting on a ‘world-view’ that saw racial struggle and survival of the fittest as the key determinants in human history, had been central to his thinking since the 1920s. However uncharted the route to attaining them, these basic ideas, once formed, never left him.
The obsessiveness and tenacity with which he held to these fixed ideas were part of Hitler’s unique role in steering Germany, Europe, and the world to disaster. However, relatively few of the millions of followers attracted to Nazism on its road to power saw matters precisely as Hitler did, or were drawn by fanatical adherence to the fixed points of the personal ‘world-view’ that constituted his own prime ideological driving-force.14 The growing appeal of Hitler as an alternative to Weimar democracy rested to a far greater extent on the forcefulness of his uncompromising, frontal assault on a visibly failing political system undermined in high places and increasingly haemorrhaging mass support. During his rise to power, his central ideological tenets had been embedded within the general, all-embracing armoury of hate-filled tirades against the Weimar ‘system’ and within the appealing counter-image he conjured up of national rebirth once the ‘criminals’ who had instigated defeat and revolution, with catastophic consequences, had been destroyed. His success as a demagogue lay in his ability to say what the disaffected masses wanted to hear, to speak their language — to capture and exploit a psychology of despair and invest it with new hope for a phoenix-like resurgence of the nation. He was able as no one else to give voice to popular hatreds, resentments, hopes, and expectations. He spoke more stridently, more vehemently, more expressively and appealingly than any of those with a similar ideological message. He was the mouthpiece of the nationalist masses at a decisive time of all-embracing national crisis.
And in showing that he could galvanize the nationalist masses as no one else could, he made himself an increasingly attractive proposition to those with power and influence, who saw him and his rapidly expanding Movement as an indispensable weapon in the fight against ‘Marxism’ (code not just for attacks on the Communists, but on the Social Democrats, the trade unions, and the democratic system itself), which the conservative elites had done everything possible to undermine. Through their help, in the final stage of the collapse of the Weimar Republic, Hitler was at last given what he had long striven for: control over the German state. Their fatal error had been to think that they could control Hitler. Too late, they discovered how disastrously they had underestimated him.
By the time he was levered into power, the ‘redemptive’ politics which Hitler preached — the overturning of the defeat and revolution of 1918 at their heart — had won the support of over 13 million Germans, among them an activist base of well over a million members of the various branches of the Nazi Movement. Hitler embodied their expectations of national salvation. The pseudo-religious strains of the cult built up around him — in an era when popular piety was still strong — had been able to portray him as a secular ‘redeemer’. A lost war, national humiliation, profound economic and social misery, lack of faith in democratic institutions and politicians, and readiness to look to a ‘strong man’ able to overcome through force the apparently insurmountable acute political chasms prevailing in a comprehensive state crisis, had all contributed to drawing large sections of the masses towards seductive slogans of national salvation.
But not only the politically naive had been attracted. The deep cultural pessimism widespread in neo- conservative and intellectual circles could also find appeal in the idea of ‘national rebirth’, however much the vulgarity of Hitler and his followers might be disparaged. Already before the First World War, the sense of unstoppable cultural decline — often directly coupled with increasingly fashionable views on the allegedly inexorable growth of racial impurity — was gathering pace.15 In the aftermath of the war, the mood of cultural despair gripped ever more tightly among conservative intellectuals. Oswald Spengler’s
Germany’s cultural descent seemed mirrored in politics. Where only decades earlier Bismarck had bestridden the political stage as a giant, the country’s representatives now appeared reduced to squabbling pygmies, the irredeemably divided Reichstag a reflection of an irredeemably divided Germany — irredeemable, that is, unless a new national hero creating (if need be by force) new unity should emerge. Hopes could be invested only in the vision of such a hero — warrior, statesman, and high priest rolled into one — who would arise from the ashes of national humiliation and post-war misery to restore national pride and greatness.18 The seeds of subsequent intellectual backing for Hitler and his Movement were fertilized in such soil — however distant reality proved to be from the ideal.
The shrill antisemitism of the Nazis was no barrier to such support. The Jews — less than 1 per cent of the population, the vast majority more than anxious to be seen as good, patriotic German citizens — had few friends.
