alone opposition, might have gathered. The feeling of a great change, which had affected people vaguely, as a kind of euphoric expectation, when Hitler entered the government, now overcame wider and wider sectors of the population. Hitler had moved rapidly from the status of demagogue to that of a respected statesman. The craving to join the ranks of the victors was spreading like an epidemic, and the shrunken minority of those who resisted the urge were being visibly pushed into isolation. Faced with a defeat apparently imposed “by history itself,” they concealed their bitterness and their lonely disgust. The past was dead. The future, it seemed, belonged to the regime, which had more and more followers, which was being hailed everywhere and suddenly had sound reasons on its side. “The only ones who give the impression of resolute refusal to accept it all, although they say nothing, are the servant girls,” Robert Musil ironically noted in March, 1933. But he, too, admitted that he lacked any alternative for which to fight; he was unable, he wrote, to imagine the new order being replaced by a return of the old or of a still older state of affairs. “What this feeling probably signifies is that National Socialism has a mission and that its hour has come, that it is no puff of smoke, but a stage of history.” Kurt Tucholsky on the Left implied much the same thing when he wrote, with that brash resignation peculiar to him: “You don’t go railing against the ocean.”
Such moods of fatalism, of cultural resignation, speeded the success of Nazism. Only a few were able to resist the swelling current of the triumphant cause. Not that the terrorism and the injustices went unnoticed. But in the old European dichotomy
On the Way to the Fuhrer State
I did not become Chancellor in order to act otherwise than I have preached for fourteen long years.
There was no pause, no sign of failing grip, in the transition from the first to the second phase of seizing power. The smashing of the democratic constitutional and parliamentary state was barely concluded in the summer of 1933 when its metal began to be smelted into the monolith of the totalitarian Fuhrer state. “We have the power. Today nobody can offer us any resistance. But now we must educate German man for this new State. A gigantic project lies ahead.” Thus Hitler outlined the tasks of the future to the SA on July 9.
For Hitler was never interested in establishing a mere tyranny. Sheer greed for power will not suffice as explanation for his personality and energy. Unquestionably, power, the virtually unrestricted use of it, with no necessity to account to anyone—that kind of power meant a great deal to him. But he was at no time satisfied with it alone. The restlessness with which he conquered, extended, and applied that power, and finally used it up, is evidence of how little he was bom to be a mere tyrant. He was fixated upon his mission of defending Europe and the Aryan race from deadly menace, and to this end he wanted to create an empire that would last. The study of history, particularly the history of his own age, had taught him that material instruments of power alone would not suffice to guarantee duration. Rather, only a great “revolution comparable to the Russian Revolution” could develop the tremendous dynamism such a goal required.
As always, he thought of this task also chiefly in terms of psychology and propaganda. Never had he felt so dependent upon the masses as he did at this time, and he watched their reactions with anxious concern. He feared their fickleness, not only as the child of a democratic age but because of his personal craving for approval and acclamation. “I am not a dictator and never will be a dictator,” he declared, and added rather contemptuously: “As a dictator any clown can govern.” He had, he admitted, eliminated the principle of democratic voting, but that by no means meant that he was free; strictly speaking, no such thing as arbitrary rule existed, only various ways of expressing the “general will.” He solemnly assured his listeners: “National Socialism is the true realization of democracy, which has degenerated under parliamentarianism…. We have cast aside outmoded institutions precisely because they no longer served to keep in fruitful contact with the totality of the nation, because they led to idle chatter, to impudent cheating.” Goebbels was saying the same thing when he remarked that in the age of political masses, government could not function “by states of emergency and nine-o’clock curfews.” Either the people would have to be given an ideal, an object for their imaginations and their loyalties, or they would go their own ways. The scholars of the period spoke of “democratic Caesarism.”
In keeping with this view, the psychological mobilization of the country was not left to chance or whim, certainly not to the operations of dissent. It was the product of consistent, totalitarian penetration of all social structures by means of a close-knit system of supervision, regimentation, and guidance. The object was to “belabor people as long as necessary, until they succumb to us.” That meant penetrating the private realm as well as every social area: “We must develop organizations in which an individual’s entire life can take place. Then every activity and every need of every individual will be regulated by the collectivity represented by the party. There is no longer any arbitrary will, there are no longer any free realms in which the individual belongs to himself…. The time of personal happiness is over.”
But the whole of national existence could not be reshaped overnight. Part of Hitler’s keen tactical sense was a sure feeling for tempo. More than once during the hectic early summer of 1933 he worried that control of events might slip away from him: “More revolutions have succeeded in the first onslaught than successful ones have been checked and brought to a halt,” he told his followers during this period in one of those speeches exhorting them to patience.13 Unlike them, he was not carried away by the headiness of success. He was prepared at any time to subordinate the emotions of the moment to his further power aims. Thus he vigorously opposed efforts to push on with further seizures of the government apparatus after those first months. His instinct told him to go slow. The departmental chiefs of the shadow government that the party had developed during the years of waiting had to cool their heels a while longer. Only Goebbels, Darre, and to an extent Himmler enjoyed the fruits of victory during this second phase. Rosenberg, for example, whose ambition had been the Foreign Office, was disappointed. So was Ernst Rohm.
Hitler’s refusal to turn the government over to the party was based on two considerations. By showing constraint, he would create the sense that he was engaged in healing the nation’s wounds and thus entrench himself deeper. With the coolness of the modern revolutionary, whose nature differs fundamentally from that of the fervent barricade builders of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Hitler repeatedly warned his followers in the summer of 1933 “to be prepared for many years and to calculate in very long spans of time.” If in doctrinaire haste they went “looking around to see whether there was anything else to revolutionize,” they would gain nothing, he told them; rather, they must be “prudent and cautious.”14
On the other hand, he had begun to regard the government as an instrument with which to keep the party, whose leader he was, in check. The technology of power was involved. Just as he had always encouraged competing institutions and rival subleaders within the party so that he might stand above their dissensions and bickerings and maintain his omnipotence all the more unchallenged, so he now employed the various executive offices of the government as counters in an even more baffling and Machiavellian game by which he strengthened his control. In the course of time he even increased the number of such offices. Two, and after Hindenburg’s death three secretariats were at his sole disposal: the Reich secretariat (Reichskanzlei) under Dr. Hans Lammers, the Fuhrer’s secretariat under Hess and Bormann, and, finally, the presidential secretariat under State Secretary Meissner, a holdover from the days of Ebert and Hindenburg. Foreign policy, education, the press, art, the economy, were battlegrounds fought over by three or four competing departments, and this guerrilla warfare over territory, the din of which continued down to the last days of the regime, permeated even the lowest branches of the bureaucracy. One official complained about contradictory instructions and conflicts over areas of authority when he was only trying to organize a proper celebration of the solstice. In 1942 there existed fifty-eight Supreme Reich boards as well as a plethora of extragovemmental bureaus whose orders criss-crossed, who wrestled over precedence, insisting on authority they might or might not have. With some justice the Third Reich can be called authoritarian anarchy. Cabinet ministers, commissioners, special emissaries, officials of party affiliates, administrators, governors, many of them with assignments kept deliberately vague, formed an inextricable knot of interlocking authorities, which Hitler alone, with virtually a Hapsburgian grasp of puppet mastery, could supervise,
