himself in his secret speech to the officer class of 1938 spoke of the anguish and depressing conflicts caused by political and social progress whenever it clashed with those “sacred traditions” that rightly claimed men’s loyalty and attachment: “There have always been catastrophes…. Those affected have always had to suffer…. Precious memories always had to be abandoned, traditions always had to be superseded. The past century, too, inflicted deep grief upon many. It is so easy to talk about ages, so easy to talk about, let us say, other Germans who in those days were pushed out. It was necessary! It had to be…. And then came the year eighteen and added a new great sorrow, and that too was necessary, and finally came our revolution, and it has drawn the ultimate conclusions, and it too is necessary. There is no other way.”54
The dual nature of the National Socialist revolution to a high degree marked the regime as a whole and gave it its peculiar Janus-faced appearance. The foreign observers who poured into Germany in growing numbers, lured by the “Fascist experiment,” and who reported on a peaceful Germany in which the trains ran on time as they had in the past, a country of bourgeois normality, of rule of law and administrative justice, were just as right as the exiles who bitterly lamented their misfortune and that of their persecuted and harried friends. The suppression of the SA undeniably put a halt to the dominion of violence and ushered in a phase of stabilization in which the authoritarian forces of political order braked the dynamism of totalitarian revolution. For a while it appeared as if normality once again replaced the state of emergency. At least, for the time being, there was an end of those conditions in which (in the words of a July 1, 1933, report to the Bavarian Prime Minister) everybody arrested everybody else, and everybody threatened everybody else with Dachau. It has been observed that in the Germany of 1934 to 1938, in the midst of coercion and flagrant injustice, there were idyllic enclaves that were sought out and cultivated as never before. Emigration abroad fell off considerably, and even the emigration of Jewish citizens continually diminished.55 But many were emigrating inwardly, into the
A dual mentality corresponded to the “dual state.” Political apathy went hand in hand with displays of jubilant approval. Again and again Hitler created pretexts for lashing the nation to enthusiasm: coups and sensations in foreign policy; spectacles, monumental building programs, and even social measures, all of which had the effect of stimulating the imagination and raising self-confidence. The essence of his art of government consisted largely in understanding how to manipulate popular need. The consequence was a curiously nervous, exceedingly artificial graph of popularity, marked by abrupt upswings amidst phases of disgruntlement. But Hitler’s own charisma and the respect the nation accorded him for having succeeded in restoring order were the basis for his psychological power. Those who compared the horrors of the years past—the riots, the unemployment, the arbitrary brutality of the SA, and the humiliations in foreign policy—with the hypnotic counterimage of power- conscious order, as manifested in parades or party rallies, would seldom track down his errors. Moreover, the regime made a point of stressing its authoritarian-conservative features, representing itself as a more stringently organized version of government by militant German Nationalists. Papen’s idea of the “new state” might have been conceived along similar lines.
And, for all its austerity and police-state sterility, the regime satisfied to a high degree the craving for adventure, heroic dedication, and that gambler’s passion in which Hitler shared and for which modern social- welfare states leave so little room.
Behind this picture of order, however, a radical energy was at work. Very few of the contemporaries had any idea of how radical it was. The frightened bourgeois soon convinced themselves that Hitler had acted as a conservative, antirevolutionary force in defeating Rohm. But in fapt he had been obeying the law of revolution, had been the more radical as against the merely radical revolutionary. “A second revolution was being prepared,” Goring had accurately stated on the afternoon of June 30, “but it was made by us against those who have conjured it up.”
Even then, anyone who looked closer should not have failed to see that a state consecrated to order, full employment, and equal rights on the international front could not possibly satisfy Hitler’s ambition. In November, 1934, it is true, he assured a French visitor that he was not thinking of conquests. He was, he said, concerned with building a new social order that would earn him the gratitude of his people and consequently a more lasting monument than any dedicated to a victorious general. But such statements were empty rhetoric. His dynamism had never been nourished by the ideal of a totalitarian welfare state with its spic-and-span dreariness, its complacency, and all the common man’s felicity he despised. The source of his inner drive was a fantastically overwrought, megalomaniacal vision leaping far beyond the horizon and claiming for itself a life span of at least a thousand years.
VI. THE YEARS OF PREPARATION
The Age of
It does not suffice to say, as the French do, that their nation was taken by surprise. Neither a nation nor a woman is forgiven for an unguarded hour in which the first adventurer who comes along can sweep them off their feet and possess them. We do not solve the mystery by such phrases, but merely formulate it differently.
Woe to the weak!
Historians have looked back upon the mid-thirties with some vexation. This was the period in which Hitler repeated, on the plane of foreign policy, those same practices of overwhelming his opponents that had yielded him such easy triumphs at home. And he applied them in the same effortless manner and with no less success. In accord with his thesis “that before foreign enemies are conquered the enemy within must be annihilated,”1 he had behaved rather quietly in the preceding months. His only flamboyant gestures had been his withdrawal from the League of Nations and his treaty with Poland. Secretly, meanwhile, he had begun rearmament, since he was well aware that without military force a country could have only the most limited freedom of movement in the realm of foreign policy. He would have to get through the transitional phase from weakness to power without breaches of treaties and without provoking powerful neighbors. Once again, as at the beginning of his seizure of power, many observers predicted his impending fall. But by a series of foreign-policy coups he managed within a few months to throw off the restrictions imposed by the Versailles Treaty and to occupy vantage points for his intended expansionist movements.
The reaction of the European nations to Hitler’s challenges is all the harder to understand because the process of seizing power, with its bloody finale in the Rohm affair, had provided some inkling of the man’s nature and policies. In a speech of January, 1941, Hitler declared, peeved, but quite rightly: “My program from the first was to abolish the Treaty of Versailles. It is futile nonsense for the rest of the world to pretend today that I did not discover this program until 1933, or 1935, or 1937…. These gentlemen would have been wiser to read what I have written-—and written thousands of times. No human being has declared or recorded what he wanted more often than I. Again and again I wrote these words: ‘The abolition of the Treaty of Versailles.’ ”2
From the very start no one could be in doubt about this particular aim, at the very least. And since abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles represented a direct threat to almost all the nations of Europe, there must have been strong though possibly somewhat hidden factors that contributed to Hitler’s effortless triumphs.
Once again Hitler’s deep inner ambiguity, which governed all his behavior, all his tactical, political, and ideological conceptions, proved of crucial importance. It has been rightly pointed out that he would surely have roused the united opposition of the European nations, or of the whole civilized world, had he been merely an
