Hitler

and the surrender. It was as if National Socialism had been nothing but the motion, the state of intoxication and the catastrophe it had caused. It is not accidental that in the contemporary accounts dating from the spring of 1945 certain phrases crop up repeatedly—to the effect that a “spell” had been broken, a “phantasmagoria” shattered. Such language borrowed from the sphere of magic conveys the peculiarly unreal nature of the regime and the abruptness of its end.

Hitler’s propaganda specialists had talked constantly of invincible alpine redoubts, nests of resistance, and swelling werewolf units, and had predicted a war beyond the war—but there was no sign of this. Once again it became plain that National Socialism, like Fascism in general, was dependent to the core on superior force, arrogance, triumph, and by its nature had no resources in the moment of defeat. The cogent point has been made that Germany was the only defeated country in the Second World War that failed to produce a resistance movement.¹

This impermanence also showed up in the conduct of the regime’s leaders and functionaries. It was especially apparent in the course of their efforts during the Nuremberg trials to exculpate themselves ideologically. They denied or belittled the crimes that shortly before had had eschatological portent, so that in the end everything—the violence, the war, the genocide—assumed the character of a ghastly, stupid misunderstanding. That behavior, too, contributed to the impression that Nazism had not been a phenomenon spanning and characterizing the era, but a superficial movement sprung from an individual’s urge for power combined with the resentments of a restive nation with a craving for conquest. For had it been deeply rooted in the times, had it been one of the age’s elemental movements, a military defeat could not have consigned it so abruptly to oblivion.

Nevertheless, after only twelve years it had given the world a different aspect; and it is patent that such tremendous processes cannot be adequately explained solely as resulting from the whims of an individual in power. Such events become possible only if this individual embodies the emotions, anxieties, or interests of a multitude, and if powerful forces of the age are impelling him onward. Here we see once more Hitler’s role and importance in relation to the energies that surrounded him. An enormous, chaotic potential of aggressiveness, anxiety, devotion, and egotism lay ready to hand; but it needed to be called forth, concentrated, and applied by an imperious figure. To that figure it owed its impetus and legitimacy, with that figure it celebrated its imposing victories, and with that figure it went down to destruction.

But Hitler was more than the unifying figure for many of the tendencies of the age. He also imposed direction, extension, and radicalness upon the course of events. In this he was aided by his habit of thinking in absolutes and subordinating everything, principles, opponents, allies, nations, and ideas, icily or maniacally to his own monstrous goals. His extremism corresponded to his inward remoteness. August Kubizek had noted his friend’s tendency “to overturn the millennia.” And although we should not lay undue emphasis on such recollections, Hitler’s later way of dealing with the world did have something of the infantile radicalness that this phrase suggests. His own remark, that he confronted “everything with a tremendous, ice-cold absence of bias,”² points in the same direction. We might even contend that contrary to his claim, which he dated back to his youth, he never grasped the true nature of history. He thought of it as a kind of hall of fame with doors wide open to ambitious men. He knew nothing of the meaning and the justification of tradition. In spite of the aura of bourgeois decline that surrounded him, he was a homo novus. And in that spirit, with an unconcern that seems abstract, he went about realizing his intentions. He changed the map of Europe, destroyed empires, and promoted the rise of new powers, evoked revolutions, and brought the colonial age to an end. Finally, he enormously widened the horizon of mankind’s experience. To paraphrase a saying of Schopenhauer, whom he revered after his fashion, it might be said that he taught the world some things it will never forget.

Dominant among his motivations—and here he was borne along on the powerful current of his era—was an inescapable sense of being threatened—the fear of annihilation that had seized many political entities and nations in the course of centuries. But only now, at this crossroads in history, did this annihilation become a universal force threatening all mankind. One of the photos from the new chancellery shows Hitler’s-desk, on which lies a folio- sized book titled The Salvation of the World.³ And at various junctures in his life it became evident that he took his role of savior with the utmost seriousness. That was not only his mission and “cyclopean task,” but also—in this life dominated by histrionic concepts—the great exemplary part that he connected with memories of his early favorite opera, Lohengrin, and with the myths of a good many liberating heroes and white knights.

For him the idea of salvation was indissolubly linked with European pride. Aside from Europe no other continent counted, no other culture of significance existed. All other continents were only geography, areas for slaves and exploitation, unhistorical empty spaces: hie sunt leones. Thus Hitler’s attitude was also a last exaggerated expression of Europe’s claim to remain master of its own history, and thus of history in general. By the time he was done, Europe played the same part in his view of the world that Germanism had in his early years: it was the supreme value, but so threatened that it was already almost lost. He was extremely alert to the pressure of dissoluton to which the Continent was exposed on all sides, to the dangers to its nature that came both from outside and from inside, to the vastly multiplying “lesser breeds” of Asia, Africa, and America that were swarming over the globe and virtually suffocating it, and to the democratic ideologies within Europe itself that denied its history and its greatness.

He himself, it is true, was a figure of the democratic era, but he represented only its antiliberal variant, which flourished on rigged elections and the charisma of a leader. One of the things he learned from the November, 1918, revolution, and was never to forget, was an insight into the obscure connection between democracy and anarchy. He had seen, he thought, that chaotic conditions were the real, unfalsified expression of true popular rule and that the law of such rule was arbitrariness. Thus Hitler’s dictatorship may be regarded as a last desperate effort to hold old Europe to the conditions that had made for her onetime greatness, to defend the sense of style, order, and authority against the dawning era of democracy with its consultation of the masses, its egalitarian encouragement of everything plebeian, its emancipation, and its concomitant decline of national and racial identity. He saw the Continent subject to a mighty dual assault by two alien forces, devoured by “soulless” American capitalism, on the one hand, and by “inhuman” Russian Bolshevism on the other hand. Rightly, the nature of his commitment has been defined as a “death agony.”

Expand these ideas to a global plane, and we see the parallel to the state of mind of the early Fascist followings, those middle-class masses who saw themselves being slowly crushed by the unions on the one hand and the department stores on the other, by Communists and anonymous corporations—all this against a general background of panic. In these terms Hitler can also be understood as an effort to maintain a kind of third-force position between the two dominant powers of the times, between Left and Right, East and West. This may account for his appearance of dualism, so that none of the unequivocal definitions, none of the attempts to classify him as conservative, reactionary, capitalistic, or petty bourgeois, really comprehend him. By standing between all positions he shared in all of them and usurped crucial elements of them; but he combined them into his own unique, unmistakable phenomenon. His accession to power brought to an end the conflict that Wilson and Lenin had initiated over Germany after the First World War. The former had tried to win Germany over to parliamentary democracy and the idea of international peace, the latter to the cause of world revolution. Twelve years later, the struggle was renewed and settled in Solomonic fashion by the partition of the country.

The third position that Hitler sought to occupy was intended to embrace the entire continent, with Germany as its vital nucleus. He held that the contemporary mission of the Reich was to reinvigorate tired Europe and rouse her to a consciousness of her grandeur. He wanted to make up for the missed imperialistic phase in Germany’s development, and though coming late on the historical scene win the highest imaginable prize: hegemony over Europe secured by vast expansion of power in the East, and through Europe domination of the world. With some justification he assumed that under developing patterns of power, the chances for conquering an empire were growing slimmer, and since he always thought in sharp alternatives, he saw Germany condemned either to found an-empire or “to close her existence… as a second Holland and a second Switzerland,” if not worse, “to vanish from the earth or serve others as a slave nation.”⁴ That the country lacked the energies and resources to meet this aim did not much worry him. What really was at stake, he argued, was “to force the German people, who are hesitating to confront their destiny, to take the road to greatness.” When someone pointed out the risk of ruining Germany by setting her such goals, he merely answered that in that case everything would be “in a mess.”⁵

Hitler’s nationalism, consequently, was also not without its equivocations and rode roughshod over the