Hitler

has vigorously denounced it (see his letter to Das Parlament, 111:14, April 8, 1953). However, the account given in his self-justificatory Memoirs makes considerable demands upon the reader’s credulity. Among other things, he tries to make the meeting appear quite accidental and casual; he repeatedly stresses that its sole purpose was to obtain information. This version contradicts Schroeder’s declaration, in a sworn affidavit, that only a few weeks before Hitler had refused to negotiate with Papen. Even if Papen’s later assertion is correct, that no offer was made, the fact remains that Hitler felt himself to have been directly addressed by Hindenburg through Papen. At the very least the offer existed in the person of Papen; as a diplomat he should have known this, and undoubtedly did know it. Furthermore, Papen alleges that he conducted the conversation in the interests of Schleicher, and for the sake of supporting Schleicher. Moreover, Papen further alleges, the plan for a duumvirate referred not to Hitler and himself, but to Hitler and Schleicher. If nothing else, then, the anxious secrecy surrounding the meeting reveals the absurdity of this version.

54. The estate, purchased principally with funds supplied by industry, was not given formally to Hindenburg, but to his son, in order to evade the inheritance tax. Hindenburg also worried a good deal about Papen’s coup of July 20, 1932. Bruning has recorded: “Erwin Planck, who visited me in the hospital one evening four days before Schleicher’s resignation from the chancellorship, told me about the difficulties the administration was encountering because of Hindenburg’s fear of indictment, and I have been told that this was one reason for Hindenburg’s finally consenting to appoint Hitler Chancellor.” Cf. H. Bruning, “Ein Brief,” in: Deutsche Rundschau, 1947, p. 15. In the summer of 1935 Bruning added, in conversation with Count Kessler, that Oskar von Hindenburg “slithered into all sorts of murky stock exchange dealings and consequently found himself in a position where he was constantly afraid of ‘revelations.’ ” Count Kessler, In the Twenties, p. 469.

55. According to Bruning, Memoiren, p. 645, who had his information from Schleicher, Hindenburg allegedly said: “Thank you, Herr General, for everything you have done for the Fatherland. Now, with God’s help, let us see how the cat jumps.”

56. Kessler, In the Twenties, p. 443.

57. Thomas Mann, “Bruder Hitler,” in: Gesammelte Werke 12, p. 774.

58. Report of Police Detective Feil, HStA Munich, Allgemeine Sonderausgabe I, No. 1475.

59. Hitler to Schleicher, beginning of February, 1933. Cf. Bruning, Memoiren, p. 648.

60. Cf. Frank, pp. 121 f. In the published version of his book, however, Frank does not quote the eschatological passage cited here; cf. on this Gorlitz and Quint, p. 367.

INTERPOLATION II

1. Gottfried Benn, “Doppelleben,” Gesammelte Werke IV, p. 89.

2. G. A. Borgese, Goliath: The March of Fascism, p. 361.

3. Friedrich Franz von Unruh in a series of articles, “Nationalsozialismus,” which was published in the Frankfurter Zeitung between February 22 and March 3, 1931.

4. E. Vermeil, “The Origin, Nature and Development of German Nationalist Ideology in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” in: The Third Reich, p. 6. Cf. also Rohan D’O. Butler, The Roots of National Socialism, W. M. Govern, From Luther to Hitler, and W. Steed, “From Frederick the Great to Hitler. The Consistency of German Aims,” in: International Affairs, 1938:17.

5. Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe.

In spite of many accurate observations on single items, all historians who have tried to assess Hitler as the focal point of centuries of history run one great risk: they come dangerously close to the Nazis’ own interpretations of their movement. For that is what the Nazis were claiming when they usurped the Hansa, mysticism, Prussianism and Romanticism, and hailed their Third Reich as the fulfillment of German history. But there is something equally dubious about the opposing school, which seeks to represent National Socialism, and totalitarianism in general, as aspects of the crisis of the democratic era, flowing out of its rebellion against tradition and its petrified systems, its social antagonisms and economic weaknesses. For this school Nazism is the consequence of the modern rather than the German character; it is the negative utopia of the total state, such as was evoked in many pessimistic prophecies of the nineteenth century. For National Socialism viewed itself precisely as the world-historical corrective of that crisis. In the German accounts that posit this interpretation, Hitler frequently appears as an overwhelming foreign influence, a “counterpoise to tradition, especially to the Prusso-German and Bismarckian tradition,” as Gerhard Ritter puts it in his contribution to the collection of essays in The Third Reich (pp. 381 ff.), in which he consistently takes a stand diametrically opposite to that of E. Vermeil. Ritter argues that even the wrongheaded attitudes of which the Germans have been accused were on the whole characteristic of the age: “It is astonishing how many expressions of nationalistic ambition, militaristic principles, racist pride and antidemocratic criticism can be found in the intellectual and political literature of all European countries.”

None of these excessively one-sided interpretations can possibly grasp the nature of the phenomenon; the standard Marxist interpretation makes that crystal clear. Constantly hampered by their own actions and by piety toward their comrades who went down to defeat, the Marxist spokesmen have basically never been able to free themselves from the well-known, officially proclaimed definition of National Socialism as a manifestation of the “open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinistic and imperialistic elements of finance capital.” Consequently, if this thought is followed to its logical conclusion, the key personalities of National Socialism must have been not Hitler, Goebbels, and Streicher, but Hugenberg, Krupp, and Thyssen. Such a view is in fact actually taken by, for example, Czichon, in Wer verhalf Hitler zur Macht? and by many others. Cf. for this whole subject the instructive survey in Bracher, Diktatur, pp. 6 ff.

6. Cf. Note 13 to Interpolation I. During a stay in Germany in the early twenties the Rumanian Fascist leader Codreanu complained, significantly, that there was no visceral, consistent anti-Semitism in that country; cf. Nolte, Krise, p. 263.

7. Rudolf Hoss, at one time commandant of Auschwitz; see Gustave Mark Gilbert, The Psychology of Dictatorship, p. 250.

8. Harold J. Laski, “The Meaning of Fascism” in: Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, p. 106.

9. Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen was the title of an embittered criticism of democracy by Edgar J. Jung, who later became Papen’s assistant and was killed during the purge of June 30, 1934.

10. Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, p. 113.

11. Pierre Vienot, Is Germany Finished?, p. 97.

12. Domarus, p. 226.

13. Albert Speer, in a memo to the author; for Hitler’s rejection of Hess or Himmler as his successor, cf. Speer, Inside the Third Reich, pp. 137, 276.

14. G. Ritter asserts in Carl Goerdeler, p. 109, that the idea of having fallen into the hands of an unscrupulous adventurer would have seemed absolutely grotesque to the majority of the German bourgeoisie. Rudolf Breitscheid’s reaction is reported by Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Offiziere gegen Hitler, p. 12; Julius Leber’s comment on the lack of an intellectual foundation comes from a diary entry; see his Ein Mann geht seinen Weg, pp. 123 f. Many Social Democrats secretly expected that Hitler would quickly tangle with Papen and Hugenberg, and they would reap the benefit. “Then there will be a settlement of accounts, and very different it will be from 1918,” Prussian ex-State Secretary Abegg threatened in conversation with Count Kessler; see Kessler, In the Twenties, p. 447.

15. Kessler, p. 428.