Hitler

nothing, and broke the most solemn oaths with never a qualm. To Rauschning, the perfidy of National Socialism was literally boundless. All its ideology was merely sound and fury to mesmerize the masses. Central to it was a will to power that craved for nothing but power itself and regarded every success merely as a step to new and ever bolder adventures—without meaning, without goals, without the possibility of satisfaction. “This movement is totally without ideals and lacks even the semblance of a program. Its commitment is entirely to action; its crack troops are instinctively geared for mindless action; the leaders choose action on a cold, calculating and cunning basis. For National Socialists there was and is no aim which they would not take up or drop at a moment’s notice, their only criterion being the strengthening of the movement.”

Rauschning was right in recognizing that as a movement National Socialism always manifested a great willingness to adapt and that Hitler himself was remarkably indifferent to programmatic and ideological issues. He admitted that he adhered to his twenty-five points, even when they were obsolete, only for tactical reasons. Any change, he had observed, breeds confusion in the popular mind, and it really did not matter what one’s program was supposed to be. Of Alfred Rosenberg’s magnum opus The Myth of the Twentieth Century, widely considered one of the basic works of National Socialism, he openly stated that he had “read only a small part of it since it is… written in a style too hard to understand.” But even if National Socialism did not develop a true party line and was content to accept certain gestures and formulas as sufficient proof of orthodoxy, it was not entirely ruled by cynical considerations of success and power. National Socialism combined the practice of total control with the doctrine thereof; the two elements were continually intertwined, and even as Hitler and his cohorts confessed on occasion to the simplest and most unscrupulous power mania, they always revealed themselves the prisoners of their own prejudices and baleful utopias. Hitler’s astonishing career can be seen as the triumph of his tactical genius. Time and again he owed his salvation to some inspired tactical move. Yet his success in a deeper sense emanated from the entire complex of national anxieties, hopes, and visions that Hitler shared, even as he manipulated it. Nor can we overlook the compelling force he managed to impart to his thoughts on certain basic questions of history and politics, power and human existence.

Inadequate and clumsy Mein Kampf may have been. But it set forth, although in fragmentary and unorganized form, all the elements of National Socialist ideology. Here Hitler spelled out his aims, although his contemporaries failed to recognize them. As one begins to arrange the scattered sections and grasp their inner logic, one comes upon “a scheme of thought so consistent as to take one’s breath away.” In the following years Hitler did tinker somewhat with the text, rounding it off and making it more systematic, but on the whole the book evolved no further after his imprisonment at Landsberg. The phenomenon of early ossification, which stamps so much of this man’s life, is nowhere so evident as in the field of ideology, where ideas espoused in youth persist, dov/n to their very phraseology, throughout the rise to power and the years of dictatorship, and even when the end is in sight retain their crippling hold. Nationalism, anti-Bolshevism, and anti-Semitism, linked by a Darwinistic theory of struggle, formed the pillars of his world view and shaped his utterances from the very first to the very last.

Hitler’s world view did not contain any new vistas or a new concept of social well-being. Rather, it was a synthesis of all that Hitler’s “spongelike memory” had soaked up in his early years of voracious reading. The material appears, however, in startling permutations and relationships. Hitler’s originality manifested itself precisely in his ability to force heterogeneous elements together and to impose solidity and structure on the patchwork creed. His mind, one might say, hardly produced thoughts, but it did produce energy. It concentrated and shaped the variegated ideas, pressing them into a glacial mass that from the very beginning clearly portended conquest, enslavement, mass murder. Hugh Trevor-Roper has described the cold insanity of this world in a telling image: “imposing indeed in its granite harshness and yet infinitely squalid with miscellaneous cumber—like some huge barbarian monolith, the expression of giant strength and savage genius, surrounded by a festering heap of refuse—old tins and dead vermin, ashes and eggshells and ordure,—the intellectual detritus of centuries.”⁹

Of special significance was Hitler’s way of perceiving everything from the angle of power. In contrast to the spokesmen of the volkisch movement, whose failure was in no small part due to their love for ideological subtleties, Hitler regarded ideas in themselves as “mere theory” and only took up those that lent themselves to useful practical application. When he spoke of “thinking in party terms,” he was describing his own habit of casting all ideas, trends, and beliefs into a form that fitted the needs of power, and was political in the true sense.

In fact he was formulating a last-ditch ideology for a bourgeoisie long on the defensive; he took its beliefs, diluted and coarsened them, and overlaid them with an aggressive and purposeful theory of action. His philosophy was a compound of all the nightmares and intellectual fads of the bourgeois age: the fear of revolution from the Left, a threat that had haunted Europe since 1789 and had actually been realized recently in Russia and, briefly, in Germany. Then there was the German Austrian’s psychosis about being overrun by foreigners; this emerged as an obsession with racial and biological questions. Then came the fear of the volkisch group, expressed in any number of ways, that awkward, dreamy Germany would be the loser in the contest of nations; this emerged as nationalist feeling. And finally there was the historical angst of the bourgeoisie who felt their period of greatness coming to an end and whose sense of security was eroding. “Nothing is anchored any longer,” Hitler declaimed. “Nothing is rooted within us any longer. Everything is superficial, flies away from us. The thinking of our people is becoming restless and hasty. All of life is being torn asunder….”¹⁰

Hitler himself had soaked up this basic mood of angst, and with his disposition to drive things to extremes, to see periods in terms of eons, he felt that the fate of mankind was at stake. “This world is at an end!” He was obsessed by the notion of a world-wide disease, by viruses, termites, and the tumors of humanity. He later turned to Horbiger’s world ice theory, which held that fire and ice had always struggled for supremacy in the universe, and his imagination was caught by the idea that the history of the planet and the evolution of man could be traced back to massive cosmic cataclysms. With deep fascination he anticipated the fall of nations and civilizations, and this cataclysmic view of history came to be coupled with his belief in messianic figures and his sense of his own great destiny. Students of the period have marveled at the determination with which he pursued his program for destroying the Jews right up to the last possible moment during the war, without regard for military necessities. This determination cannot be explained as mere obstinacy. Rather, Hitler was convinced that he was in the midst of a titanic struggle whose importance outweighed any events of the moment. He felt himself to be that “other force” which hurls evil “back to Lucifer” in order to save the universe.¹¹

The concept of a cosmic struggle runs all through Mein Kampf. However absurd or fantastical this may appear in retrospect, we cannot deny the metaphysical earnestness of Hitler’s thinking. “We may perish, perhaps. But we shall take a world with us. Muspilli, universal conflagration,” he once said in one of his apocalyptic moods. There are many passages in Mein Kampf that soar into universal dimensions. “The Jewish doctrine of Marxism,” he asserts, “…as a foundation of the universe… would bring about the end of any order intellectually conceivable to man.” The very illogic of such a thesis, which raises an ideology to the level of a principle of order in the universe, demonstrates Hitler’s urge to think in cosmic terms. It was necessary for “the stars,” “the planets,” “the world ether,” and the “light years” to take part in his personal struggle, for which “creation,” the “planet Earth,” and the “Kingdom of Heaven” served as backdrop.

These terms could readily be combined with the principle of the struggle for life and of the survival of the fittest, resulting in a sort of eschatological Darwinism. “The earth,” Hitler was fond of saying, “is like a chalice passed from hand to hand, which explains the efforts to always get it into the hand of the strongest. For tens of thousands of years…” He discerned a sort of fundamental law of the universe in the perpetual and deadly conflict of all against all:

Nature… puts living creatures on this globe and watches the free play of forces. She then confers the master’s right on her favorite child, the strongest in courage and industry…. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development of organic living beings would be unthinkable…. In the end, only the urge for self-preservation can conquer. Beneath it so-called humanity, the expression of a mixture of stupidity, cowardice, and know-it-all conceit, will melt like snow in the March sun. Mankind has grown great in eternal struggle, and only in eternal peace does it perish.