Hitler (92 page)

The death of Hindenburg made no tangible break. In the plethora of obituaries and testimonials of grief, the legal measures went almost unnoticed. But those carefully prepared measures sealed the new situation. A decree of Hitler's instructed the Minister of the Interior to prepare a plebiscite in order to give the union of chancellorship and presidency—which was presented as already “constitutionally valid”—the “explicit sanction of the German people.” For Hitler declared he was “firmly permeated with the conviction that every state power must proceed from the people and be confirmed by the people in free and secret elections.” To disguise the absolute power that would now center in himself he announced that the “greatness of the departed” did not permit him to claim the title of President for himself. He therefore wished, “in official as well as in unofficial communication to continue to be addressed only as Führer and Chancellor.”

On the day of Hindenburg's death the army leadership also felt called upon to offer its unconditional loyalty to Hitler. In an act of opportunistic overzealousness, for which legal authority was not created until three weeks later, Defense Minister von Blomberg had all the officers and enlisted men of the armed forces in all garrisons take an oath of allegiance to the new commander in chief. The old oath had been to “nation and fatherland”; now the men had to swear “by God” unconditional obedience to Hitler personally. It confirmed the totalitarian character of Hitler's leader state, which could never have been brought into being without the aid of the armed forces. Soon afterward, this personal oath of allegiance was required of government officials, including the cabinet ministers, and thus “something resembling monarchy” was restored.

The obsequies for the deceased President gave Hitler the opportunity for one of those great displays of theatrical veneration of the dead that the regime had brought to a high art. It was also an occasion for Hitler to flaunt his heightened sense of power. After the Reichstag's memorial session on August 6, the central feature of which was Hitler's tribute to the deceased and music from Wagner's
Götterdämmerung,
the army paraded past its new commander in chief outside the Kroll Opera House. But hard on the heels of the “only bearer of arms in the nation,” in the same parade step, wearing the same steel helmets and in part with fixed bayonets, came an honor shock troop of the SS Adolf Hitler Bodyguard Regiment, a special formation of the Hermann Göring Police Battalion, an honor unit of the SA, and other groups of paramilitary formation outside the Reichswehr. On the following day Hindenburg was interred at the site of his 1914 victory, in the court of the Tannenberg monument in East Prussia. In his funeral oration Hitler declared that the name of the deceased would remain immortal, “even when the last trace of this body has vanished.” He concluded: “Dead warlord, now enter into Valhalla!”

The plebiscite on August 19 served the same purpose as these elaborate obsequies. In an interview with the British journalist Ward Price at this time Hitler stressed that the German public was thus being given the opportunity to confirm or reject the policies of its leaders. And with a touch of malicious irony he added: “We wild Germans are better democrats than other nations.”
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But in reality the plebiscite, noisily organized with all the tried-and-true methods of propaganda, once again served the purpose of mobilizing unpolitical feelings for political purposes. This sound and fury was meant to dispel the tangible and lasting uneasiness over the virtually “Oriental” solution in the Röhm affair. And once again Hitler was wooing the public, attempting to win back its momentarily lapsed affection. In his funeral oration to the Reichstag Hitler had implored the public to let bygones be bygones and henceforth “to look from the transitory moment into the future.”

But the. prestige of the new rulers had evidently been seriously damaged. Far from the 100 per cent elections of totalitarian regimes, the affirmative votes did not rise above 84.6 per cent. In some districts in Berlin, also in Aachen and Wesermünde, they did not even reach 70 per cent. And in Hamburg, Lubeck, Leipzig, and Breslau nearly a third of the population voted “no.” For the last time some elements of the country were registering opposition, chiefly the socialist and Catholic groups.

Hitler's chagrin at the outcome of the plebiscite was clearly reflected in the following day's proclamation. It announced the conclusion of the fifteen-year struggle for power, since “starting with the highest leadership of the Reich and extending through the entire administration down to the officials of the smallest town... the German Reich is today in the hand of the National Socialist Party.” But the struggle for the allegiance of “our dear people,” Hitler declared, must continue with undiminished vigor until “even the last German wears the symbol of the Reich as a profession of faith in his heart.”

Two weeks later Hitler struck a similar note, adding, however, a threat against all malcontents, in the proclamation with which he opened the sixth party rally at the Kongresshalle in Nuremberg. As usual he let Gauleiter Wagner of Munich, whose voice was almost identical to his own, read his message: “We all know whom the nation has entrusted with the leadership. Woe to those who do not know it or forget it! Revolutions have always been rare in the German nation. With us, the agitated age of the nineteenth century has at last come to an end. In the next thousand years there will not be another revolution in Germany.”

At this same time the real revolution in Germany was beginning. To be sure the forces within the movement that had aimed at violent overturn were now eliminated. Their energies had been channeled chiefly into propaganda and keeping an eye on the populace. Insofar as Hitler had undertaken to control them in deference to Hindenburg and the army, the “lion-taming” concept of the spring of 1933 was celebrating its last belated victory. But Hitler's imperious statement in Nuremberg that on that day he had “the sole power in Germany in everything” went along with his resolve to try everything.

The barbarous aspects of the regime, its anti-Semitism, the German claims to hegemony, the sense of a special national mission—all these have focused attention upon the related ideological and political forces. But the social impulses that supported Nazism were no less strong, perhaps stronger. Many middle-class groups expected that after assuming power the Nazis would smash the frozen authoritarian structures and the social bonds that the revolution of 1918 had failed to budge—but would do so in the course of an orderly upheaval. For these groups Hitler meant above all a chance to complete the German revolution. After so many unsuccessful beginnings they no longer trusted the democratic forces to do it and had never wanted to trust the Communists.

Obviously, the new flood of proclamations about the end of the revolution aimed principally at soothing the emotions of a still distraught public. And by the autumn of 1934 signs of a return to more orderly conditions began to appear. Not that they in any way changed Hitler's long-range goals. These remained unalterable. In the midst of all the reassuring phraseology, he explicitly warned in his final speech at Nuremberg against the illusion that the party had lost its revolutionary impetus and abandoned its radical program: “In its teaching unalterable, in its organization hard as steel, in its tactics supple and adaptable, but in its over-all image an Order.” Thus it would face the future. Among intimates he made similar remarks to the effect that he was putting an end to the revolution only to outward appearances and that he was now shifting it inward.

Because of these disguises, so deeply rooted in Hitler's character, the revolutionary nature of the regime is not immediately apparent. The social change it produced was accomplished within unusual forms. Among Hitler's remarkable achievements, which assure him a place in the history of great political upheavals, was the realization that insurrectionary revolutions were irrevocably things of the past. Hitler for the first time drew the logical conclusion from the insight—already formulated by Friedrich Engels in 1895—that revolutionaries of the old type were necessarily weaker than the established power. Consequently, it was Hitler who created the modern concept of revolution. For men like Röhm, revolution was always commotion and took place in the streets. Modern revolution, on the other hand, did not overcome power but “seized” it, and employed bureaucratic rather than bellicose methods. It was a quiet process. Shots hurt their ears, to generalize Malaparte's remark about Hitler.

For all that, this revolution reached deep and spared nothing. It gripped and changed the political institutions, shattered the class structures in the army, the bureaucracy, and to some extent in the economy. It broke up, corrupted, and enfeebled the still influential nobility and the old upper crust. In a Germany that owed its charm as well as its provinciality to the same backwardness, it introduced that degree of social mobility and egalitarianism indispensable to a modern industrial society. It would not be fair to object that such modernization was only incidental or even contrary to thé declared intention of the brown revolutionaries. Hitler's admiration for technology was well known. Where methods were concerned, he thought entirely in modern terms—especially since he needed, for his expansionist aims, a rational and efficient industrial state.

The structural revolution that the regime brought in was distorted by an antiquarian perspective that made much of folklore and ancestral heritage. In other words, the sky over Germany was and remained romantically darkened. The peasantry, for example, became the object of widespread sentimentalizing, while its actual economic plight visibly accelerated, and the so-called “flight from the land” reached a new statistical high between 1933 and 1938. Similarly, by its industrialization programs (especially in central Germany with its militarily vital chemical plants) the regime furthered the very urbanization that it simultaneously denounced. Though for the first time it integrated women into the industrial process, it continued to condemn all the liberal and Marxist tendencies to defeminize women. It made a cult of tradition, but a “confidential report” circulated early in 1936 stated: “The link with tradition must be thoroughly destroyed. New, altogether unknown forms. No individual rights...”

In an attempt to grasp this two-faced character of the phenomenon some writers have spoken of a “double-revolution,”
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a revolution against the bourgeois order in the name of bourgeois standards, against tradition in the name of tradition. The cozy romantic decor need not be considered as cynical masquerade; quite often it was an effort to fix in thought or in symbol something irrevocably lost in reality. The majority of Nazi fellow travelers, at any rate, interpreted the idyllic trimmings of National Socialist ideology in this way. Hitler 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.”
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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.
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But many were emigrating inwardly, into the
cachettes du coeur.
The old German mistrust of politics, the aversion to its commitments and importunities, seemed confirmed and vindicated during those years.

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.