Hitler (98 page)

Psychologically, this change can undoubtedly be traced to the mounting self-confidence that followed from his series of successes. “Today we have once again become a world power!” he proclaimed in the Munich Hofbräuhaus on February 24, 1937, at the annual celebration of the party's founding. A new tone of challenge and impatience can be detected in all his speeches of this period. In the impressive balance sheet of achievements with which he came before the Reichstag on January 30, 1937, after four years of his government, he “most solemnly” withdrew Germany's signature from the discriminatory clauses of the Versailles Treaty. Shortly afterward, he mocked at the “Esperanto languages of peace, of reconciliation among nations” that weaponless Germany had spoken for years. “It would seem that this language is not so well understood internationally. Our language is being understood again only since we have had a large army.” And, reverting to the old Lohengrin image, the idea of the White Knight with whom he usually identified, he declared: “We move through the world as a peace-loving angel, but one armed in iron and steel.”

At any rate he was now secure enough to show considerable pique. In the course of the spring he did make still another attempt at approaching England by offering a guarantee for Belgium. But at the same time he offended the British government by abruptly canceling an announced visit of his Foreign Minister von Neurath to London. And when Lord Lothian called upon him on May 4, 1937, for a second conversation, he showed himself out of sorts and vehemently criticized British policy. The British were incapable of recognizing the Communist peril, he said, and in general did not understand their own interests. He added that he had always been pro-English, had been so during his time as a “writer.” A second war between the German and the English peoples would be tantamount to the departure of both powers from the stage of history; it would be as useless as it was ruinous. Instead, he was offering collaboration on the basis of defined interests.
²⁸
Once more he waited for a reaction from London. He waited half a year. When it did not come, he reshaped his design.

 

Although an essential premise of Hitler's ideal scheme had remained unfulfilled, he had nevertheless carried out his projects to an amazing extent. Italy and Japan were won over. England was wavering and had lost considerable prestige. France's weakness had been exposed. No less important was the fact that he had destroyed the principle of collective security and restored the
sacro egoismo
of nations as the prevailing political principle. Faced with the swift shifts in power relationships, the smaller countries grew visibly uneasy, thus accelerating the dissolution of the anti-German front. After Poland, Belgium now turned her back on her impotent French ally. Hungary, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia also reoriented their policies. Along with the fatal blow Hitler had inflicted upon the Versailles system, innumerable sources of conflict reappeared, which the system had only suppressed but not eliminated. All of southeast Europe began to falter. Naturally, its statesmen admired the example of Hitler, who had overcome the weakness of his own country, put an end to Germany's humiliations, and taught the erstwhile victors “to shiver and shake.” As “Europe's new Man of Destiny”
²⁹
Hitler soon found himself the focus of a good deal of political pilgrimaging. His advice and his assistance counted for something. His stupendous achievements seemed to prove the superior capacity of totalitarian regimes to take action. Evidently the liberal democracies must lag hopelessly behind with their palavering, their judicial appeals, their sacred weekends and their Malvern soda water. French Ambassador Frangois-Poncet, who had been in the habit of meeting diplomatic colleagues of friendly or allied countries for intimate dinners at Horcher's, Berlin's luxury restaurant, has reported that fewer and fewer people came, with each of Hitler's successes.
³⁰

Reactions in Germany itself extended to considerably greater depths. The shrinking number of skeptics had the wind knocked out of their sails. Ivone Kirkpatrick, first secretary at the British Embassy in Berlin, recorded the fact that Germans who had been calling for caution found all their warnings refuted. Kirkpatrick observed that Hitler was reinforced in his conviction that he could do anything and that many Germans now enlisted under the Nazi banners, having held off only because they thought Hitler was going to lead the country straight to disaster.
³¹
Instead he was piling up successes, winning prestige, international respect. A nation with pride still badly shaken at last found itself impressively represented, and derived a grim satisfaction from the surprise coups which left yesterday's powerful victors stupefied. An elemental craving for righting scores was being gratified.

The regime's achievements at home answered this craving in another way. The recently crushed country, which had seemed to incorporate all the crises and abuses of the age within its apparently hopeless national and social wretchedness, suddenly found itself admired as a model. Goebbels, characteristically self-congratulating, called this unexpected change “the greatest political miracle of the twentieth century.” Delegations from all over the world came visiting to study German measures for economic revival, for the elimination of unemployment. They looked into the widely ramified system of social benefits: the improvement of labor conditions, the factory canteens and workers' housing, the newly established athletic fields, parks, kindergartens, the plant contests and professional competitions, the Strength-Through-Joy fleet of cruise ships and the people's vacation resorts. The model of a hotel for the masses, planned to extend for about 2½ miles on the island of Rugen, with its own special subway system to shuttle the tens of thousands of vacationers, received the Grand Prix at the Paris World's Fair of 1937. Even critical outsiders were impressed by the regime's accomplishments. In a letter to Hitler, Carl J. Burckhardt hailed the “Faustian achievement of the Autobahn and the Labor Service.”
³²

In his major Reichstag speech on January 30, 1937, Hitler had declared that the “period of surprise actions” was over. His next steps followed with a good deal of logic from the initial position he had assumed with each of his actions. Just as the treaty with Poland had given him the principal key to the advance against Czechoslovakia, the reconciliation with Italy offered the lever for the annexation of Austria. German politicians began paying frequent visits to Poland. Polish politicians were invited to Germany. Hitler issued assurances of friendship and statements that Germany withdrew all claims on Polish territory. By such steps he tried to draw Poland closer, and while he had Göring, on a visit to Warsaw, emphasize again that Germany took no interest in the Polish Corridor, he himself told Josef Lipski, the Polish ambassador in Berlin, that Danzig, so long a point of contention, was really in the sphere of Poland. Simultaneously he reinforced the relatively new ties with Italy. Early in November, 1937, he persuaded Italy, again with Ribbentrop's aid, to join the Anti-Comintern Pact. Joseph C. Grew, the American ambassador in Tokyo, pointed out in an analysis of this triangle that the participating powers were not only antiCommunist but that their policy and their practices ran counter to those of the so-called democratic powers; they represented a coalition of have-nots who had made “overthrow of the status quo” their goal. Significantly, Mussolini let it be known in the conversations with Ribbentrop that preceded the signing ceremony that he was tired of playing the guardian of Austrian independence. In other words, the Italian dictator was preparing to abandon his old stand for the sake of his new friendship. He did not seem to sense that by so doing he was giving up his last card. “We cannot impose independence on Austria.”

This conversation took place in the Palazzo Venezia on November 5, 1937, the same day Hitler in the Berlin chancellery gave the Polish ambassador a guarantee for the integrity of Danzig; at 4
P.M.
on the very same day Hitler met with the leaders of the armed forces. The Foreign Minister, von Neurath, was also present. In a four-hour-long, top-secret speech Hitler revealed to them his “fundamental ideas.” These were the old obsessions of racial menace, existential anxiety, and geographic constriction, for which he saw the “only and perhaps seemingly visionary relief” in the winning of new
Lebensraum,
in the building of a vast unbroken empire. After the assumption of power and the years of preparation these “fundamental ideas” were now ushering in—with amazing consistency—the expansionist phase.

He stands like a statue, grown beyond the measure of earthly man.

 

The
Völkische Beobachter
describing Hitler's appearance on November 9, 1935

 

At this point the reader may question, both on moral and literary grounds, the emphasis we have placed on Hitler's achievements and triumphs, and wonder if the negative aspects of these years have not deliberately been ignored. But this was indeed the period when he developed remarkable control and energy, seemed to know intuitively when to push forward and when to show restraint, threatened, cajoled, and took action so forcefully that all resistance yielded before him. He managed to concentrate upon his person all the attraction, the curiosity, and the fears of the age. This capacity was further strengthened by his extraordinary gift to represent this power with overwhelming effect.

This moment in history is typical for Hitler's peculiarly patchwork career, a career marked by such sharp breaks that it is often difficult to find the connecting links between the different phases. The fifty-six years of his life are divided between the first thirty years with their dullness, their obscure asocial circumstances, and the suddenly electrified political half. The later period, however, falls into three distinct segments. At the beginning there are approximately ten years of preparation, of ideological development, and of tactical experimentation. During this time Hitler ranked as no more than a marginal radical figure, distinguished, it is true, by an unusual talent for demagoguery and political organization. Then followed the ten years in which he riveted the attention of the age, and in retrospect seems to stand before a film of flashing scenes of mass jubilation and crowd hysteria. He himself was fairly sensitive to the fairy-tale character of this phase of his life; indeed, he could not fail to feel that he had been “elected” to his role and remarked that it “had not been the work of men alone.” And then followed six more years of grotesque errors, mistake piled upon mistake, crimes, convulsions, destructive mania, and death.

Reviewing this, we are once again drawn to look at the person of Adolf Hitler. His individual outline is still blurred; at times it might seem as if he emerged more distinctly from the imprint he made upon political and social conditions than from any account of his personal biography; as if the statue into which he stylized himself reveals, amid all the pomp of his political self-display, more of his essence than the human being behind it.

Political events during these years of success were accompanied by incessant fireworks: grand spectacles, parades, dedications, torchlight processions, demonstrations, bonfires leaping from mountaintop to mountaintop. We have already made the point of the close connection in totalitarian regimes between foreign and domestic policy; but even closer was the connection of both with propaganda policy. Memorial days, deliberately created incidents, state visits, harvest festivals or the death of a party member, the conclusion or breach of treaties—all these served as the pretext for great spectacles, whose purpose was to integrate the nation more and more closely, preparing it for mobilization in every sense of the word.

In Hitler's government the connection between policy and propaganda was so intimate that sometimes the emphasis shifted, so that politics took second place to become merely the handmaiden of theatrical effects. In planning the grand boulevard of the future rebuilt Berlin, Hitler was even willing to conceive of a rebellion against his rule. Carried away, he described how the armored vehicles of the SS would come rolling invincibly up the 400-foot-wide avenue, advancing slowly upon his palace. His theatrical nature was never quite submerged and led him to subordinate political to histrionic categories. In this amalgam of aesthetic and political elements, Hitler's origins in late-bourgeois bohemia and his lasting connection with that sphere can clearly be recognized.

The style of National Socialist spectacles also points back to these origins. Some have perceived the influence of the showy, colorful ritual of the Catholic Church. But equally evident is—once again—the heritage of Richard Wagner, whose splendiferous theatrical liturgy was carried to its ultimate point in the operatic excesses of the party rallies. The hypnotic fascination of these spectacles, which still comes through in the cinematic records of them, is partly due to these origins. “I had spent six years in St. Petersburg before the war in the best days of the old Russian ballet,” Sir Nevile Henderson wrote, “but for grandiose beauty I have never seen a ballet to compare with it.”
³³
The spectacles testify to a precise knowledge of the dramaturgy of grand scenes and of the psychology of the common man. The forest of flags and the flickering torches, the marching columns and the blaring bands combined to make a magic that the mentality of the age, haunted by images of anarchy, could scarcely resist. Each detail was tremendously important to Hitler. Even in the festivals with their vast blocks of humanity he personally checked seemingly trivial points. He approved every scene, every movement, as he did the selection of flags or flowers, and even the seating order for guests of honor.

Significantly, Hitler's talents as stage manager reached their summit when the object of the celebration was death. Life seemed to paralyze his inspiration, and his attempts in that direction never went beyond a dreary nod to peasant folklore: hailing the joys of dancing about the Maypole or the rearing of large families. On the other hand, he could always invent impressive effects for funeral ceremonies. Though the form may vary, the message was always the same. As Adorno said of Richard Wagner's music: “Magnificence is used to sell death.”
³⁴