Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (58 page)

Even on Jewish policy, which to Hitler was the most important issue of all, there was inconsistency and hesitation. In the first flush of Nazi triumph, many Jews were murdered or put in camps, or stripped of their property by the
SA
and allowed to flee. Some Nazi leaders wanted a policy of enforced emigration, but no systematic and effective measures were ever taken to bring this about. Nor did Hitler smash the big Jewish department stores, something he had promised countless times to do: Schacht persuaded him that 90,000 jobs would thereby be lost.
¹¹⁷
The Economics Ministry opposed attacks on Jewish business chiefly because it believed they would lead to attacks on big business in general, and it set up a special bureau to stop Nazi harassment.
¹¹⁸
The Nuremberg Laws themselves were drawn up in a hurry. Hitler
announced them as the ‘final settlement of the position of the Jews’. In fact many ambiguities remained, even in his own mind. He authorized signs ‘Jews Not Welcome’ outside towns, which were theoretically illegal, but conceded Jews could not actually be forbidden to enter. In 1936 the Interior Ministry even discussed banning
Der Stürmer
, the anti-Semitic Nazi paper. Anti-Semitism became more violent in 1938, probably because Hitler was adopting a more isolationist economic policy. The Interior Ministry produced the ‘name decree’, obliging all Jews to adopt Israel or Sarah as a middle name.
¹¹⁹
This was followed by the terrifying violence of the
Kristallnacht
on 9 November 1938, incited by Goebbels. But it is not clear whether Goebbels acted on his own initiative or, more likely, on Hitler’s orders, given quite casually.
¹²⁰
Only with the coming of war did Hitler fix upon the real ‘final solution’: he had had it in mind all along but needed war to make it possible. On his world aims, as opposed to domestic policy, he was always clear, consistent and resolute, as we shall see.

Hitler had no economic policy. But he had a very specific national policy. He wanted to rearm as fast as possible consistent with avoiding an Allied pre-emptive strike. He simply gave German industry his orders, and let its managers get on with it. Before he came to power, Otto Strasser had asked him what he would do with Krupp, and was told: ‘Of course I would leave him alone. Do you think I should be so mad as to destroy Germany’s economy?’
¹²¹
Hitler thought that Lenin’s greatest economic mistake had been to order party members to take over the running of industry, and kill or expel its capitalist managers. He was determined that the Brownshirts and other party elements would not get their hands on business, and warned Major Walter Buch, judge of the Party Court, in 1933: ‘It is your task as the highest judge within the party to put a brake on the revolutionary element.’ The unwillingness to do this had led to the destruction of other revolutions, he said.
¹²²

There is no evidence whatever that Hitler was, even to the smallest degree, influenced by big business philosophy. He bowed to business advice only when convinced that taking it would forward his military and external aims. He regarded himself as a socialist, and the essence of his socialism was that every individual or group in the state should unhesitatingly work for national policy. So it did not matter who owned the actual factory so long as those managing it did what they were told. German socialism, he told Hermann Rauschning, was not about nationalization: ‘Our socialism reaches much deeper. It does not change the external order of things, it orders solely the relationship of man to the state …. Then
what does property and income count for? Why should we need to socialize the banks and the factories? We are socializing the people.’
¹²³
Presenting his Four Year Plan (which, like Stalin’s, was a mere propaganda exercise), he said that it was the job of the Ministry of Economics merely to ‘present the tasks of the national economy’ and then ‘the private economy will have to fulfil them’. If it shrank from them ‘then the National Socialist state will know how to solve these tasks’.
¹²⁴

Thus Hitler kept Germany’s managerial class and made them work for him. Firms flourished or not exactly in accordance with the degree to which they carried out Hitler’s orders. Of course he extracted money from them: but it was a blackmail—victim relationship, not that of client and patron. A case in point was the chemical firm I.G.Farben, originally caricatured by the Nazis as ‘Isidore Farben’ because of its Jewish directors, executives and scientists. It won Hitler’s favour only by ridding itself of Jews (for instance the Nobel prize-winner Fritz Haber) and by agreeing to give absolute priority to Hitler’s synthetics programme, the heart of his war-preparedness scheme, in a secret treaty signed 14 December 1933. Thereafter Farben was safe, but only at the cost of slavery to Hitler. Far from big business corrupting his socialism, it was the other way round. The corruption of I.G.Farben by the Nazis is one of the most striking individual tragedies within the overall tragedy of the German nation.
¹²⁵

Not having an economic policy was an advantage. Hitler was lucky. He took over a month before Roosevelt, and like him benefited from a recovery which had already begun shortly before. Unlike Roosevelt, however, he did not tinker with the economy by systematic public works programmes, though they existed. At a meeting on 8 February 1933 he said he rejected any such programmes which had no bearing on rearmament. He started autobahn construction in September 1933 chiefly because he wanted fast motor-roads and thought he had discovered an organizing genius to create them in Fritz Todt (he had).
¹²⁶
Brüning had pursued an excessively deflationary policy because he had a paranoid fear of inflation. Hitler scrapped it. He sacked Dr Hans Luther, the Reichbank President, and replaced him by Hjalmar Schacht, whom he also made Economics Minister. Schacht was by far the cleverest financial minister any country had between the wars. He was a market economist but an empiric who believed in no theory and played every situation by ear.

Hitler hated high interest-rates and tight credit not because he was a pro-Keynesian but because he associated them with Jews. He told Schacht to provide the money for rearmament and Schacht did so,
breaking the Reichbank’s rules in the process. Inflation was avoided by Brüning’s stricr exchange-controls (which Hitler, in his pursuit of autarchy, made still more fierce), taxation (tax revenues tripled 1933–8) and general belt-tightening: German living standards were scarcely higher in 1938 than a decade earlier. The Germans did not mind because they were back at work. Over 8 million had been unemployed when Hitler took over. The number began to fall very quickly in the second half of 1933, and by 1934 there were already shortages in certain categories of skilled labour, though 3 million were still out of work. By 1936, however, there was virtually full employment, and by 1938 firms were desperate for labour at a time when Britain and the USA were again in recession.

Germany was thus the only major industrial country to recover quickly and completely from the Great Depression. The reason undoubtedly lies in the great intrinsic strength of German industry, which has performed phenomenally well from the 1860s to this day, when not mutilated by war or bedevilled by political uncertainty. Weimar had provided a disastrous political framework for business, which puts a stable and consistent fiscal background as the precondition of efficient investment. Weimar always had difficulty in getting a budget through the Reichstag and often had to administer financial policy by emergency decree. Its inherent political instability grew worse rather than better. After the 1928 election it became increasingly difficult to form a stable government, and by March 1930 it was clear the regime would not last, with a risk that a Marxist system might replace it. Hitler’s coming to power, therefore, provided German industry with precisely what it wanted to perform effectively: government stability, the end of politics and a sense of national purpose. It could do the rest for itself. Hitler was shrewd enough to realize this. While he allowed the party to invade every other sphere of government and public policy, he kept it out of industry and the army, both of which he needed to perform at maximum efficiency as quickly as possible.
¹²⁷

By the mid-1930s Hitler was running a brutal, secure, conscienceless, successful and, for most Germans, popular regime. The German workers, on the whole, preferred secure jobs to civil rights which had meant little to them.
¹²⁸
What did become meaningful to them were the social organizations which Hitler created in astonishing numbers, under the policy he termed ‘belonging’. He also had the policy of co-ordination, which emphasized the unity of the state (under the party, of course). The Third Reich was a ‘co-ordinated’ state to which ordinary Germans ‘belonged’. This concept of public life appealed to more Germans than the party politics of Weimar. The mood might not have lasted indefinitely, but it was still strong when
Hitler destroyed his popularity by getting Germany into war again. It was probably strongest among the humblest and poorest (though not among some Catholic peasants, who refused to give Nazi salutes and greetings, and bitterly resented attacks on Christianity).

Hitler also appealed to the moralistic nature of many Germans, that is, those who had a keen desire for ‘moral’ behaviour without possessing a code of moral absolutes rooted in Christian faith. Himmler, the conscientious mass-murderer, the scrupulous torturer, was the archetype of the men who served Hitler best. He defined the virtues of the ss, the embodiment of Nazi ‘morality’, as loyalty, honesty, obedience, hardness, decency, poverty and bravery. The notion of obeying ‘iron laws’ or ‘a higher law’, rather than the traditional, absolute morality taught in the churches, was a Hegelian one. Marx and Lenin translated it into a class concept; Hitler into a race one. Just as the Soviet cadres were taught to justify the most revolting crimes in the name of a moralistic class warfare, so the ss acted in the name of race – which Hitler insisted was a far more powerful and central human motivation than class. Service to the race, as opposed to the Marxist proletariat, was the basis of Nazi puritanism, marked by what Rudolf Hoess, commandant at Auschwitz, termed the ‘cold’ and ‘stony’ attitude of the ideal Nazi, one who ‘had ceased to have human feelings’ in the pursuit of duty.
¹²⁹

By early 1933, therefore, the two largest and strongest nations of Europe were firmly in the grip of totalitarian regimes which preached and practised, and indeed embodied, moral relativism, with all its horrifying potentialities. Each system acted as a spur to the most reprehensible characteristics of the other. One of the most disturbing aspects of totalitarian socialism, whether Leninist or Hitlerian, was the way in which, both as movements seeking power or regimes enjoying it, they were animated by a Gresham’s Law of political morality: frightfulness drove out humanitarian instincts and each corrupted the other into ever-deeper profundities of evil.

Hitler learnt from Lenin and Stalin how to set up a large-scale terror regime. But he had much to teach too. Like Lenin, he wished to concentrate all power in his single will. Like Lenin he was a gnostic, and just as Lenin thought that he alone was the true interpreter of history as the embodiment of proletarian determinism, so Hitler had confidence only in himself as the exponent of the race-will of the German people. The regime he set up in January 1933 had one major anomaly: the
SA
. Hitler did not fully control it, and Roehm had visions which did not fit into Hitler’s plans. The
SA
,
already very large before the take-over, expanded rapidly after it. By the autumn of 1933 it had a million active, paid members, and
reserves of 3.5 million more. Roehm’s object was to make the
SA
the future German army, which would overthrow the Versailles settlement and secure Germany’s expansionist aims. The old army, with its professional officer class, would be a mere training organization for a radical, revolutionary army which he himself would take on a voyage of conquest. Hitler was determined to reject this Napoleonic scheme. He had a high opinion of the regular army and believed it would put through rearmament quickly and with sufficient secrecy to carry the country through the period of acute danger when the French and their allies were still in a position to invade Germany and destroy his regime. Even more important, he had not the slightest intention of sharing power with Roehm, let alone surrendering it to him.

From March 1933, when he began to assist the rise of Himmler, who had a secret phone-link to him, it is clear that Hitler had a gigantic crime in mind to resolve the dilemma which Roehm’s
SA
presented to him. He prepared it with great thoroughness. From October 1933, Himmler was authorized by Hitler to acquire in plurality the offices of chief of political police in all the German states, in addition to the city of Munich. This process, naturally seen by Himmler’s enemies as empire-building, required Hitler’s active assistance at every stage both because it was illegal (Frick had to be kept in the dark) and because it involved negotiations with the
Gauleiters
, whom Hitler alone controlled, in each
Gaue.
The process was completed on 20 April 1934 when Heydrich’s
SD
revealed a ‘plot’ to murder Goering, which his own Gestapo had failed to uncover. Hitler then ordered Himmler to take over Goering’s police (officially as his deputy). The
SS
organization, big in itself, now controlled all Germany’s political police and was in a position to strike at even the gigantic, armed
SA.