The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (23 page)

What was he then? Chamberlain answers: Probably an Aryan! If not entirely by blood, then unmistakably by reason of his moral and religious teaching, so opposed to the “materialism and abstract formalism” of the Jewish religion. It was natural then—or at least it was to Chamberlain—that Christ should become “the God of the young Indo-European peoples overflowing with life,” and above all the God of the Teuton, because “no other people was so well equipped as the Teutonic to hear this divine voice.”

There follows what purports to be a detailed history of the Jewish race from the time of the mixture of the Semite or Bedouin of the desert with the roundheaded Hittite, who had a “Jewish nose,” and finally with the Amontes, who were Aryans. Unfortunately the Aryan mixture—the Amorites, he says, were tall, blond, magnificent—came too late to really improve the “corrupt” Hebrew strain. From then on the Englishman, contradicting his whole theory of the purity of the Jewish race, finds the Jews becoming a “negative” race, “a bastardy,” so that the Aryans were justified in “denying” Israel. In fact, he condemns the Aryans for giving the Jews “a halo of false glory.” He then finds the Jews “lamentably lacking in true religion.”

Finally, for Chamberlain the way of salvation lies in the Teutons and their culture, and of the Teutons the Germans are the highest-endowed, for they have inherited the best qualities of the Greeks and the Indo-Aryans. This gives them the right to be masters of the world. “God builds today upon the Germans alone,” he wrote in another place. “This is the knowledge, the certain truth, that has filled my soul for years.”

   Publication of
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
created something of a sensation and brought this strange Englishman sudden fame in Germany. Despite its frequent eloquence and its distinguished style—for Chamberlain was a dedicated artist—the book was not easy reading. But it was soon taken up by the upper classes, who seem to have found in it just what they wanted to believe. Within ten years it had gone through eight editions and sold 60,000 copies and by the time of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 it had reached a sale of 100,000. It flourished again in the Nazi time and I remember an announcement of its twenty-fourth edition in 1938, by which time it had sold more than a quarter of a million copies.

Among its first and most enthusiastic readers was Kaiser Wilhelm II. He invited Chamberlain to his palace at Potsdam and on their very first
meeting a friendship was formed that lasted to the end of the author’s life in 1927. An extensive correspondence between the two followed. Some of the forty-three letters which Chamberlain addressed to the Emperor (Wilhelm answered twenty-three of them) were lengthy essays which the ruler used in several of his bombastic speeches and statements. “It was God who sent your book to the German people, and you personally to me,” the Kaiser wrote in one of his first letters. Chamberlain’s obsequiousness, his exaggerated flattery, in these letters can be nauseating. “Your Majesty and your subjects,” he wrote, “have been born in a holy shrine,” and he informed Wilhelm that he had placed his portrait in his study opposite one of Christ by Leonardo so that while he worked he often paced up and down between the countenance of his Savior and his sovereign.

His servility did not prevent Chamberlain from continually proffering advice to the headstrong, flamboyant monarch. In 1908 the popular opposition to Wilhelm had reached such a climax that the Reichstag censored him for his disastrous intervention in foreign affairs. But Chamberlain advised the Emperor that public opinion was made by idiots and traitors and not to mind it, whereupon Wilhelm replied that the two of them would stand together—“You wield your pen; I my tongue (and) my broad sword.”

And always the Englishman reminded the Emperor of Germany’s mission and its destiny. “Once Germany has achieved the power,” he wrote after the outbreak of the First World War, “—and we may confidently expect her to achieve it—she must immediately begin to carry out a scientific policy of genius. Augustus undertook a systematic transformation of the world, and Germany must do the same … Equipped with offensive and defensive weapons, organized as firmly and flawlessly as the Army, superior to all in art, science, technology, industry, commerce, finance, in every field, in short; teacher, helmsman, and pioneer of the world, every man at his post, every man giving his utmost for the holy cause—thus Germany … will conquer the world by inner superiority.”

For preaching such a glorious mission for his adopted country (he became a naturalized German citizen in 1916, halfway through the war) Chamberlain received from the Kaiser the Iron Cross.

   But it was on the Third Reich, which did not arrive until six years after his death but whose coming he foresaw, that this Englishman’s influence was the greatest. His racial theories and his burning sense of the destiny of the Germans and Germany were taken over by the Nazis, who acclaimed him as one of their prophets. During the Hitler regime books, pamphlets and articles poured from the presses extolling the “spiritual founder” of National Socialist Germany. Rosenberg, as one of Hitler’s mentors, often tried to impart his enthusiasm for the English philosopher to the Fuehrer. It is likely that Hitler first learned of Chamberlain’s writings before he left Vienna, for they were popular among the Pan-German and anti-Semitic groups whose literature he devoured so avidly in those
early days. Probably too he read some of Chamberlain’s chauvinistic articles during the war. In
Mein Kampf
he expresses the regret that Chamberlain’s observations were not more heeded during the Second Reich.

Chamberlain was one of the first intellectuals in Germany to see a great future for Hitler—and new opportunities for the Germans if they followed him. Hitler had met him in
Bayreuth
in 1923, and though ill, half paralyzed, and disillusioned by Germany’s defeat and the fall of the Hohenzollern Empire—the collapse of all his hopes and prophecies!—Chamberlain was swept off his feet by the eloquent young Austrian. “You have mighty things to do,” he wrote Hitler on the following day, “… My faith in Germanism had not wavered an instant, though my hope—I confess—was at a low ebb. With one stroke you have transformed the state of my soul. That in the hour of her deepest need Germany gives birth to a Hitler proves her vitality; as do the influences that emanate from him; for these two things—personality and influence—belong together … May God protect you!”

This was at a time when Adolf Hitler, with his Charlie Chaplin mustache, his rowdy manners and his violent, outlandish extremism, was still considered a joke by most Germans. He had few followers then. But the hypnotic magnetism of his personality worked like a charm on the aging, ill philosopher and renewed his faith in the people he had chosen to join and exalt. Chamberlain became a member of the budding Nazi Party and so far as his health would permit began to write for its obscure publications. One of his articles, published in 1924, hailed Hitler, who was then in jail, as destined by God to lead the German people. Destiny had beckoned Wilhelm II, but he had failed; now there was Adolf Hitler. This remarkable Englishman’s seventieth birthday, on September 5, 1925, was celebrated with five columns of encomiums in the Nazi
Voelkischer Beobachter
, which hailed his
Foundations
as the “gospel of the Nazi movement,” and he went to his grave sixteen months later—on January 11, 1927—with high hope that all he had preached and prophesied would yet come true under the divine guidance of this new German Messiah.

Aside from a prince representing Wilhelm II, who could not return to German soil, Hitler was the only public figure at Chamberlain’s funeral. In reporting the death of the Englishman the
Voelkischer Beobachter
said that the German people had lost “one of the great armorers whose weapons have not yet found in our day their fullest use.” Not the half-paralyzed old man, dying, not even Hitler, nor anyone else in Germany, could have foreseen in that bleak January month of 1927, when the fortunes of the Nazi Party were at their lowest ebb, how soon, how very soon, those weapons which the transplanted Englishman had forged would be put to their fullest use, and with what fearful consequences.
²⁷

   Yet Adolf Hitler had a mystical sense of his personal mission on earth in those days, and even before. “From millions of men …
one
man must step forward,” he wrote in
Mein Kampf
(the italics are his), “who
with apodictic force will form granite principles from the wavering idea-world of the broad masses and take up the struggle for their sole correctness, until from the shifting waves of a free thought-world there will arise a brazen cliff of solid unity in faith and will.”
²⁸

He left no doubt in the minds of readers that he already considered himself that
one
man.
Mein Kampf
is sprinkled with little essays on the role of the genius who is picked by Providence to lead a great people, even though they may not at first understand him or recognize his worth, out of their troubles to further greatness. The reader is aware that Hitler is referring to himself and his present situation. He is not yet recognized by the world for what he is sure he is, but that has always been the fate of geniuses—in the beginning. “It nearly always takes some stimulus to bring the genius on the scene,” he remarks. “The world then resists and does not want to believe that the type, which apparently is identical with it, is suddenly a very different being; a process which is repeated with every eminent son of man … The spark of a genius,” he declares, “exists in the brain of the truly creative man from the hour of his birth. True genius is always inborn and never cultivated, let alone learned.”
²⁹

Specifically, he thought, the great men who shaped history were a blend of the practical politician and the thinker. “At long intervals in human history it may occasionally happen that the politician is wedded to the theoretician. The more profound this fusion, the greater are the obstacles opposing the work of the politician. He no longer works for necessities which will be understood by the first good shopkeeper, but for aims which only the fewest comprehend. Therefore his life is torn between love and hate. The protest of the present, which does not understand him, struggles with the recognition of posterity—for which he also works. For the greater a man’s works are for the future, the less the present can comprehend them; the harder his fight …”
³⁰

These lines were written in 1924, when few understood what this man, then in prison and discredited by the failure of his comic-opera putsch, had in mind to do. But Hitler had no doubts himself. Whether he actually read
Hegel
or not is a matter of dispute. But it is clear from his writings and speeches that he had some acquaintance with the philosopher’s ideas, if only through discussions with his early mentors Rosenberg, Eckart and
Hess
. One way or another Hegel’s famous lectures at the University of Berlin must have caught his attention, as did numerous dictums of Nietzsche. We have seen briefly
^*
that Hegel developed a theory of “heroes” which had great appeal to the German mind. In one of-the Berlin lectures he discussed how the “will of the world spirit” is carried out by “world-historical individuals.”

Note the similarities between this and the above quotation from
Mein Kampf
. The fusion of the politician and the thinker—that is what produces a hero, a “world-historical figure,” an Alexander, a Caesar, a Napoleon. If there was in him, as Hitler had now come to believe, the same fusion, might he not aspire to their ranks?

In Hitler’s utterances there runs the theme that the supreme leader is above the morals of ordinary man.
Hegel
and Nietzsche thought so too. We have seen Hegel’s argument that “the private virtues” and “irrelevant moral claims” must not stand in the way of the great rulers, nor must one be squeamish if the heroes, in fulfilling their destiny, trample or “crush to pieces” many an innocent flower. Nietzsche, with his grotesque exaggeration, goes much further.

Such teachings, carried to their extremity by Nietzsche and applauded by a host of lesser Germans, seem to have exerted a strong appeal on Hitler.
^*
A genius with a mission was above the law; he could not be bound by “bourgeois” morals. Thus, when his time for action came, Hitler could justify the most ruthless and cold-blooded deeds, the suppression of personal freedom, the brutal practice of
slave labor
, the depravities of the concentration camp, the massacre of his own followers in June 1934, the killing of war prisoners and the mass slaughter of the Jews.