The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  5

  BUILDING THE PEOPLE’S COMMUNITY

  BLOOD AND SOIL

  I

  For Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, the Third Reich represented the coming to power of the mob and the overthrow of all social authority. Although Reck lived in aristocratic style in Upper Bavaria, where he had an old country house with eleven hectares of land, he was in fact North German; he owed his origins and his allegiance, he explained to a Munich newspaper in 1929, not to the Bavarian but to the ancient Prussian aristocracy. Deeply conservative, snobbish, steeped in nostalgia for the days before the Junkers were dragged screaming into the modern world by Bismarck, Reck loathed Nazi Germany with a rare intensity. From the comparative safety of his rural retreat, he poured into his diary all the distaste he felt at the new order of things. ‘I am the prisoner of a horde of vicious apes,’ he wrote. Hitler was a ‘piece of filth’ whom he should have shot when he had had the opportunity when, carrying a revolver to protect himself against the raging mob violence of the times, he had encountered him in the Osteria restaurant in Munich in 1932. Listening to Hitler speak, Reck’s overwhelming impression was one of the Leader’s ‘basic stupidity’. He looked ‘like a tram-conductor’; his face ‘waggled with unhealthy cushions of fat; it all hung, it was slack and without structure - slaggy, gelatinous, sick’. And yet people worshipped this ‘unclean . . . monstrosity’, this ‘power-drunk schizophrenic’. Reck could not bear to witness the ‘bovine and finally moronic roar of “Hail!” . . . hysterical females, adolescents in a trance, an entire people in the spiritual state of howling dervishes’. ‘Oh truly,’ he wrote in 1937, ‘men can sink no lower. This mob, to which I am connected by a common nationality, is not only unaware of its own degradation but is ready at any moment to demand of every one of its fellow human beings the same mob roar . . . the same degree of degradation.’1

  The Nazi leaders, Reck thought, were ‘dirty little bourgeois who . . . have seated themselves at the table of their evicted lords’.2 As for German society in general, he wrote bitterly in September 1938:Mass-man moves, robotlike, from digestion to sleeping with his peroxide-blonde females, and produces children to keep the termite heap in continued operation. He repeats word for word the incantations of the Great Manitou, denounces or is denounced, dies or is made to die, and so goes on vegetating . . . But even this, the overrunning of the world with Neanderthals, is not what is unbearable. What is unbearable is that this horde of Neanderthals demands of the few full human beings who are left that they also shall kindly turn into cavemen; and then threatens them with physical extinction if they refuse.3

  Wisely, perhaps, Reck hid his diary every night deep in the woods and fields on his land, constantly changing the hiding place so that it could not be discovered by the Gestapo.4

  Reck was particularly distressed at what had happened to the younger generation of the aristocracy. Visiting a fashionable Berlin nightclub early in 1939, he found it filled with ‘young men of the rural nobility, all of them in SS uniforms’:They were having a fine time dropping pieces of ice from the champagne coolers down the décolletages of their ladies and retrieving the pieces of ice from the horrible depths amidst general jubilation. They . . . communicated with each other in loud voices that must certainly have been understandable on Mars, their speech the pimps’ jargon of the First World War and the Free Corps period - the jargon which is what the language has become during the last twenty years

  ... To observe these men meant looking at the unbridgeable abyss that separates all of us from the life of yesterday . . . The first thing is the frightening emptiness of their faces. Then one observes, in the eyes, a kind of flicker from time to time, a sudden lighting up. This has nothing to do with youth. It is the typical look of this generation, the immediate reflection of a basic and completely hysterical savagery.5

  These men, he wrote prophetically, ‘would turn the paintings of Leonardo into an ash heap if their Leader stamped them degenerate’. They ‘will perpetrate still worse things, and worst, most dreadful of all, they will be totally incapable of even sensing the deep degradation of their existence’. Aristocrats of ancient and honourable lineage, he raged, accepted meaningless titles and honours from a regime that had degraded them and so brought disgrace on their famous names. ‘This people are insane. They will pay dearly for their insanity.’ The traditional moral and social order had been turned upside-down, and the man he blamed more than any other was Hitler himself. ‘I have hated you in every hour that has gone by,’ he told the Nazi leader in the privacy of his own diary in August 1939, ‘I hate you so that I would happily give my life for your death, and happily go to my own doom if only I could witness yours, take you with me into the depths.’6

  Reck was unusual in the vehemence of his disdain for what he saw as the Nazified masses. The sharpness and percipience of some of his observations perhaps owed something to his extreme marginality. For the claims to noble lineage made in his 1929 article in the Munich newspaper were as false as the details of his supposed origins in the Baltic aristocracy that he provided in his elaborately constructed family tree. He was, in truth, just plain Fritz Reck. His grandfather had been an innkeeper, and though his father had acquired enough wealth and standing to get himself elected to the Prussian Chamber of Deputies in 1900, it was in the lower house that he sat, as befitted a commoner, not in the upper house, where the hereditary nobility belonged. Reck himself was a qualified physician who devoted most of his time to writing - novels, plays, journalism, film scripts and much more. He constructed a whole fantastic past for himself, involving military service in many different theatres of war, and even service in the British colonial army. All of it was invented. Yet Reck’s claim to be an aristocrat seems to have aroused no suspicion or animosity in the circles in which he moved. It was underpinned by his notoriously superior and arrogant bearing in public. Reck took on in his social and personal life all the attributes of the Prussian Junker. His belief in his own aristocratic character and in the virtues of the social elite of the titled and the cultured seems to have been absolutely genuine.7 And however many of the details in his diary were invented, Reck’s hatred for Hitler and the Nazis was unquestionably authentic.8

  Reck’s conservatism was far more extreme than that of most of the genuinely old Prussian aristocracy. As he astutely recognized, it was scarcely shared by the younger generation at all. The German aristocracy had undergone an unusually sharp generational divide during the Weimar years. The older generation, deprived of the financial and social backing they had enjoyed from the state under the Bismarckian Reich, longed for a return to the old days. They regarded the Nazis’ pseudo-egalitarian rhetoric with suspicion and alarm. But the younger generation despised the old monarchies for giving up without a fight in 1918. They saw in the Nazi Party in the early 1930s the potential vehicle for the creation of a new leadership elite. They regarded the aristocracy to which they belonged not as a status group based on a shared sense of honour, but as a racial entity, the product of centuries of breeding. It was this view that had prevailed in the 17,000-strong German Nobles’ Union (Deutsche Adelsgenossenschaft) in the early 1920s as it had banned Jewish nobles (about 1.5 per cent of the total) from becoming members. But it was not universally held. Catholic nobles, overwhelmingly concentrated in the south of Germany, stayed aloof from this process of racialization, and many took the side of their Church when it began to come under pressure in the Third Reich. Relatively few even of the younger Bavarian aristocracy followed their North German Protestant counterparts into the SS, although many had opposed the Weimar Republic. They felt instead more comfortable in other right-wing organizations such as the Steel Helmets. Older nobles in all German regions were usually monarchists, and indeed an open commitment to the restoration of the German monarchies was a precondition of belonging to the Nobles’ Union until it was dropped under the Third Reich. Yet many of them were attracted by the Nazis’ hostility to socialism and Communism, their emphasis on leadership, and the
ir rhetorical attacks on bourgeois culture. For the younger generation, the rapid expansion of the armed forces offered new opportunities for employment in a traditional function in the officer corps. The Nazi prioritizing of the conquest of living-space in Eastern Europe appealed to many in the Pomeranian and Prussian nobility who saw it as reviving the glorious days in which their ancestors had colonized the East. Conscious of the need to win votes from the conservative sectors of the population, the Nazis frequently brought scions of the nobility along to stand with them on electoral platforms in the early 1930s. The younger members of the Hohenzollern family took the lead in supporting the Nazis: Prince August Wilhelm of

  Prussia was an officer in the stormtroopers well before 1933, and Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm urged people to vote for Hitler against Hindenburg in the Presidential elections of 1932.9

  Although the brownshirts and a good number of ‘old fighters’ continued to pour scorn on what they saw as the effete degeneracy of the German nobility, Hitler himself recognized that its younger generation would be indispensable in staffing his new, vastly expanded officer corps and in giving a continued veneer of respectability to the foreign service. He even allowed the German Nobles’ Union to continue in existence, duly co-ordinated under Nazi leadership. However, as soon as he felt it was no longer necessary to treat the conservatives with kid gloves, Hitler made it clear he was not going to contemplate the restoration of the monarchy. Aristocratic celebrations of the ex-Kaiser’s birthday in Berlin early in 1934 were broken up by gangs of brownshirts and a number of monarchist associations were banned. Any remaining hopes amongst the older generation of German nobles were finally dashed with Hitler’s assumption of the headship of state on the death of Hindenburg, when many had hoped for a restoration of the monarchy. But if Hitler’s treatment of the aristocracy became cooler, this was more than compensated for by the growing enthusiasm shown towards them by Heinrich Himmler, Reich Leader of the SS. Bit by bit, the older generation of SS men, with histories of violence often going back to the Free Corps of the early years of the Weimar Republic, were pensioned off, to be replaced by the highly educated and the nobly born. Nazi populists might have castigated the German aristocracy as effete and degenerate, but Himmler was convinced he knew better; centuries of planned breeding, he thought, must have produced a steady improvement in its racial quality. Soon he was conveying this message to receptive audiences of German aristocrats. Figures such as the Hereditary Grand Duke of Mecklenburg and Prince Wilhelm of Hesse had already joined the SS before 30 January 1933; now young aristocrats fell over themselves to enrol, including many from the Prussian military nobility such as the Barons von der Goltz, von Podbielski and many more.10

  By 1938 nearly a fifth of the senior ranks of SS men were filled by titled members of the nobility, and roughly one in ten among the lower officer grades. To cement his relations with the aristocracy, Himmler persuaded all the most important German horse-riding associations, preserves of upper-class sportsmanship and snobbish socializing, to enrol in the SS, irrespective of their political views, much to the disgust of some of the older generation of SS veterans, so that SS riders regularly won the German equestrianism championships, hitherto the preserve of privately run riding clubs. But some, especially those who had come down in the world under the Weimar Republic, took a more active and committed role. Typical here was Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who had volunteered for service in the war at the age of fifteen, joined a Free Corps, then been cashiered from the army in 1924 because of his proselytizing for the Nazis. He had made a living running a taxi firm, then a farm, before joining the Nazi Party and the SS in 1930; by the end of 1933 he was already moving rapidly up the hierarchy. Other young noblemen with similar careers included Ludolf von Alvensleben, who had also served in a Free Corps, lost his Polish estate at the end of the war and his compensation for the loss during the inflation, and made an unsuccessful attempt to run a car firm, which eventually went bankrupt; or Baron Karl von Eberstein, who had tried to eke out his existence in the 1920s as a travel agent. Reck-Malleczewen’s observation in the Berlin nightclub had been shrewd and percipient: many of the younger members of the Junker aristocracy had indeed joined Himmler’s new German elite. Others, especially those who had enrolled in the army or the foreign service, enthusiastic though they may have been to begin with, were in time to become bitterly disillusioned with the regime.11

  II

  Germany’s aristocracy had traditionally made its living from the land. Although over the years nobles had come to play a significant and in some areas more than significant role in the officer corps, the civil service, and even industry, it was the land that still provided many of them with the main source of their income, social power and political influence in the 1920s and 1930s. Reich President Paul von Hindenburg had been particularly susceptible to the influence of the Prussian landed aristocrats with whom he socialized when he was down on his estate in East Prussian Neudeck, and a great deal of public comment had been aroused by the special concessions the government had made to landowners like him, in the form of aid for agricultural producers in the rural East. As far as the Nazis were concerned, however, it was not the large landowner but the small peasant farmer who constituted the bedrock of German society in the countryside. Point 17 of the Nazi Party programme of 1920 indeed demanded ‘a land reform suited to our national needs’ and the ‘creation of a law for the confiscation of land without compensation and for communally beneficial purposes’. Following on point 16, which demanded the abolition of the department stores, this clause seemed on the face of it to be directed against the great estates. But Nazism’s critics made it look as if the Party was threatening peasant farms with expropriation as well, so on 13 April 1928, Hitler issued a ‘clarification’ of this clause in what had in the meantime been repeatedly trumpeted as a fixed, unalterable and non-discussable list of demands. Point 17 of the Party programme simply referred, he said, to Jewish land speculators who did not control land in the public interest but used it for profiteering. Farmers need not worry: the Nazi Party was committed in principle to the sanctity of private property.12

  Reassured by this statement, and driven to despair by the deep economic crisis into which agriculture had fallen even before the onset of the Depression, the North German peasantry duly voted for the Nazi Party in large numbers from 1930 onwards. The landowning aristocracy stayed aloof, preferring to support the Nationalists. On the face of it, Nazism seemed to have little to offer them. Nevertheless, their interests were well represented in the coalition that came to power on 30 January 1933. Alfred Hugenberg, the Nationalist leader, was not only Minister of Economics but Minister of Agriculture too, and in this capacity he swiftly introduced a series of measures designed to pull his supporters, and German farmers more generally, out of the economic morass into which they had sunk. He banned creditors from foreclosing on indebted farms until 31 October 1933, he increased import duties on key agricultural products, and on 1 June he introduced measures providing for the cancellation of some debts. To protect dairy farmers, Hugenberg also cut the manufacture of margarine by 40 per cent and ordered that it should include some butter amongst its constituents. This last measure led in a very short space of time to an increase of up to 50 per cent in the price of fats, including butter and margarine, and caused widespread popular criticism. This was yet another nail in Hugenberg’s political coffin. By late June the process of co-ordination had long since overwhelmed the key agricultural pressure-groups and was reaching Hugenberg’s own Nationalist Party. By the end of the month, Hugenberg had resigned all his posts and disappeared into political oblivion.13

  The man who replaced him was Richard Walther Darré, the Party’s agricultural expert and inventor of the Nazi slogan ‘blood and soil’. For Darré, what mattered was not improving the economic position of agriculture but shoring up the peasant farmer as the source of German racial strength. In his books The Peasantry as the Life-Source of the Nordic Race, published in 1
928, and New Aristocracy from Blood and Soil, which appeared the following year, Darré argued that the essential qualities of the German race had been instilled into it by the peasantry of the early Middle Ages, which had not been downtrodden or oppressed by the landowning aristocracy but on the contrary had essentially formed part of a single racial community with it. The existence of landed estates was purely functional and did not express any superiority of intellect or character on the part of their owners.14 These ideas had a powerful influence on Heinrich Himmler, who made Darré the Director of his Head Office for Race and Settlement. Himmler’s idea of a new racial aristocracy to rule Germany had many aspects in common with Darré’s, at least to begin with. And Darré’s ideas appealed to Hitler, who invited him to join the Party and become head of a new section devoted to agriculture and the peasantry in 1930. By 1933 Darré had built up a large and well-organized propaganda machine that spread the good news amongst the peasantry about their pivotal role in the coming Third Reich. And he had successfully infiltrated so many Nazi Party members into agricultural pressure-groups like the Reich Land League that it was relatively easy for him to organize their co-ordination in the early months of the new regime.15