The Origins of Totalitarianism
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49 How dangerous it can be to be innocent from the point of view of the persecuting government, became very clear when, during the last war, the American government offered asylum to all those German refugees who were threatened by the extradition paragraph in the German-French Armistice. The condition was, of course, that the applicant could prove that he had done something against the Nazi regime. The proportion of refugees from Germany who were able to fulfill this condition was very small, and they, strangely enough, were not the people who were most in danger.
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50 Even under the conditions of totalitarian terror, concentration camps sometimes have been the only place where certain remnants of freedom of thought and discussion still existed. See David Rousset, Les Jours de Notre Mort, Paris, 1947, passim, for freedom of discussion in Buchenwald, and Anton Ciliga, The Russian Enigma, London, 1940, p. 200, about “isles of liberty,” “the freedom of mind” that reigned in some of the Soviet places of detention.
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51 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790, edited by E. J. Payne, Everyman’s Library.
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52 Robespierre, Speeches, 1927. Speech of April 24, 1793.
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53 Introduction by Payne to Burke, op. cit.
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54 This modern expulsion from humanity has much more radical consequences than the ancient and medieval custom of outlawry. Outlawry, certainly the “most fearful fate which primitive law could inflict,” placing the life of the outlawed person at the mercy of anyone he met, disappeared with the establishment of an effective system of law enforcement and was finally replaced by extradition treaties between the nations. It had been primarily a substitute for a police force, designed to compel criminals to surrender.
The early Middle Ages seem to have been quite conscious of the danger involved in “civil death.” Excommunication in the late Roman Empire meant ecclesiastical death but left a person who had lost his membership in the church full freedom in all other respects. Ecclesiastical and civil death became identical only in the Merovingian era, and there excommunication “in general practice [was] limited to temporary withdrawal or suspension of the rights of membership which might be regained.” See the articles “Outlawry” and “Excommunication” in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences. Also the article “Friedlosigkeit” in the Schweizer Lexikon.
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1 The “magic spell” that Hitler cast over his listeners has been acknowledged many times, latterly by the publishers of Hitlers Tischgespräche, Bonn, 1951 (Hitler’s Table Talks, American edition, New York, 1953; quotations from the original German edition). This fascination—“the strange magnetism that radiated from Hitler in such a compelling manner”—rested indeed “on the fanatical belief of this man in himself” (introduction by Gerhard Ritter, p. 14), on his pseudo-authoritative judgments about everything under the sun, and on the fact that his opinions—whether they dealt with the harmful effects of smoking or with Napoleon’s policies—could always be fitted into an all-encompassing ideology.
Fascination is a social phenomenon, and the fascination Hitler exercised over his environment must be understood in terms of the particular company he kept. Society is always prone to accept a person offhand for what he pretends to be, so that a crackpot posing as a genius always has a certain chance to be believed. In modern society, with its characteristic lack of discerning judgment, this tendency is strengthened, so that someone who not only holds opinions but also presents them in a tone of unshakable conviction will not so easily forfeit his prestige, no matter how many times he has been demonstrably wrong. Hitler, who knew the modern chaos of opinions from first-hand experience, discovered that the helpless seesawing between various opinions and “the conviction ...that everything is balderdash” (p. 281) could best be avoided by adhering to one of the many current opinions with “unbending consistency.” The hair-raising arbitrariness of such fanaticism holds great fascination for society because for the duration of the social gathering it is freed from the chaos of opinions that it constantly generates. This “gift” of fascination, however, has only social relevance; it is so prominent in the Tischgespräche because here Hitler played the game of society and was not speaking to his own kind but to the generals of the Wehrmacht, all of whom more or less belonged to “society.” To believe that Hitler’s successes were based on his “powers of fascination” is altogether erroneous; with those qualities alone he would have never advanced beyond the role of a prominent figure in the salons.
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2 See the illuminating remarks of Carlton J. H. Hayes on “The Novelty of Totalitarianism in the History of Western Civilization,” in Symposium on the Totalitarian State, 1939. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 1940, Vol. LXXXII.
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3 This was indeed “the first large revolution in history that was carried out by applying the existing formal code of law at the moment of seizing power” (Hans Frank, Recht und Verwaltung, 1939, p. 8).
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4 The best study of Hitler and his career is the new Hitler biography by Alan Bullock, Hitler, A Study in Tyranny, London, 1952. In the English tradition of political biographies it makes meticulous use of all available source material and gives a comprehensive picture of the contemporary political background. By this publication the excellent books of Konrad Heiden—primarily Der Fuehrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power, Boston, 1944—have been superseded in their details although they remain important for the general interpretation of events. For Stalin’s career, Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, New York, 1939, is still a standard work. Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, New York and London, 1949, is indispensable for its rich documentary material and great insight into the internal struggles of the Bolshevik party; it suffers from an interpretation which likens Stalin to—Cromwell, Napoleon, and Robespierre.
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5 Franz Borkenau, The Totalitarian Enemy, London, 1940, p. 231.
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6 Quoted from the German edition of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” Die Zionistischen Protokolle mit einem Vor- und Nachwort von Theodor Fritsch, 1924, p. 29.
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7 This, to be sure, is a specialty of the Russian brand of totalitarianism. It is interesting to note that in the early trial of foreign engineers in the Soviet Union, Communist sympathies were already used as an argument for self-accusation: “All the time the authorities insisted on my admitting having committed acts of sabotage I had never done. I refused. I was told: if you are in favour of the Soviet Government, as you pretend you are, prove it by your actions; the Government needs your confession.’” Reported by Anton Ciliga, The Russian Enigma, London, 1940, p. 153.
A theoretical justification for this behavior was given by Trotsky: “We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right. The English have a saying, ‘My country, right or wrong.’...We have much better historical justification in saying whether it is right or wrong in certain individual concrete cases, it is my party” (Souvarine, op. cit., p. 361).
On the other hand, the Red Army officers who did not belong to the movement had to be tried behind closed doors.
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8 The Nazi author Andreas Pfenning explicitly rejects the notion that the SA were fighting for an “ideal” or were prompted by and “idealistic experience.” Their “basic experience came into existance in the course of the struggle.” “Gemeinschaft und Staatswissenschaft,” in Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft, Band 96. Translation quoted from Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State, New Yo
rk and London, 1941. p. 192. From the extensive literature issued in pamphlet form by the main indoctrination center (Hauptamt-Schulungsamt) of the SS, it is quite evident that the word “idealism” has been studiously avoided. Not idealism was demanded of SS members, but “utter logical consistency in all question of ideology and the ruthless pursuit of the political struggle” (Werner Best, Die deutsche Polizei, 1941, p. 99).
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9 In this respect postwar Germany offers many illuminating examples. It was astonishing enough that American Negro troops were by no means received with hostility, in spite of the massive racial indoctrination undertaken by the Nazis. But equally startling was “the fact that the Waffen-SS in the last days of German resistance against the Allies did not fight ‘to the last man’” and that this special Nazi combat unit “after the enormous sacrifices of the preceding years, which far exceeded the proportionate losses of the wehrmacht, in the last few weeks acted like any unit drawn from the ranks of civilians, and bowed to the hopelessness of the situation” (Karl O. Paetel, “Die SS,” in Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, January, 1954.
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10 The Moscow-dominated Eastern European governments rule for the sake of Moscow and act as agents of the Comintern; they are examples of the spread of the Moscow-directed totalitarian movement, not of native developments. The only exception seems to be Tito of Yugoslavia, who may have broken with Moscow because he realized that the Russian-inspired totalitarian methods would cost him a heavy percentage of Yugoslavia’s population.
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11 Proof of the nontotalitarian nature of the Fascist dictatorship is the surprisingly small number and the comparatively mild sentences meted out to political offenders. During the particularly active years from 1926 to 1932, the special tribunals for political offenders pronounced 7 death sentences, 257 sentences of 10 or more years imprisonment, 1,360 under 10 years, and sentenced many more to exile; 12,000, more-over, were arrested and found innocent, a procedure quite inconceivable under condition of Nazi or Bolshevik terror. See E. Kohn-Bramstedt, Dictatorship and Political Police: The Technique of Control by Fear, London, 1945, pp. 51 ff.
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12 Nazi political theorists have always emphatically stated that “Mussolini’s ‘ethical state’ and Hitler’s ‘ideological state’ [Weltanschauungsstaat] cannot be mentioned in the same breath” (Gottfried Neesse, “Die verfassungsrechtliche Gestaltung der Ein-Partei,” in Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft, 1938, Band 98).
Goebbels on the difference between Fascism and National Socialism: “[Fascism] is ...nothing like National Socialism. While the latter goes deep down to the roots, Fascism is only a superficial thing” (The Goebbels Diaries 1942–1943, ed. by Louis Lochner, New York, 1948, p. 71). “[The Duce] is not a revolutionary like the Führer or Stalin. He is so bound to his own Italian people that he lacks the broad qualities of a worldwide revolutionary and insurrectionist” (ibid., p. 468).
Himmler expressed the same opinion in a speech delivered in 1943 at a Conference of Commanding Officers: “Fascism and National Socialism are two fundamentally different things,...there is absolutely no comparison between Fascism and National Socialism as spiritual, ideological movements.” See Kohn-Bramstedt, op. cit., Appendix A.
Hitler recognized in the early twenties the affinity between the Nazi and the Communist movements: “In our movement the two extremes come together: the Communists from the Left and the officers and the students from the Right. These two have always been the most active elements.... The Communists were the idealists of Socialism....” See Heiden, op. cit., p. 147. Röhm, the chief of the SA, only repeated a current opinion when he wrote in the late twenties: “Many things are between us and the Communists, but we respect the sincerity of their conviction and their willingness to bring sacrifices for their own cause, and this unites us with them” (Ernst Röhm, Die Geschichte eines Hochverräters, 1933, Volksausgabe, p. 273).
During the last war, the Nazis more readily recognized the Russians as their peers than any other nation. Hitler, speaking in May, 1943, at a conference of the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter, “began with the fact that in this war bourgeoisie and revolutionary states are facing each other. It has been an easy thing for us to knock out the bourgeois states, for they were quite inferior to us in their upbringing and attitude. Countries with an ideology have an edge on bourgois states....[In the East] we met an opponent who also sponsors an ideology, even though a wrong one....” (Goebbels Diaries, p. 355).—This estimate was based on ideological, not on military considerations. Gottfried Neesse, Partei und Staat, 1936, gave the official version of the movement’s struggle for power when he wrote: “For us the united front of the system extends from the German National People’s Party [i.e., the extreme Right] to the Social Democrats. The Communist Party was an enemy outside of the system. During the first months of 1933, therefore, when the doom of the system was already sealed, we still had to fight a decisive battle against the Communist Party” (p. 76).
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13 Hitlers Tischgespräche, p. 113. There we also find numerous examples showing that, contrary to certain postwar legends, Hitler never intended to defend “the West” against Bolshevism but always remained ready to join “the Reds” for the destruction of the West, even in the middle of the struggle against Soviet Russia. See especially pp. 95, 108, 113 ff., 158, 385.
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14 We now know that Stalin was warned repeatedly of the imminent attack of Hitler on the Soviet Union. Even when the Soviet military attaché in Berlin informed him of the day of the Nazi attack, Stalin refused to believe that Hitler would violate the treaty. (See Khrushchev’s “Speech on Stalin,” text released by the State Department, New York Times, June 5, 1956.)
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15 The following information reported by Souvarine, op. cit., p. 669, seems to be an outstanding illustration: “According to W. Krivitsky, whose excellent confidential source of information is the GPU: ‘Instead of the 171 million inhabitants calculated for 1937, only 145 million were found; thus nearly 30 million people in the USSR are missing.”’ And this, it should be kept in mind, occurred after the dekulakization of the early thirties which had cost an estimated 8 million human lives. See Communism in Action. U. S. Government, Washington, 1946, p. 140.
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16 A large part of these plans, based on the original documents, can be found in Léon Poliakov’s Bréviaire de la Haine, Paris, 1951, chapter 8 (American edition under the title Harvest of Hate, Syracuse, 1954; we quote from the original French edition), but only insofar as they referred to the extermination of non-Germanic peoples, above all those of Slavic origin. That the Nazi engine of destruction would not have stopped even before the German people is evident from a Reich health bill drafted by Hitler himself. Here he proposes to “isolate” from the rest of the population all families with cases of heart or lung ailments among them, their physical liquidation being of course the next step in this program. This as well as several other interesting projects for a victorious postwar Germany are contained in a circular letter to the district leaders (Kreisleiter) of Hesse-Nassau in the form of a report on a discussion at the Fuehrer’s headquarters concerning “measures that before ...and after victorious termination of the war” should be adopted. See the collection of documents in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Washington, 1946, et seq., Vol. VII, p. 175. In the same context belongs the planned enactment of an “over-all alien legislation,” by means of which the “institutional authority” of the police—namely, to ship persons innocent of any offenses to concentration camps—was to be legalized and expanded. (See Paul Werner, SS-Standartenführer, in Deutsches Jugendrecht, Heft 4, 1944.)
In connection with this “negative population policy,” which in its aim at extermination decidedly matches the Bolshe
vist party purges, it is important to remember that “in this process of selection there can never be a standstill” (Himmler, “Die Schutzstaffel,” in Grundlagen, Aufbau und Wirlschaftsordnung des nationalsozialstischen Staates, No. 7b). “The struggle of the Fuehrer and his party was a hitherto unattained selection.... This selection and this struggle were ostensibly accomplished on January 30, 1933.... The Fuehrer and his old guard knew that the real struggle had just begun” (Robert Ley, Der Weg zur Ordensburg, o.D. Verlag der Deutschen Arbeits-front. “Not available for sale”).
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17 F. Borkenau describes the situation correctly: ‘The Communists had only very modest successes when they tried to win influence among the masses of the working class; their mass basis, therefore, if they had it at all, moved more and more away from the proletariat” (“Die neue Komintern,” in Der Monat, Berlin, 1949, Heft 4).
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18 William Ebenstein, The Nazi State, New York, 1943, p. 247.
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19 As Maxim Gorky had described them. See Souvarine, op. cit., p. 290.
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20 Heinrich Himmler’s speech on “Organization and Obligation of the SS and the Police,” published in National-politischer Lehrgang der Wehrmacht vom 15–23. Januar 1937. Translation quoted from Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression. Office of the United States Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality. U. S. Government, Washington, 1946, IV, 616 ff.
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21 Gustave Lebon, La Psychologie des Fottles, 1895, mentions the peculiar selflessness of the masses. See chapter ii, paragraph 5.
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22 The founders of the Nazi party referred to it occasionally even before Hitler took over as a “party of the Left.” An incident which occurred after the parliamentary elections of 1932 is also interesting: “Gregor Strasser bitterly pointed out to his Leader that before the elections the National Socialists in the Reichstag might have formed a majority with the Center; now this possibility was ended, the two parties were less than half of parliament;...But with the Communists they still had a majority, Hitler replied; no one can govern against us” (Heiden, op. cit., pp. 94 and 495, respectively).