A Patriot's History of the Modern World

by Larry Schweikart

  Germany followed a two-pronged economic strategy of seeking regional trade dominance and getting the Allies to lift their demand for reparations. The latter finally occurred at the Lausanne Conference in 1932 in which Germany, Britain, and France agreed to end the burdens of Versailles as it was becoming evident that the worldwide depression was making further reparations impossible. Under Lausanne, a one-year moratorium on payments became permanent, with the understanding that Germany would negotiate with the United States for further assistance in meeting outstanding debts. But the Americans rejected the plan in 1932, and the prior Young Plan (1929) had expired, making the debt relief permanent. Once relieved of its reparation obligations, however, Germany saw little incentive for close relations with the United States, and the potential for American influence on German domestic politics vanished. It would be too strong to say that the end of reparations enabled the rise of Hitler, but it certainly minimized the advantages of German-American friendship.

  Debates over the scale, schedule, and even justice of the reparations payments emanating from Versailles continue to bubble to this day. John Maynard Keynes had argued in 1919 that the burdens on Germany were too high, and later felt they provoked German dissatisfaction sufficiently to enable the rise of Hitler.37 More recently, however, historians such as Sally Marks, Niall Ferguson, Stephen Schuker, and Gerhard Weinberg have all noted that the Germans had plenty of ability to pay, but not the political will; that the Allies failed to enforce the payments by seizing and holding Germany territory until the debts were paid; and that American loans more than offset the burden on Germany.38 All in all, the preponderance of evidence shows that Germany indeed had the wherewithal to pay, and that it chose every alternative—inflation, loans, delay, shifting the burdens from taxpayers—to avoid meeting its reparations requirements.

  The United States was hardly left as a winner in this exchange: without German money flowing in, France, Belgium, Poland, and other countries defaulted on their own debts the same year.39 Reparations battles and continuing economic crises in Germany also coincided with another fateful shift when the German farm lobby, representing some 13 million farmers, between 1925 and 1933 began to demand relief. This culminated in their calls for trade terms similar to those given American farmers under Smoot-Hawley. Consequently, instead of “big business” bringing down Weimar and assuring Hitler’s ascension, the farmers, pandered to by most major politicians, played the critical role. When Chancellor Heinrich Brüning refused to adopt quotas similar to the Americans, the farmers’ support for the Republic ended and they shifted their allegiance to the Nazis.

  Brüning also made an enemy of the paramilitary organization known as the SA (Sturmabteilung, or “storm detachment”), a Nazi thug group that increasingly seemed on the verge of launching a coup. General Kurt von Schleicher, a major influence in the formation of German cabinets from 1930 to 1932, had grown close to the Nazis. Convinced only a “strong man” could lead Germany and serve as a counterweight to the Social Democrats, he hoped to end the Weimar Republic.40 Following a secret meeting with Hitler, von Schleicher intrigued against Chancellor Brüning and convinced President Paul von Hindenburg to fire him. Von Hindenburg appointed ex-Chancellor Franz von Papen as Brüning’s successor, and he served briefly from June to November 1932. For his part in ousting Brüning (and as part of the overall agreement with Hitler), von Schleicher was named minister of defense. In June 1932, the von Papen government dissolved the Reichstag and two weeks later lifted the ban on the SA and SS (Schutzstaffel, or “protective squad,” originally Hitler’s bodyguard, but by 1926 his elite paramilitary organization charged with handling internal Party situations as well as other duties that might be required).

  Von Papen recognized the need to accommodate the National Socialists now that they were the largest party in the Reichstag, so he, Hjalmar Schacht, and a few others put together a plan to co-opt the Nazis. They would convince von Hindenburg that they could handle Hitler by allowing him to assume the chancellorship, while von Papen would assume the positions of vice chancellor and Prussian prime minister. In that way, Hitler would have an official position in government (thereby recognizing the Nazis’ strength in the Reichstag) while the real power would remain—they thought—with von Hindenburg, von Papen, and the majority of ministers who were not Nazis and could unite against Hitler if he got out of line. This was the first of numerous blunders in which powerful politicians, holding positions superior to Hitler, grossly misjudged him and expressed their confidence in their ability to “control” him. When the aged von Hindenburg administered the oath of office to Hitler in January 1933 surrounded by von Papen’s conservatives, von Papen remarked, “All that has happened, is that we have given [Hitler] a job.”41 In reality, von Papen had thrown a cobra into the crib of German government.

  The “miracle” recovery had already started under von Papen and von Schleicher, mostly due to Hjalmar Schacht, president of the Reichsbank from 1923 to 1930, and the Cologne banker Baron Kurt von Schröder. They had overseen the end of reparations and established the trade policies placing Romania and Hungary in the German orbit. Schacht devised a new foreign exchange system that helped control German imports and address the imbalance of trade. The rebound, which continued after Hitler assumed the chancellorship, thereby benefiting the Nazis, was in no way attributable to Nazi economic policies except those intrinsic to rearmament (that is, through large government weapons purchases). Nor did rearmament begin strictly with Hitler: during the time Gustav Stresemann was foreign minister (1923–29) the General Staff, led by Generals Hans von Seeckt, Kurt von Schleicher, Wilhelm Heye, Werner von Blomberg, and Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, had already been modestly and secretly building up German forces, aided significantly by the Soviet Union. When the Paris Convention of 1926 ended the international community’s supervision of the German aircraft industry, Germany’s air force already consisted of two fighter squadrons, one bomber squadron, and one auxiliary bomber squadron, operating within the framework of Lufthansa, the civilian air transport company.42 Exploiting that crack, Germany pried open the door further, and by the time of the World Disarmament Conference in 1933, the German delegation felt emboldened enough to walk out after being denied the opportunity to maintain armed forces similar to those of the other major states. By then the Truppenamt, which in 1935 became the General Staff, had on paper fleshed out a mobilization strength of twenty-one divisions, 300,000 men in an army equipped with heavy weapons and an air force. In August 1933, the army took delivery of its first tanks, and a tank battalion came into existence in 1934.43 Between the arms industry, the reinstatement of military conscription in 1935, and the “Battle for Work” (announced in 1933, consisting of Reich support for local subsidized work projects), unemployment fell from eight million in 1933 to under half that a year later, and by 1936 there was virtually full employment.

  But the bulk of this came from military-related spending and putting young Germans into the armed forces. Germany reintroduced a draft in 1935, bringing the Reich as close to full employment as it would get short of actual war. By July 1938, the Labor Ministry of the Reich proudly reported only 292,000 unemployed in all of Germany, a scant 1 percent of the workforce. Of these, many were seasonal actors, musicians, and artists who one Reich official suggested should be subjected to “radical occupational redirection.”44 As Adam Tooze observed, “Make-work schemes at their peak [only] directly accounted for 30 percent of the reduction in registered unemployment. Even when they were at their most extensive, they accounted for a minority of jobs created.”45 Germans may have been back on the job, but their standard of living barely improved. Hitler attempted to raise German living standards with higher tariff rates on Germany’s neighbors, all imposed by intimidation. Per-capita GDP indeed rose, outstripping England, but the benefits were unequally distributed. Labor’s share of the national income fell, despite the rise in employment.46 Indeed, mortality rates and the measures of the general health and diet of averag
e Germans declined during the 1930s.47 German industrial production related to the military grew, but starting in July 1934, nonmilitary production (such as textiles) collapsed and the consumer goods sector remained mired in depression.

  Hitler’s Rise

  Economic stagnation and unemployment provided a fertile field for Hitler’s ascension, with the water and nutrients provided by resentments of Versailles. To that mix, Hitler added a unique element, Jew hatred. Born on April 20, 1889, in Austria of Catholic parents, Adolf Hitler attended Catholic school in Lambach, Upper Austria, where the family moved in 1897, and where he was traumatized by his mother’s death from breast cancer a decade later. Modern historians often note that his mother’s doctor was Jewish, as if this episode were the root of Hitler’s anti-Semitism. But surviving letters, in which Hitler praised the doctor’s efforts, seem to refute that interpretation.48

  After living in Vienna in poverty, due to his failure (twice) to gain acceptance to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, Hitler obtained his portion of his father Alois’s small estate in 1913 and moved to Munich.49 He admired all things German: he sang “Deutschland über Alles,” the German anthem, rather than the Austrian anthem, used German greetings, and tore up his school certificate from Austria. The one Austrian he did admire, however, was Lanz von Liebenfels, a former monk who published the magazine Ostara, Briefbucherei der Blonden and Mannesrechtler (“Ostara, Newsletter of the Blond and Masculists”), which promulgated Aryan supremacy and anti-Semitism. In addition to Ostara, Hitler explored occult writings and German nationalist works. During World War I, he served as a runner in a Bavarian infantry regiment and received the Iron Cross, Second Class, for heroism. He was wounded in 1916 during the Battle of the Somme when a shell exploded in his dugout, and after a temporary return to duty, he was temporarily blinded in a mustard gas attack and again hospitalized. Stuck behind the lines when the Armistice came, Hitler incorporated the “stab-in-the-back” theory into his anti-Semitism and German nationalism to explain why the “undefeated” German army nevertheless had to accept a Carthaginian peace.

  Still in the army after Versailles, he was assigned as an intelligence agent to infiltrate a radical party, the German Workers Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or DAP). Instead of becoming an informant, he became an acolyte. His actual rise to power can thus be traced to September 1919 when he first attended a meeting of the DAP. Seven months later he was discharged from the army and began a career as a full-time politician. An emotional, dramatic speaker who practiced constantly in front of a mirror, Hitler never used notes. His passion attracted crowds, especially at the beer halls he frequented, and he became identified with the Nazi movement even before emerging as its leader in 1921, weathering a mutiny from other DAP members. His message appealed to the unemployed, but also attracted large numbers of those terrified by the rising Bolshevik threat from Russia as well as from domestic Communist parties. He courted business as well, understanding their fears of collectivism, and added “National Socialist” to the party name to broaden its appeal.

  Sensing Weimar Germany was ripe for toppling in 1923, he led a failed and comedic attempt to seize control of Bavaria. He and his Nazis interrupted a large public meeting in a Munich beer hall and captured the local officials. This “Beer Hall Putsch” rapidly unraveled when the prisoners escaped, whereupon Hitler’s group, led by Colonel General Erich Ludendorff, marched on the Bavarian Defense Ministry in a desperate attempt to regain the upper hand. There they were met by rifle fire from police. Fourteen Nazis were killed, a number wounded (including Herman Göring), and most of the others, including Hitler, scattered. Two days later, police arrested Hitler and after trying him for high treason, shipped him off to Landsberg prison for a five-year term. Already a celebrity prisoner, Hitler spent most of the eight months he served “receiving a constant stream of visitors, including admiring women and cringing politicians.”50 He was allowed unsupervised visitors, and more than thirty people celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday with him in his suitelike cell. Papers from Landsberg prison reveal three to four hundred signature cards from well-wishers, leading the owner of a Bavarian auction house that later acquired the papers to describe Hitler’s prison stint as “more like a holiday.”51 Any time he wasn’t chatting with admirers, Hitler used to dictate his manifesto, Mein Kampf, to his deputy Rudolf Hess. This long-winded, often rambling, always overblown book occasionally provided an insightful glimpse of Hitler’s plan for European domination. At first few read it, although by 1934 he had sold a quarter million copies. In 1926, however, few people took his radical ideas seriously.

  As he outlined in Mein Kampf, Hitler now realized that Germany could not be seized in a violent revolution, but was entirely vulnerable to a democratic takeover. Indeed, Weimar’s experience with hyperinflation fit perfectly with Hitler’s tendency to blame everything on Jews and bankers. Obsessed with a Malthusian view of population and convinced Germany’s land could not support its population, Hitler looked to Poland (in his view, as in Stalin’s, an entirely illegitimate postwar creation) and, ultimately, Ukraine as places where Germans could obtain “living space” (Lebensraum). This principle served as the staple of his speeches as a politician, then as Fuehrer, but beneath the surface loomed a titanic land-envy of both the Soviet Union and the United States. “Only an adequately large space on this earth assures a nation of freedom of existence,” he wrote, and “if we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states.”52 Any future German foreign policy must be “an eastern policy in the sense of acquiring the necessary soil for our German people.” It should also “destroy” the “French efforts toward hegemony in Europe.”53 He then combined Russia’s deterioration with “Jewish Bolshevism,” thereby making the destruction of France, Russia, and the Jews synonymous. Anyone paying even the slightest attention to Hitler’s language could not doubt his intentions, but many dismissed him as just another perpetually lying politician. Post hoc, most of the appeasers adopted this view, claiming they interpreted Hitler’s bombast as mere political puffery—stump speeches and exaggerations for internal consumption.

  Lost in modern discussions of fascism and communism is the stark similarity between Hitler and Karl Marx. Hitler’s ideas, for example, strongly internalized the Nazi Party Program of 1920, which incorporated all ten points of Marx’s Communist Manifesto, then enhanced it with several Jew-specific clauses. Hitler himself incorporated Marxist language throughout his speeches and writings. “History…represents the progression of a people’s struggle for survival,” Hitler wrote in his “Second Book,” with almost no variation from Marx’s “All history is the history of class struggle.”54 Nazi economic theory, such as it existed at all, was a mix of German nationalism combined with socialism. Hitler flatly stated in his “Second Book,” “I am a socialist.”55 “People who love to speak of socialism,” he insisted, “do not understand that the most socialistic organization of all was the German people’s army.”56

  One key element of difference between Hitlerian fascism and communism lay in the former’s use of race as the aspect of human struggle and the latter’s reliance on class. Hitler’s broad discussions of geopolitics and conflict always returned to what he saw as three intertwined realities: the death of the Jew, the life of Germany, and the expansion of the Reich’s borders. Germany’s survival demanded space and foreign powers, especially Russia (with the Jewish Bolsheviks), and Britain and the United States (whose banks were under Semitic control) would resist the acquisition of that space. In Hitler’s view, success depended on removing the Jews from power, but he was not only interested in displacing them. Rather, he advocated their extermination—killing them as the Germans moved in to repopulate their newly won territories with a superior race and spread German blood.

  Hitler’s anti-Semitism has been the subject of innumerable academic works. Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler analyzed the arguments of more than a dozen historians, theologians, and philo
sophers, none of whom agreed on the essential origins or character of Hitler’s Jew-hatred.57 Statements by Hitler have been interpreted so flexibly as to render them all little more than literary linguine. However, if one takes them at face value and appreciates the heavy spiritual context within which they were written, they take on new clarity:

  “The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is…the Jew.”

  “Since the Jew…was never in possession of a culture of his own, the foundations of his intellectual work were always provided by others.”

  “If the Jews were alone in this world, they would stifle in filth and offal; they would try to get ahead of one another in hate-filled struggle and exterminate one another.”

  “The Jew is led by nothing but the naked egoism of the individual.”

  “Thus, the Jew lacks those qualities which distinguish the races that are creative and hence culturally blessed.”

  “The Jew cannot possess a religious institution, if for no other reason because he lacks idealism in any form.”

  “On this first and greatest lie, that the Jews are not a race but a religion, more and more lies are based.”

  “Race…does not lie in the language, but exclusively in the blood.” (emphasis ours)

  “The Jewish influence on economic affairs grows with terrifying speed through the stock exchange.”

  “The Jew by means of the trade union…shatters the national economy.”

  “With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting [German] girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate.”58

  And on and on. As Professor Robert Loewenberg once observed, “Hitler’s choice to eradicate the Jews and Judaism instead of Armenians or Biafrans is what makes for the Holocaust’s particularity” (emphasis ours).59 Understanding Hitler in this way makes it literally impossible to refer to a “Palestinian holocaust,” for example. Repeatedly, Hitler invoked spiritually charged pseudo-Christian terms to describe the war against the Jews, referring to “eternal Germanity,” effecting a “reconciliation of mankind,” emphasizing the “purity of the blood.”60 The fight had to be one to the death, for the Jew intended the “enslavement, and with it the destruction, of all non-Jewish peoples.”61 Connecting Jewishness to trade-unionism and Bolshevism enabled Hitler to demonize the Soviet Union; linking Jewishness to bankers and financiers permitted him to do the same with the United States and Britain. But these connections only constituted necessary tactics to achieve the final goal, the “extermination” (Ausrottung) of the Jews as a “race,” and this objective was only the first step in replacing Christianity with Nazism. The Nuremberg trials revealed the extent of the Nazis’ war on Christianity, noting that “Christian churches were systematically cut off from effective communication with the people. They were confined as far as possible to the performance of narrowly religious functions, and even within this sphere were subjected to as many hindrances as the Nazis dared to impose…[including through] illegal and terroristic means.”62 Both the German Evangelical Church and the Norwegian National Church (after the Nazi invasion) were seized by the Nazi government. All other churches were directly controlled through Nazi administration of their finances and through a series of laws that drastically reduced their powers across a broad spectrum of issues. But whether the Jews were (at first) specifically singled out as the end product of Nazi terror, or whether they were the first step toward a National Socialist religion mattered little in practical terms as the decade unfolded and Jews were rounded up, renamed, and eventually gassed.