The Human Story

by James C. Davis

  Other countries also had their problems, and they dealt with them as best they could. Couldn’t able Germans do even better? Yes! shouted rabble-rousing Adolf Hitler. He knew just what to do, not merely to revive the nation but to make the Germans once again a master race.

  Strangely enough, this Hitler, who would play a giant role in Germany, had not been raised there. His first home was just across the border in Austria, which at this time was the German-speaking heartland of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a retired customs officer, a hard, short-tempered man, and his mother a former housemaid. Both of them died while Adolf was in his teens. At sixteen he dropped out of high school, and two years later he went to Vienna, the capital of the empire, to study art.

  The Viennese Academy of Fine Arts found his test drawings “unsatisfactory” and rejected him. But Hitler stayed on in the city for five years. He slept in public hostels, and after he ran out of money he did odd jobs such as shoveling snow and carrying travelers’ suitcases at a train station. He also earned a little by painting postcards and making advertising posters for products such as Teddy’s Perspiration Powder. A couple of kindly Jewish dealers sold his mediocre postcards. Hitler was a strange young man, lazy and moody. He wore a greasy derby hat and a well-worn black overcoat given to him by an old-clothes dealer, a Hungarian Jew named Neumann.

  Meanwhile, Hitler was becoming Hitler. He was reading widely in a public library, peering at the world, and deciding on his loves and hates. He loved the German people of the distant past (as he dreamed they were), hardy forest dwellers, worshippers of warrior gods, and fighters even Romans couldn’t beat. He loved the operas of Germany’s Richard Wagner, with their tales of northern gods and heroes, demons, dragons, blood feuds, and even the twilight of the gods, when a princess seeking vengeance set the hall of fallen warriors on fire, and all went up in flames.

  His hates were many. He hated the Hapsburg family, who ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire; and he hated the aristocrats in their carriages who glided past him, a shabby ambler on the sidewalk; and he hated businessmen, socialists, and communists. Above all, like many Europeans of his time, he hated Jews and put the blame on them for every ill. He argued about his loves and hates with the other down-and-outers in the hostels, ranting and waving his arms.

  A year before the start of World War I, Hitler moved from Austria to the southern German city of Munich. And so it was that, when the war began, he enlisted not in the Austrian army but in the German one. In the next few years, the war transformed him. In peacetime he had been a nothing, but now he felt caught up in something big and thrilling. He served as a “runner” who carried messages along the front lines, and was wounded in a leg. Later a British mustard gas attack temporarily blinded him. Twice he won the Iron Cross for bravery. The officer who recommended him for the second cross was Hugo Gutmann, a Jew.

  For two years after the war Hitler stayed on active duty. The army sent him to Munich, his former home, and told him to keep patriotism alive in army veterans and workers. At this time Munich swarmed with secret clubs and bands of angry, jobless men bent on fighting pacifism, democracy, and communism.

  On orders, Hitler joined the German Workers, which was part political party and part debating club. When he attended a meeting of its executive committee, he saw how insignificant the party was. The meeting took place in a small back room in a beer hall, where (he later wrote), “Under the dim light shed by a grimy gas-lamp I could see four people sitting around a table.” Two members must have been absent, because when Hitler joined the committee he became its seventh member. He was thirty years old.

  He left the army and threw himself into party work, and soon he was the German Workers’ leader. Although his offstage manner was harsh and jerky, he turned into a good speaker. His looks were unimpressive, with his smidgen of mustache, but he carried a heavy riding whip made of hippopotamus hide. Another member of the little party, Ernst Röhm, had a private force of brown-shirted Storm Troopers who served as the party’s fist. They guarded Hitler and beat up communists and anyone else who needed it.

  Meanwhile, the German Workers renamed themselves the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The name is misleading, since the party was not national, nor socialist, nor made up mainly of blue-collar workers. The name was also too long, but that problem was soon resolved. From the German word for national came the nickname everybody called the party: the Nazis.

  In 1923 Hitler, an immigrant, former drifter, ex-corporal, leader of a minor party, decided to seize power, not merely in Munich but in all of Germany. He was counting on support from the army, and on nerve and bluff. On November 8 he entered a beer hall where Munich’s political leaders were meeting. With him, inside and outside the building, were several hundred Storm Troopers.

  He fired a pistol at the ceiling and pushed his way onto the platform, where he shouted, “The national revolution has begun!” Then he led a march toward the center of the city. But policemen fired at the Nazis and they scattered — even Hitler. He was captured and, after a sensational trial that every German followed, the court sentenced Hitler to five years in prison.

  His jailers treated Hitler as the celebrity he was, and they kept him in prison only nine months, instead of five years. While he was there, flattering politicians and admiring women paid him visits, and he strolled in the prison garden with other Nazi prisoners. He also found time to begin to write a book, which soon was published in two volumes with the name Mein Kampf (My Struggle).

  IN MEIN KAMPF Hitler told the world what he thought and what he planned to do. Life, he wrote, guided by his misreading of Darwin and others, is an endless struggle. The strong will flourish and the weak die out, as they deserve to do. Humans have climbed to mastery over other animals, and among humans one “race” has trampled on the others and emerged on top. This noble folk, this “master race,” are the “Aryans” of northern Europe, especially the Germans.

  However, Germans recently had lost their ancient force. To be a master race, said Hitler, Germans must again, as in the past, put their fate in strong and steady hands. His new Germany would have no “democratic nonsense.” The ruler would be a leader, a man of action, a dictator. In short, Hitler.

  The reason for the Germans’ loss of mastery, he wrote, wasn’t only that they had lacked a strongman. They had also shared their land, and even mixed their blood, with people of the lower races, especially Slavs and Jews. He put the blame on Jews for Germany’s defeat in war, the humiliation of Versailles, greedy capitalism, communism, pornography, and trafficking in prostitution. The master race must eliminate the “lower peoples.” “All who are not of good race in this world are chaff,” he wrote. The Germans “must call eternal wrath upon the head of the foul enemy of mankind.”

  For the master race he had a master plan. Germans must, he said, venture from their corner of the world, show again their ancient valor, and conquer “living space” for themselves. The first step would be to destroy France, their ancient enemy to the southwest, so as to prevent the French from interfering with what was to follow. That done, Germany must drive to the east. It would annex the other Germanic peoples in Austria and Czechoslovakia and unite them once again with Germany. After that would come the climax, the crushing of the hated Slavs, victory over communist Russia, and the conquest of living space for the German people on the plains of Poland and southwest Russia.

  Although he had been famous during 1923 and 1924, after he was freed from prison everyone had nearly forgotten Hitler. For several years the German economy was strong, and for a rabble-rouser times that are good are bad. People scarcely mentioned Hitler and the Nazis now except as butts of jokes, and his fizzled grab for power now was called the Beer Hall Coup. Even many of his longtime comrades believed that he was finished. In 1929 a scholar was editing the memoirs of a British ambassador to Germany. He wrote a footnote mentioning Hitler’s jailing and added: “He was finally released after six [sic] months…thereafter fading into obl
ivion.”

  After 1929 the Depression gave him his chance. Shops and factories closed, and millions, who only a few years before had lost their savings to inflation, now lost their jobs. Many Germans lost all faith in their capitalist economy and in democracy, which they had known for only a decade. Some turned to the left and saw salvation in communism, with its promise of a classless world with food for all. But a larger number, especially the middle class, saw communism as certain death. They knew a little — but that was plenty — about Russia under Stalin. Who or what, they asked, could save them from hunger and from communism?

  Hitler had the answer. In speech after speech he hypnotized the Germans, thrilled them with his wrath, and made them dream of what they could become. He denounced the Treaty of Versailles as an insult to a noble race, scorned the German democratic state as weak and futile, lashed the parties of the left, and swore to navigate the country out of the Depression.

  Aided by hard times and fiery words, Hitler and the Nazis started on their climb to power. This time, unlike 1923, they did it legally. Their share of the seats in the Reichstag or parliament rose steadily, and by 1932 they were Germany’s largest single party and entitled to lead the country. At the time the president was Paul von Hindenburg, a crusty aristocrat and former general. It was his task to name the chancellor (or chief executive). He distrusted Hitler, but he thought the Nazis had earned a chance to show that they could govern. In 1933 he named Hitler chancellor.

  As Hitler had made clear in Mein Kampf, “democratic nonsense” was not for him. He had no intention to cooperate with other parties. He wanted total power, and what he needed was a pretext to secure it. At just this time an unhinged Dutchman set the Reichstag building afire, burning it to the ground. For Hitler, who may have secretly ordered it, the fire was opportune. He exulted, “Now I have them!”

  He blamed the fire on communists and issued a decree that gave him all-embracing powers. But legally he needed to amend the constitution, so he convened the parliament. (Having lost their building, they gathered in an opera house.) By now the Nazis ran the parliament, since they had thrown in prison many Communist deputies and about a dozen Social Democrats.

  Hitler urged them to approve a bill empowering him to write the laws without the parliament’s approval, and if necessary to ignore the constitution. When the leader of the Social Democrats bravely stated that his party would oppose the bill, Hitler told him, “I don’t want your votes…. The star of Germany is in the ascendant; yours is about to disappear. Your death knell has sounded.” Overwhelmingly the parliament approved the bill, and in the square outside a mass of Germans roared approval.

  Now the Leader could begin to make them all a master race, fused by hatred, fear, and pride.

  At rousing such emotions Hitler shone. He was now a splendid speaker and had learned to stage a rally as Wagner did an opera. A packed crowd waiting in a stadium would watch in awe as columns of Nazis wearing jackboots strode inside, by the light of torches, to the beat of patriotic marches. A thousand men in uniform would mass in squares before the stage. Nazi banners rippled, and searchlights would create a dome of beams.

  Finally the Leader would appear, saluting in the Nazi style, and step up to the microphone. From here his words would reach not just the crowd before him but, thanks to radio, all the Fatherland. Now the stadium would darken, except for one bright beam focused on the Leader. When at last he spoke he moved the crowd with words of fire and rage — and maybe madness. The crowd would roar as one, “Sieg heil!” (“Hail victory!”) “Sieg heil! Sieg heil! Sieg heil!”

  Soon after taking power, Hitler decided to eliminate his comrade Röhm and cut the number of Storm Troopers. They were a raucous lot, fit for helping him take power but not for holding it or making war. For his master plan of conquest he would need the regular army and its able generals. So Hitler prepared a “blood purge” for a weekend in June. (Throughout his career he liked to hit his enemies on weekends, when they were off their guard.)

  Röhm and a number of his followers were staying at a resort hotel. Hitler went to Röhm’s hotel room, woke him up, and had him shot. At the same time the Nazis murdered many other Storm Troopers and inconvenient people, perhaps a thousand of them. They shot two troublesome generals on the doorsteps of their homes. Nazis murdered a well-known music critic named Willi Schmitt by mistake; he had the same name as a man on their murder list. Just for fun some soldiers killed a group of Jews. The Nazis later killed a number of Communist leaders. Those who escaped fled to Russia, where Stalin killed them.

  Hitler called his purge “the night of the long knives.” When it was over he proclaimed in the parliament that he was the “supreme judge” of the German people. Far away in Moscow, when Stalin learned about the purge, he asked someone, “Have you heard what’s happened in Germany? Hitler, what a lad! Knows how to deal with political opponents.” Hitler’s example may have influenced Stalin when he decided shortly after to conduct a purge.

  Like Stalin, Hitler and the Nazis were totalitarians, which means they wanted to control the life of every German. They wanted Germans to love the Leader absolutely and to sacrifice their person-hood. The Leader told the Hitler Youth, “We have to learn our lesson: one will must dominate us; we must form a single unity; one discipline must weld us together; one obedience, one subordination must fill us all, for above us stands the nation.”

  Borrowing the idea from the Russians, the Nazis set up prison camps for those who opposed them in the slightest ways. Prisoners were badly beaten, sometimes killed. The security service used 100,000 part-time spies to snoop on every German and report disloyal remarks. One never knew if his or her own secretary, son, or friend was an informer. Woe to him who dared to call the Leader the “rat-catcher.” The remark might lead to a visit from Nazi thugs, then to torture and death.

  To think, to preach, to lead, was dangerous. The Nazis discharged hostile newsmen, labor leaders, pastors, and professors. From the walls of art museums they pulled down “decadent” paintings by Van Gogh, Picasso, Grosz, and Chagall. A few months after Hitler was named chancellor, thousands of students marched by torchlight to a square beside the University of Berlin. Using torches they set fire to a huge pile of books, and as the flames took hold they threw on more until twenty thousand books were burning. The same event took place in other cities. The students stated that they burned any book that “acts subversively on our future or strikes at the root of German thought, the German home, and the driving forces of our people.”

  Totalitarian control takes more than concentration camps and bonfires. Equally important was the shaping of the coming generation. Children joined the Hitler Youth when they were six, and at the age of ten each child would take this oath: “In the presence of this blood banner, which represents our Leader, I swear to devote all my energies and my strength to the savior of our country, Adolf Hitler. I am willing and ready to give up my life for him, so help me God.” Until they reached eighteen the Hitler Youth were trained in camping, sports, and soldiering, and learned the story of the master race.

  HITLER HAD PROMISED in Mein Kampf to purify the German people, and as soon as he had taken power he set about it.

  Jews were less than 1 percent of Germany’s population. The Nazis drove them from their jobs in government, the schools, and universities. They decreed that Jews had no citizenship rights, and they forbade marriages or even sexual relations between Jews and others. Hitler genuinely hated Jews. (He once described the U.S. president, Franklin Roosevelt, as a “pettifogging Jew” married to a woman with a “completely negroid face” that showed that she was “half-caste.” He was wrong on every count.) But Jews also were for Hitler what the middle class or “capitalists” were to Lenin and Stalin, a scapegoat and a tool for unifying a people by giving them a common enemy.

  In 1938 a Jewish boy, half crazed because of Nazi mistreatment of his parents, shot and killed a German official. The Nazis answered by unleashing the Storm Troopers, who carried ou
t a swift campaign of persecution called “the Night of Broken Glass.” All over Germany they looted, smashed, and burned the shops and offices of Jews, as well as synagogues. They beat up several thousand Jews, raped or murdered unknown numbers, and rounded up some thirty thousand for the concentration camps. Nazi prosecutors ignored the murders, since the killers were more or less following orders. Rapists, on the other hand, were sternly punished because they had violated the laws forbidding sexual intercourse with Jews. The government later confiscated moneys that insurance companies paid to Jews whose businesses the Nazis had wrecked. It fined the Jews collectively a billion marks for provoking the attack on them.

  Despite the horrors of the new regime, many Germans were apparently content. What if they had lost their freedom? They didn’t know or didn’t care. As Hitler started to rearm, preparing for a war, the Depression in Germany came to an end and almost everybody found a job. They joked that at least under Hitler you didn’t have freedom to starve. Under a program called “Strength through Joy” the government provided workers with dirt-cheap cruises on the Mediterranean, vacations on the Baltic Sea, skiing in the Alps, adult education, and low-cost theater tickets.