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"SWASTIKA OR SOVIET STAR"[Hitler] -
The various social forces opposing the revolution were not all
agreed on the tactics to adopt. On one side there were those like
Gröner or Stinnes who judged that it was initially best to
compromise and to collaborate with the SPD in efforts to stabilise
the situation. While this did not preclude bloody civil war against
radical workers, it did mean combining forces (if only temporarily)
with Ebert and supporters of the new Republic.
However, there was another current which believed that the best
form of defence against revolution was direct counter-revolutionary
attack. This group included the Freikorps whose lives and livelihoods
were committed to the cause, as one of them put it:
Completely disconcerted, a bourgeois generation faced the new
world of 1918... Fighting had become our life purpose and goal;
any battle, any sacrifice for the might and glory of our country
[in] the battle against the reds.
Many such Freikorps troops became Nazis such as Ritter von Epp
(whose activities including crushing the Bavarian Soviet Republic),
and Captain Röhm, later the leader of the Nazi Stormtroopers
(SA). The history of the early Nazi party is inextricably bound
up with such active counter-revolution.
Hitler's biography makes this clear. Son of a minor government
official in Austria, he had drifted from doss house to doss house
in Austria and Bavaria, painting postcards to earn a living. Initially
evading conscription, war service for Germany gave his existence
a structure and purpose. In November 1918 he was dismayed with the
way that the revolution not only signalled the end of his way of
life, but also Germany's military defeat and a challenge to society.
He later claimed that it was at this point that he determined to
enter politics. Branding the republican forces "November criminals"
he echoed Field Marshall Hindenberg's contention that "the
German army was stabbed in the back" by revolution at home.
Hitler was in Munich when, in 1919, counter-revolution triumphed
over the Bavarian Soviet Republic. His superior officer instructed
him to help link up the reactionary army with right-wing civilian
politics. He was to make contact with the German Workers' Party
(DAP or Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) which was, despite its name, a
fanatical nationalist grouping. In March 1920 Hitler was demobilised
because the clauses of the Versailles Treaty limited the Reichswehr
to 100,000. Five months later his rhetoric had won him the DAP's
leadership and it was renamed the National Socialist German Workers'
Party (NSDAP).
What was the ideology of Nazism? This is a surprisingly difficult
question to answer because it was an incoherent mass of prejudices,
hatred and plain untruths. Policies were designed to win converts
rather than reflect the real thinking of the leadership.
One element was social Darwinism, which Hitler expressed in this
way:
In the end, only the urge for self-preservation can conquer.
Beneath it so-called humanity, the expression of a mixture of
stupidity, cowardice and know-it-all conceit, will melt like snow
in the March sun. Mankind has grown great in eternal struggle,
and only in eternal peace does it perish.
Thus; "Men dispossess one another, and one perceives that,
at the end of it all, it is always the stronger who triumphs. Is
that not the most reasonable order of things?"
In Hitler's version the struggle is transposed into a struggle
of nation against nation or race against race. Hitler was obsessed
by the idea of imperialist expansion and Lebensraum (living space):
"The purpose of domestic policy is to secure for the race the
power needed for its external policy claims." There was therefore
nothing original about the Nazis' expansionist aims. The goal of
Lebensraum, of "middle Europe under German leadership"
had been set out by the German Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, as
early as September 1914. His plan almost exactly matched Hitler's
conquests a quarter of a century later because it encompassed France,
Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Austria, the Austrian Empire (Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, etc.) and eventually Italy and Norway.
Hitler's attitude to nations and races infected his views on every
other aspect of society right down to the individual:
[This outlook] by no means believes in an equality of the races,
but along with their difference it recognises their higher or
lesser value and feels itself obligated, through this knowledge,
to promote the victory of the better and stronger, and demand
the subordination of the inferior and weaker in accordance with
the eternal will that dominates this universe. Thus, in principle,
it serves the basic aristocratic idea of Nature and believes in
the validity of this law down to the last individual. It sees
not only the different value of the races, but also the different
value of individuals.
It derives from the "eternal will" and laws of "Nature".
He concluded that: "The capitalists have a right to lead due
to their abilities; for they have worked their way to the top, and
on the grounds of this selection, proved their higher race."
Elitism in politics followed. Hitler divided society into three
groups: "the great mass of the people and consequently... the
simplest-minded part of the nation", a smaller middle group
and finally "the smallest; it consists of the minds with real
mental subtlety, whom natural gifts and education have taught to
think independently... splendid people." Democracy is therefore
wrong because: "Today, when the ballot of the masses decides,
the chief weight lies with the most numerous group, and this is
the first: the mob of the simple or credulous."
Hitler's counter-revolutionary strategy would only become popular
in crisis conditions where even rudimentary compromise of the parliamentary
kind was anathema for important sections of the establishment. This
set it apart from the usual tenor of politics and its extremism
took it on to another plane. Thus while Kaiser had detested democracy
his Chancellor, Bismarck, had gone through the motions of consulting
the people by introducing universal male suffrage in 1871 which
pre-dated Britain by 47 years.
ANTI-SEMITIC IDEOLOGY
Many historians emphasise the anti-Semitic character of the movement.
There can be no doubt that this was a key feature. Hitler's first
political statement of 16 September 1919 drips with anti-semitism.
It blamed Jews for "the racial tuberculosis of the nation",
the solution for which "must be the total removal of all Jews
from our midst." Anti-semitism was a cancer running throughout
Hitler's life. In 1928 he wrote that "The higher the racial
merit of a people, the higher is their general right to life."
Hitler's very last statement, dictated just before his suicide in
the Berlin bunker on 29 April 1945 ends with this curse: "uphold
the race laws to the limit and resist mercilessly the poisoner of
all nations, international Jewry." Nazi anti-Semitic beliefs
went far beyond anything envisaged in the Kaiser's time.
This has led historians to explain Nazism by referring to its racism:
"In regard to Hitler's ideology the critique of the republic,
democracy, parliamentarism, Marxism, socialism and so forth should
be viewed as entirely subordinate to his anti-semitism." Such
a conclusion is understandable. However, the deranged actions of
a deluded individual and the account that person gives for their
actions do not reveal the real causes. Irrational ideas and actions
have rational explanations and causes which lie beneath the surface.
If this is true for the individual it is also valid for a movement.
One causal factor that can be excluded from the start is Jewry itself.
Jews were not the cause of anti-semitism. Forming just 0.5% of the
German population, the obsessive and fanatical anti-semitism of
Nazism cannot be explained by anything they did. The delusion must
therefore be explained by other conditions.
Abram Leon argues the origins of anti-semitism were rooted in the
development of European society. In pre-capitalist times the conventional
society was based on landed production and Jews were assigned a
special role in commerce and banking which it could not supply.
In this sense the Jews were both an ethnic group and had "a
specific social function", the formed "a people-class".
To fulfil their role they could assimilate into the rest of society
as happened to countless other ethnic groupings over the centuries.
When feudalism went into decline, the Jews, to whom nobles might
be in debt, became the object of ruling class hatred. Since the
aristocracy possessed political and ideological power, officially
sponsored anti-semitism was encouraged and pogroms organised. The
simultaneous rise of capitalism brought no respite as Jews were
now seen as rivals and competitors to "native" businessmen.
The pattern of feudal decline and rising capitalism occurred first
in Western Europe, spreading successively to central and then Eastern
Europe. In Britain, therefore, the period of most intense anti-Jewish
riots was in the twelfth century, culminating in massacres in London,
Lincoln, Stafford and York (1189-1190). By the twentieth century
the social force of anti-semitism here was a pale shadow of its
former self. However, where feudalism was replaced more recently
by capitalism, such as Russia, Poland, and crucially for Nazism,
Hitler's Austria, the ideological power of anti-semitism tended
to be greater.
According to this analysis, while anti-semitism existed throughout
pre-war Europe it was more likely to be virulent in countries to
the east of Germany and, as one writer put it recently: "Surveying
European society in 1914, it would have taken a great leap of imagination
to nominate Germany as the future perpetrator of genocide against
the Jews. Tsarist Russia, with its government-encouraged pogroms,
the Hapsburg lands [i.e. Austrian Empire]... may have seemed likelier
candidates."
So how can the extreme position of the NSDAP be explained. Some
authors blame it entirely on Hitler and his individual psychology.
This is a weak argument for a mass movement and even in the case
of Hitler it does not stand up. Focus on events like the unsuccessful
treatment of Hitler's dying mother by a Jewish doctor, the fact
that four members of the committee that rejected his application
to Art School were Jewish or that Hitler read anti-semitic literature
in Austria are not convincing. Racism did not become his crusade
until 1919. Only now was there a real cause for his all-embracing
and politically motivating hatred - defeat and revolution.
This was what turned Hitler and his immediate followers to political
action based on anti-semitism. Already imbued with a ruling class
ideology of nationalism and authority, they were confronted with
the impact of the Russian and German revolutions, surrender, virtual
civil war between revolutionaries and establishment, and finally
demobilisation. The military's ambitions had brought untold suffering,
but in Hitler's view, "What the German people owes to the army
can be briefly summed up in a single word, to wit: everything."
It was primarily this hatred of revolution and working class organisation
that powered his anti-semitism. Significantly, his first political
statement, quoted above, also includes the phrase that "the
driving force of the Revolution [are] the Jews." A list of
Hitler's 22 early speeches shows that only two mentioned Jews in
the title while 11 alluded to the consequences of war and revolution.
References to the centrality of counter-revolution abound in Hitler's
later speeches and writings.
Hitler's Mein Kampf, written in 1924 fulminates against Marxism:
"a doctrine that must lead to the destruction of all humanity".
The anti-war movement was made up of "treacherous murderers
of the nation" whose leaders "should at once have been
put behind bars, brought to trial, and thus taken off the nation's
neck. All the implements of military power should have been ruthlessly
used for the extermination of this pestilence." He considered
that "The scum of our people then made the revolution... It
was not the German people as such that committed this act of Cain,
but its deserters, pimps, and other rabble that shun the light."
Hitler's autobiography described his first activities as "The
Struggle against the Red Front".
His criticism of the establishment was that the tactics employed
against the left were too weak and ineffective: "the revolution
had been possible thanks only to the disastrous bourgeois leadership
of our people." In arguing this Hitler showed the contradictory
character of Nazi ideas. Like most leading Nazis, in his own person
he was an outsider to the ruling class. He therefore had contempt
for their collective failure to protect their society. Later he
talked of "that riff-raff of a bourgeoisie" whose behaviour
was such that "I don't blame the small man for turning Communist".
By contrast to the old establishment his group had "The fists
to protect the German people... And how these lads did fight!"
The aim was spelled out:
if we are victorious Marxism will be destroyed, and completely
destroyed... We shall not rest until the last newspaper has been
destroyed, the last organisation liquidated, the last centre of
education wiped out and the last Marxist converted or exterminated.
If Hitler's public utterances are not to be believed (as he was
a self-confessed inveterate liar), his private comments are more
reliable. In a letter written in 1932 Hitler claimed "it was
solely to save Germany from the oppression of Marxism that I founded
and organized a Movement," During the approach to Operation
Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia in 1941, Göbbels, Hitler's
propaganda chief said: "We shall now destroy what we have fought
against for our entire lives. I say so to the Führer and he
completely agrees with me... This plague will be driven out of Europe".
It would be wrong to counterpose Nazism's counter-revolutionary
character with its anti-semitism, or to suggest one outweighs the
other. The two were inextricably linked in the Nazi leadership's
fevered imaginations. If there was any genuine connection between
anti-Marxism and anti-semitism it was the prominent part played
by internationalist Jews in socialist and revolutionary movements
- from Marx in Germany to Luxemburg, a Pole, to Trotsky, a Russian,
and so on. In other words counter-revolution was the real basis
of the Nazi's deluded belief system. Mein Kampf brings this out:
Only a knowledge of the Jews provides the key with which to comprehend
the inner, and consequently real aims of Social Democracy. The
erroneous conceptions of the aim and meaning of this party fall
from our eyes like veils, once we come to know this people, and
from the fog and mist of social phrases rises the leering grimace
of Marxism.
Himmler, arch-racist, elitist and leader of the SS, was equally
convinced of the link between Jewry and workers' revolution:
time and again the Jews have stirred up the various systems of
government by means of wars and revolutions, not only political
but economic and intellectual revolutions... As the proletariat
cannot lead a state, leadership comes into the hands of the Jews.
Nazi anti-semitism also derived from another source which reflected
the class composition of the Party. According to Kater, in the NSDAP
"the relative proportion of elite elements was higher among
the leadership than in the party and large or in the Reich population.
[It] tended to increase with rank [and] was particularly influential."
Overall, however in the leadership the middle class "were in
the absolute majority." As already mentioned, the right-wing
petty bourgeoisie has a peculiar relationship to capitalism, both
aspiring to become big capitalists and suffering from the development
of capitalism in which large capitals squeeze out small ones, commerce
and banking challenge the security and survival of individual enterprises,
and so on. As a typical representative of the petty bourgeoisie,
Hitler came to associate what he saw as the regrettable side-effects
of capitalism with Jews: "Business was depersonalized, i.e.
Judaized... It became the object of speculation. Employer and worker
were torn asunder." Thus, in Germany "a sixty-million
people sees its destiny to lie at the will of a few dozen Jewish
bankers." The Jews served the Nazis' purpose well by being
the scapegoat both for a hatred of the labour movement and anger
at the inevitable workings of the capitalist system: "how wonderfully
the Stock Exchange Jew and the leader of the workers...cooperate.
Moses Kohn on the one side encourages his association to refuse
the workers' demands, while his brother Isaac in the factory incites
the masses..."
This is evident rubbish, but it does show, in a distorted way,
the sequence of causality - from the real pressure of the external
world through to the fantasy of anti-semitism. As a result we can
reject the notion that Hitler and his circle derived anti-semitism
from some form of mental derangement, or that all Germans subscribed
to such ideas. The history of ideology is suffused with irrational
belief systems but the explanation lies outside the individual mind
and is to be found in social conditions.
NATIONAL SOCIALISM?
It would be a mistake to portray Nazism as a typical current of
thought. There were important differences that went beyond a readiness
to take extreme measures and use brutal violence. Hitler believed
that society as at present constituted was incapable of successfully
combating revolution: "the struggle of the bourgeois world
against the Marxist international must fail completely. It has long
since sacrificed the foundation which would have been indispensably
necessary for the support of its own ideological world." The
problem was that "it had not from the outset laid its chief
stress on winning supporters from the circles of the great masses."
Hitler's approach was to try to re-establish this "definite
mutual relationship" between the ruling class and the masses
that had been disrupted by revolution. In doing so he exhibited
resentment at capitalism, but at the same time insisted that his
movement alone could save it by providing the necessary links with
the population. This aspect was given especial emphasis when the
attempt to seize power by direct military means in 1923 failed utterly.
In 1924 he wrote in Mein Kampf that the masses were to be won back
by propaganda which he said "must be popular and its intellectual
level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those
it is addressed to." Genuine argument is no part of this because:
"The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine
by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts
and actions far less than emotion and feeling."
It is in this light that we should approach the official 25 point
programme of 1920 This was to combine nationalism and racism flavoured
with "Germanic socialism". Points 1 to 3 of the programme
included a rejection of the Versailles Treaty and a demand for territorial
expansion. Points 4 to 10 involved racism against Jews and foreigners.
Points 11-14 dealt with the so-called "socialism" of
the Nazis. Clause 11 demanded "abolition of income unearned
by labor or effort; breaking the bondage of interest." 12 asked
for "complete confiscation of all war profits"; 13 - "nationalisation
of all incorporated companies"; 14 - "profit sharing."
(The later points (15-25) dealt with a variety of subsidiary issues
such as small businesses, education, farming, health, law and religion).
Do points 11-14 invalidate the assertion that Nazism was counter-revolutionary?
An appeal to the masses through lying propaganda had to be included.
But whenever Hitler was compelled to define "socialism"
the contradictions emerged.
Unbelievably, the Kaiser's system was regarded as close to socialism:
"The old Reich had at least made an honourable attempt to be
socially minded (sozial)... That the old Reich was in this sense
'social', that it did not allow itself to regard its people merely
as numbers - this it was which constituted its greatest danger to
the supporters of the World Stock Exchange." Nazism's phoney
socialism was nothing new. As long ago as 1848 Marx had summed up
its characteristics in The Communist Manifesto: "this form
of socialism aspires ... to cramping the modern means of production
and of exchange within the framework of the old property relations
that have been and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In
either case it is both reactionary and utopian." 80 years after
these lines were written the idea of returning to the former structures
of capitalism was completely impractical and so only the reactionary
aspect was left.
When, in 1922, property owners expressed worries about NSDAP "socialism"
they were calmed:
You are thinking of the false Jewish socialism (Marxism) of the
Sozis [socialists] and Communists. National Socialism expressly
recognises private property but demands that every producer subordinate
his private interests to the interests of the German folk community.
In 1933 Hitler told the Reichstag that one of the three aims of
his party was "to maintain the idea of property as the basis
of our culture." In private he would later add: "My plan
is that we should take profits on whatever comes our way."
Asked what would happen to people like Krupps under National Socialist
rule Hitler maintained: "But of course things would remain
as they were."
Expressions of concern for the working class were designed to incorporate
it ideologically within the future Nazi state and society:
The new movement categorically rejects any class or status division...and
is for the formation of a unified national body through the immediate
incorporation of the so-called fourth estate in a people's community...
It wants the millions strong masses to be led away from their
current internationalist and most unGerman seducers and leaders
and their full incorporation into the framework of the nation
and the state.
Thus, Hitler's definition of socialism was:
he who is prepared so completely to adopt the cause of his people
that he really knows no higher ideal than the prosperity of this
- his own - people, he who has so taken to heart the meaning of
our great song 'Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles', that
nothing in this world stands for him higher than this Germany,
people and land, land and people, he is a Socialist.
Shortly afterwards he declared "the highest socialist organisation
is the German army".
All the elements mentioned so far - social Darwinism, imperialism,
elitism, anti-democracy, anti-semitism, counter-revolution, rejection
of the Versailles Treaty and territorial expansion - were fully
acted upon when Hitler attained power. None of the so-called "socialist"
(11-14) points, such as nationalisation, profit-sharing or abolition
of interest, were put into effect.
A THIRD WAY?
It is clear that Hitler eventually got massive support from the
middle class, but this was only in the 1930s. What of Nazi ideology
at the moment it was taking shape? The fact is, that in the formative
period the middle class was moving massively to the left, and away
from the ideology being formulated for the NSDAP. There were a number
of indicators for this. One was the changing electoral pattern.
Pre-war German politics was characterised by a working class that
mostly voted socialist, and a middle class that generally voted
Liberal or Conservative. The minority Catholic Centre Party cut
across these divisions by combining a section of middle and working
class voters. In 1919 the political landscape had been transformed.
The Liberal vote had split with four fifths of it moving left to
form the German Democratic Party (DDP); the traditional Liberals,
now Stresemann's German People's Party (DVP) were now a rump. Conservativism
continued in the shape of the German National People's Party (DNVP).
The Catholic vote (now shared by the Centre Party and a Bavarian
offshoot, the BVP) remained little changed. Though the socialist
vote had split into two groups, its overall share had risen dramatically.
A comparison of the 1912 and 1919 elections brings out these shifts:
| |
Cons | Liberals | Catholic | Socialist | |
| 1912 | 12.2 | 26.0 | 16.4 | 34.8 | |
| |
| DNVP | Left Libs | Old Libs | Catholic | Socialist |
| DDP | DVP | | Centre+BVP | SPD (37.9) + USPD (7.6) |
| 1919 | 10.3 | 18.6 | 4.4 | 19.7 | 45.5 |
There must clearly have been a swing of large numbers of middle
class votes from the right towards the left in the shape of the
DDP and even the socialist parties.
Even more striking than electoral statistics was mass unionisation
of white collar workers who traditionally regarded themselves as
middle class. Before the war only 80,000 white collar employees
belonged to the socialist affiliated union, the AfA-Bund. By contrast,
600,000 were in the professional association dominated by the far
right DHV. The impact of the revolution was demonstrated very quickly.
The ZdA, an even more left-wing organisation than the AfA-Bund,
grew from 66,000 to 138,000 in the first quarter of 1919. By 1920
the AfA-Bund itself had multiplied over 8 times to 690,000 members.
Meanwhile the DHV's share had fallen to 463,000. The very fact of
mass unionisation suggested to contemporaries that: "the middle-class
associations of white-collar workers decided to acknowledge that
their members were indeed members of the labor force - something
they had not only previously denied, but sometimes denied in a doctrinaire
manner." and striking "lost its stigma for the first time"
Salaried employees could now be regarded as "standard bearers
of the revolution".
It could be argued that Nazi ideology did not mirror any class.
Certainly there were enough cranks, eccentrics and pathetic social
misfits in the party's minuscule ranks to make a case for the NSDAP
being a simple aberration. Hitler may well have had "multiple
personality disorders including borderline personality... schizotypal,
histrionic, narcissistic and antisocial personality." It is
true the chief Nazi "philosopher", Alfred Rosenberg seriously
insisted on "the existence of a Nordic prehistoric culture-centre"
located in Atlantis, that Jesus was "non-Jewish" and that
the Roman empire was brought down by "four hundred years of
race-destroying democracy." However, such raving should not
make us overlook the real social content of Nazi ideology. The Nazi
belief in open counter-revolution went well beyond its ranks. This
was clear from the Kapp putsch.
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