Ian Kershaw: Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

Some individuals from within the national-conservative élite groups — mainly in the leadership of the army and the upper echelons of the state bureaucracy — would some two years later at first gradually and falteringly begin to feel their way towards fundamental opposition to the Nazi regime. But at this time, they still saw their own interests, and what they took to be the national interest, served by the apparently successful policies of national assertiveness and reconstruction embodied in the figure of Hitler.

Only the intensified ‘Church Struggle’, causing heightened friction between clergy and churchgoers on the one side and Party activists on the other, cast a substantial shadow, notably in Catholic rural districts where the influence of the clergy remained unbroken, over what amounted otherwise to an extensive prevailing consensus (in part, of course, manufactured through a mixture of repression and propaganda). But the stance of both major Christian denominations was riddled with ambivalence. Though still wielding considerable influence over the churchgoing population, the clergy felt they had to tread warily in public pronouncements, particularly where religious matters were not directly concerned. In some ways, they were led by public opinion more than they were willing or able to lead it. They had to take account of the fact that Hitler’s national ‘successes’, most of all his triumph in remilitarizing the Rhineland, were massively popular even among the same members of their flocks who harshly criticized the Nazi attacks on the Churches.

The unrest stirred up by the ‘Church Struggle’ was extensive. But it was largely compartmentalized. It seldom equated with fundamental rejection of the regime, or with any commitment to active and outright political opposition. Fierce defence of traditional observances, customs, and practices against Nazi chicanery was compatible with support for Hitler personally, with approval for his assault on the Left, with applause for his national ‘triumphs’, with readiness to accept his discriminatory measures against Jews, with most measures, in fact, which did not directly impinge on Church affairs. Catholic bishops had, in the very first weeks of Hitler’s chancellorship, exhorted their charges to obedience to the new regime. 7And even at the height of the ‘Church Struggle’, they publicly endorsed its stance against ‘atheistic’ Bolshevism and affirmed their loyalty to Hitler. 8The brutality of the concentration camps, the murder in 1934 of the SA leaders, and the mounting discrimination against the Jews had brought no official protests or opposition. Similarly in a Protestant Church divided within itself, unease, criticism, or dissent over Nazi high-handedness towards the Church and interference in its affairs, practices, structures, and doctrine coexisted — apart from the examples of a few exceptional individuals — with official avowals of loyalty and a great deal of genuine approval for what Hitler was doing.

Underpinning Hitler’s unchallenged authority in spring 1936 was the adulation of the masses. Large sections of the population simply idolized him. Even his opponents acknowledged this. ‘What a fellow, Hitler. He had the courage to risk something,’ was a sentiment frequently recorded at the time by the underground socialist opposition. ‘The spirit of Versailles is hated by all Germans. Hitler has now torn up this accursed treaty and thrown it at the feet of the French,’ was the reason given for the upsurge of support for the Dictator even among those who up to then had been less than enthusiastic about him. 9In 1936, the German people — at any rate the vast majority of them — revelled in the national pride that Hitler (almost single-handedly, it often seemed, in the relentless trumpetings of effusive propaganda) had restored to the country.

The backing of a huge mass movement, the mainstay of his plebiscitary support, guaranteed that the flow of adulation was never stemmed. But the support for Hitler was genuine enough, and massive in extent. Most Germans, whatever their grumbles, were at least in some respects Hitler supporters by summer 1936. Unquestionably, the foreign-policy triumphs had united the overwhelming majority of the population behind his leadership. Admiration for the Führer was widespread. Indeed, at the level of humdrum daily life, too, many were prepared to credit Hitler with bringing about a change in Germany that seemed to them little short of miraculous. For most of those who did not belong to a persecuted minority, remain firm adherents of the suppressed Social Democrats or Communists, or feel wholly alienated by the attacks on the Churches, things seemed incomparably better than they had been when Hitler took over. Unemployment, far from increasing again (as the Jeremiahs had predicted), had practically been wiped out. Modestly, but noticeably, living standards were beginning to improve. More consumer goods were becoming available. The ‘people’s radio’ (Volksempfänger) was spreading to more and more households. 10Leisure pursuits, entertainment, and minor forms of tourism were expanding. The cinemas and dance-halls were full. And even if the much-trumpeted ‘glamour’ trips to Madeira or Norway on cruise-ships run by ‘Strength Through Joy’ (the leisure organization of the German Labour Front) remained the preserve of the privileged and made little real dent on class divisions, far more people were able to take advantage of days out in the country or visits to theatres and concerts. 11For many, even looking back long after the war, these were the ‘good times’. 12

In a mere three years, Hitler appeared to have rescued Germany from the miseries and divisions of Weimar democracy, and to have paved the way for a grandiose future for the German people. The demagogue and political firebrand had apparently been transformed into a statesman and national leader of a stature to match that of Bismarck. That the the national revival had been accompanied by rigid authoritarianism, loss of civil rights, brutal repression of the Left, and intensifying discrimination against Jews and others thought unfit to belong to the ‘national community’ was seen by most as at least a price worth paying — by many as positively welcome.

Few at this stage had the foresight to imagine what would come — that Germany’s new international standing in spring 1936 would prove the prelude to boundless expansion, world war bringing slaughter on an immeasurable scale, unparalleled genocide, and the eventual destruction of the Reich itself. ‘That this new deed of Hitler is another milestone on the way to the hell’s jaws of destruction,’ the same perceptive report of the exiled Social Democratic movement added, ‘seems hardly to have entered the consciousness of anyone.’ 13

For most dictators, the acquisition of unrivalled power over the state would have been enough. For Hitler, this was no end in itself. In his thinking, power served a twin ideological purpose: destroying the Jews — for him, Germany’s mortal enemy; and, through their destruction, acquiring mastery over the entire continent of Europe — a platform for subsequent world dominance. Both interlocking aims, resting on a ‘world-view’ that saw racial struggle and survival of the fittest as the key determinants in human history, had been central to his thinking since the 1920s. However uncharted the route to attaining them, these basic ideas, once formed, never left him.

The obsessiveness and tenacity with which he held to these fixed ideas were part of Hitler’s unique role in steering Germany, Europe, and the world to disaster. However, relatively few of the millions of followers attracted to Nazism on its road to power saw matters precisely as Hitler did, or were drawn by fanatical adherence to the fixed points of the personal ‘world-view’ that constituted his own prime ideological driving-force. 14The growing appeal of Hitler as an alternative to Weimar democracy rested to a far greater extent on the forcefulness of his uncompromising, frontal assault on a visibly failing political system undermined in high places and increasingly haemorrhaging mass support. During his rise to power, his central ideological tenets had been embedded within the general, all-embracing armoury of hate-filled tirades against the Weimar ‘system’ and within the appealing counter-image he conjured up of national rebirth once the ‘criminals’ who had instigated defeat and revolution, with catastophic consequences, had been destroyed. His success as a demagogue lay in his ability to say what the disaffected masses wanted to hear, to speak their language — to capture and exploit a psychology of despair and invest it with new hope for a phoenix-like resurgence of the nation. He was able as no one else to give voice to popular hatreds, resentments, hopes, and expectations. He spoke more stridently, more vehemently, more expressively and appealingly than any of those with a similar ideological message. He was the mouthpiece of the nationalist masses at a decisive time of all-embracing national crisis.