Joachim Fest: Plotting Hitler's Death

This Nazi tactic was well suited to a sharply divided society in which many irreconcilable interests and ideologies clashed. The fruits could be seen in the almost immediate crackdown on Communists, whose persecution and arrest, often outside the judicial system, was greeted with relief by many people, despite their doubts about the justice and legality of it all. Similarly torn feelings surfaced at the time of the boycott of Jewish shops and department stores on April 1, 1933, even though the conditions were admittedly different. And again, in the summer of 1934, the public viewed with ambivalence the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler’s purge of the SA, which seemed to suggest that the Führer shared the public’s mounting disgust with SA hooliganism but which also showed, to the horror of many, his will­ingness to eliminate anyone who crossed him.

Hitler’s road to power was thus paved with a mixture of legality, anarchy, and arbitrary strikes at specific targets. The lack of strong public reaction to the numerous excesses and acts of violence was also related to the always widespread need to conform. There was a pro­found yearning for order, too, and a desire to identify with the state. In times of sweeping social change, opportunism and eagerness for advancement also figure prominently, hence the masses of new Nazi supporters who suddenly emerged from the woodwork in the first few weeks after Hitler came to power and who were referred to ironically as Märzgefallene (“those who fell in March”).

Finally, one of the most striking features of the first six months of Nazi rule was the general eagerness to share in the sense of belonging and in the celebration of the fraternal bond among all Germans. Even intellectuals seemed to grow tired of the stale, stuffy air in their studies and to long to join the historic movement “down on the streets,” sharing in the warmth and personal closeness of the “national revival.” Among the curious platitudes making the rounds and gaining ever more converts was the cry that one should not “stand off aside” but “join the ranks” as the nation blazed a new trail. No one could say where this trail might lead, but at least it was away from Weimar.

Such were the tactical and psychological ploys that Hitler used to accumulate power. Also instrumental were what Fritz Stern calls the “temptations” of National Socialism: promises of a national rebirth, revision of the Treaty of Versailles, and a strong state. 6All this was accompanied by Hitler’s sonorous evocations of tradition, Germany’s cultural roots, and its Christian values, each of which he repeatedly invoked in his rhetorical flights.

The Nazi movement was also surrounded by an aura of socialist ideas, which formed part of its appeal. Although the Weimar Repub­lic had broken sharply in many ways with the Reich of the kaisers, it had clung to the past more closely than it should have. The republic paid dearly throughout its short life for failing to enact a social revolu­tion in the wake of the postwar turmoil between 1918 and 1920 and for continuing to bear the legacies of the Germany of old. Many of the members of the conservative bourgeoisie also nursed unfulfilled desires for reform and a feeling that society desperately needed a thorough revamping. The vague but clearly radical program of the Nazis was interpreted as offering hope for the satisfaction of certain demands, such as greater social mobility, new economic opportuni­ties, and social justice. Like all other mass movements, the Nazi movement owed at least some of its dynamism and vigor to this wide­spread desire for change.

These aspects of the Nazi movement were widely noted, and they appealed to the sentimental socialism of the German people. Despite its enormous contrasts with the traditional left, the Nazi brand of socialism stemmed from the same social and intellectual crisis of the first half of the nineteenth century. To be sure, the Nazi movement was not rooted, as traditional socialism was, in the humanist tradition.

But it did aim to create an egalitarian society and a sense of fraternity among its members, to be achieved through what it called the Volksgemeinschaft, or community of the people. National Socialism rejected freedom, but the mood of the day placed more emphasis, in any case, on a sense of belonging and a place in the social order. The Nazis promised security and an improved standard of living, espe­cially for working people and the petty bourgeoisie. The results in­cluded housing projects, community work programs, and the “beauty of work” plan, as well as social welfare programs ranging from subsi­dies during the winter months and “Nazi welfare” to the leisure cruises for workers organized by the Kraft durch Freude (“Strength through Joy”) organization.

The Nazi brand of socialism was particularly attractive because of its appeal to nationalism. This, and virtually only this, was what concealed the real nature of the Nazi revolution, encouraging the mistaken but widespread view, at the time and later, that National Socialism was essentially a conservative movement. In reality it was egalitarian and destructive of traditional structures. However, in wrap­ping its radical core in a layer of German nationalism, it seemed not only to assert the long-neglected national interest, but also to meld the general desire for change with the equally strong need to preserve the familiar. People wanted a new, modernized Germany but they also feared it, and the cultivation of ritualistic Germanic theater, folklore, and local customs provided a comfortable setting for a radical break with the past. It was the combination of apparent conservatism with promises of change, the tempering of the one with the other, that brought National Socialism a level of popularity that Marxism’s inter­national socialism, with its adamant insistence on progress, could never achieve. Hitler’s appeal to Germany’s traditionally leftist work­ing class cannot be understood if these factors are ignored-as they so often have been-or dismissed as mere demagoguery.

Increasingly convinced of the hopelessness of any opposition and hard pressed by the persecution and prohibitions they faced, many opponents of the Nazis-especially those on the left-decided to leave Germany. In so doing, however, they were abandoning the workers to their fates, as Carlo Mierendorff, later one of the leaders of the resistance group known as the Kreisau Circle, pointed out at the time. “ They can’t just all go to the Riviera,” he replied when concerned friends advised him to flee. 7Opponents of the Nazis who remained in Germany had only two options: they could attempt to influence the course of events from within the system, enduring all the illusions, self-deceptions, and unwelcome involvements that al­most inevitably accompany such a double life, or they could accept social exclusion and often personal isolation, turning their backs on the “miracle of a unifying Germany,” as the Nazis’ self-laudatory pro­paganda described the emerging sense of community and revival.

Many people who felt torn by this dilemma have described what it meant for them. Wilhelm Hoegner, the future prime minister of Ba­varia, recalled wandering through the streets of Munich feeling that all of a sudden they had become hostile and threatening. 8Helmuth von Moltke’s mother felt profoundly uprooted, as if she “no longer belonged to the country.” 9Others have spoken of losing old friends, of an atmosphere of suspicion, of spying neighbors and the rapid disintegration of their social lives even as the alleged brotherhood of all Germans was being celebrated in delirious parades and pseudo-religious services, mass swearings of oaths and vows under domes of light, addresses by the Führer, nightly bonfires on hills and moun­tains, secular chants and hymns. All this fervor was fueled by the intense sensation that history was in the making. For the first time since the rule of the kaisers, Germans seemed to be living in a coun­try which celebrated both leadership and political liturgy.