Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Attempts to coordinate the civil service began with the law of April 7, 1933 and continued to the end of the regime without ever being completely successful because of the lack of capable personnel who were loyal Nazis. “Non-Aryans” (Jews) or persons married to “non-Aryans,” politically unreliable persons, and “Marxists” were discharged, and loyalty to Nazism was required for appointment and promotion in the civil service.

Of the chief elements in German society, only the presidency, the army, the Catholic Church, and industry were not coordinated by 1934. In addition, the bureaucracy was only partially controlled. The first of these, the presidency, was taken over completely in 1934 as the result of a deal with the army.

By the spring of 1934 the problem of the SA had become acute, since this organization was directly challenging two members of the Quartet, the army and industry. Industry was being challenged by the demand of the SA for the “second revolution’—that is, for the economic reforms which would justify the use of the word “Socialism” in the name “National Socialism/’ The army was being challenged by the demand of Captain Rohm that his SA be incorporated into the Reichswehr with each officer holding the same rank in the latter as he already held in the former. Since the Reichswehr had only 300,000 men while the SA had three million, this would have swamped the Officers’ Corps. Hitler had denounced this project on July 1, 1933, and Frick repeated this ten days later. Nevertheless, Rohm repeated his demand on April 18, 1934, and was echoed by Edmund Heines and Karl Ernst. In full Cabinet meeting Minister of War General von Blomberg refused.

A tense situation developed. If Hindenburg died, the Reichswehr might have liquidated the Nazis and restored the monarchy. On June 21st Hindenburg ordered Blomberg to use the army, if necessary, to restore order in the country. This was regarded as a threat to the SA. Accordingly, Hitler made a deal to destroy the SA in return for a free hand to deal with the presidency when it became vacant. This was done. A meeting of SA leaders was called by Hitler for June 30, 1934, at Bad Wiessee in Bavaria. The SS, under Hitler’s personal command, arrested the SA leaders in the middle of the night and shot most of them at once. In Berlin, Göring did the same to the SA leaders there. Both Hitler and Göring also killed most of their personal enemies; the Reichstag incendiaries, Gregor Strasser, General and Mrs. von Schleicher, all of von Papen’s close associates, Gustav von Kahr, all those who had known Hitler in the early days of his failure, and many others. Papen escaped only by a narrow margin. In all, several thousands were eliminated in this “blood purge.”

Two excuses were given for this violent action: that the murdered men were homosexuals (something which had been known for years) and that they were members of a conspiracy to murder Hitler. That they were in a conspiracy was quite true, but it was by no means mature in June 1934, and it was aimed at the army and heavy industry, and not at Hitler. In fact, Hitler had been wavering until the last moment whether he would throw in his lot with the “second revolution” or with the Quartet. His decision to join the latter and exterminate the former was an event of great significance. It irrevocably made the Nazi movement a counterrevolution of the Right, using the party organization as an instrument for protecting the economic status quo.

The supporters of the “second revolution” were driven underground, forming a “Black Front” under the leadership of Otto Strasser. This movement was so ineffectual that the only choice facing the average German was the choice between the reactionary mode of life built about the surviving members of the Quartet (army and industry) and the completely irrational nihilism of the inner clique of the Nazi Party. Only as the regime approached its end did a third possible way appear: a revived progressive and cooperative Christian humanism which sprang from the reaction engendered within the Quartet by the realization that Nazi nihilism was merely the logical outcome of the Quartet’s customary methods of pursuing its customary goals. Many of the persons associated with this new third way were destroyed by the Nazis in the systematic destructiveness which followed the attempt to assassinate Hitler on June 20, 1944.

In return for Hitler’s decisive step—the destruction of the SA on June 30, 1934—the army permitted Hitler to become president following Hindenburg’s death in August. By combining the offices of president and chancellor, Hitler obtained the president’s legal right to rule by decree, and obtained as well the supreme command of the army, a position which he solidified by requiring a personal oath of unconditional obedience from each soldier (Law of August 20, 1934). From this time on, in the minds of the Reichswehr and the bureaucracy, it was both legally and morally impossible to resist Hitler’s orders.

THE RULERS AND THE RULED, 1934-1945

Thus, by August 1934, the Nazi movement had reached its goal—the establishment of an authoritarian state in Germany. The word used here is “authoritarian,” for, unlike the Fascist regime in Italy, the Nazi regime was not totalitarian. It was not totalitarian because two members of the Quartet were not coordinated, a third member was coordinated only incompletely and, unlike Italy or Soviet Russia, the economic system was not ruled by the state but was subject to “self-rule.” All this is not in accord with popular opinion about the nature of the Nazi system either at the time it was flourishing or since. Newspaper men and journalistic writers applied the term “totalitarian” to the Nazi system, and the name has stuck without any real analysis of the facts as they existed. In fact, the Nazi system was not totalitarian either in theory or in practice.

The Nazi movement, in its simplest analysis, was an aggregation of gangsters, neurotics, mercenaries, psychopaths, and merely discontented, with a small intermixture of idealists. This movement was built up by the Quartet as a counterrevolutionary force against, first, the Weimar Republic, internationalism, and democracy, and against, second, the dangers of social revolution, especially Communism, engendered by the world economic depression. This movement, once it came to power at the behest of the Quartet, took on life and goals of its own quite different from, and, indeed, largely inimical to, the life and goals of the Quartet. No showdown or open conflict ever arose between the movement and the Quartet. Instead, a modus vivendi was worked out by which the two chief members of the Quartet, industry and the army, obtained their desires, while the Nazis obtained the power and privileges for which they yearned.

The seeds of conflict continued to exist and even to grow between the movement and its creators, especially because of the fact that the movement worked continually to create a substitute industrial system and a substitute army parallel to the old industrial system and the old Reichswehr. Here again the threatening conflict never broke out because the Second World War had the double result that it demonstrated the need for solidarity in the face of the enemy, and it brought great booty and profits to both sides—to the industrialists and Reichswehr on one hand and to the party on the other hand.

Except for the rise of the party, and the profits, power, and prestige which accrued to the leaders (but not to the ordinary members) of the party, the structure of German society was not drastically changed after 1933. It was still sharply divided into two parts—the rulers and the ruled. The three chief changes were: (1) the methods and techniques by which the rulers controlled the ruled were modified and intensified, so that law and legal procedures practically vanished, and power (exercised through force, economic pressures, and propaganda) became much more naked and direct in its application; (2) the Quartet which had held real power from 1919 to 1933 were rearranged and increased to a Quintet, such as existed before 1914; and (3) the line between rulers and ruled was made sharper, with fewer persons in an ambiguous position than earlier in German history; this was made more acceptable to the ruled by creating a new third group of non-citizens (Jews and foreigners) which could be exploited and oppressed even by the second group of the ruled.