The German Question

CHAPTER I THE GERMANS
AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM

THE WORLD’S SHARE OF RESPONSIBILITY

WITH horror and disgust, contempt and indignation, all that can still be called the civilized world turned away from that regime which had arisen out of the deepest mire of the human soul and, with its mixture of sentimentality and utter brutality, of lying and cool calculation, had set up the most loathsome tyranny of all times. To what extent are the Germans as a whole responsible for it? Or was National Socialism simply the quintessence of all the evil and menacing elements that had slumbered through all time in the German people?

That is the first question we must ask ourselves. But here we enter a field so overgrown with passions, suspicions, and misunderstandings that the author has no alternative but to begin with a few personal details. He was himself born in Germany, in Hanover, and he declares that the National Socialists became the object of the great and inextinguishable hatred of his life. Fifteen years ago he went to war, so to speak, against them, and from then on he waged that war at the risk of life and health and livelihood. They have destroyed his mother country, dishonoured her, dragged her through the mire, and covered her with the slime of their lies, and they have brought the whole of our Western civilization to such a pass that we do not yet know whether it will recover. When all was lost they continued, with an iron grip on the throat of the German nation, senselessly to pursue the war in order to prolong their own wretched lives for a few weeks or months, thus adding infinitely to the destruction and chaos. They slaughtered millions like cattle, and robbed other millions of those they most loved. Their stupidity was only exceeded by their malice, their loquacity by their ignorance, their swaggering by their secret fear. And to this day there is no visible end to the evil they have wrought since they opened the gates of the world for the spirit of evil, and gave free rein to the destructive forces of nihilism and totalitarianism.

And all this could be clearly foreseen long before Nazism began to unmask to the world—so far as anyone took the trouble to pay attention to the words and deeds of the Nazis, and so far as anyone had sufficient moral sense to react to them with the disgust of a civilized being. Those who had ears to hear and eyes to see could not but know what they had to expect from these persons with their greed for power. They had but to look at the men’s faces, plainly marked with obstinate stupidity, they had but to hear their speeches and read their writings and note their deeds, which even before 1933 had reduced to terror a nation already rendered helpless. Nazism was a mixture of the ebullient feelings and the uncontrolled energies of boy scouts with cynicism, opportunism, brutality, mendacity, with hatred, envy, ambition, faithlessness, and intrigue, and with lewd sexuality. It was a barbarism, the barbarism not of immaturity but of rottenness, a barbarism the more repulsive since it was deliberate, studied, and pseudo-scientifically formulated. It was a hysterical orgy of decadent irresponsible intellectuals, who whipped up the masses with their phrases and turned their heads with their distortions of a language that had once been that of Lessing, Goethe, and Schopenhauer.

Amid all this there was a great deal of what may fairly be called honest idealism, among followers whose heads had been turned but not their hearts. These followers were certainly difficult to understand, but there was some excuse for them so long as the behaviour of the Nazis was calculated to deceive the innocent. Then came the moment after which no excuse was possible any longer. The last opportunity for these straying souls to find the way back to civilization came in August, 1932. In that month Storm Troopers were on trial in Potempa, in Upper Silesia, for the bestial murder of political opponents. When they were sentenced to death, Hitler shamelessly sent them a telegram of sympathy and encouragement. This act of his aroused a wave of indignation in Germany, and any who after that remained in a party led by such a man, or later felt no compunction in making him Chancellor of the Reich, pronounced their own condemnation. At the least there should be no place for them in the future in the public life of their nation.

For foreign opinion there was still some excuse for a time. The foreigner had the means of learning all the things that must be familiar to every German; but as a rule, at least until the commencement of the Third Reich, the foreigner had not the shock of direct observation. The foreigner was still less likely than the German to take the trouble to read Hitler’s Mein Kampf, a propaganda document that was revealing alike in its contents and its illiteracy. If the foreigner had no knowledge of German, he had the opportunity of reading the book in a French or English translation, from which he could almost acquire the illusion that it was a literary product to be taken seriously, and not a mass of cheap and uncouth journalese.

But when the Nazis had wormed their way into power, and had begun to make use of their power in the manner every open-eyed observer was bound to expect, the time was quickly past for any toleration of them to be justifiable even abroad. It was well known abroad after a few weeks or months what powers of evil were at work, with the concentration camps filling and violence and illegality and falsity piled high. And now imagine the agony which we who had left our country in disgust, knowing all that must come, had to endure through six long years, finding that the world did not stir, did not want to know anything about us. We émigrés were received abroad with sympathy, but as political advisers we were suspect. Our motives were respected, but we were given to understand that as émigrés we simply did not count, even where we were not openly set down as agitators and warmongers. At so late a stage as in October, 1938, when the policy of appeasement had reached its nadir after the shameful sacrifice of Czechoslovakia, I was treated by an American colleague as a poor half-wit when I declared that Czechoslovakia was lost and, moreover, that Europe was heading for disaster.

As a professor at Marburg University, realizing the threatening peril, I had used every opportunity between 1930 and 1933 to combat National Socialism in speech and writing, and my freely-expressed convictions had already made me unpopular enough. At the birth of the Third Reich I took a further step that procured me the honour of being placed on one of Hitler’s first lists of dismissed University professors. At the end of February, 1933—early in the unforgettable day on which the Reichstag building was fired by the Nazis—I had spoken at the grave of a dead colleague. I had quoted the famous phrase from Voltaire’s Candide, “mais il faut cultiver notre jardin,” and had praised my colleague as a gardener by nature in the broadest sense, and concluded: “And as a gardener of that sort he was probably no longer suited to the present time—the present that is proceeding to turn the garden of civilization into fallow land and to allow it to revert to the primeval jungle.”

It did indeed call for no exceptional clarity of vision to recognize Nazism as a frightful barbarian invasion of the laboriously hedged garden of civilization. But why was there general blindness to this in Germany, as later in the rest of the world, and why, in both cases, were men’s eyes opened only when it was too late, when Germany had suffered the catastrophe of tyranny, and the world the catastrophe of war? The main reason lay in the weakening of the moral reflexes. That was what prevented so many people, faced with a barbarism which in the preceding generation would have made its perpetrators utterly impossible in the civilized world, from taking up the only proper attitude of flaming and uncompromising indignation, and nipping the evil in the bud. People were blind because they were determined to be blind. But that determination in face of unprecedented barbarism proved the serious weakening of the moral sense, of which the world had already given a first sign in the case of Fascist Italy when men praised the punctuality of the trains and the improvement of tourist travel, but forgot what that regime meant for the Italians.

Thus the failure to recognize the true features of Nazism was in the last resort a moral failure, which men sought to cover up with all sorts of theories by way of excuse, euphemism, or even justification, and with stale witticisms. But this is a responsibility the world must share in full with the Germans. There was certainly a good deal in this National Socialism that was anything but edifying, and certainly its victims deserved sympathy and assistance. But, on the other hand, had not Germany been given order and discipline? Were not the Autobahnen, the motor roads, perfect? Was not the economic and social policy of the Third Reich a thoroughly interesting experiment, perhaps worth emulating? Was it really so monstrous for the Third Reich to repudiate the limitations on its armaments (they could not be maintained for ever), to claim full sovereignty over the Rhineland, to work for reunion with the Germans of Austria and perhaps even of the Sudetens, and to treat Danzig more and more openly as a German city under its rule? And was it not, moreover, performing the service of holding off from the West something still worse—Bolshevism? And that financial wizard, Schacht, who cheated the foreign creditors with grinning cynicism, was he not really a genial fellow? Was it not possible, by using discretion and plenty of bribery and flattery, to do excellent deals with these new men? And was it not even possible for a Socialist to learn a lot from this regime? As for its unattractive sides, would it not be enough to express indignation, or to joke about them, instead of being led into the awkward course, so incompatible with a pacifist programme, of putting up resolute diplomatic and military resistance? Thousands, indeed millions of people outside Germany must admit that these bitter questions strike home.

One of these questions of ours had reference to the fact that one ground for coming to terms with Nazism was the idea that it was an efficient bulwark against Bolshevism, or at least was, in comparison with Bolshevism, the lesser evil. In this belief there was all too ready acceptance of the Nazi propaganda claim that the coup d’état of 1933 saved Germany from a Communist revolution. That theory was indeed one of the trump cards played by National Socialism against unfavourable world opinion—we know with what success. At the outset and for a long time very few realised that this was no more than casting out devils through Beelzebub, and that the differences between the Red collectivism and the Brown totalitarianism could not remove from the world the essential similarity of their principles of structure.

But since these two chief varieties of collectivism—National Socialism and Communism—were rivals who very naturally fought bitterly against each other and who, as tricksters who saw through each other’s methods, had every reason to be afraid of each other, neither of them missed any opportunity of turning the free opinion of the world in its favour and against the other. Each denounced the other as the thing that in truth each of them was—a tyranny. Each claimed to be what in truth neither of them was—a guardian of democracy. In fact, their ideal aim was attained if every opponent of Fascism or Nazism was branded as a Communist and every opponent of Communism as a Fascist.

It is unfortunate for the world that the two rival forms of collectivism seem largely to have attained this aim. In doing so, however, they created a confusion that facilitated the game of both. Thus they involuntarily worked into each other’s hands. It was, in fact, in this way that Nazism improved its position with a considerable section of the free opinion of the world, which without Communism would have been inaccessible to its approaches, while at the same time Communism succeeded in winning over another section of the free opinion of the world which, but for Nazism, would have shown more reserve and better judgment. It remains a serious fault that the world should have allowed itself to have been so led astray in its judgment and its moral susceptibilities by this playing-off of Communism against National Socialism. How grave is this fault and how ready our times show themselves to submit to this mental and emotional confusion is shown by the fact that today we see the same unsureness and denseness in regard to Communism. Nobody who actively defends Communism or even finds excuses for it has any right to be indignant with the German people for its seduction by the Brown collectivism, and a world that today shows the same attitude to Communism that it showed in the past to National Socialism, an attitude of palliation and of appeasement, if not of actual encouragement, proves to us that it is in a moral and mental condition that might have made it an accomplice in Nazism.

This play between Fascism (National Socialism) and Communism was facilitated by a certain interpretation of National Socialism. We refer to the idea that National Socialism, like Fascism, was fundamentally simply a spurious and insincere collectivism, with the aid of which “capitalism” was trying to maintain its position in a last desperate struggle against genuine collectivism, without troubling too much about the methods of government or the ideologies to be worked off on the masses who were to be fooled. Such a theory was well adapted to make the fundamental opponents of collectivism more ready to come to terms with National Socialism, if it did not actually throw them into its arms, while winning the allegiance of the others for “true” collectivism. One side was persuaded in this way to see in National Socialism an ally in the struggle against collectivism, and the other to see in collectivism an ally against Nazism. One side thus became partisans or promoters of Nazism and the other of Communism.

We may feel the latter to be less unattractive than the former, but this does not prevent the two sides from both being wrong, because the interpretation of Nazism from which both proceed is untenable. It is an altogether primitive sociological principle, although, unfortunately, propagated by Marxism, that a government is simply the executive organ of the “ruling class.” “The class that in truth rules politically is the class of the rulers, with their religious, philosophic, or moral ideas, whatever these may be,”1 but not a group that stands for any sort of common economic interests. It is cheap romanticism to suppose that the leaders of a State are marionettes, dancing at the end of wires pulled by the “capitalists.” The idea is completely untenable, even though there are actually “capitalists” who themselves entertain it. In Germany itself it was mainly “capitalists” who were so stupid as cynically to promote Hitler’s rise to power, and later one of them, when the National Socialism he had supported had driven him into emigration, was actually simple enough to publish a book describing the wretched part he had played, instead of keeping a shamed silence. All these “capitalists” were driven long ago to the painful conclusion that Nazism was an entirely genuine collectivism, and was determined to rule by its own uncontrolled power. Thus those Socialists who still adhered to the theory that National Socialism was a last desperate struggle of “monopoly capitalism” and was a pseudo-collectivism, made the same mistake in their theories which the “capitalists” of the type of Fritz Thyssen had made earlier in practice. Now that that idea has been proved in practice by the “capitalists” to be a fatal error, it should be considered as disposed of also in the theories of the Socialists. Needless to say, in the case of the Socialists it was no more than a mistaken idea, but in the case of those “capitalists” it was at the same time a grave and inexcusable moral lapse. The Socialists have our entire sympathy, but they must allow us to tell them that they were mistaken.

Thus intellectual confusion and moral obtuseness united to clear away the obstacles in the path of the Nazis—obstacles which otherwise would soon have made an end of their dominance. We who knew what Nazism meant had assumed in those critical years after the coup d’état of 1933 that the conclusions we had drawn must force themselves upon the whole world. We took it for granted that at the very outset the Third Reich must come to grief through the resistance of the outer world, after the internal resistance had proved inadequate. We imagined the world’s reactions and power of decision to be still more or less normal, so that we could not believe that the Nazi regime would last long. We thought the object lesson the Nazis had given in Germany would be sufficient to open the eyes of the rest of the world; the failure in Germany would increase the resolution abroad; since the battle had been lost in Germany, in the international field the determination not to lose it could not, we thought, but increase accordingly.

It had been impossible for us to make any mistake in our estimate of National Socialism; but unfortunately we were entirely mistaken in our estimate of the world outside Germany. We had not expected such inertia, indecision, and lack of unity. Indeed, time after time, from 1933 to this day the points were set wrongly with such incredibly mistaken instinct that disaster rushed upon us all like an express train. Thus we had the depressing spectacle of the representatives of foreign countries willingly shaking hands with murderers, liars, Reichstag-burners, torturers, blackmailers, sexual perverts, and such fry, hurrying to attend Nazi festivals, and taking pains to make it seem that these figures from the dregs of society were entitled to consideration. The German efforts to increase the tourist traffic fell on fruitful soil; bodies like the International Chamber of Commerce held their congresses in Germany, and not a few foreigners’ arms were held out in the Fascist greeting; while scarcely a soul was tactless enough to inquire about concentration camps, “People’s Courts,” or nocturnal outrages. Men strove to discover every possible “good side” of Nazism, regardless of the fact that such a regime could not exist at all without some “good sides.” How few foreign intellectuals were able to summon up the modicum of courage needed to refuse to go on contributing to German periodicals which were closed to anti-Nazi Germans ! Was there one among them who, invited in the most flattering terms to attend one of the many scientific congresses held in Germany actually after 1933, had the courage to make use of his unique opportunity, envied by his German colleagues, of speaking freely and plainly and tearing apart the web of propaganda that was spun on these occasions? How many, on the contrary, submitted to flattering and lionizing; and how many books were published abroad in praise of National Socialism—books whose authors must be wishing today that they had never been written.

The courting of world favour by the Third Reich was shamefully successful, and here again there was merely a repetition of what we had already witnessed in the case of Italian Fascism. It was the time when an anti-Nazi German could ask himself bitterly whether one of the marks of a totalitarian State was not the advantage attaching to the possession of a foreign passport. It was discovered how well and how cheaply the foreigner could live in Germany, and with what exquisite courtesy he was then treated; and people became willing victims of the noisy propaganda carried on by the regime over all sorts of “achievements” which were by no means absent in democratic countries but about which no fuss was made there. Is it forgotten how at that very time the Olympic Games were transferred to Germany, giving the Nazis a unique opportunity of increasing their prestige among Germans and abroad, while in the country around, the Terror was raging and arms were being secretly forged against the youth of all countries—the very youth who were streaming at that time into Berlin? And will anyone claim now to have been the innocent victim of shameless deception because he could not have known what scoundrels these Nazis were? It would have been plain enough if there had not been a moral obliquity that closed men’s eyes to the crimes of the regime, already amply evidenced. Men simply did not want to know, because it was inconvenient knowledge. So there was recruited in all countries the “intellectual Foreign Legion” of Nazism.

It was particularly fatal that this spiritual and moral capitulation of the world to the Third Reich affected the policy of all governments, though it was of vital importance to them, had they realized it, to unite with the anti-Nazi Germans against the enormous peril of Nazism, and though they would have been perfectly well able, by acting in time, to make an absolute end of it. We had to witness the responsible statesmen simply letting slip every opportunity of nipping the Third Reich in the bud. They could probably have done this with success by the simple and bloodless process of allowing the Nazis to “stew in their own juice,” entirely ostracizing them diplomatically, mobilizing world opinion against them, and reducing all relations with the Third Reich to the absolute minimum.

Not only did they do nothing, not only did they idly permit themselves to be outstripped militarily in a few years—particularly in the extremely important air arm—but the United Kingdom, for instance, actually concluded a naval agreement with the Berlin Government; this agreement included the recognition of German rearmament in defiance of the Versailles Treaty, and could not fail to encourage the Nazis to proceed energetically along that path. During the first years of the regime it would have been child’s play to make an end of the monstrous thing, and in all probability even in 1936 the simple mobilization of France would have sufficed to turn the treaty-breaking reoccupation of the Rhineland from a triumph into an annihilating political defeat of Hitler. When in 1938 Austria was violated, nobody stirred, and when in the autumn of that same year the same game of extortion and menace was played against Czechoslovakia, in the Munich capitulation world policy in regard to the Third Reich descended to the uttermost extreme of weakness. During the whole period countless Germans had set their last desperate hopes on a firm attitude on the part of the Great Powers, but again and again they had to witness the triumph of their hated tyrants over a spineless world. Finally, Russia, too, made concessions to Hitler in the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement, enabling Hitler at last to let loose war and, with the support of Russian deliveries, to carry it on successfully for a considerable time. The dismal picture is completed by the sudden chorus of praise from the Communists of all countries of the coalition of Nazism and Communism against the “imperialist and capitalist world.”

If we consider all this soberly and with scientific objectivity, we can no longer doubt that the world-wide catastrophe of today is the gigantic price the world has to pay for its deafness to all the warning signals that prophesied with ever-increasing shrillness from 1930 to 1939 the Hell the Satanic forces of National Socialism were to let loose, first against Germany herself and then against the rest of the world. The horrors of the war just ended correspond exactly with those which the world permitted Germany to suffer, while it actually maintained normal relations with the Nazis and organized with them international festivals and congresses.

None are so deaf as those who are determined not to hear. The universal passivity in regard to the Third Reich was indeed the result of the paralysis produced by a spiritual and moral poisoning, and of the determination to ignore the writing on the wall in order to postpone the day of reckoning and to purchase a few years of peace and comfort, at the price of a most terrible final catastrophe. For this catastrophe the Germans have to bear the main responsibility; nevertheless, all nations have reason to beat their breasts, to confess, and to repent.

Today it seems almost incredible that the world should have been able for so long to harbour the illusion that the Nazis might treat foreign countries better than they treated their own people; its doing so is inexcusable. Today, however, it should be clear to everybody that Nazism began its march of conquest in Germany itself, that the Germans were the first victims of that barbarian invasion, which poured over them from below, that they were the first to be overwhelmed by terrorism and by mass-hypnosis, and that all that the occupied countries had later to endure was suffered first by the Germans themselves, including the worst fate of all, that of being impressed or seduced into becoming tools of further conquest and oppression. Germany was a sailing vessel, the worst elements of whose crew had banded together to overpower the rest, to set their own ringleader in place of the senile captain, and then to hoist amid shouts their blood-red flag with its spider-like sign of criminality and to set out on their buccaneering cruise. In the fashion of the old pirates they then proceeded to impress the crews of captured ships in their service and to make them their accomplices. The first victims of these abominable proceedings was Austria, the country with which the Nazis began their process of horizontal conquest after they had completed the vertical conquest of Germany; and also the country from which the ringleader had come with his empty “blarney.”

To sum up—the leading Nazis are so far outside all human moral law that we should do them undue honour if we were to apply to them the moral standard of guilt. But we are bound to speak of guilt (which implies the conceptions of repentance, expiation, and rebirth) in the case of all those who, in their mental blindness and moral bewilderment, by their action or inaction left the way clear for those caricatures of humanity, instead of stopping them in time. This, however, is guilt which the world has to share with the Germans.

NAZISM AS TOTALITARIANISM

It would be a misjudgment of the German problem if we were pharisaically to ignore the share of guilt that has to be borne by the world outside Germany; and this guilt is at the same time an offence against that section of the German people which stood out against Nazism. The world will not want to have applied to it Goethe’s lines:

Ihr lasst die Armen schuldig werden,

Dann überlasst ihr sie der Pein—

“Ye leave the poor souls guilt to incur, Then send them on to suffer torture.” But it would also be an error to see in Nazism nothing more than the sudden madness of a single nation in the midst of an entirely healthy world, and to forget that it was the special German form of a tendency that was of an international character. The Third Reich was the German form of the social and administrative system that we know as totalitarianism; and just as that system is not the mark of a nation but of a period, it came into existence in Germany owing to conditions which can be shown to have existed throughout the civilized world. For reasons peculiar to Germany, she succumbed to germs of disease from which other countries were not free, but against which they were able to set greater powers of resistance. The disease obtained an exceptional hold over Germany because in that country national characteristics, international infection, and the exceptional circumstances of the time made up a particularly dangerous combination. The world could not have had so appalling a degree of complicity in German totalitarianism and its career if it had not already been itself infected.

Some years ago the great French historian and sociologist Elie Halévy coined the phrase “era of tyrannies,”2 which has since become famous. But long before this it had become clear that those state systems, of which the first had made its appearance in Russia in 1917 and which then appeared in several other countries in a great variety of forms, have essential traits common to all of them, later comprehended under the name “totalitarianism.” Whether in Bolshevism, Fascism, or Nazism, we meet continually with the forcible and ruthless usurpation of the power of the State by a minority drawn from the masses, resting on their support, flattering them and threatening them at the same time; a minority led by a “charismatic leader” (Max Weber) and brazenly identifying itself with the State. It is a tyranny that does away with all the guarantees of the constitutional State, constituting as the only party the minority that has created it, furnishing that party with far-reaching judicial and administrative functions, and permitting within the whole life of the nation no groups, no activities, no opinions, no associations or religions, no publications, no educational institutions, no business transactions, that are not dependent on the will of the Government.

This total autocracy, in tune with the worst instincts of the masses, acknowledges no other limits than those of expediency in the choice of the means by which it attains power and keeps itself in power. Having been lifted up on the waves of a mass movement, and being entirely dependent on that movement, it devotes all its energy, its inventiveness, and its technique of propaganda, to currying favour with the masses. Concentration camps, whose inmates are subjected for an indefinite period to inhuman treatment; secret police, torture chambers, people’s courts of “justice,” and the most elaborate system of espionage, penetrating even into the family and setting the very children against their parents; frenzied self-advertisement, and continual whipping up of the population by more and more massive stimulants and by the continual announcement of new aims of the “national community” by means of noisy monopolistic propaganda; the utmost mental and economic isolation from the outer world; public “enlightenment,” refined to a diabolical science, and reaping its harvest in almost unanimous plebiscites; the cult of an imposed ideology, the cynical perversion of traditional institutions, values, and terms, the deification of the “charismatic” leader, on whose infallibility no shadow of doubt is permitted to be cast, and the directing of popular ill-will against one new group after another of “enemies of the people,” “malignants,” and “saboteurs”—these are the principal methods of this new tyranny. Whenever it has come into power it has ruled by means of the masses and within the masses by means of their worst elements, and against the educated élites, giving careful thought at all times, in every word uttered and every step taken, to the reaction of the masses. Thus it is a form of rule that gives expression to the rising of the masses against the élite of which the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset has written in his book, The Revolt of the Masses.

The more we gained knowledge of these new totalitarian systems of mass-rule, the more we realized not only their similarity of structure, but also the fact that we had to do with a type of dominance that had been known in earlier epochs. We discovered that what the ancients called “tyrannis,” or “cheirokratia,” what Sulla or the tyrants of the Italian Rennaissance had practised, and what finally alarmed the world in the French Revolution and under Napoleon, had surprisingly many similarities with modern totalitarianism, although this latter had elements with which they cannot be compared, and although it possessed means of domination unknown in past ages. Benjamin Constant wrote in his book De l’Esprit de Conquête et de l’Usurpation (Hanover 1814)3 of the experience of the French Revolution and of Napoleon. Scarcely a page of the classic analysis of totalitarianism in that book can be read without coming to deep truths about the totalitarianism of today. Very often one has only to change the names to apply what is said in this book of 130 years ago to the case of Germany, insulting though it would be to the personality of Napoleon to compare it with that of Hitler.

Just as so much else was repeated, so the experience has been renewed in our day that tyranny, as an illegitimate, usurped form of rule, has no constitutional title of any sort, and consequently regards it as the ultimate purpose of its activities, underlying every word and every action, to find a substitute to make good its lack of a constitutional title and to bolster up the declining popularity of its regime. Hence the necessity for compulsory uniformity of opinion and for ruthless enforcement of the will of the State; hence also the agitated courting of the masses and the hunt after new and more and more spectacular momentary successes, the anxious glances to make sure that the masses and foreign observers are pleased, the lack of the calm a legitimate government can permit itself, the morbi sensitivity to praise or blame, the inferiority complex that betrays itself unmistakably beneath the blatant self-assertiveness, and the concern of every tyranny to counter its illegitimacy and its ephemeral quality with monumental buildings. Hence also the fear of simple ordinariness and the constant invention of new occasions for whipping up the excitement of the population, to prevent the calm that permits clear thought; the launching of slogan after slogan, to “pith” the skulls of the people, so that they can be reduced in the end to accepting praise today of what was damned yesterday. Society is thus turned into a whipping-top that can only be kept in equilibrium by rapid turning—by “dynamism,” to use one of those mouthing-phrases in the invention of which Fascism and Nazism were so fertile.

All these peculiarities of the structure of modern tyranny, whose ugliest and extremest form was Nazism, are marked by the entire dissolution of the values and standards without which our society, or any other, cannot exist in the long run: a pernicious anaemia of morality, a cynical unconcern in the choice of means, which in the absence of firm principles become ends in themselves; a nihilistic lack of principle, and, in a word, what may be described literally as Satanism and Nihilism. Everything rots away, and finally there remains only one fixed aim of the tyranny, to which all moral principles, all promises, treaties, guarantees, and ideologies are ruthlessly sacrificed—the naked lust for domination, for the preservation of the continually threatened power, a power held on to for no other purpose than the continued enjoyment of all its fruits. The immorality of such a regime needs no arguing. There is thus scarcely a villainy that is not to be expected from such a regime. All the ideals and emotions blatantly appealed to—social justice, national community, peace, religion, family life, welfare of the masses, claims in the international field, the return to simpler and more natural forms of life, and so forth—prove as a rule to be nothing more than crudely-painted interchangeable boards for the staging of mass propaganda. The leaders blow hot and cold; they shriek with indignation at the treatment of German minorities, or they may shamefully sacrifice minorities really ill-treated, such as the South Tyrolese. The tyrant becomes the most unscrupulous of all publicity agents, only asking himself: How will it work? How will it help to bolster me up?

In Nazism the complete unscrupulousness in the choice of serviceable-looking slogans and the truly reckless speculation on human stupidity reached perhaps its zenith in the invention of the gigantic farce of the propaganda for “European solidarity against Bolshevism.” After ruining Europe by their crimes and at the same time openly challenging Soviet Russia, nothing better occurred to the Nazis than to paraphrase the old Wilhelmian slogan, “Peoples of Europe, guard your holiest possessions!” This they did (1) after inciting the Japanese against the Europeans in the Far East; (2) after it had become clear that a Hitlerite Europe was simply not worth saving; (3) after all Europe had realized that it was brazen impudence for the Nazis to rage against Bolshevism; and (4) after all Europe had come to ask who would save it from the grip of Nazism. And when these barbarians talked of three thousand years of European civilization being at stake, the only possible answer was roars of laughter. “The saviour of Europe,” Jacob Burckhardt said long ago, “is preeminently the man who saves her from the danger of a political, religious, and social Procrusteanism that threatens her specific character, namely the manifold wealth of her intellect.”4.

Such a regime, the expression of complete Nihilism and Satanism, can be imposed only on a nation that has already suffered the extreme of inner disintegration; but certainly no man can become and remain for any length of time the leader of such a system unless he is a Satanist and Nihilist through and through. It is inevitable that such a regime should be an entirely intolerable member of the family of nations and should end sooner or later in a war of conquest. It may fairly be said of it that Imperialism begins at home. After reducing its own people to subjection, it will of necessity carry imperialism abroad, in order to remain true to its own principle and practise abroad the looting begun at home, and in order to forestall the results of the justified suspicion among its neighbours; in order, too, to provide a diversion for internal criticism and discontent, to intoxicate its people with the poison of nationalism and imperialism, and to meet the need for spectacular successes after a certain satiation has been reached at home.

Each of the essential traits of tyranny here mentioned does indeed include the urge to war. A regime that has not the slightest respect for the freedom and the rights of the individual will have no greater respect for the freedom and the rights of other nations. If a State applies at home, with complete amorality, every expedient for the acquisition and maintenance of domination, it cannot be expected that it should apply other means abroad, or that it should moderate its lust for power in foreign relations and set limits to it when it sees a prospect of expansion. That such a State should respect international commitments can only be expected by those who have no understanding of its structure. It is clear, too, that a regime that owes its existence to mass enthusiasm, and has constantly to rekindle that enthusiasm, is forced by inescapable laws of psychology to stir up nationalism to a white heat; it can no more dispense with that expedient than it can omit to weld the nation together by resort to the well-tried means of national hatred and war. Such a State will be driven along the same path by the necessity of making good its lack of legitimacy; it must pursue one colossal enterprise after another, in order to impress the people. Thus it is driven to resort to a stimulant that shares with all other stimulants the property of being effective only so long as the dose is continually increased. And once it has been encouraged to pursue this path by slight initial successes, it can no longer retrace its steps without heading for disaster. And finally the socialistic and autarkic economy that is inseparable from the nature of this totalitarian tyranny cannot but let loose tendencies that powerfully drive the tyranny along the path of extreme nationalism, conquest, and war, since it is an economy based essentially upon expenditure, waste of substance, and ruinous exploitation, and so must be continually on the search for fresh fields to strip bare.

As a rule it takes a considerable time for a tyranny to plunge the world around it into the inevitable war; but this is not due to any peaceful spirit in the tyranny, but to the long-suffering and the weakness of the other countries. They put away from their minds until the last moment the idea that war is inevitable, and hope to avoid it by means of the concessions which the totalitarian State extorts from them, exploiting their love of peace. Tragically, however, it is these very concessions that in the end make war inevitable; step by step they tempt the tyrant along a path from which he himself would no longer be able to retreat even if his successes had not gone to his head. By abandoning position after position, the peaceful countries gradually manoeuvre themselves into a situation in which they can no longer under any circumstances avoid war with the totalitarian mischief-maker if they are not to give way all along the line. But they enter the war under conditions which they themselves, through the concessions already made and through the demoralizing effect of their “policy of appeasement,” have made as unfavourable as could be.

It took Europe twelve years to bring Napoleon to his knees, after he had been permitted through weakness, short-sightedness, and disunity to grow great. It took just the same twelve long years—and what years !—for the world to deal with Hitler, and in those years, without intending it, it did everything to make the ultimate war once more as obstinate, as frightful, and as destructive as it possibly could be. The parallel is too striking—in spite of differences so disgraceful for Hitler—for us not to read with entire agreement what Benjamin Constant wrote in 1814:

“It is probable that the same disposition of the moderns that leads them to prefer peace to war would at the outset give great advantages to the people forced by its government to become an aggressor. Nations absorbed in the enjoyment of their possessions would be slow to resist: they would abandon a portion of their rights in order to preserve the rest; they would hope to save their repose by the compromise of their liberty. By a very strange combination, the more peaceful the general spirit, the more would the State that entered into war against that spirit gain easy successes at the outset.”5 And a few pages further on we come to a passage that might have been written in our own day:

“The force a people needs in order to hold all the rest in subjection is a privilege which today, more than ever, cannot endure. A nation that claimed such dominance would place itself in a position more perilous than that of the weakest community. It would become the object of universal horror. The opinions of all, the aspirations of all, the hatred of all, would menace it, and sooner or later this hatred, these opinions, and these aspirations, would close in upon it.

“There would be without doubt in this fury, against a whole people, an element of injustice. Never is a whole people guilty of the excesses which its leader makes it commit. It is this leader who leads it astray, or, yet more frequently, does not seduce it but constrains it.

“But the nations that become the victims of its deplorable obedience would be unable to give it credit for concealed feelings which its conduct belies. They blame the instruments for the crime of the hand that directs them.”6

The Napoleonic wars can only be compared with Hitler’s with the utmost caution, since Napoleon’s relation to Hitler is that of a genuine dignitary of history to a disreputable gangster. But there is nothing to prevent us from taking from the history of the nineteenth century another example that reveals the part played in international life by an insane tyrant, showing very plainly that the case of Hitler is by no means unique. We refer to the abominable tyrant of Paraguay from 1862 to 1870, Francisco Solano Lopez, who like Hitler was obsessed by the insane idea of giving his continent a “New Order,” and who became involved in a war with all his neighbours; he was a precursor on a small scale of the authors of Germany’s tragedy today.7 This man, too, imagined that his will was all that was needed to stand the world on its head, and he, too, was completely blind to the true strength of the opposition he aroused. Relying on his armed force, he embarked on a policy that brought great initial successes, for the reasons stated by Constant, but ultimately, when his imperilled neighbours united against him, plunged his regime and his country into the abyss. “His intellectual arrogance”—so the Deutsche Rundschau boldly wrote in April, 1941—“growing more and more upon him, clouded his view of the superior moral and economic forces of the neighbour countries. He allowed himself to be elevated more and more by his entourage to the status of a demigod: flattering speeches and the incense of continual adoration intoxicated him, with his natural tendency to exaggerate his own qualities, so that he could no longer see the world as it really was. But his very successes were his undoing. They made the peril of this ‘total’ State seem so overpowering that Argentina and Brazil forgot their long-standing feud and united in a close alliance against this upstart military power.” So came, in the end, the inevitable catastrophe. “For the guilt one man had incurred in his madness, the whole nation must now surfer! Plectuntur Achivi” The article concludes:

“Thus a curse lies to this day upon the name of Lopez, the gloomy tyrant. Finding himself forced into continual retreat, he resorted to more and more senseless measures. But the more his mania developed the more justification he found for his suspicions; for so much the more eagerly persons with a sense of responsibility sought means of sparing the nation from the worst and achieving an honourable peace. With the frightful means of the semi-mediaeval criminal law of his time, Lopez frustrated all these efforts. The Paraguayan nation was forced to pursue its Calvary to the bitter end.”

We thus see that Nazism is no fabulous monster, no dragon found only in the primeval forests of Germania. It belongs to a species not too difficult to define, which in the nomenclature of sociology bears the name of “totalitarianism.” It is certainly a particularly abominable specimen, which under peculiar circumstances was able to grow to saurian dimensions, but which for all that can be classified without difficulty as belonging with every essential characteristic to the species.

But here again it must not be forgotten that in the intellectual procreation of this monster the world outside Germany most certainly played a part. If National Socialism is essentially a particular form of totalitarianism, the story of its intellectual birth must to that extent be also that of totalitarianism. It is a specially complicated story, and this is not the place for its detailed narration. But the very circumstance that German totalitarianism was preceded by the Russian and Italian forms shows to how great an extent Nazism took over and worked out with German thoroughness ideas that were by no means of German origin. It would be wearisome to compile the names that mark the various stages passed through by the ideology of the totalitarian State.8 But if we merely mention the chief writers, such as the Frenchman Georges Sorel (who by their own acknowledgment strongly influenced both Lenin and Mussolini) and the Italian Pareto, and if we add how deeply the theorists and practicians alike, both of Russian Bolshevism and of Italian Fascism, influenced the German National Socialists, we have made it easy to see that the outer world worked just as ardently on the building of the intellectual foundations of the Third Reich as did Germany herself.

Even the racial mania which seems to be an exclusive domain of German totalitarianism, was presented to the Germans by foreigners—particularly by the French writer Gobineau, who himself simply elaborated an idea that dates back to the eighteenth century. The racial delusion may be described as a cross between those foreign germs and the specifically German ethical romanticism which will occupy us later.9 While these and other precursors of the Nazi racial doctrine have nothing in common with the appalling delusionary character of that doctrine, the fact remains that that is the abyss into which we are inevitably plunged in the end, if we once pursue the mistaken path of the biologism of which Darwin and his school laid the foundations. The Nazi racial doctrine is the final putrid product of the decay of an intellectual process by which in the course of the Nineteenth Century man was degraded, with the zeal of a misunderstood science, to a subject of zoology and stud farming; but in this process all the principal countries of the West took part. The death chambers of Auschwitz and Maidanek are the final gruesome result of certain scientific ideas having ultimately found their way in the course of a century to the morally and mentally lowest levels of humanity, to a group which then, through a social catastrophe of inconceivable dimensions, became the rulers of a great people.

That National Socialism is the expression of an international contemporary spirit rather than that of the spirit of a nation is, finally, also shown by the fact that similar tendencies are to be found in the contemporary literature of all countries, and, at least for a time, were not without influence. Whether we recall The Coming American Fascism, by an American, Lawrence Dennis, or The Managerial Revolution, by another American, James Burnham, or the tirades of Colonel Lindbergh and his wife about the “wave of the future” and all sorts of other things, we continually find, more or less disguised by perfumes, the miasma that has poisoned Germany. Everywhere are the “totalitarians in our midst” of whom F. A. Hayek, in his book The Road to Serfdom, has given from the English scene a ruthless analysis, not sparing representatives of totalitarianism on the Left. It is the painful duty of the honest observer to mention the names of Jewish writers who, like Emil Ludwig or Paul Einzig, have loudly praised Italian Fascism, thus laying themselves open to the suspicion that they were kept from a similar admiration of Nazism only by its anti-Semitism.10

THE PECULIAR FEATURES OF NAZISM

National Socialism undoubtedly belongs to the genus of totalitarianism and is to that extent akin to Russian Communism and Italian Fascism. On the other hand, it no less clearly shows many peculiar features that give it a unique character, just as in the other cases of totalitarianism. These features are, indeed, so striking that the untrained eye has difficulty in seeing beneath them the true character of Nazism as a totalitarian regime. At the least, it seems as if Nazism can be compared only with Italian Fascism, and not with Russian Communism, although we know now that the appearance is wholly deceptive, as in all three cases we have to do with the ideology and the reality of the totalitarian termite State and with the collectivism characteristic of it. Yet it is obvious that Nazism and Fascism form, relatively to Bolshevism, a sharply defined subsection, for which, of course, the term “Fascism” has gained currency.

If we are at least to make shift to give some answer to the difficult question what the structure of Nazism has in common with that of Fascism, in contradistinction with Bolshevism, we must emphasize various points.11 In both cases the totalitarian rule followed a coup d’état which was clothed as far as could be in legal forms and only gradually revealed its revolutionary aims. Both Fascism and Nazism set out to establish themselves in an extraordinarily complex society and actually with the aid of decidedly anti-revolutionary elements; consequently they found themselves compelled to proceed step by step, with a maximum of indefiniteness in their programmes, a maximum of mutually incompatible promises, and an appeal to every sentiment that seemed to influence opinion. This explains the total absence of any clear doctrine such as that of the Communists, and its replacement by a rhetorical propaganda that pulled out every stop of passion and emotion. Since neither Fascism nor Nazism wanted, like Bolshevism, to make a clean sweep of the existing social order, or could do so—both, on the contrary, were compelled at first to leave the traditional class divisions intact—there resulted a necessity for continual compromises, especially in economic policy, which were capable of disguising for a considerable time the collectivist character of the aims pursued. Many measures adopted were simply facades, behind which was either nothing at all or the precise opposite of what they represented. This applies, above all, to the treatment of private property. Just as in Russia the church was openly persecuted, but in the Third Reich it was as far as possible disintegrated from within, so in Russia private property in the means of production was openly abolished, but in the Third Reich it was reduced, by continual restrictions of the rights and functions of the owner, to an empty shell, while for propagandist purposes the shell was allowed to continue to exist. Thus in the two cases the forms of abolition of private property were different but their results were essentially the same.

Fascists and National Socialists made the utmost use of romantic slogans announcing a return to simpler and earlier ways of living and forms of society. But it must have been clear from the outset that these totalitarian regimes, which could only end in economic and social collectivism, could have no genuine intention of continuing to promote a true peasantry and an independent middle class if they were not to stultify themselves. As a matter of fact, the National Socialist agrarian policy was carried out by urban intellectuals who were worlds away from the realities of peasant life. They worked under a man who came from Argentina, and who had clearly read too much of the writings of Hermann Löns, a very influential writer on the German countryside, whom the Nazis found to their dismay, after solemnly interring his remains, to have been of Jewish descent.

The less it was possible to offer the masses in the way of tangible improvements in their situation, the stronger was the urge to arouse nationalism, making use of the national sentiment which alike in Italy and in Germany had made an important contribution to the growth of the Fascist movement. To make capital in this way out of external affairs was the more essential since the cramped conditions, in both countries, in comparison with Russia set clear limits to the employment in home affairs of the energies unleashed. Fascism and Nazism had the same need as Bolshevism for “enemies of the people” as targets for the masses, but, at first, in accordance with their special character, described above, they respected the existing class differences and had to content themselves with the persecution of defenceless minorities—the freemasons, the Liberals, the Marxists, the pacifists, and in Germany the Jews. Only gradually did each regime grow more radical in this respect, as it became able to establish itself in place of the forces, at first threatening, of the untouched elements of power in the State—army and navy, police, universities, landowners, industrialists, and churches. This growing radicalization was bound steadily to diminish the differences between Fascism and Nazism on one side and Bolshevism on the other, especially since Bolshevism came more and more to adopt “Fascist” traits, largely because the Russian social order, at first subjected to extreme simplification, underwent differentiation through the building up of a new social hierarchy and because the power of mass emotions, especially of nationalism, was rediscovered.

Within the general group of totalitarian States, we have sought to outline the common nature of Nazism and Fascism; it remains to determine the elements peculiar to Nazism. We come here to the essence of the matter—the special nature alike of German conditions, the German national character, and German history.

To begin with there is the general fact that Nazism, even in the points in which it resembles Fascism, differs from it through an exaggeration, a coarsening, and a logical consistency which we may certainly regard as an expression of German pedantry, “thoroughness,” and lack of moderation. All the things that down in the south were amateurish or had an operatic quality were put through in Germany with the grimmest seriousness and carried to the bitter end. Reservations and modifications permitted in Italy were rejected in Germany. The naïveté of the south became self-consciousness and cheap sentimentality in Germany. At the same time everything was regarded in a light that was much more “romantic,” in a bad and morbid sense. In Italy Blut und Boden, “blood and soil,” at least meant Virgil, Augustus, and the Renaissance; in Germany they meant primeval forests and heathen barbarism. It is in consonance with this that it remained for Nazism, in the race mania for which “anti-Semitism” is much too weak a term, to sink to the lowest animal level of group hatred, and to be led by it into a savage policy with which even the history of Italian Fascism has nothing to compare. There was no room in the north for even a temporary compromise with the Christian churches, and so the German Nazi was bound to appear to the average Fascist as just a barbarian Goth, a subject alike for fear and contempt, in spite of the unscrupulousness common to both types. In addition to this, Nazism unquestionably had from the outset a much more definite mass character than Fascism and was much more deeply rooted in the actual proletariat. It had set itself from the first to win over the mass of manual and office workers, and it cannot be denied that Nazism was largely successful in this aim, especially among the younger generation, which lacked the liberal traditions of the old trade unions. It is not sufficiently realized today that it was on these proletarianized and traditionless masses that Nazism mainly depended; it was these that it exerted itself to flatter, and they responded only too readily to its courtship: Nazism gave them a sense of status that raised their self-importance to arrogance; it showed them a consideration which it would have been suicidal for an employer to expect. In comparison with these classes, not inconsiderable sections of the upper middle class showed a much better attitude.

There is a final point of the utmost importance. Nazism and Fascism had an aggressive nationalism in common, in contrast with Russian Communism, but in this respect again Nazism far outran Fascism, for the following reasons. To begin with, Germany was so much wealthier and more powerful than Italy that the temptation to conquest was bound to be correspondingly greater. Secondly, Nazi militarism and imperialism had the benefit of a tradition, that of Greater Prussia, which Italy lacked. Thirdly, and this perhaps is the most important of all, Nazism was distinguished not only from Communism but also from Fascism by the repulsive conceit that proclaimed the Germans to be a chosen people, a master race—a doctrine that carried the race mania into international politics.

THE RELENTLESS MACHINERY OF TOTALITARIANISM

A totalitarianism of this sort, with all the special characteristics of that form of rule and also the peculiarities of its own that we have described—such was National Socialism. As in all totalitarian countries, it overwhelmed people and Government by a coup d’état devilishly staged, a coup in which all the resources of cunning and violence were regarded as legitimate; and just as it had not come into power through a revolutionary popular movement, it could not be removed by that means. Once it had established itself, it could only be overthrown by the same means, the coup d’état, that had brought it into power, or by intervention from abroad. As everywhere where totalitarianism had conquered the State, the German nation as a whole was condemned to impotent submission to tyranny, and must not only allow itself to be ordered about and exploited and directed in its every movement, but also to be demoralized and corrupted, until at last the fatal optical illusion was produced that the German nation could be identified with Nazism.

As fate would have it, only those can fully understand the path the German nation has trod since 1933 who have had actual experience of the sociology of totalitarianism, whereas today nations are called to decide about Germany for the very reason that they resolutely rejected totalitarianism and would have nothing to do with it. Those nations have no knowledge, all of us outside Germany have no knowledge, of what it meant to five for twelve terrible years under such a regime, and the imagination cannot take the place of that absent knowledge. But perhaps we shall not appeal to those nations in vain if we suggest that we all must avoid any sort of pharisaism and constantly bear in mind that, for the very reason that we have been spared that tragic experience, we are bound to reserve judgment and to permit ourselves to be instructed at every possible opportunity. We can all learn from the intelligent and noble German woman who wrote to me after the outbreak of this war that she had always been of the same mind with me and hoped to continue so, but that after long years of experience she realized that she could not know how she would be affected by the war propaganda and the completely one-sided information. Should she in the future become untrue to her past views, I must remember in her favour that she had to live under conditions that made her quite irresponsible. That she nevertheless bravely stood her ground, proves her greatness of intellect and character, but not any mistakenness in her remarks.

The all-important thing we must always keep in mind is the incontrovertible fact that the National Socialists did not come into power by the clear will of a majority of the German nation, but by the disreputable backstairs method of the coup d’état. At the beginning of the Third Reich the majority of the German nation was opposed to Nazism, and the importance of this fundamental fact is in no way diminished because, by the iron logic of totalitarianism, the nation that had become its victim suffered on top of all else immeasurable injury to its soul and was brought down to the acceptance of its own servitude. And was the development very different in Italy or in the Communistic countries? Have the Poles, the Roumanians, the Latvians, or the Yugoslavs, all, or even a majority of them, become Communists, simply because the ruthless machinery of totalitarianism has descended upon them? And is even the case of Russia so unambiguous that we may identify the Russians with Communism, or more precisely with Stalinism? Is not the answer obvious?

Nobody is entitled to forget that the Nazis never gained a majority vote from the Germans in a free election. On the contrary, we must bear in mind that even the Reichstag election of March, 1933, held already under terrorism, and falsified into the bargain, brought the Nazis no more than some 43 per cent, of the total vote. We must keep in mind also what unimaginable devilries—beginning with the burning of the Reichstag—they had to commit in order to break the resistance of so many Germans, and what an utterly criminal system of the most brutal violence and the most subtle deceptions they had to invent and perfect in order to maintain themselves in power.

After the Nazis had come into power, it became more and more an irrelevance to estimate how many Germans supported Hitler. The only datum of any value would have been the number of émigrés and inmates of concentration camps; and even this would have been of value only so far as concerned those who were persecuted on account of their political conviction and, therefore, as the result of their own courageous stand, and not those other victims who could not help being Jews. That the number of political émigrés, especially at first, was relatively small, is not a fact in favour of the Germans, although it must not be forgotten that the tightening up of the immigration legislation of almost all countries placed much greater obstacles in the way of German emigrants than earlier in the way of the Russians or even of the Italians. As for the attitude of the remaining Germans, the honest answer was at all times that we had no knowledge of it and no means of ascertaining it.

What it was possible to know, however, was this one fact, over and over again: so soon as a totalitarian regime of this sort is installed, it acquires a dominance over its population that makes it impossible to continue to apply normal human standards. Its subjects are reduced to a state of existence that makes them in a high degree morally irresponsible; but it is precisely then that allowance must be made for the fact that these conditions were imposed against their will. Thereafter, the slightest attempt at resistance is all the more to their credit. No totalitarian regime has profited by these conditions for the control and corruption of the people with more devilish calculation than the Nazi regime. Who that has not experienced it can realize what it meant to live under the continual pressure of an inconceivable terror and in an atmosphere in which a man could no longer trust his neighbour or his friend or his own child? There are people who say that the Germans ought to have made a more courageous stand against Nazism and its atrocities, and we fully share this opinion. But ought we not, in order to be quite just, also to bear in mind that diabolical hostage system of the Nazis, which threatened the family of every rebel with a cruel death? How far was a man entitled to show courage at the expense of his wife and children?

Who, again, can judge the way the soul of man reacts to an unceasing flow of subtle monopolist propaganda, shutting out all other information? It may be admitted that the German, for reasons we shall consider later, is particularly easily influenced and particularly lacking in judgment in all political questions; but we do not know how the experiment would have worked out with any other nation that was unable, like the occupied countries of Europe, to draw strength from resistance, from the patriotic revolt against the impudent pretensions of an alien conqueror speaking another language. The whipping-up of the German’s patriotism, on the contrary, bound him all the more strongly to his own tyrannical Government. The case of Austria comes, fairly close to an experiment of this sort, but who will claim that the Austrians behaved much better than the Bavarians, the Rhinelanders, or the Hanoverians?

Today the world is filled with horror and unbounded indignation in face of the evidence of the conditions of terror which the Nazis left behind them in the Golgothas of their concentration camps. All too many people are inclined to judge the German nation only the more harshly on this score, contending that the Germans had tolerated these crimes. We ask those who argue thus: Is it not more logical to see in these conditions the incontrovertible proof of the terror under which the Germans lived day and night through twelve years? If Englishmen or Americans retort that they are sure they would not have tolerated anything so disgraceful under similar conditions, they should thank the merciful fate that saved them from being enabled to give practical evidence of what they are so sure about. In Germany, too, there was a time when, in face of the barbarisms of Italian Fascism, people declared with the utmost conviction that “such a thing would be impossible among us.” Is it fair to make the Germans pay for the fact that their critics have had no personal experience of what it means to be helplessly delivered over to this crippling horror, the creation of which is one of the principal secrets of totalitarianism?

The world is deeply to blame for having for so long taken all too little notice of the atrocities Nazism committed against the Germans themselves. Now, faced with the whole grisly truth, are we to blame the German nation alone for remaining inactive, after the rest of us had allowed it to be brought into a situation in which those who moved a finger inescapably took the road that led to Buchenwald and the other Golgothas ? Are not these concentration camps, indeed, the most moving evidence that even under the most frightful terror there were still plenty of Germans who did resist? It is understandable that in the first flaming indignation the world allowed itself to be carried away into illogical inferences, but we cannot believe that it can long shut its ears to the voice of impartial justice. It will then, perhaps, at least silently, ask itself what may have been going on in the last ten years in the concentration camps and labour camps of Siberia and of the Russian tundra, and come to the conclusion that a diabolical system of terror is everywhere one of the means of totalitarian domination.

Other things contribute to such a nation sinking ever deeper into the morass of a totalitarian State, bravely though individuals may resist it. In a State whose slimy tentacles reach everywhere, what may be called “spiritual emigration” is especially difficult. It is a daily and hourly struggle, in which the strongest may ultimately be crippled, especially when nervous exhaustion and physical under-nourishment and continual mental over-excitement are added. Everyday life with its petty cares goes on, and, as the example of the occupied countries shows, it is almost impossible for those who do not simply withdraw into the Maquis to avoid manifold relations with the despots, relations which at first seem entirely neutral but in the long run prove to be so many threads that entangle the individual in responsibility for the despotism. Dulled feelings and gradual familiarization also play their part; and finally it was one of the devilish methods of the Nazis to compel as many people as possible to fulfil this or that function in the machine, and so to corrupt them.

There was a peculiar mechanism of spiritual reaction that played its part in the case of all those who entered into any compromise, however seemingly innocent, with the regime. There were, unfortunately, thousands in Germany, diplomats, journalists, industrial leaders, professors, judges, and other members of the directing classes, who, without being National Socialists, were unable to summon up the resolution to break with Nazism, even where this involved no particular risk. Their anxiety to continue to play a part in the world, and their fear of the drabness of existence without function or status, overcame the promptings of indignation at the satanic character of the regime; and probably there were countless people, particularly in Germany, who clung to a specifically German conception of “duty” which at bottom was simply a euphemism for lack of pluck. One could draw up a long list of all the theories with which one person and another tried to conceal what in truth was simply anxiety to be “in the swim.” They told themselves and others that if they remained at their post they could “prevent worse things,” that they must not let themselves be “frozen out,” that “hanging on” demanded greater sacrifices than resigning, that “one must not leave the Fatherland in the lurch at this difficult time,” and made all sorts of similar excuses—where the kind fate of some conflict with the racial laws did not take the decision out of their hands. But anyone who had once given his little finger very soon felt himself compelled to be silent where his conscience would have told him to speak, to do nothing where, as an honest person he should have acted, to descend to lying and hypocrisy or to do something that made him an accomplice. Then there remained only three alternatives; it was still possible to make the decision to break with the regime; or every fresh day would inevitably bring fresh cause for self-contempt; or the effort must be made to persuade oneself that in one’s judgment of National Socialism one must, after all, have been a little mistaken. For the first alternative many people no longer had the courage, and the second would have been against human nature. Thus there remained only the third course: men began to talk of “the good sides of the regime that do after all exist,” of the possibility of gradual normalization, or of the supposed necessity of helping the “decent” Nazis against the worse ones. Nothing could have suited Nazism better.

All this shows perfectly clearly that the Germans became accomplices in the Third Reich, although at first the majority of them had no desire for it; but this is very far from meaning that Nazism is in harmony with the German soul. As we know, it is of no use to try to base that allegation on the fact that the Germans never made a successful attempt to bring down the regime and that all the hopes set on a German revolution during the war ended in disappointment. Even this latter fact does not by any means mean that there were not at least attempts that failed, and it is only now that we are slowly learning the truth about the resistance actually offered to the most powerful system of dominance known to history—from such witnesses as still remain alive. In any case, it was clear in advance that anyone who expected the ending of Nazism by a popular revolution showed his complete inability to realize the true structure of such a totalitarian system. Not one of these systems has so far been overthrown in this way, for reasons we know already; and where, as in Fascist Italy, the spell was broken, it was not through a revolution but through a coup d’état, which was enormously facilitated there by the fact that, unlike Russia and Germany, Italy still possessed the monarchy as the last remaining source of the legitimate, pre-revolutionary authority of the State. Even under these exceptionally favourable circumstances the coup d’état in Italy was carried through only after the complete disintegration of the army and in face of a disastrous defeat.

In Germany, too, the totalitarian regime could only be brought down by a coup d’état or by foreign intervention. We are not entitled, therefore, to ask why the Germans did not throw off the Nazi yoke. What we have to ask is why those who were in a position to do so did not bring down Nazism by a coup d’état when that was still possible. The only group, however, that had the power to do this was the Generals, representing the Prussian tradition, and their following. That no serious attempt was made in time and carried out in full force from that quarter is indeed the indelible historic default for which the group of Generals and the classes at their back are to blame. Their guilt in this respect makes it necessary to do away once for all with the influence of that group, an influence which throughout the last hundred years has been so fatal for Germany herself and for Europe; but this is not guilt that can be charged against the Germans as a whole.

Sages and social philosophers of all times have declared that the worst harm a tyranny can do to a nation is to drag it down morally, and all examples in history confirm the rule. The process of continuing demoralization and corruption has been given an unexcelled description, once more by Benjamin Constant, in dealing with the experiences of the Napoleonic period. The whole relevant section of his book, De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation (Part I, chapter viii, pages 28-32) deserves to be quoted here in full, because every sentence fits the case of the German nation and describes its inner collapse, after falling victim to Nazism, better than we can do. Above all, we may let Constant speak for us in describing the influence upon the German people of the world war wickedly started by the Nazis:

“Although abandoning itself to its gigantesque projects, the government would not dare to say to its nation: Let us march to the conquest of the World. The nation would reply to it with a unanimous voice: We do not want to conquer the World.

“But it would speak of national independence, of national honour, of the rounding off of the frontiers, of commercial interests, of precautions dictated by prudence; of all sorts of things—for, inexhaustible is the vocabulary of hypocrisy and injustice.

“It would speak of national independence, as if the independence of a nation was compromised because other nations are independent.

“It would speak of national honour, as if national honour was wounded because other nations uphold their honour.

“It would allege the necessity of the rounding off of the frontiers, as if this doctrine, once admitted, did not banish from the earth all repose and all equity. For it is always outwards that a government wants to round off its frontiers . . .

“This government would invoke the interests of commerce, as if it was serving commerce to depopulate a country of the flower of its youth, tearing away the most necessary hands from agriculture, from manufactures, from industry, to raise blood-drenched barriers between itself and other peoples.

“Under the pretext of precautions dictated by prudence, this government would attack its most peaceful neighbours, its humblest allies, attributing hostile projects to them, and affecting to forestall aggression meditated by them. If the unfortunate objects of its calumnies were easily subjugated, it would boast of having been too quick for them: if they had the time and the force to offer resistance, You see, it would exclaim, they wanted war, because they are defending themselves . . .

“Subjects who suspect their masters of duplicity and perfidy, are trained in perfidy and duplicity: he who hears the leader who governs him called a great politician, because every line that he publishes is an imposture, wishes to be a great politician in his turn, in a less exalted sphere; truth seems to him foolishness; fraud, cleverness. In the past he lied only for profit: he will lie in future for profit and for self-respect. He will have the conceit of the impostor; and if the contagion extends to an essentially imitative people, and a people among whom everyone is afraid to be thought a dupe, will it be long before private morality is engulfed in the shipwreck of public morality?”

We should like to say to the Germans: Do you not see yourselves in this picture? Did you not permit yourselves all too readily to be deceived as to the true causes and the real aims of this war? Were you not already sunk so low that you took pride in the successful overpowering of Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and other peaceful and kindly nations, and regarded the heroic resistance they then put up as mere obstinacy? Did not all of you, whether Nazis or not, allow yourselves to be carried away by the intoxication of victory when your armies overran France? Did you not permit yourselves so to stray in heart and mind that you supported your criminal leaders when they fell upon Czechoslovakia? Did you not hear with dull indifference, even perhaps with satisfaction, the news of the first fiendish bombardments of Warsaw, Rotterdam, and Belgrade, of London and Coventry? You profess now that you were never supporters of the Nazi regime. Could you, if you had honestly asked yourselves, have given this assurance when Europe seemed to be falling into the laps of your masters, and would you be giving it now if the whole adventure had not come to grief? Let each of you hold deep communion with himself, and give account honestly and unreservedly to himself as if he stood before Almighty God. If you have to admit that you cannot answer our questions with a candid Yes, then admit your guilt. Nazism would have gained final and complete mastery over you were you to fail to admit the immense guilt you have incurred and the bitter need to expiate it and so to purge yourselves of it.

But we should also have to say to the other nations: The guilt of the Germans is different to that of the National Socialists; it is the guilt of the seduced, not of the seducers, the degradation of the violated, not the infamy of the violators. It shows that a people on whom tyranny has worked its own corruption of soul had integrity enough to be capable of corruption, and may still have integrity enough left to be able to rid itself of the corrupting poison if it is not simply damned in common with its seducers. They knew only too well that there is no greater means of corruption than a successful war, which adds to all the other bonds with which a tyranny shackles its people the strongest bond of all, that of common peril from without and the ignition of the patriotic and warlike passions that peril arouses.

It will also be rather unimaginative to ask why there were no mass mutinies of German troops or risings of German workers. Everyone who has served in an army knows that it is not a simple matter to mutiny, and that efficient command can make it almost impossible. Must we still further point out that the Austrian troops fought everywhere with distinction for the Third Reich, to say nothing of the contingents of all sorts of nationalities who fought many a hard battle against the Allies in Italy and France? And finally we may ask, why did the millions of slave-workers brought into Germany from other countries keep quiet, though they surely had reason enough to rise against their masters?

It would be fatal if the Germans made up their minds that their guilt had been the work of an inescapable destiny, and so missed the way to liberation from their guilt through repentance and regeneration. But it would be just as lamentable if the rest of the world failed to realize that under a totalitarian regime it is possible to share the responsibility for the regime without bearing the same responsibility as its leaders, and if the world were so to miss the way to understanding helpfulness and Christian compassion.

THE ATROCITIES

But how can we get over the appalling fact that the Germans, wherever they carried their conquests, committed the most horrible crimes and hair-raising cruelties, that the German name is associated with the cold-blooded extermination of millions, with the infliction of indescribable tortures, with unfeeling destruction of irreplaceable values, and with causing infinite mental torment? All those of us who learned with boundless indignation and the deepest horror of these crimes know how near we were to wishing for that execrable country the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. And yet the National Socialists would have attained one of the aims they were probably pursuing with their atrocities if we allowed ourselves to be carried away by our anger into identifying Germany with Nazism. This is the very point at which our sense of justice is subjected to its hardest test and must not fail us.

This sense of justice demands from us the recognition of the fact that what was done in Germany’s name was not done by the Germans as such, any more than all the crimes that were committed earlier in time of peace against the Germans themselves.12 How can it be forgotten in this connexion that we have to do with a totalitarian regime, and not only that but a regime at war and accordingly able to carry totalitarianism to the last extreme, a regime able to keep its people almost entirely ignorant of anything it did not want them to know, and one which, even if the people had been informed, would have ruthlessly suppressed all expression of opinion? As a rule it was Nazi special troops or agents of the Gestapo that carried out the sanguinary orders of the leaders, and often the worst of all were not strictly Germans. At the head of the German terrorist regime in the unfortunate Netherlands was an Austrian, of even more undoubted nationality than Hider, and Vlassov’s Cossacks competed with units of the S.S. and the Gestapo in mercilessness. Would anyone set down for all time as crimes of the Italian people Graziani’s massacre of Arabs in Libya, the abominable conduct of the war in Abyssinia, or the Good Friday attack on Albania?

It was Nazism that showed its true features, not the German nation, in the atrocities.13 These features could long ago have been recognised if sufficient attention had been paid to the earlier activities of Nazism in Germany. What else but the blackest criminality could have been expected, for instance, from the Dr. Best who excited German opinion long before the Third Reich with his so-called “Boxheim documents”? It might even fairly be asked whether the Italian historian, Guglielmo Ferrero, was not right when, after the massacre of June 30th, 1934, he wrote that the savagery of the Nazis, exceeding all that had gone before, might be due to the exceptional resistance they had to overcome in Germany.

But even if we speak of Nazi and not of German atrocities, the question forces itself upon us how it happened that Germany could produce so many men of the lowest type as instruments of Nazism. This question, too, needs careful attention. It would be difficult, and in conflict with an impartial examination of German history, to claim that the German is by nature cruel, treacherous, or otherwise loathsome, and even the recollection of the horrors of Louvain and Dinant of the war of 1914 must not lead us astray. There certainly is a German character, formed by history and environment, and we shall have occasion to discuss it at length, and certainly this character has many dark sides, among which one is struck by a certain methodical vehemence. But nobody who is trying to form an objective judgment can rest content with the theory that the Germans are a race of murderers, thieves, torturers, and bestial bullies.

If we probe to the bottom of the question, we shall probably come up against the following general truth: Every society, however civilized and Phaeacian it may seem to us, conceals in its depths a sewer of subhuman types, which must be kept firmly closed like the fisherman’s bottle in the “Arabian Nights.” In other words, the powers of evil lurk everywhere, awaiting their chance from some earthquake or conflagration, revolution or war. Bore into these depths and it will be seen how masses of the dregs of humanity are hurled into the air. Ask the French with their bloodthirsty militia of the Laval regime, the Norwegians with their “hirden,” the Dutch, the Croats, the Hungarians, or the Austrians, and let not the Englishman or American be too sure that “it can’t happen here!” Instead, let them be glad that they have been spared that experience so far. And we will not be so tactless as to ask how things are in Russia.

The upheaval of society by totalitarianism must of necessity bring the worst elements to the top.14 That is a general law, which has only been confirmed by Nazism and is of universal application all over the world. Wherever anything resembling the Nazi upheaval has happened (as in Russia, in Italy, or elsewhere), the biggest blackguards have regularly set the tone, dragging the honour of their country through the mire. Thus what happened in Germany was simply that such men as the execrable von Papen and his backers, who can never do adequate penance for their stupidity and perversity, opened up the sewers of the German community, a process which some of them, by unpardonable stupidity, even mistook for the freshwater supply.

That is the actual kernel of what happened. Let us repeat, however, a sad truth already mentioned, by adding that twelve years of such a regime have carried the germs of corruption deep into the German soul, and above all have played havoc that will only be made good with difficulty in the souls of the particularly easily influenced German youth. It is unfortunately probable that thousands upon thousands of Germans have been incurably perverted. All that can be done will be to make it impossible for them to do any harm.

____________________

15Benedetto Croce, Orientamenti, 2nd edit., Milan, 1934, p. 44

16E. Halévy, L’ère des Tyrannies, Paris, 1938. The thesis of the book had been propounded by him as early as 1936.

17Now republished in an excellent German translation by Hans Zbinden under the title “Ueber die Gewalt,” Berne 1942.

18Jacob Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, new impression, Basle, 1942, p. 144.

19Benjamin Constant, op. cit., p. 39 of the fourth edition (Paris, 1814).

20Benjamin Constant, op. cit. p. 58.

21 We follow the account given by Ernst Samhaber in the Deutsche Rundschau of April, 1941; and we cannot omit to pay tribute to the courage shown by the writer of the article, and by the publisher of that review, with its long and distinguished record, in allowing the article to appear. If anyone asks how the German intellect made a stand against National Socialism, one answer must be to point to the Deutsche Rundschau.

22A comprehensive history of the ideas of totalitarianism has yet to be written. Cf., at present, Hans Barth, “Ueber den totalen Staat und seine ideologischen Voraussetzungen,” in Fluten und Dämme, der philosophische Gedanke in der Politik, Zurich, 1943, pp. 203-242. Not to be lost sight of is the important share of Socialism in the genesis of totalitarianism: Marx foreshadowed it in his “dictatorship of the proletariat.” For this intellectual line of descent see E. Halévy, L’ère des Tyrannies, Paris, 1938; F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, Routledge, London, 1944.

23Among the important representatives of the racial doctrine is the Austrian L. Gumplowicz (Der Rassenkampf, Innsbruck, 1883), who exerted considerable influence. It is a tragic irony that he was a Jew. But all he did was to establish the existence of the racial struggle, not to promote it.

24Cf. also F. A. Hayek, op. cit., pp. 230 sqq.

25In this I am able still to rely on a study I published in 1935—“Fascist Economics,” Economica, February, 1935.

26See, among other sources, the British White Book, No. 2 (1939), on the proved crimes committed by Nazis against Germans. Those there recorded are but a tiny sample from the vast flood of the atrocities committed in Germany since 1933. Probably the full truth will never be learnt, since too many of the witnesses have themselves become victims of the same terror machine. According to one of the pamphlets published by the German trade union secretariat in Great Britain (The Other Germany, Facts and Figures), in the first three years of Nazi rule sentences totalling some 600,000 years of imprisonment were pronounced against “enemies of the State.” The number of persons condemned to death by the end of 1938 was estimated at 12,000, and in April, 1939, according to the same source, there were 302,562 political prisoners in Germany, while the registers of the Gestapo contained the names of some two millions of political suspects. The number of persons herded together and tortured in the concentration camps is as yet beyond all possibility of estimating, and the things that happened in Germany during the war must have been one long chain of horrors. Only with the discoveries at Belsen and the rest did the veil begin to be lifted. Unfortunately, the world only too easily forgets that these Golgothas were originally set up for the martyrizing of Germans.

27The same conclusion forces itself upon us in all other cases. Thus, C. Burnell Olds writes in the American Foreign Affairs that the Japanese people must not be held responsible for the cruelties of the Japanese militarists, and he writes in warm appreciation of the attractive sides of the character of the Japanese people and of Japanese culture.

28Cf. the special chapter X of the book by F. A. Hayek already mentioned, The Road to Serfdom.

• 1Erich Eyck, Bismarck (Allen & Unwin)
• 2For the source of the structure of the Swiss State, see now William E. Rappard, Cinq siècles de sécurité collective (1291-1798), Geneva and Paris, 1945.
• 3Since we have touched on the exceedingly complicated relationship between Germans and Jews, we may also recall that again and again during the first world war there were attempts in the Allied countries to account for Germany’s unattractive traits as due not only to a “Prussification,” but also to a “Judification.” Max Scheler, in his interesting book on the origin of anti-Germanism (Die Ursachen des Deutschenhasses, Leipzig, 1917, p. 114) was also driven to deal with that charge. Cf. now Karl Thieme, Das Schicksal der Deutschen, ein Versuch seiner geschichtlichen Erklärung, Basle, 1945, p. 35. We may quote Goethe as the greatest precursor of the view expressed in the text. He remarked to Riemer that “the antipathy of peoples against the Jewish type of humanity, an antipathy in which esteem increases distaste, is really to be compared only with another—that against the Germans, whose destined role and whose inward and outward situation among peoples reveal the most astonishing kinship with those of the Jews. He did not want, he said, to enlarge on the subject, but, he said, he confessed that at times he was overcome by a breath-taking fear that one day the united world hatred against the other salt of the earth, Germandom, would be liberated in a historic uprising.”
• 4Jacob Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, new impression, Basle, 1942, p. 144.
• 5Benjamin Constant, op. cit., p. 39 of the fourth edition (Paris, 1814).
• 6Benjamin Constant, op. cit. p. 58.
• 7We follow the account given by Ernst Samhaber in the Deutsche Rundschau of April, 1941; and we cannot omit to pay tribute to the courage shown by the writer of the article, and by the publisher of that review, with its long and distinguished record, in allowing the article to appear. If anyone asks how the German intellect made a stand against National Socialism, one answer must be to point to the Deutsche Rundschau.
• 8A comprehensive history of the ideas of totalitarianism has yet to be written. Cf., at present, Hans Barth, “Ueber den totalen Staat und seine ideologischen Voraussetzungen,” in Fluten und Dämme, der philosophische Gedanke in der Politik, Zurich, 1943, pp. 203-242. Not to be lost sight of is the important share of Socialism in the genesis of totalitarianism: Marx foreshadowed it in his “dictatorship of the proletariat.” For this intellectual line of descent see E. Halévy, L’ère des Tyrannies, Paris, 1938; F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, Routledge, London, 1944.
• 9Among the important representatives of the racial doctrine is the Austrian L. Gumplowicz (Der Rassenkampf, Innsbruck, 1883), who exerted considerable influence. It is a tragic irony that he was a Jew. But all he did was to establish the existence of the racial struggle, not to promote it.
• 10Cf. also F. A. Hayek, op. cit., pp. 230 sqq.
• 11In this I am able still to rely on a study I published in 1935—“Fascist Economics,” Economica, February, 1935.
• 12See, among other sources, the British White Book, No. 2 (1939), on the proved crimes committed by Nazis against Germans. Those there recorded are but a tiny sample from the vast flood of the atrocities committed in Germany since 1933. Probably the full truth will never be learnt, since too many of the witnesses have themselves become victims of the same terror machine. According to one of the pamphlets published by the German trade union secretariat in Great Britain (The Other Germany, Facts and Figures), in the first three years of Nazi rule sentences totalling some 600,000 years of imprisonment were pronounced against “enemies of the State.” The number of persons condemned to death by the end of 1938 was estimated at 12,000, and in April, 1939, according to the same source, there were 302,562 political prisoners in Germany, while the registers of the Gestapo contained the names of some two millions of political suspects. The number of persons herded together and tortured in the concentration camps is as yet beyond all possibility of estimating, and the things that happened in Germany during the war must have been one long chain of horrors. Only with the discoveries at Belsen and the rest did the veil begin to be lifted. Unfortunately, the world only too easily forgets that these Golgothas were originally set up for the martyrizing of Germans.
• 13The same conclusion forces itself upon us in all other cases. Thus, C. Burnell Olds writes in the American Foreign Affairs that the Japanese people must not be held responsible for the cruelties of the Japanese militarists, and he writes in warm appreciation of the attractive sides of the character of the Japanese people and of Japanese culture.
• 14Cf. the special chapter X of the book by F. A. Hayek already mentioned, The Road to Serfdom.
• 15THE dictum placed as a motto in front of this book came in 1866 from the pen of a far-seeing and unbending opponent of Bismarck. In that same fateful year of German and European history, Ludwig Bamberger, the eminent German Liberal and economist, wrote to his friend von Stauffenberg, after a fresh meeting with his old comrade of the revolution of 1848, Carl Schurz, who later became a Senator and Home Secretary of the United States: “I have greatly enjoyed meeting Schurz. That is what we could become if we were not stuck in a dog-kennel.” Almost eighty years later, Roosevelt, President of the country to which Carl Schurz, like so many others of the best Germans, had rendered inestimable service after 1848, spoke of the Germans as the “tragic nation.”
• 16What strength, what inspiration has proceeded from that central country of our continent in those thousand years! What talent, what honest and indeed desperate endeavour to gain the mastery over fate! And again and again the Germans’ effort has been fruitless—so much so that the whole history of Germany until 1866 (the year in which Germany ceased to exist, making way for a Greater Prussia) may be described as simply a history of frustration. Nowhere is it more natural than on Swiss soil to note how close together lie here the two opposite examples of a federalization that succeeded and one that failed throughout a thousand years—Switzerland and Germany, two countries bearing much the same relation to each other as two animals subjected to biological experiment, one of them receiving a particular vitamin and the other not. An obvious question, however, is whether there is not a danger that the ultimate consequences of the German fiasco might have very undesirable repercussions on the success of any tolerably sound political, economic, social, and spiritual structure in other countries. What that implies will be considered later.
• 17Let us hold on to the fact that the Germans, who today have become odium generis humani, are a people with whom fate has played a more evil game than with any other—fate and their own failure. What is worst of all is that this unique history—above all in its last and most fateful hundred years—has left deep traces in the German character that have made the Germans one of the most complex and problematic and, in the end, one of the best-hated of all nations. Thus, on top of all their other troubles, they have to bear the dislike of the rest of the world, which still further worsens their situation. In this, as in so many other things, they strikingly resemble another tragic nation of world history, the Jews; this has been noted again and again by acute observers, and is probably the final cause of the quite peculiar relation between Germans and Jews, which departs from normal to fall now into hatred and now into liking.
• 18In Nazism the complete unscrupulousness in the choice of serviceable-looking slogans and the truly reckless speculation on human stupidity reached perhaps its zenith in the invention of the gigantic farce of the propaganda for “European solidarity against Bolshevism.” After ruining Europe by their crimes and at the same time openly challenging Soviet Russia, nothing better occurred to the Nazis than to paraphrase the old Wilhelmian slogan, “Peoples of Europe, guard your holiest possessions!” This they did (1) after inciting the Japanese against the Europeans in the Far East; (2) after it had become clear that a Hitlerite Europe was simply not worth saving; (3) after all Europe had realized that it was brazen impudence for the Nazis to rage against Bolshevism; and (4) after all Europe had come to ask who would save it from the grip of Nazism. And when these barbarians talked of three thousand years of European civilization being at stake, the only possible answer was roars of laughter. “The saviour of Europe,” Jacob Burckhardt said long ago, “is preeminently the man who saves her from the danger of a political, religious, and social Procrusteanism that threatens her specific character, namely the manifold wealth of her intellect.”.
• 19“It is probable that the same disposition of the moderns that leads them to prefer peace to war would at the outset give great advantages to the people forced by its government to become an aggressor. Nations absorbed in the enjoyment of their possessions would be slow to resist: they would abandon a portion of their rights in order to preserve the rest; they would hope to save their repose by the compromise of their liberty. By a very strange combination, the more peaceful the general spirit, the more would the State that entered into war against that spirit gain easy successes at the outset.” And a few pages further on we come to a passage that might have been written in our own day:
• 20“But the nations that become the victims of its deplorable obedience would be unable to give it credit for concealed feelings which its conduct belies. They blame the instruments for the crime of the hand that directs them.”
• 21The Napoleonic wars can only be compared with Hitler’s with the utmost caution, since Napoleon’s relation to Hitler is that of a genuine dignitary of history to a disreputable gangster. But there is nothing to prevent us from taking from the history of the nineteenth century another example that reveals the part played in international life by an insane tyrant, showing very plainly that the case of Hitler is by no means unique. We refer to the abominable tyrant of Paraguay from 1862 to 1870, Francisco Solano Lopez, who like Hitler was obsessed by the insane idea of giving his continent a “New Order,” and who became involved in a war with all his neighbours; he was a precursor on a small scale of the authors of Germany’s tragedy today. This man, too, imagined that his will was all that was needed to stand the world on its head, and he, too, was completely blind to the true strength of the opposition he aroused. Relying on his armed force, he embarked on a policy that brought great initial successes, for the reasons stated by Constant, but ultimately, when his imperilled neighbours united against him, plunged his regime and his country into the abyss. “His intellectual arrogance”—so the Deutsche Rundschau boldly wrote in April, 1941—“growing more and more upon him, clouded his view of the superior moral and economic forces of the neighbour countries. He allowed himself to be elevated more and more by his entourage to the status of a demigod: flattering speeches and the incense of continual adoration intoxicated him, with his natural tendency to exaggerate his own qualities, so that he could no longer see the world as it really was. But his very successes were his undoing. They made the peril of this ‘total’ State seem so overpowering that Argentina and Brazil forgot their long-standing feud and united in a close alliance against this upstart military power.” So came, in the end, the inevitable catastrophe. “For the guilt one man had incurred in his madness, the whole nation must now surfer! Plectuntur Achivi” The article concludes:
• 22But here again it must not be forgotten that in the intellectual procreation of this monster the world outside Germany most certainly played a part. If National Socialism is essentially a particular form of totalitarianism, the story of its intellectual birth must to that extent be also that of totalitarianism. It is a specially complicated story, and this is not the place for its detailed narration. But the very circumstance that German totalitarianism was preceded by the Russian and Italian forms shows to how great an extent Nazism took over and worked out with German thoroughness ideas that were by no means of German origin. It would be wearisome to compile the names that mark the various stages passed through by the ideology of the totalitarian State. But if we merely mention the chief writers, such as the Frenchman Georges Sorel (who by their own acknowledgment strongly influenced both Lenin and Mussolini) and the Italian Pareto, and if we add how deeply the theorists and practicians alike, both of Russian Bolshevism and of Italian Fascism, influenced the German National Socialists, we have made it easy to see that the outer world worked just as ardently on the building of the intellectual foundations of the Third Reich as did Germany herself.
• 23Even the racial mania which seems to be an exclusive domain of German totalitarianism, was presented to the Germans by foreigners—particularly by the French writer Gobineau, who himself simply elaborated an idea that dates back to the eighteenth century. The racial delusion may be described as a cross between those foreign germs and the specifically German ethical romanticism which will occupy us later. While these and other precursors of the Nazi racial doctrine have nothing in common with the appalling delusionary character of that doctrine, the fact remains that that is the abyss into which we are inevitably plunged in the end, if we once pursue the mistaken path of the biologism of which Darwin and his school laid the foundations. The Nazi racial doctrine is the final putrid product of the decay of an intellectual process by which in the course of the Nineteenth Century man was degraded, with the zeal of a misunderstood science, to a subject of zoology and stud farming; but in this process all the principal countries of the West took part. The death chambers of Auschwitz and Maidanek are the final gruesome result of certain scientific ideas having ultimately found their way in the course of a century to the morally and mentally lowest levels of humanity, to a group which then, through a social catastrophe of inconceivable dimensions, became the rulers of a great people.
• 24That National Socialism is the expression of an international contemporary spirit rather than that of the spirit of a nation is, finally, also shown by the fact that similar tendencies are to be found in the contemporary literature of all countries, and, at least for a time, were not without influence. Whether we recall The Coming American Fascism, by an American, Lawrence Dennis, or The Managerial Revolution, by another American, James Burnham, or the tirades of Colonel Lindbergh and his wife about the “wave of the future” and all sorts of other things, we continually find, more or less disguised by perfumes, the miasma that has poisoned Germany. Everywhere are the “totalitarians in our midst” of whom F. A. Hayek, in his book The Road to Serfdom, has given from the English scene a ruthless analysis, not sparing representatives of totalitarianism on the Left. It is the painful duty of the honest observer to mention the names of Jewish writers who, like Emil Ludwig or Paul Einzig, have loudly praised Italian Fascism, thus laying themselves open to the suspicion that they were kept from a similar admiration of Nazism only by its anti-Semitism.
• 25If we are at least to make shift to give some answer to the difficult question what the structure of Nazism has in common with that of Fascism, in contradistinction with Bolshevism, we must emphasize various points. In both cases the totalitarian rule followed a coup d’état which was clothed as far as could be in legal forms and only gradually revealed its revolutionary aims. Both Fascism and Nazism set out to establish themselves in an extraordinarily complex society and actually with the aid of decidedly anti-revolutionary elements; consequently they found themselves compelled to proceed step by step, with a maximum of indefiniteness in their programmes, a maximum of mutually incompatible promises, and an appeal to every sentiment that seemed to influence opinion. This explains the total absence of any clear doctrine such as that of the Communists, and its replacement by a rhetorical propaganda that pulled out every stop of passion and emotion. Since neither Fascism nor Nazism wanted, like Bolshevism, to make a clean sweep of the existing social order, or could do so—both, on the contrary, were compelled at first to leave the traditional class divisions intact—there resulted a necessity for continual compromises, especially in economic policy, which were capable of disguising for a considerable time the collectivist character of the aims pursued. Many measures adopted were simply facades, behind which was either nothing at all or the precise opposite of what they represented. This applies, above all, to the treatment of private property. Just as in Russia the church was openly persecuted, but in the Third Reich it was as far as possible disintegrated from within, so in Russia private property in the means of production was openly abolished, but in the Third Reich it was reduced, by continual restrictions of the rights and functions of the owner, to an empty shell, while for propagandist purposes the shell was allowed to continue to exist. Thus in the two cases the forms of abolition of private property were different but their results were essentially the same.
• 26This sense of justice demands from us the recognition of the fact that what was done in Germany’s name was not done by the Germans as such, any more than all the crimes that were committed earlier in time of peace against the Germans themselves. How can it be forgotten in this connexion that we have to do with a totalitarian regime, and not only that but a regime at war and accordingly able to carry totalitarianism to the last extreme, a regime able to keep its people almost entirely ignorant of anything it did not want them to know, and one which, even if the people had been informed, would have ruthlessly suppressed all expression of opinion? As a rule it was Nazi special troops or agents of the Gestapo that carried out the sanguinary orders of the leaders, and often the worst of all were not strictly Germans. At the head of the German terrorist regime in the unfortunate Netherlands was an Austrian, of even more undoubted nationality than Hider, and Vlassov’s Cossacks competed with units of the S.S. and the Gestapo in mercilessness. Would anyone set down for all time as crimes of the Italian people Graziani’s massacre of Arabs in Libya, the abominable conduct of the war in Abyssinia, or the Good Friday attack on Albania?
• 27It was Nazism that showed its true features, not the German nation, in the atrocities. These features could long ago have been recognised if sufficient attention had been paid to the earlier activities of Nazism in Germany. What else but the blackest criminality could have been expected, for instance, from the Dr. Best who excited German opinion long before the Third Reich with his so-called “Boxheim documents”? It might even fairly be asked whether the Italian historian, Guglielmo Ferrero, was not right when, after the massacre of June 30th, 1934, he wrote that the savagery of the Nazis, exceeding all that had gone before, might be due to the exceptional resistance they had to overcome in Germany.
• 28The upheaval of society by totalitarianism must of necessity bring the worst elements to the top. That is a general law, which has only been confirmed by Nazism and is of universal application all over the world. Wherever anything resembling the Nazi upheaval has happened (as in Russia, in Italy, or elsewhere), the biggest blackguards have regularly set the tone, dragging the honour of their country through the mire. Thus what happened in Germany was simply that such men as the execrable von Papen and his backers, who can never do adequate penance for their stupidity and perversity, opened up the sewers of the German community, a process which some of them, by unpardonable stupidity, even mistook for the freshwater supply.