IV. Invasion of Poland
When confronted with the public text of the pact, the Western emissaries could only creep home quietly. For the moment the Soviet obtained immunity from attack by Hitler, the opportunity for considerable expansion, and noninvolvement in the war which opened with Hitler's Blitzkrieg against Poland on September 1. Britain and France entered this war on September 3. On September 17 the Soviets announced they were entering eastern Poland.
Actually the line of the secret protocol was now shifted by mutual consent. The Nazi-Soviet boundary in Poland became the Bug River instead of the Vistula River. In exchange the Soviets were allotted Lithuania. The Polish state disappeared. The Soviet Union handed Vilna to Lithuania and acquired an area whose western boundaries were roughly the same as the Russian frontier of 1795, plus eastern Galicia.
For the moment World War II had no front, except for what was derisively called the Sitzkrieg or ''phoney war'' in the West, where neither the French nor the Germans attempted any serious offensive. In September and October the Soviet Union forced the three Baltic states to sign mutual assistance pacts, but temporarily left them independent.
The foreign reaction to the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the annihilation of Poland was one of shock and rage. The Communist parties abroad, which had no official warning of the Soviet switch, reacted with confusion. On September 6 Thorez and other French Communists joined their regiments, calling for aid to Poland, only to desert at Moscow's behest a few days later. Harry Pollitt, the British Communist leader, wrote a pamphlet unfortunately titled "How to Win the War," and after two weeks both he and his pamphlet had to drop from public gaze. The German Communists in exile made strange noises suggesting that the Allies were worse than Hitler. The general line was that already stated by Stalin in March, that the war was an ''imperialist'' one for the redivision of the world. The Communists said much more about Allied than about Nazi ''culpability,'' and demanded ''peace.''
The Soviets brought pressure on Finland for a pact comparable to those signed by the Baltic states, but Finland refused and on November 29 was invaded by the Red Army. Otto Kuusinen, a Finnish Communist in Moscow's reserve for such emergencies, was brought out and made head of a puppet government which conceded all Soviet demands. The Soviets thereupon declared that they were not at war with Finland at all. Western sympathy for the Finns mounted as they successfully resisted the Reds.
In 1939 the Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations. Britain and France, observing the apparent weakness of the Red Army, debated sending troops to aid the Finns, and actually decided to do so a few days before a Soviet-Finnish peace was concluded in March 1940. The Nazis also took note of Soviet military weakness and filed it for future reference. The peace was an important factor in Daladier's replacement by Paul Reynaud as French premier, just in time to be faced with a new Nazi offensive in the West.
V. Invasions of Denmark and Norway
On April 9 Hitler occupied Denmark and invaded Norway, where British forces landed and tried to resist. When they had been defeated and withdrawn from southern Norway (although troops remained in Narvik a month longer), public opinion finally forced Chamberlain from office.
On May 10 Winston Churchill became British prime minister, heading a coalition government including Labor.
VI. Blitzkrieg in the West
On the day that Winston Churchill became prime minister, Hitler attacked the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, and France. A break-through at Sedan was followed by a Nazi advance which reached the Channel on May 21, splitting Allied armies and compelling the British evacuation of Dunkirk. The Dutch had already been overrun, and the Belgian king surrendered on May 28. On June 10 Italy belatedly declared war on Britain and France. The French army was already shattered. On June 16 Reynaud yielded the premiership to Marshal Petain, who sued for peace at once. Churchill's Britain was left alone.
The Soviets reacted sharply to the fall of France, even before the signing of an armistice. Stalin ordered military occupation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and all three were ''admitted'' into the Soviet Union as constituent republics in July. In late June the Soviets also annexed Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. The annexation of Bukovina went beyond the line of the secret protocol of the pact with Hitler, which was to create some problems latter. All this was done by way of an ultimatum to Rumania. The Russians then used most of the annexed territory to create a new Moldavian SSR.
The Nazis as well seemed to be closing up to their side of the protocol line. In August and September they began to occupy the rest of Rumania, partitioned its Transylvanian province and gave much of it to Hungary, and forced the Rumanians to cede the southern Dobrudja to Bulgaria.
VII. Barbarossa
In July 1940 Hitler had secretly decided to prepare to attack the Soviet Union. In September a German-Italian-Japanese Tripartite Pact was signed, and although it stipulated that it would not affect the relations of any of the three powers with the Soviets, a certain deterioration in Berlin-Moscow amity had become apparent. In November 1940 Molotov visited Berlin for further discussions of a vague and grandiose kind, but Hitler did not cancel his plans for attack. On December 18, 1940, he issued the directive for operation Barbarossa, the code name for the invasion of the Soviet Union, to be launched in the middle of May 1941.
Beginning in August the Nazis were launching large-scale air attacks on Britain. They were also consolidating their influence in the Balkans. The line of the secret protocol ended where Bessarabia touched the Black Sea, and south of that point neither Nazis nor Soviets could formally object to what their partners did. Hitler now extended the Tripartite Pact, often called the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis, by obtaining the adhesion of Hungary, Rumania, and Slovakia in November. After some tension with Moscow over Bulgaria, the Bulgarians also signed the Axis pact. German troops, of course, went where the pact did.
In late March 1941 Yugoslavia added its signature to the Axis pact, but the government was promptly overthrown by a pro-Western coup. Immediately Hitler attacked and overran Yugoslavia and Greece as well. In doing so Hitler incidentally extricated Mussolini from a gravely embarrassing position. After his declaration of war in June, Mussolini had attacked Greece from Albania, but had been forced to retreat after a successful Greek counterattack.
The brief Balkan campaign compelled Hitler to postpone "Operation Barbarossa" for a month, but its success left him in control of the whole continent. That is to say it left him in control up to the Soviet border, either directly or by way of his allies Mussolini and Franco, except for neutral Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland. Even in Finland the government had accepted his aid in joint preparations for attacking the Soviet Union.
Western sources warned the Soviets that a Nazi attack was imminent. It is till uncertain whether Stalin and his colleagues expected the attack. Evidently the Soviets were still thinking in terms of better relations with the Nazis, deliveries to whom were maintained with scrupulous fidelity throughout the period of the pact, as well as with Hitler's Japanese allies. In the spring Foreign Minister Matsuoka came to Europe, and in April a Soviet-Japanese neutrality pact was signed, acclaimed by Izvestiia as an ''historic reversal in the relations between Russia and Japan.'' Stalin conducted a remarkable public demonstration of affection for all Germans and Japanese who were in sight as he was bidding farewell to Matsuoka at the railway station. At that moment the Nazi attack was two months away. The Soviets, of course, did not know that. For that matter, neither did the Japanese.
The night before the attack, Mototov summoned Count Schulenburg, Nazi ambassador in Moscow, told him that there were indications that the Germans were dissatisfied with the Soviets, and begged him to explain what had brought about the existing state of affairs. Schulenburg professed himself unable to say, and departed. A few hours later, however, he was back with all declaration of war on the Soviet Union. The Nazi invasion occurred, with Finnish, Rumanian, and other aid, all along the front from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea, on June 22, 1941.
Defeat, Chaos and Rebirth
Almost 40 million human beings from 21 different countries had lost their lives in the war that had just ended in Europe. Half of them were civilians. This was more than twice the total dead in the war against Japan and more than twice the total of dead on all fronts in World War I.
The worst casualties had been incurred in Eastern Europe. Poland lost nearly 5.5 million of its people-more than one-sixth of the prewar population. The Soviet Union lost a horrendous 20 million people-more than a tenth of its population, including over 13 million civilians. Germany, too, paid a fearful price for Hitler's war. Six percent of the prewar population, totaling nearly 7 million, died as a consequence of the war:
- 3,250,000 military
- 3,640,000 civilians
- 2,000,000 post-hostilities expellees.
Of all Germans born in 1924, 25 percent were dead by the end of the war, and 31 percent wounded-a casualty rate of more than one in two. The worst casualty ratios were among ethnic groups, who fell victim to the Nazi racial extermination program. Nearly 6 million Jews perished out of the estimated 10 million living in Europe before the war-most of them from Poland and the Soviet Union. The Gypsies of Eastern Europe, totaling some half million, were virtually exterminated.
By comparison with this horrific tally of dead, the Western Allies suffered relatively light casualties in proportion to their populations:
- France 520,000 (military and civilian dead),
- Britain 390,000 (dead, including 60,000 civilians),
- U.S.A. 170,000 (dead, all military),
- Canada 40,000 (dead),Italy 400,000 (dead including 70,000 civilians = 1 percent of population).
These figures ignore the no less horrendous totals of wounded-2 million in Germany alone-and the tens of millions of people uprooted from their homes by the war and its aftermath: a displacement of peoples on a scale without precedent in the history of the human race. The sheer size of this disaster was due to a number of causes:
1. the immense geographical extent of the war front, involving almost every country in Europe;
2. sophisticated and lethal weaponry, especially in the air;
3. Nazi savagery, especially toward the Jews and the Slavs;
4. the concept of total war.
The concept of total war brought with it the moral acceptance of civilian casualties as a means of achieving a strategic military objective, as in the area-bombing of German cities. The idea of total war also involved the achievement of political goals, as in the Germans' use of terror against subject populations.
The material damage caused by the war was as cataclysmic as the human slaughter. Air raids, artillery bombardment, street battles and scorched-earth tactics had partly destroyed cities as far apart as Coventry, Rotterdam, Lyons, Naples, Cracow, Leningrad and Kiev. These tactics severely damaged capitals like London, Vienna, Budapest and Belgrade. Warsaw and Berlin had been almost obliterated. Countless smaller towns and villages had been razed to the ground or turned into ghost towns. Wiener Neustadt in Austria emerged from the air raids and the street-fighting with only 18 houses intact and its population reduced from 45,000 to 860. In Russia 6 million houses had been destroyed, leaving 25 million people homeless. In Düsseldorf 93 percent of the houses were left uninhabitable.
The basic economic infrastructure of Europe had ceased to exist and industrial production had fallen by two-thirds or more. In Russia 3,000 oil wells and 1,000 coalpits had been destroyed and nearly 70 million head of livestock were taken by the Germans. Yugoslavia had lost two-thirds of its industrial resources, Poland and France a half. In the whole of the continent only two ports, Antwerp and Bordeaux, were working normally. The rest were blocked with dynamited jetties and sunken ships. More than half the railway stock of France and Germany had been destroyed. Half of Britain's mercantile fleet had been sent to the bottom. The financial system had been destroyed and international trade completely disrupted.
Some currencies collapsed completely and inflation got out of hand in many countries: in Hungary one American dollar was worth 11 sextillion pengoes. Britain was bankrupted by the cost of the war: her exports had declined by nearly 70 percent; her foreign debts had increased by 600 percent, largely on account of her borrowings from the USA. Only the United States came out of the war a good deal better off than she went into it. Its war production had grown to enormous size and its domestic economy had been maintained at a high level; its exports alone had risen by 300 percent during the course of the war.
II. Germany in Chaos
For the second time in the century Germany's expansionist dreams lay shattered in ruins. Once again, as in 1918, Germany was the passive object of policy by her conquerors. This time, however, the costs of the adventure were more gigantic and more terrifying than ever before in its history. Furthermore, unlike 1918, there was no political or revolutionary action this time against the former rulers.
One of the most fateful aspects of the whole story of this post-war period derives from the fact that the German people failed to do anything themselves to throw off the yoke of the Nazi dictatorship. Even under the hammering blows of Allied bombings and of Allied armies pushing deeper and deeper into the country, there was not a single instance of Germans rising up to overthrow even local Nazi authority.
In Fascist Italy, at least in the north, the coming of Allied soldiers was preceded by anti-fascist acts of liberation. Mussolini was ousted and finally done away with by Italian hands. But Germany experienced not a single revolutionary outbreak. The only signs on the walls which greeted the advancing Allied armies were Nazi slogans and calls for a fight to the death under the Führer.
Germany was freed from the shackles of totalitarianism by outsiders, by foreign armies and by foreign sacrifices. Nationalist sentiment, disciplined obedience, and dazed inertia and apathy combined to stay the hands of Germans from doing even as much as the Italians had done. Or was it also the fear of another "stab in the back" legend that paralyzed the anti-Nazis? Once again, democracy was initiated in Germany with the odds heavily pitted against it. Once again democracy came as the gift of the former enemy and the outside.
The condition of the country at the close of hostilities in May 1945 can be described by one word, chaos-chaos in its most literal and classical sense. Unlike World War I, which ended with German armies everywhere on enemy soil and which left German territory unscathed, World War II bequeathed to Germany, as it did to the rest of Europe, appalling physical destruction.
Continuous battering by Allied bombers, despite Göring's proud boast that his Luftwaffe would never permit Allied planes to invade the German skies; violent house-to-house and street-to-street fighting by last-ditch fanatical Nazi formations, and willful destruction of bridges, public buildings, and roads by retreating Nazis, all brought physical decimation to a very substantial part of German territory. There was hardly an important city or town that did not present a spectacle of mounds and mounds of rubble and ruins, of half-destroyed buildings, shattered dwellings, battered railroad stations and disorganized public utilities.
Among the larger cities only Heidelberg, Celle, and Flensberg remained intact, with Lübeck and Bamberg not too badly hit. But Kassel, Nürnberg, Cologne, Mannheim, Darmstadt, Essen, Koblenz, and Würzburg seemed almost completely destroyed. Berlin, Dresden, Breslau, Munich, Hamburg, Mainz, and Frankfurt were almost as badly damaged. People lived huddled together in the ruins of houses, in cellars and in bunkers, and trudged in a dazed condition over what they once knew as streets but what were now only heaps of rubble. The stench of dead bodies buried underneath the rubble lingered on for many, many months.
The New York Herald Tribune correspondent, entering Berlin on May 3, 1945, wrote:
"Nothing is left in Berlin. There are no homes, no shops, no transportation, no government buildings. Only a few walls are the heritage bequeathed by the Nazis to the people of Berlin. Berlin can now be regarded only as a geographical location heaped with mountainous mounds of debris."
The Russian Pravda correspondent told of the terrified and starving housewives of Berlin plundering the shops, and described Berlin as a city of desolation and shattered dreams, inhabited by a half mad, half starving population, clawing its frenzied way into battered food shops, slinking for shelter into dark cellars, and currying favor with their conquerors as they emerged from the catacombs, raising their clenched fists and shouting "Rote Front."
Germany at the close of the war became the center of one of the most gigantic population movements in modern history. To the approximately 66,000,000 Germans, were added close to 8,000,000 nationals of other countries, liberated from concentration camps and labor camps. These were later joined by thousands of infiltrees who came trekking into Germany-Jews from Poland and the USSR, and anti-Communists, taking advantage of disorganized conditions to flee from the Soviet dictatorship.
After 1947 came refugees from other Soviet-dominated countries who found Germany, by virtue of its geographical location and because of the absence of civil government, the most convenient place to find shelter. Added to these were some 8,000,000 soldiers of the invading armies of the major powers and the various missions of the smaller powers, making a grand total of over 15,000,000 non-Germans of varying degrees of political status and economic situation who constituted a completely foreign body in the demographic structure of the country.
To these must also be added close to 10,000,000 German refugees. These were, in the first place, ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Rumania, and Poland, in order to cleanse those countries from German minority problems. Secondly, there were Germans who fled or were expelled from the former German territories annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union in the east, namely, Silesia and East Prussia.
The great majority of these German refugees filtered into Western Germany. Homeless and without means, they came into the rubble-ridden, half starved and congested West German cities and created a heavy drain on the physical resources of the native population. The native Germans at first regarded them, for the most part, as aliens, and in general resented their coming and the political and cultural baggage which they brought with them.
This huge amorphous population of post-war Germany was further disorganized by the division of the country into four zones of occupation. In the beginning each of the zones was sealed off tightly from the others. The ruined economy, the disrupted transportation, and the divided families all found further difficulties and complications created by four zones, four occupying powers, four different political and administrative setups, four different mentalities, and four borders to cross.
The effects of the strain of war, the influence of twelve years of nihilistic National Socialist rule, the shock of defeat, and the tension of occupation combined to bring about a profound moral disintegration and loss of all sense of values. The primary preoccupation of most Germans was with the most elementary problems of food, shelter, and work.
There came the days of a wildly flourishing black market, of a tobacco-starved population that threw official currency to the winds and improvised a wildly fluctuating cigarette economy, in which goods and services were traded for cigarettes, often measured not by the carton or even by the pack, but by the single cigarette. There came the Stummel period when foreign soldiers and civilians found themselves followed by Germans waiting to pick up discarded cigarette butts. There followed the days of the Fräuleins, who, whether the official military orders were for or against fraternization, carried on with Allied soldiers in varying degrees of intimacy in return for chocolate bars, nylon stockings, or K rations, to supplement the family food rations.
All these manifestations, in part the concomitance of any military occupation, now assumed vaster dimensions than ever before in history. They continued on well into 1947, until by various actions of the Allied powers, they gradually disappeared. Among these Allied actions were the repatriation of displaced persons (DPs) and emigration of others; economic reforms; relief administration; and more rigid control of their own troops. The more shocking and glaring aspects of this occupation period were thus gradually eliminated. Deep scars of a moral and psychic nature remained. These scars added more complexity to the already difficult problems of the new German state.
III. A New Beginning
West Germany built in many styles on its ruins. In the first stage a roof was put over a ground floor, a theater, or a "hotel" was made of an air-raid shelter. Many of the later structures look like American apartment houses and office buildings. Others are solid mixtures of concrete and glass or cinderblock-functional, durable, and unimaginative. The cities are hybrid. The Hochhäuser-the semi-skyscrapers-are likely to stand in no sensible relationship to the architecture around them.
Where there were so many wide fields of blasted stone, new buildings sprouted one at a time, or rose in apartment blocks that imposed a sensible order on a small area. These structures often conflicted sharply with the architecture of the old city. In almost all the cities the rubble has left its marks. In West Berlin, for example, much of the rubble has been moved and planted to form artificial parks and hills.
The effects of the strain of war, the influence of twelve years of nihilistic National Socialist rule, the shock of defeat, and the tension of occupation combined to bring about a profound moral disintegration and loss of all sense of values. The primary preoccupation of most Germans was with the most elementary problems of food, shelter, and work.
There came the days of a wildly flourishing black market, of a tobacco-starved population that threw official currency to the winds and improvised a wildly fluctuating cigarette economy, in which goods and services were traded for cigarettes, often measured not by the carton or even by the pack, but by the single cigarette. There came the Stummel period when foreign soldiers and civilians found themselves followed by Germans waiting to pick up discarded cigarette butts. There followed the days of the Fräuleins, who, whether the official military orders were for or against fraternization, carried on with Allied soldiers in varying degrees of intimacy in return for chocolate bars, nylon stockings, or K rations, to supplement the family food rations.
All these manifestations, in part the concomitance of any military occupation, now assumed vaster dimensions than ever before in history. They continued on well into 1947, until by various actions of the Allied powers, they gradually disappeared. Among these Allied actions were the repatriation of displaced persons (DPs) and emigration of others; economic reforms; relief administration; and more rigid control of their own troops. The more shocking and glaring aspects of this occupation period were thus gradually eliminated. Deep scars of a moral and psychic nature remained. These scars added more complexity to the already difficult problems of the new German state.
III. A New Beginning
West Germany built in many styles on its ruins. In the first stage a roof was put over a ground floor, a theater, or a "hotel" was made of an air-raid shelter. Many of the later structures look like American apartment houses and office buildings. Others are solid mixtures of concrete and glass or cinderblock-functional, durable, and unimaginative. The cities are hybrid. The Hochhäuser-the semi-skyscrapers-are likely to stand in no sensible relationship to the architecture around them.
Where there were so many wide fields of blasted stone, new buildings sprouted one at a time, or rose in apartment blocks that imposed a sensible order on a small area. These structures often conflicted sharply with the architecture of the old city. In almost all the cities the rubble has left its marks. In West Berlin, for example, much of the rubble has been moved and planted to form artificial parks and hills.
The surge of enterprise which brought Germany its remarkable improvement in the standard of living made the way of a liberal, democratic economy an easy one for the working population to accept and cherish. West Germany lost through strikes from 1949 to 1954 an average of only 103 man hours per thousand employed. This compared with an average between 1952 and 1954 of 151 for the United Kingdom; 1,244 for France, and 1,515 for the United States. The German worker clung to his job. It was the only thing that was sure to make sense.
Such was the bounty of the recovery that from 1954 on some two million Germans a year could travel to Italy. There were also countless excursions of factory workers and other groups traveling through Germany and neighboring countries on trips that had once been possible only for the well-to-do. The Nazis started this movement in their "Strength Through Joy" campaigns, but it has continued in the republic on a much greater scale.
The philosophy of the free market was developed further by the CDU coalition than by the dominant political parties of any other country. Americans had long preached the crusade against monopoly and extolled the virtues of free enterprise, but the German economic leadership gave these economics a metaphysical form.
The efforts to reduce European tariffs, the Economic Payments Union, the development of the idea of the Common Market in the European Economic Community, the European Monetary Agreement, the French-German agreements to pool their resources in the development of European and African industry - these were the product of powerful forces in Germany and France and throughout Western Europe. People now recognized that new ways would have to be found, not only to deal with the Communist threat outside their borders, but also with the anarchy and disintegration within Europe itself.
These efforts were not confined to economic measures. Although the French had feared Germany's industrial competition almost as much as its rearmament, Schuman and others, who wanted German forces as part of a European army, thought it best that German industry should be revived in a European context. The settlement of the Saar dispute was an example of this kind of thinking. It came about as a result of profound political changes. Yet it was also a decision of reasonable men, determined to resolve controversies that were being blown up far beyond their worth to either country alone. The Saar has gone back to Germany, but both France and Germany share in the production of its industries. It has become a place where the two countries meet and collaborate, instead of a cause of endless friction.
More than ever before, the French and Germans attempted to develop means and methods of mutual comprehension. From the beginning of the occupation, the French, despite the arrogant airs of conquerors who had been placed in power by the arms of others, had developed the idea of meetings between small groups from the two countries. Every Frenchman believed that Germany had much to learn from France, and some thought both countries had a good deal to learn from each other. In the first three years of the occupation, there were gatherings of German and French youth.
While it was not until 1948, that the French permitted Germans to travel to France, there were many later meetings of people with special interests in common-teachers and religious groups, for example. French families, like the Americans, took German children into their homes for holidays and sent their children to Germany. French theatrical companies appeared before enthusiastic German audiences. As early as 1957 it was even possible to place French troops under the command of a German general.
A new concept of Europe could grow out of this French-German collaboration. Every country has been made aware of what Western Europe, despite its profound historic differences, holds in common. Somewhat awkwardly expressed, a sign in German at the Strasbourg bridge connecting France and Germany read in the mid-1950s:
"You are leaving Europe-You remain in Europe."
The economic order was changing, blurring old linguistic and ethnic borders. Goods and people could move across them with greater freedom. As the curtain closed in the East there was all the more need for common markets, and the intricate measures of mutual defense. It became possible to foresee an end to the mutual destruction, the causes of which were part of the political thinking of other centuries. The murder of an archduke, a Hohenzollern on a foreign throne, one flag or another flying over a splinter of border territory, would not be the grave threat to national security in the later half of the 20th century.
A common danger made Europe aware of its common heritage. The industries of war and peace made their alliances over the ancient borders. General de Gaulle and Chancellor Adenauer met in the summer of 1958 only to reaffirm the policies of collaboration. There is no place under the long shadow of Russia, in the glare of mid-century science and technology, for any other long-range policy.
With one third of the population under twenty and 10 percent over sixty-five, the German army threatened to be a serious drain on the already limited supply of able-bodied and productive workers. But the Germans were more concerned with the kind of army they were going to have, than with its economic effects. The idea of an army of civilians, like the Swiss or American, was attractive to a population that would have preferred to be without armed forces of any kind. Plans for placing the army under the control of parliament and a civilian minister were approved unanimously in the press. But there were some who thought the amenities were going beyond nonmilitarist aims, when it was rumored, that the young soldiers were to serve a nine-hour day, and need not salute their officers, or wear uniforms when off duty.
The look of the old army would be missing: the militarist haircut was abolished. The uniform was slate gray, non-inflammable, proof against infrared rays, and resistant to radiation. Helmets resembled those of the Americans. Jackboots were replaced by rubber-soled shoes, such as the GI wore. Only the East Germans kept the helmet and the cut of the uniform of the Reich. In the West the recruits were to be served their meals by waitresses without having to wait in the line for their food, as they did in the democratic army of their American tutors.
In the summer of 1955, the Bundestag passed the Law for the German Army. It was a different type of German army which this law created. The Minister of Defense, Theodor Blank, was an anti-Nazi trade-union official, a former carpenter, who during the war had been a lieutenant in an armored unit and had been captured by the Russians. Officers, the law stated, were to be chosen without regard to birth, religion, or social standing. An order was to be disobeyed if it would lead to the commission of a crime, but if the soldier obeyed without knowing his act was unlawful, he was to be adjudged innocent.
The army was to uphold the "free democratic order as laid down in the Basic Law." It was to be an army that would have the confidence of the entire people, recognizing the value of personal freedom, and unreservedly devoted to the democratic system
The Great Depression: Parliamentary Paralysis and Government Presidential
Even before the famous New York stock-market crash on October 24, 1929, business activity in Germany had experienced a slowdown resulting in 1.3 million unemployed by the fall of that year. The stock-market crash, however, had an even greater effect on the German economy because it led to the recall of short-term American loans that had helped fuel Germany's economic prosperity in the late 1920s. Business failures multiplied and unemployment rose dramatically to 3 million in 1930, 4.35 million in 1931, and 6 million by winter of 1932. The last figure meant that one in three of the working population was out of work. This economic crisis created a climate of despair for many Germans. Many workers, especially hard hit by unemployment, remained committed to the left but turned increasingly away from the democratically oriented Social Democrats (SPD) toward the more radical Communist party (KPD), which desired the overthrow of the Weimar Republic.
The middle classes, who remembered what the inflation of 1923 had done to them economically and socially, were alarmed. Although not unemployed, they feared the eventual loss of their jobs and their social prestige and status. As the workers became more radicalized and joined the KPD in larger numbers, the middle classes grew apprehensive at the thought of a communist revolution. Small businessmen resented big business and big labor. As the depression progressed from 1930 to 1932, the middle classes, like the workers, tended to become radicalized.
Unlike the workers, however, they found the answers to their insecurity in the messages of the NSDAP. Nazi propaganda provided simple but apparently understandable reasons for the economic collapse. The Nazis blamed the Versailles settlement and reparations, the Weimar system itself, the "November criminals" who created it, and the political parties that perpetuated it. They blamed the Communists, who wanted a revolution that would destroy the traditional German values. They blamed big business and the economic profiteers who were ruining the middle classes. And they blamed the Jews, who allegedly stood behind Marxism, the Weimar system, much of big business, and economic profiteering. The Nazi accusations were unsophisticated but effective. Lower middle-class unemployed and employed embraced a Nazi party that promised to eliminate this corrupt Weimar system.
The economic, social, and psychological crises created by the Great Depression had dire political consequences for Weimar democracy. Beginning in 1928, the "Great Coalition," which included the left-wing Social Democrats and the conservative People's Party (DVP), had governed Germany. This unlikely combination worked largely because of the economic recovery and the political acumen of the DVP leader Gustav Stresemann, the primary architect of Germany's progress between 1924 and 1929. His death in October 1929 and the simultaneous economic decline severely tested the coalition. It fell completely apart in March of 1930 over the issue of the rising cost of unemployment benefits. The DVP, representing the interests of industrialists, wished to reduce unemployment benefits. On the other hand the SPD, unwilling to see any loss in the benefits gained by labor since 1918, favored an increase in unemployment funds with employers shouldering half of the burden. Neither side was willing to compromise, and the government resigned.
The collapse of the Great Coalition and the continuing economic chaos created a parliamentary crisis that opened the door to the so-called presidential system, built upon the extension of the president's constitutional powers. Article 48 of the Weimar constitution gave the president emergency powers to restore law and order in a crisis, including use of the army if necessary. However, the Reichstag had the right to revoke these emergency measures. Because of the imprecision of Article 48's wording, it was left to the Reich president himself to determine when a threat to law and order existed. This power had been invoked by the first Weimar president, Friedrich Ebert, to defend the republic against armed attacks. It had, in fact, saved Weimar democracy on a number of occasions.
This power of the president to rule in an emergency was now enlarged to cover the crisis created by the depression and the failure of the parliamentary parties to form a majority government that could deal with the economic difficulties. The president would form a new government composed of a chancellor and cabinet ministers. The government would not be affected by the interests of the political parties but would rule by emergency decrees issued by the president in lieu of laws passed by the Reichstag. Such a government would depend on presidential support rather than on the Reichstag.
Several forces converged to create this presidential system. Reich president Paul von Hindenburg, at heart a monarchist, had never fully accepted the republican system of party politics and had come to detest the squabbling of the parties. The president was old (he had been first elected in 1925 at the age of seventy-eight) and was easily persuaded by his advisers to pursue a new course because of the political stalemate . The president's state secretary, Otto Meissner, and other members of the state bureaucracy favored a change to a more authoritarian system that would be "above parties" and, through use of the president's emergency power, independent of the Reichstag.
The army favored the change as well. It felt that the Weimar system, especially because of the power of the pacifistic left, had never created a climate favorable to army growth. The army's political expert, General Kurt von Schleicher, was the foremost exponent of a presidential system. Because of his intimate ties to Hindenburg's advisers and to Hindenburg himself, he was able to manipulate the appointment and dismissal of chancellors and cabinets behind the scenes. But Schleicher was not a right-wing fanatic; he wished to use the presidential system not to destroy but to maintain the life of the republic.
Despite Schleicher's objectives, it is easy to see in hindsight that the presidential system meant the demise of democratic rule. The Germans were politically inexperienced, and to many of them democracy seemed merely a sham anyway. A more authoritarian system, reminiscent of imperial Germany, was envisioned as Germany's salvation. In many ways, Weimar democracy ended in 1930 with the establishment of the presidential system. It prepared. people for the dictatorial rule of the Nazis.
Upon Schleicher's recommendation, the first chancellor under the presidential system was Heinrich Bruening, one of the leaders of the Catholic Center party. Bruening tried to deal with the depression by applying traditional economic theory, and submitted a balanced budget to the Reichstag in July 1930. When the Reichstag failed to pass it, Bruening had Hindenburg invoke Article 48 and implement his program by presidential decrees. The Reichstag, acting within its constitutional rights, overrode the chancellor and revoked these decrees. Normally, upon this vote of no confidence, Bruening and his government should have resigned. But, considering his government a presidential one and above parliamentary politics, Bruening had Hindenburg dissolve the Reichstag and establish new elections for September 14, 1930. Meanwhile, Bruening continued to run the government and even reinstated his economic agenda through the use of Article 48.
Bruening believed that the forthcoming election would vindicate his efforts at strong leadership and produce a parliamentary majority that would bolster his presidential chancellorship. But he was very wrong. The economic crisis in Germany had spawned fear and insecurity. Supporters of the republic attacked the government for destroying the constitution. Others blamed the government for the economic crisis. The extremists of left and right saw new possibilities in the midst of crisis. In the end, they were right.
The Reichstag election of September 14, 1930, proved to be the decisive breakthrough that Hitler and the Nazis had planned for. Even Hitler was surprised by the magnitude of the Nazi victory. The Nazi vote went from 800,000 in the 1928 election to 6.5 million, or 18.3 percent of the total. This gave the Nazis 107 seats and made them the second largest party in the Reichstag after the Social Democrats. The NSDAP made its best showing among farmers and the middle class, especially the lower-middle-class voters in rural, small-town Protestant areas in northern, central, and eastern Germany. The Nazis also gained support from considerable numbers of new voters and pulled middle-class voters away from center and right-wing parties such as the People's party (DVP), the Democrats, and the Nationalists (DNVP). These last three parties lost 67 seats in the Reichstag.
The Nazi shift in strategy in 1928 had proved to be a master stroke. The party had been organized so well that the Nazis easily made the transition to a mass movement. Within three months of the election, they added another 100,000 members. The SA began to mushroom. The Nazi party had become a formidable force.
Hitler and the Nazis believed that more electoral victories would eventually produce a majority that would give them power. Although this did not happen, Nazi electoral successes were an important factor in Hitler's eventual claims to the chancellorship. In turn, a crucial element in the party's election successes was its superior use of mass propaganda.
Elections and Nazi Propaganda, 1930-1932
The Nazis became adept at propaganda. Hitler emphasized its importance and established the principles on which it should be based. Propaganda must be addressed to the masses and not to the intellectuals. Its function was to call the attention of the masses to certain facts, not to educate them. Since the masses were influenced more by emotions than by reason, propaganda must be aimed primarily at the emotions. Given the limited intelligence of the masses, propaganda had to focus on constant repetition of a few basic ideas, eventually establishing these ideas as truths in the minds of the masses. In addition, mass meetings were psychologically important in creating support for a movement. They offered a sense of community, gave meaning to life, and created the emotional effects that gave people strong convictions.'
The man responsible for putting Hitler's principles into practice was Joseph Goebbels, the master propagandist of the Third Reich. Goebbels, the son of a Catholic working-class family in the Rhineland, had received a Ph.D. in German literature from the University of Heidelberg in 1921. After failing in his attempts at a professional career and writing a novel, Goebbels joined the Nazi party in 1924 and became a collaborator of Gregor Strasser. A cynical opportunist and shrewd realist, Goebbels switched to Hitler's side in 1926 and was rewarded with the position of Gauleiter of Berlin. His tremendous success in Berlin, achieved through the brilliant use of propaganda and his oratory (many thought he was as good an orator as Hitler), brought a new appointment by Hitler in 1929 as Reich propaganda leader of the NSDAP. In this position, Goebbels played a crucial role in the electoral campaigns from 1929 to 1932.
The Reich Propaganda Office under Goebbels maintained control over the propaganda activities of the party. Propaganda departments were set up at each level of party offices. Although subordinate to the political leadership at each level, propaganda offices had their own chain of command as well. Information on local activities was collected and passed up to higher levels. The Reich Propaganda Office sent out specific directives to lower levels by means of a monthly magazine. These directives specified the themes and slogans to be used at mass rallies and underscored the necessity of adapting subjects to the interests of the local audience. The Reich Propaganda Office printed standard posters and pamphlets for all districts and distributed patriotic and party movies.
Recognizing the need for effective orators at all levels, including small villages, the NSDAP established a Speakers' School for the training of propaganda speakers. Students memorized set speeches and rehearsed answers to questions in front of mirrors. Two thousand speakers were trained in 1929 and 1930 alone. The program was expanded with the establishment by Fritz Reinhardt of a correspondence school. Students memorized a simple speech written by Reinhardt, who also corrected speeches written by the students themselves. Each month questions and answers on a new topic would be sent to each student. Undoubtedly these methods did not produce great orators, but they did give to the Nazi party a cadre of dedicated speakers who pushed the party line in every corner of Germany.
The most effective regional and national speakers were used on more important occasions. Through posters and leaflet campaigns controlled from above, local groups mobilized people for mass rallies of varying sizes. The Nazis used a technique of saturation advertising. They would schedule 70 to 200 rallies in the space of one to two weeks in one district. These rallies were carefully planned to make maximum use of party groups. This saturation strategy was used particularly where there was hope for a major electoral breakthrough for the party. This type of campaign usually made use of Hitler as the featured speaker.
In fact, the Nazis were pioneers in modern electioneering techniques. They covered Germany in whirlwind campaigns by car, train, and airplane. "Hitler Over Germany" was the name attached to one of Hitler's campaign tours, which covered fifty cities in fifteen days. The Nazis also established voter recruitment drives that continued both during and between elections.
Undoubtedly, there was a relationship between the number of young people in the Nazi party and the dynamism of its electoral politics. As we have seen, young people were especially attracted to Nazism. It offered a politics of activism, clear-cut lines of authority, and opportunities for leadership at an early age. Compared with the other political parties (except for the Communists, who attracted working-class youth for similar reasons), Nazism certainly offered a break with old conventions and a hope of restoring German greatness. Nazism gave young people a chance to actually be part of this process, to feel a part of historical destiny. In a sense, Nazism liberated in young people the tremendous energy that comes from participating in a politics based on the belief that one is indeed going to create a new world or a new age. Many observers have commented on how the Nazis, regardless of the size of their local group, seemed to do more in election campaigns than all the other parties combined.
The mass meetings of the election campaigns were carefully organized to the smallest item. Marching bands, swarms of fluttering flags, shouts of Heil, the play of spotlights-all were precisely orchestrated to produce the maximum emotional effects on the crowd. Hitler's own rallies were except well managed. A Hamburg schoolteacher gave this impression of a rally she attended:
"The Fuehrer is coming!" A ripple went through the crowds. Around the speaker's platform one could see hands raised in the Hitler salute. A speaker opened the meeting, . . . A second speaker welcomed Hitler and made way for the man who had drawn 120,000 people of all classes and ages. There stood Hitler in a simple black coat and looked over the crowd, waiting-a forest of swastika pennants swished up, the jubilation of this moment was given vent in a roaring salute. Main theme: Out of parties shall grow a nation, the German nation. He censured the system ("I want to know what there is left to be ruined in this state!").... When the speech was over, there was roaring enthusiasm and applause. Hitler saluted, gave his thanks, the Horst Wessel song sounded out across the course.... Then he went.-How many look up to him with touching faith as their helper, their savior, their deliverer from unbearable distress."
This schoolteacher's impressions reveal the emotional impact of these rallies on the onlookers. They disclose as well the approach Hitler took to campaign themes. What were the Nazis telling the German people that made them so attractive to certain groups?
The Nazis successfully managed two fundamentally opposite approaches to the German voters. First of all, in their election campaigns they specifically geared their themes to the needs and fears of different social groups. In working-class areas, they campaigned against capitalism, offering to protect workers by destroying international high finance, or exploited the economic issues of unemployment. One Nazi campaign poster directed to the working class shows a Nazi destroying the stock exchange, which is labeled "International High Finance." Another poster, entitled "Work and Bread," pictures an arm with a Nazi armband, the hand offering tools to the outstretched hands of the unemployed. For the middle classes, the Nazis exploited fears of the communist revolutionary threat to private property. A Nazi poster portrayed a hideous skeleton in a Communist uniform against a red background with the caption "Only one man can save us from Bolshevism -Adolf Hitler." To appeal to lower middle-class businessmen, the Nazis attacked big department stores as a threat to shopkeepers, stressing that the attacks were really aimed at the Jews who controlled these stores. The Nazis were flexible, however. In areas where anti-Semitism was not popular, the Nazis would drop the attacks on Jews and focus instead on anticommunism, nationalism, and the defense of religious values. The last of these issues was important for Protestant voters.
The second half of the Nazis' dual approach blatantly contradicted the first. The Nazis denounced conflicts of interest and claimed to stand above classes and parties. They promised to overcome the old class and caste spirit and build a Volksgemeinschaft, a national community, a new Germany based on social equality. To create the new Germany, the Nazis would have to replace democracy with the principle of leadership. The Nazis also appealed to traditional militarism, national pride, and national honor, denouncing the Versailles treaty and the "traitors" who accepted and upheld it. Hitler believed that human beings are motivated by more than economic forces, that idealism, national honor, sacrifice, and dedication struck chords of emotion in his listeners. While his Nazi speakers in various regions of Germany could appeal to the specific interests of different groups, Hitler claimed to stand above it all. Hitler's only promise was to create a new Germany, a nation great and proud again, devoid of class differences and party infighting, a nation where all could work after the turmoil of Weimar democracy. Hitler struck a note to which many Germans responded from the depths of their souls.
Political Maneuvering
Since the unsuccessful Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler had pursued a legal strategy of working within the system to achieve power. The campaigns of 1930 to 1932, in which the Nazis sought power through victories at the ballot box, reflected this strategy. But Hitler and the Nazis did not plan to govern democratically. The Nazis made it clear that they intended to establish a new order under their sole direction once they came into power legally. Indeed, in the oath of legality Hitler had taken at a trial of young army officers in Leipzig in 1930, he had stated that the Nazis were entering the legal arena in order to make their party the ruling power. Once they possessed constitutional power, they would mold the state into "the shape we hold to be suitable." Parliamentary elections, however, proved to be a stumbling block, and the Nazis were forced to become involved in the intricate political maneuvering within the presidential system in order to come to power "legally."
Heinrich Bruening had failed miserably in the elections of 1930 to gain a center-right majority to support his presidential regime. Bruening's government, relying upon Hindenburg's use of Article 48, did survive, but only because the Social Democrats were unwilling to face new elections. Although that party considered Bruening's presidential regime a violation of the constitution, it was unwilling to bring down the government.
During 1931, Bruening's government proved unable to cope with Germany's problems. His difficulties were exacerbated by Nazi tactics. SA troops marched through the streets challenging Communists and engaging them in pitched battles. Themselves the instigators of this civil violence, the Nazis nevertheless blamed the government for being unable to curb the lawlessness on the streets of Germany. While claiming to work within the constitutional system to gain power, the Nazis worked at the same time within the Reichstag to undermine the parliamentary system and create additional chaos. Eighty-eight percent of the Nazi delegates were newcomers to the parliament; 60 percent were under forty years of age. Nazi delegates were effective obstructionists in the Reichstag. They boycotted sessions and disrupted parliamentary debates with shouting and calls for discussion of points of order. They did not want the system to work, but demanded its protection while pursuing a legal path to power.
Within the Nazi party one group in particular, the SA, favored a return to the path of revolution. Indeed, in April 1931 a group of SA leaders in Pomerania reproached Hitler thus: "the NSDAP had departed from the revolutionary course of true National Socialism for Germany's freedom, had pursued the reactionary line of a coalition party, and consequently had given up-purposely or accidentally-the pure ideal for which [SA leaders were] fighting."' Many SA members resented the control exercised over them by the political wing of the party while they were carrying out the strenuous and even life-threatening work of the party. Hitler was faced with a serious dilemma. He wanted to keep the SA on the legal path. He did not want to alienate the authorities and was especially fearful after his Beer Hall Putscb of creating a situation where the army would be used to crush his movement. At the same time, he had to conciliate the militants within the SA who wanted action. For the time being, Hitler managed to keep the SA in line by personal appeals for loyalty and vague promises of the SA as a reservoir of the future national army.
In 1931 and early 1932, Hitler worked on reestablishing his ties with conservative groups in Germany. In the summer of 1931, the Nazis agreed to cooperate again with their old Young Plan referendum allies, the German Nationalists (DNVP). This led to a demonstration with parades at Bad Harzburg in October. But Hitler once again demonstrated his independence by leaving the rostrum after the SA marched past, but before the Stahlhelm, the Nationalist version of the SA, had paraded.
Hitler made a concerted effort to woo industrialists and financiers in western Germany in a speech to that region's leading industrial magnates at the Industry Club in Duesseldorf in January 1932. He posed as the defender of their economic well-being who would destroy the Communists and establish an authoritarian government under which big business could thrive. Although Hitler did receive some money from a few big businessmen before 1933, only a minority of large industrialists supported the Nazis. Smaller businessmen at local levels accounted for considerably more contributions. Self-financing through membership dues, initiation fees, and sale of newspapers remained an important source of the party's income.
In October of 1931, Hitler attempted to convince Hindenburg that the Nazis should be allowed to form a government. Hindenburg had a very low opinion of Hitler and refused. With Hindenburg's term as president coming to an end in the spring of 1932, Hitler was confronted with a new decision whether or not to run for the presidency. Both Hindenburg and Hitler were reluctant to run. The old field marshal was eighty-four and would have preferred retirement. But he was warned that only he could prevent the election of Adolph Hitler, and reluctantly he agreed to run. He was supported not by the parties of the right, as in the election of 1925, but by the left and by moderate supporters of democracy, who now saw Hindenburg as their last hope to preserve the Weimar system against the Nazis. This was not a reassuring development for the future of the republic, since Hindenburg had once been an opponent of the republic and was now approaching senility. Hitler was not eager to run against the popular Hindenburg, knowing he would certainly lose. But as leader of the second largest party, he thought it crucial that the Nazis contest the election. Since he was an Austrian citizen, the tiny state of Brunswick, which had a considerable number of Nazi officeholders, made Hitler a state councilor, a position that automatically bestowed German citizenship upon him. Despite an intensive and exhausting campaign, Hitler gained only 30 percent of the vote. But since Hindenburg failed to gain an absolute majority (he had 49.45 percent of the vote), a second ballot was required, pitting Hitler against Hindenburg without the Nationalist candidate Theodor Duesterberg. This time Hindenburg achieved his absolute majority with 53 percent. Hitler's vote increased to almost 37 percent.
The reelection of Hindenburg set the stage for another change in the presidential system. Three days after the election, Hindenburg accepted Chancellor Bruening's recommendation for a ban of the SA because of its illegal activities during the election. General Kurt von Schleicher, originally a supporter of Bruening, began now to agitate against him. He was especially anxious to harness the Nazis to a new right-wing government and opposed the ban on the SA. Through Hindenburg's son Oskar, Schleicher put pressure on the Reich president to dismiss Bruening.
Hindenburg had already grown increasingly disenchanted with Heinrich Bruening. He blamed him for a political situation in which the Social Democrats and other moderate parties had been his chief support in the recent election. Moreover, Bruening had failed to solve the economic crisis, and his deflationary policies had led opponents to label him the Hunger Chancellor. The final and decisive strike against him, in Hindenburg's eyes, was his plan to carve up the estates of bankrupt Prussian landlords and distribute the land to landless peasants. The Junkers (of whom Hindenburg was one) objected, and Hindenburg agreed with them. By the summer of 1932, Hindenburg was willing to let go of Bruening. Bruening, having neglected to win favor in the Reichstag because he had ruled by presidential decree, had no support left. Hindenburg's only condition was a suitable replacement, and General Schleicher arranged that.
Schleicher's choice as the new chancellor was Franz von Papen, a Catholic aristocrat who had defected from the Center party because his political views were considerably closer to those of the German Nationalists. Schleicher considered Papen a person who could easily be controlled from behind the scenes. He hoped that Papen, a dedicated right-winger, would win back conservative support for the presidential government. Schleicher negotiated with Hitler to gain Nazi toleration of a Papen government. Fearing a civil war if the Nazis were not won over, Schleicher agreed to lift the ban on the SA and to call new Reichstag elections in return for Hitler's consent. Hitler agreed. Bruening was dismissed on May 30 and the Papen government installed. Reichstag elections were set for July 31, and the ban on the SA was lifted on June 14.
There now entered the German political arena a figure who played a crucial role in Hitler's accession to power. A cunning man, he proved to be dangerous not because of his craftiness but because he did not really have the political ability to play the role he thought he could. He entered big-time politics as a small-time player and was eventually outclassed by his opponents, especially Hitler. Papen was a reactionary who planned to end the democratic system by instituting an authoritarian order. To prove that his government could be effective and to win rightist support in the forthcoming elections, Papen used emergency decrees to depose the anti-Nazi Prussian state government run by a coalition of Social Democrats and the Center party. He purged the Prussian civil service, replacing government officials loyal to the Weimar Republic with Nationalists. Since Prussia constituted almost three fifths of Germany, this action was a serious blow to the republic. It provided an example to the Nazis of how to take over power in the federal states by pseudolegal means. The relative ease of the Papen takeover convinced Nazis that the process could be easily repeated. Papen's action in Prussia was a step toward an authoritarian regime.
The Nazis waged a vigorous campaign for the July 31 elections. The election campaign itself was conducted in an atmosphere reminiscent of civil war: frequent street battles took place between Nazis and Communists after the ban on the SA was lifted. Almost 1 00 men were killed and over a thousand wounded in one month's battles in Prussia alone. The Nazis again stressed the inability of the government to maintain law and order.
On July 31, 1932, the Nazis won their most impressive victory to date. The party advanced from 108 to 230 delegates and was now the largest party in the Reichstag. The Nazis had won 37 percent of the vote and yet had failed to gain the majority they thought they could win. Goebbels commented in his diary: "Conclusion: we must come to power. Since the last presidential election we have greatly increased our votes. We'll drop dead from winning elections."
Hitler now demanded that he be made chancellor and that the Nazis be allowed to fill the major cabinet positions. Hindenburg refused and suggested that Hitler take the vice-chancellorship and enter a coalition government. Hitler rejected this offer, believing he must hold out for the top position if the Nazis were to achieve their goals. The morale of the Nazi party began to suffer badly. Great expectations of success had not materialized. The SA began again to agitate for a revolutionary course of action since the path of legality seemed at an end. Hitler, ever fearful of army suppression of the movement, rejected any illegal action.
Hitler believed that the Nazis still occupied a good position. The Nazis and Communists now made up 52 percent of the Reichstag. Although these extremist parties of the left and the right would never make a coalition government, they could essentially cripple the parliamentary system. Hermann Goering had, in fact, been elected president of the Reichstag. Since the Reichstag had the right by Article 48 to repeal any presidential emergency decrees, the Nazis and Communists could also wreak havoc with a presidential government by coordinating their efforts.
Faced with this dilemma, Papen called for a new election when the Reichstag met in September. Aware of sagging Nazi morale, he hoped that a loss of votes would make the Nazis more cooperative. The Nazis feared another election campaign. After the July 31 Reichstag elections, they were psychologically and financially unprepared for another vigorous campaign. The Nazis' fears seemed justified: their vote fell from 37 to 33 percent, with a corresponding decrease in Reichstag seats to 196. It was a costly defeat for the Nazis. It broke the myth of invincibility that they had fostered. It appeared to contemporaries that the Nazis had peaked in July and then had lost much of their political momentum. By the end of 1932 the Nazi party seemed at an important crossroads.
The Nazi Party on the Eve of Power
By the end of 1932, membership in the Nazi party had risen to 450,000, with an additional 400,000 men in the SA. The latter was now four times the size of the regular army.
The composition of the Nazi rank and file remained consistent with that from 1924 to 1930, and in its expansion into a mass movement the Nazi party continued to attract people from all classes. Although both the lower middle class and elite were overrepresented in terms of the total German population, in absolute numbers the Nazi party was predominantly a lower middle-class party. One could also argue that the economic depression was not the only direct cause of the growth of the NSDAP toward the end of the republic. After all, workers, who suffered the most from unemployment, were underrepresented in the party. The lower middle class and upper middle class (the elite), which suffered the least, were overrepresented. No doubt, fear of hardship rather than hardship itself motivated many Germans to become Nazis. But noneconomic variables, such as disenchantment with political democracy, the trauma associated with the loss of the war and subsequent yearning for national greatness, fear of communism, anti-Semitism, and an inclination to militarism, also help to explain their willingness to become Nazis. These factors transcend class differences and economic determinism. There is no doubt that Hitler and the Nazis cleverly appealed to these fears and hopes.
As more people joined the Nazi party the average age of joiners began to rise, from thirty in 1930 to thirty-two in 1932. By the end of 1932 the percentage of female members had increased slightly, from 5.9 percent to 7.8 percent. This increase was due to the greater attention given to females because of their voting potential, the development of specific organizations for women, and the example of upper-class women who joined the party and thereby attracted other women.
A social profile of Nazi leaders shows little change from the period 1924-1929. With the expansion of the party, there was, of course, a tendency to seek out more highly trained professional people, thus increasing the number of upper-middle-class leaders. Recent analyses of elections show that although the Nazis did draw from all classes, they gained their main strength from the middle class, especially the lower middle class. Despite the effort to woo workers, the latter remained mostly with the SPD or transferred their allegiance to the KPD. The Nazis gained support in lower-middle-class areas in the small towns and countryside of northern, western, and eastern Germany, areas that were heavily Protestant. Overall the Nazis were weakest in big cities, such as Berlin and Leipzig, and in industrial areas and Catholic rural areas. The urban vote for the Nazis tended to come from upper-middle-class districts where it was often substantial. The Nazis were extremely weak in predominantly Catholic rural areas. The significance of the religious factor can best be seen in Bavaria: the northern part, which was heavily Protestant, tended to vote Nazi while Catholic southern Bavaria gave the Nazis their lowest vote in any section of Germany. This was, of course, where the party had started and where its leadership was still based.
Although the Nazis had failed in elections to achieve a majority in the Reichstag, they had managed to gain control of five German federal states: Anhalt, Oldenburg, Mecklenburg, Thuringia, and Brunswick. In addition, they had gained a fair number of offices throughout Germany. These Nazi officeholders presented a taste of what national rule would be like. They politicized all aspects of life under their control. In the state of Anhalt, they expelled the Bauhaus School of Design from Dessau because of its modern approach to architecture.
For all its efforts, it was apparent by the end of 1932 that the Nazi party was in considerable trouble. As Joseph Goebbels remarked in his diary: "The year 1932 was one eternal run of bad luck. One must beat it into pieces.... The past was difficult and the future is dark and gloomy; all prospects and hopes have completely disappeared." The NSDAP had many problems. In addition to the psychological tests of apathy and depression, the party was faced with seemingly insurmountable debts. Rumors continued to circulate about incipient SA revolts. There were additional losses in state and local elections in November and December, and it was clear that the Nazis had reached a limit with their voting constituency. They could not break the refusal of Catholic and working-class voters to vote for them. Economic improvement in the winter of 1932 made the Nazis realize that they might lose even more of the protest vote that had made their electoral successes possible.
Finally, a minority within the party was critical of Hitler's unwillingness to enter a coalition. Hitler's demands, even after the election reversal, remained the same the chancellorship for himself and a Nazi-dominated cabinet. Gregor Strasser, in particular, feared that the Nazis would miss their chance unless they entered a coalition and tried to gain power through the "back door." Hitler disagreed, believing that progress to full Nazi control through this approach would be too slow and the SA would get out of control from impatience. Strasser's position, however, was shared by others, creating the possibility of a split in the party. But renewed political maneuvering led indirectly to the salvation of the Nazi movement and to the appointment of Hitler as chancellor.
Hitler Moves West
The German Generals had put to good use the "Twenty-Years-Armistice" since 1918. They brooded over their defeat in 1918 and studied its causes carefully. The principal cause of the German defeat in 1918 had been the costly stalemate in World War I, which permitted the Allies to mobilize their superior manpower and resources and overwhelm the Germans. The German strategists therefore determined that in the next war there must not be a stalemate, but that their new opponents-who were likely to be their old ones-must be overwhelmed by a Blitzkrieg, before they could bring their superior economic and manpower potential to bear again.
In searching for weapons and tactics with which they could carry out a swift war of movement, the German strategists fastened onto the tank and the airplane. Both had been used in World War I, but not effectively. Tanks had been used solely as a screen for infantry attacks, not as an independent weapon. Airplanes, apart from reconnaissance, had little practical value. The dramatic "dogfights" of such famed air aces of World War I as Manfred von Richthofen, René Fouck, Billy Bishop, or Eddie Rickenbacker gave a nostalgic touch of sportsmanship and chivalry to the drab war of trenches. Bombing by hand-dropped bombs from airplanes and Zeppelins achieved a certain psychological effect. But neither use of airpower had any noticeable effect on the outcome of the hostilities.
After the war, military specialists of many nations worked on improving the armor, range, and speed of tanks and airplanes and sought new methods for their use. But it was German soldiers, scientists, and engineers who thought about and experimented with tanks and airplanes most consistently. By 1939 the Germans had organized several independent Panzer divisions, the function of which was to pierce the enemy's front, like a battering ram, and to wreak havoc in his rear. By 1939 they had also built up an efficient, independent Luftwaffe, carefully trained to give close cooperation to ground forces.
Meanwhile, the generals of the western powers were on the whole more inclined to put their trust in the methods that had brought them victory in 1918. The mechanization of infantry and the organization of special armored divisions using tanks as an independent weapon was suggested by an obscure French Lieutenant-Colonel, Charles de Gaulle by name. While instructor at Saint-Cyr (the French military academy) he wrote a highly original treatise, The Army of the Future (1934), in which he developed many ideas on mechanized warfare which were later used with lethal effectiveness by the Germans against France. But he was dismissed by his superiors as a "romantic" and incurred the wrath of the politicians of the Third Republic because of his conservative, Catholic background.
When World War II came, expecting it to be a repetition of World War I, French generals proposed to wait for the Germans to come and exhaust themselves by costly and vain attacks against the supposedly impregnable Maginot Line. Only after this occurred, at some distant point in the war, would the western Allies have to pass to the offensive.
The drawback of this strategy was that it left the initiative in the war to the Germans. The Germans first used it to dispose of Poland, completely unhindered by the western Allies.
I. Invasion of Poland
Leaving only a screening force of conventional troops to man the defenses of the West Wall, the Germans concentrated forty-four divisions (out of 66 which they then had), six armored and six motorized divisions, and virtually their whole air force for the Polish campaign. The Polish army was large enough (22 divisions, including one division and seven independent brigades of cavalry) and well enough equipped for the type of warfare that prevailed on the Eastern front in 1914-18. But it was woefully unprepared for modern mechanized warfare.
The German Blitzkrieg against Poland, which began at dawn on September 1, 1939, proved to be "a campaign from the book." The weather was what newspapermen later came to call "Hitler weather" -- dry and sunny, perfect for the operations of airplanes and tanks. Converging on Poland from East Prussia and Slovkia as well as from Germany, the German Wehrmacht overwhelmed the Polish army and won a military decision in tend days. The small Polish air force was destroyed on the ground on the very first day of the campaign. The Panzer divisions cut through the Polish forces at will and isolated them for later disarming. by September 15 organized Polish resistance collapsed. The Polish government fled to Rumania and France where it was reorganized as a government-in-exile under President Rackiewicz and Prime Minister General Sikorski. Only Warsaw heroically held out until the end of month.
Hitler, flushed with victory over Poland, was impatient to turn on the Western Allies at once. But his generals felt that Germany was far from prepared for a major campaign in the West. The British and French declarations of war had filled them and the whole German people with evil foreboding. There were no stirring scenes of patriotism and enthusiasm for the war in Berlin in 1939, as there had been in 1914, even though the immediate campaign against the despised Poles was popular. Even Hermann Göring, Hitler's successor-designate and commander of the Luftwaffe, was moved to exclaim: "If we lose this war, then Heaven have mercy on us."
But Hitler brooked no opposition or restraint. On October 9, 1939, he issued orders for the preparation of operation "Yellow," the plan of attack on the Netherlands and Belgium, which was to give Germany a large area on the Channel coast as a base for naval and aerial operations against Britain, preliminary to the grand assault on the Western Allies in France. As the date of execution of his plan he set November 12. But his generals, fearful of the coming conflict in the West, stalled and again plotted his removal. After an ugly, angry scene with the commander in chief of the army, Hitler postponed the operation. The Allies, feeling smugly safe believed the Maginot line, also did not stir. The period of inactivity which resulted, was dubbed by the Germans Sitzkrieg and by American war correspondents, disgruntled by lack of news copy, "phoney war." But both sides continued to arm feverishly, and the Germans, at least, continued to plan.
In January 1940 the plans for operation "Yellow" fell by accident into Belgian hands and had to be recast completely. Meanwhile, Hitler's attention was drawn to an operation suggested by the naval command, namely, to seize Denmark and Norway as bases for submarine operations against the British navy. It was approved by Hitler on March 1 and received the code name "Exercise Weser."
II. Naval warfare
Naval warfare in World War II took the same form as in World War I. Immediately after declaring war on Germany, the British navy blockaded the German coast. The French navy meanwhile kept an eye on Italy, which had not yet entered the war. The German navy in 1939 was much more modest than it had been in 1914. The submarine fleet consisted of only 57 U-boats, of which only 26 were suitable for Atlantic operations, but thereafter the submarine fleet grew rapidly. The Germans endeavored to effect a counter-blockade of Britain and France by mines and submarines.
On September 4, one day after the British and French declaration of war, a German U-boat sank the British liner Athenia without warning, causing loss of over 100 lives. Air raids and a new type of "magnetic" mine inflicted heavy destruction of British shipping, forcing the merchant vessels to crowed into western harbors which were at the time beyond the range of German bombers. The British navy countered the German move by multiplying their sea and air patrols, tightening the blockade, scrutinizing all neutral shipping.
Sowing mines in German harbors, and bombing their port installations. In December three British cruisers chased a German battleship Graf Spee into the Montevideo harbor. When the Uruguayan government asked it to leave, it was scuttled by its crew. On February 17, 1940 the British seized a German ship, which served as a prison for Allied seamen, in Norwegian coastal waters. Despite protests from the Norwegian government, the British and French announced that they had mined Norwegian coastal waters to halt the transit of German vessels which had been eluding the Allied blockade. This was done on April 8. On the following day the Germans launched "Exercise Weser."
III. "Exercise Weser"
The German army invaded and occupied Denmark, which offered no resistance. German naval units attacked Norwegian ports, while hundreds of paratroops floated down on their airfields. Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim, Stavanger, and Narvik were occupied in surprise invasions, but after momentary consternation the Norwegians rallied courageously. The Allied expeditionary force, originally destined for Finland, was rushed to aid them, and Trondheim, Bergen and Narvik were temporarily recovered. Prime Minister Churchill was of the opinion that this time Hitler had "missed the bus."
Unfortunately for the Allies, the Germans maintained complete superiority in the air. This enabled them to pour troops at will into any vital point. German troops advanced steadily north and by June 8 extinguished the last Norwegian resistance and forced the Allies to evacuate Narvik. The King of Norway, Haakon VII, escaped with his ministers to London, where he set up a government-in-exile. In Norway the German occupants set up a puppet government under a pro-Nazi politician Vidkun Quisling, whose name became speedily synonymous with perfidy and treason. All parties, except Quisling's Nasjonal Samling, were abolished and for five years Norway passed into the darkness of "totalitarianism."
The British government had suffered a grievous loss of prestige and Chamberlain was forced to resign. On May 10 Winston Churchill formed a National government. Daladier had earlier been replaced by Raynaud. it was high time for these changes, for on the same day that Churchill assumed power the Germans launched operation "Yellow." The battle in the west had begun.
IV. Operation "Yellow."
The Germans had assembled for it a mighty host of 135 conventional, ten armored, and four motorized divisions and two air fleets (1500 fighters and 3500 bombers). Opposing them, apart from the small, ill-equipped Belgian army, were the Allied armies consisting of ninety-five French and ten British divisions. Part of the French strength, however, was tied up in manning the Maginot Line and guarding the Alpine passes against a possible Italian attack.
In total armored strength the Allies were equal to the Germans (about 2450 tanks on both sides). But only a portion of their armor (4 divisions) had been recently organized into independent mobile units. The rest was distributed in brigade, battalion, and regimental strength all along the front to support the infantry. In the air the Allies were quite inferior to the Germans (1000 French and 700 British planes in France).
The Allied generals firmly expected the Germans to repeat the Schlieffen Plan of 1914 and invade France through the flatlands of Belgium. Therefore they decided to anticipate the Germans by marching into Belgium as soon as the German violation of Belgian neutrality permitted it. But the Germans had decided to follow not the invasion route of 1914 but the more difficult and unexpected invasion route of 1870. The revised plans for operation "Yellow" called for sending inferior forces into the Low Countries and concentrating their armored and motorized divisions for a powerful blow against the Allied lines at a point where the Germans, French, and Belgian frontiers meet.
When on May 10 the Germans hurled their divisions against the west, little Luxembourg put up no resistance and the resistance of neutral Holland collapsed in five days. Queen Wilhelmina and the Dutch government fled to London. On May 13 the main German force, spearheaded by the Panzer divisions and supported closely by the Luftwaffe, broke through the Allied lines in the Ardenne Forest to Sedan, just where the Maginot Line ended. The public learned then for the first time that this famous line, in which the French put an almost mystical faith, covered only the Franco-German but not the Franco-Belgian borders.
Meanwhile, the whole British expeditionary force and three French armies marched north into Belgium -- and thereby walked into a German trap. After the main German force broke through at Sedan, there was nothing much to stop its advance down the Somme valley toward the sea. The Germans exploited the advantage fully. One French armored division which tried to intercept them ran out of gas and was defeated. Another one, under de Gaule, which engaged them further west, was pushed aside.
On May 20 the German spearheads reached the English Channel at Abbeville, isolating the Allied armies in Belgium from the Allied armies in France. Panic broke out in Allied councils. The Allied commander-in-chief, General Gamelin, was replaced by General Weygand.
The new commander, after surveying the situation, ordered the Allied armies in Belgium to attack south to break through the thin German spearhead separating them from the forces in France. Simultaneously, he moved north to aid the breakthrough by attacking the Germans. However his attack was beaten off and Lord Gort, the commander of the British expeditionary force, disregarded his orders. This was to provoke bitter French recriminations, but in the light of subsequent events the British decision was probably correct. The Battle of France had already been lost. The thing to do was to prepare for the coming Battle of Britain.
A. "Miracle of Dunkirk"
Lord Gort feared lest the Germans, who had reached the Channel and turned north, cut off his egress to the sea. On May 28 the King of Belgium, Leopold III, ordered the Belgian army to surrender. For this the Belgian government, which had fled to France and was later to go to London, declared him deposed. On the same day the British began to pull out of Belgium by way of the Dunkirk beaches. By June 4 a motley armada of ships, from liners to tugboats, had succeeded in evacuating to Britain some 220,000 British and 112,000 French soldiers.
The public in Britain was unaware of the extent of the catastrophe. The press even hailed the "Miracle of Dunkirk" as victory. But Churchill soberly reminded the country that "wars are not won by evacuations." Indeed, the evacuated army had left behind all its heavy equipment and some 600,000 soldiers, mostly French, who were captured by the Germans or had been killed. If the Germans had a plan and attempted to invade Britain immediately after Dunkirk, they might very well have succeeded.
B. Operation "Red"
Instead, however, they regrouped to carry out operation "Red," the conquest of France herself. General Weygand tried to throw up a defense line north of Paris, but it caved in at the first German touch (June 5). The French army had been organized for and conditioned to a stationary war. The fluid war of movement, imposed on it by the Germans, bewildered it. Above all, it lacked anti-tank guns, without which it was completely helpless against the German Panzers.
The government evacuated Paris, which was declared an open city and left undefended, and when the Germans entered it on June 13 they found it largely deserted. The population had panicked and fled by the thousands, clogging up the roads to the south and impeding the movements of the army trying to throw up a new defense line along the Loire River.
C. Italy declares War
On June 10 Italy declared war on France and attacked in the Alps and along the Riviera. With the lack of vision characteristic of many continental statesmen, Mussolini assumed that the approaching fall of France meant the end of the war. His transparent intention to share in the spoils before the war was over provoked President Roosevelt to break the silence imposed on him by American neutrality and brand the act "a stab in the back."
The second line of defense on the Loire proved no more effective than the first. The government, which had moved to Bordeaux, began to discuss surrender. In a desperate effort to persuade the French government to continue the struggle, if need be from North Africa, Churchill flew to Bordeaux. To move his French colleagues he made a startling proposal: complete fusion of the British and French empires until final victory. But the French statesmen, who regarded France as the heart of the anti-German coalition, to move to Africa appeared absurd and Churchillian rhetoric a counsel of despair. with the fall of France, they were firmly convinced, the war would be over. An era of Pax Germanica was about to begin and the best course for France was to try to accommodate herself to it.
On June 21, 1940, in the same old railway car of Marshal Foch at Compiègne in which the Germans had signed the armistice terms on November 11, 1918, the French delegation faced Hitler. On the following day the second Compiègne armistice was signed. For the moment France had ceased to be a great power.
The Question of German Guilt
In April 1946, Hans Frank confessed his war crimes to the Nuremberg tribunal, which had been convened by the Allied powers to judge the major Nazi leaders, by declaring: "A thousand years will pass and this guilt of Germany will not be erased."' When Frank spoke these words, the heinous crimes perpetrated by the Nazis were fresh in everybody's mind, and there was a universal outcry to punish the guilty. This world-wide revulsion was directed not only at the top Nazis but also at the German people as a whole; they stood condemned in the eyes of the world as the most bestial murderers in history. This was in 1946. Time erases memories and heals wounds; but Nazi Germany continues t.') haunt our collective memory and disturb our sleep. The specter of Hitler is still abroad in the world, and Germans in particular are still living, in part, under his dark shadow. When Germans visit foreign countries, they still evoke unpleasant memories; bitterness toward Germans is still very strong in some countries, and a heavy German accent is still perceived and exploited by our public image-makers as a sign of either arrogant bluster or unbridled aggression.
Given the unspeakable crimes committed by the Nazis, such reactions were to be expected in 1946. Should they still be expected today? One historian has asked: Has the time come to stop blaming the Germans for the crimes of Nazism? The question hides two assumptions, namely, that it would be the task of people other than the Germans to persuade the world of this and that the Germans are either incapable or unqualified to speak for themselves.
In 1946 there was every reason to assume that the Germans were incapable of honestly coming to terms with the crimes in which their Nazi leaders had implicated them. The problem then was one of identifying the guilty and punishing them. Twenty-one major Nazi leaders were tried before the Nuremberg tribunal, an Allied legal machine whose responsibility was to ferret out those who had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. In order to lend respectability and credibility to the proceedings, this trial was presided over by a lord justice of Great Britain, flanked by eight Allied judges and assisted by a judge of the United States Supreme Court who served as chief prosecutor. The defendants were well treated during their incarceration, and they were accorded legal rights that were consistent with the actual practices then standard in Western societies. Despite the claims of Gbring and others that the proceedings were a sham and the outcome a foregone conclusion, the trial was conducted fairly by judges who, though not brilliant, were professional and honest.'
Nuremberg was only one of many trials, held inside and outside Germany, that were conducted to judge those who had committed crimes during World War II. Although the Germans would eventually be able to judge their own people, this option was not available in 1945 because Germany's institutions had collapsed and its people lacked the moral strength to confront the problems of guilt and punishment. The three major Nazi leaders who were responsible for the decisions that led to the tragedy of World War II - Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels - had committed suicide. All the twenty-one defendants at Nuremberg pleaded innocent, and only a few of them admitted that they were guilty of serious transgressions. They also questioned the legality of being tried by non-Germans and by legal principles and procedures for which they claimed there was no precedent. Confronted by incriminating evidence, many dodged behind a series of rationalizations. The most popular was that they merely followed orders and that Hitler or Himmler was really the guilty one. It was, of course, convenient for the top Nazis, as it was to some degree for all Germans, to blame everything on Hitler, for with Hitler dead and unable to speak for himself, they could claim ignorance or innocence or both. Almost to a man, the Nazi leaders also claimed that they were ignorant of what went on beyond their own spheres of competence. Keitel explained that as an assistant to Hitler he had nothing to do with the political motives or backgrounds of the operations he planned. He or jodl, he said, "never discussed with the Fiihrer the question of aggression or defensive war. According to our concept that was not our job."' That his signature was on immoral orders resulting in mass murder was also not his official concern. When the consequences of such decisions were brought home to the defendants, they often used another defense mechanism by downplaying the crime and defusing its sting by what Peter Gay has called "comparative trivialization," which consists in acknowledging brutality but also pointing indignantly at crimes committed by others that were just as bad.' Thus, Rosenberg told Dr. Gilbert, one of the Nuremberg prison psychiatrists, "The Russians have the nerve to sit in judgement-with 30 million lives on their conscience! Talk about persecution of the church! Why they are the world's greatest experts. They killed priests by the thousands in their revolution."' Ribbentrop also parroted the same line: "Haven't you heard about how the Americans slaughtered the Indians? Were they an inferior race too? -Do you know who started the concentration camps in the first place? - The British."' As to those atrocity films, Göring shrugged them off by saying, "Anybody can make an atrocity film if they take corpses out of their graves and then show a tractor shoving them back in again."'
When not indulging in massive denial or comparative trivialization, G6ring and other dyed-in-the-wool Nazis engaged in mutual accusations, which took the form of casting blame on one another for having lost battles or failed to perform duties as administrators or military leaders. Such mutual recrimination, which had been endemic throughout the Nazi period, was as irrelevant as it was unproductive because it foreclosed genuine dialogue and thus blocked the truth. A few Nazi leaders did acknowledge their culpability, even dramatically confessing their crimes in the courtroom, as did Hans Frank, the butcher of Poland. The Allies, however, were not convinced by dramatic confessions, suspecting that such belated urges to confess harbored ulterior motives aimed at enhancing self-importance and pleasing the accuser.
If the highest leaders of Germany did not come clean in 194S, it should not be surprising that the German people, still traumatized by war and economic ruin, were unable to confront the problem of culpability. Ordinary people, too, dodged into convenient excuses, claiming that they were insignificant cogs caught in a totalitarian system where opposition was difficult to organize and invariably resulted in imprisonment or death. Having undergone tremendous suffering at the hands of their own criminal regime and those of their enemies, many Germans came to believe that the suffering already inflicted on them relieved them of the stigma of responsibility or collective guilt. But even if the German people had desired to grapple with the legal or ethical problem of guilt and punishment, circumstances made this increasingly difficult. The country was occupied and administered by the victorious powers that began to impose their own political and ideological agenda on them. For a second time in the twentieth century, the course of Germany's future had been taken out of the hands of Germans and placed in the hands of foreigners. As Friedrich Meinecke justly observed, this made it difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish the task of assigning guilt and meting out punishment from a position of autonomy and strength.' It was the Allied powers that instituted, each in its own peculiar ways, what became known as "denazification" -that is, identifying those who had been seriously implicated in the Nazi regime, punishing them, and excluding them permanently from public office. Five categories were drawn up: (1) major offenders, punishable by death or life imprisonment; (2) offenders, sentenced to a maximum of ten years; (3) lesser offenders, to be placed on probation; (4) followers who went along with the NSDAP; and (S) exonerated persons. Although denazification was placed in the hands of German tribunals (Spruchkammer), the Allied powers supervised the process. Denazification was part of a larger effort by the Allied powers to destroy German militarism and National Socialism, to hold war criminals to account, to force the Germans to pay for war damages, and to embark upon a policy of reeducating the Germans along the political lines deemed appropriate by the occupying powers.
Denazification proceeded by fits and starts between 1945 and 1950. It was clouded over by conflicting ideological aims; the Soviets, who had occupied most of eastern Germany, saw Nazism as rooted largely in socioeconomic conditions associated with capitalism and amenable to Communist treatment, whereas the Anglo-Americans believed that the establishment and acceptance of democratic institutions and practices, combined with major efforts in social rehabilitation, would eventually root out Nazism in a capitalist state. Although many guilty Nazis were punished and imprisoned, as many, if not more, got off scot-free. Many Germans mocked the process, especially the elaborate questionnaires (Fragebogen) that they had to fill out before judgment in every case was rendered. Some later privately admitted that too many of them had been whitewashed by what they called Persilscheine-testimonials obtained by many Germans from priests, anti-Nazis, or Jews who attested to the sterling quality of the holder and were then given to the tribunals as affidavits. A contemporary joke compared the tribunals to laundries that one entered with a brown shirt and exited with a white one.
The coming of the Cold War and the division of Germany into a Communist East and a capitalist-democratic West put an end to any real soul-searching about what would later be called the unmastered past. The question of German guilt remained in a kind of suspended animation. Both the Germans and their guardians were preoccupied with economic reconstruction and the ideological battle between two different ways of life.
The economic miracle of the 1950s, which saw a remarkable resurgence of economic prosperity in West Germany, stifled criticism and reinforced a kind of collective amnesia about the Nazi past that had set in right after the collapse of Nazism in 1945. Although the Bonn government instituted a program of reparations called Wiedergutmachung, aimed at compensating the victims of Nazism, particularly the Jews, for damages to life, health, freedom, or property incurred at the hands of the Nazis, most Germans (East or West) refused to grapple with the Nazi legacy. Important work on Hitler and National Socialism took place in Britain and the United States rather than in Germany, where historians were still reluctant to reopen old wounds and where the relevant documents were difficult to obtain because they had been appropriated by the victorious powers and stored in faraway places. Until the late 1960s German schools continued past practices of neglecting the importance of contemporary history in favor of more remote historical periods, thereby making it conveniently impossible to confront the recent Nazi past.
As the tranquil Adenauer years began to fade by the mid-1960s, giving way to a decade of social conflict, Germans were once more confronted with the dark shadow of Adolf Hitler. The younger generation of Germans, too young to have participated in the crimes of the Third Reich, demanded better answers from their parents about the Third Reich and their involvement in it. In West Germany the younger generation was becoming increasingly Americanized and radicalized, which caused acute generational conflicts and led to widespread criticism of government institutions, particularly the universities where conservatism was strongly entrenched. For better or worse, the social tensions of the 1960s prepared the way for a more open forum of ideas, which unfortunately also erupted into violence and sorely tested West Germany's democratic institutions. Yet, despite a certain shrillness that colored the intellectual climate of opinion in the late 1960s, the Germans made undeniable progress in coming to terms with their recent past. Several tenacious historians, social scientists, and journalists such as Werner Maser, Helmut Heiber, Max Domarus, Ernst Nolte, Martin Broszat, Karl Dietrich Bracher, and Joachim Fest wrote or edited incisive and comprehensive studies on Adolf Hitler and National Socialism. Elementary and secondary schools revamped their outmoded curricula and began to instruct their students more honestly regarding Germany's recent past. Meanwhile, a flood of newspaper and magazine articles, records, and films began to appear on Nazi Germany, which further stimulated public discussion. In 1960 Adolf Eichmann was tried in Jerusalem; from December 1963 to August 1965 Germans followed the Auschwitz proceedings of twenty major offenders who were tried for war crimes at Frankfurt. Information about Nazi atrocities was therefore widely available to ordinary Germans who were receptive to the truth.
Unfortunately, many chose not to watch documentaries such as Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah but preferred instead to listen to the fabrications, half-truths, and plain lies that were still being disseminated by neo-Nazis and fellow travelers, aided and abetted by foreign racists, who wanted to whitewash Nazi crimes. Even in 1969, the author of the first comprehensive German work on National Socialism, Karl Dietrich Bracher, had to admit the persistence of such ideas, again camouflaged under the guise of "National Opposition," which were widely promoted by elite journals, newspapers, a flood of pamphlets, and a steady stream of exculpatory memoirs or sanitized biographies of fallen idols of World War II.' Moreover, Bracher's judgment that this revisionist literature was being handed down to a new generation of politically ignorant youthful followers is as true now as it was then. On the other hand, very few young Germans identified with Nazism; the vast majority supported the democratic way of life. The truth is that most Germans surely wanted to get along with their lives in a resurgent economy, unburdened by the weight of historical crimes.
Yet the ghost of Hitler continues to spook the Germans and the world at large: "Hitler is today all around us - in our loathings, our fears, our fantasies of power and victimization, our nightmares of vile experience and violent endings."" In 1983, Gerd Heidemann, a journalist for the German magazine Stern, presented a stunned world with the "discovery" of Hitler's diaries, which he claimed had been fully authenticated by scholarly experts, including H. R. Trevor-Roper, and would disclose exciting new information about Nazi Germany. The "Hitler diaries" became a media event, dwarfing most other newsworthy stories and making 1983 one of the best years the fiihrer ever had. However, it turned out that these sixty volumes were outright forgeries and that Heidemann had worked closely with the forger, Konrad Kujau, and had almost conned the world into believing that the fiihrer had confided his innermost thoughts over many years to his secret diaries. The Hitler diary affair disclosed some ugly truths about Germans, neo-Nazis, and a world obsessed by sordid scandals and revolting people."
Several years later, a red-hot controversy, involving some foremost German historians, erupted in the German press and quickly assumed ugly political overtones. The debate was set off by several conservative historians, notably Ernst Nolte, who argued that the time had come to view the Third Reich in proper historical perspective, by which he meant liberating historical consciousness from the collective images of horror and barbarism by which Nazi Germany had been perceived. According to Nolte, perceptions of the Third Reich had hardened into a mythology of absolute evil, residing outside historical space and time, which made it impossible to view the period in comparison to any other period and prevented the historian from drawing comparisons between the deeds of Nazism and those of other totalitarian systems that engaged in similar genocidal activities. Nolte had written a comparative study of fascism in the 1960s in which he described fascism as a metaphysical system whose broad aim was to usurp the radicalization of the left, also based on metaphysical assumptions of social reality, and usher in a new homogenized community of the people. Nolte was quite properly describing the clash of absolute ideologies that had plagued the twentieth century with wars of annihilation. In the 1970s and 1980s Nolte left the plane of abstract thought and began to examine how and to what extent the clash of ideologies resulted in genocidal activities on all sides; by so doing, he stirred up a hornet's nest because it was his contention that Hitler's extermination of the Jews was not a unique act but was to be expected from a political religion that presupposed extermination as a necessary element of its worldview. After all, the Communists had long accepted the view that their enemies, the bourgeois, had to be liquidated. To the Bolsheviks, class membership determined whether individuals were either saved or damned. The Soviets had made it unmistakably clear that they intended to exterminate a whole class. Nolte's point was that the Nazis were no different except that they aimed to exterminate races rather than classes. So far, so good, but when Nolte next proceeded to draw causal connections between Bolshevik genocide and the Nazi Holocaust, claiming that the latter was in response to the former, he began to skate on thin ice indeed. It may be true to some extent, as has been argued in this study, that the Nazis thought they were using exterminatory measures out of self-defense against an enemy who was also waging a war of annihilation. Hitler undoubtedly linked Communism with the Jews, which, in his view, 'ustified exterminating them both. But this way of thinking is mad, and by stepping into this pattern of irrational reasoning, if perhaps only to understand it, Nolte created some very unfortunate impressions, namely, that Hitler's policies were understandable and to some extent justified, and that the Holocaust, however unfortunate, was not unique at all but part of a dynamic of hate that was deeply rooted in history.
Nolte is not a racist and neither are the conservative historians who come to his aid, but the cumulative effect of relativizing Nazism was to diminish the uniqueness of the Holocaust and, by extension, to minimize the guilt and responsibility of the generation of Germans who shaped the Third Reich. Very little is served by arguing that the biological extermination of the Jews was a copy of the class extermination practiced by the Communists" and that "Auschwitz did not result in the first place from inherited anti-Semitism and was at its core not a mere genocide (Völkermord), but was really a reaction born out of the anxiety of the annihilating occurrences of the Russian Revolution."" Such speculations can only trivialize the Nazi experience and, by so doing, play into the hands of racist revisionists who argue that German policies toward the Jews were standard in world history because societies always tend toward biological ethnic homogeneity and are therefore justified in removing alien forces. In this view, ethnic cleansing is a necessary measure in order to maintain public health and hygiene.
The Historikerstreit (historians' conflict), pitting conservative against liberal or left-wing historians, was conducted on all sides with such vehemence that the purpose was largely obscured for the public." The controversy illustrates how sensitive the issue of Nazism still is fifty years after its ignominious defeat. It hangs over the Germans, obscuring the past and clouding the future. Even the assertion of minimal national pride has been a problem for Germans because it has frequently evoked paranoia abroad about the rise of a "Fourth Reich." In fact, the Historikerstreit quickly expanded beyond its German forum when foreign pundits began to inject their own tendentious opinions. German historians were accused of whitewashing history and promoting an ominous political agenda aimed at political unification and teaching Germans to get off their knees and learn to walk tall again.
Can Germans walk tall again, or is the burden of Nazi Germany so great that they will always be held under its weight? This question goes to the heart of the problem of guilt. It also goes to the heart of the problem of national identity that is connected to it. As long as Germans lived in a divided nation, these two problems were less acute than they are today in the context of a reunified Germany. A divided nation did not have to worry unduly about a national identity, but with the recent reunification of East and West, the problem of German identity cries out for a workable solution, and we suspect that the answer, in turn, depends on how Germans deal with the question of guilt and responsibility.
In 1947, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, who had a clear conscience, a good heart, and great moral vision, provided a compass that can still serve us in finding our way out of the moral wilderness of Nazism. In trying to examine "German guilt," it is first necessary to define the wrong that was committed that should precipitate guilt. Jaspers and most moral Germans would agree that in the case of Nazism such wrongdoing involved committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. Other crimes included imperialist expansion, the manner in which war was fought, and even the crime of starting the war. There can be no denying that Hitler's Germany was indeed guilty of these crimes. There are, however, as Jaspers points out, types of guilt, which he labels as criminal guilt, political guilt, moral guilt, and metaphysical guilt." Criminal guilt involves anyone who committed a crime under unequivocal laws, with jurisdiction resting with the court. Political guilt attaches to all citizens who tolerated what was done under the name of the state. We are all co-responsible for the way in which we are governed and therefore liable for the consequences of the deeds done by the state, although not every single citizen is liable for the criminal actions cornmitted by specific individuals in the name of the state. urisdiction for political guilt rests ultimately with the victor. Moral guilt involves the individual's awareness of serious transgressions or participation in unethical choices that resulted in specific wrongdoing. Jaspers argued that C4 moral failings cause the conditions out of which both crime and political guilt arise."" jurisdiction of moral guilt rests with one's individual conscience. Finally, there is metaphysical guilt, which arises when we transgress against the general moral order and violate the archetypal moral bonds that connect us to each other as human beings. As humans we are co-responsible for every wrong and injustice that is committed; and by inactively standing by, we are metaphysically culpable. The jurisdiction with metaphysical guilt ultimately rests with God.
Although Jaspers was willing to admit that Germans were morally and metaphysically culpable in the sense of tolerating conditions that gave rise to criminal activities on a large scale, he denies that all Germans were collectively guilty of the crimes committed by the Nazis. For crimes one can punish only individuals; a whole nation cannot be charged with a crime." The criminal is always an individual. Moreover, it would be tragic to repeat the practice of the Nazis and judge whole groups by reference to some abstract "trait" or character. There is no national character that extends to every single individual. This would be committing the fallacy of division that holds that what is true of some presumed whole must be true of all its members. One cannot make an individual out of a people without falling victim to the same disease that afflicted the Nazis. People are not evil; only individuals are.
In rejecting collective guilt, Jaspers by no means excluded the notion of collective responsibility. Adult Germans who lived through the Third Reich and served as active participants in Hitler's world were co-responsible for what happened, perhaps not from a criminal point of view but from a political, moral, and metaphysical one. Indeed, it has been suggested by various philosophers that, as part of a social contract, we are all corporately responsible, even for what was done by others before us because we are the recipients of decisions, good or bad, that have been made for the social group by those who preceded us - decisions, of course, that can and sometimes must be reversed if they are demonstrably unworkable or harmful. Most decent Germans today have seen the need of accepting a corporate responsibility for what was done in the name of Germany by the Nazis, which does not involve collective guilt but a moral obligation to prevent the recurrence of criminal actions that are undertaken in the name of Germany.
If one accepts, as Jaspers did, that Germans were guilty in the sense just described, how far does that guilt extend? This is a question that Jaspers did not examine, but on January 24, 1984, West German chancellor Helmut Kohl, who was visiting Israel, said:
The young German generation does not regard Germany's history as a burden but as a challenge for the future. They are prepared to shoulder their responsibility. But they refuse to acknowledge a collective guilt for the deeds of their fathers. We should welcome this development.'s
Accepting as a fact that Nazi Germany committed horrendous crimes against humanity in general and against the Jewish people in particular; accepting as given that Germans carry varying degrees of guilt, as postulated by Karl Jaspers; and further agreeing with Chancellor Kohl that the degree of guilt diminishes with distance, it appears that the question of German guilt can be likened to the concentric circles formed by ripples when a rock is dropped into a still pond. The rock is the act, the crime, that stirs the pool to movement; the first circle holds those criminally responsible; the second, those politically responsible; the third, those morally responsible; and the fourth and all circles after that are those metaphysically guilty. just as the ripples formed in water eventually lose their momentum and fade back into the stillness of the pond, so should the ripples of guilt be allowed to subside so that quiet and peace can be attained. The political ramifications of not allowing the German people to work through the question of guilt by themselves, especially now that they are again one people and can face such problems on a basis of strength - in short, keeping the issue as alive and pressing in 1995 as it was in 1945 - could be grave not only for the Germans but for the world at large. It will only be when the Germans have rediscovered a sense of humane statehood that Nazi Germany will have passed into history.