Bernard Weiner
America in 2003 Vs. Germany in 1933.
Sat Jun 28 17:08:20 2003
208.152.73.138

Germany in 1933: The easy slide into fascism
By Bernard Weiner
Co-editor of The Crisis Papers & Online Journal Contributing Writer

June 13, 2003 - If my email is any indication, a goodly number of
folks wonder if they're living in America in 2003 or Germany in 1933.

All this emphasis on nationalism, the militarization of society,
identifying The Leader as the nation, a constant state of fear and
anxiety heightened by the authorities, repressive laws that shred
constitutional guarantees of due process, wars of aggression launched
on weaker nations, the desire to assume global hegemony, the merging
of corporate and governmental interests, vast mass-media propaganda
campaigns, a populace that tends to believe the slogans and lies it's
fed without asking too many questions, a timid opposition that barely
contests the administration's reckless adventurism abroad and police-
state policies at home, etc. etc.

The parallels are not exact, of course; America in 2003 and Germany
70 years earlier are not the same, and Bush certainly is not Adolf
Hitler. But there are enough disquieting similarities in the two
periods at least to see what we can learn - cautionary tales, as it
were - and then figure out what to do with our knowledge.

The veneer of civilization is thin. We know this from our own
observations, and various writers - from Shakespeare to Sinclair
Lewis ("It Can't Happen Here") - have shown us how easily populations
can be manipulated by leaders skillfully playing on patriotic emotion
or racial or nationalist feelings.

Whole peoples, like individuals, can become irrational on occasion -
sometimes for a brief moment, sometimes for years, sometimes for
decades. Ambition, hatred, fear can get the better of them, and gross
lies told by their leaders can deceive their otherwise rational
minds. It has happened, it happens, it will continue to happen.

One of the most outrageous and horrific examples of an entire country
falling into national madness probably was Hitler's Germany from 1933-
45. The resulting world war was disastrous, leading to more than 40
million deaths.

A good share of what we know about how this happened in Germany
usually comes to us many years later from post-facto books, looking
backward to the horror. There are very few examples of accounts
written from the inside at the very time the events were unfolding.

One such book is "Defying Hitler," by the noted German
journalist/author Sebastian Haffner. The manuscript was found,
stuffed away in a drawer, by Haffner's son in 1999 after his father's
death at age 91. Published in 2000, the book became an immediate best
seller in Germany and was published last year in English, translated
by the son, Oliver Pretzel. (His father's original name was Raimund
Pretzel; as Sebastian Haffner, he went on to a highly successful
career, writing in England during the war and then later back in
Germany. He authored "From Bismarck to Hitler" and "The Meaning of
Hitler," among many other works.)

"Defying Hitler" is a brilliantly written social document, begun (and
ended abruptly) in 1939; even though it fills in the reader on German
history from the First World War on, its major focus is on the year
1933, when, as Hitler assumed power, Haffner was a 25-year-old law
student, in-training to join the German courts as a junior
administrator.

You find yourself reading this book in amazement; there is so much
historical perspective, so much sweep of what was going on and
predictions of what later was to happen, so many insights into what
led so many ordinary Germans to join with or acquiesce to the Nazi
program - how could anyone so young be so prescient in the midst of
the brutal sordidness that was Nazism? (Indeed, some critics claimed
that Haffner must have rewritten the book decades later; every page
of the original manuscript was sent to laboratories, which
authenticated that it indeed had been composed in 1939.)

The Individual in Society

What distinguishes "Defying Hitler," in addition to its superb
writing, is that Haffner focuses on "little people" like himself,
rather than on the machinations of leaders. He wants to explore how
ordinary Germans, especially non-Nazi and anti-Nazi Germans,
permitted themselves to be swallowed whole into the Hitlerian maw.

Haffner makes occasional broad pronouncements about German character
traits ("As Bismarck once remarked in a famous speech, moral courage
is, in any case, a rare virtue in Germany, but it deserts a German
completely the moment he puts on a uniform"), but he devotes a good
deal of his attention to the question of personal responsibility. If
you read ordinary history books, he says, "you get the impression
that no more than a few dozen people are involved, who happen to
be 'at the helm of the ship of state' and whose deeds and decisions
form what is called history.

"According to this view, the history of the present decade [the
1930s] is a kind of chess game among Hitler, Mussolini, Chiang Kai-
Shek, Roosevelt, Chamberlain, Daladier, and a number of other men
whose names are on everybody's lips. We anonymous others seem at best
to be the objects of history, pawns in the chess game, who may be
pushed forward or left standing, sacrificed or captured, but whose
lives, for what they are worth, take place in a totally different
world, unrelated to what is happening on the chessboard.

" . . . It may seem a paradox, but it is nonetheless the simple
truth, to say that on the contrary, the decisive historical events
take place among us, the anonymous masses. The most powerful
dictators, ministers, and generals are powerless against the
simultaneous mass decisions taken individually and almost
unconsciously by the population at large . . . Decisions that
influence the course of history arise out of the individual
experiences of thousands or millions of individuals."

The Riddle of Hitler's Rise

Haffner tries to solve the riddle of the easy acceptance of fascism
in Hitler's Third Reich. In March of 1933, a majority of German
citizens did not vote for Hitler. "What happened to that majority?
Did they die? Did they disappear from the face of the earth? Did they
become Nazis at this late stage? How was it possible that there was
not the slightest visible reaction from them" as Hitler, installed by
President Paul von Hindenburg as chancellor, began slowly and then
more quickly consolidating power and moving Germany from a democratic
state to a totalitarian one?

All along the way, Hitler would propose or actually promulgate
regulations that sliced away at German citizens' freedoms - usually
aimed at small, vulnerable sectors of society (labor unionists,
communists, Jews, mental defectives, et al.) - and few said or did
anything to indicate serious displeasure. In the early days, on those
rare occasions when there was concerted negative reaction, Hitler
would back off a bit. And so the Nazis grew bolder and more voracious
as they continued slicing away at civil society. Many Germans
(including some of Hitler's original corporate backers) were
convinced Nazism would collapse as it became more and more extreme;
others chose denial. It was easier to look the other way.

Haffner saw what was starting to happen, but retreated into his law
studies. Even while the Brown Shirts were beating and killing people
in the streets, the courts with which he worked remained a solid
bulwark in defense of traditional democratic principles. And then one
day, the Nazis simply marched into the Berlin court buildings and
took over Germany's judicial system. Haffner was shaken to the core,
but continued studying for his final exams.

Shortly thereafter, he and his fellow students were dispatched to a
kind of boot camp for ideological and military training. Haffner, a
Christian anti-Nazi, found himself, to his astonishment and horror,
wearing jackboots, a swastika and learning how to kill.

In an inner monologue, Haffner says: "There are some things I must
never do: never say anything that I would be ashamed of later.
Shooting at targets is all right. But not at people. I must not
commit myself, or sell my soul . . . Oh dear! It dawned on me that I
had already relinquished and lost everything. I wore a uniform with a
swastika armband. I stood to attention and cleaned my rifle. . . .
But that did not count: it was not me that did it; it was a game and
I was acting a part.

"Only what if, dear God, there was some court that did not recognize
this defense, but simply wrote down everything as it happened; that
did not look into my heart, but simply noted the swastika armband?
Before that court I was in a wretched position. Dear God, where had I
gone wrong? What should I say to the judge who asked, 'You wear a
swastika armband and say that you do not want to. Then why do you
wear it?'"

Nazi propaganda, policies and terror had broken down traditional
support networks. You couldn't be sure whom to trust. Everyone could
be on the government payroll, or could turn into informants to save
their skins. And so arms went out in Nazi salutes, militarist songs
were sung at rallies and on the streets, "each one of us the Gestapo
of the others." In fear, individualism was crushed, leaving most
citizens to relate only to The Leader, or to their military units,
the comradeship offered by fascism.

Millions of Marks for a Loaf of Bread

Then there was the economic factor, the terror associated with having
no money with which to live. One reads Haffner's description of the
hyper-inflation crisis, but it's difficult to accept or
understand: "No other nation has experienced anything comparable to
the events of 1923 in Germany. All nations went through the Great
War, and most of them have also experienced revolutions, social
crises, strikes, redistributions of wealth, and currency devaluation.
None but Germany has undergone the fantastic, grotesque extreme of
all of these together; none has experienced the gigantic, carnival
dance of death, the unending, bloody Saturnalia, in which not only
money but all standards lost their value.

" . . . Anyone who had savings in a bank or bonds saw their value
disappear overnight. Soon it did not matter whether it was a penny
put away for a rainy day or a vast fortune. Everything was
obliterated . . . A pound of potatoes which yesterday had cost fifty
thousand marks now cost a hundred thousand. The salary of sixty-five
thousand marks brought home the previous Friday was no longer
sufficient to buy a packet of cigarettes on Tuesday . . . In August,
the dollar reached a million [marks]. . . . In September, a million
marks no longer had any practical value . . . At the end of October,
it was a billion . . . The atmosphere became revolutionary once
again."

When citizens face uncertainty on this scale = and the fear and
dislocation that attend all such social traumas - a man on a white
horse promising to restore order has great appeal, even to some
staunch democrats.

There were other ingredients that went into the bubbling fascist vat:
the humiliating terms of the Versailles Treaty that were placed on
defeated Germany after World War I; the unceasing propaganda barrage
in the mass media, helping citizens to agree with the government; the
martial mentality that pervaded society. "From 1914 to 1918 a
generation of German schoolboys daily experienced war as a great,
thrilling, enthralling game between nations, which provided far more
excitement and emotional satisfaction than anything peace could
offer; and that is where [Nazism] draws its allure from: its
simplicity, its appeal to the imagination, and its zest for action;
but also its intolerance and its cruelty toward internal
opponents . . . Ultimately, that is also the source of Nazism's
belligerent attitude toward neighboring states. Other countries are
not regarded as neighbors, but must be opponents, whether they like
it or not."

And then there is the inexplicable mystique that surrounds such men
as Hitler that mesmerizes and lures millions into their web. "If my
experience of Germany has taught me anything, it is this: Rathenau
[who led a progressive government in 1921-22, and was then
assassinated by anti-Semitic thugs] and Hitler are the two men who
excited the imagination of the German masses to the utmost; the one
by his ineffable culture, the other by his ineffable vileness. Both,
and this is decisive, came from inaccessible regions, from sort
of 'beyond.' The one from a sphere of sublime spirituality where the
cultures of three millennia and two continents hold a symposium; the
other from a jungle far below the depths plumbed by the basest penny
dreadfuls, from an underworld where demons rise from a brewed-up
stench of petty-bourgeois backrooms, doss-houses, barrack latrines,
and the hangman's yard. From their respective 'beyonds,' they both
drew a spellbinding power, quite irrespective of their politics."

When Hitler's in-your-face brand of "beyond" power - with its
meanness and arrogance and menace, throwing opponents in jail,
beating them, even killing them - met the traditional democratic
culture, those on the other end often had no tools at their disposal
to combat the new hardball politics: "It was then that the real
mystery of the Hitler phenomenon began to show itself: the strange
befuddlement and numbness of his opponents, who could not cope with
his behavior and found themselves transfixed by the gaze of the
basilisk, unable to see that it was hell personified that challenged
them."

The Big Lie Technique

And how did Haffner deal for so long with this menacing force in
front of him? "What saved me was . . . my nose. I have a fairly well
developed figurative sense of smell, or to put it differently, a
sense of the worth (or worthlessness!) of human, moral, political
views and attitudes. Most Germans unfortunately lack this sense
almost completely. The cleverest of them are capable of discussing
themselves stupid with their abstractions and deductions, when just
using their noses would tell them that something stinks."

Given their built-in weakness and their willingness to swallow the
most outrageous Big Lies emanating from the propaganda ministry and
the media, most Germans were fruit waiting to be plucked by the Nazi
harvesters. "They still fall for anything. After all that, I do not
see that one can blame the majority of Germans who, in 1933, believed
that the Reichstag fire was the work of the Communists. [The
Parliament burned down and a convenient Communist was fingered as the
arsonist, which the Nazis used as the excuse to unleash police state
tactics against all opponents.] What one can blame them for, and what
shows their terrible collective weakness of character clearly for the
first time during the Nazi period, is that this settled the matter.
With sheepish submissiveness the German people accepted that, as a
result of the fire, each one of them lost what little personal
freedom and dignity was guaranteed by the constitution; as though it
followed as a necessary consequence."

In short, what should have been a strong political and moral
opposition movement to Hitlerian policies, meekly acceded to the
destruction of their country's institutions of law and social
harmony. The result in society was a clear leaning toward the
dynamic, muscular policies advocated by the Nazis, and a
seething "anger and disgust with the cowardly treachery of their own
[opposition] leadership."

Of course, fear of police state action always was operative. "Join
the thugs to avoid being beaten up. Less clear was a kind of
exhilaration, the intoxication of unity, the magnetism of the masses.
Many also felt a need for revenge against those who had abandoned
them. Then there was a peculiarly German line of thought: 'All the
predictions of the opponents of the Nazis have not come true. They
said the Nazis could not win. Now they have won. Therefore the
opponents were wrong. So the Nazis must be right.' There was also
(particularly amo