Document-11. |
Chancellor Adolf Hitler
Adolf
Hitler, was leader of the German Nazi party and, from 1933 until his suicidal
death at the end of the war in 1945, became dictator of all Germany. He
rose from the bottom of society to conquer first Germany and then most
of Europe. Riding on a wave of European fascism after World War I and favoured
by traditional defects in German society, especially its lack of cohesion,
he built a Fascist regime unparalleled for barbarism and terror. His rule
resulted in the destruction of the German nation state and its society,
in the ruin of much of Europe's traditional structure, and in the extermination
of about 6 million Jews. He was eventually defeated, but his temporary
success demonstrated frighteningly, at the brink of the atomic age, the
vulnerability of civilization.
Wolfgang Sauer University of California,
Berkeley
Early
Years
Hitler's professed aim in Vienna was to
study art, especially architecture, but he twice failed, in 1907 and 1908,
to get admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts. These failures destroyed what
little order he had established in his life. He withdrew completely from
family and friends and wandered aimlessly through the city, observing its
life. Though he continued to read voraciously, he derived most of his knowledge
from second-hand sources, coffee house talk, newspapers, and pamphlets.
He encountered the writings of an obscure author whose racist and anti-Semitic
ideas impressed him. Politically, he turned to a fervent German nationalism
and a vague anti Marxism. But at this time he was probably mainly interested
in being accepted as an artist and architect.
When the money left by his parents ran
out, Hitler fell into total poverty, lodging in a men's hostel. Grudgingly,
he decided to support himself by painting postcards and watercolors and
to accommodate himself to the mixed company of tramps, outcasts, cranks,
and transients that populated his lodgings. In both respects he did the
barest minimum; he never learned to work regularly, and he remained essentially
a loner. But he learned an invaluable lesson: how to evaluate and exploit
the mentality of these marginal people, the Lumpenproletariat. He never
considered that they posed a social problem, however, and for the rest
of his life he mistook them for the real working class.
Military
Service
Rise
to Political Leadership
Hitler quickly recognized that this party
offered him a better chance for his new goal: political power. In April
1920 he left the army to devote all his time to his position as chief propagandist
for the party. He developed a new system of political propaganda, one that
emphasized mass emotionalism and violent provocation. Hitler was a masterly
demagogue, and the party soon became a factor in Bavarian politics, mainly
attracting the urban petty bourgeoisie. In July 1921, he became party chairman
with dictatorial powers.
His goal was to overthrow the government,
but he had to compete with numerous other Bavarian right-wing groups and
with his friend Ernst Roehm, a Bavarian staff officer. Roehm advocated
the primacy of the military and wanted to incorporate the party's paramilitary
units, called the SA, or Storm Troopers (Sturmabteilung) into his secret
army, while Hitler insisted on the primacy of politics. When the French
occupied the Ruhr in January 1923, German nationalist feelings ran high,
and military authorities prepared for mobilization. The views of Roehm
and the other right-wingers now seemed to be prevailing; Hitler thereupon
tried to regain control of the movement by his Beer Hall Putsch of Nov.
8-9, 1923. The putsch was aimed at capturing, first, the government of
Bavaria, and then the nation's, but the Bavarian authorities were able
to suppress it.
The failure of the putsch destroyed the
party organization, severed its army ties, and resulted in prison terms
for Hitler and other leaders. Hitler used his trial to gain nation wide
attention for his cause. He served nine months of his 5-year sentence in
the fortress of Landsberg, where he wrote Mein Kampf in an effort to demonstrate
that his leadership was based on intellectual as well as political superiority.
Hitler's writing in Mein Kampf is crude
and disorganized, and his ideas are not original, but the book is still
an important document. The most persistent theme is social Darwinism: the
struggle for life governs the relationships of both individuals and nations.
He argued that the German people, supposedly racially superior, were threatened
by liberalism, Marxism, humanism, and bolshevism, which were directed from
behind the scenes by the Jews. Relief would come from a plebiscital dictatorship
that would fight a relentless war against internal and external foes, in
the process conquering Lebensraum (living space) that would make Germany
militarily and economically unassailable. Hitler was much more effective
when writing about the techniques of power and demagoguery. He appears
in the book as a man determined, and to some degree able, to implement
even the maddest schemes.
Rebuilding
the Nazi Party
Social conditions still prevented the party
from growing, however. Interest in extremist solutions had waned as Germany
had regained economic and political stability. In addition, Hitler was
prohibited from speaking, which deprived him of his most powerful weapon.
His breakthrough came in 1929, when the German Nationalist party made him
politically respectable by soliciting his help in its vicious campaign
against the Young Plan's arrangements for German reparations. In September
1930, after the depression had hit Germany, the Nazis made their first
substantial showing (18.3% of the vote) in national elections, and from
then on Hitler seemed to rise irresistibly. He still used propaganda, demagoguery,
and terror, but he now proclaimed, and defended against strong party opposition,
a policy of legality. While his propaganda appealed to the lower class
victims of the depression, his insistence on legality made him acceptable
to the conservatives, nationalists, and the military.
Personal
Life and Rise to Power
In 1932, with Germany close to anarchy,
Hitler's career approached its crisis. He narrowly lost to the incumbent
Paul von Hindenburg in the presidential elections in April, and the Nazis
polled their highest vote (37.2%) in the July elections. In the November
elections, however, the Nazi vote decreased to 33.1%. Hitler had lost prestige
through his stubborn insistence on "total power; the party was psychologically
and financially exhausted; and the depression was beginning to wane. At
this moment, a conservative group led by former Chancellor Franz von Papen
arranged for Hitler to enter the government. On Jan. 30, 1933, the aged
President Hindenburg appointed him chancellor in a coalition government
with the conservatives.
The conservatives deluded themselves in
thinking they could use Hitler for their own interests. Within four months,
Hitler had dramatically established his mastery over them and over all
other political groups. He had destroyed the Communist and Socialist parties
and the labour unions; forced the bourgeois and right wing parties to dissolve;
emasculated or destroyed the paramilitary organizations; eliminated the
federal structure of the republic; and on March 23, 1933, won from a decimated
and intimidated Reichstag an enabling law that gave him dictatorial powers.
His success came from a combination of pseudo democratic mass demonstrations;
terror by the SA and the Nazi controlled police, which accelerated after
the Reichstag fire in February; and a seemingly conservative program that
kept the conservatives quiescent.
Consolidation
of Power
From 1935 to 1938 he consolidated his dictatorship.
The basis of his power was still his control over the masses, who admired
him as the "man of the people and falsely credited Germany's economic recovery
to him. (Its real architect had been Hjalmar Schacht, a conservative banker.)
In 1937-1938 the economy reached full employment, thanks to an increasingly
reckless rearmament policy. Hitler also protected his position by promoting
rivalries among his subordinates, and he encouraged Himmler to build a
formidable apparatus of terror by means of the SS, the Gestapo, and the
concentration camps. He then escalated the persecution of the Jews through
the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which deprived Jews of their citizenship and
forbade marriages between Jews and non-Jews. Additional restrictive laws
were passed during the next few years, and Hitler's policies resulted in
a large-scale emigration of Jews, socialists, and intellectuals and in
the virtual destruction of Weimar Germany's highly creative culture.
Preparations
for War
From the outset, Hitler had been determined
to conquer Lebensraum. In November 1937 he disclosed his war plans to his
ministers, and when they objected, he dismissed Schacht and the heads of
the army and of the foreign ministry. By replacing these men, he eliminated
the last traces of the conservative alliance and cleared the way for war.
Under the guise of a policy of self-determination, Hitler annexed Austria
in March 1938 and the Sudetenland, the German inhabited border areas of
Czechoslovakia, in October. By disclaiming any further expansionist aims,
he won approval of the Sudetenland occupation from Britain, France, and
Italy at a conference in Munich. When he nevertheless extended his rule
over all of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and then threatened Poland, Britain
and France abandoned their appeasement policy and guaranteed Poland's integrity.
Unimpressed, Hitler continued his preparations by signing a nonaggression
pact with Russia on August 23. When he attacked an unyielding Poland on
September 1, Britain and France surprised him by declaring war.
Appearing before the Nazi Reichstag (Parliament)
on the sixth anniversary of his coming to power, Adolph Hitler made a speech
commemorating that event and also made a public threat against the Jews...
"In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it. During the time of my struggle for power, it was in the first instance only the Jewish race that received my prophecies with laughter when I said that I would one day take over the leadership of the State, and with it, that of the whole nation, and that I would then among other things settle the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think that for some time now, they have been laughing on the other side of their face. Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"Early Successes in World War II Allied inactivity and a lightning victory over Poland permitted Hitler to mobilize his forces fully and to persuade his reluctant generals to intensify the war effort. In April 1940, German troops conquered Norway and Denmark; in May and June they swept through the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. On June 22, a triumphant Hitler forced France to sign an armistice at Compiegne, the site of the armistice of 1918. He was at the peak of his career, having now proved himself a superior military commander, and he began to build his New Order in Europe. The New Order's only tangible result was Heinrich Himmler's policy of racial reorganization. It combined a senseless resettlement of racially "valuable populations with a relentless suppression and extermination of "subhumans, among them about 6 million Jews, through slave labour, concentration camps, gas chambers, firing squads, and starvation. Meanwhile, Britain's determination and the imminent conflict with Russia forced Hitler to go on. After unsuccessfully trying to defeat Britain through a heavy bombing attack on the British Isles and a ground offensive against British troops in North Africa, Hitler turned with full force to the east. On June 22, 1941, he launched his attack on the Soviet Union. But the German advance was stopped before Moscow by a harsh winter and a Russian counterattack. At the same time Japan, with which Germany had a nonaggression pact, attacked Pearl Harbour, and Hitler declared war on the United States. Military
Reversals
Hitler's
Last Days
On June 6, 1944, the Allies invaded France;
later, the Russians broke through in the east, forcing Hitler to move his
headquarters to Berlin. He showed increasing signs of physical and mental
disintegration, intensified by an illness that had not been properly treated
by his physician, a quack doctor, upon whom Hitler had become dependent
for injections. With the Allies crossing the Rhine River and the Russians
closing in on Berlin, he at last acknowledged defeat and decided to commit
suicide; but he wanted Germany to follow suit. Germany, he argued, had
proved itself unworthy of his genius and had failed to prevail in the struggle
for life.
As his personality disintegrated, however,
so did the loyalty of his lieutenants. Albert Speer, the minister of armaments
and munitions, refused to carry out Hitler's order to institute a scorched-earth
policy in Germany; Goering, from his retreat in Bavaria, tried to usurp
Hitler's leadership; and Himmler attempted to negotiate with the Allies.
Hitler condemned them, but without effect. Only Goebbels, Bormann, and
Eva Braun, whom he now married, remained with him. Hitler dictated his
political testament and appointed Adm. Doenitz his successor. With the
Russians rapidly approaching his bunker in Berlin, Hitler and Eva committed
suicide on April 30, 1945.
The above file is courtesy "Grollier" The Battle of Britain - 1940
website © Battle of Britain Historical Society
2007
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