Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (8 page)

On the one hand, members of the
Volksgemeinschaft
reaped the benefits, thanks to an activist state which built public housing, gave advice on child rearing, issued cookbooks and provided free vacations and modern medical care—often continuing the same interventionist welfare policies initiated by Social Democrats in the 1920s, and eliciting the same kind of intense civic idealism. On the other hand, however, the health of the collectivity meant the segregation, sterilization and even killing off of mentally, physically or racially diseased bodies by the state, control of marriage and reproduction, and fierce sanctions against anyone who dissented. The traditional family unit was thereby supported but also subjected to a higher power.

Fear of denunciation and surveillance entered the family, the home and even the subconscious mind. “It was about nine o’clock in the evening,” started the dream of a forty-five-year-old German doctor in 1934:

My consultations were over, and I was just stretching out on the couch to relax with a book on Matthias Grünewald, when suddenly the walls of my room and then my apartment disappeared. I looked around and discovered to my horror that as far as the eye could see no apartment had walls any longer. Then I heard a loudspeaker boom, “According to the decree of the 17th of this month on the Abolition of Walls …”
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Having written down his dream, the doctor then dreamed that he had been accused of writing down dreams. Not even sleep was private any longer.

Since freedom of conscience was not recognized, a Jehovah’s Witness who said only “Heil” rather than “Heil Hitler” (on the grounds that such a greeting was due only to God) could be legally dismissed from his or her job. Children educated according to values regarded as incompatible with those of the Hitler Youth were said to be “neglected” by their parents and could be placed in a foster home. In 1938, for instance, one family was broken up because the father had refused to let his children be enrolled in the Hitler Youth. According to the local court, he thereby “abused his right of custody of his children.”
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This abolition of the distinction between private and public spheres of life matters in assessing popular attitudes towards the Nazis. A free citizenry in a democracy chooses whom to support and with what degree of fervour. In the Third Reich, however, anything less than enthusiasm could be seen as potentially subversive and hence punishable. Public opinion did not exist since there was no means to express it; how then do we gauge the popularity of the regime?

Discussing, for example, the question of whether a citizen had a duty to hoist a swastika on festive occasions, one commentator argued that while there was no legal duty, failure to raise the flag might be taken to indicate a want of enthusiasm for National Socialism: the solution, he went on, perhaps lay in a spell in a concentration camp. In another case, a civil servant was prosecuted for refusing to donate money to the Winter Relief Fund. The defendant protested that he gave generously to various other causes, and should be allowed to decide which charity he favoured, especially since donations to the Winter Relief Fund were “voluntary.” His arguments, however, failed to persuade the court, which concluded: “The defendant’s conception of liberty is of an extreme character … For him liberty is the right to neglect all of his duties except where they are explicitly required by law.” This had led him to “a despicable abuse of the liberty which the Leader has granted in full confidence that the German people will not abuse it.”
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In this environment, where the individual was no longer permitted the unimpeded exercise of a free judgement, it was no easy matter for observers—whether secret police or underground opposition—to
assess the state of popular feeling towards the regime. On specific issues—over food prices, the treatment of the Jews, foreign policy, the Church—people spoke fairly forthrightly; but sweeping judgements about the regime itself rarely surfaced, for obvious reasons.

We can, however, point to some general trends. In Nazi Germany, as in the one-party states in Italy and Russia, people routinely drew a distinction between the leader and the party apparatus. Open grumbling and annoyance at the behaviour of local officials were often expressed in the same breath as admiration, reverence and even adoration for the figure of the Leader. The Italian historian Emilio Gentile has talked about the “sacralization of politics” under Mussolini. Leadership cults—whether of the Duce, Hitler or Stalin—helped to unify and integrate populations and reconcile them to otherwise unpopular regimes.
⁶¹
Such a “sacralization of politics” involved lavish spending on monumental buildings and rallying grounds, propaganda exhibitions and publications. Mass rallies, parades and marches offered ritual and projected a sense of power which underlined the atomization and impotence of the individual. In a world of enemies, the Leader offered inspiration and security. But leadership cults were propagated also through the everyday forms of modern life—the spread of radio, the extension of literacy and increased schooling as well as the militarization of communal life in general.

Nor was this simply a process in which people were hoodwinked by powerful regimes through censorship and manipulation. It is, rather, a story of values shared, and argued over jointly, by leadership and population alike. The fundamental utopian projects—construction of Socialism in One Country, of a German
Volksgemeinschaft
or an imperial Italy—projected positive images of a new, undivided nation and were far from unpopular. Policy issues were now debated not between parties but inside the only one permitted to exist, or across ministries and other public and private institutions. Opposition to aspects of the regime could thus be expressed in many forms besides total rejection of the system: in internal party feuds, or siding with “normal” people against party fanatics, or with party “idealists” against those in favour of business as usual.

The high degree of support for the peacetime Reich emerges in
other ways as well. Of course, the Nazi regime used the law and the police as a repressive instrument to elicit mass obedience. Before 1939 the courts passed several thousand death sentences; compared with the twenty-nine death sentences passed on political prisoners in Fascist Italy, or the handful passed by Japanese courts, the relative severity of Nazi law stands out. On the other hand, the coercive powers of the state were never nearly as much in evidence in peacetime Nazi Germany as they were in Stalin’s Soviet Union: Nazi concentration camps in the 1930s housed some 25,000–50,000 prisoners, compared with the millions in the Gulag. Today, those 1950s theories of totalitarianism, which posited a state of affairs in which a small elite kept down an enormous population by sheer terror, look more and more like a comfortable delusion, whose effect is to blind us to the stability of undemocratic regimes in inter-war Europe. The Third Reich was not built on repression alone, nor was that the sole function of its legal system. A majority of the German population failed to vote for Hitler, but also failed to resist him. People accepted the new state of affairs and the regime became part of normal life.
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The differences between Europe’s two largest one-party states—Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia—outweighed their similarities. Nazism came to power with massive electoral backing, communism through a
coup d’état
. The Third Reich was run by a large party whose leader’s power was unquestioned within both party and the country at large. The Soviet Union, with double the population spread over a vast land mass, had a party membership of about the same size, riven by internal and external tensions, beset by an acute succession crisis following Lenin’s death, and ultimately run by a leader always nervous of his position as
primus inter pares
. Whereas Hitler valued his fellow “old fighters” and was acknowledged by them as their
Führer
, Stalin ruthlessly purged the party of his former comrades in order to bolster his personal power. The Night of the Long Knives, for all its brutality, left the bulk of the Nazi Party untouched; by contrast, the Communist Party of the late 1930s had little in common with the revolutionary force created by Lenin.
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These contrasts reflect the fact that the party’s ideological purpose was not the same in the two cases. Hitler’s Germany was the major
industrial power in Europe, with a highly educated labour force; the domestic goal of the NSDAP was the creation of a racial welfare state—the
Volksgemeinschaft
—which built upon and expanded earlier welfare traditions in both its constructive and its coercive aspects. Its key domestic victims were a small minority, unlike the millions of peasants targeted by the Bolsheviks.
Their
goal was far more radical: it involved abolishing private property, developing a new Soviet nationality to hold the Union together, and compressing into a single decade an industrial revolution that had taken much of the latter nineteenth century elsewhere, in the most backward peasant economy in Europe. Hence the extraordinary strains and tensions which the Bolsheviks faced as they tried forcing this project through. It is the difference between these two enterprises which explains the vastly differing levels of domestic violence in the two countries in the 1930s.

But it was precisely because so much of Nazi domestic policy could be fitted smoothly into traditional German life that the genuinely radical proponents of National Socialism, of whom Hitler was the most important, were constantly wary of being buried by business as usual, by the bankers, the middle classes and nationalist conservatives who just wanted order and stability. Normality frightens revolutionaries because it acts as a drag on their utopian dreams, and the German population’s easy acceptance of the regime tended to alarm Hitler almost as much as it alarms us. It was one thing to eliminate Röhm and bring his lawless SA under control in 1934 in order to consolidate the Nazi grip on power; another to give in to the bourgeoisie altogether. “Political lethargy” dismayed the Führer, especially as evidence mounted in 1935–6 of growing public apathy.
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Nazi radicals saw the inglorious fate met by the Fascist Party in Italy, which had been ingested after the conquest of power into the state apparatus and had been obliged to abandon thoughts of a radical Fascist revolution. The leaders of the Third Reich had different aspirations. While Mussolini deified the state, Hitler insisted upon the need to control its inertia and passivity through the dynamism of the party. “Not the state commands us, but we command the state,” he declared at the party congress in 1934. The party’s political message must “penetrate the hearts of the masses for it is our best and
strongest belief-carrier.” To what end? The gigantic rearmament programme launched in the 1930s provides the clue. For the Führer—his eyes set upon the millions of Germans living outside the borders of the Reich—there could be only one answer. Only in war could the Nazi project for the racial salvation of the German nation be realized.
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TWO

Empires, Nations, Minorities

By making the State and the nation commensurate with each other in theory, [nationality] reduces practically to a subject condition all other nationalities that may be within the boundary … according, therefore, to the degree of humanity and civilization in that dominant body which claims all the rights of the community, the inferior races are exterminated, or reduced to servitude, or outlawed, or put in a condition of dependence
.

—LORD ACTON, 1862
¹

The First World War and the collapse of Europe’s old continental empires signalled the triumph not only of democracy but also—and far more enduringly—of nationalism. With the extension of the principle of national self-determination from western to central and eastern Europe, the Paris peace treaties created a pattern of borders and territories which has lasted more or less up to the present. Yet the triumph of nationalism brought bloodshed, war and civil war in its train, since the spread of the nation-state to the ethnic patchwork of eastern Europe also meant the rise of the minority as a contemporary political problem. Where a state derived its sovereignty from the “people,” and the “people” were defined as a specific nation, the presence of other ethnic groups inside its borders could not but seem a reproach, threat or challenge to those who believed in the principle of national self-determination.

The old nineteenth-century empires had operated very differently. They had claimed their legitimacy on the basis of dynastic loyalty, not ethnicity, so it was possible for ethnic Germans to rise to high positions in Tsarist administrations, and for diplomats representing the
Ottoman Empire in international congresses to be Greek. The war of 1914–18 swept this world away. “None but members of the nation may be citizens of the state,” ran point four of the 1920 Nazi Party programme, speaking, in this respect at least, for much of Europe. Discussing the arguments in favour of changing Turkish and Slavic-sounding place-names into Greek ones, the Greek scholar Kambouroglou wrote after the war that “on Greek soil there should remain nothing that is not Greek.”
²