M01_WILL3192_04_SE_C01.QXD 12/10/10 11:00 Page 1 Part One INTRODUCTION M01_WILL3192_04_SE_C01.QXD 12/10/10 11:00 Page 2 M01_WILL3192_04_SE_C01.QXD 12/10/10 11:00 Page 3 1 The historical debate he Third Reich has had a truly global impact. Not only did its destru- fascism Between 1919 ction act as a catalyst for the Cold War, and the subsequent partition and 1945 there were many varieties of fascism, Tof Germany for 45 years, but it also accelerated de-colonisation and the essence of which was: the creation of the Israeli state. Attempts to define the nature of National a nationalist ideology and Socialism (hereafter Nazism) began as soon as it became a major political an authoritarian state with a charismatic leader- force in the 1930s and have continued unabated ever since, which has ship ready to use force resulted in an academic literature ‘beyond the scope even of specialists’ to achieve national aims. (Hildebrand, 1991: 101). Marxist Referring to In assessing the nature of Nazism, contemporaries raised questions which Marxism Philosophical are still relevant today: was it a version of fascism or totalitarianism (see system constructed by Karl Marx (1818–83). below), which had more in common with Stalin’s Russia than Mussolini’s Its essence was that Italy, or was it a unique revolutionary phenomenon? On the Left, Nazism the economic system of was defined in broadly Marxist terms. Orthodox Marxist thinkers perceived a country determined its political and social it to be a mass movement manipulated by big business and finance in a structures. Marx was last-ditch attempt to defend capitalism from socialism. Georgi Dimitrov, the convinced that capitalism would be overthrown by General Secretary of the Comintern, defined fascism, in which he included the workers. Nazism, in 1935 as ‘the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most imperialist elements of finance capital’ (in Kershaw, Comintern The Commun- ist international move- 1993: 10). In this context Hitler was nothing more than a puppet of big ment set up in 1919 business and finance. Other more independent Marxist thinkers took their to organise worldwide revolution. arguments from Marx’s seminal essay on Napoleon’s coup of 2 December 1851, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and compared fascism to Bonapartism Political system employed by Bonapartism in the France of Napoleon III. On the one hand this had made Napoleon III of France life safe for capitalism as it destroyed working-class political power, but it (1851–70). He created a also had its own dynamism and ended up by controlling the capitalist class, dictatorship which was supported by the wealthy too, even though it created an environment basically favourable to capitalism elites and the lower [Doc. 1, p. 146]. middle classes. He A different approach was taken by the broadly nationalist school of his- attempted to strengthen it through a vigorous torians within Germany in 1933, who interpreted Hitler’s rise to power as assertion of French a national revolution, which was both anti-liberal and anti-Marxist. Johannes national interests. M01_WILL3192_04_SE_C01.QXD 12/10/10 11:00 Page 4 4 THE THIRD REICH Haller, for instance, argued that it was one of the most powerful ideas of the time that ‘national and social were not opposites’ (in Michalka, 1984: 361). This assessment met with some understanding in Britain, where, as late as 1935, Churchill still believed that Hitler might one day be regarded by history as one of those ‘great figures whose lives have enriched the story of mankind’ (Hildebrand, 1974: 602), while Lloyd George saw him as a libera- tor of the German people. [Doc. 14, p. 156] By far the most penetrating of the early non-Marxist studies of Nazism was written by Hermann Rauschning, the former Nazi President of the Danzig Senate, who in his classic study Germany’s Revolution of Destruction argued that Nazism was a ‘revolutionary power whose creed was action for action’s sake and whose tactics were the destruction and undermining of all that is in the existing order’ (Rauschning, 1939: 13) [Doc. 2, p. 146]. In the war years and early post-war period, both Western and Soviet historians and propagandists, like Rohan Butler (1941), Sir Robert Vansittart (1941) and Edmond Vermeil (1945), in their search for the origins of Nazism, attempted to identify lines of continuity in German history, which allegedly stretched ‘from Luther to Hitler’. In response to this blanket condemnation of their nation’s past, German historians such as Friedrich Meinecke and Gerhard Ritter argued that Nazism could only be understood within the context of the general European crisis triggered by the First World War. The outbreak of the Cold War in Europe had a considerable impact on the historical debate on Nazism. Both East and West Germany sought to interpret their common Nazi past differently. For East German historians, Georgi Dimitrov’s definition of fascism remained valid and an essential rallying cry against the capitalist West. For West Germans, and increasingly the West as a whole, Nazism was seen as a variant of totalitarianism. According to Carl Friedrich, the German émigré political scientist in the USA, it had in common with Russian Communism ‘a total ideology, a single mass party, a terroristic secret police, a monopoly of mass communications, a monopoly of weapons, and a centrally directed planned economy’ (Friedrich and Brzezinski, 1956: 294). This ‘totalitarian’ definition of Nazism was the dominant theme in western research on Nazism until the 1960s, when an increasing number of specialised studies began to show that the concept of totalitarianism did not do justice to an understanding of the structure of the Third Reich and the role of Hitler. A dramatic change in historical thinking was signalled by the Fischer controversy of the early 1960s. In his Griff nach der Weltmacht, Fischer returned to the thesis of continuity in German history by arguing that the expansionist territorial aims of the German elites in the First World War were broadly similar to Hitler’s. His book had a profound influence on German historians and helped to direct historical research back to the vital M01_WILL3192_04_SE_C01.QXD 12/10/10 11:00 Page 5 The historical debate 5 question of continuities in the role of elites and social structure between Wilhelmine Germany and the Nazi period. In that sense Fischer could be called the father of the new structuralist school of historians which domi- nated modern German history for the next 30 years. This methodology was further developed by Hans-Ulrich Wehler in his study of the German Empire (1871–1918), where he deliberately avoided close studies of personalities and analysed the empire ‘as a totality’ with its interconnections between politics, the economy and society. Primarily, Wehler was motivated by the desire ‘to investigate why Hitler’s National Socialist regime came to power some dozen years after the end of the monar- chy’ (Wehler, 1985: 7). He established a ‘new orthodoxy’, which argued that new orthodoxy The Germany’s failure to develop into a parliamentary democracy during the evolution of what was originally a revisionist Kaiserreich set Germany on the special path, or Sonderweg, that ultimately historical interpretation led to the Third Reich. Applying similar analytical methods to the Third into an almost univers- Reich, structuralists, like Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen, have chal- ally held interpretation. lenged the orthodox view of a virtually all-powerful Hitler and stressed that structuralists The name the study of political leaders and ‘great men’ needs to be complemented by given to the school of a structural analysis of contemporary society (Broszat, 1981; Mommsen, historians, the most emi- nent members of which 1979). They argue that historians should concentrate more on explaining are Hans Mommsen, how Nazi society worked and on showing that Hitler himself was often a Broszat and Wehler, which applies a structural prisoner of forces and structures which he might have unleashed or created analysis to modern but could not always control. Inevitably this emphasis on structural deter- German history, particu- minants, which played down political and diplomatic history as well as the larly the Third Reich. They play down the role role of the individual in history, met with fierce opposition from the more of Hitler and instead traditional historians, or intentionalists, such as Andreas Hillgruber and place more emphasis Klaus Hildebrand, who see Hitler and his aims as central to the study of on the German elites and the polycratic nature of the Third Reich. This debate between the intentionalists and structuralists, the regime. as will be seen in the chapters that follow, still pervades every aspect of modern research on the Third Reich and Nazism. intentionalists Historians who stress the import- ance of the individual and personal intention in history. Thus inten- tionalists, such as CAN THE THIRD REICH BE ‘HISTORICISED’? Andreas Hillgruber, Klaus Hildebrand and Lucy One of the dilemmas confronting historians of the Third Reich is that the Davidowicz, stress the aims and intentions of appalling atrocities carried out by the Nazis make historical objectivity, or Hitler and emphasise his historicisation, difficult to achieve. When the orders for dealing with the key role in the formula- Russians were issued to the German army in 1941 (see pages 103–4), tion of policies, particu- larly foreign policy and Major-General von Tresckow observed with horror to his fellow officer, the campaign against Rudolf von Gersdorff, that guilt would fall on the Germans for a hundred the Jews ending in the Holocaust. years ‘and not just on Hitler alone, but on you and me, your wife and mine, your children and my children, the woman crossing the road now, and the M01_WILL3192_04_SE_C01.QXD 12/10/10 11:00 Page 6 6 THE THIRD REICH boy playing with a ball over there’ (Burleigh, 2000: 707).