The Third Reich Between Vision and Reality: New Perspectives on German History 1918–1945
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The Third Reich Between Vision and Reality: New Perspectives on German History 1918–1945 Hans Mommsen Editor BERG German Historical Perspectives/XII The Third Reich Between Vision and Reality New Perspectives on German History 1918–1945 Edited by HANS MOMMSEN Oxford • New York First published in 2001 by Berg Editorial offices: 150 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JJ, UK 838 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10003-4812, USA © Hans Mommsen 2001 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg. Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 1 85973 254 2 (Cloth) Typeset by JS Typesetting, Wellingborough, Northants. Printed in the United Kingdom by Antony Rowe. Contents Editorial Preface Gerhard A. Ritter and Anthony J. Nicholls vii Introduction Hans Mommsen 1 Violence and Sacrifice: Imagining the Nation in Weimar Germany Bernd Weisbrod 5 Hitler and Vienna: The Truth about his Formative Years Brigitte Hamann 23 Fatal Attraction: The German Right and Italian Fascism Wolfgang Schieder 39 People’s Community and War: Hitler’s Popular Support Norbert Frei 59 The Nazi Boom: An Economic Cul-de-Sac Christoph Buchheim 79 Ideological Legitimization and Political Practice of the Leadership of the National Socialist Secret Police Ulrich Herbert 95 The Indian Summer and the Collapse of the Third Reich: The Last Act Hans Mommsen 109 HANS MOMMSEN Introduction This collection of scholarly contributions on German history during the inter-war period focuses on the elements of continuity between the Weimar period and the National Socialist dictatorship, but tries simultaneously to shed light on several of the most controversial issues of recent research, especially the pre- conditions for the implementation of the Holocaust as well as the relative modernity and economic efficiency of the Nazi regime. From different angles, the contributions to this volume coincide in their endeavour to analyse the ideological and psychological pre- conditions for Hitler’s rise to power and the considerable popular support for his rule, which lasted well into the war. In many respects National Socialism skilfully exploited the resentment, particularly among the German upper and middle classes, arising from the defeat of 1918, which many were unwilling to accept. This must be perceived within the larger context of the political and intellectual crisis in Germany; as a reflection of social cleavages which had been consider- ably sharpened by the material losses of the war and the economic crises of the post-war period. In dealing with the widespread acceptance of the use of violence in the political arena Bernd Weisbrod describes the vunerability above all of the German intellectuals and middle class to a fundamentalist appeal to the ‘imagined community’ of the nation and of an adoration of violence and sacrifice which then was utilized by Hitler and culminated in anti-Jewish persecution. Parallel to this, Brigitte Hamann in her report on Hitler’s formative years in Vienna shows convincingly that the future dictator was exposed to eccentric world views of a völkisch and racist persuasion in the Habsburg capital and acquired there a specifically visionary perception of politics. However, the extremely destructive influence 1 2 Hans Mommsen of völkisch and nationalistic advisers during his stay in the Reichswehr group command IV in Munich early in 1919 have been crucial for the formation of his Weltanschauung. In the following chapter Wolfgang Schieder depicts the impact the Fascist experiment in Italy had on the German bourgeois right which was ready to support any kind of leadership cult and perceived Mussolini’s dictatorship as a model for the solution of Germany’s domestic crisis. Schieder describes the deep impression Mussolini made on his German visitors, whom he would most frequently address in their mother tongue, and the early contact between leading members in the Fascist and Nazi parties. Moreover, he underlines the tactical use by Hitler of the widespread philo-fascism among the German elite and raises the question to what extent the sympathies of the German conservative elite with Italian Fascism paved the way for Hitler’s seizure of power. Turning to conditions under the Nazi dictatorship, Norbert Frei analyses the impact of the Volkgemeinschaft myth on the German population at large and its role in compensating for any clear-cut domestic political programme by presenting Germans with the visionary political goal of a classless society, excluding however all alien racial groups. He stresses the fact that the German population was strongly committed to the idea of the Volkgemeinschaft and that this contributed to the massive popularity of Hitler, especially after the victories over Poland and France. Its integretative function even withstood the burdens connected with the protracted war against the Soviet Union and did not wither away before the defeat at Stalingrad early in 1943, but turned then into a prevailing mood of emptiness and resignation. This created apathy, combined with an increasing, if unadmitted, feeling of complicity in Nazi crimes. In contradiction to the widespread assumption that the NS regime successfully exploited the German economy for its ends and achieved an impressive economic expansion, Christoph Buchheim in his essay portrays Nazi economic policy as anything but a success story and argues that it inevitably led to complete economic disarray, although the latter was retarded by the ruthless economic exploitation of occupied countries. Thus he describes the uncoordinated and contra- dictory traits of the Nazi economic system, which had to rely upon unremitting expansion and escalating violence and was not able to achieve any long-term stability. There existed, however, remarkable pockets of rationality, as Ulrich Herbert, by drawing a line from the völkisch anti-Semitic indoctrination Introduction 3 practised in Weimar Republic universities to the rather consistent ideological world view of the leading officers in the Main Security Office, points out. In his view, the unremitting energy which led to the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’ emerged mainly from ideological premises and cannot be described simply as the outcome of bureaucratic processes. He argues, however, that, while the different varieties of anti-Semitic beliefs within the German population were a precondition for the Holocaust, its actual implementation relied on a progressive interaction between the local perpetrators and the central authorities of the SS, who were characterized by a calculating and unemotional anti-Jewish mentality. In a concluding essay Hans Mommsen deals with the progressive dissolution of the Nazi regime, describing its ultimate decay after the battle of Stalingrad in January 1943 until its complete breakdown in May 1945. This chapter starts from the assumption that the Nazi regime in its decline exposed its very nature in a rather condensed form and returned to the concepts of the combat period before 1933 as well as to the revolutionary objectives which had been postponed in 1933/4. It took refuge in the dream of complete racial and political homogeneity to achieve either survival or a heroic downfall which would preserve the National Socialist ideal for future generations. The recourse to unrestricted party rule and an overall mobilisation of the party for the war effort meant that there was no possibility of stopping a war that was already lost before the complete collapse occurred together with Hitler’s suicide, which necessarily led to an all-embracing destruction of the Nazi state. The tendency of the Nazi movement to return to its origins revealed what all the time had been the key of the Nazi credo – the demand for unshakeable belief as an end in itself, which fitted well enough into the fundamentalist subcurrent in German political culture depicted by Bernd Weisbrod. The collection of essays in this volume cannot include all the aspects of recent research on Germany in the inter-war period, but provides a representative picture of new trends and frames of reference within German historiography, designed to put the history of Nazi Germany into a broader social and intellectual context as well as overcoming the oversimplified interpretations presented by the theory of totalit- arianism. This page intentionally left blank BERND WEISBROD Violence and Sacrifice: Imagining the Nation in Weimar Germany For some years now there has been talk about the alleged modernity of the Third Reich, its ugly modern face of barbarism as well as its hidden impact on the push towards modernity in post-war Germany. Some have read back the experience of the 1950s into the ‘good years’ of the Third Reich – or rather the myth of the Wirt- schaftswunder, which was itself generated to forget the hardship experienced by refugees, the old and the unskilled. Some mistook what was ‘modern’ in National Socialist ‘social policies’ on the shop floor or in mass culture as a harbinger of ‘modern times’, when in fact it was merely a postscript to the mode of rationalization of the 1920s and the Weimar ‘cult of modernity’. But this itself was very much a big city illusion which left the heartland of Germany untouched.1 This