Politicians From Austria

"Hitler had no superior, and there was no appeal against him. The only alternative to obedience was imprisonment or death. He ruled Germany through the regular government and the increasingly powerful Nazi Party whose organizations reached every level of the population. The regime looked simple and streamlined, but Hitler, who believed in the survival of the fittest, encouraged competition among his subordinates, often appointing two people to very similar jobs, so that they would have to come to him for resolution. He rarely consulted his cabinet but relied on a loyal coterie headed by Heinrich Himmler, chief of the elite SS troops, and the Gestapo (secret police), Hermann Goring, commander of the air force and Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda. Hitler was the ultimate amateur, a skilled politician with no education but a photographic memory that enabled him to intimidate his officers. He distrusted educated specialists and believed he was right about everything. He met with his cronies over tea where he would endulge in endless monologues - tea, because he was a vegetarian and teetotaller who also firmly discouraged smoking."

"The names of Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler will forever be linked to the tragic course of European history in the first half of the twentieth century. Only weeks after the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks created secret police forces far more brutal than any that had existed under the tsar. The Nazis followed suit and were no sooner in power than they instituted the dreaded Gestapo. Under both regimes millions of people were incarcerated in concentration camps where they were tortured and frequently worked to death."

"I was most unfavourably impressed by Hitler's personality. Unlike Stalin as I was to know him, or Mussolini, he appeared negative to me, certainly not compelling; he was also rather shifty. Stalin and Mussolini were, in their separate ways, men whose personality would be felt in any company. Hitler was essentially the man who would pass in the crowd."

"What's to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn't right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question."

"Two things made the German experience unique. The first was Hitler himself, who was in many ways more bizarre than Chaplin knew. An art-school reject who had once scraped a living by selling kitschy picture postcards; an Austrian draft-dodger who had ended up a decorated Bavarian corporal; a lazy mediocrity who rose late and enjoyed both Wagner's operas and Karl May's cowboy yarns - here indeed was an unlikely heir to the legacy of Frederick the Great and Otto von Bismarck. In Munich in the early 1920s he could be seen attending the soirées of a Romanian princess 'in his gangster hat and trenchcoat over his dinner jacket, touting a pistol and carrying as usual his dog-whip'. It is not altogether surprising that President Hindenburg assumed he was Bohemian. Others thought he looked more like 'a man trying to seduce the cook', or perhaps a renegade tram conductor. If it had not been for the advice of his publisher Max Amann, he would have called his first book Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice instead of the distinctly catchier My Struggle. The longer title captures something of Hitler's shrill and vituperative personality. As for his sexuality, about which there has long been speculation on the basis of circumstantial or tainted evidence, he may have had none. Hitler hated. He did not love."

"If all Hitler had done was kill people in vast numbers more efficiently than anyone else ever did, the debate over his lasting importance might end there. But Hitler's impact went beyond his willingness to kill without mercy. He did something civilization had not seen before. Genghis Khan operated in the context of the nomadic steppe, where pillaging villages was the norm. Hitler came out of the most civilized society on Earth, the land of Beethoven and Goethe and Schiller. He set out to kill people not for what they did but for who they were. Even Mao and Stalin were killing their "class enemies." Hitler killed a million Jewish babies just for existing."

"Everybody thinks Hitler got to power because of his armies, because they were willing to kill, and that's partially true, because in the real world power is always built on the threat of death and dishonor. But mostly he got to power on words, on the right words at the right time."

"The tragedy for Germany’s subsequent victims was that a critical mass of the population, desperate for order and respect, was eager to follow the most reckless criminal in history. Hitler managed to appeal to their worst instincts: resentment, intolerance, arrogance and, most dangerous of all, a sense of racial superiority. Any remaining belief in a Rechtsstaat, a nation based on respect for the rule of law, crumpled in the face of Hitler’s insistence that the judicial system must be the servant of the new order. Public institutions–the courts, the universities, the general staff and the press–kowtowed to the new regime. Opponents found themselves helplessly isolated and insulted as traitors to the new definition of the Fatherland, not only by the regime itself, but also by all those who supported it. The Gestapo, unlike Stalin’s own secret police, the NKVD, was surprisingly idle. Most of its arrests were purely in response to denunciations of people by their fellow Germans."

"In the introduction to his edition of Hitler's Table Talk, Hugh Trevor-Roper maintains that Hitler's ideas on culture were "trivial, half-baked and disgusting". This seems questionable. At least, there are marked similarities between the cultural ideals promulgated in the Führer's writings and conversation and those of the intellectuals we have been looking at... The contention, then, that Hitler's ideas on culture were trivial, half-baked and disgusting can be allowed only if the same epithets are applied to numerous cultural ideas prevalent among English intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century, some of which are still espoused today. The superiority of "high" art, the eternal glory of Greek sculpture and architecture, the transcendent value of the old masters and of classical music, the supremacy of Shakespeare, Goethe and other authors acknowledged by intellectuals as great, the divine spark that animates all productions of genius and distinguishes them from the low amusements of the mass — these were among Hitler's most dearly held beliefs. His contempt for "gutter journalism", advertising and "cinema bilge", his espousal of the aristocratic principle, and his comparison of the "dunderheaded multitude" with women and children, are other features that readers of this book will have no difficulty matching in intellectual discourse. To such readers, his various rewritings of the mass — as exterminable subhumans, as an inhibited bourgeois herd, as noble workers, as peasant pastoral — will also be familiar intellectual devices. The tragedy of Mein Kampf is that it was not, in many respects, a deviant work but one firmly rooted in European intellectual orthodoxy."

"That is the language of a gambler—of a man who stakes his all in one card... when the other players simply refuse to call a bluff, he may safely risk his stake. And yet, with the great triumphs Hitler has flaunted, with the increase in power and population... how are we to explain the apathy shared by... Germans, with exceptions of the few thousand commandeered to function at processions? They do not revolt, yet they are neither happy nor content... the enthusiasm wanes... as it has been since the third year of the Hitler régime..."

"The Germans were wretched so long as they had no sword. ...Only a world once more trembling before the gigantic juggernaut of a German army could do... [A] genuine idealism ...inspires the German Nazi youth. It is bellicose... and looks forward to a hero's death... they believe in the superiority of the German race and its right to rule the world. Their new leader did not merely promise all this; he began to turn it into reality... The technique of government by advertisement... has enabled a ruler... to attain his aims by sheer propaganda and bluff..."

"The appointment of ignorant young men by the Party to high places in the German universities and clinics... has caused profound depression in the country... A country which no longer recognizes a written constitution, a country in which the Minister of Justice proclaims as his guiding principle, "Right is what is useful to Germany," a country in which the police force... watches with sympathetic interest any crime which is committed to the Party's advantage—is a country where none can feel safe. Even the free can hardly take much pleasure... where more than 100,000 souls are imprisoned... Any German who has not risen to wealth and position through the Party feels less free... Millions are ashamed because they are no longer citizens of a constitutional State. Meanwhile their Führer sits in his villa... and here he entertains his friends. ...As he talks ceaselessly and seldom listens... business cannot be settled."

"Since the banks and the big industrialists wished to rid themselves of the Socialists, with their wage demands and strikes, they contributed generously to this popular party. ...Hitler's speeches constantly promised the masses a renewal of the soldier-spirit, a new army and new victories."

"As a man without religion, without philosophy, without principles, he balked at nothing. ...[H]e concealed... his desire for self-aggrandizement, and... believes in his own idealism."

"I was born in 1933 in Vienna, Austria, the year Hitler came to power; his shadow shadowed me." So Evelyn Torton Beck began the narrative of her life as a Jewish lesbian feminist at the NYU "Women's Liberation and Jewish Identity" conference."

"The only man for whom Hitler had 'unqualified respect' was Stalin the genius', and while in the case of Stalin and the Russian regime we do not... have the rich documentary material that is available for Germany, we nevertheless know since Khrushchev's speech before the Twentieth Party Congress that Stalin trusted only one man and that was Hitler."

"In Hitler's eyes, Christianity was a religion fit only for slaves; he detested its ethics in particular. Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest."

"[Hitler] himself saw Christianity as a temporary ally, for in his opinion 'one is either a Christian or a German'. To be both was impossible. Nazism itself was a religion, a pagan religion, and Hitler was its high priest... Its high altar [was] Germany itself and the German people, their soil and forests and language and traditions."

"Men of action, when they are without faith, have never believed in anything but action. Hitler's untenable paradox lay precisely in wanting to found a stable order on perpetual change and no negation."

"But if you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on Earth should it be impossible to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability? Objections such as "these are not one-dimensional abilities" apply equally to cows, horses and dogs and never stopped anybody in practice. I wonder whether, some 60 years after Hitler's death, we might at least venture to ask what the moral difference is between breeding for musical ability and forcing a child to take music lessons. Or why it is acceptable to train fast runners and high jumpers but not to breed them. I can think of some answers, and they are good ones, which would probably end up persuading me. But hasn't the time come when we should stop being frightened even to put the question?"

"This man, compounded of mystic and megalomaniac, orator and self-hypnotist, faithless and merciless in pursuit of his aims, was to bring upon his own country, upon Europe and more distant lands, suffering, destruction and death. He was to do worse. In the name of racial purity, he inspired a surge of beastliness unparalleled for centuries. Hitler was a failure, for he transformed the world in the sense in which he least wished. When the struggle was over, Europe lay prostrate and power had passed to Russia in the East and the United States in the West, countries he dreaded or despised. His opportunity came at a climacteric in history and he made terrible use of it."

"It would assist us if the Chancellor could state his position about...Locarno. Hitler declared that the German Government would "scrupulously and faithfully observe every treaty into which they had entered of their own free will, including Locarno." The world must not expect to obtain Germany's signature on all occasions, but Germany's signature, once given, would be honoured. No assurance could have been firmer or more specific, if it could be believed. The argument was also clear enough. Hitler did not regard the Versailles Treaty as binding, because it had been signed under duress, but I thought at the time that Hitler might be genuine in this distinction and that he could intend to observe treaties "freely" signed by Germany. This possibility remained in my mind until the occupation of the Rhineland destroyed any further confidence I might have had in Hitler's statements."

"Superficially, Hitler's appeal to German voters is easy to understand. He simply offered more radical remedies to the Depression than his political rivals. Others might offer piecemeal solutions to unemployment; Hitler was willing to contemplate a bold programme of public works. Others might worry that financing public works with deficits would trigger a new inflation; Hitler bluntly stated that the hoodlums of his Sturmabteilung would deal with any profiteers who charged excessive prices. Others might argue, as Rathenau and Stresemann had, that Germany must try to pay reparations, if only to prove the impossibility of doing so, or must borrow to the hilt in New York so as to drive a rift between the Western creditors; Hitler essentially argued for default. It helped, of course, that the reparations system had itself collapsed by 1932; Germany had already defaulted, albeit with American consent, by the time Hitler came to power. It helped, too, that the Nazis were able to recruit the widely respected former Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht, who had resigned his post in 1930 after effectively endorsing Hitler's campaign against the revised reparations schedule known as the Young Plan. Yet even with his imprimatur on them, it took real political skill to sell such unorthodox economic solutions to a relatively sophisticated and highly variegated electorate. The Nazis' success without doubt owed much to Joseph Goebbels, the evil genius of twentieth-century marketing, who sold Hitler to the German public as if he were the miraculous offspring of the Messiah and Marlene Dietrich. The Nazi election campaigns of 1930, 1932. and 1933 were unprecedented assaults on public opinion, involving standardized mass meetings and eye-catching posters, as well as rousing songs (like the Horst-Wessel Lied) and calculated physical intimidation of opponents. Though much of this owed its inspiration to Mussolini - not least the snazzy uniforms for supporters, and the Roman salutes - Goebbels understood the need for finesse as well as bombast. For one thing, he saw more clearly than the star himself the need to adjust Hitler's message according to which of the German electorate's many segments was being addressed."

"Hitler is probably the world's most notorious tyrant. His name is virtually synonymous with evil. Rising from obscurity and failure, he found inspiration in the German army and entered politics after World War I. His Nazi Party became the largest in Germany, leading to his appointment as Chancellor in 1933. Within a year, he had turned Germany into a dictatorship. He built up the economy while establishing a police state based on terror. He pushed his country into World War II where his aggressive leadership produced spectacular vicotories until he was opposed by the Soviet Union and the United States. During the war, he ordered the murder of six million Jews and other minorities. With his country collapsing around him, he committed suicide."

"Hitler did a better job than Stalin of accomplishing Lenin's totalitarian promises—better, too, than Mussolini,..."

"What was new about Hitler and Stalin was what Friedrich Meinecke, in an attempt shortly after World War II to express his horror at Hitler's moral nihilism, called a 'Machiavellianism of the masses'."

"Hitler, who had made his way to power by his great gifts as a stage manager and speaker, introduced into the Reichschancellory all that browbeating noise which the Germans are so prone to take for greatness. ...Immediately after his appointment as chancellor, Hitler resolved to prove to the world that he had come, a new , to slay the dragon of communism. While the German Reichstag was burning, he accused the Communists of the guilt... This trial he lost... for its sole result was to expose the guilt of the Nazis."

"By exploiting material wealth confiscated and plundered in a racial war, Hitler's National Socialism achieved an unprecedented level of economic equality and created vast new opportunities for upward mobility for the German people."

"Try explaining Hitler to a kid."

"Check out Hitler, what did Hitler say to the German people in the middle of depression? What did he say were the causes of the problem in German? He said it was the Jews, he said it was the communists, and he said it was the people who sold out in the World War 1. Those were the three forces responsible for the downfall of Germany. What are Nixon and the other neo-fascists saying nowadays? What is the cause of the crisis that we have in our country and the United States and Puerto Rico and Hawaii? What are the causes? Well, it's the communists, it's the Third World people instead of the Jews this time, and it's the peace people. Same lines. Fascism always has the same lines. Fascism is a dictatorship, a capitalistic dictatorship. When things fall apart they started a dictatorship."

"[H]e works to create the single great impression that here is a prophet whose heart is bleeding for the fate of his people. ...[H]e is sly enough to use an arrangement on his speaker's desk through which, by pressing a button, the spotlights are switched on to him so that the ecstasies can be properly filmed for the news reels. A similar combination of ecstasy and artifice can be observed in other actors."

"His effect, in complete contrast to Mussolini's... he juggles with mystical notions such as Honor, Blood, and Soil, and thus wraps his audience in that cloud of mysticism which the Germans love far more than mere prosaic logic."

"[H]e commanded over a hundred of his armed adherents to make an open attack on the armed police force. The latter met the rebel's attack... Shots were fired. Fourteen men lay dead on the Munich pavement. ...Hitler vanished ...The fourteen heroes of the Nazi movement were later eulogized... by the leader who had abandoned them in danger."

"As a stage manager and advertiser, he gave proof as real genius. In his book... "The Entente," he writes, "won the war simply and solely by its propaganda." A crowd is ready to believe anything, "true or false," provided it is constantly reiterated; one only has to say the same thing often enough."

"Hitler's aim was to attract attention to himself. ...[H]e personally arranged all the lighting effects and spotlights, as well as his entry into a hall with fanfares. He trained crowds to salute with the right arm, taught them his songs, and transformed the audience from an apathetic mass into active collaborators in his festivities."

"He is past-master in the technique of platform speaking, and he can be humorous, grave, witty, tragic and cynical as the occasion requires."

"He realized that he could rise only through the support of the discontented and utterly disillusioned middle class. All he did later was to subjugate it. Rauschning describes in detail Hitler's intense hatred of Germany's laboring masses."

"He lives in an unnatural detachment that makes his disease of being a godhead batten on itself: the most balanced of human beings could not stand this kind of life without losing a sense of realities, and nobody would call Hitler emotionally balanced at the best of times. Most commentators make a great fuss about his diet or his celibacy: what seems to me far more important is his lack of ordinary human contacts. Abnormal himself, the constant adulation makes him pathological. He receives only the thrice-distilled views of the fanatics, intriguers and genuine patriots around him. Nobody can tell him anything or speak frankly, still less criticize his policy or himself. He lives in a mental world of his own, more aloof than any Sun-King, and he has only the narrow mental equipment and experience of an agitator to guide him. Unless one accepts the prevalent German view that he gets his inspiration direct from God (one of the most powerful Nazis once said he had a private line to heaven!), one must conclude that the future of Germany and the peace of the world rest on the tangled working of the mind of one man whom not even his friends would call normal. It is the most extraordinary comment on human evolution that, in this age of science and progress, the fate of mankind rests on the whimsy of an abnormal mind, infinitely more so than in the days of the old despots whom we criticize so much."

"[H]e certainly succeeds in winning his audiences. After all, he is appealing to their feelings, not their intellect, and he captures them in an ecstasy of emotion, whipping them hither and thither by the castigations of his rather harsh, and frequently breaking, voice. He always uses the same methods, the same tricks of oratory, the same half-dozen gestures (especially the outpointed finger and the curious corkscrew movement of his hand), the same appeal to the crudest emotions, the same exploitation of common hatreds, even the same words. Goebbels is an infinitely finer and more polished orator from our point of view, but it is always Hitler who grips the meetings. No display of emotionalism is too crude for him. He frequently weeps."

"Hitler may achieve his avowed goal; he may consolidate the entire nation along the lines he wants. If this is so, the outlook for peace would still be clouded, because Hitler's consolidation is contingent upon ideas—such as economic Autarky, military aggressiveness, a dashing foreign policy, and a general Imperialistic ideology—which, of necessity, would lead to war. He cannot achieve some of these without war, and if he does not achieve them, the people will feel deluded, and in that case Hitler's consolidation will not be successful. That is his basic dilemma. If he persists in the policies he has enunciated, he plunges Europe into war; if he abandons them, he can no longer maintain his position within Germany. Logically, then, the success or the failure of Hitlerism brings war in its train."

"Abstract intelligence and logic are not necessary in his scheme of things. He seems to have a single-track mind. Always a simplist, he cannot understand the complexities of most problems. He cannot, for instance, recognize the importance of diplomatic forms or the element of safety provided by the tortuous methods of conventional diplomacy. He simplifies every problem, even the most vital questions of domestic and foreign policy. He applies a general principle of an intuitive solution to a question complicated by centuries of history and arrives at some delusively simple outcome. Mein Kampf gives him away in this. After its publication he could never again claim subtlety of analysis or breadth of vision."

"Nobody would claim that Hitler is of outstanding mental stature. If he really expresses the Romantic Ideal carried to the point of absurdity, and if romanticism is the liberation of the less conscious levels of the mind...extreme mental clarity would not be expected from him. His life, as I see it, can be expressed as an attempt at escaping from reality and a more or less constant intoxication of his imagination by a free indulgence in fantasy. He has none of that "great measuring virtue" without which Ruskin asserts true greatness is impossible. The psycho-analysts have a marvellous subject for discussion in Herr Hitler. Some of them say that he shows the salient features of schizophrenia (split personality) because of his overwhelming ambition and conceit, his favourite role of himself as the saviour of mankind and his habit of speaking as if he received personal revelations from the Deity. Others hold that he is a manic-depressive; others again a paranoiac... The typical paranoid is terrified of imaginary persecutors, and defends himself against this fear by the annihilation in fantasy of his persecutors. Sometimes, as in the case of Hitler, the annihilation can to some extent be translated from fantasy into fact. Hitler's persecution of the Jews and Communists, for instance, can be explained from this point of view. This is all a matter for the experts, of course, but some of the facts certainly appear as evidence for the psycho-analyst's stress on Hitler's persecution mania, his ways of escape from reality, his great anxieties, his over-keen but distorted observation of realities, his alternating moods of melancholy and elation, his recurring doubts of himself—and contrasting sense of omnipotence."

"His strength, then, is the unduly assertive characteristic of a man not certain of himself and shunning a real analysis of the problems confronting him. It is a mixture of brazenness and empiricism, and above all, a form of escape from his own introspectiveness. He is harassed, tormented, tortured by imaginings and confused thoughts; and the only way out of the tangle is to take some act that is seemingly decisive, or, more often, to find refuge in the endless reiteration of stock arguments, such as those against Semitism or Bolshevism."

"Hitler's technique of oratory is largely the result of... mass psychology... He declared to his small, new party that everything depended on fascinating the crowd. Above all, he realized... restore to the German people, deprived of an army, their flags, bands and songs. ...He invented every emblem himself, except the swastika, designed his own flag, and prescribed every collar and button for the slowly-growing party troops."

"The pyramid familiar to the Germans... in which each individual carries another on his back but makes up for it by standing on somebody else, was set up anew by Hitler."

"Freedom and honour! For ten long years Hitler and his coadjutor have manhandled, squeezed, twisted, and debased these two splendid German words to the point of nausea, as only dilettantes can, casting the highest values of a nation before swine. They have sufficiently demonstrated in the ten years of destruction of all material and intellectual freedom, of all moral substance among the German people, what they understand by freedom and honour. The frightful bloodbath has opened the eyes of even the stupidest German—it is a slaughter which they arranged in the name of "freedom and honour of the German nation" throughout Europe, and which they daily start anew."

"Every word that comes from Hitler's mouth is a lie. When he says peace, he means war, and when he blasphemously uses the name of the Almighty, he means the power of evil, the fallen angel, Satan. His mouth is the foul-smelling maw of Hell, and his might is at bottom accursed. True, we must conduct a struggle against the National Socialist terrorist state with rational means; but whoever today still doubts the reality, the existence of demonic powers, has failed by a wide margin to understand the metaphysical background of this war."

"Shaken and broken, our people behold the loss of the men of Stalingrad. Three hundred and thirty thousand German men have been senselessly and irresponsibly driven to death and destruction by the inspired strategy of our World War I Private First Class. Führer, we thank you!"

"Adolf Hitler I'm not worthy to speak up for Adolf Hitler, and to any sentimental rousing his life and deeds do not invite. Hitler was a warrior, a warrior for humankind and a preacher of the gospel of justice for all nations. He was a reforming character of the highest order, and his historical fate was that he functioned in a time of exampleless [i.e., unequalled] brutality, which in the end felled him. Thus may the ordinary Western European look at Adolf Hitler. And we, his close followers, bow our heads at his death."

"So the bastard's dead? Too bad we didn't capture him alive!"