20.3: Fascism in Germany- The Nazis

Adolf Hitler was critically important to the development of Nazism. His private obsessions became state policy and were used as the justification for war and genocide. His unquestionable powers of public speaking and political maneuvering transformed the Nazis from a small fringe group to a major political party. While he was largely ineffective as a practical decision-maker, he remained central to the image of strength, vitality, and power that the Nazis associated with their state.

Hitler was born in Austria in 1889, a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His dream of being an artist ended when he was rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts in the Austrian capital of Vienna. Before the outbreak of World War I, Hitler lived in flophouses, cheap hotels for homeless men, where he discovered right-wing politics and his own talents for oratory. He read popularized works derived from racist pseudo-scholarship that glorified a fabricated version of German history. When World War I broke out, he enthusiastically volunteered for the German army and served at the western front, surviving both a poison gas attack and shrapnel from an exploded shell. Unlike most veterans of the war, Hitler experienced combat and service in the trenches as exhilarating and fulfilling, and he was completely without compassion.

Figure 20.5.1: Hitler, on far right, and some of his fellow soldiers in his infantry regiment early in WWI. He trimmed his moustache to its (in)famous length during the war in order to be able to securely wear a gas mask.

While investigating a small right-wing group, the German Workers Party, in Munich, Hitler found like-minded conservatives who loathed the Weimar Republic and blamed socialism and something they called “international Jewry” for the defeat of Germany in the war. He swiftly rose in the ranks of the Nazis, becoming the Fuhrer ("Leader") of the party due to his outstanding command of oratory and his ability to browbeat would-be political opponents. Under Hitler’s leadership, the party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers Party (“Nazi” is derived from the German word for “national”).

Unlike Italian Fascists, the Nazis believed that races were biological entities and that something inherent in the blood of each "race" directly impacted its ability to create or destroy something as vague as “true culture.” According to Nazi ideology, only the so-called Aryan race, Germans and related white northern Europeans like the Danes, the Norwegians, and the English, had ever created culture or been responsible for scientific progress. Other races, including some non-European groups like the Persians and the Japanese, were considered “culture-preserving” races who could at least enjoy the benefits of true civilization. At the bottom of this invented hierarchy were “culture-destroying” races, most importantly Jews but also Slavs, like Russians and Poles. In the great scheme for the Nazi new world order, Jews would be somehow pushed aside entirely, and the Slavs would be enslaved as manual labor for "Aryans."

In 1921, under Hitler’s leadership, the Nazis organized a paramilitary wing called the Stormtroopers (SA in their German acronym). In 1923, inspired by the Italian Fascists' success, Hitler led his fellow Nazis in an attempt to seize the regional government of the German region of Bavaria. The“Beer-Hall Putsch” failed, but Hitler used his ensuing trial on a national stage, as the German press widely discussed the event. While serving a ludicrously short sentence in a minimum security prison, Hitler dictated his autobiography, Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"), to the Nazi party's secretary, Rudolf Hess.

Figure 20.5.2: The Nazi leadership on trial. Note the degree to which the photo looks like a publicity stunt rather than a criminal proceeding. Hitler is joined by Erich Ludendorff, in the center, one of the top German commanders during WWI. Ludendorff flirted with Nazism early on, but abandoned the party after the Beer Hall Putsch.

The Great Depression threw the Weimar government and German society into such turmoil that extremists like the Nazis suddenly gained considerable mass appeal. Promising the complete repudiation of the Versailles Treaty, the build-up of the German military, an end to economic problems, and a restoration of German pride and power, the Nazis steadily grew in popularity. In 1930, an electoral breakthrough saw them win 18% of the seats in the Reichstag. In 1932, they won 37% of the national vote. The Nazis never came close to winning an actual majority in the Reichstag.

In January of 1933, President Hindenburg was convinced by members of his cabinet led by a conservative Catholic politician, Franz von Papen, to use Hitler and the Nazis as tools to help dismantle the Weimar state and replace it with a more authoritarian political order. Thus, Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor, the second-most powerful political position in the state.

Hitler seized the opportunity to launch a full-scale takeover of the German government. The Reichstag building was set on fire by an unknown arsonist in February, and Hitler blamed the communists, pushing through an emergency measure (the “Reichstag Fire Decree”) that suspended civil rights. The German Communist Party was destroyed, and 20,000 of its members were forced into newly built concentration camps. Through voter fraud and massive intimidation by the Nazi Stormtroopers, the Nazis won 44% of the seats in the next elections. With the aid of other conservative parties, the Nazis pushed through the Enabling Act, which empowered Hitler and the presidential cabinet to pass laws by decree. In July, the Nazis outlawed all parties except themselves. By the summer of 1933, the Nazis controlled the state, with Hindenburg willingly signing off on their measures.

The Weimar Constitution was never officially repudiated, but the letter of laws became far less important than their interpretation according to the “spirit” of Nazism. The only unshakable core principle was the Fuhrer's personal supremacy, which was supposed to embody Nazism itself.

Hitler was obsessed with winning over “ordinary Germans” to the party’s outlook. To that end, the state both bombarded the population with propaganda and sought to alleviate the dismal economic situation of the early 1930s. The Nazi state poured money into a debt-based recovery from the Depression. The economics of the recovery was totally unsustainable, but the Nazi leadership gambled that war would come before the inevitable economic collapse. Hitler publicly broke with the terms of the Versailles Treaty in 1935, rearming the German military. Soon the rapidly-rebuilding military was staging enormous public rallies.

From 1933 until the end of World War II in 1945, a period that historians have termed the 'Third Reich", the Nazis sponsored a full-scale attempt to recreate German culture and society to correspond with their vision of a racialized, warlike, and “purified” German nation. They targeted almost every conceivable social group with a specific propaganda campaign and encouraged (or required) German citizens to join a specific Nazi league. Workers were encouraged to work hard for the good of the state. Women were encouraged to produce as many healthy children as possible (and to stay out of the workplace). Boys were enrolled in a paramilitary scouting organization, the Hitler Youth. Girls joined the League of German Girls, and trained as future mothers and domestics. All vocations and genders were united in the glorification of the military and of the Fuhrer himself (“Heil Hitler” was the official greeting used by millions of German citizens, even if they were not a member of the Nazi party).

Figure 20.5.3: Hitler Youth and League of German Girls members at a rally in 1933.

The Third Reich suspended civil rights and pursued concomitant campaigns against the so-called “enemies” of the German people. The Nazis vilified Jews and other groups, such as people with disabilities and the Romani. In 1935 the Nazis passed the so-called “Nuremberg Laws”, which outlawed Jews from working in various professions, stripped Jews of citizenship, and made sex between Jews and non-Jews a serious crime.

The Nazis threatened imprisonment or death for those who dared defy them. In 1933, the first concentration camp was opened. Soon, a vast web of police forces monitored the German population. The SS (Schutzstaffel, meaning “protection squadron") was the most important organization, an enormous force of dedicated Nazis with almost unlimited police powers. This group had the right to hold anyone indefinitely, without trial, in "protective custody" in a concentration camp. The Nazi secret police, the Gestapo, were merely one part of the SS. This combination of "carrots" (e.g. propaganda, programs, incentives) and "sticks" (e.g. the SS, concentration camps) helps explain why there was no significant resistance to the Nazi regime from within Germany.