Remembering the Fuhrer and His Legacy

Can evil be the catalyst for progress?

Thursday marks the centenary of Adolf Hitler’s birth. Never before has one man so inverted the world: By plumbing the depths of depravity, Hitler gave mankind a vision of hell; and as it recoiled, the world rejected Hitler’s Weltanschauung-- his personal conception of the world and of human life--and adopted the very opposite of what he preached.

The Central Europe that shaped Hitler’s character was a cauldron of the smokestack era, where prevailing wages were a $1 day or less, mass consumer-goods industries were non-existent and industrialization only exacerbated inequalities. Most people lived in what today we would consider abject poverty; the chaos after World War I did nothing to accelerate the pace of modernization. In Germany, a sense of national purpose fostered by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck was destroyed without being replaced by anything else.

Nazism was a political movement born in Bavaria, in southern Germany, rooted in petit bourgeois, agrarian and small-town interests rebelling against the dominance of the Berlin government and Prussia, the Ruhr industrialists and the Frankfurt financiers. Not until the desperation of the Great Depression did it become a national movement.

Hitler called it a revolution, but it was a revolution of reaction. It embraced technological advances but rejected everything else modern. A large part of the Nazi Party consisted of economic dropouts who disliked competition. Hitler, the prime example, had below-average grades in school and never held a job: From the time he left school at the age of 16 until he was 22 he idled his time away while existing on an orphan’s pension and his patrimony. For three years thereafter he peddled picture-postcard art; for the four years of World War I he was in the army, and afterward he lived on donations and political contributions. The Nazi ideal was the re-creation of a state-dominated, non-competitive mercantile society.

Hitler was anti-modern, anti-capitalist, anti-international, anti-liberal, anti-intellectual and anti-competitive.

Jews, aside from their historic employment as scapegoats, symbolized everything that Hitler detested. If Germans were to be regimented into uniform nationalist ranks-- “ein Volk! ein Reich! ein Fuhrer! “--with uniform thinking, competing not against each other but all harnessed together for the good of the state, then the liberal influence, competitive capitalism and individualism of the Jews would have to go.

Since such a Nazi-patterned state could not function as a significant member of the world economy, it was necessary to transform it into a self-sufficient entity, and this could be accomplished only through conquest. Thus, war on a grand scale to establish an empire for the supply of natural resources became inevitable. “What one does not have, but needs, one must conquer,” Hitler said.

Yet in many ways, Hitler’s views were only exaggerations, and sometimes mere reflections, of accepted perspectives and mores of the times. During the 1920s it was the United States, not Germany, that was the citadel of racism--where the Ku Klux Klan roamed and elected public officials, where new immigration laws banned Asiatics and severely restricted entry to East and South Europeans and Henry Ford fulminated against the “international Jew.” Hitler wrote in “Mein Kampf”: “By simply excluding certain races from naturalization, it (the United States) professes in slow beginnings a view which is peculiar to the folkish state concept.”

And so in Nazi terminology, the war that Hitler launched became the “war against the Jews.”

“If the international Jewish financiers in and outside of Europe succeed in plunging the nations once more into world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the world, and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe,” he shouted to the Reichstag on Jan. 30, 1938.

In this, as the Holocaust attests, he largely succeeded. But he failed in everything else. His assault on the Soviet Union was for the purpose of creating an enormous, autarchical German empire. “It is not a case of conquering people, but of conquering agriculturally useful space,” he said. The Slavs were to be starved to death or returned to a status befitting their name (the word “slave” is derived from “Slav”). He intended to make Europe safe against communism and create a “thousand-year Reich” in which Germany would be the master of the Continent. Instead, he drew the Soviet Union into Central Europe and facilitated its transformation into a world power. Instead of uniting all Germans, he divided them, brought the smaller half under communist rule and created a power vacuum in Central and Western Europe, the likes of which had not been seen since the Middle Ages.

Europeans, vanquished and victors alike, were left so prostrate as to lack the ability to control their own destinies--that fell now to the Soviet Union and the United States. Total war had brought about the massive German investment in rocket power and an even greater American investment in the development of the atomic bomb--the latter project a veritable Noah’s Ark of scientists, many of them driven out of Europe by Hitler. In combination, missiles and the atom bomb, both children of Hitler’s war, transformed the world into a single battleground and no longer made all-out war a tenable proposition--giving the lie to Hitler’s dictum that “war is still a law of nature (that) serves the survival of the race and the state.”

But the terrible firestorm that left Europe in ashes also prepared the ground for new growth--and the realization that the old order of haves and have-nots, with economic deprivation and lack of consumer markets, was not viable. The U.S. Marshall Plan provided the seed money and the concurrent establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization--which grew out of the lesson taught by Hitler that a common enemy requires a united defense--reversed centuries of centrifugal nationalism and became the wellspring of a new pan-Europeanism. Out of the Marshall Plan and NATO evolved the thinking that brought the European Common Market and the European Community into being, and has now taken Europe to the threshold of economic union, set for 1992.

Before World War II, Europeans expected colonialism to be a continuing fact of African and Asian life. But the crushing defeats of four major colonial powers--France, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium--and the stresses suffered by Great Britain ended the perception of European mastery, and within a generation brought the Third World into being.

Colonialism and the “white man’s burden” went hand in hand with racism. At the end of the war, there was still no indication that it would be anything but segregation as usual in the United States. But as the terrible effects of the practices of the Master Racist sank in, the United Nations in December, 1948, passed the Declaration on Human Rights, and in the same month President Harry S. Truman felt constrained to desegregate the armed forces--it was an order that took years to implement, but which marked the first official breaking of the barriers.

During the last dark days of the Berlin bunker, Hitler prophesied that Germany was now doomed to perdition. Instead, Germans, freed from the yokes of Prussian aristocracy and militarism and able to devote their energies and resources to constructive purposes, have attained undreamed-of affluence and become the central engine driving European prosperity.

It is well to remember Hitler. It is as if he had been commissioned by Satan to appeal to all mankind’s baser instincts, its prejudices and rapacity, vainglories and brutalities; and only, perhaps, by the thinnest of margins did the world escape from his embrace. Hitler was indeed responsible for precipitating a new order, not only in Europe but the world. But it is the antithesis of the order that he would have established. Thus it is well, periodically, to contemplate him, lest we grow complacent about what we have today, lest we forget what otherwise the world might have been.