Leftism
12. National Socialism and Socialist Racism
At heart Mussolini was always a Socialist. Hitler, on the other hand, had never formally belonged to the Socialist party, although he had drunk from almost the same ideological sources. His Weltanschauung too had been largely fathered by the image of the national socialist Taborites.
We should not consider it accidental that the big “Masaryk Encyclopedia” (Masarykův Ottův Naučný) features under the heading “National Socialism” both the Czech and the German National Socialist parties. The first foundations of the latter were laid among the Germans of Bohemia in 1897 when a small periodical, Der Hammer was transferred from Vienna to Eger. Its editor was Franko Stein, a member of an organization that called itself “German National Workers’ League.” Backed by his paper this man was able to organize a German National Workers’ Congress in Eger (northwest Bohemia) in 1898, where a program of twenty-five points was adopted, a program rather similar to the Linz program of Georg von Schönerer, Austria’s most prominent nationalist leader. (This nationalist program had been partly drawn up by Victor Adler, who later left the nationalist camp and became Austria’s leading Social Democrat.) These nationalist workers, however, soon headed by a bookbinder called Ferdinand Burschofsky, distrusted Schönerer and considered him too “bourgeois” to lead or to rally class-conscious workers. They wanted socialism, they wanted a nationalism of a distinctly leftist pattern.
At a local election in Reichenberg the German Workers’ party was able to marshal 14,000 votes in 1905. In 1906 it sent three deputies to the Reichsrat, the Parliament in Vienna, thus appearing for the first time in the center of Austrian life. An “All-Austrian” congress of the German Workers’ party took place in Prague in 1909 and again the Moravian effort to change its name was defeated. Now new men were coming up. There was a Rudolf Jung, a man with an engineering degree who had been transferred from Vienna to Bohemia by the state railway since he engaged too much in nationalistic propaganda. There was also a lawyer, Dr. Walter Riehl. There were “bourgeois” elements, to be sure, but we find them in all Socialist parties.
In the beginning World War I had a paralyzing effect on all political activities, but in 1916 Die Freien Stimmen, the paper of the D.A.P., started to propagate anew the adoption of the term “National Socialist.” In April 1918 a motion to rename the party along these lines was again defeated by a vote of 29-14 in Aussig, but a month later the change was effected at a large congress in Vienna. Thus a “German National Socialist Workers’ party” (D.N.S.A.P., not yet N.S.D.A.P) was born months before the end of the war, while Hitler was still a Gefreiter, a private first class, on the Western Front.
The program formulated in Vienna had a purely Leftist character. It said: “The German National Socialist Workers’ party is not a workers’ party in the narrow sense of the term: It represents the interests of all honestly creative labor. It is a liberty-loving and strictly nationalist party and therefore fights against all reactionary trends, against ecclesiastical, aristocratic, and capitalist privileges and every alien influence, but above all against the overpowering influence of the Jewish-commercial mentality in all domains of public life. . . .
“. . . it demands the amalgamation of all regions of Europe inhabited by Germans into a democratic, social-minded German Reich. . . .
“. . . it demands plebiscites for all key laws in the Reich, the states and provinces. . . .
Who was this amazing person, Adolf Hitler? As with every human being, one has to study his development in the light of environment, personal experiences, and the ideas to which he was exposed. He was a tragic and not attractive figure. To understand him fully one has to know the Austrian and especially the Viennese atmosphere.
His social inferiority complex weighed heavily on him. Carl Burckhardt, grand nephew of the famous Jacob Burckhardt and last League of Nations Commissioner in Danzig, explained to what extent this factor contributed to the outbreak of World War II. In Meine Danziger Mission 1937-1939 Burckhardt reports his conversation with Hitler in August 1939 about the prospects of war and peace. Hitler shouted, “I have read idiotic reports in the French press to the effect that I have lost my nerve, whereas the Poles have kept theirs.” (Hitler was so furious that for a few moments he was unable to continue.)
Burckhardt: “You do these journalists too much honor if you take their views so seriously. A Chancellor of the Reich ought not to get upset about such trifles. . . .”
Released from jail, he was accepted by all three National Socialist parties as the undisputed leader, though Schulz established a dissident group in Austria. In Czechoslovakia the National Socialists were dissolved in October 1933 and replaced by the Sudetendeutsche Partei which was certainly National Socialist in character. It was led by Konrad Henlein, a gymnastics teacher. The most militant element in the Czech national movement was always the Sokol, a calisthenics association founded by Miroslav Tyrš, a fervent admirer of Jahn and Darwin. The majority of the German and Austrian calisthenic leagues, the Turnvereine, were also nationalistic—the identitarian nostalgia of identically dressed men and women making identical movements in mass performances!
In 1923 Hitler failed to take over Germany by force. The Weimar Republic, however, with its democratic constitution offered an ideal frame for a peaceful and legal takeover by just winning elections. Any party could either achieve supreme power by attaining a majority and thus provide the government or, as a strategically placed minority in the parliament, make a mockery of democratic principles. Of course the Weimar Constitution was extremely democratic in its intentions: It prescribed proportional representation and provided one deputy for every 60,000 voters. The number of deputies was thus flexible and depended upon the size of the electorate.
Perhaps even more interesting than the denominational aspects of the spread of National Socialism were its ideological conquests. Looking at the three or four elections before the brown wave finally buried everything, we get a curious picture. Let us put the many parties into three separate categories: the National Socialists; the parties with fixed ideologies (Communists, Social Democrats, Catholic Centrists, German Nationalists, Bavarian People’s party); and the parties belonging to the liberal-democratic dispensation (German People’s party, Democratic party, Economic party). The German People’s party was the successor of the National Liberals of Bismarck’s day and was led by Dr. Gustav Stresemann until his death. The Democratic party had been renamed the State party. The Bavarian People’s party was monarchist and conservative. In our tabulation we include the March 1933 elections, though their genuineness is most questionable. They were held under Nazi control and we know of specific cases where the results were falsified.
First of all, we also have to bear in mind that only 481 deputies had been elected in 1928 as against 647 in 1933, an increase explained by the fact that more and more habitual nonvoters came to the polls: the wishy-washy and the withdrawn, indifferent and skeptical people. Their imagination, obviously, had been caught by the Nazis and thus they strongly contributed to their victory. (Of course, this cannot be proved “scientifically”; theoretically it is possible that they now voted for the Socialists, Centrists, or Nationalists, while former voters became Nazis, but nobody knowing the German scene would dare to argue like this.) Yet just as important as the mobilization of the old nonvoters was the switch of the “Demo-Liberals,” the uncommitted left, the “progressivists” and the middle-roaders to the Nazis. The Democratic party, which in 1919 still had 80 deputies, had only two in November 1933. The Economic party of the middle class went down from 23 in 1928 to zero, the German People’s party, the former National Liberals, decreased from 45 in 1928 to a mere 2 in March 1933, but the Catholic Centrists increased during the same time from 61 to 73, the Bavarian royalists from 17 to 19, even the questionably conservative German Nationalists rose in the years 1930 to 1933 from 44 to 53 seats. This shows quite clearly what resisted and tried to stem the Nazi tide: certainly not the forces of agnosticism, polite doubt, left-of-centrism, progressivism, and enlightenment.
DEPUTIES
| ELECTION DATE | National Socialists | Non-Nazi Ideologists | Demo-Liberals |
| May 20, 1928 | 12 | 363 | 116 |
| September 14, 1930 | 107 | 351 | 119 |
| July 31, 1932 | 230 | 358 | 20 |
| November 6, 1932 | 196 | 364 | 24 |
| March 5, 1933 | 288 | 346 | 13 |
The Social Democrats decreased, but only slightly. From May 1928 to November 1932 their seats in the Reichstag numbered 153, 143, 133, and 121. To whom did they lose?
We find a hint in the totals of their fellow Marxists, the Communists: 44, 77, 89, and 100. This shows that by July 1932 the two big totalitarian parties, the Nazis and Communists, held 319 seats out of 608—an absolute majority which proves that more than half of all Germans emphatically rejected parliamentary democracy and that another large sector regarded it with the greatest skepticism. This again means, in other words, that the democratic republic uncompromisingly demanded by Wilson, was the basis of future slavery in Germany, the door through which tyranny entered. Plato’s and Aristotle’s dictum that tyranny always arises out of democracy was well confirmed.
It had been Papen’s idea to form a coalition government in which for every Nazi in an important ministerial post, a non-Nazi would be appointed to counterbalance him. Hitler was to be Chancellor of the Reich, Papen Vice-Chancellor, and so on along the whole line. Papen and his friends expected—as did the outside world—that Hitler would never be able to master either the gigantic economic difficulties or those in the domain of foreign policy. Internally, however, Hitler solved the unemployment problem by armament and public works, and the West was so frightened of him that they made every concession they had denied to Dr. Brüning. Still, an earlier offer by Papen to enter such a coalition government had been rejected by Hitler in a haughty letter whose salient passages highlight the leftist character of the Nazi movement. In his analysis of Papen’s predicament Hitler puts the following words into his mouth:
“In this emergency only one thing could help. We wanted to invite them, i.e., the Nazis, into our cabinet which enjoys not only the support of all Jews, but also of many aristocrats, conservatives, and members of the Stahlhelm. We were certain that they would accept our invitation without guile, freely and gladly. Then we would slowly have started to draw their poison fangs. Once they had shared our company, they could hardly withdraw. Caught together, hanged together!”
The “open letter,” printed by the thousands and distributed, was terminated in the best leftist “common-man” tradition:
But in January 1933 Papen gave in on far less advantageous terms, and was duly cheated and outsmarted. The tragedy ran its full course. The outcome is only too well known.
In the meantime, misinterpretations of the real character of National Socialism continued almost unchallenged. Against these it must be emphasized that, not only in the judgment of the historian and the political scientist, but of its own leaders and ideologues, National Socialism had a distinctly leftist pattern which generally can clearly be traced back to the French Revolution.
Who were the real Nazis? Professor Theodor Abel found among the leading Nazis (i.e., those known to the broad public, the historians, etc.) 7 percent who belonged to the upper layer, 7 percent peasants, 35 percent workers and 51 percent who could be described as middle class. In the party the largest single occupational group were the elementary school teachers, a group well known in Europe for its inclination toward authoritarianism and its intellectual curiosity sadly combined with a lack of scholarly preparation. (European elementary schools usually last only four or five years and in the past the teachers almost never had the equivalent of a college education.) Yet what about the army? Since army officers (or even soldiers) were not permitted to belong to the National Socialist party, the Nazi fanatics with military ambitions were almost all in the Waffen-SS which paralleled the Wehrmacht, the regular army, where there were very few high-ranking officers with Nazi convictions. (Men such as Keitel—“la Keitel”—and Jodl were exceptions.) This situation changed radically following the last attempted assassination of Hitler (there had been several), and after the end of July 1944 members of the Nazi Party and Gottgläubige (non-Christian theists) could be members of the officers’ corps; the “German Greeting” (Heil Hitler!) was also made obligatory. Thus the army was Nazified at that late date. Before these events even the draftees had to return their membership cards to the party and show a deposit slip that they had done so. Membership could be resumed only after military service. Until July 1944 the higher officer’s corps, including the General Staff, consisted about half noblemen and half commoners, and most of the latter were also anti-Nazi. (Names such as Beck, Halder, Rommel, Speidel immediately come to mind.) Yet besides the Jews, the groups most hated by the Nazi leaders were royalty and the nobility, and it was primarily the nobility within the armed forces which, as a group, really struck—in July 1944. The retribution was terrible. Hitler had the hanging of the conspirators filmed—including the suspension of their naked corpses on butchers’ hooks. Here again we encounter the sadistic drives of a genuine, Sade-inspired leftism.
We have dealt with the horrors of Nazism or communism in Russia because these are, as we perhaps rashly assume, sufficiently well known. The world, however, is indebted to Germany in a terrifying way, because she demonstrated to everyone what the ultimate conclusions of negative and destructive ideas really are. Ideas which in London or New York are repeated as seemingly harmless abstractions have been shown up by the Germans in all their blood-chilling finality. In this sense Nazi Germany has become the Gorgonian Mirror in which a decadent West could study its own features. This is a characteristic shared by the whole spine of Europe which stretches from the Straits of Gibraltar via Spain, France, Germany, and Poland into Russia, where people tend to be pèlerins de l’absolu, “pilgrims of the absolute,” to use the phrase of Leon Bloy. While the rest of the world has only too often been engaged in small talk, the “absolutists” have transformed abstraction and theories into concrete realities. Have not American and British so-called Liberals repeatedly voiced ideas and notions leading directly in ice-cold logic to the gas chambers and cremation stoves of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Majdanek, to the icy graves of Siberia, the gloomy forest of Katyn, the orgiastic cemeteries of Red Spain? The case of Germany, however, should be a memento to the English-speaking world because there was a nation to be admired in so many ways, the heart of the Holy Roman Empire, the cradle of the Reformation, a land of Dichter und Denker, (poets and thinkers), degenerating into a land of Richter und Henker, (judges and hangmen).
But that is not enough. “The bourgeoisie know what they’re about when they give their children soldiers and cannons for toys. Let us do the same, let us give our own children armies of leaden workers, barricades, buses, factories, and an enemy army as horrible as the heart desires, made up of capitalists, preachers, and cops. For the child, play should be a game of massacres. Our holidays need no longer be those of the bourgeois calendar, for the chocolate Easter eggs let us substitute chocolate guillotines.
“Excite desires! Monogamy does not exist yet. After the butcher, the prostitute! It is up to her to give the child a taste, and not a disgust for love. . . .”
Nicolas Calas exhorted leftists with the words, “Comrades, be cruel!” Hitler followed this call. Not in vain have we been told by Charles Fourier, grandfather of socialism, in his Théorie de l’unité universelle:
“The office of the butcher is held in high esteem in Harmony.”
