Liberty or Equality

CHAPTER VII THE RISE OF THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST PARTY

The Genesis of a Totalitarian Movement—II

I am tired, Mr. Roosevelt, of hearing it said—even by M. Maritain—that the democracies are the opposite of the dictatorships. Democracy offers no defence to dictators, that is the truth. Every democracy can at any moment have an acute attack of dictatorship, as one has an acute attack of appendicitis; and national temperament can do nothing about it.

1. ONCE MORE: DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

2. THE HUSSITE ROOT OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM

The scene of the rise of National Socialism, and its more immediate forerunners in the last five hundred years, must be sought in Bohemia and in an area within a hundred miles from the boundaries of that ancient kingdom.

Ethnic nationalism, once strong in the days of Hus and Žižka, was at an ebb in Bohemia in the eighteenth and even in the early nineteenth centuries. The struggle between the countries of the crown of St. Wenceslaus and the Habsburgs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries following the Lutheran Reformation had a patriotic and religious rather than an ethnic character. Neither Count Mathias Thurn, who headed the revolutionaries of 1619, nor the ill-fated Frederick of the Palatinate, the “Winter King,” were Czechs. Germans and Czechs suffered equally from the consequences of the Battle of White Mountain (Bíla Hora). And until about eighty years ago German- and Czech-speaking Bohemians, united by a common patriotism, lived peacefully together.

3. THE BEGINNINGS OF GERMAN NATIONAL SOCIALISM

For some time to come the Mährisch-Trübauer Verband played an active rôle, until it broke into its constituent parts in 1903. A certain Hans Knirsch had become managing leader (Geschäftsführer) of this organization in 1901, and he was, together with Jung and Krebs, one of the few original National Socialists who remained after January, 1933, in the daughter party, the N.S.D.A.P., the “Nazi” Party.

There were also other demands made, such as the separation of Church and State, the stricter application of democratic principles in army promotions, and the nationalization of mines and railroads—the usual tenor of “progressive” Continental parties.

In the same year we hear of another move to change the name of the struggling party. It came from the Moravian Hans Knirsch, who proposed to call the party the “Deutschsoziale “or “Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei.” He was not successful. The reasons are obvious: the move was blocked by the Bohemian groups, which were afraid of being accused of copying the Czech National Socialist Party.

At the elections of 1911, three deputies were again sent to Vienna, and in 1913 four representatives were elected to the Moravian Diet. Yet the outbreak of the war brought a lull in party activities; the Reichsrat was suspended, and the only event of importance in 1916 was the campaign of the D.A.P. organ Freie Stimmen in favour of adopting the name “National Socialist.”

. . . the German National Socialist Workers’ Party is not a party exclusively for labourers; it stands for the interests of every decent and honest enterprise. It is a liberal and strictly folkic party fighting against all reactionary efforts, clerical, feudal and capitalistic privileges; but before all against the increasing influence of the Jewish commercial mentality which encroaches on public life . . .

. . . it demands the amalgamation of all European regions inhabited by Germans into a democratic and socialized Germany . . .

. . . it demands the introduction of plebiscites (referenda) for all important laws in the country . . .

This programme was the very synthesis of all collectivistic, majoritarian, egalitarian, democratic and pseudo-liberal currents of the early twentieth century. The claim of being liberal (freiheitlich) was still upheld, but finally dropped when Hitler took over, and never revived again.

The plan to conquer Germany from the Catholic domains had thus proved a failure. After a prolonged and partly enforced lull the conquest of Germany began by legal means—that is, within the framework of the democratic process. The first states which fell a prey to Hitler were Saxony and Thuringia. In the autumn of 1930 the National Socialists won 107 seats, gaining triumph after triumph in the northeast—in East Prussia (with the exception of Catholic Varmia), in Pomerania, Mecklenburg, and Sleswig-Holstein.

Nothing is more revealing than a study of the election results of the whole period between 1928 and 1933. Not only does the comparison of the religious with the political map of Germany tell a striking story, but also does the study of the increase and decrease of the individual parties. If we divide them into three groups, viz., the National Socialists, the “Rigid Ideologists” (National Conservatives, Catholics, Socialists and Communists), and the “Demo-Liberals” (Democratic, Liberal, Protestant, non-partisan peasant and middle-class parties), we get for four of the elections of that period the following picture:

ELECTION	DEPUTIES ELECTED BY
	National Socialists	“Rigid”	Demo- Liberals
May 20, 1928   ..	..  12	363	116
September 14, 1930	..107	351	119
November 6, 1932	..196	364	24
March 5, 1933  ..	..288	346	13

What had happened?

Not only did the National Socialists succeed in mobilizing the inert non-voters, the “private citizens” (idiotae), who ordinarily show no interest in political matters,* but they also gobbled up the “demo-liberals.” The German Democratic Party (later called Staatspartei), which had over 80 mandates in 1919 and in 1928 still had 25 deputies, decreased finally to 5 seats. The “Wirtschaftspartei des Mittelstandes,” which boasted of 23 deputies in 1928, had none in 1933. Yet the royalist “Bavarian People’s Party” maintained and slightly increased its number of supporters, whereas the Catholic Centre Party rose slowly from 61 to 73 seats. The Socialists had small losses; the Communists increased considerably; the National Conservatives fluctuated but managed to maintain their hold. On the other hand the Deutsche Volkspartei, the heirs of Bismarck’s National Liberals, gradually declined from 45 to 2 members. It was German liberalism and German bourgeois democracy which had turned National Socialist.

This letter was terminated by Hitler’s proud insistence on the loyalty of his supporters, who do not belong to “Herr von Papen’s world” but “want to be the most faithful sons of our people, although they are mostly of simple origin and often living in dire poverty.” This community of millions of German workers of the “forehead and the hand” and of the German peasants “does not fight with the lips but with a suffering borne thousandfold, and with innumerable sacrifices, for a new and better German Reich.”

Yet the trick of collaboration did not work. The silly cavalry officer had underestimated the shrewd post-card painter. The clique around the President had underestimated the crushing power of mass movements functioning in complete harmony with the spirit of the age. “Insuperable difficulties” there were none, because the Western powers made concessions to Hitler which they had never made to Brüning, or to any one of his immediate successors.

Other “collaborationists” thought cynically with Baron Steiger: “La garde se rend mais elle ne meurt pas” (“The Old Guard surrenders but does not die”). Some others again were convinced that they should act as clercs in the sense in which Julien Benda uses this expression—as servants of the “general will,” of the masses, of the prevailing trends, riding the “wave of the future.” It is, needless to say, the duty of true élites to oppose the masses if they err, and to prefer death to compromise: prius mori quam superari.

Yet Hitler, who definitely had his eye set on the multitudes, repeatedly called National Socialism “democratic” and styled himself an “arch-democrat.” So did Goebbels and Rudolf Hess. The following are only a few instances:

Hitler: Attack against Eton and Harrow, December 10, 1940 (Völkischer Beobachter, December 11, 1940); calls himself an arch-democrat, Munich, November 8, 1938 (V.B., November 10, 1938); calls National Socialism the “truest democracy,” Berlin, January 30, 1937 (V.B., January 31, 1937); calls the National Socialist constitution democratic, Berlin, May 21, 1935 (V.B., May 22, 1935); also in Mein Kampf (Munich: Eber, 1939), p. 99: “The truly Germanic democracy with the free election of the Leader, who is obliged to assume full responsibility for all his actions.”

Still, Dr. Goebbels declared in 1932:

After 1939 the National Socialists received not only open support from the Communists (until 1941) but also, in France, Belgium and Denmark, from various leftist elements. Ex-Socialists and ex-Communists like Laval, Doriot and Déat became collaborators. The left Œuvre became pro-Nazi, and only forty of the original Socialist deputies were able to run again for Parliament in 1945. The Danish Social Democrats under Stauning collaborated until 1943. The Finnish Social Democrats under Väinö Tanner were in the same boat. Some Belgian Socialists led by Hendrik de Man were, by and large, also collaborationists.

Wir sind das Heer vorn Hakenkreuz,	We are the army of the swastika,
Hebt hoch die roten Fahnen!	Raise high the red banners!
Der deutschen Arbeit wollen wir	We want to build German labour’s
Den Weg zur Freiheit bahnen.

or:

Wir Nationalen Sozialisten,	We National Socialists
Wir wollen keine Reaktion	Want no reaction.
Wir hassen Juden und Marxisten	We loathe Jews and Marxists.
Ein Hoch der deutschen Revolution!	Long live the German Revolution!
(Refrain)	(Refrain)
Drum Brüder auf die Barrikaden!	Onward, brothers, to the barricades!
Der Führer ruft, so folget gleich	The Führer calls, follow him now!
Die Reaktion hat ihn verraten,	Reaction has betrayed him
Und dennoch kommt das Dritte Reich!

National Socialism, as we have seen, is neither a conservative nor a reactionary movement, but merely the synthesis of practically all ideas dominant in the last 160 years. It is obvious that the roots of these ideas antedate the French Revolution.

National Socialism had naturally also a local colour, but how much of it is based on historical reminiscences going back for centuries is difficult to decide. We are inclined to think that remote historical events, apart from shaping (to a certain extent) a national character, do not mysteriously slumber in some sort of “racial subconscious,” but are revived in “re-representations “provoked by entirely new political happenings. That these re-representations are sometimes not only slightly inaccurate, but often downright historical falsehoods, is too well known to need further emphasis.

4. SUMMARY

In tracing the origins of the Nazi Party we have first outlined the relationship between nazism and democracy and nazism and the Reformation. After this preparatory work we investigated the influence of the popular conception of Hus on the Czech Socialists and National Socialists. Since the conscious living up to this picture has always been freely acknowledged by these two Czech groups, it is hardly necessary to concern ourselves with this connection any further.

A more difficult matter is the copying of the Czech example by the German-speaking proto-Nazis of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. It is evident that neither did the Czech National Socialists want to boast of their Teutonic epigones, nor did the men of the D.A.P. and the D.N.S.A.P., in their ethnic and racial pride, desire to acknowledge their Slavic forerunners. The whole struggle, from 1904 to 1918, against the acceptance of the term “National Socialist” shows this very clearly.

Nor has this study only the interest of a post-mortem. Though nazism is overthrown and Hitler dead (they tell us), unfortunately National Socialism is by no means a phenomenon of the past. It must be borne in mind that socialism, unless realized on a world-wide scale, is bound to be a national socialism; and although British “national socialism,” with its liberal nostalgia, clings to the Western World, the quarrel between Yugoslavia and the U.S.S.R. is one between South Slav and Russian national socialism. Nothing is more significant than the Soviets’ strict ban on the use of the term “National Socialism,” which at all times had to be replaced by “Fascism” or “Hitlerism”—save for the period when Russian national socialism was allied with German racial socialism. Thus we have to face the fact that as long as collectivism, totalitarianism, the Continental tradition of democracy—as long as racialism, ethnic nationalism, the subordination of ends to means, egalitarianism, socialism and utilitarianism remain the characteristic traits of our civilization and epoch, the danger of a new, deadly synthesis will by no means be eliminated. The defeat, even the destruction of the Third Reich is after all too minor an incident to thwart or permanently discredit these evil powers and negative currents which are present everywhere.

Wrote David Rousset, a former inmate of one of the deadliest German concentration camps about National Socialism and its horrors:

Ce serait une duperie, et criminelle, que de prétendre qu’il est impossible aux autres peuples de faire une experience analogue pour des raisons d’ opposition de nature.*

 

 

* We add the Czech names of the cities in parentheses.

* Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, founder of the Pan-Europe movement, repeatedly called the Jews the new aristocracy of Europe.

* With strict proportional representation—60,000 votes for one seat in the Reichstag—the total number of deputies rose from 481 to 647.

* L’Univers Concentrationnaire (Paris: Editions du Pavois, 1946), pp. 186–87.