Hitler in Hell Read online

  In keeping with my promise to the industrialists, we did not carry out any large-scale nationalizations as the Communists in Russia had done. However, we did get rid of some owners, such as the aircraft fabricant Hugo Junkers, who did not cooperate. We also forced some companies to sell their patents to the Reich so that other larger companies active in the same field could use them as well. Instead, we put in place a whole series of regulations to ensure that industry would be doing what we wanted it to do in the national interest. That included very stringent controls on imports and a strong drive towards autarky.

  I personally had learned from our errors during the Great War. At that time the government had done almost nothing to alleviate the plight of the masses, particularly the urban masses. The outcome was immense, almost indescribable, suffering. People starved; people froze. People lost their immune systems and died of disease, especially the very young and the very old. Perhaps worst of all, the fertility of many young women was threatened. I was determined that no such thing would happen again. By hook or by crook—one of my favorite expressions by the way—we had to make sure that our population remained at least tolerably well fed, clothed, and housed. This included, of course, heating. We did all this even as we engaged in large-scale hostilities against our neighbors.

  Another pressing concern we had was our supply of strategic raw materials. Again, this was a field where the lessons of the Great War were only too clear. The imperial government of those days had been hopeless. Before the war, they did not even consider that, to produce explosives, we needed nitrogen; but nitrogen was something we did not have. In the event we had to turn to a Jewish scientist, Fritz Haber, to help us produce what we needed.

  I myself, humble as my position was, remember how, during the last months of the Great War, the prevailing shortage of copper caused us to be issued cartridges made of steel instead of brass. Now heat causes the former to expand much more than the latter. The outcome was jammed weapons that just would not fire, often at the most critical moment. How many brave German soldiers lost their lives as a consequence no one knows. So desperate was our need for rubber, which at that time could be had only in the Far East, that many of our vehicles and aircraft actually ran on wooden wheels.

  Even more serious was our need for oil. Our indigenous production of that commodity was very limited. Experience taught us that no sooner would war break out than our maritime communications would be cut. At that time no one knew about the vast reserves of high-quality oil buried under the sands of Italian-owned Libya. Had we known, the war might have ended differently. In the event, except for some wells in Hungary, the nearest sources of any importance were located at Ploesti, Romania. From there the oil could be transported to Germany by way of the Danube. Even so, we only had at our disposal about two percent of the world’s “proven reserves.” Moreover, experience had taught us how unstable, to put it mildly, Romanian politics could be. No one could know where they would end.

  To make ourselves autarkic, large investments were needed. But industry, fearing for its profits, would not make those investments. Thus we had no choice but to depart from our declared policy of relying on private enterprise. Instead, we made the state step in. By the beginning of the war our scientists had solved the problem of producing synthetic rubber, which was known as Buna. Its quality was not as good as that of natural rubber; but it met our needs, more or less. Synthetic oil, which could be produced from coal, was also available. However, the necessary installations were complex, delicate, and, when the time came, vulnerable to bombing. We never succeeded in building a sufficient number of plants to meet all of our needs in that field; synthetic oil was also considerably more expensive than its natural equivalent.

  Finally, there was the problem of steel, the most important raw material of all without which no modern society, let alone modern war, is conceivable. So much so, in fact, that it was customary to rate the relative power of countries by the annual amount of steel they produced. Here we were lucky in that, at Salzgitter in Saxony, we had plenty of ore. Albeit it was of a low quality not normally considered suitable for exploitation. Göring’s solution was to build, at state expense and under state ownership and management, a vast new industrial complex. Named after himself, of course. After we annexed Austria in 1938, the company, by taking over some Jewish property, expanded into that country as well. As a result, steel was one commodity of which we did not suffer any serious shortage until late in the war when Allied bombing destroyed both the factories and our transportation system.

  Meanwhile, Schacht, who had managed our economic recovery so well, started causing problems. At his post as President of the Reichsbank Schacht had remained faithful to his liberal-conservative principles. Increasingly worried about our deficit, he suggested that we slow down the pace of rearmament and rely on trade to fill our needs. As if peace would last forever! By contrast, we National Socialists saw war and territorial expansion as the solution to our present and future economic problems. That is why we were determined to extend the state’s control over industry so that it would serve our purposes.

  Adding to the difficulty was Schacht’s opposition to our Jewish policies. It was not that he had any particular liking for Jews. He did not. But he saw our policies as economically disruptive and sharply attacked Streicher and his paper. As I could not know at the time, from 1938 on he was also in sporadic contact with the bunch of traitors whose activities culminated in the attempt on my life on 20 July 1944. That suited him fine. In the event, the outcome was a breach between us. In November 1937 I took his post as Minister of the Economy away from him, and in January 1939 I also dismissed him as President of the Reichsbank. His successor in both capacities was Walter Funk. To be sure, he did not have Schacht’s stature. With war approaching, though, I had more important things to worry about.

  13. A New Kind of State

  Having done without, I learned to appreciate both how important money is and what it can do for you. Nevertheless, I always saw economics as a means to an end. Like all truly great leaders, I had a vision. I wanted to create a new kind of state, not just to increase the GDP of the existing one so that people would be able to buy larger houses, go on more expensive vacations, or dine in fancier restaurants. Much later, I accidentally learned how one German novelist, Hans Carossa, saw these things. “There is,” he wrote to a friend who had chosen exile, “a lot going on here in Germany. We are being laundered, purified, scrubbed, disinfected, separated, nordicized, toughened up…” This was in 1933, and he could not yet know how spot-on he was. Appointed head of the European Writers’ League by Goebbels, within a few years he was writing odes to “the brave… fighter and leader who bears all our destiny.”

  By the mid-thirties our most important problem, i.e. providing our people with work and bread, had been largely solved. Watching the country wake up and buzz with activity was a joy indeed. I now felt free to turn my attention to other aspects of our Party program. The first, and in some ways most important, was the wish to build a Völkisch state. Let me explain what I mean. Our German political tradition had long been authoritarian, meaning that it worked from the top down. Definitely in the case of the smaller states, it had even been patrimonial. Even after Napoleon reduced their number by nine tenths, so small did many of them remain that, down to the end of the World War, separating the rulers’ private affairs from those of their states often remained all but impossible. In all this we differed from many others who, starting with the English Revolution of 1688 and proceeding through the American one of 1776, and the French one of 1789, had turned to democracy and liberalism.

  That does not mean I wanted to make our country more democratic in the usual sense. Far from it. My experience, first in Vienna and later during the years from 1919 to 1932, had thoroughly immunized me against any such idea. What it did mean was that, unlike the Italian Fascists, we were not étatists. It was not the state, imposing itself on society like a steel helmet on a head, which was the shin
ing goal of our efforts. It was the racial community; specifically including all its varied forms of life, constantly bubbling up from below like mineral springs at the bottom of a pool. Endowing it with color and making it come alive. I wanted to make the state, that coldest of all cold monsters as Nietzsche once called it, shed some of its pomposity and grow closer to the people. It and the bureaucracy that represented it should be made to serve them rather than the other way around.

  Such being the case, I did not seek to imitate Napoleon by creating a body of law to be named after me. After all, such a body, if enacted, would have served little purpose except to limit our moves. Instead, I used other methods that seemed more appropriate. Among the most important ones was propaganda. By that I mean the unceasing drumfire, ably orchestrated by Goebbels, which sought to convince people that they and the state were not two separate entities but one. As the famous slogan had it, ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer. No translation needed! It was to make sure that this propaganda—and no other—would reach the masses that we imposed censorship on all papers, magazines, books, theaters, and films. Not only did we tell them what not to publish and to show, but very often we gave them explicit orders as to what to write, on what page to put it, and even what size the letters comprising the headline should be. Editors who disobeyed our instructions soon learned who was boss, by being fired if they were lucky or sent to a concentration camp if they were not.

  We, the government, also assumed complete control over that most accessible means of modern communications, radio. I myself hardly ever listened to any of its programs. However, I fully understood how important it was and was determined to use it to the best advantage. Our Volksempfanger, or people’s receiver, was a great help in this respect. It could only be tuned to German stations and no others; nevertheless, being cheap, it sold by the millions. For those who did not have a set we installed loudspeakers in public squares as well as at schools, clubs, factories, and so on. To quote Goebbels, in National Socialist Germany the only time people could avoid what we wanted them to hear was during their sleep. At the time television only existed in a rudimentary form. In fact the first experimental broadcasts were made during the Berlin Olympics. But had the technology been mature and available for mass production and use, we surely would have taken control of that as well. As to the Internetz, I shall leave you to think what we could, and would, have done with it.

  A considerable part of our propaganda took the form of mass ceremonies, rallies, and political theater in general. Probably no regime has ever made greater use of them than we did. Those of Fascist Italy were paltry by comparison whereas Soviet ones, though as large as ours, lacked imagination and tended to be boring. The meetings started at the village level, where they became a regular part of life (this was at a time when electronic media and electronic communications had not yet begun to close the gap between cities and the countryside as they later did.) They went up all the way to the gigantic Party rally held in Nuremberg each year from 1933 on. Effectively covered by radio and film—think of Leni Riefenstahl’s masterpiece, The Triumph of the Will—they lifted both participants and observers out of their day-today existence. Making them feel part of an entity much greater, much more powerful, than their insignificant selves. Once again, we had a nice slogan which summed up all this: Du bist nichts, dein Volk ist alles (you are nothing, your people are everything). Often we invited foreigners to watch the ceremonies. Others attended of their own accord. Almost to a man, they came away impressed by our display of unity, order, discipline, and power. Sheer power.

  Another method we used was to hold plebiscites. Plebiscites were frequent in the ancient world, especially in Greece. Since everyone had one vote, and since no one had heard of representation and parliaments, in a sense the whole of political life consisted of a continuous series of plebiscites. In Athens, classical scholars say, they were held about once every three weeks. Napoleon used them, and so did his nephew Napoleon III, in both cases to very good effect. Not so German emperors, kings, grand-dukes, princes, or whatever they called themselves. Claiming to be God-appointed, they had always been somewhat afraid of what a plebiscite might bring. Article 73 of the Weimar Constitution allowed them. However, only one was held—in 1926, to decide on the thorny question of whether the various former royal houses should be expropriated. (They were, but only in part.)

  I myself saw plebiscites in a completely different light. To me they were a method to draw people and government closer together by making the former feel that they were participating in the affairs of the latter. Our opponents and subsequent critics have claimed that, ere we put a question to the nation to decide, we made sure that the nation would come up with the answer we wanted. Of course we did! But so did everyone else since the beginning of the world. A plebiscite held without proper preparation is both foolish and dangerous. Look what happened to de Gaulle in 1969. As the voice went against him, he was forced to resign, thereby depriving his country of the one outstanding statesman it has produced since at least 1945. In any case there was hardly any need to do so. Time after time, the overwhelming majority of people were happy to say yes. At most, here and there, a little intimidation was needed. But not much. In November 1933, when we asked voters whether Germany should or should not remain a member of the League of Nations, even the inmates of concentration camps voted in our favor.

  But what is a plebiscite? Does the term always and necessarily refer to a formal process whereby the government puts a question to the people, sets up neat little voting boxes, and then proceeds to count the number of those who respond with a yes or a no, as in the case of BREXIT, for example? Can’t it also refer to acclamation, as in ancient Sparta? And how about the Germanic Middle Ages, when it was known as Huldigung? One of my better-known biographies is called A Study in Tyranny. But that is typical petit-bourgeois rubbish. As Joachim Fest quite correctly said, I did not tyrannize the German people. I seduced them. Not because I had come from Mars, but because they and I had grown out of the same roots and were made of the same material. Hence the acclamation I received and the outcome of the plebiscites I held; in more ways than one, I was the most democratic ruler in the whole of German history. And not just German history either. Wherever I went, tsunamis of people came to see me, listen to me, identify themselves with me, and experience me. Just as, four hundred years earlier, they had done with Luther! Considered in this light, wouldn’t it be true to say that the entire history of the Third Reich—certainly until July 1940, when we celebrated our victory over France—was one long plebiscite, one which got me the confidence of the people not once, or twice, or thrice, but day by day, a thousand times over?

  The wish to close the gap between the government and the people also caused us to tackle the bureaucracy. I in particular, since personal experience had taught me both what the lack of the Abitur could do and the way bureaucrats treated those who did not have it. Too many of them really believed that, as the German proverb goes, “He to whom God gives an office He also provides with the necessary wisdom.” This, it must be admitted, is not very great! Our efforts to change this state of affairs had two prongs. First, we wanted to open the way to talent—to create equal opportunity, as it is now known. The situation whereby only the scions of the upper classes, properly groomed, polished, and schooled, could rule had to be altered. During our early years in power in particular we did our best to identify young working-class people with leadership potential to prepare them for important tasks without putting too much emphasis on any formal education they might or might not have.

  Second, and perhaps even more important, we wanted to make it, if not exactly more populist—an oxymoron, that—at least more flexible and more responsive to the demands of ordinary people. To that end, decentralization would have been essential. The situation, so characteristic of Germany, where every petty Rat (Councilor) hid behind the regulations and looked down on those who needed his services, had to be terminated. Instead, we wanted to encourage initiativ
e and to make people take responsibility for their actions. In addition, we wanted to modify the system of promotion by seniority so as to make way for talent. As part of this, we started using the term Genosse, roughly translatable as “fellow participant.” We also abolished old-fashioned forms of address such as “most humbly.” In the event, our attacks on rank and privilege proved quite popular. Unfortunately, though, they remained limited, partly because many of the new candidates were just not up to the job and partly because the existing bureaucracy, with its tradition going back hundreds of years, resisted us tooth and nail.

  Closely related to our attempts to establish the völkisch character of our state was the socialist part of our National Socialist program. This takes me back to my years in Vienna. I myself came from a petit-bourgeois family. However, keeping track of what Lueger was trying to do taught me that, in the modern world, no political program that does not promise an improvement in the condition of the workers stands the slightest chance of success. Not even my difficulties with Röhm and his associates, who wanted to go much further than I did and paid the price, made me forget that lesson. Like the Italian Fascists, our entire intent in governing Germany was to find a “third way” between capitalism on one hand and communism on the other. We wanted the advantages of both systems, but without the concomitant disadvantages of either.