The structural revolution that the regime brought in was distorted by an antiquarian perspective that made much of folklore and ancestral heritage. In other words, the sky over Germany was and remained romantically darkened. The peasantry, for example, became the object of widespread sentimentalizing, while its actual economic plight visibly accelerated, and the so-called “flight from the land” reached a new statistical high between 1933 and 1938. Similarly, by its industrialization programs (especially in central Germany with its militarily vital chemical plants) the regime furthered the very urbanization that it simultaneously denounced. Though for the first time it integrated women into the industrial process, it continued to condemn all the liberal and Marxist tendencies to defeminize women. It made a cult of tradition, but a “confidential report” circulated early in 1936 stated: “The link with tradition must be thoroughly destroyed. New, altogether unknown forms. No individual rights…”
In an attempt to grasp this two-faced character of the phenomenon some writers have spoken of a “double-revolution,”53 a revolution against the bourgeois order in the name of bourgeois standards, against tradition in the name of tradition. The cozy romantic decor need not be considered as cynical masquerade; quite often it was an effort to fix in thought or in symbol something irrevocably lost in reality. The majority of Nazi fellow travelers, at any rate, interpreted the idyllic trimmings of National Socialist ideology in this way. Hitler himself in his secret speech to the officer class of 1938 spoke of the anguish and depressing conflicts caused by political and social progress whenever it clashed with those “sacred traditions” that rightly claimed men’s loyalty and attachment: “There have always been catastrophes…. Those affected have always had to suffer…. Precious memories always had to be abandoned, traditions always had to be superseded. The past century, too, inflicted deep grief upon many. It is so easy to talk about ages, so easy to talk about, let us say, other Germans who in those days were pushed out. It was necessary! It had to be…. And then came the year eighteen and added a new great sorrow, and that too was necessary, and finally came our revolution, and it has drawn the ultimate conclusions, and it too is necessary. There is no other way.”54
The dual nature of the National Socialist revolution to a high degree marked the regime as a whole and gave it its peculiar Janus-faced appearance. The foreign observers who poured into Germany in growing numbers, lured by the “Fascist experiment,” and who reported on a peaceful Germany in which the trains ran on time as they had in the past, a country of bourgeois normality, of rule of law and administrative justice, were just as right as the exiles who bitterly lamented their misfortune and that of their persecuted and harried friends. The suppression of the SA undeniably put a halt to the dominion of violence and ushered in a phase of stabilization in which the authoritarian forces of political order braked the dynamism of totalitarian revolution. For a while it appeared as if normality once again replaced the state of emergency. At least, for the time being, there was an end of those conditions in which (in the words of a July 1, 1933, report to the Bavarian Prime Minister) everybody arrested everybody else, and everybody threatened everybody else with Dachau. It has been observed that in the Germany of 1934 to 1938, in the midst of coercion and flagrant injustice, there were idyllic enclaves that were sought out and cultivated as never before. Emigration abroad fell off considerably, and even the emigration of Jewish citizens continually diminished.55 But many were emigrating inwardly, into the cachettes du coeur. The old German mistrust of politics, the aversion to its commitments and importunities, seemed confirmed and vindicated during those years.
A dual mentality corresponded to the “dual state.” Political apathy went hand in hand with displays of jubilant approval. Again and again Hitler created pretexts for lashing the nation to enthusiasm: coups and sensations in foreign policy; spectacles, monumental building programs, and even social measures, all of which had the effect of stimulating the imagination and raising self-confidence. The essence of his art of government consisted largely in understanding how to manipulate popular need. The consequence was a curiously nervous, exceedingly artificial graph of popularity, marked by abrupt upswings amidst phases of disgruntlement. But Hitler’s own charisma and the respect the nation accorded him for having succeeded in restoring order were the basis for his psychological power. Those who compared the horrors of the years past—the riots, the unemployment, the arbitrary brutality of the SA, and the humiliations in foreign policy—with the hypnotic counterimage of power-conscious order, as manifested in parades or party rallies, would seldom track down his errors. Moreover, the regime made a point of stressing its authoritarian-conservative features, representing itself as a more stringently organized version of government by militant German Nationalists. Papen’s idea of the “new state” might have been conceived along similar lines.
And, for all its austerity and police-state sterility, the regime satisfied to a high degree the craving for adventure, heroic dedication, and that gambler’s passion in which Hitler shared and for which modern social-welfare states leave so little room.
Behind this picture of order, however, a radical energy was at work. Very few of the contemporaries had any idea of how radical it was. The frightened bourgeois soon convinced themselves that Hitler had acted as a conservative, antirevolutionary force in defeating Röhm. But in fapt he had been obeying the law of revolution, had been the more radical as against the merely radical revolutionary. “A second revolution was being prepared,” Göring had accurately stated on the afternoon of June 30, “but it was made by us against those who have conjured it up.”
Even then, anyone who looked closer should not have failed to see that a state consecrated to order, full employment, and equal rights on the international front could not possibly satisfy Hitler’s ambition. In November, 1934, it is true, he assured a French visitor that he was not thinking of conquests. He was, he said, concerned with building a new social order that would earn him the gratitude of his people and consequently a more lasting monument than any dedicated to a victorious general. But such statements were empty rhetoric. His dynamism had never been nourished by the ideal of a totalitarian welfare state with its spic-and-span dreariness, its complacency, and all the common man’s felicity he despised. The source of his inner drive was a fantastically overwrought, megalomaniacal vision leaping far beyond the horizon and claiming for itself a life span of at least a thousand years.
VI. THE YEARS OF PREPARATION
The Age of Faits Accomplis
It does not suffice to say, as the French do, that their nation was taken by surprise. Neither a nation nor a woman is forgiven for an unguarded hour in which the first adventurer who comes along can sweep them off their feet and possess them. We do not solve the mystery by such phrases, but merely formulate it differently.
Woe to the weak!
Historians have looked back upon the mid-thirties with some vexation. This was the period in which Hitler repeated, on the plane of foreign policy, those same practices of overwhelming his opponents that had yielded him such easy triumphs at home. And he applied them in the same effortless manner and with no less success. In accord with his thesis “that before foreign enemies are conquered the enemy within must be annihilated,”1 he had behaved rather quietly in the preceding months. His only flamboyant gestures had been his withdrawal from the League of Nations and his treaty with Poland. Secretly, meanwhile, he had begun rearmament, since he was well aware that without military force a country could have only the most limited freedom of movement in the realm of foreign policy. He would have to get through the transitional phase from weakness to power without breaches of treaties and without provoking powerful neighbors. Once again, as at the beginning of his seizure of power, many observers predicted his impending fall. But by a series of foreign-policy coups he managed within a few months to throw off the restrictions imposed by the Versailles Treaty and to occupy vantage points for his intended expansionist movements.