Long ago, in the days of struggle, Hitler had let himself be represented grandiloquently as “the man who would rather be a dead Achilles than a living dog.” Later on, he had begun to elaborate the scenario for his obsequies. His burial place was to be a mighty crypt in the bell tower of the gigantic structure he had planned to build on the bank of the Danube at Linz. But in fact he was hastily shoveled into a shell hole among mountains of rubble, fragments of wall, cement mixers, and scattered rubbish.
This was not yet the end of the story. Goebbels tried to coax the Russians into separate negotiations by references to their “common holiday of May 1.” When these efforts failed, Goebbels and his family committed suicide. Bormann, together with the other inhabitants of the bunker, made an attempt to break out. Then Soviet troops occupied the abandoned bunker and immediately set about searching for the remains of Hitler’s body. A medical report dated May 8, 1945, of an autopsy of a severely charred male body came to the conclusion that this was “presumably Hitler’s corpse.” Other statements shortly afterward cast doubt on this assertion. Then again Soviet sources maintained that Hitler had after all been identified on the basis of dental studies; but this statement, too, was questioned, and rumors arose that the British authorities were hiding Hitler in their zone of occupation. At the Potsdam Conference in July, 1945, Stalin assured his Western colleagues that the Russians had not found the corpse and that Hitler was hiding in Spain or South America.78 In the end the Russians managed to swathe the whole question in such obscurity that the wildest versions concerning the end of Hitler circulated. Some said he had been shot in the Berlin Tiergarten by a German squad of officers. Others had him fleeing in a submarine to a remote island. Still other stories maintained that he was living in a Spanish monastery or on a South American hacienda. All his life Hitler had owed his successes largely to one or the other of his enemies. Now, once more, his ill-wishers—as if in a last display of all the mistakes of the era—made it possible for him to live a mythical posthumous life.
For all that the event had no consequences, it was a symbol. It once again forcibly suggested that the appearance of Hitler, the conditions of his rise and his triumphs, were founded upon premises that point far beyond the narrow framework of merely German conditions. Granted, every nation bears the responsibility for its own history. But only a mind that has learned nothing from the misfortunes of these times will call him the man of a single nation and refuse to recognize that a powerful tendency of the age culminated in him, a tendency that dominated the entire first half of this century.
Thus Hitler not only destroyed Germany. He also put an end to old Europe with its nationalisms, its conflicts, its hereditary foes, and its insincere imperatives—as well as with its brilliance, its grandeur, and the magic of its douceur de vivre. Possibly he was deceiving himself when he called that Europe “outmoded.” His unique radicality, his visions, his missionary fever, and, as the outcome of these, an unprecedented explosion of energy, were needed to destroy it. But ultimately it must be granted that he could not have destroyed Europe without the help of Europe.
CONCLUSION
The Dead End
A man once said to me: “Listen, if you do that, Germany will fall apart in six weeks.”
I said: “What do you mean by that?”
“Germany will just collapse.”
I said: “What do you mean by that?”
“Germany will just cease to exist.”
I answered: “Once upon a time the German people survived the wars with the Romans. The German people survived the Great Migrations. The German people survived the later great battles of the Early and Late Middle Ages. The German people survived the wars of religion at the dawn of modern times. The German people survived the Thirty Years’ War. The German people later survived the Napoleonic Wars, the Wars of Liberation; it even survived a World War, even the Revolution—it will survive even me!”
Almost without transition, virtually from one moment to the next, Nazism vanished after the death of Hitler and the surrender. It was as if National Socialism had been nothing but the motion, the state of intoxication and the catastrophe it had caused. It is not accidental that in the contemporary accounts dating from the spring of 1945 certain phrases crop up repeatedly—to the effect that a “spell” had been broken, a “phantasmagoria” shattered. Such language borrowed from the sphere of magic conveys the peculiarly unreal nature of the regime and the abruptness of its end.
Hitler’s propaganda specialists had talked constantly of invincible alpine redoubts, nests of resistance, and swelling werewolf units, and had predicted a war beyond the war—but there was no sign of this. Once again it became plain that National Socialism, like Fascism in general, was dependent to the core on superior force, arrogance, triumph, and by its nature had no resources in the moment of defeat. The cogent point has been made that Germany was the only defeated country in the Second World War that failed to produce a resistance movement.1
This impermanence also showed up in the conduct of the regime’s leaders and functionaries. It was especially apparent in the course of their efforts during the Nuremberg trials to exculpate themselves ideologically. They denied or belittled the crimes that shortly before had had eschatological portent, so that in the end everything—the violence, the war, the genocide—assumed the character of a ghastly, stupid misunderstanding. That behavior, too, contributed to the impression that Nazism had not been a phenomenon spanning and characterizing the era, but a superficial movement sprung from an individual’s urge for power combined with the resentments of a restive nation with a craving for conquest. For had it been deeply rooted in the times, had it been one of the age’s elemental movements, a military defeat could not have consigned it so abruptly to oblivion.
Nevertheless, after only twelve years it had given the world a different aspect; and it is patent that such tremendous processes cannot be adequately explained solely as resulting from the whims of an individual in power. Such events become possible only if this individual embodies the emotions, anxieties, or interests of a multitude, and if powerful forces of the age are impelling him onward. Here we see once more Hitler’s role and importance in relation to the energies that surrounded him. An enormous, chaotic potential of aggressiveness, anxiety, devotion, and egotism lay ready to hand; but it needed to be called forth, concentrated, and applied by an imperious figure. To that figure it owed its impetus and legitimacy, with that figure it celebrated its imposing victories, and with that figure it went down to destruction.
But Hitler was more than the unifying figure for many of the tendencies of the age. He also imposed direction, extension, and radicalness upon the course of events. In this he was aided by his habit of thinking in absolutes and subordinating everything, principles, opponents, allies, nations, and ideas, icily or maniacally to his own monstrous goals. His extremism corresponded to his inward remoteness. August Kubizek had noted his friend’s tendency “to overturn the millennia.” And although we should not lay undue emphasis on such recollections, Hitler’s later way of dealing with the world did have something of the infantile radicalness that this phrase suggests. His own remark, that he confronted “everything with a tremendous, ice-cold absence of bias,”2 points in the same direction. We might even contend that contrary to his claim, which he dated back to his youth, he never grasped the true nature of history. He thought of it as a kind of hall of fame with doors wide open to ambitious men. He knew nothing of the meaning and the justification of tradition. In spite of the aura of bourgeois decline that surrounded him, he was a homo novus. And in that spirit, with an unconcern that seems abstract, he went about realizing his intentions. He changed the map of Europe, destroyed empires, and promoted the rise of new powers, evoked revolutions, and brought the colonial age to an end. Finally, he enormously widened the horizon of mankind’s experience. To paraphrase a saying of Schopenhauer, whom he revered after his fashion, it might be said that he taught the world some things it will never forget.