55. According to Brüning, Memoiren, p. 645, who had his information from Schleicher, Hindenburg allegedly said: “Thank you, Herr General, for everything you have done for the Fatherland. Now, with God’s help, let us see how the cat jumps.”
56. Kessler, In the Twenties, p. 443.
57. Thomas Mann, “Bruder Hitler,” in: Gesammelte Werke 12, p. 774.
58. Report of Police Detective Feil, HStA Munich, Allgemeine Sonderausgabe I, No. 1475.
59. Hitler to Schleicher, beginning of February, 1933. Cf. Brüning, Memoiren, p. 648.
60. Cf. Frank, pp. 121 f. In the published version of his book, however, Frank does not quote the eschatological passage cited here; cf. on this Görlitz and Quint, p. 367.
INTERPOLATION II
1. Gottfried Benn, “Doppelleben,” Gesammelte Werke IV, p. 89.
2. G. A. Borgese, Goliath: The March of Fascism, p. 361.
3. Friedrich Franz von Unruh in a series of articles, “Nationalsozialismus,” which was published in the Frankfurter Zeitung between February 22 and March 3, 1931.
4. E. Vermeil, “The Origin, Nature and Development of German Nationalist Ideology in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” in: The Third Reich, p. 6. Cf. also Rohan D’O. Butler, The Roots of National Socialism, W. M. Govern, From Luther to Hitler, and W. Steed, “From Frederick the Great to Hitler. The Consistency of German Aims,” in: International Affairs, 1938:17.
5. Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe.
In spite of many accurate observations on single items, all historians who have tried to assess Hitler as the focal point of centuries of history run one great risk: they come dangerously close to the Nazis’ own interpretations of their movement. For that is what the Nazis were claiming when they usurped the Hansa, mysticism, Prussianism and Romanticism, and hailed their Third Reich as the fulfillment of German history. But there is something equally dubious about the opposing school, which seeks to represent National Socialism, and totalitarianism in general, as aspects of the crisis of the democratic era, flowing out of its rebellion against tradition and its petrified systems, its social antagonisms and economic weaknesses. For this school Nazism is the consequence of the modern rather than the German character; it is the negative utopia of the total state, such as was evoked in many pessimistic prophecies of the nineteenth century. For National Socialism viewed itself precisely as the world-historical corrective of that crisis. In the German accounts that posit this interpretation, Hitler frequently appears as an overwhelming foreign influence, a “counterpoise to tradition, especially to the Prusso-German and Bismarckian tradition,” as Gerhard Ritter puts it in his contribution to the collection of essays in The Third Reich (pp. 381 ff.), in which he consistently takes a stand diametrically opposite to that of E. Vermeil. Ritter argues that even the wrongheaded attitudes of which the Germans have been accused were on the whole characteristic of the age: “It is astonishing how many expressions of nationalistic ambition, militaristic principles, racist pride and antidemocratic criticism can be found in the intellectual and political literature of all European countries.”
None of these excessively one-sided interpretations can possibly grasp the nature of the phenomenon; the standard Marxist interpretation makes that crystal clear. Constantly hampered by their own actions and by piety toward their comrades who went down to defeat, the Marxist spokesmen have basically never been able to free themselves from the well-known, officially proclaimed definition of National Socialism as a manifestation of the “open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinistic and imperialistic elements of finance capital.” Consequently, if this thought is followed to its logical conclusion, the key personalities of National Socialism must have been not Hitler, Goebbels, and Streicher, but Hugenberg, Krupp, and Thyssen. Such a view is in fact actually taken by, for example, Czichon, in Wer verhalf Hitler zur Macht? and by many others. Cf. for this whole subject the instructive survey in Bracher, Diktatur, pp. 6 ff.
6. Cf. Note 13 to Interpolation I. During a stay in Germany in the early twenties the Rumanian Fascist leader Codreanu complained, significantly, that there was no visceral, consistent anti-Semitism in that country; cf. Nolte, Krise, p. 263.
7. Rudolf Höss, at one time commandant of Auschwitz; see Gustave Mark Gilbert, The Psychology of Dictatorship, p. 250.
8. Harold J. Laski, “The Meaning of Fascism” in: Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, p. 106.
9. Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen was the title of an embittered criticism of democracy by Edgar J. Jung, who later became Papen’s assistant and was killed during the purge of June 30, 1934.
10. Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, p. 113.
11. Pierre Vienot, Is Germany Finished?, p. 97.
12. Domarus, p. 226.
13. Albert Speer, in a memo to the author; for Hitler’s rejection of Hess or Himmler as his successor, cf. Speer, Inside the Third Reich, pp. 137, 276.
14. G. Ritter asserts in Carl Goerdeler, p. 109, that the idea of having fallen into the hands of an unscrupulous adventurer would have seemed absolutely grotesque to the majority of the German bourgeoisie. Rudolf Breitscheid’s reaction is reported by Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Offiziere gegen Hitler, p. 12; Julius Leber’s comment on the lack of an intellectual foundation comes from a diary entry; see his Ein Mann geht seinen Weg, pp. 123 f. Many Social Democrats secretly expected that Hitler would quickly tangle with Papen and Hugenberg, and they would reap the benefit. “Then there will be a settlement of accounts, and very different it will be from 1918,” Prussian ex-State Secretary Abegg threatened in conversation with Count Kessler; see Kessler, In the Twenties, p. 447.
15. Kessler, p. 428.
BOOK V
1. What went on at this meeting and how important it proved to be was first revealed during the Nuremberg trial; see IMT XXXV, pp. 42 ff.; also IMT V, pp. 177 ff., XII, pp. 497 ff., and XXXVI, pp. 520 ff.
2. See Domarus, pp. 207, 209, 211, 214; also Baynes, I, pp. 238, 252.
3. Hans Mommsen, “The Reichstag Fire and Its Political Consequences,” in Holborn, ed., Republic to Reich, pp. 129 ff.
4. Cf. IMT IX, pp. 481 f. and PS-3593. To the very end, incidentally, Göring vigorously denied having participated in any way in setting the fire. He remarked—quite believably—he would not have needed any pretexts to strike against the Communists. “Their debt was so heavy, their crime so tremendous, that without any further prompting I was determined to begin the most ruthless war of extermination with all the instruments of power at my command against this plague. On the contrary, as I testified at the Reichstag Fire trial, the fire which forced me to take measures so rapidly was actually extremely awkward for me, since it forced me to act faster than I intended and to strike before I had made all my thorough preparations.” Hermann Göring, Aufbau einer Nation, pp. 93 f.