(This article was originally written in 2003)
Three score and ten years---the traditional reckoning of a lifetime---that’s how long it’s been since Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933.
Hitler took the helm with an extremely clear idea of how he would mobilize the nation to achieve the program he had in mind. His goal was to enable Germany to throw off the shackles imposed on it by the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I and to achieve German domination of Europe from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains.
In the wreckage of Germany in the years following the armistice of 1918, Hitler cobbled together the political philosophy he clung to for the rest of his life. Force mattered most in deciding things, Hitler believed. To him, notions of overcoming the injustices suffered by some peoples at the hands of others through negotiation, reason and internationalism were nothing but sophistry. Worse, such ideas were fetters whose purpose was to keep those who ruled the earth in their positions of power. Germany would realize its rightful place in the sun only when Germans hardened their hearts against other peoples and forged an implacable unity under the direction of an uncompromising leader.
Race was at the heart of Hitler’s distinctly unoriginal world view. The world’s races, he held, were locked in a struggle for survival, one against another. The Germans constituted a master race, superior to those around them, in particular the Slavs. Only the Jews, Hitler thought, could thwart the German march to supremacy. The Jews---Hitler and the Nazi racial theorists believed---constituted a bacillus that had to be excised from the blood stream of Germany and Europe. This idea, for decades the subject of the ranting of the politically demented in flop houses and beer halls, ultimately became the basis for the murder of six million in the Holocaust.
There was nothing inevitable about Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. He became Chancellor for the very good reason that his party won the largest number of votes in free elections. But without the active scheming of members of Germany’s ruling elite, he never would have been sworn in on that fateful January day. Hitler’s electoral support was actually slipping on the eve of his accession to power. While the Nazis won 37.4 per cent of the vote in parliamentary (Reichstag) elections in July 1932---their highest ever total in a free election---this proportion fell to 33.1 per cent in November 1932, in Germany’s last free parliamentary election.
It took Hitler just over a year and a half to acquire absolute power after becoming Chancellor. One would like to be able to record that as Hitler established concentration camps, set in train the highly visible and ferocious persecution of the Jews, and built a military force with the plain goal of assaulting neighbouring countries, that Germans soured on their leader. The reverse was true. Hitler’s rearmament put unemployed Germans back to work. He sailed from triumph to triumph in foreign policy, swallowing Austria and Czechoslovakia without war. On the eve of the second world war, historians agree that Hitler’s popularity with the German people was immense, that he was the most idolized leader in the world with his own people.
Germany’s early victories in the Second World War convinced Hitler’s adoring public that he was a military as well as a political genius. It was his inability to accept that he and Germany were subject to any limits that brought him down. Invading the Soviet Union in June 1941 and recklessly declaring war on the United States four days after Pearl Harbour in December 1941, sealed his fate. On January 30, 1943, ten years to the day after Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor, Hermann Goering, the Nazi air force chief, broadcast to the German people a "funeral oration" for the doomed German Sixth Army at Stalingrad. Twenty-seven months later, the Soviet Army was in Berlin, the western allies were closing in, and Hitler had shot himself in his bunker.
If Hitler’s totalitarianism and his maniacal drive to remake the world in his own image have a distinctly 20th century feel about them, they also remain a stark warning in our new century. A lifetime after he took power exclusionism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the idolization of leaders who seem to be able to solve problems through force, are very much a part of our world. And the weapons Hitler deployed were mere toys in comparison to the weapons today’s great states possess.
Three score and ten years---the traditional reckoning of a lifetime---that’s how long it’s been since Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933.
Hitler took the helm with an extremely clear idea of how he would mobilize the nation to achieve the program he had in mind. His goal was to enable Germany to throw off the shackles imposed on it by the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I and to achieve German domination of Europe from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains.
In the wreckage of Germany in the years following the armistice of 1918, Hitler cobbled together the political philosophy he clung to for the rest of his life. Force mattered most in deciding things, Hitler believed. To him, notions of overcoming the injustices suffered by some peoples at the hands of others through negotiation, reason and internationalism were nothing but sophistry. Worse, such ideas were fetters whose purpose was to keep those who ruled the earth in their positions of power. Germany would realize its rightful place in the sun only when Germans hardened their hearts against other peoples and forged an implacable unity under the direction of an uncompromising leader.
Race was at the heart of Hitler’s distinctly unoriginal world view. The world’s races, he held, were locked in a struggle for survival, one against another. The Germans constituted a master race, superior to those around them, in particular the Slavs. Only the Jews, Hitler thought, could thwart the German march to supremacy. The Jews---Hitler and the Nazi racial theorists believed---constituted a bacillus that had to be excised from the blood stream of Germany and Europe. This idea, for decades the subject of the ranting of the politically demented in flop houses and beer halls, ultimately became the basis for the murder of six million in the Holocaust.
There was nothing inevitable about Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. He became Chancellor for the very good reason that his party won the largest number of votes in free elections. But without the active scheming of members of Germany’s ruling elite, he never would have been sworn in on that fateful January day. Hitler’s electoral support was actually slipping on the eve of his accession to power. While the Nazis won 37.4 per cent of the vote in parliamentary (Reichstag) elections in July 1932---their highest ever total in a free election---this proportion fell to 33.1 per cent in November 1932, in Germany’s last free parliamentary election.
It took Hitler just over a year and a half to acquire absolute power after becoming Chancellor. One would like to be able to record that as Hitler established concentration camps, set in train the highly visible and ferocious persecution of the Jews, and built a military force with the plain goal of assaulting neighbouring countries, that Germans soured on their leader. The reverse was true. Hitler’s rearmament put unemployed Germans back to work. He sailed from triumph to triumph in foreign policy, swallowing Austria and Czechoslovakia without war. On the eve of the second world war, historians agree that Hitler’s popularity with the German people was immense, that he was the most idolized leader in the world with his own people.
Germany’s early victories in the Second World War convinced Hitler’s adoring public that he was a military as well as a political genius. It was his inability to accept that he and Germany were subject to any limits that brought him down. Invading the Soviet Union in June 1941 and recklessly declaring war on the United States four days after Pearl Harbour in December 1941, sealed his fate. On January 30, 1943, ten years to the day after Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor, Hermann Goering, the Nazi air force chief, broadcast to the German people a "funeral oration" for the doomed German Sixth Army at Stalingrad. Twenty-seven months later, the Soviet Army was in Berlin, the western allies were closing in, and Hitler had shot himself in his bunker.
If Hitler’s totalitarianism and his maniacal drive to remake the world in his own image have a distinctly 20th century feel about them, they also remain a stark warning in our new century. A lifetime after he took power exclusionism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the idolization of leaders who seem to be able to solve problems through force, are very much a part of our world. And the weapons Hitler deployed were mere toys in comparison to the weapons today’s great states possess.
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