Defying Hitler: how could the Nazis seize power?

There are legions of historians, sociologists, and economists who have devoted lives to that question. Sebastian Haffner lived it and provides the observations of a sensitive eyewitness in Defying Hitler: a Memoir, written in 1939 from exile from Germany when he could not know where all this might lead. (Part one of my series on this book is here.)

His story begins with World War I, not with the experiences of those who fought and suffered in the trenches, but with a younger generation raised on the war's mythology.

From 1914 to 1918 a generation of German schoolboys daily experienced war as a great, thrilling, enthralling game between nations, which provided far more excitement and emotional satisfaction than anything peace could offer; and that has now become the underlying vision of Nazism.

He has nothing much to say in favor of the political upheavals in the German state after that war and the deposition of the German Kaiser, the last Hohenzollern monarch. The chaotic birth of the Weimar Republic did not inspire.

As middle-class boys, who moreover had only just been roughly jolted out of a four-year-long patriotic intoxication with war, we were naturally against the Red revolutionaries; against Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and their Spartacus League. Although we only vaguely knew that they would “rob us of everything,” probably liquidate those of our parents who were well-off, and altogether make life frightful and “Russian,” we had thus to be in favor of Ebert and Noske and their Free Corps. But, alas, it was impossible to work up any enthusiasm for these figures. The spectacle they offered was too obviously repellent, the stench of treachery that clung to them was too pervasive; it was plain even to the nose of an eleven-year-old boy.

Things didn't get much better over the decade of the 1920s, though the young Haffner wasn't personally discomfited by the ongoing instability of the German state. The highpoint of Weimar democracy according to historians came under the leadership of the Jewish industrialist and politician Walter Rathenau who was assassinated by gangsters of the extreme right.

What the short-lived Rathenau epoch left behind was the confirmation of the lesson already learned in the years 1918 and 1919: nothing the left did ever came off.

By 1932, the unstable Weimar Republic was being torn apart by worker discontent on the left and right-wing demagoguery that blamed democracy itself for the state's failures. The Nazis deftly navigated this fractious stew, placing their leader Hitler in power. The old political class of the center -- Haffner's class of educated professionals -- did not hold.

It was strange to observe how the behavior of each side reinforced that of the other: the savage impudence that gradually made it possible for the unpleasant little apostle of hate to assume the proportions of a demon; the bafflement of his tamers, who always realized just too late exactly what it was he was up to — namely, when he capped it with something even more outrageous and monstrous; then, also, the hypnotic trance into which his public fell, succumbing with less and less resistance to the glamour of depravity and the ecstasy of evil.

... The mind-set of “appeasement” was also apparent. Powerful groups were in favor of rendering Hitler “harmless” by giving him “responsibility.” There were constant political arguments, fruitless and bitter, in cafés and bars, in shops, schools, and in family homes. ...  The Nazis constantly gained ground. What was no longer to be found was pleasure in life, amiability, fun, understanding, goodwill, generosity, and a sense of humor. There were few good books being published anymore, and certainly no readers. The air in Germany had rapidly become suffocating.

With terrible foreboding, Haffner watched the the Nazis march to power in the national elections of 1933.

It started with a huge victory celebration before the elections on March 4 — ”Tag der nationalen Erhebung” (Day of National Rising). There were mass parades, fireworks, drums, bands, and flags all over Germany, Hitler’s voice over thousands of loudspeakers, oaths and vows — and all before it was even certain that the elections might not be a setback for the Nazis, which indeed they were. 

These elections, the last that were ever held in prewar Germany, brought the Nazis only 44 percent of the votes (in the previous elections they had achieved 37 percent). The majority was still against the Nazis. If you consider that terror was in full swing, that the parties of the left had been prohibited from all public activity in the decisive final week before the elections, you have to admit that the German people as a whole had behaved quite decently. 

However, it made no difference at all. The defeat was celebrated like a victory, the terror intensified, the celebrations multiplied. Flags never left the windows for a whole fortnight.

And then he watched the collapse of nominal opposition to Nazism.

Hundreds of thousands, who had up until then been opponents, joined the Nazi Party in March 1933. ... In each individual case the process of becoming a Nazi showed the unmistakable symptoms of nervous collapse. The simplest and, if you looked deeper, nearly always the most basic reason, was fear. Join the thugs to avoid being beaten up. Less clear was a kind of exhilaration, the intoxication of unity, the magnetism of the masses. 

Many also felt a need for revenge against those who had abandoned them. Then there was a peculiarly German line of thought: “All the predictions of the opponents of the Nazis have not come true. They said the Nazis could not win. Now they have won. Therefore the opponents were wrong. So the Nazis must be right.”

He watched the Nazis begin to manipulate public understanding to mount their campaign against Jewish Germans.

Apart from the terror, the unsettling and depressing aspect of this first murderous declaration of intent was that it triggered a flood of arguments and discussions all over Germany, not about anti-Semitism but about the “Jewish question.” This is a trick the Nazis have since successfully repeated many times on other “questions” and in international affairs. By publicly threatening a person, an ethnic group, a nation, or a region with death and destruction, they provoke a general discussion not about their own existence, but about the right of their victims to exist. In this way that right is put in question.

Though most everyone Haffner knew understood that something poisonous had taken over their country, there was little resistance once Hitler controlled the power of the state and the allegiance of a populist, murderous gang.

One temptation, often favored by older people, was withdrawal into an illusion: preferably the illusion of superiority. Those that surrendered to this clung to the amateurish, dilettantish aspects that Nazi politics undoubtedly exhibited at first. Every day they tried to convince themselves and others that this could not continue for long, and maintained an attitude of amused criticism. They spared themselves the perception of the fiendishness of Nazism by concentrating on its childishness, and misrepresented their position of complete, powerless subjugation as that of superior, unconcerned onlookers.

Wistfully, writing in 1939, he concluded that

Germany did not remain Germany. The German nationalists themselves destroyed it. ... The real conflict beneath the surface, hidden by the common clichés and platitudes, was between nationalism and keeping faith with one’s country.

By that he meant that the militaristic, aggressive, racist nationalism of the Nazis had supplanted any love of county which could countenance peace or harmony among peoples and nations.

• • •

Postlude. Let's go with the modern English lyrics sung to the tune of Jean Sibelius' Finlandia:

This is my song, O God of all the nations
A song of peace, for lands afar and mine
This is my home, the country where my heart is
Hear are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine
But other hearts in other lands are beating
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean
And sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine
But other lands have sunlight too, and clover
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine
Oh hear my song, thou God of all the nations
A song of peace for their land and for mine.