Deconstructing Hitler Part Two

‘How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don’t think’

Part one of Deconstructing Hitler ended in the mid 1930s and the Nazis in power. I argued that central to the popularity of the Nazi government was a range of social policies which obtained mass support coupled with the importance of the Hitler personality cult. In part two, I will focus on the countdown to the war which would inevitably bring an end to the Nazi regime and also the popularity of Hitler. The final part of this article addresses issues of historical methodology. What I want argue is that in order to truly understand Hitler, and more importantly the peoples that produced him, and then went on to execute his orders, we need to create a fusion of the Marxist analysis of history with the Freudian understanding of the individual. In the 1930s this was aptly called Social Psychology. Returning to this method we can begin the process of deconstructing Hitler. However, first we need to return to where we left off in part one and explore the experience of the Nazis in power.

Adolf Hitler knew early on his career that a ‘personality cult’ would be an important factor in winning the allegiance of the masses. The myth of Hitler as a charismatic helmsman, or as the ‘strongman’ who had rescued Germany from the corrupt system of party politics was indispensable to the integral function of the Third Reich. Moreover, Hitler transcended party politics. Many Germans held the Nazi Party in poor regard and at local level party functionaries were often treated with contempt. In local government the Nazis were seen as incompetent, corrupt and lazy. They had promised to clean up the rotten system of ‘party politics’ but instead behaved with the arrogance of new ruling elites. Ordinary Germans however perceived Hitler as distinct from the Nazi Party. Hitler was widely seen as a man who had forfeited his own life for the sake of the country. “If only Hitler knew”, was a common response to the incompetence and corruption of Nazi Party functionaries.

Following the Nazi seizure of power all political parties were banned. The members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who were fortunate enough to avoid the concentration camps formed a network of spies inside the Third Reich who provided valuable sociological information about life inside Nazis Germany. According to SPD sources, by the mid 1930s Hitler’s popularity had spread significantly amongst the industrialised working class and the unemployed many of whom had benefited from the Nazis job creation programme. By the end of the decade and the countdown to war Hitler’s popularity never wavered. In fact, his early foreign policy adventures made him even more popular.

The main aim of Hitler’s foreign policy was to restore Germany’s national glory which had collapsed at the end of the First World War. According to Hitler, Germany would become an imperial nation again and take her place amongst the world’s great empires. In particular he was a strong admirer of the British Empire. His aims struck a chord with German nationalism however support for his foreign policy was conditional on German imperialism being restored without bloodshed. Between 1938 and 1940 Hitler appeared to pull this off.

Hitler’s first act was the military reoccupation of the Rhineland, a complete breach of the Treaty of Versailles that he so despised. This was followed by the seizure of Austria in 1938. According to Hitler, the unity of these two great nations marked a return to a Greater Germanic Empire which the Nazis had promised. Piece by piece and bereft of any bloodshed Germany’s imperial glory was being restored and the period of boundless jubilation that followed in nationalistic circles marked the high point of Hitler’s popularity. In 1939 Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia to ‘liberate’ the German speaking people of the Sudetenland, and once again his goals were accomplished without a shot being fired. At this juncture, Hitler was regarded by the Nazi Party and also significant sections of the German population as a military and diplomatic genius. He had managed the seemingly impossible feat of restoring Germany’s honour without war, although it is important to point out that his foreign policy ‘successes’ were also down to luck and the failure of the major European powers to challenge him. From the late 1930s onwards, Hitler started to believe in his own personality cult. Hitherto he has been distant from it but recognised its importance in ‘stupefying the masses’. Quasi-religious terms began to appear in his speeches and he starts to draw upon mysticism to explain his own, and Germany’s destiny. ‘I go the way providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker’ he claimed.

The Second World War marked the beginning of the end of the Hitler personality cult. From the moment the war started his popularity was dependent on bringing the conflict to a swift end. The SPD noted that many Germans believed that Hitler could not win a long war. In particular, older Germans who remembered the realities of the First World War did not welcome a new conflict, although this view was not shared by many of the younger generation who were keen to support Hitler. Amidst military defeats and a deterioration of living conditions in Germany the personality cult that surrounded Hitler eventually collapsed. Between 1943 and 1944 the nightly bombing of cities by the Allied forces greatly impacted on German morale. Military retreat in North Africa followed by the disaster in Stalingrad changed the perspective most Germans had of Hitler. By the first months of 1945 most Germans regarded themselves as Hitler’s main victim.

History is easy to write when we are detailing what happened. The why did it happen is far more difficult. George Orwell writing shortly after the end of the war noted that Hitler had said to his people ‘I offer you danger and death and as a result a whole nation flings itself to his feet’. In the 1920s Adolf Hitler captivated the imagination of entire social movement, and then again in the mid-1930s he managed to gain the adulation of cross sectors of German society. The Fuhrer personality cult transcended both gender and class. Hitler’s popularity is all the more incredible when you take into account his rather insignificant origins which I referred to in part one. In Kershaw’s meticulous study of the Fuhrer myth, he reveals that Hitler’s followers possessed what seemed like biblical illusions about their leader. One rank and file Nazi said of his relationship to Hitler, ‘I did not come to Hitler by accident, I was searching for him’. Similar accounts are repeated in the notebooks of other Nazis.

At party rallies, young and impressionable members of the National Socialist movement competed with one another in claims that the Fuhrer had looked at them. Kershaw notes that their will to follow Hitler was like a secularised faith informed by a quasi-religious superstition of their leader’s greatness. Yet before Adolf Hitler had secured any position of power at the helm of a social movement, no one had commented on any signs or hints of greatness that he may have possessed. Perhaps the origins of a leadership cult reflected the mentality prevalent within the social movement than it did any special qualities about Adolf Hitler. Too often the study of history is focused on the role played by individuals. The question, which is the wrong question to ask, why certain individuals achieve greatness, often leads to individual psychology. Is it due to their charisma, or looks, or oration and so forth? A more appropriate question to ask, and the case of Hitler illustrates this point, is why are significant sections of the population prepared to follow powerful individuals? The methods of social psychology begin to offer an understanding. Social psychology started off as a critique of Marxist sociology although it is important to note that its main proponents subscribed to the materialist conception of history.

The Marxist study of history, what Marxists call Historical Materialism is often seen as providing the answers to understanding history. Marx, his followers in the twentieth century argued, had discovered the universal laws that determine history. In the hands of lesser minds than Karl Marx, the material conception of history often gave way to a crude form of economic determinism in which the economic realm was given priority over all other aspects of social phenomena. Bereft of a theory of human psychology Marxism became an ideology which dehumanised the individual, the ‘root cause’ of whose consciousness and sense of being was reduced to economic forces. When socialism is concerned only with economic forces the end game is Stalinism.

Marxist historians argued that economic factors are the fundamental factor upon which all others are dependant. All societies according to Marxists could be understood within a simple model that they referred to as ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’. By ‘base’ Marxists meant the mode of production which is the foundation of any given society, upon which rests a ‘superstructure’. The ‘superstructure’ consists of the state, political institutions, ideas and theories and so forth. Early Marxists interpreted this model as a simple relation of dominance and dependence in which the economic base determines changes the superstructure.

To prove the point in one of the most overused (and taken out of context quotes) they cite Marx himself: ‘it is not the consciousness of men that determines reality but on the contrary reality that determines consciousnesses’. In a crudely reductionist narrative the early Marxists went on to argue that class interest and class struggle is the driving force of all history. ‘One has the impression’ the historian Hobsbawm notes, ‘that some Marxists never read past the first page of the Communist Manifesto and the phrase that the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles’. Humanity, Marxists asserted, was divided up into two hostile camps, ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘proletarians’. Now whilst this may be true from an economic point of view (and it is debateable) from a psychological perspective it is a false dichotomy. When social, political and economic crisis occurred in Germany between 1929 and 1933 orthodox Marxists looked to the mode of economic production and the state of the class struggle in order to find answers. Moreover, Marxists developed the simplistic formula that proletarians equal good and bourgeoisie equal bad. Writing at the time, the social psychologist Wilhelm Reich noted:

Owing to its lack of knowledge of mass psychology Marxist sociologists set bourgeois against proletariat. This is incorrect from a psychological point of view. The character structure of fascism is not restricted to the capitalists: it is prevalent among the working men of all occupations.

Marxists, Reich went on to argue, had failed to take into account the character structure of the masses and the social effects of mysticism. The consequence was that the Marxist left underestimated the influence of the personality cult which Hitler had constructed. When Marxists did attempt to analyse the psychology of the masses the end result was often a romanticised view of the ‘proletarian’. Marxist sociology, particularly the vulgar Marxism of the early twentieth century had a one dimensional view of the human individual. An assertion was made that the individual would act in a way that was rational, or what appeared to be rational from the standpoint of Marxist theory. For example, the more economically exploited an individual becomes the more likely he or she is to support revolutionary social change.

The early Marxists argued that the downtrodden proletarian would eventually overthrow their oppressors in the act of revolution. But as the twentieth century unravelled Marxists were faced with the reality that they had completely overestimated the revolutionary potential of the working classes. The real story of the twentieth century is not the oppressed masses rising up to overthrow their oppressors as naively hoped for by Marx and Lenin and their many followers. Instead it is the story of the oppressed masses systematically murdering and butchering one another to defend a social system which according to Marxists was the origin of their own alienation.

Between 1914 and 1918 millions of working people slaughtered one another to defend the interests of their rulers. Men, who Marxists had said had nothing to lose but their chains rallied to the causes of the Kaiser or King and Country. Socialist revolution was rejected in order to support crudely nationalistic and xenophobic regimes. Marxists concluded that the poor workers had been betrayed and duped. It was all the fault of the Second International and the Social Democrats, screamed Lenin. In later years when the hope of socialist revolution in Germany came to nothing, Marxists blamed it on the betrayal by the German Communist Party or the now familiar cry of Marxists, that it was all the fault of the trade union leaders. But no one in the Marxist movement asked why it was that the masses allowed for such betrayals to take place in the first place.

Social Psychology, which originally emerged in the 1930s, was an attempt to link the political economy of Marx with the insight into man’s character structure as gained by Freud and the advent of scientific psychology. It is the unity of these two discourses which can truly enable an understanding of why the masses were prepared to follow Hitler and the Nazis. According to Social Psychologists, Marxism neglected the subjective factor in history and as a consequence was unable to explain the lack of correlation between the economic frustrations of the working class and its lack of will to put an end to the system which oppresses them. In addition to this, Marxism did not comprehend that the character structure of large sections of the proletariat was geared towards acquiescence and obedience to their oppressors. In the false dichotomy between base and superstructure, Reich notes that ideology is rigidly dependent on the economy and fails to see the dependency of economic development upon that of ideology. Marxists, particularly those informed by Lenin, argued that the economic conditions for international socialist revolution had occurred. In fact Lenin was so confident that the ‘objective conditions’ had been met that he based the success of socialist revolution in Russia entirely on this premise. Bereft of an understanding of Social Psychology, Lenin did not take into account that the ripening for internationalism would not be accompanied by corresponding developments in man’s structure and ideology.

In order to understand why it was that in the 1930s the economic interests of German imperialism triumphed over proletarian unity we need to understand why the masses were capable of absorbing imperialistic ideology. The masses are seduced by power and often worship at alters of the rich and powerful. Hitler carefully understood the mystique of power. Power was his sole purpose in life and it was why so many of his subordinates hung on his every word. Of course there is resistance to the power of individuals or social systems but in the main resistance tends to be marginal and acquiescence the norm. The character structure of the mass of people varies at any given point. In studies of German workers the Social Psychologist Theodore Adorno noted that around 10 per cent of participants possessed an ‘authoritarian character’.

This was defined as a person whose sense of strength and identity is based on a symbiotic subordination to authorities, and at the same time a symbiotic domination of those submitted to his or her authority. According to Erich Fromm, the authoritarian character himself feels strong when he can submit and be part of an authority which is inflated, is defied, and when at the same time he can inflate himself by incorporating those subject to his authority. By being part of the ‘big’, he becomes ‘big’. Fromm argues that any threat to his authority is also a threat to his authoritarian structure, and is for the authoritarian character a threat to his own sanity, hence he is forced to fight against this threat to authoritarianism as he would fight against a threat to his life or to his sanity.

Take for example the cases of those who carried out orders that led to the Holocaust. Attempts to understand these men in terms of individual psychology were futile. Initial studies of the Nazi genocide interpreted it as an outrage committed by born criminals, sadists, madmen or otherwise morally deficient individuals. Such accounts, which have dominated popular consciousness, have done little to develop an understanding of what actually occurred in Nazi Germany and do not stand up to close scrutiny. When probed deeper the experiences of the Third Reich are far more disturbing. Psychologists interviewing members of the SS after the war concluded that less than ten per cent could be described as ‘abnormal’:

The overwhelming majority of SS men, leaders as well as rank and file, would have easily passed all the psychiatric tests ordinarily given to American army recruits or Kansas City policemen (Bauman, 1989).

In order to understand how such men participated in the Holocaust it is necessary to locate their behaviour as part of a wider structure. It is within these command systems such as the army, the police force or the bureaucratic departments of a modern nation state, that individual morality is moulded and shaped. In Freudian terms, the role of the superego in the psychic structure of the individual shifts from an evaluation of the goodness or badness of an action to an assessment of how well or poorly one has functioned in the authoritarian system. Heroic acts of resistance are minimal, and in the case of the Holocaust less than five per cent of the soldiers.

Deconstructing Hitler was an ambitious undertaking. On the one hand I have attempted to explain what happened and also to offer an explanation of why it happened. The individuals I have quoted in this article, Reich, Fromm, Adorno, all attempted a synthesis between Marx and Freud. It is the latter’s insight into our character structure which offers an account of not only who we are, but what we as a species are capable of. Marx knew this only too well when he said that his famous maxim was ‘nothing human is alien to me’. Hitler and the Nazis were humanity’s creation. The readiness of the masses to follow powerful and charismatic individuals is the story of political life in the twentieth century. From left and right of the political spectrum, individual men, in an age of Enlightenment values, and in an era referred to as modernity, ruled societies and held influence over people just like they were medieval monarchs. Wilhelm Reich pointed out in 1930 that the scientific view of the world moves much too slowly to keep pace with the rapid spread of mystical contagion. The spread of ‘mystical contagion’ is the story of modern man. We can trace its history all the way back to the Greeks or to the Roman Empire and the beginnings of an emperor cult which would influence the early Christians narrative of Jesus. This may sound crude but it is a lack of faith in our selves that results in a need to worship others. During times of social turbulence this need is all the more compounded. The sociologist Max Weber traced the emergence of three different types of political authority. Charismatic authority he argued tends to arise in unusual or crisis conditions and rests on heroism or the exemplary character of the leader. Charisma, according to Weber, is a quality determined by the subjective perceptions of the followers. The threat to charismatic rule is ‘routinisation’ -the lapse back into stabilisation, regulation, systematisation and normality.

Hitler and Mussolini, but also Lenin and Stalin, Mao and Castro are cases in point. They made their entrances onto the centre stage of history during periods of political crisis and turmoil. Periods of social stability tend to produce what Weber called ‘traditional’ or ‘legal’ authority, which rests on rational and bureaucratic rules. Western democracies have specialised in this political leader, what we call the ‘men in grey suits’. Adolf Hitler was very much the product of the social turmoil of another time. It was in this age of extremes, to use Hobsbawm’s term that Hitler found his audience.

Today in a world of standardisation, routinisation and bureaucratisation it would be much more difficult or near to impossible for a Hitler or his political opposite Lenin to emerge. There is no epicentre of power to be seized, something Marxists have failed to theorise. As Bauman notes, if the time of systemic revolutions has passed, it is because there are no buildings where the control desks of the system are lodged and which could be stormed and captured by the revolutionaries. The dreamers and the utopians, whether they offer class struggle or race struggle certainly make for a more dramatic history. But Communism and Fascism (and Fascism to a much greater extent) both instilled in their followers a sense of moral rightness in ideology which resulted in the social engineering that led to the Holocaust and the Gulag. If the twentieth century has taught us anything it is that we should be wary of one size fits all ideologies which attempt to nationalise the people into one particular narrative.

These ideologies, the main two being Communism and Fascism promised the earth to their followers, but for those who did not fit into the narrative the end result was usually the concentration camps.