An Honourable Defeat Read Free

could not possibly last a year. Part of Hitler’s initial success was due to the fact that enough powerful people did not take him seriously, and part was due to the related fact that they did not see him for what he really was. One man under no illusions was the eminent painter Max Liebermann, born in the same year as Hindenburg. When he saw the torchlight processions cross Pariser Platz under the Brandenburg Gate, he closed the shutters of his flat windows. ‘There comes a time when you can’t eat as much as you want to throw up,’ he remarked to journalists. He died two years later. He had never reopened his shutters.
    Hitler was also a brilliant opportunist, with a famous sixth sense for personal danger which helped preserve him more than any of his considerable security measures. His indecisiveness, his habit of changing his plans at the last minute, and of not attending a given meeting or function at the appointed time, also hamstrung attempts to kill him. It is not hard to imagine Hitler living out his life as a kind of dream — a fantasy-fulfilment which even he could hardly have imagined possible. At each new step he may have asked himself, ‘Am I going to be able to carry this one off too?’ And as time progressed, and his success continued, so he might well have come to believe in his own infallibility. He never so far lost his grip of reality, however, as to neglect matters regarding his own safety.
    Hitler was under no illusions about the dissident elements in the Army, especially in the General Staff, and always regarded the Army with suspicion, even after he had ‘tamed’ it. In 1933 the Army, traditionally above politics, was prepared to go along with what it perceived as a strong new leader who was committed to rearmament (in the interests of defence) and the re-establishment of Germany’s place in the world. They were prepared to turn a blind eye to the bully-boy tactics of his minions; but in any case senior officers had no love or respect for the democratic tradition as demonstrated by the Weimar Republic, and they feared the influence of Bolshevism in a country where the Communist Party had always been extremely powerful. This is not to say that some senior members of the Army were not opposed to Hitler from the very first. There was even a plot to topple Hitler on the eve of his appointment to the Chancellorship; but this, headed by the last Chancellor of the Weimar Republic, Major-General Kurt von Schleicher, a career soldier with political ambitions who had managed to hold on to his position for only a matter of months, had more to do with a power struggle between the National Socialists and the old-guard conservatives than with disapproval of Hitler’s policies. Indeed, the worst of these were yet to emerge, although he had made no secret of his plans in Mein Kampf .
    For his part, Hitler was not yet secure enough in his position to attempt to muzzle or otherwise curb the Army’s power. True, the SA, under his long-time comrade-in-arms, Ernst Röhm, was a powerful force itself. With several million members it far outnumbered the Army; but the SA, despite Röhm’s ambitions for it, was not a disciplined force, and in the course of the next year Röhm would fly fatally close to the sun. When the chips were down, it didn’t matter that Röhm was Hitler’s oldest friend, the only man he was on the familiar ‘Du’ terms with; [6] when the Führer felt threatened, he struck hard — and his accurate political instincts ensured that he never missed his mark.
    The Nazis had yet to build up their organisation of terror, too. The dreaded secret police network which was to spread all over Germany and the countries it conquered, which was to employ six million agents, was still in its infancy. This is not a history of Nazi administration, [7] but it is worth pointing out that the complexity already alluded to did not lead to efficiency. The Gestapo was never subtle in its methods and its field