An Honourable Defeat Read Free Page B

death in front of his mother. The perpetrators were variously sentenced to death and to life imprisonment, but Hitler sent them a personal telegram expressing his solidarity with them, and the Nazi Party newspaper, the Volkischer Beobachter , echoed his support. These were violent times, but this endorsement of lawlessness and the callous murder of a political opponent opened the eyes of some Germans at least to what they might expect if the Nazis came to power. Unfortunately Hitler’s early success brought him popular support which never absolutely deserted him; and on the other hand the various elements of the Resistance could never show a united front. In the case of the Army, which had the only real means of toppling the regime, the number of people recruited to the conspiracy had to remain relatively small for reasons of security. Within the Army, too, there was disunity, and very few generals with real executive power could be persuaded to join the Resistance. Nevertheless, given the frankness with which Army conspirators made approaches to their colleagues, there was remarkably little betrayal.
    Hitler never wholly liked or trusted the Army. To him the generals were a bunch of monocled snobs who embodied old Prussian values and traditions, which he, coming from a lower-middle-class Austrian background, feared, resented and failed to understand. Hitler himself was an inverted snob of the worst kind, and it is central to his character that he hated what he longed to be part of, but which rejected him, from art school to German high society, and consequently wished to destroy it. He surrounded himself with kindred spirits — all the leading Nazis were, in their way, malcontents from petty bourgeois or lower-middle-class backgrounds — backgrounds in which resentment and prejudice flourished in those days like maggots in an apple. Only a small percentage of German aristocrats joined the SS or the SA — a notable and prominent example being the old Kaiser’s fourth son, August-Wilhelm.
    Nazis disliked universities (which, curiously, supported the Party on the whole), intellectuals, the Church — both Evangelical and Roman Catholic; indeed the long-term plan was to de-Christianise Germany after the ‘final victory’ — and the old ruling class. The key word for Hitler was Gleichschaltung — one of many German words that took on a special significance in Nazi-speak. Gleichschaltung meant the conformity and subservience of everything to the Party line. There was to be no law but Hitler, and ultimately no god but Hitler. The identities of the country and the Führer were to be fused. This led to reckless iconoclasm, part of the reason for which may be sought in the relative youth of the Nazis. In 1933, Hitler celebrated his forty-fourth birthday, but Göring was forty, and Goebbels only thirty-six. Himmler was born in 1900, and Heydrich in 1904. By the time war broke out in 1939, the young soldiers going to fight had reached maturity knowing only Nazi rule. The police state was the norm.
    Hitler was Chancellor, but the National Socialist Party did not hold a majority of Cabinet posts. The National Conservatives, who had helped Hitler to power, thus thought they could direct this ‘new broom’ with which they hoped to sweep away the debris of the Weimar Republic (though still acting constitutionally). Their plans to replace it varied — ranging from, in its most liberal aspect, a restored but constitutional monarchy, through benign oligarchy, to military dictatorship. At the back of their minds was the old German ideal of the father figure and leader — Bismarck, Wilhelm I, even the deposed Kaiser. President Hindenburg, a link with Imperial Germany, filled the role; but he was old, and gave no leadership any more. And Hitler, with all the warped romanticism that coloured his view of ‘Germania’, the old empire of the German-speaking peoples which he saw as the cradle of civilisation and the natural source of