second part
CONTINUED FROM PART ONE
The Nazi movement itself was originally protected and directed by military groups which included the notorious homosexual circle of Captain Röhm, the man who brought Hitler to politics and who was his chief of staff until 1934. You may perhaps not be aware that, until the purge of 1934, Röhm and his homosexual-staffed and homosexual-led SA loomed, in most people’s eyes, larger in the picture of the Nazi movement, than Hitler himself. Of course, Hitler had them butchered; and of course, he used their notorious homosexuality as an excuse. But an excuse is all it was. What the purge was about was, 1), to remove a group that was threatening Hitler and that intended to alter the course of Nazi politics - even to bring in a form of modified Party democracy; and, 2), to reassure the Wehrmacht leadership (itself, according to rumour, riddled with homosexuals) that the Nazi government had no intention to replace them with the SA as Röhm intended. Neither of these purposes, it goes without saying, had anything to do with any disapproval of homosexuality per se. The ensuing persecution of homosexuals - which never reached to the top of the party, where highly suspect individuals such as Göring, von Schirach and Funk were allowed to carry on with behaviour that would have sent lesser persons to the camps - was partly a mere epiphenomenon of the suppression of the SA (whose leadership was still being treated with suspicion as late as 1945) and partly a matter of what Ian Kershaw called “working towards the Führer” - that is, the constant attempt, on the part of State, Army and Party functionaries at every level, to second-guess the desires of the Führer and follow them even in the absence of stated objects, laws or guidelines.
What happened, in other words, is this. For fifteen years (1919-1934) Hitler, who was by temperament and education a Bohemian, hardly on the intellectual level of George and his friends, but with the same kind of relationship with bourgeois society, not only ignored but publicly flouted the average German’s dislike for “perverts”, by his intimacy with and constant support for Röhm and his gang, whose tastes were obvious to the very cobblestones. Read the contemporary testimony of Konrad Heiden if you don’t believe me. (Hitler himself was a different kind of pervert, as his destructive incestuous relationship with his niece shows. There also were rumours of masochism and urolagnia.) In 1934, he found himself obliged to destroy them; and he used their homosexuality as an excuse. As soon as the words had left his lips, however, “the little mice scurried” (to use an expression from Marvel’s former boss Jim Shooter), convinced that the way to please Hitler was to murder homosexuals; and the majority of Europe’s identifiable homosexuals were doomed - unless of course they were well placed in Party or Army, in which case nobody would touch them. All that this shows is that murder was so natural and easy to the Nazi Party that any “scunner” taken, for
whatever reason, against any particular group, could result in massacre.
This leads me to an interesting point. Of all the major historians I have read on the matter, only one fails to lay proper emphasis on the persecution of the Churches as part of the overall Nazi plan: Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre). This brilliant writer, whose outstanding point was an English prose style among the finest in the century, was a vicious and worse than prejudiced hater of the Catholic Church, who managed to use his wonderful literary skills to suggest a close kinship between Nazism and Catholicism on every page of his famous The last days of Hitler; and my Oxford friend Richard Gombrich found out, during a passage-of-arms about a proposed Honoris causa Oxford degree to the Pakistani tyrant Z.A.Bhutto, that he was also a closet but virulent anti-Semite.
This put Trevor-Roper, as a historian of Nazism, in a bit of a quandary. As an anti-Semite, he would not underline - even though he would not hide or deny it - the Nazi mass murder of Jews; for, whatever his intellectual dishonesty with respect to the Church, he was still on another level from the David Irvings of this world. So he adopted an interesting strategy: he declared that the ultimate significance of Nazism was anti-Russian. And, you know, he managed to make quite a good case for it. After all, no two nations suffered more from deliberate and pre-planned Nazi violence than Poland and Russia (Poland, as a Slav state abutting on German territory, easily fell into the Nazi definition of the Slavic East); and the colonization of Russia by a foreseen, or rather dreamed-of “250 million Germans”, was at the core of the Nazi programme from the beginning. Incidentally, Dacre is right about another matter: that it was not as Communists that the Russians were primarily condemned, but as Slavs. The Nazi programme entailed the uprooting equally of the democratic Slavs of Czechoslovakia, the near-Fascist Slavs of the “articulated democracy” of Poland, and the Communist Slavs of Russia. In other words, it is just as possible to argue, with Trevor-Roper, that the ultimate significance of Nazism was anti-Russian, as that it was anti-Jewish or anti-Christian.
The point is that no one group can claim to be the primary target of the Nazis. Certain groups were always central to its murderous designs: Slavs, Jews, Communists and the Churches were designated targets from the beginning. Others were marginal; I am convinced that Hitler did not at the beginning have the extermination of the disabled and mentally ill in mind, and as for homosexuals, their massacre is almost literally a historical accident. But Nazism killed; it killed because it saw that as its mission. It killed because of its Darwinian view of life as a zero-sum game: that if you do not deprive other breeds of space and ultimately of life, they will deprive yours of it. It killed because it believed that it was in harmony with nature to do so, and to be in harmony with nature was the ancient dream of all romanticism.
The English poet Matthew Arnold, a full century before Hitler, had already answered this nonsense in one of those thunderous restatements of moral truth of which English poetry is often capable:
TO AN INDEPENDENT PREACHER, WHO PREACHED THAT WE SHOULD BE “IN HARMONY WITH NATURE”
"In harmony with nature?" Restless fool,
Who with such heat dost preach what were to thee,
When true, the last impossibility;
To be like Nature strong, like Nature cool:-
Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more,
And in that more lies all his hope of good.
Nature is cruel; man is sick of blood:
Nature is stubborn; man would fain adore:
Nature is fickle; man hath need of rest:
Nature forgives no debt, and fears no grave:
Man would be mild, and with safe conscience blest.
Man must begin, know this, where nature ends;
Nature and man can never be fast friends.
Fool, if thou canst not pass her, rest her slave!
Taking this as a premise, it follows that you entirely misstate the relationship of Party and Church and the reasons for persecution. I would agree, of course, that ultimately they sought for an abolition of all churches in general (being rival organisations to the omnipresent party regime)… You agree with nothing I said; in fact, you come close to putting words in my mouth. The Party was quite willing to guarantee the existence of some sort of Church life, so long as it accepted and adhered to its murder-ethics. What it would not tolerate at any cost was the Christian ethics; as Hitler said clearly and repeatedly. I would agree, of course, that ultimately they sought for an abolition of all churches in general (being rival organisations to the omnipresent party regime)…? This reduces the conflict to a matter of power politics - the Churches as rivals to the Party organization. But the whole point of the party was to alter the ethics of the German people, to reshape its soul; and this was what bothered them about the Churches. Read Hitler on the “slave-ethics” of Christianity and then tell me whether this was a matter of organizational conflict.
Indeed, the greatest difference between Fascist and Communist parties is that Fascists are not really “totalitarian” in the same sense as Communists. There is a fundamental difference in their attitude to existing institutions. Communist parties form whole alternative power structures intended not to integrate but to replace the old State. While it is possible to point to hundreds of thousands of defections to Communism in the course of the Russian (and Chinese) civil wars, it is also the case that every institution in the country, with the single and partial exception of the Churches, springs from the Party; no institution independent of it had been allowed to remain. However many former Tsarist officers might serve in it, the Army was a Party army; however many lawyers trained before the Revolution might take part in it, justice was Party justice; however many - or few - old Okhrana hands might be involved, the police was Party police. The schools, the taxes, even the land - all rested in the hand of the party.
On the other hand, Mussolini left the king of Italy on his throne and only modified the democratic and liberal part of Italian institutions. Nazism did not replace the Reich; it only set up a whole lot of parallel institutions - the SS to parallel the Army, Goering's Four-Year Plan to parallel the Reichsbank, People's Courts to shadow Reich Courts, and so on. Fascists always disregarded the institutions, which therefore tended to carry on in some recognizable shape under their rule. In the end, both Mussolini and Hitler found themselves regretting they had not followed the example of fellow butchers Lenin and Stalin and killed the whole old guard. This is usually interpreted as a tactical decision - and a wise one - on the side of Mussolini and Hitler, or the result of convergent interests between a State frightened of Communist subversion and a street rabble party in search of excitement and enemies. This may be true, but it is also the case that, if Nazi-fascist parties were capable of living with a whole layer of society not originally of their making, it must be that something in their mind-set made it possible.
What I see in this is a diseased relationship between the Fascist bully and the bullied civil society, from which the Fascist bully claims respect and admiration: the Fascist needs the existing institutions to continue in some form, just so as to have a public before which to strut and fret, and a term against which to measure itself. (It is no accident that Fascism was born in Italy, the Land of the Wild Wandering Ego. Whenever you deal with an Italian, especially a male Italian, you must make an assumption that he or she is an egotist. There are exceptions, but they are exceptions. And I speak as a male Italian.) To be a compound of fear and awe, an almost supernatural manifestation of the pure nation's soul and people's will, is a part of the Fascist's own self-image. For the bold young troops to parade and be admired, there must be some more staid or weak element to stand on the sidelines and watch. Communism presumes a new world, and forms the institutions of that new world - however much it might announce that the future would be without any institutions at all; Fascism presumes a restoration, and looks upon democratic institutions - but not on all institutions - as nasty parasites on the healthy body of the nation. A crude painting, obviously the work of a militiaman, has been found in one of the last SS barracks in besieged Berlin: it showed two young SS volunteers in uniform covering a nun and some children with huge, medieval-style shields. Given the brutality with which the Church was treated, the concept is ridiculous: yet this is how the SS saw themselves - done by the fighters themselves, as good as any confession - as knightly defenders of a helpless people. And above all they expected due recognition and gratitude for it.
Hitler was always willing to accept the existence of what he regarded as actual powers. He butchered his old friend Röhm, the man who had started him in politics and sponsored him in the early days, in order to appease the Wehrmacht, even in a situation where he could just as easily have backed Röhm against the professionals; and although the Wehrmacht was in later days to feel what domination by Hitler meant, he never put an end to its organizational individuality or assimilated it to the Waffen-SS, as he might well have done after July 20, 1944. (To the contrary, even as he was slaughtering its leading officers, he recalled to its leadership the dismissed Guderian, who had never been a Nazi and who was an Army man to the marrow of his bones.) The Wehrmacht after July 20 was the model of how he envisaged his relationship with any other actual institution. It shows how he would have dealt with other institutions who came to deal with him; as, indeed, did the French State. On those terms, he was, as he repeatedly said, as eager to “guarantee the British Empire” as he was to “guarantee the Catholic Church”; at the same bullying terms, and for the same egotistical reasons. He wanted the British Empire to go on, under his own ultimate sanction, as an instrument of enduring domination of white races over blacks; he wanted the Church, on the same terms, as a power of influence and intrigue. (That, incidentally, is what the Russian Orthodox Church ultimately became, in the last decades of Russian Communism; unable to destroy it, the Communists finally decided to use it for their own ends, especially on an international level. It managed a great deal of propaganda and mischief, especially in the World Council of Churches. Read The Mitrokhin archives.) No doubt, had either of these two actual powers even tried to reach an agreement, they would have found out, as bitterly as Petain and the Wehrmacht ever did, what domination by Hitler meant; but this does not mean that he would have destroyed them organizationally. Only spiritually. That this would eventually have entailed a great persecution - even supposing that the persecution was not already in act - you need not doubt.
Ultimately, your grossest mistake - which shows a striking incomprehension of the German hard-right tradition from which Hitler sprang - is to separate the persecution of the Churches from the persecution of the Jews. And you make it because you completely underrate and misunderstand the spiritual significance of Nazism. Nazism was not ultimately about control of the German state by one party: it was about making an epochal change in the very nature of civilization. It was about replacing an ethics of pity for an ethics of domination. Germany was almost incidental to this cultural project. And from the beginning, before Hitler was even born, the writers of the extreme right had identified the “Semitic” origins of the Christian Church as the arch-enemy. Houston Stewart Chamberlain railed in thousands of learned and diseased pages against the “Syrian” origins of the Church, although - not unlike Hitler himself - he did not despair of being able to produce a reformed Christianity without any of its “Syrian” corruptions. Chamberlain is a transitional figure. He still clings to some of his old Protestant English proprieties even as he assumes the form of a prophet of the new world of Fascism, and indeed manages, in his old age, to hail Hitler himself as the coming force of Germany (this was two years before Hitler’s electoral triumph of 1930, at a time when no-one else took him seriously). The next generation is even clearer about the connection between “Semitic” origins and the poisonous, denaturating forces of conscience. When Hitler declares conscience to be a blemish like circumcision, he is standing in an illustrious tradition, one might almost say in the mainstream of the German right. The notion of being in harmony with Nature includes the complete rejection of conscience, the element which - as Matthew Arnold so eloquently said from the opposite side - separates man from nature, from the lebenswarm world of instinct to which the German right-wing intellectual aspires. The Jews are identified as historically the first rebels against “life” and “nature”, the first to place Conscience at the centre of the human personality: and it is for this reason (whatever the more stupid and merely pornographic members of the movement, such as Julius Streicher, may say) that they are identified as the chief poisoners of human life and culture.
(In this respect, the George-Kreis, although in every other respect the chief drum-beaters for Fascism in Germany - it was from George’s role among them as spiritual leader and chief prophet, that Hitler drew his Führerprinzip - were untypical. At least one Jew was a leading member, and it is perhaps not just a coincidence that the composer Schoenberg, another Jew, set some of George’s poems to music.)
The curse of Hebraism is extended both to Communism and to Catholicism, and for the same reason: both are poisoners of the clean well of “life” instinct with the mud of conscience. To understand the intellectual root of the German right’s attack on everything that was Jewish in modern culture, You should read the angry and really beautiful pages in which the great historian of religions Walther Friedrich Otto (whose Die Götter Griechenlands, engl.tr. The Homeric Gods, is one of the best and most perceptive guides to Greek religion ever written) attacks the personality and character of St.Paul of Tarsus. And so, Communism is not rejected because it is brutal or conscienceless: to the contrary, what really condemns it is the appeal it makes to that bogey of the “life”-obsessed hard right, namely conscience. As a way of merely moving mobs, it would be sympathetic to that particular strand of anti-liberal tradition that went back to the French writer Sorel, and that was certainly a founding part of international Fascism; but the fact that it mobilized mobs in the name of moral ideas, however misapplied, made it intolerable. It was Conscience, the Jewish invention, that had to be disabled; the Jews, conversely, had to be opposed because they had no part in the instinctual “life” of the community - being an external element that claimed abstract “rights”, and whose treatment, therefore, was a touchstone of the conflict between communitarian “life” and abstract “conscience”. The same thing that the Jew invented, Conscience, is what protects the Jew in modern society. Attack the one, and you attack the other.
An interesting side issue is that the most recent writers about Hitler can find no evidence of actual anti-semitism in his views and behaviour, however extreme and aggressive in other ways, until 1919 and the beginnings of his political career (Important remarks on the matter in Kershaw, Hitler, vol.1, pgg. 49-52; and notice, incidentally, the repeated allusions to homoeroticism and homosexuality in the circle of Lanz von Leibenfals, the Viennese anti-semite - another instance of homosexualism presiding at the birth of German Fascism.) His first proven anti-Hebraic remarks come in 1919. It seems likely that, when he told of being an anti-Semite in the slums of Vienna before the war, he either lied or retrojected much later experiences. And that being the case, it hardly seems a coincidence that anti-Semitism was deliberately introduced to the uprooted and disoriented German public, still reeling from the defeat in a war which they had thought to the last minute that they were winning, by a real conspiracy of North German extreme rightists one of whom was certainly the sinister Graf von Reventlow, who was later to become a Nazi. Before 1919, anti-Semitism as a passion was very limited and marginal in German society, though there was clearly a certain amount of prejudice. Early in 1919, a number of sinister hard-right circles began an unprecedented campaign against Jews, which culminated one year later with the first German translation of the Protocols of the sages of Zion. It was a sensation. Its publication, with the preceding year of repeated yet curiously anonymous attacks on the Jews, has all the characteristic of a conspiracy, and the fact that many of the people involved still could not be surely identified as late as 1967 (when Norman Cohn published his Warrant for genocide, detailing the whole sordid story as far as it was known; I do not know whether they have been identified since) shows that precautions were taken to disguise who was responsible; exactly as though the people behind the publication knew that they were doing something better done underhandedly. Which, if you think about it, is a curious way to do something no more illegal or dangerous than publishing a book.
My view is that popular anti-semitism was introduced in Germany deliberately, by a conspiracy of extreme right wingers and former army men eager to offer the German people a scapegoat for their disasters. And if that is the case, then it is interesting that Hitler should have been among those who bought it. In 1919, Hitler was very much rabble; a follower, not a leader; a tiny atom of the violent and conspiratorial underground of reaction, much of it connected with the Army, that was used to bloodily suppress the rise of more or less soviet-like popular governments in Munich, in Berlin and elsewhere. In Munich, he played the despicable part of the infiltrator and the spy, living with revolted soldiers in their barracks and eventually pointing out to the death squads those who had been most active politically. If it was at this point, and no earlier, that he developed his hatred for Jews, then this shows the force of that politico-intellectual leadership of the hard right, even in the middle of the collapse of a war which was theirs if it was anyone’s; Hitler, who had certainly been fanatically committed to the war and shattered when defeat became clear, was one of the many who “bought” what might be called the Protocols Excuse. It also shows that we cannot stop at Hitler in trying to define the significance of Nazi doctrine; Hitler was not only derivative, he was more derivative than he himself realized or admitted.
That being the case, we must look for the ultimate significance of anti-Judaism, not to Hitler himself, but to his intellectual sources, the people who literally put the idea into his head. And, as I said, there is no doubt why they regarded Hebraism and all its works with detestation: it was because Christianity and Communism appealed to that diseased excrescence of human life, conscience. In a world in which being in harmony with nature meant killing off the rivals for living space, conscience was not only a disease, but one which the nation - or rather, the race - could not afford. The catastrophe of military defeat showed what could go wrong when conscience interfered with the Darwinian struggle for survival. That being the case, conflict with the Church was absolutely inevitable; not only because the Church is an institution that stands upon the individual conscience if it stands on anything at all, but also because it was by its own nature supra-national, a complete denial of the ultimate value of the national or racial community. Throughout the thirties and forties, it was the notion of the ultimate value of the racial community that was the constant target of Catholic writers throughout the West. The Church was quite as clear about what it fought and why, as Hitler was on the opposite side.
Can you doubt, therefore, that Hitler was serious when he said that, once he had won the war, he would “settle accounts” with all the pfaffen? Can you doubt that the growing pressure on the Churches, ratcheted up once the war began, was the prelude to something which, had the Nazis won, would have been infinitely worse? Can you doubt that the murder of thousands of priests and tens of thousands of laymen was not just hitting at “a few notable individuals”, but preparing the ground for the persecution to come? Can you doubt that the Church, and the Christian religion, were the ultimate targets of a movement which denied their most basic attitudes and regarded their values as poison to the nation - and which, as we have seen, took murder to be a natural means of political action?
Yes, you would say, but the Church only suffered a few tens of thousand casualties, the Russians and the Jews millions. Yes. This has to do with the way Hitler operated, and that way is not exactly explained purely by political expedience.
Most historians, dazzled by such withering sequences of events as the destruction of the Weimar Republic in a few months and the lightning war that put an end to France, identified Hitler’s peculiarity as a sudden dazzling speed, that put potential enemies in front of accomplished facts. Stephen Koch, author of one of the most important and least known histories of the period, Double lives (whose neglect by the whole historical establishment is one of those occasional intellectual scandals generated by the power of entrenched opinion) has aptly characterized Hitler and Stalin as the Hare and the Tortoise. Yes, but there is an opposite feature which is just as typical. In his memoirs, Guderian, one of the most brilliant generals of the war - and a mind of notable independence in his own field - all but rails at Hitler for having missed all the opportunities that opened themselves to him with the fall of France. Guderian was no dreamer, but a sober, though imaginative, soldier, who had trained in the finest school in the world; he did not want the war, but, having started it, he wanted to win it. And Hitler hesitated. He not only hesitated, he was repeatedly seized by panic: when the invasion of Norway did not go to schedule, when the British checked the advance of some German units. Again and again, firmness of purpose and clarity of vision were the very reverse of his attitude. And finally, having conquered France, he stood as if dazed, making no use of the victory he had won. Purely as a technician, it is clear to Guderian that Hitler could have won the war there and then: forced Franco (who could never have refused Hitler then as he did in 1942) into the war, invaded North Africa with the help of Spanish, French and Italian allies, driven into the Middle East, seized its vital oil, expelled the British from the Mediterranean, threatened India and Africa. For that matter, he could have annihilated the British army at Dunkerque, without which Britain would have been much easier to invade. None of these things were done; and that is because Hitler could not get used to having really and truly achieved his dreams in reality.
Hitler’s sense of timing was bad in another way. His view was that pressure on an enemy should increase in time, since people who have given up once in one matter will be the more willing to give up again. This is, of course, the exact opposite of the truth, and shows Hitler’s lack of understanding of human nature. To give one example, the British accepted the infamous naval treaty of 1935, which betrayed France and Italy and was clearly to Britain’s own disadvantage; so, by Hitler’s logic, they should have been the more willing to accept the militarization of the Rhineland in 1936. As a matter of fact, they were decidedly unhappy, but they were not, at the time, willing to risk a war with Germany at the same time as relations with Italy were already at breaking point over the matter of Ethiopia. Again by Hitler’s hypothesis, they should have been progressively more willing to surrender Austria, the Sudetenland, and Bohemia-Moravia. In point of fact, the reverse was true. Britain was very unhappy about the loss of Austria; seriously considered going to war over the Sudetenland, before deciding to go to Munich; and finally lost patience with the invasion of Bohemia and Moravia, which represented the end of the policy of appeasement. The next German demand led to war. And Hitler was puzzled by the British attitude, could actually not be led to understand that Britain would never again grant him another Munich, that - in simple and ordinary human terms - British patience had ran out.
In real human life, a strategy of constantly increasing pressure, of constantly multiplied demands and threats, is the best possibly way to multiply your enemies and stiffen their resolve. It was what killed Robespierre, when his own allies realized that he was still hankering for yet more executions. Conversely, those tyrants who die peacefully in their beds are those who, like Octavian Augustus and Francisco Franco, have tended to concentrate their crimes and their murders in their early days. Octavian and Franco came to power on the wave of hideous civil wars attended by every refinement of illegality and cruelty; but as they consolidated their power, they also committed themselves to a strategy of limited reconciliation. Augustus welcomed in his circle the poet Horace, well knowing that he had fought against him, and tolerating a strong streak of independence in him; an episode comparable, in Spain, with the return home of the great liberal philosopher Ortega Y Gasset in 1948. Lenin, with his move from war communism to the NEP, looked as though he might be willing to take a similar direction, but he died too early.
What Hitler’s attitude amounts to is the mistaken calculation, they’ve allowed me to commit a crime before, they’ll allow me again. What underlies it is, at some level, the astonished surprise at having been allowed to go so far. At some unconscious level, he did not expect to be allowed to do what he was allowed to; and having been allowed once, he feels reassured, and does it again - and next time he does it worse. This pattern of behaviour goes straight back to what we know of Hitler’s childhood, a headstrong child navigating his way between an indulgent and spoiling mother and a violent disciplinarian father; and it may be summed up as an unconscious question, “how far will they let me go?” In effect, Hitler knows that he is violating all sorts of bounds, but as he is at first allowed to do so - by the judiciary in 1923; by the state authorities; by the electorate; by President Hindenburg; by the Wehrmacht; by the British; by the French; by Mussolini - he comes to feel that these bounds they claim to respect really don’t mean that much anyway. The spoiled child assumes that a tantrum will always eventually get him what he wants.
What I am saying is that with Hitler, one crime is always going to be the prelude to another. It is only a matter of the opponent once giving way. And Hitler insures, in all sorts of ways, that the opponent will give way. Guderian says, with his usual simplicity, that when Hitler was faced with a united front, he gave way; and regrets that Keitel and Jodl, especially Keitel, could not see their way to co-operate with other Army commanders and resist his orders. Yes. The only time in his whole career when he faced clear, determined, armed resistance - by Mussolini, in 1934, at the time of Dollfuss’ murder - he could not withdraw fast enough. The unarmed Bishop von Galen, by the power of his word alone, put a stop to the murder of the unfit - which was official state policy, and which must have humiliated Hitler horrendously. But that is exactly why Hitler promoted a man like Keitel, who could be trusted not to join forces with anyone who opposed Hitler; that is why he took care to break up all the powers of the State between several different competing agencies.
Think therefore. In the matter of religion, you say that Hitler did not have to bother to persecute the Churches, and that “only a few” outstanding individuals were murdered. I say that Hitler never held back from murdering anyone merely because the group concerned did not threaten him; after all, what harm could he fear from the Gypsies? I say that the reason why he did not stretch his hand against the Churches was that he did not feel strong enough; because he dreaded united and forceful responses such as had forced him to give way on the matter of euthanasia; because he still felt the informed, watchful eye of the Vatican following his every move, with increasing concern and increasing protests, more unbending than any other enemy had ever proved, more all-seeing and baleful than his father’s when he sought his mother’s skirts long ago.
The sheer subconscious potency of that one paternal figure above the world is something that we Catholics ourselves are perhaps not geared to understand. To us, it is part of the ordinary run of things, not to mention that most of us are perfectly disposed to resist his views if we see sufficient reason to do so (dogma is another matter). It was a shock to me to read that it loomed so enormously large in the collective imaginary of our Waldensian neighbours, to the extent that they practically defined themselves with respect to him; and I have little doubt that some similar resonance reaches many other members of the Western world. I have little doubt that Hitler, who had grown up in a Catholic country, still felt its force.
Does that mean that he would not attack the Church in the future? To the contrary. Once he had gained sufficient confidence, Hitler could nerve himself to anything. In 1934, he had ingloriously retired before Italy alone; in 1939, the united might of Britain and France did not hold him back for one day. The day was coming, it was practically around the corner, when he would have acted against the Churches as savagely as Lenin ever did. In my view, the Wannsee conference and the decision to annihilate the Jews prelude exactly to that. If he can once destroy one religious body without interference, he can then go on to destroy another; just as the naval treaty encouraged him to remilitarise the Rhineland, the militarization of the Rhineland encouraged him to invade Austria, and the successful anschluss encouraged him to violate Czechoslovakia - the successful, rich, democratic Slav state that violated every mental category he ever held. One crime led to another; one crime encouraged, steeled, nerved him up, to another. If Hitler had won the war, above all if he had completed the massacre of the Jews as he wished, he would have done exactly what he said he would: “settled accounts” with pfaffen of all confessions, murdered them in their tens of thousands, and then either set up, in the Communist fashion, a puppet Church of his own, or force his control by military means on the Vatican and “elect” a puppet Pope. I would not put it past him to force a “union” between Catholics and Lutherans, like Stalin in 1945 forced the Catholics of the Ukraine into a “union” with his own Orthodox Church. Only a fool could expect otherwise, and only the fact that the Vatican had been more vigilant and more loudly protesting than any other of Hitler’s real or supposed opponents had so far held the murderous hand back to some extent. And bear in mind that it is only because of the monstrous size of Nazi crimes, that the assault on the Churches looks so small that people like you can mistakenly dismiss it; in any other environment, a regime that had accounted for 6000 priests in twelve years would count as one of the blackest spots in Christian history.
I want to conclude with a consideration that has only marginally to do with Hitler. It is my view that anti-Hebraism as a recurring disease of Christendom always occurs when some conscious or unconscious attempt is taking place to nationalize the Church, to assimilate it to the community, to deny its universal character. The first great persecution of Jews in modern Europe took place as a side-effect of the Crusades, the episode which taught the Latin West to identify itself with “Christendom”, to the exclusion of the still thriving Christianities of the east. Luther nationalized the Church, and persecuted Jews; at the same time, Spain was growing conscious of itself as a great nation charged with an exclusive, national and intolerant Christianity - and persecuted Jews. The issue is simple: the existence of a radically different group which lays claim to the same Scriptures and the same God puts into radical question any claim of national exclusivity - it means the presence of the Other, in as radical a fashion as humanly possible, at the very core of our religious identity. The natural reaction is to kill the Other.
Traditional Catholic teaching, as expressed by St.Thomas Aquinas, is simple: persecution of the Jews is forbidden, because they are the ones who received the first revelation. In other words, the very question about identity and religion which the Jew-haters are trying to silence must be endured, along with the presence of the religious body in which it is expressed. Every fair means must be used to try and encourage them to convert; but, as St.Bernard of Clairvaux said in a passage whose real toleration goes unnoticed by people who cannot stomach strong language or a belief in the Devil, “if they will not serve God of their own free will, leave them to serve the Devil of their own free will”. I very much doubt whether, if one of our liberals today really believed in the Devil, s/he would be willing to allow people the freedom to serve it. And as long as the Church has remembered that it was in fact Catholic (for there are plenty of shameful episodes), the doctrine has held. Jews hounded by Christian mobs often found refuge in the local Bishop’s palace; and the most ancient Jewish community in the world, some of whose families can trace their pedigree back 1750 years, is in Rome, where they have lived for two millennia under the shelter of the Pope’s power.
In other words, there is a reason why the disease of anti-Judaism, earnestly propagated by fanatics around the world, had most effect in Germany - and least, at the same time, in Italy. Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide describes temporary successes in various Western countries - Poland, France, briefly Britain, the US, even Japan - but it triumphed only in Germany, and conversely had practically no impact at all in Italy. And the reason is obvious. German Fascism amounted to a very real, very strong attempt to nationalize the whole spiritual/religious life of the country; at the same time as Italy, alone among the Western countries, experienced an utter and largely unhealed split between the national spirit and the national religion. It is never sufficiently realized that Italy was created against the Church, and that for a very long time the Pope and the Italian political leadership were at war. Hence there was absolutely no temptation to nationalize religion; even if an Italian managed the acrobatic feat of being both a patriot and a Catholic, s/he would regard the Catholic part of his/her identity as the supranational, non-patriotic part. And typically, as things have changed within the last ten years, so a worrying kind of anti-semitism is creeping back into Italy along with other kinds of racism. God has strange ways to punish us: I well remember, in the schools of my childhood, the nuns congratulating Italy because neither racism nor anti-Judaism had taken root here, unlike those dreadful people in Germany and America and South Africa….
End of the essay
The Nazi movement itself was originally protected and directed by military groups which included the notorious homosexual circle of Captain Röhm, the man who brought Hitler to politics and who was his chief of staff until 1934. You may perhaps not be aware that, until the purge of 1934, Röhm and his homosexual-staffed and homosexual-led SA loomed, in most people’s eyes, larger in the picture of the Nazi movement, than Hitler himself. Of course, Hitler had them butchered; and of course, he used their notorious homosexuality as an excuse. But an excuse is all it was. What the purge was about was, 1), to remove a group that was threatening Hitler and that intended to alter the course of Nazi politics - even to bring in a form of modified Party democracy; and, 2), to reassure the Wehrmacht leadership (itself, according to rumour, riddled with homosexuals) that the Nazi government had no intention to replace them with the SA as Röhm intended. Neither of these purposes, it goes without saying, had anything to do with any disapproval of homosexuality per se. The ensuing persecution of homosexuals - which never reached to the top of the party, where highly suspect individuals such as Göring, von Schirach and Funk were allowed to carry on with behaviour that would have sent lesser persons to the camps - was partly a mere epiphenomenon of the suppression of the SA (whose leadership was still being treated with suspicion as late as 1945) and partly a matter of what Ian Kershaw called “working towards the Führer” - that is, the constant attempt, on the part of State, Army and Party functionaries at every level, to second-guess the desires of the Führer and follow them even in the absence of stated objects, laws or guidelines.
What happened, in other words, is this. For fifteen years (1919-1934) Hitler, who was by temperament and education a Bohemian, hardly on the intellectual level of George and his friends, but with the same kind of relationship with bourgeois society, not only ignored but publicly flouted the average German’s dislike for “perverts”, by his intimacy with and constant support for Röhm and his gang, whose tastes were obvious to the very cobblestones. Read the contemporary testimony of Konrad Heiden if you don’t believe me. (Hitler himself was a different kind of pervert, as his destructive incestuous relationship with his niece shows. There also were rumours of masochism and urolagnia.) In 1934, he found himself obliged to destroy them; and he used their homosexuality as an excuse. As soon as the words had left his lips, however, “the little mice scurried” (to use an expression from Marvel’s former boss Jim Shooter), convinced that the way to please Hitler was to murder homosexuals; and the majority of Europe’s identifiable homosexuals were doomed - unless of course they were well placed in Party or Army, in which case nobody would touch them. All that this shows is that murder was so natural and easy to the Nazi Party that any “scunner” taken, for
whatever reason, against any particular group, could result in massacre.
This leads me to an interesting point. Of all the major historians I have read on the matter, only one fails to lay proper emphasis on the persecution of the Churches as part of the overall Nazi plan: Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre). This brilliant writer, whose outstanding point was an English prose style among the finest in the century, was a vicious and worse than prejudiced hater of the Catholic Church, who managed to use his wonderful literary skills to suggest a close kinship between Nazism and Catholicism on every page of his famous The last days of Hitler; and my Oxford friend Richard Gombrich found out, during a passage-of-arms about a proposed Honoris causa Oxford degree to the Pakistani tyrant Z.A.Bhutto, that he was also a closet but virulent anti-Semite.
This put Trevor-Roper, as a historian of Nazism, in a bit of a quandary. As an anti-Semite, he would not underline - even though he would not hide or deny it - the Nazi mass murder of Jews; for, whatever his intellectual dishonesty with respect to the Church, he was still on another level from the David Irvings of this world. So he adopted an interesting strategy: he declared that the ultimate significance of Nazism was anti-Russian. And, you know, he managed to make quite a good case for it. After all, no two nations suffered more from deliberate and pre-planned Nazi violence than Poland and Russia (Poland, as a Slav state abutting on German territory, easily fell into the Nazi definition of the Slavic East); and the colonization of Russia by a foreseen, or rather dreamed-of “250 million Germans”, was at the core of the Nazi programme from the beginning. Incidentally, Dacre is right about another matter: that it was not as Communists that the Russians were primarily condemned, but as Slavs. The Nazi programme entailed the uprooting equally of the democratic Slavs of Czechoslovakia, the near-Fascist Slavs of the “articulated democracy” of Poland, and the Communist Slavs of Russia. In other words, it is just as possible to argue, with Trevor-Roper, that the ultimate significance of Nazism was anti-Russian, as that it was anti-Jewish or anti-Christian.
The point is that no one group can claim to be the primary target of the Nazis. Certain groups were always central to its murderous designs: Slavs, Jews, Communists and the Churches were designated targets from the beginning. Others were marginal; I am convinced that Hitler did not at the beginning have the extermination of the disabled and mentally ill in mind, and as for homosexuals, their massacre is almost literally a historical accident. But Nazism killed; it killed because it saw that as its mission. It killed because of its Darwinian view of life as a zero-sum game: that if you do not deprive other breeds of space and ultimately of life, they will deprive yours of it. It killed because it believed that it was in harmony with nature to do so, and to be in harmony with nature was the ancient dream of all romanticism.
The English poet Matthew Arnold, a full century before Hitler, had already answered this nonsense in one of those thunderous restatements of moral truth of which English poetry is often capable:
TO AN INDEPENDENT PREACHER, WHO PREACHED THAT WE SHOULD BE “IN HARMONY WITH NATURE”
"In harmony with nature?" Restless fool,
Who with such heat dost preach what were to thee,
When true, the last impossibility;
To be like Nature strong, like Nature cool:-
Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more,
And in that more lies all his hope of good.
Nature is cruel; man is sick of blood:
Nature is stubborn; man would fain adore:
Nature is fickle; man hath need of rest:
Nature forgives no debt, and fears no grave:
Man would be mild, and with safe conscience blest.
Man must begin, know this, where nature ends;
Nature and man can never be fast friends.
Fool, if thou canst not pass her, rest her slave!
Taking this as a premise, it follows that you entirely misstate the relationship of Party and Church and the reasons for persecution. I would agree, of course, that ultimately they sought for an abolition of all churches in general (being rival organisations to the omnipresent party regime)… You agree with nothing I said; in fact, you come close to putting words in my mouth. The Party was quite willing to guarantee the existence of some sort of Church life, so long as it accepted and adhered to its murder-ethics. What it would not tolerate at any cost was the Christian ethics; as Hitler said clearly and repeatedly. I would agree, of course, that ultimately they sought for an abolition of all churches in general (being rival organisations to the omnipresent party regime)…? This reduces the conflict to a matter of power politics - the Churches as rivals to the Party organization. But the whole point of the party was to alter the ethics of the German people, to reshape its soul; and this was what bothered them about the Churches. Read Hitler on the “slave-ethics” of Christianity and then tell me whether this was a matter of organizational conflict.
Indeed, the greatest difference between Fascist and Communist parties is that Fascists are not really “totalitarian” in the same sense as Communists. There is a fundamental difference in their attitude to existing institutions. Communist parties form whole alternative power structures intended not to integrate but to replace the old State. While it is possible to point to hundreds of thousands of defections to Communism in the course of the Russian (and Chinese) civil wars, it is also the case that every institution in the country, with the single and partial exception of the Churches, springs from the Party; no institution independent of it had been allowed to remain. However many former Tsarist officers might serve in it, the Army was a Party army; however many lawyers trained before the Revolution might take part in it, justice was Party justice; however many - or few - old Okhrana hands might be involved, the police was Party police. The schools, the taxes, even the land - all rested in the hand of the party.
On the other hand, Mussolini left the king of Italy on his throne and only modified the democratic and liberal part of Italian institutions. Nazism did not replace the Reich; it only set up a whole lot of parallel institutions - the SS to parallel the Army, Goering's Four-Year Plan to parallel the Reichsbank, People's Courts to shadow Reich Courts, and so on. Fascists always disregarded the institutions, which therefore tended to carry on in some recognizable shape under their rule. In the end, both Mussolini and Hitler found themselves regretting they had not followed the example of fellow butchers Lenin and Stalin and killed the whole old guard. This is usually interpreted as a tactical decision - and a wise one - on the side of Mussolini and Hitler, or the result of convergent interests between a State frightened of Communist subversion and a street rabble party in search of excitement and enemies. This may be true, but it is also the case that, if Nazi-fascist parties were capable of living with a whole layer of society not originally of their making, it must be that something in their mind-set made it possible.
What I see in this is a diseased relationship between the Fascist bully and the bullied civil society, from which the Fascist bully claims respect and admiration: the Fascist needs the existing institutions to continue in some form, just so as to have a public before which to strut and fret, and a term against which to measure itself. (It is no accident that Fascism was born in Italy, the Land of the Wild Wandering Ego. Whenever you deal with an Italian, especially a male Italian, you must make an assumption that he or she is an egotist. There are exceptions, but they are exceptions. And I speak as a male Italian.) To be a compound of fear and awe, an almost supernatural manifestation of the pure nation's soul and people's will, is a part of the Fascist's own self-image. For the bold young troops to parade and be admired, there must be some more staid or weak element to stand on the sidelines and watch. Communism presumes a new world, and forms the institutions of that new world - however much it might announce that the future would be without any institutions at all; Fascism presumes a restoration, and looks upon democratic institutions - but not on all institutions - as nasty parasites on the healthy body of the nation. A crude painting, obviously the work of a militiaman, has been found in one of the last SS barracks in besieged Berlin: it showed two young SS volunteers in uniform covering a nun and some children with huge, medieval-style shields. Given the brutality with which the Church was treated, the concept is ridiculous: yet this is how the SS saw themselves - done by the fighters themselves, as good as any confession - as knightly defenders of a helpless people. And above all they expected due recognition and gratitude for it.
Hitler was always willing to accept the existence of what he regarded as actual powers. He butchered his old friend Röhm, the man who had started him in politics and sponsored him in the early days, in order to appease the Wehrmacht, even in a situation where he could just as easily have backed Röhm against the professionals; and although the Wehrmacht was in later days to feel what domination by Hitler meant, he never put an end to its organizational individuality or assimilated it to the Waffen-SS, as he might well have done after July 20, 1944. (To the contrary, even as he was slaughtering its leading officers, he recalled to its leadership the dismissed Guderian, who had never been a Nazi and who was an Army man to the marrow of his bones.) The Wehrmacht after July 20 was the model of how he envisaged his relationship with any other actual institution. It shows how he would have dealt with other institutions who came to deal with him; as, indeed, did the French State. On those terms, he was, as he repeatedly said, as eager to “guarantee the British Empire” as he was to “guarantee the Catholic Church”; at the same bullying terms, and for the same egotistical reasons. He wanted the British Empire to go on, under his own ultimate sanction, as an instrument of enduring domination of white races over blacks; he wanted the Church, on the same terms, as a power of influence and intrigue. (That, incidentally, is what the Russian Orthodox Church ultimately became, in the last decades of Russian Communism; unable to destroy it, the Communists finally decided to use it for their own ends, especially on an international level. It managed a great deal of propaganda and mischief, especially in the World Council of Churches. Read The Mitrokhin archives.) No doubt, had either of these two actual powers even tried to reach an agreement, they would have found out, as bitterly as Petain and the Wehrmacht ever did, what domination by Hitler meant; but this does not mean that he would have destroyed them organizationally. Only spiritually. That this would eventually have entailed a great persecution - even supposing that the persecution was not already in act - you need not doubt.
Ultimately, your grossest mistake - which shows a striking incomprehension of the German hard-right tradition from which Hitler sprang - is to separate the persecution of the Churches from the persecution of the Jews. And you make it because you completely underrate and misunderstand the spiritual significance of Nazism. Nazism was not ultimately about control of the German state by one party: it was about making an epochal change in the very nature of civilization. It was about replacing an ethics of pity for an ethics of domination. Germany was almost incidental to this cultural project. And from the beginning, before Hitler was even born, the writers of the extreme right had identified the “Semitic” origins of the Christian Church as the arch-enemy. Houston Stewart Chamberlain railed in thousands of learned and diseased pages against the “Syrian” origins of the Church, although - not unlike Hitler himself - he did not despair of being able to produce a reformed Christianity without any of its “Syrian” corruptions. Chamberlain is a transitional figure. He still clings to some of his old Protestant English proprieties even as he assumes the form of a prophet of the new world of Fascism, and indeed manages, in his old age, to hail Hitler himself as the coming force of Germany (this was two years before Hitler’s electoral triumph of 1930, at a time when no-one else took him seriously). The next generation is even clearer about the connection between “Semitic” origins and the poisonous, denaturating forces of conscience. When Hitler declares conscience to be a blemish like circumcision, he is standing in an illustrious tradition, one might almost say in the mainstream of the German right. The notion of being in harmony with Nature includes the complete rejection of conscience, the element which - as Matthew Arnold so eloquently said from the opposite side - separates man from nature, from the lebenswarm world of instinct to which the German right-wing intellectual aspires. The Jews are identified as historically the first rebels against “life” and “nature”, the first to place Conscience at the centre of the human personality: and it is for this reason (whatever the more stupid and merely pornographic members of the movement, such as Julius Streicher, may say) that they are identified as the chief poisoners of human life and culture.
(In this respect, the George-Kreis, although in every other respect the chief drum-beaters for Fascism in Germany - it was from George’s role among them as spiritual leader and chief prophet, that Hitler drew his Führerprinzip - were untypical. At least one Jew was a leading member, and it is perhaps not just a coincidence that the composer Schoenberg, another Jew, set some of George’s poems to music.)
The curse of Hebraism is extended both to Communism and to Catholicism, and for the same reason: both are poisoners of the clean well of “life” instinct with the mud of conscience. To understand the intellectual root of the German right’s attack on everything that was Jewish in modern culture, You should read the angry and really beautiful pages in which the great historian of religions Walther Friedrich Otto (whose Die Götter Griechenlands, engl.tr. The Homeric Gods, is one of the best and most perceptive guides to Greek religion ever written) attacks the personality and character of St.Paul of Tarsus. And so, Communism is not rejected because it is brutal or conscienceless: to the contrary, what really condemns it is the appeal it makes to that bogey of the “life”-obsessed hard right, namely conscience. As a way of merely moving mobs, it would be sympathetic to that particular strand of anti-liberal tradition that went back to the French writer Sorel, and that was certainly a founding part of international Fascism; but the fact that it mobilized mobs in the name of moral ideas, however misapplied, made it intolerable. It was Conscience, the Jewish invention, that had to be disabled; the Jews, conversely, had to be opposed because they had no part in the instinctual “life” of the community - being an external element that claimed abstract “rights”, and whose treatment, therefore, was a touchstone of the conflict between communitarian “life” and abstract “conscience”. The same thing that the Jew invented, Conscience, is what protects the Jew in modern society. Attack the one, and you attack the other.
An interesting side issue is that the most recent writers about Hitler can find no evidence of actual anti-semitism in his views and behaviour, however extreme and aggressive in other ways, until 1919 and the beginnings of his political career (Important remarks on the matter in Kershaw, Hitler, vol.1, pgg. 49-52; and notice, incidentally, the repeated allusions to homoeroticism and homosexuality in the circle of Lanz von Leibenfals, the Viennese anti-semite - another instance of homosexualism presiding at the birth of German Fascism.) His first proven anti-Hebraic remarks come in 1919. It seems likely that, when he told of being an anti-Semite in the slums of Vienna before the war, he either lied or retrojected much later experiences. And that being the case, it hardly seems a coincidence that anti-Semitism was deliberately introduced to the uprooted and disoriented German public, still reeling from the defeat in a war which they had thought to the last minute that they were winning, by a real conspiracy of North German extreme rightists one of whom was certainly the sinister Graf von Reventlow, who was later to become a Nazi. Before 1919, anti-Semitism as a passion was very limited and marginal in German society, though there was clearly a certain amount of prejudice. Early in 1919, a number of sinister hard-right circles began an unprecedented campaign against Jews, which culminated one year later with the first German translation of the Protocols of the sages of Zion. It was a sensation. Its publication, with the preceding year of repeated yet curiously anonymous attacks on the Jews, has all the characteristic of a conspiracy, and the fact that many of the people involved still could not be surely identified as late as 1967 (when Norman Cohn published his Warrant for genocide, detailing the whole sordid story as far as it was known; I do not know whether they have been identified since) shows that precautions were taken to disguise who was responsible; exactly as though the people behind the publication knew that they were doing something better done underhandedly. Which, if you think about it, is a curious way to do something no more illegal or dangerous than publishing a book.
My view is that popular anti-semitism was introduced in Germany deliberately, by a conspiracy of extreme right wingers and former army men eager to offer the German people a scapegoat for their disasters. And if that is the case, then it is interesting that Hitler should have been among those who bought it. In 1919, Hitler was very much rabble; a follower, not a leader; a tiny atom of the violent and conspiratorial underground of reaction, much of it connected with the Army, that was used to bloodily suppress the rise of more or less soviet-like popular governments in Munich, in Berlin and elsewhere. In Munich, he played the despicable part of the infiltrator and the spy, living with revolted soldiers in their barracks and eventually pointing out to the death squads those who had been most active politically. If it was at this point, and no earlier, that he developed his hatred for Jews, then this shows the force of that politico-intellectual leadership of the hard right, even in the middle of the collapse of a war which was theirs if it was anyone’s; Hitler, who had certainly been fanatically committed to the war and shattered when defeat became clear, was one of the many who “bought” what might be called the Protocols Excuse. It also shows that we cannot stop at Hitler in trying to define the significance of Nazi doctrine; Hitler was not only derivative, he was more derivative than he himself realized or admitted.
That being the case, we must look for the ultimate significance of anti-Judaism, not to Hitler himself, but to his intellectual sources, the people who literally put the idea into his head. And, as I said, there is no doubt why they regarded Hebraism and all its works with detestation: it was because Christianity and Communism appealed to that diseased excrescence of human life, conscience. In a world in which being in harmony with nature meant killing off the rivals for living space, conscience was not only a disease, but one which the nation - or rather, the race - could not afford. The catastrophe of military defeat showed what could go wrong when conscience interfered with the Darwinian struggle for survival. That being the case, conflict with the Church was absolutely inevitable; not only because the Church is an institution that stands upon the individual conscience if it stands on anything at all, but also because it was by its own nature supra-national, a complete denial of the ultimate value of the national or racial community. Throughout the thirties and forties, it was the notion of the ultimate value of the racial community that was the constant target of Catholic writers throughout the West. The Church was quite as clear about what it fought and why, as Hitler was on the opposite side.
Can you doubt, therefore, that Hitler was serious when he said that, once he had won the war, he would “settle accounts” with all the pfaffen? Can you doubt that the growing pressure on the Churches, ratcheted up once the war began, was the prelude to something which, had the Nazis won, would have been infinitely worse? Can you doubt that the murder of thousands of priests and tens of thousands of laymen was not just hitting at “a few notable individuals”, but preparing the ground for the persecution to come? Can you doubt that the Church, and the Christian religion, were the ultimate targets of a movement which denied their most basic attitudes and regarded their values as poison to the nation - and which, as we have seen, took murder to be a natural means of political action?
Yes, you would say, but the Church only suffered a few tens of thousand casualties, the Russians and the Jews millions. Yes. This has to do with the way Hitler operated, and that way is not exactly explained purely by political expedience.
Most historians, dazzled by such withering sequences of events as the destruction of the Weimar Republic in a few months and the lightning war that put an end to France, identified Hitler’s peculiarity as a sudden dazzling speed, that put potential enemies in front of accomplished facts. Stephen Koch, author of one of the most important and least known histories of the period, Double lives (whose neglect by the whole historical establishment is one of those occasional intellectual scandals generated by the power of entrenched opinion) has aptly characterized Hitler and Stalin as the Hare and the Tortoise. Yes, but there is an opposite feature which is just as typical. In his memoirs, Guderian, one of the most brilliant generals of the war - and a mind of notable independence in his own field - all but rails at Hitler for having missed all the opportunities that opened themselves to him with the fall of France. Guderian was no dreamer, but a sober, though imaginative, soldier, who had trained in the finest school in the world; he did not want the war, but, having started it, he wanted to win it. And Hitler hesitated. He not only hesitated, he was repeatedly seized by panic: when the invasion of Norway did not go to schedule, when the British checked the advance of some German units. Again and again, firmness of purpose and clarity of vision were the very reverse of his attitude. And finally, having conquered France, he stood as if dazed, making no use of the victory he had won. Purely as a technician, it is clear to Guderian that Hitler could have won the war there and then: forced Franco (who could never have refused Hitler then as he did in 1942) into the war, invaded North Africa with the help of Spanish, French and Italian allies, driven into the Middle East, seized its vital oil, expelled the British from the Mediterranean, threatened India and Africa. For that matter, he could have annihilated the British army at Dunkerque, without which Britain would have been much easier to invade. None of these things were done; and that is because Hitler could not get used to having really and truly achieved his dreams in reality.
Hitler’s sense of timing was bad in another way. His view was that pressure on an enemy should increase in time, since people who have given up once in one matter will be the more willing to give up again. This is, of course, the exact opposite of the truth, and shows Hitler’s lack of understanding of human nature. To give one example, the British accepted the infamous naval treaty of 1935, which betrayed France and Italy and was clearly to Britain’s own disadvantage; so, by Hitler’s logic, they should have been the more willing to accept the militarization of the Rhineland in 1936. As a matter of fact, they were decidedly unhappy, but they were not, at the time, willing to risk a war with Germany at the same time as relations with Italy were already at breaking point over the matter of Ethiopia. Again by Hitler’s hypothesis, they should have been progressively more willing to surrender Austria, the Sudetenland, and Bohemia-Moravia. In point of fact, the reverse was true. Britain was very unhappy about the loss of Austria; seriously considered going to war over the Sudetenland, before deciding to go to Munich; and finally lost patience with the invasion of Bohemia and Moravia, which represented the end of the policy of appeasement. The next German demand led to war. And Hitler was puzzled by the British attitude, could actually not be led to understand that Britain would never again grant him another Munich, that - in simple and ordinary human terms - British patience had ran out.
In real human life, a strategy of constantly increasing pressure, of constantly multiplied demands and threats, is the best possibly way to multiply your enemies and stiffen their resolve. It was what killed Robespierre, when his own allies realized that he was still hankering for yet more executions. Conversely, those tyrants who die peacefully in their beds are those who, like Octavian Augustus and Francisco Franco, have tended to concentrate their crimes and their murders in their early days. Octavian and Franco came to power on the wave of hideous civil wars attended by every refinement of illegality and cruelty; but as they consolidated their power, they also committed themselves to a strategy of limited reconciliation. Augustus welcomed in his circle the poet Horace, well knowing that he had fought against him, and tolerating a strong streak of independence in him; an episode comparable, in Spain, with the return home of the great liberal philosopher Ortega Y Gasset in 1948. Lenin, with his move from war communism to the NEP, looked as though he might be willing to take a similar direction, but he died too early.
What Hitler’s attitude amounts to is the mistaken calculation, they’ve allowed me to commit a crime before, they’ll allow me again. What underlies it is, at some level, the astonished surprise at having been allowed to go so far. At some unconscious level, he did not expect to be allowed to do what he was allowed to; and having been allowed once, he feels reassured, and does it again - and next time he does it worse. This pattern of behaviour goes straight back to what we know of Hitler’s childhood, a headstrong child navigating his way between an indulgent and spoiling mother and a violent disciplinarian father; and it may be summed up as an unconscious question, “how far will they let me go?” In effect, Hitler knows that he is violating all sorts of bounds, but as he is at first allowed to do so - by the judiciary in 1923; by the state authorities; by the electorate; by President Hindenburg; by the Wehrmacht; by the British; by the French; by Mussolini - he comes to feel that these bounds they claim to respect really don’t mean that much anyway. The spoiled child assumes that a tantrum will always eventually get him what he wants.
What I am saying is that with Hitler, one crime is always going to be the prelude to another. It is only a matter of the opponent once giving way. And Hitler insures, in all sorts of ways, that the opponent will give way. Guderian says, with his usual simplicity, that when Hitler was faced with a united front, he gave way; and regrets that Keitel and Jodl, especially Keitel, could not see their way to co-operate with other Army commanders and resist his orders. Yes. The only time in his whole career when he faced clear, determined, armed resistance - by Mussolini, in 1934, at the time of Dollfuss’ murder - he could not withdraw fast enough. The unarmed Bishop von Galen, by the power of his word alone, put a stop to the murder of the unfit - which was official state policy, and which must have humiliated Hitler horrendously. But that is exactly why Hitler promoted a man like Keitel, who could be trusted not to join forces with anyone who opposed Hitler; that is why he took care to break up all the powers of the State between several different competing agencies.
Think therefore. In the matter of religion, you say that Hitler did not have to bother to persecute the Churches, and that “only a few” outstanding individuals were murdered. I say that Hitler never held back from murdering anyone merely because the group concerned did not threaten him; after all, what harm could he fear from the Gypsies? I say that the reason why he did not stretch his hand against the Churches was that he did not feel strong enough; because he dreaded united and forceful responses such as had forced him to give way on the matter of euthanasia; because he still felt the informed, watchful eye of the Vatican following his every move, with increasing concern and increasing protests, more unbending than any other enemy had ever proved, more all-seeing and baleful than his father’s when he sought his mother’s skirts long ago.
The sheer subconscious potency of that one paternal figure above the world is something that we Catholics ourselves are perhaps not geared to understand. To us, it is part of the ordinary run of things, not to mention that most of us are perfectly disposed to resist his views if we see sufficient reason to do so (dogma is another matter). It was a shock to me to read that it loomed so enormously large in the collective imaginary of our Waldensian neighbours, to the extent that they practically defined themselves with respect to him; and I have little doubt that some similar resonance reaches many other members of the Western world. I have little doubt that Hitler, who had grown up in a Catholic country, still felt its force.
Does that mean that he would not attack the Church in the future? To the contrary. Once he had gained sufficient confidence, Hitler could nerve himself to anything. In 1934, he had ingloriously retired before Italy alone; in 1939, the united might of Britain and France did not hold him back for one day. The day was coming, it was practically around the corner, when he would have acted against the Churches as savagely as Lenin ever did. In my view, the Wannsee conference and the decision to annihilate the Jews prelude exactly to that. If he can once destroy one religious body without interference, he can then go on to destroy another; just as the naval treaty encouraged him to remilitarise the Rhineland, the militarization of the Rhineland encouraged him to invade Austria, and the successful anschluss encouraged him to violate Czechoslovakia - the successful, rich, democratic Slav state that violated every mental category he ever held. One crime led to another; one crime encouraged, steeled, nerved him up, to another. If Hitler had won the war, above all if he had completed the massacre of the Jews as he wished, he would have done exactly what he said he would: “settled accounts” with pfaffen of all confessions, murdered them in their tens of thousands, and then either set up, in the Communist fashion, a puppet Church of his own, or force his control by military means on the Vatican and “elect” a puppet Pope. I would not put it past him to force a “union” between Catholics and Lutherans, like Stalin in 1945 forced the Catholics of the Ukraine into a “union” with his own Orthodox Church. Only a fool could expect otherwise, and only the fact that the Vatican had been more vigilant and more loudly protesting than any other of Hitler’s real or supposed opponents had so far held the murderous hand back to some extent. And bear in mind that it is only because of the monstrous size of Nazi crimes, that the assault on the Churches looks so small that people like you can mistakenly dismiss it; in any other environment, a regime that had accounted for 6000 priests in twelve years would count as one of the blackest spots in Christian history.
I want to conclude with a consideration that has only marginally to do with Hitler. It is my view that anti-Hebraism as a recurring disease of Christendom always occurs when some conscious or unconscious attempt is taking place to nationalize the Church, to assimilate it to the community, to deny its universal character. The first great persecution of Jews in modern Europe took place as a side-effect of the Crusades, the episode which taught the Latin West to identify itself with “Christendom”, to the exclusion of the still thriving Christianities of the east. Luther nationalized the Church, and persecuted Jews; at the same time, Spain was growing conscious of itself as a great nation charged with an exclusive, national and intolerant Christianity - and persecuted Jews. The issue is simple: the existence of a radically different group which lays claim to the same Scriptures and the same God puts into radical question any claim of national exclusivity - it means the presence of the Other, in as radical a fashion as humanly possible, at the very core of our religious identity. The natural reaction is to kill the Other.
Traditional Catholic teaching, as expressed by St.Thomas Aquinas, is simple: persecution of the Jews is forbidden, because they are the ones who received the first revelation. In other words, the very question about identity and religion which the Jew-haters are trying to silence must be endured, along with the presence of the religious body in which it is expressed. Every fair means must be used to try and encourage them to convert; but, as St.Bernard of Clairvaux said in a passage whose real toleration goes unnoticed by people who cannot stomach strong language or a belief in the Devil, “if they will not serve God of their own free will, leave them to serve the Devil of their own free will”. I very much doubt whether, if one of our liberals today really believed in the Devil, s/he would be willing to allow people the freedom to serve it. And as long as the Church has remembered that it was in fact Catholic (for there are plenty of shameful episodes), the doctrine has held. Jews hounded by Christian mobs often found refuge in the local Bishop’s palace; and the most ancient Jewish community in the world, some of whose families can trace their pedigree back 1750 years, is in Rome, where they have lived for two millennia under the shelter of the Pope’s power.
In other words, there is a reason why the disease of anti-Judaism, earnestly propagated by fanatics around the world, had most effect in Germany - and least, at the same time, in Italy. Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide describes temporary successes in various Western countries - Poland, France, briefly Britain, the US, even Japan - but it triumphed only in Germany, and conversely had practically no impact at all in Italy. And the reason is obvious. German Fascism amounted to a very real, very strong attempt to nationalize the whole spiritual/religious life of the country; at the same time as Italy, alone among the Western countries, experienced an utter and largely unhealed split between the national spirit and the national religion. It is never sufficiently realized that Italy was created against the Church, and that for a very long time the Pope and the Italian political leadership were at war. Hence there was absolutely no temptation to nationalize religion; even if an Italian managed the acrobatic feat of being both a patriot and a Catholic, s/he would regard the Catholic part of his/her identity as the supranational, non-patriotic part. And typically, as things have changed within the last ten years, so a worrying kind of anti-semitism is creeping back into Italy along with other kinds of racism. God has strange ways to punish us: I well remember, in the schools of my childhood, the nuns congratulating Italy because neither racism nor anti-Judaism had taken root here, unlike those dreadful people in Germany and America and South Africa….
End of the essay