Items related to Nazism and War (Modern Library Chronicles)
The Second World War was the defining event of the twentieth century, leaving millions dead and redrawing the political map in ways that continue to affect nearly the entire human race. What was unprecedented, however, was not simply the war’s scale, but its causes. Unlike previous territorial or political clashes, the war launched by Nazi Germany was an ideological one, waged to wipe entire peoples and cultures from the face of the earth.
In Nazism and War, Richard Bessel, one of the preeminent authorities on the social and political history of modern Germany, demonstrates how racial hatred was the driving force behind–and not a by-product of–Nazism. War was the anvil on which Hitler’s worldview was forged; to him, war was “the most memorable period of my life,” and “all the past fell away into oblivion.” German National Socialism was born in war, emerging triumphant over a country deeply scarred by defeat and eager to reclaim its greatness and to punish those who had usurped it. As a political philosophy, Nazism glorified struggle and conflict, viewing them as the purpose of a nation and a measure of its overall condition. As a political movement and state system, Nazism made its ideology real, plunging the European continent into a war of annihilation and a sea of blood. Nazism–inseparable from war–destroyed the old Europe, and thus helped to create the world in which we live.
Incisive, authoritative, and immensely readable, this is an incendiary and forcefully argued work of scholarship that will rank with the most influential historical analyses of our time.
In Nazism and War, Richard Bessel, one of the preeminent authorities on the social and political history of modern Germany, demonstrates how racial hatred was the driving force behind–and not a by-product of–Nazism. War was the anvil on which Hitler’s worldview was forged; to him, war was “the most memorable period of my life,” and “all the past fell away into oblivion.” German National Socialism was born in war, emerging triumphant over a country deeply scarred by defeat and eager to reclaim its greatness and to punish those who had usurped it. As a political philosophy, Nazism glorified struggle and conflict, viewing them as the purpose of a nation and a measure of its overall condition. As a political movement and state system, Nazism made its ideology real, plunging the European continent into a war of annihilation and a sea of blood. Nazism–inseparable from war–destroyed the old Europe, and thus helped to create the world in which we live.
Incisive, authoritative, and immensely readable, this is an incendiary and forcefully argued work of scholarship that will rank with the most influential historical analyses of our time.
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About the Author:
RICHARD BESSEL is Professor of History at the University of York and a specialist on the social and political history of Nazi Germany. His previous books include Life in the Third Reich; Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism: The Storm Troopers in Eastern Germany, 1925—1934, and Germany After the First World War.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
1
The Aftermath of the First World War and the Rise of Nazism
Writing in Mein Kampf, while in prison after his conviction for leading the failed Munich Beer Hall putsch of November 1923, Adolf Hitler described how his First World War ended:
During the night of October 13th–14th [1918] the British opened an attack with gas on the front south of Ypres. They used the yellow gas whose effect was unknown to us, at least from personal experience. I was destined to experience it that very night. On a hill south of Werwick [Wervock], in the evening of October 13th, we were subjected for several hours to a heavy bombardment with gas bombs, which continued throughout the night with more or less intensity. About midnight a number of us were put out of action, some for ever. Towards morning I also began to feel pain. It increased with every quarter of an hour; and about seven o’clock my eyes were scorching as I staggered back and delivered the last dispatch I was destined to carry in this war. A few hours later my eyes were like glowing coals, and all was darkness around me.
I was sent into hospital at Pasewalk in Pomerania, and there it was that I had to hear of the Revolution.1
In his self-dramatizing account of how, as a blinded corporal, he had learned of the Armistice and revolution, Hitler claimed:
The more I tried to glean some definite information of the terrible events that had happened, the more my head became afire with rage and shame. What was all the pain I suffered in my eyes compared with this tragedy?
The following days were terrible to bear, and the nights still worse. To depend on the mercy of the enemy was a precept which only fools or criminal liars could recommend. During those nights my hatred increased—hatred for the originators of this dastardly crime.
For Hitler, the lesson was clear:
There was no such thing as coming to an understanding with the Jews. It must be the hard-and-fast “Either-Or.”
For my part, I then decided that I would take up political work.2
This statement tells us a great deal about the origins of Nazism and Nazi politics: as a consequence of a lost world war, expressing blind hatred, and uncompromising in its violent hostility to Germany’s supposed enemies and particularly to the Jews. It is difficult to imagine a more revealing end to the First World War than that experienced by Adolf Hitler: lying in a military hospital in provincial Pomerania, temporarily blinded by a mustard gas attack in Flanders3—a helpless invalid—as the German armies collapsed and the hopes and illusions that had sustained support for Germany’s war effort evaporated. If there was a single, identifiable moment when Nazism was born, it was in that Pasewalk military hospital in November 1918.
The sudden, catastrophic, and, for most Germans, unexpected end of the First World War came as a tremendous shock and was accompanied and compounded by the shock of political revolution. The apparent unity that had greeted the outbreak of the war in 1914—itself more a reflection of how the events of August 1914 were reported and subsequently perceived than of the actual reactions of Germans at the time4—was overtaken by open, bitter, and violent division. Whereas most Germans believed the Great War had begun with a people united in their devotion to their country, it ended with the abdication of the Kaiser and the discredit and disintegration of the imperial system amid social and economic disorder. It was not the military superiority of the Allies, reinforced by hundreds of thousands of fresh American troops in 1918, that framed Germans’ memories of the defeat, but their own collapse. Widespread discontent over hardship within Germany during the war; working-class radicalism and strikes; the “covert military strike” of German soldiers after the failed offensives of early 1918;5 and finally, in late October and early November, the mutiny of sailors at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, rebelling at the prospect of being sent on a hopeless suicide mission when the war was as good as lost, helped precipitate the fall of the Kaiser. The politicians of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD), into whose laps the German government fell in November 1918, hardly enjoyed universal popular support. Instead, they faced an embittered, suffering population filled with unrealistic expectations about what peace could bring and profoundly divided as to how they viewed the road ahead.
In the months that followed the Armistice and revolution, Germany appeared to sink into economic and political chaos. Although the political transition of November 1918 itself was remarkably peaceful, and although the return and demobilization of Germany’s wartime armies proceeded much more smoothly than anyone had predicted, bloodshed soon followed. In what had been the eastern Prussian provinces of Posen and West Prussia, Polish insurgents managed to wrest territories with a majority Polish population from German control. In Berlin, an ill-prepared Communist uprising in January 1919 was easily crushed and the Spartacist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered. In Germany’s industrial areas (in particular the Ruhr) there were strikes, sharply declining productivity, and violence. As the old army withered away, the government aided the formation of, and became dependent upon, freebooter military formations—the Freikorps. Consisting of veterans of the war and school leavers who had missed their opportunity to fight in the trenches, the Freikorps units suppressed supposed left-wing threats to the government, often in an extremely brutal and bloody manner, and served as an introduction to politics for many men who later figured large in the Nazi movement. Shortages of coal and food, transport difficulties, and raging inflation made Germans’ lives a misery. Political uncertainty and economic chaos were reflected in rising crime levels, as property crime soared against a background of inflation and violent confrontations became increasingly common.6 The well-ordered society that Germans thought they knew seemed to have vanished. Shortly before his death in 1990, the great German-Jewish sociologist Norbert Elias reminisced: “I still clearly remember the experience that the war suddenly was over. Suddenly order fell apart. Everyone had to rely on himself. One knew that peace had arrived, Germany had been defeated, which was sad, and then one tried quite simply to get on with life.”7
The First World War had left Germany a much less civilized, much rougher place in which “to get on with life.” Not surprisingly, this provoked widespread resentment. Faced with the disintegration of order, Germans looked for somewhere to place blame for the catastrophe that had befallen them. Rather than confront the hard truths about how their country had got into, fought, and been impoverished by the war, they looked angrily in two directions: externally, at the Allies who imposed the allegedly intolerable Versailles diktat upon a prostrate Germany; and internally, at those at home who supposedly had stabbed Germany in the back. The Versailles Treaty, which Germany was compelled to sign in July 1919, came as a terrible shock. For Germans, many of whom at the time of the Armistice had looked forward in naïve hope to a peace inspired by the lofty principles enunciated by American president Woodrow Wilson in the autumn of 1918, the treaty seemed unbearably harsh. The loss of territories in the west (Alsace-Lorraine, Eupen-Malmedy), the north (northern Schleswig), and, most important, in the east (Posen, West Prussia, parts of Upper Silesia), the imposition of a huge reparations bill that would take decades to pay, and the “war-guilt clause,” which ascribed blame for the outbreak of war to the German government, were regarded as intolerable and unfair. Without the economic resources that the Versailles settlement removed from the Reich, it appeared to many that the country’s future was bleak. Thus it became easy to ascribe Germany’s difficulties during the 1920s not to the material and social costs of a lost world war, but to an allegedly unjust peace settlement imposed on a prostrate country by the Allies. Condemnation of the Versailles settlement was voiced not only on the right, but across the political spectrum; indeed, hostility to the Versailles diktat became perhaps the only point of consensus in the conflict-ridden world of Wei- mar politics.
The question of how Germany had landed in this mess was no less damaging to responsible democratic politics. Many Germans came to believe that, after steadfastly defending Germany against a world of enemies for four long years, the armed forces had collapsed because of treason at home. Not the superiority of the Allies, but a “stab in the back” was the alleged cause of the sudden, unexpected defeat. Given the context of Germany’s defeat in the First World War—with German armies still on occupied enemy soil, after having knocked Russia out of the conflict and having imposed a punitive peace on the defeated power to the east, and after years of optimistic propaganda and news management by a high command and government that promoted illusions about Germany’s prospects—it was easy to believe that German soldiers had not been defeated on the field, but instead had been undermined by traitors and revolutionaries at home. Whereas the frontline soldiers allegedly had fought a heroic struggle to the end, it was the fainthearted population at home—whose morale had been sapped by shortages, hardship, and unscrupulous left-wing agitators who knew no Fatherland—who sup- posedly had failed to sustain Germany’s war effort. A myth of heroic struggle was coupled with a myth of betrayal, and the myths proved easier to swallow than the ambiguous, messy, and uncomfortable reality of how Germany in fact had lost the w...
The Aftermath of the First World War and the Rise of Nazism
Writing in Mein Kampf, while in prison after his conviction for leading the failed Munich Beer Hall putsch of November 1923, Adolf Hitler described how his First World War ended:
During the night of October 13th–14th [1918] the British opened an attack with gas on the front south of Ypres. They used the yellow gas whose effect was unknown to us, at least from personal experience. I was destined to experience it that very night. On a hill south of Werwick [Wervock], in the evening of October 13th, we were subjected for several hours to a heavy bombardment with gas bombs, which continued throughout the night with more or less intensity. About midnight a number of us were put out of action, some for ever. Towards morning I also began to feel pain. It increased with every quarter of an hour; and about seven o’clock my eyes were scorching as I staggered back and delivered the last dispatch I was destined to carry in this war. A few hours later my eyes were like glowing coals, and all was darkness around me.
I was sent into hospital at Pasewalk in Pomerania, and there it was that I had to hear of the Revolution.1
In his self-dramatizing account of how, as a blinded corporal, he had learned of the Armistice and revolution, Hitler claimed:
The more I tried to glean some definite information of the terrible events that had happened, the more my head became afire with rage and shame. What was all the pain I suffered in my eyes compared with this tragedy?
The following days were terrible to bear, and the nights still worse. To depend on the mercy of the enemy was a precept which only fools or criminal liars could recommend. During those nights my hatred increased—hatred for the originators of this dastardly crime.
For Hitler, the lesson was clear:
There was no such thing as coming to an understanding with the Jews. It must be the hard-and-fast “Either-Or.”
For my part, I then decided that I would take up political work.2
This statement tells us a great deal about the origins of Nazism and Nazi politics: as a consequence of a lost world war, expressing blind hatred, and uncompromising in its violent hostility to Germany’s supposed enemies and particularly to the Jews. It is difficult to imagine a more revealing end to the First World War than that experienced by Adolf Hitler: lying in a military hospital in provincial Pomerania, temporarily blinded by a mustard gas attack in Flanders3—a helpless invalid—as the German armies collapsed and the hopes and illusions that had sustained support for Germany’s war effort evaporated. If there was a single, identifiable moment when Nazism was born, it was in that Pasewalk military hospital in November 1918.
The sudden, catastrophic, and, for most Germans, unexpected end of the First World War came as a tremendous shock and was accompanied and compounded by the shock of political revolution. The apparent unity that had greeted the outbreak of the war in 1914—itself more a reflection of how the events of August 1914 were reported and subsequently perceived than of the actual reactions of Germans at the time4—was overtaken by open, bitter, and violent division. Whereas most Germans believed the Great War had begun with a people united in their devotion to their country, it ended with the abdication of the Kaiser and the discredit and disintegration of the imperial system amid social and economic disorder. It was not the military superiority of the Allies, reinforced by hundreds of thousands of fresh American troops in 1918, that framed Germans’ memories of the defeat, but their own collapse. Widespread discontent over hardship within Germany during the war; working-class radicalism and strikes; the “covert military strike” of German soldiers after the failed offensives of early 1918;5 and finally, in late October and early November, the mutiny of sailors at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, rebelling at the prospect of being sent on a hopeless suicide mission when the war was as good as lost, helped precipitate the fall of the Kaiser. The politicians of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD), into whose laps the German government fell in November 1918, hardly enjoyed universal popular support. Instead, they faced an embittered, suffering population filled with unrealistic expectations about what peace could bring and profoundly divided as to how they viewed the road ahead.
In the months that followed the Armistice and revolution, Germany appeared to sink into economic and political chaos. Although the political transition of November 1918 itself was remarkably peaceful, and although the return and demobilization of Germany’s wartime armies proceeded much more smoothly than anyone had predicted, bloodshed soon followed. In what had been the eastern Prussian provinces of Posen and West Prussia, Polish insurgents managed to wrest territories with a majority Polish population from German control. In Berlin, an ill-prepared Communist uprising in January 1919 was easily crushed and the Spartacist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered. In Germany’s industrial areas (in particular the Ruhr) there were strikes, sharply declining productivity, and violence. As the old army withered away, the government aided the formation of, and became dependent upon, freebooter military formations—the Freikorps. Consisting of veterans of the war and school leavers who had missed their opportunity to fight in the trenches, the Freikorps units suppressed supposed left-wing threats to the government, often in an extremely brutal and bloody manner, and served as an introduction to politics for many men who later figured large in the Nazi movement. Shortages of coal and food, transport difficulties, and raging inflation made Germans’ lives a misery. Political uncertainty and economic chaos were reflected in rising crime levels, as property crime soared against a background of inflation and violent confrontations became increasingly common.6 The well-ordered society that Germans thought they knew seemed to have vanished. Shortly before his death in 1990, the great German-Jewish sociologist Norbert Elias reminisced: “I still clearly remember the experience that the war suddenly was over. Suddenly order fell apart. Everyone had to rely on himself. One knew that peace had arrived, Germany had been defeated, which was sad, and then one tried quite simply to get on with life.”7
The First World War had left Germany a much less civilized, much rougher place in which “to get on with life.” Not surprisingly, this provoked widespread resentment. Faced with the disintegration of order, Germans looked for somewhere to place blame for the catastrophe that had befallen them. Rather than confront the hard truths about how their country had got into, fought, and been impoverished by the war, they looked angrily in two directions: externally, at the Allies who imposed the allegedly intolerable Versailles diktat upon a prostrate Germany; and internally, at those at home who supposedly had stabbed Germany in the back. The Versailles Treaty, which Germany was compelled to sign in July 1919, came as a terrible shock. For Germans, many of whom at the time of the Armistice had looked forward in naïve hope to a peace inspired by the lofty principles enunciated by American president Woodrow Wilson in the autumn of 1918, the treaty seemed unbearably harsh. The loss of territories in the west (Alsace-Lorraine, Eupen-Malmedy), the north (northern Schleswig), and, most important, in the east (Posen, West Prussia, parts of Upper Silesia), the imposition of a huge reparations bill that would take decades to pay, and the “war-guilt clause,” which ascribed blame for the outbreak of war to the German government, were regarded as intolerable and unfair. Without the economic resources that the Versailles settlement removed from the Reich, it appeared to many that the country’s future was bleak. Thus it became easy to ascribe Germany’s difficulties during the 1920s not to the material and social costs of a lost world war, but to an allegedly unjust peace settlement imposed on a prostrate country by the Allies. Condemnation of the Versailles settlement was voiced not only on the right, but across the political spectrum; indeed, hostility to the Versailles diktat became perhaps the only point of consensus in the conflict-ridden world of Wei- mar politics.
The question of how Germany had landed in this mess was no less damaging to responsible democratic politics. Many Germans came to believe that, after steadfastly defending Germany against a world of enemies for four long years, the armed forces had collapsed because of treason at home. Not the superiority of the Allies, but a “stab in the back” was the alleged cause of the sudden, unexpected defeat. Given the context of Germany’s defeat in the First World War—with German armies still on occupied enemy soil, after having knocked Russia out of the conflict and having imposed a punitive peace on the defeated power to the east, and after years of optimistic propaganda and news management by a high command and government that promoted illusions about Germany’s prospects—it was easy to believe that German soldiers had not been defeated on the field, but instead had been undermined by traitors and revolutionaries at home. Whereas the frontline soldiers allegedly had fought a heroic struggle to the end, it was the fainthearted population at home—whose morale had been sapped by shortages, hardship, and unscrupulous left-wing agitators who knew no Fatherland—who sup- posedly had failed to sustain Germany’s war effort. A myth of heroic struggle was coupled with a myth of betrayal, and the myths proved easier to swallow than the ambiguous, messy, and uncomfortable reality of how Germany in fact had lost the w...
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- PublisherModern Library
- Publication date2004
- ISBN 10 0679640940
- ISBN 13 9780679640943
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