February 05, 2006

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY CHANCELLOR HITLER

This week is the 73rd anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in democratic Germany. For those sour, doubt-ridden skeptics who track these things, it was on January 30th 1933 that Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and less than three months later all other political parties, labor unions, and the basic freedoms of speech, press, and associations disappeared in Germany’s post-World War I Republic; democracy was dead.

“Democracy is the worst form of government; unfortunately, it is the only one that works,” said Winston Churchill, in one of his epigrammatic moods. Even Churchill, the great statesman and historian, didn’t get it quite right. What he should have said was “Democracy is the worst form of government; unfortunately, it is the only one that sometimes works.”

Now that America has begun a new diplomatic crusade—to export freedom and democracy to those countries of the world which are democratically impoverished, it is well to take into account some facts of political life.

The first is that there is a big difference between democracy and a crusade for democracy. The former is a political process rooted in life and quotidian exigencies, the latter a religious activity unhinged from reality.

Anybody who understands a bit about the history and geography of democracy knows that democracy (and its impure form republicanism) exists and can exist only under certain specific circumstances.

It might be worth a few moments to reflect on how it was possible for a highly civilized nation—land of Beethoven, Goethe, Thomas Mann—a free country with democratic institutions to lose its freedom and civility in the blink of an eye. How did Hitler do it?

Although there were many shaky political moments between the time in 1919 when a new constitution for Germany created the Weimar Republic, and the Reichstag (parliamentary) elections of 1928, economic and political stability seemed to have returned to Germany in the years preceding that election. The anti-republican parties of the left and right together received only 13 percent of the total vote, with the Communists receiving about 10 percent and the Nazis taking only 3 percent.

And things seemed to be looking up on the international front as well, when, in 1929, the Allied Reparations Commission recommended that German reparations be reduced to 37 billion gold marks, less than one-third of the amount originally scheduled in 1921, and that these payments be stretched out for sixty years to make them easier to pay. It also called for the dissolution of the Reparations Commission and for an immediate end to what remained of the Allied occupation of the Rhineland.

Although members of the German government welcomed these changes and accepted the new terms, right-wing opposition parties saw the plan as nothing less than a renewal of Germany's post-war humiliation. Led by Alfred Hugenberg, the press and movie-industry lord, the nationalist opposition tried to force the government to repudiate the reparations debt completely as well as the war guilt clause of Versailles upon which the debt rested. To run the opposition's campaign, Hugenberg engaged Hitler, the leader of the apparently moribund Nazi Party.

Fortunately, the bitterly fought national plebiscite that followed found only 13.8 percent of the voters favoring the objectives of the right wing. But an unintended effect of Hugenberg’s campaign was to give widespread public exposure to Hitler, who used his access to the Hugenberg-owned press empire and to its weekly movie newsreels to give himself and his Nazi movement national publicity.
Within a few months the Wall Street crash brought an end to German and world-wide prosperity. The crash had an immediate effect in Germany as American investors, anxious about their financial position, began withdrawing their loans to Germany. Prices on the German stock exchanges fell drastically during the last month of the year. Business failures multiplied. Unemployment rose to three million during the course of the year, and by the winter of 1932 it reached six million.

The first critically important political effect of the economic crisis came in March 1930 when the government coalition fell apart over the rising cost of maintaining the unemployment program. The Social Democratic Party, representing labour, and the Peoples' Party, representing business, were unable to agree on the size of the government's contribution to the fund, and their coalition dissolved. When a new coalition could not be formed, parliamentary democracy in Germany came to an end.

Political instability forced President Hindenburg to invoke his emergency powers, which he used to appoint Heinrich Bruning of the Catholic Centre Party as Chancellor. Moreover, his fateful decision to call for Reichstag elections in September 1930, inadvertently opened the door to the enemies of democracy. Together the Nazis and Communists gained nearly one of every three votes cast. Although bitterly opposed to each other, during the next two years the Nazis and Communists succeeded in mobilizing the political and economic resentments generated by the depression. Hitler's charismatic appeal and the youthful energies of his movement were attractive to large segments of a populace fearful of being ruined by economic and social disaster. Hitler was without a doubt a genius, albeit an evil genius. He had an extraordinary capacity to remain in tune with the grievances of the lower-middle classes. To an embittered Germany he offered crude solutions and false hopes: He would unilaterally end reparations and refuse to repay debts incurred by others; he would crush the Jews who were to blame for the defeat of 1918 and the hyper-inflation, and whose greed was the source of every economic ill; he would provide every German with a job and food. He promised a Germany without partisan politics and a country to be proud of.

The power of Hitler's appeal was reflected in the party's growing membership lists—from 170,000 members in 1929 to 1,378,000 in 1932—and in the swelling ranks of the Nazi Party's paramilitary wing, the infamous storm troopers.

The depression reached its depths in the winter of 1931–32. Unemployment was still rising; as was the succession of business failures. Some hope of breaking the political impasse came with the presidential election required at the expiration of Hindenburg's first term in 1932. Hitler's opponents recognized that the 84-year-old Hindenburg, now physically weak and politically apathetic, represented their only hope of preventing Hitler from winning the presidency, and, with great difficulty, they convinced Hindenburg, who wanted to retire, to seek a second term.

Although Hindenburg was eventually reelected, a runoff was necessary, and Hitler won 37 percent of the popular vote. His larger aim, however, had been to make himself the leading, or only, candidate for Brüning's position as chancellor. (The President, in the Weimar Republic, as in many European democracies, was head of state with the power to appoint the Chancellor, or head of government—Prime Minister.) Hindenburg did choose to replace Brüning in May 1932 but named the political dilettante Franz von Papen rather than Hitler. Desperate to find a base in parliament, Papen called for Reichstag elections in July. The result was a disaster for Papen and another triumph for the Nazis, who again took 37 percent of the vote, the largest total they were ever to acquire in a free election. The Communists won 15 percent of the vote. Thus the two parties dedicated to destroying German democracy held a majority in the Reichstag.

After six months with no relief or improvement in the situation Papen was replaced by another weak, stop-gap Chancellor, Schleichen, and when Hitler finally became chancellor, two months later, on January 30, 1933, it was not on the crest of a wave of popular support but as the result of backroom political intrigue by Schleicher, Papen, and the president's son, Oskar von Hindenburg. Only Hitler, they believed, could bring together a coalition with Hugenberg's DNV Party and possibly the Centre Party that could command a majority in the Reichstag. They assured the reluctant president that Hitler's radical tendencies would be checked by the fact that Papen would hold the vice-chancellorship and that other conservatives would control the crucial ministries, such as those of war, foreign affairs, and economics. The Nazis themselves were restricted to holding the chancellorship and the insignificant federal ministry of the interior.

Whether the Nazis would ever get a chance to implement their ideological objectives depended, when Hitler became chancellor, upon whether they would be able to tighten their initially tenuous hold on the reins of power. Liberals, socialists, and communists remained bitterly opposed to Hitler; important segments of business, the army, and the churches were to varying degrees suspicious of the measures he might take.

It was a combination, finally, of Hitler's daring and brutality, of the weaknesses of his opponents, and of numerous instances of extraordinary good luck that allowed him to establish his totalitarian dictatorship. He was able to take advantage of the Reichstag fire (probably the work of a lone and deranged Dutch communist) of February 27 to suspend civil liberties and arrest communist as well as other opposition leaders.

When the Centre Party refused to join the Nazi-DNVP coalition in January 1933, Hitler demanded elections for a new Reichstag. The elections of March 5, 1933, were preceded by a brutal and violent campaign in which Nazi storm troopers figured prominently. Despite this campaign of terror, the Nazis did not win a majority, gaining only 44 percent of the total, but the 8 percent acquired by the DNVP, was sufficient for the two parties to wield a majority in the Reichstag. At its first meeting on March 23 the new Reichstag—under great pressure from the storm troopers and the SS (Schutzstaffel; “Protective Wing”), the elite corps of Nazis headed by Heinrich Himmler—voted in favor of the Enabling Act that allowed Hitler to ignore the constitution and to give his decrees the power of law.

The decree powers were the pseudolegal base from which Hitler carried out the first steps of the Nazi revolution. Within two weeks of the passing of the Enabling Act, Nazi governors were sent out to bring the federal states into line, and a few months later the states themselves were abolished.

The final step in Hitler's seizure of political power came on August 2, 1934, when, upon the death of President Hindenburg, he appropriated the powers of the presidency and combined them with his own as chancellor.

In this fashion, the Nazis established the regime they called the Third Reich, the presumed successor of the Holy Roman Empire (the First Reich) and of the German Empire ruled by the Hohenzollerns from 1871 to 1918 (the Second Reich).

Thus, through a combination of various factors, it was possible to transform a civilized nation with a democratic government into a dictatorship that was acceptable to a large segment of the population which would remain loyal through twelve years of peace and war.

What were the factors that made this possible? In summary they were:

A constitution in which there was insufficient separation and distribution of power. The executive branch of the government was the creature of the legislative branch.

A parliamentary government with many factions which makes governing difficult and gives rise to a greater degree of extreme political values.

A young democratic government without political traditions and conventions to appeal to in crises.

An economic crisis of major proportions leading to unemployment and loss of property and hope.

An aggrieved and embittered population looking for relief from a strong leader.
Lack of strong traditional leadership

A charismatic antidemocratic leader who instills hope for the future and identifies a scapegoat for peoples’ troubles.

A weak media which is capable of being manipulated.

These then are the factors which led to Hitler’s rise and his acquisition of power. None of these factors is a rare occurrence in weak nations and young democracies. In fact one or more of these conditions almost always exists in states in which democracy is untried—weak constitutions, few democratic traditions, anti-democratic demagogues, a class of wealthy reactionary power-holders who want to maintain the status quo, and a hopeless and discontented populace.

The fact is that democracy is a sometime thing, and American democracy, strong and solid as it is today, didn’t get that way overnight but only after a civil war and two hundred years of evolution.

Is it wise then to go chasing after chimerical democracies in the Arab Middle East, throwing American tax-payer dollars at diplomatic illusions only to end in supporting and financing Hitlerian despots who hate America?