subjects, to speak and explain, to take them into their alleged
confidence, however mendacious the report may be. They find it
expedient, no matter how they spurn the principles of democracy, to
pretend to treat their subjects as free to exercise a judgment. Why
else does Hitler constantly come before his people to talk? In the
western tyrannies of antiquity and the Middle Ages, in the European
monarchies of divine right and in the Oriental despotisms, the rulers
considered it unnecessary to deliver an accounting to their people.
The conclusion is that the short experience the world has had with
democracy, not yet two hundred years in duration, has left with the
most imperious ruler a sense of responsibility to the ruled, or is it
merely fear? Hitler despises the masses, I know. But he fears them
also. If Louis XVI had possessed a fraction of Hitler’s speaking
talent, or King Charles of England, or Czar Nicholas of Russia, perhaps
they might have had a different fate.
In the preface to _Mein Kampf_ Hitler indicates the paramount
importance he attaches to the art of political speaking. He wrote: “I
know that one is able to win people far more by the spoken than by the
written word, and that every great movement on this globe owes its rise
to the great speakers and not to the great writers.” He then wrote a
book of 1,000 pages which is said by now to have been distributed to
eight million people, but it was still the spoken word. He dictated
every line of it. You ask, what kind of public speaker is Hitler? I
answer, read _Mein Kampf_.
It reminds me of a man named Korff. Korff was the brains of the
Ullstein Verlag, pre-Hitler Germany’s greatest publishing concern.
Korff originated the _Berliner Illustrierte_, first of the world’s
great picture weeklies, forerunner of _Life_, and _Look_, and the
French _Match_. He raised his _Berliner Illustrierte_ to more than two
million circulation, undreamed of on the continent before. His salary
was record breaking, his prestige likewise.
One day in 1931, more than a year before Hitler came to power, Korff
came before his board of directors and said, “Gentlemen, I’m through.
I am going to resign. I wish you to release me and to make your
arrangements accordingly.” Astounded, the board asked why. “Because
I’ve read the book, gentlemen,” replied Korff. “What book?” they asked.
“_Mein Kampf_,” Korff said, and began to explain, but couldn’t on
account of the laughter. Dear old Korff had to have his joke. But no,
it was not a joke. Korff resigned, liquidated his property, got out
of Germany and in 1933 when Hitler came to power the Nazis bought out
Ullstein’s at forced sale.
The laughing members of the board and stockholders--those not yet dead,
shot attempting to escape, or hanged by their belts in concentration
camp--received a fraction of one per cent of the value of their
holding. Of all the house of Ullstein, only the man who read the book
escaped. I advise you to read the book.
As an orator, Hitler has many superiors. I have mentioned Goebbels in
Germany. Trotzky was certainly better. I heard Trotzky speak in Moscow
the last time he ever appeared on a Russian platform. It was in 1926.
He had been in disgrace for more than a year, but was allowed to speak
on the innocuous theme, “The United Sates of America and Siberia,” a
lecture with paid admissions. The proceeds were to go to the benefit
of needy students of Moscow University. Why Stalin allowed it I do
not know, but he never permitted a return engagement, for Trotzky’s
popularity proved so great that the mounted police had to be called
out to move the crowds which, despite the exorbitant admission price,
jammed the street before the lecture hall.
I paid thirty roubles for a balcony seat. It was worth the price.
Trotzky appeared, dapper in a light-gray whipcord suit, and for an hour
and a half in Russian which I only faintly understood, moved me and the
three thousand other listeners to intense appreciation of his forensic
talents. I was surprised to hear Trotzky’s voice, a clear high tenor.
I had expected a deeper, more rotund tone. They said, however, that
the clarity of his delivery and its carrying power were such that he
alone among Bolshevik orators could speak in the Red Square and without
a microphone be heard by half a million listeners. Without being able
to understand more than one word in ten, as at that time I had been
in Russia less than a year, I was nevertheless convinced by this one
hearing of Trotzky that he was one of history’s greatest orators.
Q. _What sort of eyes has Hitler? Are they magnetic? What color are
they?_
A. It seems to depend on who is looking at them. I noticed that Francis
Hackett in his useful book, _What Mein Kampf Means to America_, cites
three descriptions of Hitler’s eyes, all different. Otto Tolischus
calls them “small, greenish brown and almost poetically introspective
eyes.” William D. Bayes calls them “faded blue eyes between colorless
brows and puffy sallow cheeks.” John McCutcheon Raleigh wrote: “The
fanaticism in his eyes was the most commanding thing about him ... they
possess a hypnotic quality that can easily persuade his followers to do
anything the mind behind the eyes desires.”
These differences evoked from Mr. Hackett the remark: “If you want
to feel discouraged about the art of reporting, consider these three
accounts of Hitler’s eyes.” But what about these additions? Dorothy
Thompson says in her interview, reprinted in _Dictators and Democrats_:
“The eyes alone were notable. Dark gray and hyperthyroid, they have
the peculiar shine which often distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics and
hysterics.” In the same book Lothrop Stoddard writes: “His eyes are
very dark blue.” Likewise, in the same compilation, I have reported
that “He fixed his flat, non-magnetic, China-blue eyes on me....” I
will stick to my version. His eyes were certainly not magnetic as far
as I was concerned, though I am convinced they would be highly magnetic
to any German. As for the color, they are of such an intermediate,
shifting shade that it may well be they could show in different lights
all the way from greenish brown, faded blue, dark gray, dark blue, to
China blue.
Q. _Is Hitler really the tough man he claims to be? I remember he was
reported in a recent speech to have remarked: “I am the hardest man
ever to rule Germany.”_
A. When a man talks too much about his strength, it may mean he is not
so strong after all. Francis Hackett sorted out in his index of _Mein
Kampf_ all the references to “Qualities, concepts or practises Hitler
approves,” and to the ones he disapproves. The two lists throw a good
deal of light on Hitler’s character, or rather on what he thinks his
character ought to be.
The things Hitler approves are: First, “Advance by sections,” by which
he means that to achieve, one must concentrate upon one goal at a time,
as he has brilliantly exemplified in his conduct of the war so far.
Then in alphabetic order, Hitler approves: “Brutality; Discipline;
Executions for Treason; Faith; Fanaticism; Force; Hardness; Idealism;
Joy in responsibility; Loyalty; Obedience; Passion; Perseverance;
Ruthlessness; Sacrifice; Self-preservation; Self-sufficiency, national;
Silence and discretion; Social justice; Social responsibility;
Terrorism; Toughness; Will power and determination.”
Hitler condemns: “Cowardice; Eroticism; Half measures; Humaneness;
Liberty; Pacifism; Passive resistance.”
My impression is that of the qualities he named, Hitler possesses
brutality, discipline, faith, fanaticism, force, hardness, idealism,
joy in responsibility, passion, perseverance, ruthlessness, sacrifice,
discretion, terrorism, will power and determination; but that he does
not possess loyalty or a true sense of social justice, or social
responsibility, or toughness. He is hard without being tough. That
is, I believe he will one day prove brittle. As for loyalty, he is
notoriously able to discard a lifelong friend, and if necessary kill
him, as he did Roehm, without visible compunction.
Q. _What is the secret of Hitler’s power?_
A. That is a question that has interested me for eighteen years,
since I first saw Hitler and heard him speak. During all this time I
have heard hundreds of explanations of his power and have thought of
some myself. But the most interesting and plausible discussion of his
personality I have ever heard was given me by Dr. Carl G. Jung, the
great Swiss psychiatrist, when I visited him in his home in Zurich
to ask him to diagnose the dictators. It was in October 1938, and
I had come directly from Prague where I had witnessed the death of
Czechoslovakia.
Dr. Jung’s analysis of Hitler has been remarkably confirmed by the
events since that time. He had been personally fascinated by the
problem of Hitler’s personality, and had studied it for years. He said:
“There were two types of strong men in primitive society. One was the
chief who was physically powerful, stronger than all his competitors,
and another was the medicine man who was not strong in himself but was
strong by reason of the power which the people projected into him. Thus
we had the Emperor and the Pope.
“Hitler belongs in the category of the truly mystic medicine man. His
body does not suggest strength. The outstanding characteristic of his
physiognomy is its dreamy look. I was especially struck by that when I
saw pictures taken of him in the Czechoslovakian crisis; there was in
his eyes the look of a seer.”
I asked, “Why is it that Hitler who makes nearly every German fall down
and worship him, produces next to no impression on any foreigner?”
“Exactly,” Dr. Jung assented. “Few foreigners respond at all, yet
apparently every German in Germany does. It is because Hitler is the
mirror of every German’s unconscious, but of course he mirrors nothing
from a non-German.
“He is the loud-speaker which magnifies the inaudible whispers of the
German soul until they can be heard by the German’s conscious ear. He
is the first man to tell every German what he has been thinking and
feeling all along in his unconscious about German fate, especially
since the defeat in the World War, and the one characteristic which
colors every German soul is the typically German inferiority complex,
the complex of the younger brother, of the one who is always a bit late
to the feast. Hitler’s power is not political; it is _magic_.
“To understand magic you must understand what the unconscious is. It is
that part of our mental constitution over which we have little control
and which is stored with all sorts of impressions and sensations;
which contains thoughts and even conclusions of which we are not
aware. Besides the conscious impressions which we receive, there are
all sorts of impressions constantly impinging upon our sense organs of
which we do not become aware because they are too slight to attract our
conscious attention. They lie beneath the threshold of consciousness.
But all these subliminal impressions are recorded; nothing is lost.
Someone may be speaking in a faintly audible voice in the next room
while we are talking here. You pay no attention to it, but the
conversation next door is being recorded in your unconscious as surely
as though the latter were a dictaphone record.
“Now the secret of Hitler’s power is not that Hitler has an
unconscious more plentifully stored than yours or mine. Hitler’s secret
is twofold; first, that his unconscious has exceptional access to his
consciousness, and second, that he allows himself to be moved by it.
He is like a man who listens intently to a stream of suggestions in a
whispered voice from a mysterious source, and then _acts upon them_.
“In our case, even if occasionally our unconscious does reach us
through dreams, we have too much rationality, too much cerebrum to obey
it--but Hitler listens and obeys. The true leader is always _led_.
“We can see it work in him. He himself has referred to his Voice.
His Voice is nothing other than his own unconscious, into which the
German people have projected their own selves; that is, the unconscious
of seventy-eight million Germans. That is what makes him powerful.
Without the German people he would be nothing. It is literally true
when he says that whatever he is able to do is only because he has the
German people behind him, or, as he sometimes says, because he _is_
Germany. So with his unconscious being the receptacle of the souls of
seventy-eight million Germans, he is powerful, and with his unconscious
perception of the true balance of political forces at home and in the
world, he has so far been infallible.
“That is why he makes political judgments which turn out to be right
against the opinions of all his advisors and against the opinions
of all foreign observers. When this happens it means only that the
information gathered by his unconscious, and reaching his consciousness
by means of his exceptional talent, has been more nearly correct than
that of all others, German or foreign, who attempted to judge the
situation and who reached conclusions different from his.”
I remarked that if Hitler’s Voice continued to be always right, we were
in for a very interesting period. This was five months before Hitler
swallowed the whole of Czechoslovakia, and eleven months before he
launched the Second World War by assaulting Poland.
Dr. Jung gravely answered: “Yes, it seems that the German people are
now convinced they have found their Messiah. In a way the position of
the Germans is remarkably like that of the Jews of old.
“Since their defeat in the World War the Germans have awaited a
Messiah, a Savior. That is characteristic of people with an inferiority
complex. The Jews got their inferiority complex from geographical and
political factors. They lived in a part of the world which was a parade
ground for conquerors from both sides, and after their return from
their first exile to Babylon, when they were threatened with extinction
by the Romans, they invented the solacing idea of a Messiah who was
going to bring all the Jews together into a nation once more and save
them.
“The Germans got their inferiority complex from comparable causes. They
came up out of the Danube Valley too late, and founded the beginnings
of their nation long after the French and English were well on their
way to nationhood. They were too late for the scramble for colonies
and for the foundation of empire. Then when they did get together and
made a unified nation, they looked around them and saw the British, the
French, and others with rich colonies and all the equipment of grown-up
nations and they became jealous, resentful, like a younger brother
whose older brothers have taken the lion’s share of the inheritance.
“So the Germans slept through the division of the world into colonial
empires and thus they got their inferiority complex which made them
want to fight the World War; and of course when they lost it their
feeling of inferiority grew even worse and developed a desire for
a Messiah, and so they have their Hitler. If he is not their true
Messiah, he is like one of the Old Testament prophets; his mission is
to unite his people and lead them to the Promised Land. This explains
why the Nazis have to combat every other form of religion besides
their own idolatrous brand. I have no doubt but that the campaign
against the Catholic and Protestant churches will be pursued with
relentless and unremitting vigor, for the very sound reason, from the
Nazi point of view, that they wish to substitute the new faith of
Hitlerism.”
I asked Dr. Jung: “Do you consider it possible that Hitlerism
might become for Germany a permanent religion for the future, like
Mohammedanism for the Moslems?”
“I think it is highly possible,” Dr. Jung replied. “Hitler’s ‘religion’
is the nearest to Mohammedanism, realistic, earthy, promising the
maximum of rewards in this life, but with a Moslem-like Valhalla into
which worthy Germans may enter and continue to enjoy themselves. Like
Mohammedanism, it teaches the _virtue_ of the sword. Hitler’s first
idea is to make his people powerful because the spirit of the Aryan
German deserves to be supported by might, by muscle and steel. It
is not a spiritual religion in the sense in which we ordinarily use
the term. But remember that in the early days of Christianity it was
the church which made the claim to total power, both spiritual and
temporal. Today the church no longer makes this claim, but the claim
has been taken over by the totalitarian states which demand not only
temporal but spiritual power.
“Incidentally it occurs to me that the religious character of Hitlerism
is also emphasized by the fact that the German communities throughout
the world far from the political power of Berlin, have adopted
Hitlerism. Look at South America.”
Dr. Jung said he had closely observed Hitler at his meeting with
Mussolini in Berlin. “I was only a few yards away from the two men and
could study them well. In comparison with Mussolini, Hitler made upon
me the impression of a sort of scaffolding of wood covered with cloth,
an automaton with a mask, like a robot or a mask of a robot. During the
whole performance he never laughed; it was as though he were in a bad
humor, sulking. He showed no human sign.
“His expression was that of an inhumanly single-minded purposiveness,
with no sense of humor. He seemed as if he might be a double of a real
person, and that Hitler the man might perhaps be hiding inside like
an appendix, and deliberately so hiding in order not to disturb the
mechanism.
“With Hitler you do not feel that you are with a man. You are with a
medicine man, a form of spiritual vessel, a demi-deity, or even better,
a myth. With Hitler you are scared. You know you would never be able to
talk to that man; because there is nobody there. He is not a man, but
a collective. He is not an individual, but a whole nation. I take it
to be literally true that he has no personal friend. How can you talk
intimately with a nation?”
Finally Dr. Jung delivered a prophecy which was to prove woefully
accurate just five months later. “England and France,” he said, “will
not honor their new guarantee to Czechoslovakia any more than France
honored her previous pledge to Czechoslovakia. No nation keeps its
word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A
nation has no honor, it has no word to keep. That is the reason why
in the old days, they tried to have kings who did possess personal
honor, and a word. But you know if you choose one hundred of the most
intelligent people and get them all together, they are a stupid mob?
Ten thousand of them together would have the collective intelligence
of an alligator. Haven’t you noticed at a dinner party that the more
people you invite the more stupid the conversation? In a crowd, the
qualities which everybody possesses multiply, pile up, and become the
dominant characteristics of the whole crowd.
“Not everybody has virtues, but everybody has the low animal instincts,
the basic primitive caveman suggestibility, the suspicious and vicious
traits of the savage. The result is that when you get a nation of
many millions of people, it is not even human. It is a lizard or a
crocodile, or a wolf. Its statesmen cannot have a higher morality than
the animal-like mass morality of the nation, although individual
statesmen of the democratic states may attempt to behave a little
better. For Hitler, however, more than for any other statesman in the
modern world, it would be impossible to expect that he should keep the
word of Germany against her interest, in any international bargain,
agreement, or treaty. Because Hitler is the nation.”
Q. _Isn’t there anything constructive about Hitlerism? Is it all
destructive? Won’t they get over their period of madness and settle
down and make good world citizens?_
A. In 1934 I talked with President Thomas G. Masaryk of Czechoslovakia
in the old Hradzin Palace in Prague. The venerable statesman was
eighty-four years old, but he was still able to deliver measured
philosophical replies. One of them was to the question: “Aren’t you
as head of the Republic of Czechoslovakia which Hitler and his Nazis
threaten so violently, afraid he may some day attack you?” The old
man slowly replied, “No, because every revolutionary movement such as
the Nazis’ has its period of ecstasy, and the Nazis are going through
theirs now, but in a little while more they will subside and we will be
able to get along peaceably with them.”
I went away with my first example of the fact that no man over seventy
ever seems to be able to understand Hitler. I beg the pardon of the
grand exception, Senator Glass, whose early and persistent advocacy of
effective action against Hitler has distinguished him among Senators,
some of whom approach treason in their imbecilic refusal to comprehend
the life-and-death issue facing America.
Just five years after the founder of Czechoslovakia had expressed
his faith in the fundamental normality of the Nazis, his conviction
that they were after all like other people, and that their revolution
would follow the natural course of other radical movements and become
stabilized, Hitler sat at the very desk in the Hradzin where Masaryk
had sat. Czechoslovakia had ceased to exist precisely because Masaryk
and all the other heads of states in Europe blindly refused to see
that in Hitlerism the world was faced with a brute which always had to
move forward, steadily became bigger and hungrier as it was fed, and
would never cease to destroy and devour until stopped by force. To the
German there is something mystically attractive about this Nazi Wave
of Destruction. They feel their fate is being achieved by violence so
fierce that it intoxicates them, as the young Nazi Shock Troops are
intoxicated by battle lust when they fling themselves upon the enemy.
It is the Nazis’ ability to combine this berserk, mystic rage with cold
scientific mastery of the intricate instruments of mechanized war that
makes them so formidable. They even loot scientifically, as witness the
way they have bled France. I know an amusing and typical example of the
German’s aptitude for plundering profitably.
In Spain I met a young German Nazi machine gunner serving with Franco.
His name was Franz, and he had been an SS officer in Duesseldorf. He
had come to Spain, he declared, for idealistic motives, to fight the
Bolsheviks, and now after three months’ service his idealism had been
rewarded with a small fortune. I asked him how he had been able to make
any money serving as a noncommissioned officer.
“Oh,” he explained, “I have the advantage over these Spaniards and
Moors of having an academic education. I did not finish school but I
had enough _Naturwissenschaft_ to know my way about in a physics or
chemistry laboratory. Now what do these poor ignorant Spaniards and
Moors do when they enter a town we have just taken. They go busting
around breaking into homes and offices, looking for cash and jewelry
and such things, but nobody ever leaves cash and jewelry lying around.
What do I do? I go straight to the _Kino_, the motion picture theater,
and straight to the projection room, and there I remove the lenses
which are worth from ten to twenty thousand pesetas, and I put the
lenses in my suitcase when I get back, and now I have two suitcases
full of lenses. They are worth a fortune. You see the beauties of
education?”
Q. _How has Hitler run his show without money, without gold, without
foreign exchange? Can the Nazi economy continue to run indefinitely on
its present basis?_