This is the economic compulsion on Hitler to go on fighting. The Nazi
economy is one of scarcity. There are not enough workers, since most
able-bodied men are in the army; not enough food, or clothing, or
fuel, or manufactured articles. Everybody not in the armed forces has
to work very hard, very long hours in order to feed the colossal war
machine and produce the minimum necessary for the civilians to subsist.
Scarcity would normally shove prices upward; but not in the Nazi
economy where the Terror makes price control really work. The Gestapo
is a more potent backing for the currency than gold. The workings of a
totalitarian economy seem queer to us only because we continue to think
of Adam Smith’s “economic man,” and because we still believe that man
will always act freely in accord with the law of supply and demand.
But man under the Nazis is not free, does not act according to the law
of supply and demand but according to the Nazi law. This compulsion by
Terror makes a different kind of economic unit of him; our economic
laws do not apply to him any more. In our bourgeois society when civil
law condemns a man to go hungry, appetite is likely to make him break
the law. In the totalitarian state the punishments of the concentration
camp subdue almost every impulse to rebel.
For foreign trade the Nazis use an infinitely flexible, complex system
of barter, often three-way. They confidently assert they have outgrown
the use of gold; although one of the reasons Walther Darre advanced
for a Nazi conquest of America was to lay hands on the American gold
reserve at Fort Knox. The Nazis have demonstrated that they can do
without gold, but this is no proof that gold is not more convenient
than barter; it is proof only that anything can be used for money
as long as the people believe in it, by natural inclination or by
compulsion--wampum, cows, brass, paper, or the muzzle of a Gestapo
pistol. It is one of our commonest fallacies to believe that financial
considerations affect very much the beginning or the middle or the end
of a war. Can you recall any war that had to stop because one side ran
out of money? In wartime a nation becomes a collective and money a
mere bookkeeping item. Only after the war when accounts are presented,
does bankruptcy become real. Hitler inherited a bankrupt, bourgeois,
peacetime economy and turned it overnight, from the moment he came to
power in 1933, into a wartime economy. Real peace would mean the total
collapse of Hitler’s totalitarian economic machine.
Q. _Why do the Nazis call theirs the Third Reich?_
A. Historically the First Reich was the Holy Roman Empire, the second
was the one founded by Bismarck, and the third is Hitler’s. When I
discussed this once with Dr. Jung, he pointed out deeper meanings.
He said, “Nobody called Charlemagne’s kingdom the First Reich, nor
William’s the Second Reich. Only the Nazis call theirs the Third Reich,
because it has a profound _mystical_ meaning.”
Dr. Jung said the Nazis feel a parallel between the Biblical triad,
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the _Third_ Reich, and that in fact
many Nazis refer to Hitler as the Holy Ghost. “Again,” Dr. Jung
continued, “consider the widespread revival in the Third Reich of
the cult of Wotan, God of Wind. Take the name _Sturmabteilung_,
Storm Troops. The swastika is a revolving form making a vortex moving
ever toward the left--which means in Buddhistic symbolism sinister,
unfavorable, directed toward the unconscious. All these symbols of a
Third Reich led by its prophet under the banners of wind and storm
and whirling vortices point to a mass movement which is to sweep the
German people in a hurricane of unreasoning emotion on to a destiny
which perhaps none but the seer, the prophet, the Fuehrer himself can
foretell--and perhaps not even he.”
This psychiatric explanation of the Nazi names and symbols may sound
to a layman fantastic, but can anything be as fantastic as the bare
facts about the Nazi Party and its Fuehrer? Be sure there is much
more to be explained in them than can be explained by merely calling
them gangsters. They are products of that most hysterical, illogical,
emotional mentality in Europe, the German.
Q. _But I thought the Germans were stolid, phlegmatic, sensible people.
How can you describe them as hysterical?_
A. The commonest mistake the outside world makes about the Germans
is to describe them the way you have done. We Americans seem to
have judged most European nations exactly opposite from what they
really are. We consider the Italian to be emotional, easily swayed,
the Frenchman to be volatile, the Spaniard passionate, and so on.
Well, all the Latin races are models of calm, common sense and
middle-of-the-road, essentially stable people compared with the
Germans. As Dr. Jung put it, “The Italians are stable. Their minds do
not roll and wallow and leap and plunge through all the extravagant
ecstasies which are the daily exercise of the German mind.” The Germans
carry everything to excess.
What other nation in Europe would have been inundated in one decade by
a wave of hysteria which was to sweep them into idolatrous worship
of a former building-trades laborer and corporal and lift them into
conquest of the entire continent of Europe and promise the conquest of
the world? Surely this is the most extraordinary yielding by a great
people to a mass emotion ever observed in our so-called civilized world.
It is not, however, the first time that similar things have happened
in Germany. Hitler has had some notable predecessors in the turbulent
period of the Reformation.
The Anabaptists of Munster were forerunners of the Nazis, and their
Fuehrer, John of Leyden, was a figure comparable to Hitler in ambition
and in his mystic hold over his followers. Leyden and his associates
seized the city of Munster in Westphalia in 1532 and, establishing a
totalitarian theocracy, set out to conquer the world and make Munster
its capital. Is that any more or less fantastic than Adolf Hitler,
setting out to proceed from Munich to the conquest of the world?
John of Leyden differed in one respect, however, from Hitler. He
not only encouraged polygamy as Hitler’s Black Guards encourage
promiscuity, but he had four wives of his own, one of whom he, in a
typically Hitlerian fit of rage, beheaded with his own hand in the
market place. Munster for three years was the scene of excesses,
profligacy, and inhuman tortures committed upon the foes of the
medieval Nazis, until they were finally overcome by a coalition of
outraged neighbors, comparable in a smaller way, one might say, to the
present coalition against the Third Reich.
Q. _Doesn’t the life of Hitler, as far as we know it, show that he
suffered very much from poverty in his youth and then when Germany was
defeated, he suffered along with his fellow Germans so deeply that we
ought to be able to understand and forgive instead of hating and making
war upon him?_
A. That seems the equivalent of appealing for sympathy and
understanding for a mad dog, because the poor dog had been bitten and
given rabies without wanting it. It was not his fault, and he had
suffered from it, so why shoot him? Hitler, we know, did suffer as a
youth from many disabilities, including extreme poverty, and we ought
to be sorry that he did, not merely as Christians from love of our
neighbor, but because Hitler is causing us such infinite trouble and
misery, partially perhaps, on account of these early discomforts.
But we can do nothing to correct Hitler’s personal history. By the time
he came into our lives his character was fixed in rigid, implacable
hatred for every human being on earth not willing or suitable to help
him place Deutschland in command of the world with himself the globe’s
supreme ruler. He is as little susceptible to reformation today as a
rattlesnake. As for the German people and their sufferings after the
defeat in the last war, there are several things to say.
First, they did not suffer nearly so much as a nation usually suffers
after losing a four-years’ war. I can testify to that from personal
observation of the Germans from 1923 on, a period including the most
desperate months of the inflation. It is simply not correct to say
as Hackett says about the Germans after the war, “They were just as
unhappy, as despairing and as demoralized, in the midst of their
Reconstruction Period, as the old South in the years after the Civil
War.”
The old South was physically devastated by the war. Germany surrendered
before the enemy reached her territory; she came off materially
scot-free. The people of the old South felt permanently beaten and for
a long time hopeless because they had failed in their attempt to defend
their right to be independent. The people of Germany felt temporarily
frustrated of their ambition to dominate the world; just twenty years
later they set forth to try it again. Do you think the old South, if it
had wanted to do so, would have been able physically or economically
to have resumed the struggle with the North in 1885, twenty years after
the end of the Civil War, as the Germans did with the Allies in 1939,
twenty years after Versailles?
My second point about the German suffering is that before Versailles
they demonstrated their intention in the treaties of Bucharest and
Brest-Litovsk, to inflict upon their enemies terms incomparably more
severe than Versailles.
Third, in the course of the present war the Germans have proved that
the sort of peace they intend to grant the countries they vanquish now
will make the Versailles treaty appear to be a dispensation from Heaven.
Fourth, although these facts do not of course excuse the flaws in
the Versailles treaty, none of its defects could possibly excuse the
bestial behavior of the Germans toward the especial objects of their
pathological antipathy, the Jews, Czechs, and Poles, nor provide a
reasonable basis for their desire to inflict vengeance upon the entire
world.
Finally, it makes no difference what the reasons for present German
behavior are, that behavior threatens to destroy us and unless we check
it by force, we shall perish.
Q. _What should we do with Hitler after we beat him? Will he be allowed
to escape to a lifetime of comfort the way Kaiser Wilhelm did?_
A. When this question is asked I am reminded of an old Texas recipe for
cooking rabbit. It begins, “First catch your rabbit.” I do not know
what will be done with Hitler. There are many people who say he will
never be taken alive; that he will commit suicide. I do not believe
that. My guess is that Hitler would either “do a Hess” and escape to
England or seek death in battle as the Kaiser once claimed he would do.
If he remains alive, our people being incurably sentimental, we should
probably treat him the way the Allies treated Napoleon after Leipzig.
They sent him, as you may remember, to Elbe, and gave him an annual
income of 2,000,000 francs, which was about $400,000 and equivalent to
$1,000,000 in purchasing power today. Perhaps we would not, though,
especially if the American people have to live through a great deal of
hardship and bloodletting on account of this man. Maybe we will become
like the British, who, after all, are going to have something to say
about the fate of Hitler if and when he is ever caught.
The _Daily Mail_ of London ran a questionnaire asking its readers what
they thought should be done with Hitler after the war. The largest
number, twenty-five per cent, wanted him shown about the country in a
cage. This is an idea which had been suggested for the former Kaiser,
and it shows a surprising insight into the source of the deepest
emotions for extremely vain men of the type of Hitler and the Kaiser;
they certainly would suffer more from such public humiliation than from
any other punishment.
Another twenty per cent wanted him executed by hanging, shooting, or
beheading, in that order. Fifteen per cent wanted him exiled to remote,
unpleasant places, as Devil’s Island, the Andaman Islands, Ascension
Island, Arctic wastes, and the African desert. Another fifteen per cent
wanted him condemned to lifelong solitary confinement. Ten per cent
wanted to make him live the rest of his life under the same conditions
the English are living under now, with bombs, rationing, and so on.
Five per cent wanted to hand him over to the Poles or Jews. Five per
cent would have him treated as a certified lunatic.
Five per cent suggested all sorts of miscellaneous treatment, including
confinement under precisely the same conditions as normally obtain
in a Nazi torture chamber. There were no suggestions at all that he
should be treated well, as Napoleon was treated. The question is not
trivial and the answers of the British are really important, because
they throw light on the temper of the British people after the brutal
manhandling they have received from Nazi bombers. The most constructive
suggestion I ever heard on the subject of what to do with Hitler came
from my brilliant friend, Edgar Mowrer, who had a decade of experience
in Germany. He suggests that after we have defeated Hitler we put him
in a cage and send him about Germany to explain to the Germans how
wrong he had been.
Q. _What would happen if Hitler were to be killed?_
A. It would reduce the German war effort by one-half, and would
guarantee that Germany would lose. Hitler is irreplaceable, unique, and
if he were to be killed, or died, or anyhow left the scene, Germany
would not collapse but she would be as an automobile going at top
speed, suddenly run out of gasoline. The momentum of the car would
carry it forward a certain distance, but it would eventually stop.
That, in my opinion, is what would happen to Germany if deprived of
Hitler. It is not his technical ability that would be missed so much,
nor his administrative brains, nor even his incredibly accurate,
intuitive knowledge of his enemies, nor even his uncanny sense of
timing. What would be missed would be his inspiration to the German
people. If they lost their medicine man the faith in his name would
flicker on, but the confidence in his infallibility which now upholds
the civil population in the hardships of war and promotes the courage
of the troops in battle would disappear. The effect would be disastrous.
Q. _Why doesn’t somebody kill Hitler?_
A. For the last two years that has been the question most frequently
asked me on the lecture platform all over America. Sometimes a fourth
of all the written questions sent up would be this one. An average
of twenty-five persons out of every thousand in the audience would
put this question and they have been doing that ever since Hitler’s
victory over the Allies in Munich in September 1938. This itself is
an interesting light on the American attitude. Most of the time the
question was framed, “Why doesn’t some Jew, or some Britisher, or some
Frenchman kill Hitler?”
It is bewildering to reflect that up until September 1939, any young
man, Jew or Gentile, British, French, or of any of the thirteen nations
Hitler has conquered, any brave, intelligent man could have killed
Hitler within two months of making the resolution to do so. Only one
requirement was essential--that the assassin be willing to give up his
life. Now, however, it may cost the lives of millions of young men on
the battlefield before this author of evil is destroyed.
Q. _But wasn’t he always too closely guarded to be killed?_
A. Not at all. Now it is another matter. Since the war began he is so
well guarded that it might be impossible to get at him. Before the war
began it would have been easy to kill him. It might even have been
possible for a bold and shrewd assassin to have killed him without
being captured. I give you one instance.
At every Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg there are hundreds of
thousands of strangers in the city. The Gestapo with all its resources
cannot possibly check on them all. A resourceful foreigner, speaking
German and posing as a German, could obtain a room in a hotel facing
the main street down which the parades pass. During the course of the
Congress Hitler appears in at least one parade a day down this street.
He always uses a long black Mercedes car and he stands in the front,
next to his chauffeur. Hitler stands there holding on now and then with
his left hand, and giving the Nazi salute with his right.
In the rear of his car are four SS men, and on the running boards are
two others, and behind Hitler’s car is another identical Mercedes with
six to eight more SS men. The SS men, who are the best pistol shots
in Germany, lean out of their cars, peering at the crowds, and they
keep their right hands always on their pistols. You say that sounds as
though he were well guarded? Not at all. The crowd in Nuremberg is so
great that it encroaches on the path of the automobiles until they are
slowed to a walk. That means Hitler passes underneath your window at a
walking speed.
An assassin could lean out of his window and toss a bomb into Hitler’s
car with absolute accuracy. He could not miss. I have often leaned out
and looked down at Hitler and remarked in a whisper to my comrades,
“How easy it would be, wouldn’t it, to drop a grapefruit?” And if you
think a bomb is too uncertain, why not try a sub-machine gun? That
would be 100 per cent sure. You would have him at a distance of about
thirty yards. With one burst you could riddle him, put perhaps twenty
bullets into him before the guards could turn around.
You ask how the assassin could get the sub-machine gun or the bombs
into the hotel? The Gestapo is good, but it is a long way from being
perfect. They overlook a great many things. We were in Vienna when
Hitler marched in. The Gestapo had been in control of the city for
days. But on the very day Hitler came to Vienna my wife borrowed a
radio set from Tess Shirer and had the porter carry it into the hotel
and up to our room. It was the size of a large thick suitcase. Nobody
stopped her, or asked to investigate it. It might have contained two
or three sub-machine guns with sufficient ammunition and a few hand
grenades.
You object that the assassin would certainly be caught and executed. I
agree. Political assassins almost never escape. But political assassins
must always and nearly always are willing to take this chance. You
can take it as a rule of political assassination, however, that if
the assassin is bold enough, he can always get his man. Remember the
Macedonian gunman, Vlada Georgiev, who killed King Alexander and Louis
Barthou in Marseilles, October 9, 1934? He was a husky fellow who
waited behind the police line until the royal automobile came opposite
him and then burst through the line like a football player and with one
leap was on the running board of the automobile pumping bullets from
his automatic into his two victims. It was all over in thirty seconds.
The police had no chance to intervene before Alexander was dead.
General Georges, later the unhappy second in command of the French
Army, cut down the assassin with his saber.
This is the classic street assassination, resembling in every detail
the killing by Gavril Princip of the Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand in
Sarajevo, June 28, 1914, which touched off the first World War. But the
Nuremberg situation would give an assassin a chance for his life. You
see, the SS guards are constantly watching the crowds in the street.
None of them pays attention to the windows of the houses and hotels
along the street. The crowds are so thick that between our hotel and
the path of Hitler’s automobile would be standing twenty to thirty
thousand people.
Now suppose the assassin drops his bomb or fires his machine gun, or to
make assurance doubly sure, drops bombs _and_ fires his machine gun.
Hitler falls. The crowd panics. How long would it take the SS men or
other police to get through the crowd to the hotel entrance, climb the
stairs, and search for the assassin? It would take several minutes at
least. And in the midst of that howling mob of panic-stricken people
it would take minutes more before the police could surround the block.
Meanwhile the assassin would have plenty of time to run upstairs to the
roof, across to another building, and down a rear fire escape to mingle
with the crowd. Whatever the later details of escape, there would be
a chance of his getting away from the scene of the shooting if he had
laid his plans carefully in advance.
Q. _You haven’t told us yet why nobody ever tried it?_
A. Yes, it has been clumsily tried, but without the proper preparation.
Four or five attempts were made on Hitler’s life during his first
two years in office, 1933 and 1934, while I was in Berlin. They were
all hushed up so closely that we never had more than the skeleton of
the story. They were hushed up because the Nazis and especially the
Gestapo, and especially its chief, Heinrich Himmler, know that there is
nothing so infectious as the idea of political assassination.
The news of an attempt at assassination will set off a series of
imitative attempts. Therefore Himmler gave up his original idea which
was expressed in his announcement through the German press a few weeks
after Hitler took office. Himmler declared in a formal proclamation
that if anyone were to assassinate or attempt to assassinate the
Fuehrer, there would be, and these are his exact words, “a massacre
such as the world has never seen.” He specified that the Gestapo would
massacre all of the Nazis’ opponents, and implied they would kill every
Jew in Germany.
Himmler’s announcement was calculated to deter assassins, but he never
meant to put it into effect unless Hitler were actually killed. We
correspondents, however, heard of several attempts on Hitler. One was
said to have taken place the day before the great Blood Purge of June
30, 1934, and was believed to have contributed to Hitler’s decision
to exterminate his enemies. In this case the assassin fired with a
rifle at Hitler’s automobile. Another time his car was narrowly saved
from crashing into an obstacle supposed to have been placed in the
road with the purpose of killing him. Other attempts were even more
vaguely rumored. Himmler took care that the public should learn nothing
about these attempts, not only because of the infectious nature of
the news of the assassinations, but because the Gestapo considered it
undesirable to reveal that anybody in Germany could want to kill the
Fuehrer.
Q. _That’s all right about Germans, but why not a Britisher, or a
Frenchman, or a Jew?_
A. The question why doesn’t a Jew, or why didn’t a Jew, kill Hitler is
one that I have often heard asked of my Jewish friends, and the answer
usually is that if a Jew killed Hitler the Nazis would slaughter every
Jew in their dominions. The Nazis now have under their despotism in the
Reich and the fifteen conquered countries perhaps five or six million
Jews still. I agree that it is perfectly possible that the Nazis
might try to slaughter them all if a Jew were to kill Hitler, but if
Hitler is not defeated these unfortunate victims of Nazi hatred will
ultimately perish anyway.
Nevertheless, even the very courageous young Jews who used to operate
an organization to counter Arab terror argued the same way with me when
I was in Palestine, that if they killed Hitler they would doom hundreds
of thousands if not millions of Jews to death. It seems that they can
believe rationally that Hitler does intend eventually to exterminate
all the Jews in Europe, and so it would not make much difference
if they were all or many of them killed as a result of Hitler’s
assassination, but emotionally they cling to the subconscious hope that
something will happen to save them. Of course, the only thing that can
save the Jews of Europe is for Hitler to be defeated before they all
die.
As for a young Britisher or Frenchman killing Hitler, before the war
began, as I have said, it would have been easy, but consider if a man
had killed Hitler before the war, what would the world have said?
What sort of judgment would the world have delivered on the assassin?
Would he have been considered a hero, a savior of mankind? Not at all,
because Hitler up to that time was only a potential menace to Britain,
France, and the other peaceful states. If he had been killed, his
assassin would have been declared a madman, and his act would have been
condemned by all save the small group of persons who perceived the
inevitability and the catastrophic course of the war Hitler planned
against the world. No assassin kills out of pure idealism. A man who
killed Hitler would want a little credit for it, and until the war
began he would have received none.
Q. _He would receive plenty of credit now. Why doesn’t the British
government organize the killing of Hitler? Haven’t they plenty of
agents in Germany?_