Fascism. Madeleine Albright
September 1930, unhappy voters marched to the polls with protest on their minds. The Nazi tally went up, and the party’s position in the Reichstag improved as Hitler scored impressive gains among women, small businesspeople, peasants, and the young. Overnight, what had been the ninth-largest party became the second, trailing only the Social Democrats. Communists, too, did well as the political extremes assaulted the bastions of democracy from both sides, shrinking the center to an island whose sole inhabitants were pious aristocrats and bewildered liberals.
Tall, dignified Paul von Hindenburg, the German president, was a revered former war hero, but his face was hardly a fresh one. The old general had first fought for his nation in 1866, in a long-forgotten war against Austria. In his prime, he had represented the epitome of the Prussian officer class, devoted to Kaiser and flag, with no higher calling than duty and no greater fear than change. As a political figure in the modern age, he seemed a time traveler, without relevant skills and unable to decipher the meaning of contemporary events. The aged president was not well served by the officials around him, who clung to their ambitions like life jackets, trying to outmaneuver one another for prime seats on a sinking boat.
Two years on, in the spring of 1932, the old man was persuaded to stand for reelection. He defeated Hitler, but with the Depression still holding the country back, the Nazi vote rose again in the July balloting for parliament, enabling the party to capture one hundred more Reichstag seats than any of its opponents. A shaken Hindenburg invited Hitler to join a coalition government, but the upstart demanded full executive power, a proposal that the president bravely refused. This led to yet another round of elections. In November, the Nazi momentum slowed, but the party still won enough seats to provide leverage. Because bringing the Communists into a coalition was out of the question, Hindenburg was seemingly left with a choice between accepting Hitler as leader or continuing to hold elections with little hope of a decisive outcome. His advisers were split about what to do, but his son, Oskar, a Nazi sympathizer and also corrupt, argued on behalf of the intemperate Austrian. On January 30, 1933, Hindenburg folded his hand. Like Mussolini a decade earlier, Hitler was given the keys to power by an elderly man who felt he had no better option—and, like Il Duce, he arrived in the nation’s highest office without ever having won a majority vote, yet by constitutional means. The new German chancellor called the historic transfer “a legal revolution.”
THE COUNTRY’S POLITICAL ESTABLISHMENT—BIG BUSINESS, THE military, and the Church—had initially dismissed the Nazis as a band of loudmouthed hooligans who would never attract wide support. Over time, they saw value in the party as a bulwark against Communism, but nothing more. As for Hitler, they were not nearly so scared of him as they should have been. They underestimated the man because of his lack of schooling and were taken in by his attempts at charm. He smiled when he needed to and took care to answer their questions with reassuring lies. He was, to members of the old guard, clearly an amateur who was in over his head and unlikely to remain popular for long. Though they misread Hitler, the young chancellor was an acute judge of them. “The reactionary forces believe they have me on the lead,” he confided to a colleague in February 1933. “I know they hope I will achieve my own ruin by mismanagement … Our great opportunity lies in acting before they do. We have no scruples, no bourgeois hesitations … They regard me as an uneducated barbarian. Yes, we are barbarians. We want to be barbarians. It is an honorable title.”
Empowered by the Enabling Law, Hitler launched a political blitzkrieg, destroying what remained of German democracy. He began by abolishing local assemblies and replacing provincial governors with Nazis. He sent SA thugs to brutalize political opponents and, when necessary, cart them off to newly opened concentration camps. He disposed of the unions by declaring May 1, 1933, a paid national holiday, then occupying union offices throughout the country on May 2. He purged the civil service of disloyal elements and issued a decree banning Jews from the professions. He placed theater, music, and radio productions under the control of Joseph Goebbels and barred unsympathetic journalists from doing their jobs. To ensure order, he consolidated political, intelligence, and police functions in a new organization, the Gestapo.
The Nazi revolution moved ahead with quicksilver speed, but for some party members it was not ploughing deeply enough. Hundreds of thousands had signed on to the party with the expectation of immediate rewards. In the cities, they wanted jobs; in the countryside, land. The oversize SA, the Sturmabteilung, hungered to replace the regular army. Hitler, however, was not the servant of his followers. His goal was to rebuild the foundations of German national power and, to do that, he would need the skills and experience of people outside the party. He had no intention of dismantling big agricultural enterprises, disrupting core industries, or picking a fight with the military. Instead he used the personal diplomacy he was capable of, and the fear he had engendered, to enforce discipline within the party. Generally, that effort went well—but there was one notable exception.
The Nazis had recruited the SA to provide the clenched fist they needed to knock aside obstacles along the path to power. Now that the finish line had been crossed, the force was without a mission, and party leaders made plans to trim it. Rather than acquiesce, the militia’s chief of staff, Ernst Röhm, rebelled, arguing that there were many more tempting targets to attack, including corporations, landed estates, and anyone with property the SA could plunder. From Röhm’s perspective, a revolutionary movement needed a revolutionary army, and a revolutionary army devoured everything in its way. Hitler tried to reason with his old friend, but Röhm was intransigent, even adding firepower to units assigned to the capital—a threatening gesture.
On June 4, 1934, Hitler and Röhm met again. The chancellor, at his most ingratiating, proposed a cooling-off period in which the SA would go on leave for a month, with any final decisions about its fate put off until its return to duty. Röhm—who really should have known better—saluted and dropped his guard. On June 30, the Gestapo arrested him and rounded up several hundred alleged co-conspirators. Given a revolver with a single bullet and allowed ten minutes to commit suicide, Röhm replied defiantly, “If I am to be killed let Adolf do it himself.” When the ten minutes were up, two of Hitler’s aides shot Röhm, who reportedly died gasping, “Mein Führer, mein Führer.”
Operation Hummingbird, known also as “the Night of the Long Knives,” eliminated the SA as a threat to the regular army. This secured Hitler’s ties to the military establishment and cleared the way for him to succeed Hindenburg when the aged president died shortly afterward. Hitler emerged from the crisis as head of government, head of state, and commander in chief of the armed forces. From then on, the army was required to swear allegiance not to the country or the constitution, but to the Führer personally.
HITLER’S CLAIM TO DISTINCTION RESTED NOT ON THE QUALITY OF his ideas, but instead on his extraordinary drive to turn warped concepts into reality. Where others hesitated or were constrained by moral scruples, he preferred to act and saw emotional hardness as essential. From early in his career, he was a genius at reading a crowd and modulating his message accordingly. In conversations with advisers, he was frank about this. He said that most people earnestly desired to have faith in something and were not intellectually equipped to quibble over what that object of belief might be. He thought it shrewd, therefore, to reduce issues to terms that were easy to grasp and to lure his audiences into thinking that behind the many sources of their problems there loomed a single adversary. “There are…only two possibilities,” he explained, “either the victory of the Aryan side or its annihilation and the victory of the Jews.”
Hitler felt that his countrymen were looking for a man who spoke to their anger, understood their fears, and sought their participation in a stirring and righteous cause. He was delighted, not dismayed, by the outrage his speeches generated abroad. He believed that his followers wanted to see him challenged, because they yearned to hear him express contempt for those who thought they could silence him. The image of a brave man standing up against powerful foes is immensely appealing. In this way, Hitler could make even his persecution of the defenseless seem like self-defense.
The chancellor’s average height, dark hair, and unathletic body—so at odds with the Aryan ideal—may have added to his support. He referred to himself as a true representative of the people, a workingman, a veteran, without a bank account, investment income, or a mansion. “Workers,” he declared, “you must look upon me