Part One INTRODUCTION

Transcription

1 Part One INTRODUCTION

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3 1 The historical debate The Third Reich has had a truly global impact. Not only did its destruction act as a catalyst for the Cold War, and the subsequent partition of Germany for 45 years, but it also accelerated de-colonisation and the creation of the Israeli state. Attempts to define the nature of National Socialism (hereafter Nazism) began as soon as it became a major political force in the 1930s and have continued unabated ever since, which has resulted in an academic literature beyond the scope even of specialists (Hildebrand, 1991: 101). In assessing the nature of Nazism, contemporaries raised questions which are still relevant today: was it a version of fascism or totalitarianism (see below), which had more in common with Stalin s Russia than Mussolini s Italy, or was it a unique revolutionary phenomenon? On the Left, Nazism was defined in broadly Marxist terms. Orthodox Marxist thinkers perceived it to be a mass movement manipulated by big business and finance in a last-ditch attempt to defend capitalism from socialism. Georgi Dimitrov, the General Secretary of the Comintern, defined fascism, in which he included Nazism, in 1935 as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most imperialist elements of finance capital (in Kershaw, 1993: 10). In this context Hitler was nothing more than a puppet of big business and finance. Other more independent Marxist thinkers took their arguments from Marx s seminal essay on Napoleon s coup of 2 December 1851, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and compared fascism to Bonapartism in the France of Napoleon III. On the one hand this had made life safe for capitalism as it destroyed working-class political power, but it also had its own dynamism and ended up by controlling the capitalist class, too, even though it created an environment basically favourable to capitalism [Doc. 1, p. 146]. A different approach was taken by the broadly nationalist school of historians within Germany in 1933, who interpreted Hitler s rise to power as a national revolution, which was both anti-liberal and anti-marxist. Johannes fascism Between 1919 and 1945 there were many varieties of fascism, the essence of which was: a nationalist ideology and an authoritarian state with a charismatic leadership ready to use force to achieve national aims. Marxist Referring to Marxism Philosophical system constructed by Karl Marx ( ). Its essence was that the economic system of a country determined its political and social structures. Marx was convinced that capitalism would be overthrown by the workers. Comintern The Communist international movement set up in 1919 to organise worldwide revolution. Bonapartism Political system employed by Napoleon III of France ( ). He created a dictatorship which was supported by the wealthy elites and the lower middle classes. He attempted to strengthen it through a vigorous assertion of French national interests.

4 4 THE THIRD REICH Haller, for instance, argued that it was one of the most powerful ideas of the time that national and social were not opposites (in Michalka, 1984: 361). This assessment met with some understanding in Britain, where, as late as 1935, Churchill still believed that Hitler might one day be regarded by history as one of those great figures whose lives have enriched the story of mankind (Hildebrand, 1974: 602), while Lloyd George saw him as a liberator of the German people. [Doc. 14, p. 156] By far the most penetrating of the early non-marxist studies of Nazism was written by Hermann Rauschning, the former Nazi President of the Danzig Senate, who in his classic study Germany s Revolution of Destruction argued that Nazism was a revolutionary power whose creed was action for action s sake and whose tactics were the destruction and undermining of all that is in the existing order (Rauschning, 1939: 13) [Doc. 2, p. 146]. In the war years and early post-war period, both Western and Soviet historians and propagandists, like Rohan Butler (1941), Sir Robert Vansittart (1941) and Edmond Vermeil (1945), in their search for the origins of Nazism, attempted to identify lines of continuity in German history, which allegedly stretched from Luther to Hitler. In response to this blanket condemnation of their nation s past, German historians such as Friedrich Meinecke and Gerhard Ritter argued that Nazism could only be understood within the context of the general European crisis triggered by the First World War. The outbreak of the Cold War in Europe had a considerable impact on the historical debate on Nazism. Both East and West Germany sought to interpret their common Nazi past differently. For East German historians, Georgi Dimitrov s definition of fascism remained valid and an essential rallying cry against the capitalist West. For West Germans, and increasingly the West as a whole, Nazism was seen as a variant of totalitarianism. According to Carl Friedrich, the German émigré political scientist in the USA, it had in common with Russian Communism a total ideology, a single mass party, a terroristic secret police, a monopoly of mass communications, a monopoly of weapons, and a centrally directed planned economy (Friedrich and Brzezinski, 1956: 294). This totalitarian definition of Nazism was the dominant theme in western research on Nazism until the 1960s, when an increasing number of specialised studies began to show that the concept of totalitarianism did not do justice to an understanding of the structure of the Third Reich and the role of Hitler. A dramatic change in historical thinking was signalled by the Fischer controversy of the early 1960s. In his Griff nach der Weltmacht, Fischer returned to the thesis of continuity in German history by arguing that the expansionist territorial aims of the German elites in the First World War were broadly similar to Hitler s. His book had a profound influence on German historians and helped to direct historical research back to the vital

5 The historical debate 5 question of continuities in the role of elites and social structure between Wilhelmine Germany and the Nazi period. In that sense Fischer could be called the father of the new structuralist school of historians which dominated modern German history for the next 30 years. This methodology was further developed by Hans-Ulrich Wehler in his study of the German Empire ( ), where he deliberately avoided close studies of personalities and analysed the empire as a totality with its interconnections between politics, the economy and society. Primarily, Wehler was motivated by the desire to investigate why Hitler s National Socialist regime came to power some dozen years after the end of the monarchy (Wehler, 1985: 7). He established a new orthodoxy, which argued that Germany s failure to develop into a parliamentary democracy during the Kaiserreich set Germany on the special path, or Sonderweg, that ultimately led to the Third Reich. Applying similar analytical methods to the Third Reich, structuralists, like Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen, have challenged the orthodox view of a virtually all-powerful Hitler and stressed that the study of political leaders and great men needs to be complemented by a structural analysis of contemporary society (Broszat, 1981; Mommsen, 1979). They argue that historians should concentrate more on explaining how Nazi society worked and on showing that Hitler himself was often a prisoner of forces and structures which he might have unleashed or created but could not always control. Inevitably this emphasis on structural determinants, which played down political and diplomatic history as well as the role of the individual in history, met with fierce opposition from the more traditional historians, or intentionalists, such as Andreas Hillgruber and Klaus Hildebrand, who see Hitler and his aims as central to the study of the Third Reich. This debate between the intentionalists and structuralists, as will be seen in the chapters that follow, still pervades every aspect of modern research on the Third Reich and Nazism. CAN THE THIRD REICH BE HISTORICISED? One of the dilemmas confronting historians of the Third Reich is that the appalling atrocities carried out by the Nazis make historical objectivity, or historicisation, difficult to achieve. When the orders for dealing with the Russians were issued to the German army in 1941 (see pages 103 4), Major-General von Tresckow observed with horror to his fellow officer, Rudolf von Gersdorff, that guilt would fall on the Germans for a hundred years and not just on Hitler alone, but on you and me, your wife and mine, your children and my children, the woman crossing the road now, and the new orthodoxy The evolution of what was originally a revisionist historical interpretation into an almost universally held interpretation. structuralists The name given to the school of historians, the most eminent members of which are Hans Mommsen, Broszat and Wehler, which applies a structural analysis to modern German history, particularly the Third Reich. They play down the role of Hitler and instead place more emphasis on the German elites and the polycratic nature of the regime. intentionalists Historians who stress the importance of the individual and personal intention in history. Thus intentionalists, such as Andreas Hillgruber, Klaus Hildebrand and Lucy Davidowicz, stress the aims and intentions of Hitler and emphasise his key role in the formulation of policies, particularly foreign policy and the campaign against the Jews ending in the Holocaust.

6 6 THE THIRD REICH boy playing with a ball over there (Burleigh, 2000: 707). Despite the fact that there was a courageous German opposition to Hitler, many Germans, even today, would still agree with Tresckow s comment. The long shadows of the genocidal war in Russia and the Holocaust have made it very difficult for historians to normalise or treat the Third Reich like any other period of German history. Dan Diner, one of the most trenchant critics of historicisation, has, for instance, argued that Auschwitz is a no-man s-land of understanding, a black box of explanation, a vacuum of extra historiographic interpretation (Kershaw, 1993: 214). Attempts to put the Third Reich into perspective led to the Historikerstreit, or historians dispute, which erupted into a major public controversy in West Germany in Ernst Nolte, for instance, put forward the thesis that the Holocaust should be seen within the context of the atrocities committed by Stalin and Pol Pot (Nolte, 1985). Other historians, who can also broadly be described as right wing, such as Michael Stürmer, resent the intense concentration on the Third Reich and argue that it has effectively made earlier German history inaccessible to post-1945 generations, but to historians on the Left this emphasis has been welcome, as it has forced the Germans to learn the lessons of the immediate past. Jürgen Habermas, for instance, uncompromisingly insisted that a commitment to universal constitutional principles rooted in conviction has only been feasible in the cultural nation of the Germans after and through Auschwitz (in Kershaw, 1993: 199). The perception that the fall of Nazism in 1945 had effectively brought to an end the history of united Germany changed with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany in Ultimately, then, Hitler had not permanently destroyed the German nation and state, and, as Saul Friedländer, the Israeli historian, observed, reunification had given back natural continuity to German history (Kershaw, 1993: 2000). The Third Reich could now be seen as an episode in German history rather than its climax or indeed termination. A consequence of this is that particularly the younger generation of German historians, such as Michael Prinz and Rainer Zitelmann (Prinz and Zitelmann, 1991) have become increasingly interested in the modernising impact of the Nazi regime and its economic and social influence on the post-war West Germany. Other historians such as Richard Overy (Overy, 2004) have shed fresh light on the Nazi dictatorship by carrying out comparative analyses of both Stalinism and Hitlerism, while Adam Tooze has explored the links between ideology and the German war economy (Tooze, 2007) and Mark Mazower (Mazower, 2008) has looked afresh at German-occupied Europe. The challenge for historians is to historicise the Third Reich and to put it into the context of German and indeed world history without making an apologia for its horrors.