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Hitler And National Socialism In Germany Essay Adolf Hitler was born in 1889 at Braunau an Inn on the Austrian side of the border with Germany. In 1913 he left Vienna for Munich and in August 1914 he joined a Bavarian infantry battalion and spent the next four years of the First World War on the western front, where he was promoted to the rank of corporal and generally served with distinction. At the end of the war, amid considerable revolutionary fervour in Germany, he returned to Munich and joined the German Workers Party, a counter-revolutionary movement dedicated to the principles of German national socialism, as opposed to Jewish Marxism or Russian Bolshevism. In February 1920 the party took the name National Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP, Nazi for short) and set out its 25- point party programme. The name at the bottom of the document is not Hitlers that of Anton Drexler, who set up the German Workers Party in Munich. Although Hitler had only been a member of the party for a year, the twenty-five points reveal the influence of his ideas. The programme contained many of the policies that became associated with the Nazis when they gained power constitutionally in 1933. In November 1923 Hitler entered Landsberg prison; he remained there until his release in December 1924. To all practical intents and purposes his party had ceased to exist and it was perhaps as well for the fuehrer that he had to withdraw from all political activity, for the general climate was not propitious. Inflation had come to an end, and after experiencing some severe shocks in her domestic and foreign affairs, Germany entered a period of relative calm and stability. For the time being, at any rate, this reduced the appeal that the extremist movements of both right and left had for the public. Stability was not to last and in retrospect the mid-twenties appear to have provide the Nazis with the necessary interlude in which to prepare themselves for the great onslaught on the Weimar Republic which too place towards the end of the decade. Hitlers stay in prison, almost as merry and certainly as comfortable as that described in Johann Strauss famous operetta, provided him with a welcome opportunity to put some of his ideas in writing, thus giving National Socialism a doctrine of sorts. On foreign policy in particular National Socialism had been rather weak, frequently contradictory; Hitler must have felt an urgent need to give his movement some guidance in this field when, in 1926, he wrote the sections on a future German policy in the last part of Mein Kampf, and when, in 1928, he dictated his second book entirely devoted to foreign political questions, destined not to appear in print in his lifetime. In these writings Hitlers views about Russia and Bolshevism were systematically developed for the first and last time; essentially, they did not undergo any major change throughout the rest of his life. Hitler and National Socialism in Germany While Hitler was in prison the leaderless National Socialist movement split into several factions. Some Bavarian Nazis decided to follow a more radical left-wing line, mainly in order to attract Communists; there was some vague idea of a division of labour between the extremes. You hang the Jews, well hang the other capitalists, some Communists are alleged to have replied. But since this demagoguery alienated the lower middle class, which was, after all, the backbone of Nazism, the political line eventually was changed, and Communism again became a dangerous enemy. In the west of Germany, there was but little hope of attracting workers with the anti-leftist slogans that had been successful in Munich before 1923. The brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser, as well as young Dr Goebbels, who built up the Nazi Party in west Germany, decided on a much more radical approach, and one which led to open conflict within the Nazi movement and eventually to a showdown. In October 1932, when the economic crisis in the West had reached its peak, the official organ of the Nazis declared: The five year plan has ceased to be a theory. It has become a reality, a hateful, but one that must be taken into account. The relative success of the plan made a deep impression in these circles; its cost and the many unnecessary victims it demanded did not worry the Nazis; on the contrary, the Gewaltmensch Stalin became for some of them almost an attractive figure. Yet it did not make them more friendly disposed towards Communism. They stressed in their propaganda now that the Soviet menace in the East had grown and that only a National Socialist Germany could successfully withstand the Bolshevik tide. National Socialism, they said, would defend Germany not for capitalism, which was bankrupt- it was certainly not worth while to shed ones blood for this. Germany would be saved only by an idea, a new organic social order- namely, National Socialism. In 1945 German historians were confronted with a completely new challenge. The defeat of National Socialist Germany in the Second World War not meant the Germans had lost the war but now also had to face being held accountable for political crimes of previously inconceivable proportions. American historians explain this after 1945 with a politically undesirable development in Germany that is supposed to have reached from Luther to Hitler; the rise and fall of the Third Reich was thus merely the inevitable end thereof. The two leading German historians of the immediate postwar period, Friedrich Meinecke and Gerhard Ritter, both having distanced themselves considerably from the Third Reich, believed the entire tradition of the German national state to be in great danger. In 1946 Meinecke therefore tried to represent the Third Reich as the German catastrophe, for which he held the National Socialism and its demonic leader Hitler responsible. Ritter even claimed in 1948 that National Socialism was not a specifically German phenomenon, but had instead been caused by the crisis in European democracy in the twentieth century. Both failed to include National Socialism in the continuity of German history, but instead chose to interpret it as a historical break with tradition. After the erection of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent crisis in the Federal Republic of Germany, this form of dealing with Germanys past was radically challenged. Fritz Fischers book on Germanys grip for world power in the First World War showed that even the imperial government, led by Wilhelm II had followed an expansive imperialist policy- by no means was Hitler the first to do so. The continuity of German politics in the twentieth century, which most of the West German historians had vehemently denied, was thus once again on the scholarly agenda. This led to the first big Historikerstreit in the mid-1960s in the Federal Republic of Germany, who by those who believed a degree of continuity from imperialist to National Socialist Germany existed. In particular, the development of National Socialism was seen as the result of a historical singular path (Sonderweg), which only German society had followed in 1871, when the Reich was founded. The central argument of this interpretation of National Socialism consists in blaming the continued existence of pre-industrial and authoritarian societal structures for the lack of drastic modernisation in Germany. Without a successful bourgeois revolution, Germany was thus helpless when faced with the attack of authoritarian- oriented political forces. Seen from this point of view, National Socialism thus appears as the result of the opposition of national-conservative elite against the societal process of transformation in Germany that had been gathering momentum since 1919. In order to support this interpretation, less focus was placed on German politics since 1919 and more on German society during the Empire. It was National Socialism, not the Hitler Youth, that made such a powerful appeal to young Germans, above all by its activist character. In vivid contrast to the interminable discussions of the Biinde, elaborating ideals that were to be realized in some indefinite future, Hitler affirmed that the hour had already struck; the day of national salvation had arrived. The Biinde had wanted their members to understand that all the different aspects and facets of the political problem had to be studied, each from its own angle, before a political judgement could be valid and comprehensive. Commendable in itself, this relativistic approach was also their weakness, and made them an easier prey to the fanaticism and one-sidedness of National Socialism. While the Biinde were talking about sacrifice, their rivals were demanding, and getting, immediate action. Facing the rising tide of National Socialism, more and more of the biinische youth feared that history would pass them by, and felt incapable of remaining inactive. The cry for political engagement awakened a profound response in such a period of disarray and desperation. It must be remembered that the middle classes were hardly less seriously hit by unemployment than the working class; every thing seemed undermined by the general economic decline and the spectre of academic and white-collared poverty was becoming a grim reality. Choosing Hitler was not an act of political decision, not the choice of a known programme or ideology; it was simply joining a quasi-religious mass movement as an act of faith. Rational misgivings about the relevance of Hitlers professions of the solution of Germanys real problems cannot have been entirely absent from the minds of many, but they were perfectly willing to surrender their own critical judgment. It meant abandoning democracy and freedom as impotent and discredited ideas and trusting the Fiihrer, who would know best what to do.