FÜHRER

Note to the reader: ARTICLE IS BASED ON WRITER’S PERSONAL OPINION

The world was his oyster. His goal was world domination.
Adolf (Adolphus) Hitler was a German politician and the leader of the Nazi Party
(Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP). He rose to power as the Chancellor
of Germany in 1933, and then, as Führer (few-whaah) in 1934. He is known mostly for his
involvement in the atrocious act of killing 6 million Jews, which later came to be known as
Holocaust. He greeted war with enthusiasm, as a great relief from the frustration and
aimlessness of civilian life. He found discipline and comradeship satisfying and was confirmed
in his belief in the heroic virtues of war. So, it is not very surprising that not only did he
participate in the First Battle of Ypres and get two Iron crosses, but he was the one to initiate
World War-II, by invasion of Poland in 1939.

Under Hitler’s dictatorship, during the Second World War, Germany was going through a
separate war: a genocidal war. This was the massacre of certain targeted groups of innocent
civilians of Europe. 6 million Jews, 200,000 gypsies, 1 million Polish civilians, and 70,000
Germans who were ‘considered’ mentally and/or physically unstable, besides numerous
political opponents, who he later sent off to concentration camps. The Nazi method of killing
people was not just brutal, but also inhuman, not to mention the other possible atrocities
committed against the innocent victims. There were concentration camps set up in killing centres
like Auschwitz, where these helpless, innocent victims were brutally gassed to death in the gas
chambers (by choking and asphyxiation).

However, the Nuremberg Tribunal sentenced only 11 ‘leading’ Nazis to death, while many
others were imprisoned for life. This is too lenient a punishment for the draconian Nazis, on
account of the kind of shameful, brutal, and inhuman atrocities committed by them. Apparently,
the Allies did not want to be as ‘harsh’ on Germany as they had been after the First World
War. Germany, a powerful empire in the early years of the twentieth century, fought the First
World War (1914-1918) alongside the Austrian empire and against the Allies (England, France
and Russia.) All joined the war enthusiastically hoping to gain from a quick victory. Little did
they realize that the war would stretch on, eventually draining Europe of all its resources.
Germany made initial gains by occupying France and Belgium. However, the Allies,
strengthened by the US entry in 1917, won, defeating Germany and the Central Powers in
November 1918. The defeat of Imperial Germany and the abdication of the emperor gave an
opportunity to parliamentary parties to recast German polity. A National Assembly met at
Weimar and established a democratic constitution with a federal structure. Deputies were now
elected to the German Parliament or Reichstag, on the basis of equal and universal votes cast by
all adults including women. Germany was made to sign the Treaty of Versailles with its
humiliating terms. The Allied Powers demilitarized Germany to weaken its power. The War
Guilt Clause held Germany responsible for the war and damages the Allied countries suffered.
Germany was forced to pay compensation amounting to £6 billion. The Allied armies also
occupied the resource-rich Rhineland for much of the 1920s. Many Germans held the new
Weimar Republic responsible for not only the defeat in the war but the disgrace at Versailles.

The years between 1924 and 1928 saw some stability. Yet this was built on sand. German
investments and industrial recovery were totally dependent on short-term loans, largely from the
USA. This support was withdrawn when the Wall Street Exchange crashed in 1929. Fearing a
fall in prices, people made frantic efforts to sell their shares. On one single day, 24 October, 13
million shares were sold. This was the start of the Great Economic Depression. Over the next
three years, between 1929 and 1932, the national income of the USA fell by half. Factories shut
down, exports fell, farmers were badly hit and speculators withdrew their money from the
market. The German economy was the worst hit by the economic crisis. By 1932, industrial
production was reduced to 40 per cent of the 1929 level. Workers lost their jobs or were paid
reduced wages. The number of unemployed touched an unprecedented 6 million.

All this crisis formed a conducive environment for the rise of Hitler to power. The loss of
Germany in the First World War, and the humiliating Treaty of Versailles made him furious. In
1919, he joined the German Worker’s Party. With his deceptively powerful oratory skills, he
managed to take over the organization, and rechristened it as the National Socialist German
Worker’s Party, which later came to be known as the Nazi Party.
In 1923, Hitler planned to seize control of Bavaria, march to Berlin and capture power. He failed,
was arrested, tried for treason, and later released. The Nazis could not effectively mobilize
popular support till the early 1930s. It was during the Great Depression that Nazism became a
mass movement. As we have seen, after 1929, banks collapsed and businesses shut down,
workers lost their jobs and the middle classes were threatened with destitution. In such a
situation Nazi propaganda stirred hopes of a better future. In 1928, the Nazi Party got no more
than 2. 6 per cent votes in the Reichstag – the German parliament. By 1932, it had become the
largest party with 37 per cent votes. He promised to build a strong nation, undo the injustice of
the Versailles Treaty and restore the dignity of the German people. He promised employment for
those looking for work, and a secure future for the youth. He promised to weed out all foreign
influences and resist all foreign ‘conspiracies’ against Germany.

President Hindenburg offered Chancellorship of Germany to Hitler. Having acquired power, he

set out to dismantle democracy. Soon, a mysterious fire broke out in German Parliament
building, following which The Fire Decree of 28 th February 1933 was passed, under which all
civil rights were suspended indefinitely. This proves that Hitler was an extremely opportunistic
and calculative politician, along with other supporting and evident instances.

On March the 3rd, 1933, the Enabling Act was passed. This meant that Germany was now under
the claws of the monster that Hitler was. The repression of Communists was severe. Out of the
surviving 6,808 arrest files of Duesseldorf, a small city of half a million population, 1,440 were
those of Communists alone. They were, however, only one among the 52 types of victims
persecuted by the Nazis across the country. This Act gave him all power to sideline Parliament
and rule by decree. It was a state of complete tyranny under Hitler.

In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. This started a war with France and England. In
September 1940, a Tripartite Pact was signed between Germany, Italy and Japan, strengthening
Hitler’s claim to international power. Puppet regimes, supportive of Nazi Germany, were
installed in a large part of Europe. By the end of 1940, Hitler was at the pinnacle of his power.
Hitler now moved to achieve his long-term aim of conquering Eastern Europe. He wanted to
ensure food supplies and living space for Germans. He attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941.
In this historic blunder Hitler exposed the German western front to British aerial bombing and
the eastern front to the powerful Soviet armies. The Soviet Red Army inflicted a crushing and
humiliating defeat on Germany at Stalingrad. After this the Soviet Red Army hounded out the
retreating German soldiers until they reached the heart of Berlin, establishing Soviet hegemony
over the entire Eastern Europe for half a century thereafter. It is believed that Hitler, with his
newly wed wife, committed suicide in his bunker, by shooting themselves. However, Russians
believed that Hitler had probably fled in panic to hide in the Allies countries.

Hitler’s behavior cannot be justified in any circumstances, but a psychological explanation does
seem to exist. After leaving school, and before joining politics, Hitler visited Vienna, as he
dreamed of becoming an artist, for which he had some faculties, but he twice failed to secure
entry to the Academy of Fine Arts. Later, he used the small allowance he continued to draw to
maintain himself in Vienna. For some years, he lived a lonely and isolated life, earning a
precarious livelihood by painting postcards and advertisements and drifting from one municipal
hostel to another. Hitler already showed traits that characterized his later life: loneliness and
secretiveness, a bohemian mode of everyday existence, and hatred of Jews. It looks like Hitler
took the rejection by the Art Academy very negatively, which resulted in the enhancement of a
really negative attitude, formed in part due to negative early life experiences. He was fourth of
the six children born to his parents. Three of his siblings died in infancy. Hitler experienced
intense conflicts with his father because of his refusal to conform to the strict discipline of his
school, which is quite surprising as he grew to love the very idea of discipline. His father used to
beat him often, with his mother trying to protect him. He is an exception to the statement, ‘Spare
the rod, spoil the child’. Hitler wanted to be a priest, an artist, and an architect at different
stages in his life, but it is his disturbed state of mind, which lead him not to any constructive
career, but to be a mass murderer. He had a destructive coping mechanism for dealing with bad
experiences. His hatred for Jews had a cultural basis, as like most Austrian-Germans, he began to
develop German nationalist ideas from a very young age. Hitler and his friends (he did have
friends in school perhaps before he became morose and aggressive) used the greeting ‘Heil!’ and
sang ‘Deutschlandlied’ instead of the Austrian Imperial Anthem.
Many Germans saw the world through Nazi eyes, and spoke their mind in German language,
fickle minded as they were. Their sadistic behavior was characterized by marking houses of Jews
and reporting suspicious neighbors. It is really strange how they believed that the Nazis who
killed millions, ‘would bring them prosperity’, and ‘improve general well-being’. This is
evidenced by the following interview excerpt:

Was the lack of concern for Nazi victims only because of the Terror? No, says Lawrence Rees
who interviewed people from diverse backgrounds for his recent documentary, ‘The Nazis: A
Warning from History’.

Erna Kranz, an ordinary German teenager in the1930s and a grandmother now, said to Rees:

‘1930s offered a glimmer of hope, not just for the unemployed but for everybody, for we all felt
downtrodden. From my own experience, I could say salaries increased and Germany seemed to
have regained its sense of purpose. I could only say for myself, I thought it was a good time. I
liked it.’

However, not all Germans were Nazis. While some Germans were passionately against Jews and
pro-Nazism, there were some Germans who actually organized active resistance against
Nazism, braving police action and death. There were also some Germans who were too scared
to act, to differ, to protest (in my opinion, cowardly), and preferred to look away.

Pastor Niemoeller, a resistance fighter, observed a shameful absence of protest, an uncanny

silence, amongst ordinary Germans in the face of brutal and organized crimes committed against
innocent civilians in the Nazi empire. He wrote movingly about this silence:

‘First, they came for the Communists,

Well, I was not a Communist –

So, I said nothing.

Then they came for the Social Democrats,

Well, I was not a Social Democrat

So, I did nothing,

Then they came for the trade unionists,
But I was not a trade unionist.
And then they came for the Jews,
But I was not a Jew –

So, I did little.

Then when they came for me,
There was no one left who could stand up for me.’

There are many books, movies, and documentaries made on Hitler. The main book written about
Hitler was by himself, namely, ‘Mein Kampf’, followed by a book written as an answer to his
autobiography. I am writing specifically more about this book because it was a very courageous
hit-back by a declared enemy of the Third Reich, written during his regime only. First published
in 1935, ‘Hitler’s Lies’ by Irene Harand, is a challenge to the arguments, assumptions, and
actions of Hitler. In this book, Harand explodes the myth of racial and national superiority, and
attacks the persecution of the Jews, on the grounds that Anti-Semitism debases Christianity. The
author was an Austrian leader who vigorously attacked the evils of Nazism, anti-Semitism, and
religious intolerance, and was honored by Israel for her efforts. Her book ‘Sein Kampf’, was
banned by the Nazis that year. When Nazi Germany invaded Austria in 1938, Harand was in
London, which saved her life. She later emigrated to the United States, where she lived till she
died in 1975.

- Chinar Sodhani