Wednesday, January 29, 2003 â?? Page A15 Globe & Mail
Three score and 10 years -- the traditional reckoning of a lifetime --
that's how long it has been since Adolf Hitler was sworn in as chancellor
of Germany on Jan. 30, 1933.
Hitler took the helm with an extremely clear idea of how he would mobilize
the nation to achieve the program he had in mind. His goal was to enable
Germany to throw off the shackles imposed on it by the Treaty of Versailles
at the end of the First World War and to achieve German domination of
Europe from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains.
In the wreckage of Germany in the years after the 1918 armistice, Hitler
cobbled together the political philosophy he clung to for the rest of his
life. Force mattered most in deciding things, Hitler believed. To him,
notions of overcoming the injustices suffered by some peoples at the hands
of others through negotiation, reason and internationalism were nothing but
sophistry. Worse, such ideas were fetters whose purpose was to keep those
who ruled the Earth in their positions of power. Germany would realize its
rightful place in the sun only when Germans hardened their hearts against
other peoples and forged an implacable unity under the direction of an
uncompromising leader.
Race was at the heart of Hitler's distinctly unoriginal world-view. The
world's races, he held, were locked in a struggle for survival, one against
another. The Germans constituted a master race, superior to those around
them, particularly the Slavs. Only the Jews, Hitler thought, could thwart
the German march to supremacy. The Jews -- Hitler and the Nazi racial
theorists believed -- constituted a bacillus that had to be excised from
the bloodstream of Germany and Europe. This idea, for decades the subject
of the ranting of the politically demented in flophouses and beer halls,
ultimately became the basis for the murder of six million Jews.
There was nothing inevitable about Hitler's rise to power. He became
chancellor for the very good reason that his party won the largest number
of votes in free elections. But without the active scheming of members of
Germany's ruling elite, he never would have been sworn in on that fateful
January day.
Hitler's electoral support was actually slipping on the eve of his
accession to power. While the Nazis won 37.4 per cent of the vote in the
parliamentary election in July of 1932 -- their highest total in a free
election -- this fell to 33.1 per cent in November of 1932 in Germany's
last free parliamentary election.
It took Hitler just over a year and a half to acquire absolute power after
becoming chancellor. One would like to be able to record that -- as Hitler
built concentration camps, set in train the highly visible and ferocious
persecution of Jews, and created a military force with the clear goal of
assaulting neighbouring countries -- Germans soured on their leader. The
reverse was true.
Hitler's rearmament put unemployed Germans back to work. He sailed from
triumph to triumph in foreign policy, swallowing Austria and Czechoslovakia
without war. On the eve of the Second World War, historians agree that
Hitler's popularity with the German people was immense, that he was the
most idolized leader in the world with his own people.
Germany's early victories in the Second World War convinced Hitler's
adoring public that he was a military as well as a political genius. It was
his inability to accept that he and Germany were subject to any limits that
brought him down. Invading the Soviet Union in June of 1941 and recklessly
declaring war on the United States four days after Pearl Harbor in December
of 1941 sealed his fate.
On Jan. 30, 1943, 10 years to the day after Hitler was sworn in as
chancellor, Hermann Goering, the Nazi air force chief, broadcast to the
German people a "funeral oration" for the doomed German Sixth Army at
Stalingrad. Twenty-seven months later, the Soviet army was in Berlin, the
Allies were closing in, and Hitler had shot himself in his bunker.
If Hitler's totalitarianism and his maniacal drive to remake the world in
his own image have a distinctly 20th-century feel about them, they also
remain a stark warning in our new century. A lifetime after he took power,
exclusionism, ethnic cleansing, genocide and the idolization of leaders who
seem to be able to solve problems through force are very much a part of our
world. And the weapons Hitler deployed were mere toys in comparison to the
weapons today's great states possess.
James Laxer is a professor of political science at York University.
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