MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
DURING the last week I have been reading with profit and pleasure Mr. Alan Bullock's biography of Adolf Hitler. Valuable as it will be as a text-book and a reference-book for the history of the period, its great merit is that, without any straining after dramatic effects, it leaves a sense of drama in the mind. The little man in the soiled and ill-fitting aquascutum becomes the ruler of Europe, the Sieg Hells pulsate gratingly as a steam-saw in vast auditoriums, potentates and premiers are dragged as captives to Obersalz- burg, and in the palaces of fallen dynasties the Austrian wastrel dictates the destinies of half the world. Yet in all the splen- dour of his triumph, in all his harsh gloating over the subjuga- tion of his enemies, he remains astonishingly insignificant and inappropriate. The tragedy follows the classic form; his egomania degenerates into hubris; the jealousy of Olympus is aroused; and in the last act the Furies flit and gibber like vampires among, the smoking ruins. Yet as we ponder upon the desis and lusis of this frightful tragedy we are left, not with the purifying effects of pity and terror, but with a sad sense that here was no heroic figure defying the Fates, no symbol of magnificent madness or error, but someone small and barren, generating superhuman force by the very inten- sity of his envy and rancour. How came it that so empty a character can have captured the devotion of a great people ? That is the problem that will remain so long as the Hitler myth survives. It is not sufficient, to my mind, to explain it by the contention that Hitler was able to reflect and exaggerate the underlying emotions of humiliation and vengeance that afflicted the Germans after their defeat in the First War. Nor is it wholly satisfactory to trace the calculating ways that enabled Hitler, without departing from the strict letter of legality, to treat the constitution as an artichoke, stripping the German people leaf by leaf of all protection against his tyranny, until there was nothing left but the choke of his own daemonic force. After all, the Germans are neither weak nor stupid. How did he succeed in binding the thoughts of all those millions ? * * * * When I was working in Berlin in 1929 I received one day a report from Munich to the effect that the Hitler movement had not, as some contended, been finally discredited by the fiasco of November 9th, 1923, but that every day he was gaining more adherents and might soon become a real menace to the stability of the Weimar Republic. Disturbed by this information, I consulted a German friend of mine whom I had known for many years. He was a diplomatist of wide experi- ence and knowledge, who in the last years of the Empire had held the post of Foreign Secretary for some short and danger- ous months. He laughed at my perplexity, and to this day I can remember the words he used. " However well," he said, " we diplomatists may think we know a foreign country, there is always something that eludes our analysis. It is quite impos- sible that Adolf Hitler could ever achieve eminence in this country, and for three reasons. First, his appearance and accent are ridiculous, and the Germans are incapable of res- pecting a Bohemian buffoon. Secondly, he showed cowardice on the Odeonplatz at the time of the Ludendorff Putsch, and no German respects a coward. And thirdly, he is despised and suspected by the Army, and no Austrian adventurer can ever hope to achieve power in this country with the Officer Corps solid against him. No, my dear young friend, believe me, you can dismiss this Hitler from your calculations." * * * 4 I was not, I am glad to recall, fully convinced by these assurances. I went to visit the Papal Nuncio, Cardinal Pacelli, who had lived long in Bavaria and whose understanding of the German character was sympathetic and acute. " It is not given us," he said, " to foretell the future. But I see danger there; great danger; perhaps a terrible danger." Already, before I left Berlin at the end of that year, I had watched small groups of brown-shirted lads marching through the streets singing their wild song; already the dread microbe had begun to spread its infection. It is true that the German body politic was at that date not in a fit state to resist any virus. Defeat, hunger, revolution and inflation had deprived the Germans of their self-assurance; they were suffering from that neurotic uncer- tainty to which they are congenitally addicted, and which tempts them to accept uncritically the categorical imperatives of a compelling leader. The Germans in the period from 1929 to 1933 were, as Mr. Stephen Spender remarked in a recent lecture delivered to the Anglo-German Association in London, a convalescent generation who had not been accorded the time. to be healed." The wounds inflicted on them by inflation proved even more septic than those delivered by the Treaty of Versailles. Whole families had seen themselves falling from the level of respectable bourgeoisie down to the uncertain level of the proletariat; their children were hungry, ill-clothed, slinking like pariahs in the streets in search of food or pleasure. It is not surprising that the slump of the early 'thirties should have created hurricane panic in the land and that the shrieks and lamentations of the Munich revivalist should, while inflaming their self-pity and apprehensions, have at the same time aroused an almost desperate hope.
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It is not true, however, to contend that the German people themselves chose Hitler as their master and that they must therefore bear responsibility for his crimes. Never, so -long as a free vote existed, did a majority of the German electorate vote in favour of the Nazis. When they awoke to the fact that by a series of subtle manoeuvres Hitler had gathered all the strings of power into his hands, it was too late to organise any constitutional resistance; they were bound and gagged. Then followed his astonishing series of diplomatic and military triumphs; unemployment was solved, a renewed inflation averted, the shame of Versailles obliterated, and their armies marched victorious from the Channel to the Caucasus. Yet even then, even amid the clamour of jubilation, there were still some enlightened Germans who foresaw the coming disaster and sought, at the risk of torture and death, to rescue their country from the maniac who held it in chains. Can any of us be positive that, when experiencing this tremendous triumph, we also would not have been deafened by the surrounding acclaim ? Can we be certain that, when confronted by the magnetic potency of Hitler's personality, when listening to his prophetic ecstasies, when exposed to the typhoon of his demented rage, we also would have preserved an unflinching independence or retained our conviction that he was wrong ? It was so easy to surrender to the prevailing mood and to take refuge in the belief that here was in fact the prophet sent by Providence to lead his suffering but chosen people to the promised land. In the noon of splendour, Hitler's insignifi- cance, his seeming emptiness and vulgarity, actually confirmed the miracle. How, were it not for some magic gift orintuition, could so ordinary a man have accomplished such extraordinary things ? Is it so strange that people should have lost their judgement and have accepted the myth of the Magician ?
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The whole problem seems to me to be one, not of the Ger- man temperament only, but of human nature in general. Even those who believe that their thoughts and feelings are guided by reason may, when faced with fantastic ordeals, lose the power of self-criticism and surrender themselves to emotional gusts of glory, fear, suspicion and credulity. How many of us can aver in honesty that during the dark days of 1940 we lost nothing of our accustomed equanimity ? We British were granted a leader who, in the midst of defeat, represented and enhanced our moral values: the Germans were cursed with a leader who gave them unimagined victory, but who was barren of all sense of evil.
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