HITLER'S RULE TO POWER AND TOMORROW'S GERMANY
Barbes, Harry Elmer
The Progressive's Bookshelf Hitler's Rise To Power And Tomorrow's Germany DER FUEHRER: Hitler's Rise to Power, by Kon-rad Heiden. Houghton Mifflin. $3. GERMANY AFTER HITLER, by Paul Hagen....
...After offering a veritable whirlwind of "evidence" that the Germans are not fit to live, and have never been fit to do so, we are astonished to find that he rejects extermination or even wholesale castration and ovariotomy...
...WHAT TO DO WITH GERMANY, by Louis Nizer...
...Since sedition charges and sedition trials are being thrown around lightly right now, it may not be illogical or unfair to hold that this sort of literature and the frantic blurbs in its behalf are virtually seditious in that they give aid and comfort to the enemy...
...The main and best part of the book is that which deals in rich details with the use of force, political duplicity, and conscienceless propaganda by the Nazis to overthrow the Republic ajid set up the Third (Nazi) Reich...
...But they seem to have gagged on Nizer...
...This volume is much more than a rehash of these...
...Indeed, even this appraisal probably qualifies me for the Understatement Department of the New Yorker...
...For I firmly believe that if 10 million Americans would read this book, there would be no World War III...
...Of course, it might be argued that Goebbels is not getting any comfort out of it after all—that the would-be blood-letters of the typewriter and nightclub squads in this country, battling valiantly from their beleaguered foxholes at the Stork Club or El Morocco, have so outdone the Nazis in verbal violence, billingsgate, and mendacity that the cltibfooted boy has been scared into a cold sweat...
...There is a good account of the Purge of 1934...
...The weakest aspect of the book arises from Heiden's fantastic underlying thesis that the Nazis used the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion, coming and going, backwards and forwards, as it were...
...3) the patriotic sentiments of the people and the urge for self-determination...
...Despite the defects of this book, honest students of Germany and Europe will hope that Mr...
...But Heiden goes on to contend that the Nazis took the bogus plot of the Jews to rule the world, substituted themselves for the Jews, and literally built up the Nazi policy, especially the Nazi foreign policy, on this foundation and pattern...
...Clifton Fadiman says of Louis Nizer's book, What To Do With Germany: "A calm, cool, completely documented, bullet-proof demonstration of the fact that unless the German nation (not merely the official Nazi gang) surrenders unconditionally, "we are inviting another war with Germany 20 years hence...
...This book will further confirm his status in this respect...
...Unfortunately, most of the Official and unofficial plans for postwar Germany are almost perfectly suited to smother any resurgence of liberalism in Germany...
...If they must die, or worse, anyway, they might better die in honor than in disgrace...
...2) the universal craving for personal and political liberty...
...Paul Hagen's book advances the thesis that the only hope of a civilized postwar Germany and of European peace lies in a Socialist Germany—a Germany run by a radical Democratic Labor Party, which will be neither Communist nor the quasi-bourgeois "Socialist" regime of the Weimar Republic...
...This is about as sane and constructive a book as one could expect from a sorely tried refugee...
...Nizer recommends is a program of psychological and physical intimidation, cultural humiliation, political suppression,, and economic exploitation which would produce a super-Hitler in another generation...
...Such writing aids the enemy by making them feel that they might as well fight to the bitter end...
...Heiden shows that almost the reverse was true, with von Bloomberg and von Reichenau "blindly" admiring Hitler and ready to execute any order he might give...
...Nizer brings us up sharply against a dizzying non sequitur in his plan for postwar Germany...
...Hagen lists four forces which he believes will establish a free Germany: (1) the vital energy of the German people which has been suppressed by the Nazis...
...In spreading before us the picture of the rise and triumph of Hitler and his henchmen, Heiden exposes to our gaze an almost incredible panorama of ruthless and clever political manipulation and of the control of mass opinion by a propaganda machine never matched down to that time...
...The non-Communist radicals are made of good stuff and, with wise aid from the United Nations, can regenerate and stabilize Germany...
...This forged Protocols myth doubtless gives Dr...
...Der Fuehrer is a little less objective than the first two of Heiden's books, and a bit more gossipy and anecdotal, but it is a substantial and informed book —somewhat as if it had been written, say, by Gustavus Myers in his best days and interpolated and embellished a bit by Walter Winchell...
...That is, he does not advocate the extermination of more than some half a million Nazi officers, soldiers, political leaders, and bureaucrats...
...the Nazis have enough sins to answer for but they had no plan of literal world dominion...
...Far-rar and Rinehart...
...He has already written two rather formidable books on this subject —a biography of Hitler and A History of National Socialism...
...To Hagen, only the German conservatives are biological villains...
...Reviewed by Harry Elmer Barnes KONRAD HEIDEN is commonly regarded as the foremost authority on Hitler and the Nazis...
...It is ominous to recall that even the Nazis were character assassins long before they were assassins of their political enemies...
...Perhaps such a book should not be objective at this time...
...Incidentally, Hagen exposes his lordship, Vansittart, as a flagrant falsifier of historical documents, which ought not to surprise anybody who is permitted to be out alone after dark...
...Nizer contends that the Germans have remained true to this ever since Caesar's time, and yet we find that it is the Prussian agricultural aristocracy—the Junkers—who are represented as both the fountain-head and backbone of German militarism...
...If they do not assassinate bodies as lightheartedly as Adolf and his boys, they have no more hesitation to assassinate characters...
...The prosecution might rest at this point, for such encomiums by Fadiman and Stout are enough to condemn any book on world affairs at the present writing...
...What they sought was dominion over Central and Southeastern Europe, and an understanding with England, to the effect that Britain would abandon her meddling and balance of power policy on the Continent in return for Hitler's valiant support of the British Empire, time without end...
...It is far more reasonable than most of the large crop of books on the prospects and proposed treatment of Germany after the war...
...In dealing with this, incidentally, Heiden devastat-ingly exposes the myth that Hitler has never been anything more than a helpless and frightened puppet of the German General Staff...
...Lamentably, these methods and techniques are not limited to totalitarian countries...
...126ff...
...It is worth while to proceed, however, since there are a number of favorable blurbs by worthy people, of whom it is most generous to think that they never read the book, but benignly believed they were doing a kindly act or rendering a patriotic service by plugging for it...
...Heiden will give us an equally full account of the growth of Nazism since 1934...
...but nothing is to be gained by claiming that it is...
...The White Russians who manhandled the forged Protocols after- the first World War were pikers by comparison...
...The first portion of the book—the historical and anthropological section—appears to the reviewer to be a combination of ignorance and psychosis...
...Ziff-Davis...
...Having doomed German liberalism by harsh terms in 1918 and thereafter, we will assure its rise and triumph this time by imposing terms tenfold more harsh...
...What Mr...
...Further suspicion is engendered by the fact that the book is not published by any of the well-known publishing houses, though most of them have shown great nasal insensibility and gastric fortitude in these days...
...The Nazis used the French-faked and Russian-circulated Protocols to inflame the Germans against the Jews...
...This may mean a million unnecessary American casualties...
...2.50...
...And Rex ("the Rip") Stout waxes even more lyrical: "I did not sleep last night...
...and I do not know how to go about persuading 10 million Americans to read it...
...While it covers much the same ground and uses some of the earlier material, there is a great deal which is new, both of political detail and personal interest...
...and (4) assistance from progressive international forces in the postwar world...
...Leaders in democracies are becoming adept in the cultivation of the higher arts of smearing, ingratitude, and duplicity...
...Someday, but not soon, we may hope for a complete and competent survey of Germany under National Socialism which will match the scholarship and measured judgment of George Kneller's study of Nazi education and Clifford Kirkpatrick's monograph on women under the Nazis...
...Goebbels many a hearty chuckle as proof of his thesis that the anti-Nazis have picked up Nazi methods...
...This faked Jewish plot to dominate the world was very truly and obviously used by the Nazis, and by a lot of other Germans—and by Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Americans—to stir up anti-Semitism...
...He has an elaborate plan for unseating and expelling the Nazis (pp...
...it would be the more kind to suspect that it is mainly the latter...
...Further, writings of this type comfort Joe Goebbels and his boys, since they prove to the hilt Goebbels' prediction that Nazi ideals would conquer the ostensible foes of the Nazis —that the Nazi spirit would be more powerful in defeat than in its prime...
...It is my measured opinion that there is nothing else in the way of would-be serious literature in print which, in the same space, contains more errors of fact ' and interpretation...
...After implying at length that the Germans are biological, hereditary, and racial degenerates and rogues, Mr...
...He departs from the Winkler-Vansittart-Nizer thesis that all Germans are congenital scoundrels...
...Take just one example: Caesar, who knew notoriously little about the Germans, is quoted as asserting that the Germans avoided agriculture lest it diminish "their warrior zeal...
...and now Heiden uses the same myth, in reverse, to inflame the enemies of the Nazis...
...It is easily the most important book on Hitler and the progress of the Nazis down through the Blood Purge of 1934...
...Those who do will have an exciting five hours, and when they finish they .will be the wisest and best informed among us...
...This is palpable nonsense...
Vol. 8 • March 1944 • No. 10
