Periodically over the last few months
I've been dipping into a most fascinating historical exploration. I
am in no hurry to finish it, which is why I am only on page 231 of
William Shirer's massive 1200+ page Rise and Fall of the Third
Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. Despite my slowness, it is an
intriguing read.
Here I learned of the almost comic
“Beer Hall Putsch” where a young and fiery Hitler burst onto the
view of Germany brandishing a pistol at a large beer hall and calling
for a revolution in Germany. Bluffing that three government leaders
he held hostage were in support of his putsch, Hitler garnered enough
public support to throw the city of Munich into confusion. The next
morning Hitler—still brandishing his pistol—marched through the
streets of Munich with three thousand followers at his back.
But this revolution of November 1923
fell into the cracks of the pavement after a firefight with the
police. Hitler fled as the rest of his Nazi cohorts scattered across
the countryside and across Europe to avoid arrest. Most of them,
including Hitler, were unable to avoid arrest, but Hitler turned even
this dismal turn of events into a speaking platform for his movement.
And after nine months in prison he was back on the street, feverishly
polishing off the tarnish from his image.
While Hitler gave up his revolutionary
aspirations after his arrest and imprisonment, his rise to absolute
power was not entirely legal, and certainly not peaceful, although it
was done with the consent of the German people. Hitler realized he
must overthrow the German Republic from within so he began winning
over the voting populace to the Nazi party. It was a long and
seemingly impossible road for the once ridiculed Austrian Vagabond;
yet ultimately, the blame for Hitler's rise to power rests with the
German people. Even a year and a half after his appointment as
Chancellor, when Hitler illegally combined the office of Chancellor
and President into one Fuehrer, the German people were given one last
chance to remove someone whose words and actions had clearly been
leading the nation towards totalitarianism. William Shirer writes of
Hitler's final grab for power:
“That the 'law' was illegal also made little difference in a Germany where the former Austrian corporal had now become the law itself. That it was illegal was obvious... But what mattered the law now? ...And the German people? On August 19 [1934], some 95 per cent of those who had registered went to the polls, and 90 per cent, more than thirty-eight million of them, voted approval of Hitlers usurpation of complete power” (229-230).
Shirer goes on in astonishment to note:
“the overwhelming majority of Germans did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of their culture had been destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work had become regimented to a degree never before experienced even by a people accustomed for generations to a great deal of regimentation... a newly arrived observer was somewhat surprised to see that the people of this country did not seem to feel that they were being cowed and held down by an unscrupulous and brutal dictatorship. On the contrary, they supported it with genuine enthusiasm. Somehow it imbued them with a new hope and a new confidence and an astonishing faith in the future of their country” (231).
And what were the origins of this new
“hope” and “faith in the future?” Much of it came from the
writings of a neurotic Englishman named Houston Chamberlain, also
known as “the father of Nazism.” Chamberlain, made no secret that
he believed his once influential writings and thoughts were inspired
from outside of himself by demons. Chamberlain looked on his writings
with admiration, sometimes “unable to recognize them as his own
work, because they surpassed his expectations” (105). Shirer
writes:
“Once, in 1896, when he was returning from Italy, the presence of a demon became so forceful that he got off the train at Gardone, shut himself up in a hotel room for eight days and, abandoning some work on music that he had contemplated, wrote feverishly on a biological thesis until he had the germ of the theme that would dominate all of his later works: race and history” (105).
Needless to say, Chamberlain's views about the Aryans were not
just racist, but also “shoddy” and preposterous (105-107);
nevertheless, the early Nazi press heralded his writings as the
“gospel of the Nazi movement” (109).
Seeing the outcome of such a
hate-filled and racist “gospel” at the foundation of a government
should make us thankful that the “gospel” at the foundation of
the American government was, believe it or not, the Gospel; the good
news of Jesus coming to reconcile man with God, and man with man.
(For example, the most cited author of the American Founders was the
apostle Paul.) As can be seen, an era so dark in the world's history,
as the Nazi era was, did not come about through benign neighborly
love. Its roots were demonic and its trunk a rejection of Jesus'
command to “love your neighbor as yourself.”
William
L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History
of Nazi Germany. New York, Simon and Schuster. 1960
