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Chapter 25: The Great Depression and the Rise of Totalitarianism
53. Thu, Mar 20, 2014
Hitler and Mussolini are so reviled today that it's hard to see how anyone could have ever liked them. Understanding how they came to power, and how they came to be not just tolerated but adored, is absolutely crucial — and a lot of it has to do with fear. Generalized fear, to some extent, of a world gone profoundly strange... but also fear of a third dictator, and what he represented: Stalin.
The book's occasional sidetracks into physical description sometimes seem pointless. Not so here. Mussolini projected an image of strength, and so he was considered strong. Hitler never quite pulled that off — a smallish man, faintly ridiculous, so easily parodied that Charlie Chaplin hardly had to change his act. But Hitler, as the book noted, had his voice. Many eyewitnesses say that he was quite awkward and nervous during ordinary life and even into the beginnings of a speech — but at some point, something would click and he would become electrifying. People believed in both Hitler and Mussolini for the confidence they could project. Interestingly Roosevelt in the US was the same way — but where Roosevelt won people over with smiles and warm words, Hitler and Mussolini usually brought people over out of immense personal charisma and out of fear. Fear of what they would do to you if you didn't go along, but also fear of what would happen to you if they weren't there to protect you.
A joke illustrates how bad Germany's economic woes were in the Great Depression: a woman forgets a basketful of money on a park bench. When she comes back for it, the money's still there, but someone has stolen the basket. Germans were getting increasingly desperate, and desperate people turn to increasingly radical solutions. The chart on page 683 is illuminating. The National Socialists (the Nazis, of course) were the biggest vote-getters in 1932; the second-biggest were the Socialists, with the Communists not far behind. Eying the radical changes in the Soviet Union rather askance, many Germans turned out for the Nazis a few months later, seeing Hitler's party as the only one that stood a chance of stopping communists from coming and making off with all their property.
And then there's this: a song called "Tomorrow Belongs to Me. While a dramatization decades after the fact from a movie called "Cabaret," the scene has a lot of truth to it. There are songs that are still illegal to sing in Germany because the Nazis used them in exactly this way. The power of being a part of a group, a group utterly confident of its strength and equally certain of looming disaster unless We All Stick Together, is tremendous.
Also note the words Michael York's character says at the end: "You still think you can control them?" There's considerable evidence that many powerful men in Germany felt that they could use the Nazis as a weapon against communism without losing power themselves. They were wrong. But they were not alone: people in France, Britain, and the US all felt that communism was a far greater threat than any danger Hitler posed. Hitler was a champion of traditionalism, in a way — while he persecuted many religions, some Christians among them, he also outlawed the "dangerously subversive" jazz and imposed a strict moral regimen on previously-decadent Berlin. He might go to extremes, some thought — but at least he was standing up for decency and the sanctity of property. At least he was a bulwark against Stalin.
A word on Stalin: strikingly unlike Hitler and Mussolini, Stalin had virtually no charisma to speak of. He projected power, too — "Stalin" means "Steel," roughly — but mostly people listened to him because they had to. Stalin's power base was totally unlike the Black Shirts and Brown Shirts of the other dictators; his original source of strength lay in the bureaucracy, and in manipulation of the Communist Party. (He probably did not say "Those who vote decide nothing, those who count the votes decide everything" — but he without question would have agreed, and without question acted accordingly.) His chief rival Trotsky, and a succession of other foes, increasingly found themselves without power simply because the bureaucracy only obeyed Stalin. The phrase "the banality of evil" was invented mostly to describe functionaries under Hitler, but Stalin was a banal if ruthless functionary who rose to the top one piece of paper at a time, and then crushed everyone who moved. Stalin almost certainly killed more people under his authority than Hitler did, and the Gulag Archipelago of prison camps was a more crude and less focused but ultimately more bloody Holocaust.
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