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9 The Leader-State
Adolf Hitler came to power by legal means, appointed chancellor by President
Paul von Hindenburg on January 30, 1933, according to the constitution of the
Weimar Republic. Thereafter, however, he proceeded to dismantle the legal
structure of the Weimar system and replace it with an inflexible dictatorship that
revolved around his person. Quickly reacting to the popular confusion caused
by the suspicious Reichstag fire, Hitler issued a decree on February 28 that suspended all guarantees of civil and individual freedom. In March, the Reichstag
adopted the Enabling Act, which vested all legislative powers in his hands. Then
Hitler proceeded to destroy the autonomy of the federal states, dissolve the trade
unions, outlaw other political parties, and end freedom of the press. By the time
he eliminated party rivals in a blood purge on June 30 1934, the consolidation
of power was complete. Meanwhile, much of Germany's public and institutional
life fell under Nazi Party control in a process known as the Gleichschaltung, or
coordination. The Third Reich was organized as a leader~state, in which Hider
the Fiihrer (leader) embodied and expressed the real will of the German people,
commanded the supreme loyalty of the nation, and had unlimited authority.
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Ernst Rudolf Huber
"THE AUTHORITY OF THE FUHRER IS
ALL-INCLUSIVE AND UNLIMITED"
In Verfassungsrecht des grossdeutschen Reiches (Constitutional Law of the Greater
German Reich) (1939), legal scholar Ernst Rudolf Huber (1903-1990) offered a
classic explication of the basic principles of National Socialism. The following
excerpts from that work describe the nature of Hitler's political authority.
The FUhrer-Reich of rhe [German] people is
founded on the recognition that the true will of
the people cannot be disclosed through parliamentary votes and plebiscites but that the will
of the people in its pure and uncorrupted form
can only be expressed through the FUhrer. Thus a
distinction must be drawn between the supposed
will of the people in a parliamentary democracy,
which merely reflects the conflict of the various
social interests, and the true will of the people in
the Fuhrer-state, in which the collective will of
the real political unit is manifested ....
It would be impossible for a law to be introduced and acted upon in the Reichstag which
had not originated with the Fuhrer or, at least,
received his approval. The procedure is similar
to that of the plebiscite: The lawgiving power
does not rest in the Reichstag; it merely proclaims through its decision its agreement with
the will of the Fuhrer, who is the lawgiver of
the German people.
The FUhrer unites in himself all the sovereign
authority of the Reich; all public authority in
the state as well as in the movement is derived
from the authority of the FUhrer. We must speak
not of the state's authority but of the Fuhrer's
authority if we wish to designate the character of the political authority within the Reich
correctly. The state does not hold political
authority as an impersonal unit but receives it
352
Part Three Western Civilization in Crisis
from [he Flihrer as the executor of the national
will. The authority of the Fuhrer is complete
and all-embracing; it unites in itself all the
means of political direction; it extends into all
fields of national life; it embraces the entire
people, which is bound to the Fuhrer in loyalty
and obedience. The authority of the Fuhrer is
not limited by checks and controls, by special
autonomous bodies or individual rights, but
it is free and independent, all-inclusive and
unlimited. It is not, however, self-seeking
or arbitrary and its ties are within itself. It is
derived from the people; that is, it is entrusted to
the Flihrer by the people. It exists for the people
and has its justification in the people; it is free
of all outward ties because it is in its innermost
nature firmly bound up with the fate, the welfare,
the mission, and the honor of the people.
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REVIEW QUESTION
er
1. Point our several ways that Ernst Rudolf Huber's views represent a rejection of the
Western liberal-democratic tradition.
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10 The Nazification of Culture and Society
th,
The Nazis aspired to mOre than political power; they also wanted to have the
German people view the world in accordance with National Socialist ideology.
Toward this end, the Nazis strictly regulated cultural life. Believing that the struggle of racial forces occupied the center of world history, Nazi ideologists tried to
strengthen the racial consciousness of the German people. Numerous courses in
"race science" introduced in schools and universities emphasized the superiority of
the Nordic soul as well as the worthlessness of Jews and their threat to the nation.
Jakob Graf
HEREDITY AND RACIAL
BIOLOGY FOR STUDENTS
The following assignments from a textbook entitled Heredz'ty and Racial Biology
for Students (1935) show how young people were indoctrinated with racist
teachings.
HOW WE CAN LEARN TO
RECOGNIZE A PERSON'S RACE
Assignments
1. Summarize the spiritual characteristics of
the individual races.
2. Collect from stories, essays, and poems
examples of ethnological illustrations. Underline
those terms which describe the type and mode
of the expression of the souL
3. What are the expressions, gestures, and
movements which allow us to make conclusions
as to the attitude of the racial soul?
4. Determine also the physical features which
go hand in hand with the specific racial soul
characteristics of the individual figures.
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innermost
:he welfare,
>ple.
5. Try to discover the intrinsic nature of the
racial soul through the characters in stories and
poetical works in terms of their inner attitude.
Apply this mode of observation to persons in
your own environment.
6. Collect propaganda posters and caricatures
for your race book and arrange them according
to a racial scheme. What image of beauty is
emphasized by the artist (a) in posters publicizing sports and travel? (b) in publicity for
cosmetics? How are hunters, mountain climbers, and shepherds drawn?
7. Collect from illustrated magazines, newspapers, etc., pictures of great scholars, statesmen,
artists, and others who distinguish themselves
by their special accomplishments (for example,
in economic life, politics, sports). Determine
the preponderant race and admixture, according
353
to physical characteristics. Repeat this exercise
with the picmres of great men of all nations and
nmes.
8. When viewing monuments, busts, etc,
be sure to pay attention to the race of the
person portrayed with respect to figure, bearing, and physical characteris6cs. Try to harmonize these determinations with the features of
the racial soul.
9. Observe people whose special racial features
have drawn your attention, also with respect to
their bearing when moving or when speaking.
Observe their expressions and gestures.
10. Observe the Jew: his way of walking,
his bearing, gestures, and movements when
talking.
11. What strikes you abouc the way a Jew
talks and sings?
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Louis P. Lochner
BOOK BURNING
In
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The anti-intellectualism of the Nazis was demonstrated on May 10, 1933, when
the principal German student body organized students for a book-burning
festival. In un.iversity towns, students consigned to the flames books that were
considered a threat to the Germanic spirit, many of them written by prominent
Jewish authors. Louis P. Lochner (1887-1975), head of the Associated Press
Bureau in Berlin, provided an eyewitness account of the scene in the German
capital in The Goebbels Diaries 1942-43 (1948).
The whole civilized world was shocked when
on the evening of May 10, 1933, the books of
ology
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ures.
authors displeasing to the Nazis, including even
those of our own Helen Keller, were solemnly
burned on the immense Franz Joseph Platz
between the University of Berlin and the State
Opera on Unter den Linden. I was a witness to
the scene.
All afternoon Nazi raiding parties had gone
into public and private libraries, throwing onto
the streets such books as Dr. UosephJ Goebbels
[Nazi Progaganda Nfinister} in his supreme wisdom had decided were unfit for Nazi Germany.
From the streets Nazi columns of beerhall
figh ters had picked up these discarded volumes
and taken them to the square above referred to.
Here the heap grew higher and higher, and
every few minutes another howling mob arrived,
adding more books to the impressive pyre.
Then, as night fell, students from the university, mobilized by the little doctor, performed
veritable Indian dances and incantations as the
flames began to soar skyward.
When the orgy was at its height, a cavalcade
of cars drove into sight. It was the Propaganda
Minister himself, accompanied by his bodyguard and a number of fellow torch bearers of
the new Nazi Kultur.
3 S4
Part Three Western Civilization in CriJis
"Fellow students, German men and women!"
he said as he stepped before a microphone
for all Germany to hear him. "The age of
extreme Jewish intellecrualism has now ended,
and the success of the German revolution has
again given the right of way to the German
spirit
"You are doing the right thing in committing
the evil spirit of the past to the flames at this
late hour of the night. It is a strong, great, and
symbolic act-an act that is to bear witness
before all the world to the fact that the spiritual
foundation of the November Republic has
disappeared. From the ashes there will rise the
phoenix of the spirit." .
"The past is lying in flames. The future will
rise from the flames within our own hearts.
Brightened by these flames our vow shall be:
The Reich and the Nation and our Fuehrer
Adolf Hitler: Heil l Heil! Hei!!"
The few foreign correspondents who had
taken the trouble to view this "symbolic act"
were stunned. What had happened to the "Land
of Thinkers and Poets?" they wondered.
Joseph Roth
"THE AUTO-DA-FE OF THE MIND"
Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was born to Jewish parents in the Austro~Hungarian
Empire. He became a distinguished journalist in Berlin during the short~lived
Weimar Republic. Until 1933, when the rise of the Nazis forced him into
exile, he worked uninterruptedly for major newspapers and wrote many novels,
of which The Radetzky March, set in the Austro~Hungarian Empire, is the best
known. Already in exile in Paris when the book burnings in Germany took place,
Roth reflected on what the burning of those books meant for German cultural
life. He described German~Jewish writers as having "fallen on the intellect's field
of honor. All of them, in the eyes of the German murderer and arsonist, share
a common farnt: their Jewish blood and their European intellect." The book burning, he declared, threatened European civilization. The following excerpts are
from an essay he wrote immediately after the Nazi outrage. The term auto-da~fe
in its title refers to the public burning of heretics in Spain during the Spanish
Inquisition. Many of the heretics were forcibly converted Jews whom the
Inquisition believed to be secretly practicing Judaism.
VelY few observers anywhere in the world seem
to have understood what the Third Reich's
burning of books, the expulsion of Jewish writers, and all its other crazy assaults on the intel~
lect actually mean. The technical apotheosis of
the barbarians, the terrible march of the mecha~
nized orangutans, armed with hand grenades,
poison gas, ammonia, and nitroglycerine, with
gas masks and airplanes, the return of the spiritual (if not the actual) descendants of the
Cimbri and Teutonil~all this means far more
than the threatened and terrorized world seems
to realize: It must be understood. Let me say it
loud and clear: The European mind is capitulating. It is capitulating out of weakness, out of
sloth, out of apathy, out of lack of imagination
(it will be the task of some future generation
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Europe in the second century B.C.
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to establish the reasons for this disgraceful
capitulation).
N ow, as the smoke of our burned books
rises into [he sky, we German writers of Jewish
descent must acknowledge above all that we
have been defeated. let us, who were fighting
on the front line, under the banner of the European mind, let us fulfill the noblest duty of the
defeated warrior: let us concede our defeat.
Yes, we have been beaten.
. We are proud of
our defeat. We stood in the front row of the defenders of Europe, and we were the first to be
defeated. Our comrades "of Aryan descent" can
still hope to be pardoned (always assuming that
they will be prepared to make some concession
to the language of Goebbels and Goring). There
is even a chance that the vandals of the Third
Reich will try to exploit such "Aryan" writers
of great renown as Thomas Mann and Gerhart
Hauptmann (currently persecuted) for a while,
in order to trick mankind into believing that
National Socialism has some respect for the
human spirit. But we writers of Jewish descent
are, thank God, safe from any temptation to take
the side of the barbarians in any way. \'Ve are the
only representatives of Europe who are debarred
from returning to Germany. Even if there were
in our ranks a traitor, who, from personal ambition, stupidity, and blindness, wanted to conclude a shameful peace with the destroyers of
Europe-he couldn't do it! That "Asiatic" and
"Oriental" blood which the current wielders
of power in the German Reich hold against us
will quite certainl y not permit us to desert from
the noble ranks of the European army. God him
self-and we are proud of the fact-will not
allow us to betray Europe, Christendom, and
Judaism. God is with the vanquished, not with
the victors! At a time when His Holiness, the
infallible Pope of Christendom, is concluding a
peace agreement, a Concordat, with the enemies
of Christ, when the Protestants are establishing
a "German church" and censoring the Bible,
we descendants of the old Jews, the forefathers
of European culture, are the only legitimate
German representatives of that culture. Thanks
to inscrutable divine wisdom, we are physically
355
incapable of betraying it to the heathen civilization of poison gases, to the ammonia-breathing
Germanic war god.
It would be true to say that, from about 1900,
German cultural life was largely defined, if not
dominated by this "top class" of German Jews.
To be fair, what they did was not wholly bad.
Even their errors were sometimes salutary. In the
whole of that large kingdom w.ith a population
of sixty million, among all those industrialists,
there was-individual exceptions aside-no
class that was actively interested in art and
intellect. As far as the Pruss ian Junkers 2 are
concerned, the civilized world will know that
they were just about able to read and write. One
of their representatives, President Hindenburg,3
openly admitted that he had never read a book
in his life. And, incidentally, it was this icon,
ancient from early youth, that the workers,
Social Democrats, journalists, artists, and Jews
worshipped during the war, and that the
German people (workers, Jews, journalists, artists, Social Democrats, and the rest of them)
then reelected president. Is a people that elects
as its president an icon that has never read a
book all that far away from burning books
itself? And are the Jewish writers, scholars, and
philosophers who voted for Hindenburg really
entitled to complain about the bonfire in which
our thoughts are consumed?
As for the industrialists-their minds were
taken up by iron and steel, by guns and "Big
Berthas"; they were smelting the modern
version of "Siegfried's sword." The big bus.inesspeople were producing the cheap junk
labeled "Made in Germany" with which they
flooded an unhappy world. Only the GermanJews
(doctors, lawyers, tradesmen, department store owners,
artisans, or manufacturers) were interested in books}
theater, museums, music. Even if they were occasionally guilty of bad taste, it remains a fact that
2Prussian Junicers were aristocratic landowners who provided the army's leadership.
3President Hindenburg (1847-1934) was a general in
World War I aod presidenr of the Weimar Republic from
192 5 until his death.
356
Part Three Western Civilization in Crisis
there was no one else In the whole of Germany
capable of pointing out and correcting their
errors. The magazines and newspapers were
edited by Jews, managed by Jews, tead by
Jews! A swarm of intellectual Jewish critics and
reviewers discovered and promoted numerous
"pure Aryan" poets, writers, and actors! Does
there exist--now that theater and literature have
been "cleansed"-a single outstanding actor or
writer who was not recognized and praised at a
time when reviewing and public opinion were
in the hands of Jews' I challenge the Thitd
Reich to come up with a single example of a
gifted "pure Aryan" poet, actor, or musician who
was kept down by the Jews and emanc.ipated by
Herr Goebbels! It's only the feeblest dilettantes
who flourish in the swastika's shadow, in the
bloody glow cast by the ash heaps in which we
are consumed.
The threatened and terrorized world must understand that the arrival on the scene of Corporal
Hider does not mark the beginning of any new
chapter in the history of ant.i-Semitism: Far from
itl. What the arsonists tell us is true, though not
in the way they intended: This Third Reich is
only the beginning of the end! By destroying
Jews they are persecuting Christ. For [he first
time the Jews are not being murdered for crucifying Christ but for having produced him from
their midst. If the books of Jewish or supposed
Jewish authors are burned, what is really set
fire to is the Book of Books: the Bible. If Jewish
judges and attorneys are expelled or locked up, it
represents a symbolic assault on law and justice.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. What was Jakob Graf's purpose in teaching students how to recognize a person's
race?
2. Why do you think the Nazis made the burning of books a public event? Why does
book burning have such potent symbolism?
3. What lessons did Roth draw from the book burning?
11 Persecution of the Jews
The Nazis deprived Jews of their German citizenship and instituted many antiJewish measures designed to make them outcasts. Thousands of Jewish doctors,
lawyers, musicians, artists, and professors were barred from practicing their
professions, and Jewish members of the civil service were dismissed. A series of
laws tightened the screws of humiliation and persecution. Marriages 01' sexual
encounters between Germans and Jews were forbidden. Universities, schools,
restaurants, pharmacies, hospitals, theaters, museums, and athletic fields were
gradually closed to Jews.
In November 1938, using as a pretext the assassination of a German official
in Paris by a seventeen-year-old Jewish youth whose family had been mistreated
by the Nazis, the Nazis organized an extensive pogrom. Nazi gangs murdered
scores of Jews and burned and looted thousands of Jewish businesses homes,
and synagogues all over Germany-an event that became known as Night of the
Broken Glass (Kristallnacht). Thirty thousand Jews were thrown into concentration camps. The Reich then imposed on the Jewish community a fine of
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