Was Hitler a Riddle?
2009; Wiley; Volume: 9; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1540-5923.2008.01256.x
ISSN1540-5923
Autores Tópico(s)Academic Freedom and Politics
ResumoOn 27 September 1937, just before leaving his post in Berlin for Vienna, the highly regarded journalist William L. Shirer noted with alarm that “there is little understanding of the Third Reich, what it is, what it is up to, where it is going either at home or elsewhere abroad.” Shirer granted that the situation in Germany was “complex” and “confusing,” but in his view the thrust of Hitler's policies could not be doubted. In Mein Kampf, published in two parts in 1925 and 1926, Hitler had “vowed … to seek world domination,” but not many people in Germany or abroad at all familiar with his ideas took him at his word. Part of the problem was that four years after the Nazi assumption of power, there was still “no decent translation” of the work in English or French, which Shirer attributed to Hitler's refusal to permit an accurate rendering of the text because “it would shock many in the West.” Even Neville Chamberlain, a leading figure in the British government who became Prime Minister in May 1937, had not read Mein Kampf and seemed unaware of Hitler's declaration that “Germany will either be a world power, or there will be no Germany.” As a result, Chamberlain never understood that Hitler was moved as much by emotion as by rational calculation. Such ignorance of the German leader's intentions was dangerous, Shirer warned, because the country “is stronger than her enemies realize.”1 Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, an eminent historian, advanced a similar argument in 1948 in seeking to account for the failed foreign policies of Great Britain and France in the 1930s. In his scathing criticism of the statesmen concerned for having appeased Hitler, Wheeler-Bennett contended that from 1933 to 1939, “all schools of thought in Britain and France” demonstrated a “fundamental ignorance of the German character and a complete inability to comprehend the lengths of evil, dishonesty and deception to which the Nazi mentality could extend. … The capacity of the Germans for sheep-like conformity to leadership was not appreciated, nor the fact realized that this new political phenomenon combined all the guile of the old pre-war duplicity of Prussian diplomacy with a new and ruthless deceit of unplumbed depths.”2 Shirer's and Wheeler-Bennett's anger at the policymakers of the 1930s and their frustration with the political elite's poor grasp of world affairs are understandable. They wrote at a time when the struggle against Nazism was either unresolved or still fresh in the public consciousness. Moreover, many of the reports by diplomats who had served in Germany were still classified: the information on the situation in Germany that they had passed on to political leaders was not well known in the 1930s. Now that those reports are available, they reveal that the government in London was well served by their representatives in Germany. Well-educated and often fluent in German, British diplomats were also diligent; they traveled throughout the country, retained contact with individuals who had been prominent in various political parties, talked frequently with ordinary citizens, and at times even discussed public affairs with fairly senior members of the Nazi Party. In the five-year period from 1928 to 1933, the British embassy in Berlin sent the Foreign Office in London no fewer than 400 reports and telegrams, as well as annual summaries of the staff's findings. The summary for 1932 was especially detailed, running to 718 paragraphs.3 The ambassador during those five years also maintained a lively correspondence with officials and friends in Great Britain, in which he frequently touched on political developments in Germany. The embassy continued to be as productive after 1933, and, taken as a whole, the reports and missives provided the political leadership at 10 Downing Street with information and assessments that amounted to an accurate, comprehensive, and perceptive picture of the state of affairs in Germany. Senior officials in the British government had no reason to claim, as they often did, that Hitler was a “riddle” who thwarted their ability to respond to the Nazis’ challenges to the world order created in the 1920s, which undermined their efforts to prevent another large-scale conflagration.4 These officials as well as large segments of the political class were obviously confused by Hitler's penchant for contradictory pronouncements. He often vowed to undermine the Treaty of Versailles, whose severe restrictions prevented Germany from regaining her pre-1914 status as a world power, but he just as frequently declared his opposition to “violence of any kind.” All problems between nations, he repeatedly said, should be “solved in a reasonable and peaceful manner.”5 There was another reason for the widespread misunderstanding of Hitler and Nazism. Many among the politically engaged viewed the Führer through ideological blinkers. Those on the left tended to dismiss him as a charlatan, a tool of the capitalists, who would be discarded with the collapse of capitalism, which they insisted was imminent. Those on the right tended to believe that Hitler could be controlled by the conservatives in his government, who would soon regain their political preeminence.6 Many conservatives also viewed the Nazis as an effective counterpoise to Communism. The group within the British political class that quickly understood the shallowness of these positions was the diplomatic corps serving in Germany. They realized that Hitler was a masterful, cunning, and dishonest propagandist and insisted that to understand the real thrust of Hitler's policies, one would have to do much more than examine his many pronouncements and the decrees he had issued during the first months of his tenure as Chancellor. Hitler must also be assessed as a leader: Was he trustworthy? Was he judicious? What was the relationship between his stated goals and his actual aims? In short, the British diplomats sought to assess Hitler's character. This essay focuses on their descriptions and assessments of Hitler's personal traits. After all, as early as 1933 he was undoubtedly the preeminent figure in the Nazi Party. True, some senior officials were known to differ with him on certain issues and were even rumored to have challenged his authority, but within a year and a half Hitler had clearly crushed his potential rivals. His subsequent foreign policy successes, such as the occupation of the Rhineland in 1935 and the annexation of Austria in 1938, further strengthened his personal hold on power. No major political initiatives could be undertaken in Germany without his approval, and much of the time he had suggested them. For statesmen who had to respond to his often unexpected moves in foreign affairs, a correct evaluation of his state of mind was essential. Unlike Stalin, Hitler was not a reclusive leader. On the contrary, he enjoyed meeting foreign diplomats and dignitaries, in part because he had confidence in his powers of persuasion, but also because he relished putting on a show for foreigners, whom he generally considered to be his intellectual inferiors. Whatever the reason, he frequently met with British dignitaries, and we have detailed reports on at least eleven such encounters. Several were with leading appeasers (Lord Halifax, Nevile Henderson, Lord Londonderry, Lord Lothian, and Lord Rothermere) and their reports will be touched upon only briefly since they were generally not very enlightening about Hitler's character. However, some distinctly unflattering comments about the Führer deserve to be mentioned briefly because they raise questions about the political insights of the appeasers. In fact, on occasion the comments by an appeaser unintentionally tended to buttress the judgments of opponents in Britain. By far the most perceptive reports on Hitler and on conditions generally in Germany were produced by Sir John Horace Rumbold (ambassador to Berlin from 1928 to 1933) and by Sir Eric Phipps (ambassador from 1933 to 1937). To them, Hitler was not a riddle at all. To understand him one needed only to read his speeches and Mein Kampf, evaluate his policies during his first weeks in office as Chancellor, and scrutinize his conduct at public meetings. He knew what he wanted to achieve and it was evident that he would be unscrupulous in pursuing those goals. The only uncertainty about his future conduct was his timing and the specific methods he would apply to any particular situation. The single most remarkable dispatch, written by Rumbold on 26 April 1933, only three months after Hitler became Chancellor, reads like an analytical assessment of the Nazi regime that one might expect from a mature, insightful historian after the collapse of the Nazi state, when the relevant archival sources were available. Rumbold's dispatch was recognized at the time as a masterpiece and within the Foreign Office came to be known as the “Mein Kampf despatch.” Ramsay McDonald, the Prime Minister, read it and circulated it to the Cabinet, which included Chamberlain, who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer. Somehow it reached Harold Laski, a political theorist and prominent member of the Labour Party, who was so impressed by it that he asked Rumbold for permission to send it to William E. Dodd, the new United States Ambassador to Berlin.7 In many ways, the tone and intellectual depth of Rumbold's dispatch were surprising. During his initial years as ambassador to Berlin he had ignored Hitler's movement altogether, and when he began to pay attention to it in 1930 he showed little understanding of Germany's dire political condition or the nature of Nazism. In 1931, he was certain that the country would not “fail eventually to master its difficulties.” In December 1932, a month before Hitler's appointment as Chancellor, Rumbold believed that Nazism was one of “the three great parties of the Left.”8 But by this time he did understand that many of the Nazi leaders were unscrupulous and dangerous men. In June 1932, he referred to Joseph Goebbels, one of the more repulsive leaders of the movement and the man in charge of Nazi propaganda, in the following words: “He may be classed as a vulgar, unscrupulous and irresponsible demagogue and his success is in direct relation to the ignorance and lack of critical faculty of his audience.”9 But by late April 1933, when he drafted his most famous dispatch, Rumbold's views of Nazism had changed dramatically. He had now read Mein Kampf very carefully (he knew German) and had concluded that its principles accurately reflected Hitler's policies and ultimate goals. Rumbold stressed Hitler's fanaticism, his commitment to militarism, his intention to expand into Russia and the Baltic states “by force of arms,” and his cleverness in lulling Germany's adversaries “into such a state of coma that they will allow themselves to be engaged one by one.” He urged Hitler's neighbors “to be vigilant” and warned that they were deluding themselves if they believed that they did not have to act quickly to rein in Germany. Rumbold ended his dispatch with a general comment about an especially dangerous aspect of Nazism that, in his view, explained Hitler's “prestige and popularity. … Someone has aptly said that nationalism is the illegitimate offspring of patriotism by inferiority complex. Germany has been suffering from such a complex for over a decade. Hitlerism has eradicated it, but only at the cost of burdening Europe with a new outbreak of nationalism.”10 No one familiar with Rumbold's social and political views would have expected him to be so deeply offended by the Nazis’ racism and persecution of the Jews, which he rightly came to regard as symptomatic of the villainy that characterized not only the domestic policies of the new regime but also its foreign policy. Like his father, also a member of the Foreign Service, Rumbold was not a person who took kindly to people different from those in his social circle. In 1904, when Horace was a young man of thirty-five, he wrote his father that he did not want to meet a friend of his stepbrother because “I hate Jews.” When he arrived in Berlin in 1928, he was “quite happy” except for one drawback. “The only fly in the ointment,” he wrote a friend, “is the number of Jews in the place. One cannot get away from them.”11 Although Berlin counted more Jews than any other German city, they still made up only 4 percent of the population. Rumbold also did not like blacks and once told the conductor of a train he was taking that he would not “share a compartment with a black gentleman.” He tipped the conductor “handsomely” to secure a “compartment to myself.” During his two years of service in Madrid (1907–08) he developed a dislike for Spaniards, who, he believed, were “vain, full of pride, untruthful, dirty and inclined to idleness.”12 But Rumbold's antisemitism was, by the standards of the 1930s, relatively benign: he looked down on Jews, he wanted to avoid all contact with them, but he did not favor their persecution. Indeed, two weeks before he wrote his appraisal of Nazism, he expressed revulsion at the Nazi government's assault, legal as well as physical, on the Jewish community, and stressed that the measures against the Jews were not “directed against the Hebrew faith” but were designed to achieve certain racial goals. For Hitler, the Jews were “parasites of alien race” and he considered it necessary to purify “German blood … from this contamination.”13 Rumbold predicted at this early stage of Nazi rule that the authorities would intensify the persecution of the Jews, “for it is certainly Hitler's intention to degrade and, if possible, expel the Jewish community from Germany ultimately.” Both the anti-Jewish policies and the establishment of concentration camps for opponents of Nazism amounted to “a new departure in civilised countries.”14 It is worth noting that condemnation of Nazi policies toward the Jews remained a constant theme in the dispatches drafted by lower-level British diplomats. In September 1935, for example, Sir Basil C. Newton, writing in Berlin, warned that the Nazi Party was “determined to make life so impossible for the Jews that they might be reduced literally to starvation,” a frightening but uncannily accurate prophecy.15 Rumbold also deserves credit for realizing early in 1933 that the Nazis’ racial doctrines stood at the core not only of their antisemitism but of their entire conception of politics, and especially their views on foreign policy. It was actually an “extremely simple” conception, essentially a crude restatement of the doctrines of Social Darwinism. Hitler “starts with the assertion that man is a fighting animal; therefore the nation is, he concludes, a fighting unit, being a community of fighters. Any living organism which ceases to fight for its existence is, he asserts, doomed to extinction. A country or a race which ceases to fight is equally doomed. The fighting capacity of a race depends on its purity. Hence the necessity of ridding it of foreign impurities. … Pacifism [especially widespread among Jews] is the deadliest sin, for pacifism means the surrender of the race in the fight for existence … .Only brute force can ensure the survival of the race … .The race must fight; a race that rests must rust and perish. The German race, had it been united in time, would now be master of the globe … .To restore the German nation again ‘it is only necessary to convince the people that the recovery of freedom by force of arms is a possibility.’”16 Rumbold's one meeting with Hitler, on 11 May 1933, lasted one hour, long enough to convince the ambassador that his evaluation of the new order in Germany was accurate. Both men were frank, but they nevertheless parted, in the ambassador's words, “on perfectly good terms.” Baron Konstantin von Neurath, the German Foreign Minister from 1933 to 1938, attended the meeting and, as was his custom in Hitler's presence, kept quiet or said very little. The Führer made several dubious claims and Rumbold duly noted them without comment, which he no doubt considered unnecessary since they were so far-fetched. Hitler insisted that the recent revolution in Germany that had brought him to power was unique because it had been effected with a “minimum of violence and bloodshed. He maintained that not even a pane of glass had been broken,” a blatant falsity since it was well known that before and after the Nazis joined the government a considerable amount of street violence had broken out in Berlin and many other localities. To drive home his point and to put the British ambassador on the defensive, Hitler declared that in 1921 there had been much more violence in Ireland. So far, Hitler had remained calm, but when Rumbold brought up the treatment of the Jews, the Führer, as was his wont whenever this subject was raised, worked himself “into a state of great excitement: ‘I will never agree,’ he shouted as if he were addressing an open-air meeting, ‘to the existence of two kinds of law for German nationals. There is an immense amount of unemployment in Germany, and I have, for instance, to turn away youths of pure German stock from the high schools. There are not enough posts for pure-bred Germans, and the Jews must suffer with the rest. If the Jews engineer a boycott from abroad, I will take care that this hits the Jews in Germany.’ These were remarks delivered with great ferocity.” In fact, Hitler was so agitated that Rumbold neglected to make a point he had carefully prepared ahead of the interview, that Hitler had introduced “two standards of treatment of German nationals, inasmuch as those of Jewish race were being discriminated against.”17 Rumbold dwelt on the Jewish question not only because he considered the persecution of the Jews deplorable, but also because many people refused to believe—as some do even today—that Hitler took racist doctrines seriously. They seemed then, as now, to be too outlandish. Moreover, Rumbold wanted to stress that the anti-Jewish policies were Hitler's personal responsibility, not that of “wilder men” in the party whom Hitler could not control. “Anybody who has had the opportunity,” the ambassador continued, “of listening to his remarks on the subject of Jews could not have failed, like myself, to realise that he is a fanatic on the subject.” So certain were “convinced Nazis about any of their principal tenets” that it was pointless to raise objections to them.18 It was this fanaticism, coupled with the Führer's “extraordinary obstinacy” and ruthlessness, that led Rumbold to write to Sir Clive Wigram on 28 June 1933: “Many of us here feel as if we were living in a lunatic asylum” and to warn the Foreign Office against the hope that Hitler or his entourage would “return to sanity.” The Nazi leadership, he insisted, would not waver in pursuing their goals, and if they proclaimed their commitment to international peace, they would do so only because they wished to “calm the fears of foreign leaders.” Rumbold warned his superiors in London that the rulers of Germany were “very cunning people,” whom it would be dangerous to underestimate.19 In a private letter of 30 June 1933, to Sir John Simon, then the Foreign Secretary, Rumbold sought to be “fair” to National Socialism by recognizing “the good points in the Hitler ideology”: the stress on comradeship and devotion to the state, the attempt to restore “the self-respect of the citizen and, through him, of the State itself.” The ambassador admired the Nazis’ stated intention to end class warfare and to “ennoble” labor. But all these positive goals, Rumbold added, were overshadowed by the Nazi leaders’ fanaticism and aggressive nationalism. Outside of Germany, only Hitler was seen as an extremist who might be slightly unhinged, but many of the men in his inner circle were “not normal people” either, and within the movement as a whole “the strain of hooliganism still survives.” The three most important people in the Nazi Party—Hitler, Hermann Göring, and Goebbels—were “notoriously pathological cases,” the first two because of “wounds and hardships” endured during the First World War, and the third because of “a physical defect and neglect in childhood. His club-foot is a constant source of bitterness to him, and his friends attribute his peculiarly venomous tongue to a ‘vanity complex’ arising out of it.” As for the leaders just below these three, there were none of “real worth.” They were brutal, even sadistic, and would not hesitate to “adopt the most ruthless methods and outlandish ideas.” Rumbold emphasized that he was not just voicing his own conclusions; he had talked to almost all his colleagues in the diplomatic corps and was “struck by the unanimity of their views on the present situation. They are bewildered by the whirlwind development of Hitler's internal policy, and view the future with great uneasiness and apprehension.”20 Sir Eric Phipps, who succeeded to the ambassadorship in the summer of 1933, knew little about Germany and was not particularly interested in the country. He had hoped to be assigned to Paris and when he was posted to Berlin instead, he indicated that although he was not fond of Germans, he was not “totally hostile to the new regime.”21 He nurtured a certain admiration for the idealism in National Socialism and thought it possible that Hitler might be serious in his desire for peace.22 On the other hand, it can be assumed that as the brother-in-law of Robert Vansittart, probably the most outspoken, unyielding, and consistent critic in the Foreign Office of Nazism and Germany in general, he had been exposed to highly negative views of Germans. But it was not until his first lengthy meeting with Hitler, on 24 October 1933, that Phipps began to echo Rumbold's views. If his dispatches over the next four years lacked the historical depth, political insight, and sense of outrage of his predecessor's analyses, they were nevertheless of high quality and colorful; and they demonstrated an understanding of Hitler's psychological make-up that was shrewd as well as penetrating. His portrait of Hitler the man, sprinkled with humorous asides, still stands up as thoroughly convincing. In that first meeting, Phipps was taken aback by Hitler's unexpected and passionate outburst on his willingness to die for his people rather than “sign away their honor” by failing to press for an end to foreign intervention in German affairs. “I could see him,” Phipps wrote, poking fun at Hitler, “as he spoke, advancing, unarmed and Mahdi like, clutching his swastika flag, to meet death from a French machine gun. A trace of healthy, human fear of death would have reassured me more. Once or twice I felt inclined to smile at Herr Hitler's shouting crescendo, but the seriousness, not to say tragedy, of the situation prevented that inclination from developing. It is disquieting to feel such power in the hands of so unbalanced a being. I fancy that it is to the emotions of Germany's dictator rather than to his reason that we must suddenly appeal on any issue.”23 This was not the only exchange during his first meeting with Hitler that Phipps found bizarre. Phipps was also shocked by the Führer's response to his question about Germany substantially increasing the size of its military forces in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. The ambassador pointed in particular to the S.A. and S.S., well-armed Nazi military formations that had frequently used their weapons to silence political opponents. This increase in the military was taking place, Phipps stressed, at a time when Britain was reducing its forces to what many believed to be “a dangerous minimum.” Hitler dismissed Phipps's query as groundless and then assured the ambassador that the “S.A. and S.S. might be compared to the Salvation Army.” Phipps acknowledged that “here I regret to say that I laughed,” not a very diplomatic gesture. Perhaps because he realized that he was not being taken seriously, Hitler agreed to procedures designed to demilitarize the S.S. and S.A., but there is no evidence that they were implemented.24 About thirteen months later, in November 1934, Phipps again saw Hitler, this time at the urging of the Foreign Office, which was again worried about the rapid rearmament of Germany, and especially the creation of a military air force. Phipps had been instructed to impress upon Hitler that the British government viewed these developments with utmost seriousness; in addition, he was to point out the concern of the British people over the “militaristic trend of German education and training.” Although the Nazis claimed that their rearmament was for defensive purposes only, “the fact remains,” Phipps noted, “that the psychological reaction on others is to inspire suspicion of an offensive purpose.” On hearing this, Hitler flew into a rage, warning his guest that “Germany cannot consent any longer to allow other States to wipe their boots on her.” He also declared that he knew “for certain” that Russia and France had formed a military alliance, and when Phipps denied this, Hitler simply ignored him. As for the warlike German textbooks, the Führer urged the ambassador to “read the French, Italian and Czech text-books.” It was the first time that Phipps had seen Hitler since the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934, when the Nazis murdered at least fifty-seven colleagues suspected of disloyalty to the Führer. He was clearly in a foul mood, which did not “increase his charm or attractiveness. Whilst I spoke he eyed me hungrily like a tiger. I derived the distinct impression,” Phipps reported to the Foreign Office, “that had my nationality and status been different, I should have formed part of his evening meal.”25 A year later, in mid-December 1935, in what appears to have been Phipps's last extensive interview with Hitler, the Führer again behaved in an aberrant manner. He referred to the Russians as “noxious microbes who should be politically isolated,” even though he conceded that he had sanctioned commercial dealings with the Soviet Union. As in the past, Phipps brought up the question of German rearmament and once again Hitler lost his composure. Every so often, he would mutter sentences such as “Germany is a very great country and always will be. She was great in a military sense under the Hohenzollerns and is great now. Prussia was also great as a military Power under Frederick the Great.” He referred to Russia with “supreme contempt” and boasted that the country was no match for Germany, militarily or technologically. “At times he ground the floor with his heel, as though crushing a worm.” Phipps warned his superiors at the Foreign Office that it would be folly for Western countries to make concessions to the Germans. Returning to her the colonies she had lost in 1918 “would not only act as a stimulating hors d’oeuvre to the German gormandiser [one who eats greedily], it would enormously increase Hitler's prestige and power. Such a reward for present iniquity would be positively dangerous; and how then could we ever show our approval of some possible emergence of any future German virtue?” The only appropriate policy for Great Britain was to rearm as quickly as possible. “It is only force that Nazism admires; generosity spells weakness in its eyes, and is therefore despicable.” Still, Phipps believed that although the international situation was perilous, it was not yet desperate. Germany faced serious financial and social problems and perhaps they could yet force the Nazi leadership to change course and turn away from its aggressive policies.26 These mildly hopeful words did not seem to carry much conviction. With the appointment of Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister late in May 1937, British policy toward Germany came under the influence of outspoken appeasers. Disregarding Rumbold's and Phipps's assessments of Hitler as a serious threat to international peace, Chamberlain and his supporters argued that the Führer's appetite for aggrandizement could be stilled and war avoided by making concessions to him on such issues as the annexation of territories inhabited mainly by German speakers and by returning to Germany at least some of the colonies she had lost after the First World War. All that Hitler was expected to yield in return was a vague promise to honor the principle of “mutual understanding.” This change in Britain's foreign policy was not based on a reassessment of Hitler's character or his conduct of affairs. On the contrary, the portrait of the Führer and his senior subordinates fashioned by British diplomats in Germany continued to be highly unflattering, its central features not much different from the assessments formulated by Rumbold and Phipps. For example, in mid-October 1938, F. M. Shepherd, the consul in Bremen, reported “that the opinion that the Führer is not quite normal, which for some time past has been held by in local medical circles, is now shared by quite a number of the general public.”27 Even the new ambassador to Berlin, Nevile Henderson, who assumed office in 1937 and soon emerged as a leading proponent of appeasement in government circles, found much to criticize in Hitler's demeanor and political stance. If statesmen and officials in London chose to depict Hitler as a riddle, it was not because they lacked evidence to the contrary but, rather, because they shied away from confronting him as a leader unscrupulous in the pursuit of his goal, the enhancement of Germany's power. At the time of his appointment to Berlin, Henderson was not expected to support the policy of appeasement, let alone emerge as one of its driving forces. His major sponsor for the Berlin post was none other than the anti-German Vansittart, who favored Henderson because in his previous position as ambassador to Yugoslavia he had demonstrated exceptional gifts in handling an authoritarian ruler, King Alexander. Henderson woul
Referência(s)