The Nazis were not Conservative

From the onset, the Socialist Nationalist party presented themselves as redolent of a time before the WW1 armistice. They appealed to the deep-rooted and conservative ideations within the German people in attempt to bring about a resurgence in national glory and pride. ‘Obviously, there would have been nationalistic and anti-Semitic reaction to defeat on the battlefield, to the Communist threat, and to the Treaty of Versailles.’ (1) And, this was reactionary conservatism: although in methodology the National Socialists may have employed many novel practices, at its essence it was a profoundly traditional party and sought to restore Germany to a national glory after its defeat in WW1. What this immediately meant was distancing itself from the Weimar Republic. Firstly, we see the restoration of the sovereign leader. The last Kaiser of Germany and a committed anti-Semite, Wilhelm II, was extricated was from his duties after 1918 and lived out the rest of his life in exile. Taking up his stead, under the 1933 Enabling Act, Hitler as the German Fuhrer took up the traditional role of monarch, fulfilling a national expectation. We see the same trajectory occurring in modern day Russia with Putin acting as its de facto and constitutional monarch, taking up the vacuum left by Soviet dictatorship after 1991 and the Tsar before that. Both are similarly militaristic figures, governing a people habituated and coerced into accepting authoritarianism. From the onset, Hitler denied the defeat of Germany in WW1: he attributed its technical loss as a betrayal by the government, the November Criminals, and saw the Treaty of Versailles as the Allied exploitation of the Fatherland. Which is was. Versailles crippled Germany to prevent it regaining strength and power rival to the Allied Empires. Indeed, the national and economic growth of Germany continually led to acts of oppression by Allied states. From the second Boer War to the Moroccan crises, tensions between Germany and the Allies (Britain especially) was rising. And indeed, naval rivalry was a notable factor for tension between Britain and its antagonist state. Germany itself prior to WW1 was a highly industrial and militaristic country, placing pride in its army and navy. It was a rising power, a threat to the British Empire, and had further ambitions of growth. And obviously, Hitler’s proliferation of the German military from the public marches to the remilitarisation of the Rhineland and ambitions of lebensraum, reasserted this great German pride in their military and its desires for expansion and colonisation. The paper that the Locarno Treaties, the Kellog-Briand Pact and Munich Agreement could have been drawn up on toilet paper for how seriously they were taken. What we saw after WW1 was the multilateral proliferation of weapons under the guise of peace. There is a line of Thomas Paine I find quite pertinent here: ‘Wearied with war, and tired with human butchery, they sat down to rest, and called it peace’ (p161). Recharging Germany from WW1, Hitler merely ensured that Germany stood up again and continued with the European boxing match it had been grounded by. And, this was fundamentally the aim of Hitler: to bring back a great Germany, a Grossdeutchland. The land of great philosophy and music and culture from Wagner and Nietzsche to Goethe and Beethoven, would be restored in a great Reich lasting for 1000 years. In the 18th century, the government implemented a policy of Germanification in order to create a national unity and hierarchy of races within the Prussian states. The German race, the Aryans, were deemed superior in this hierarchy and the Jews inferior. Hitler personally saw the cultural achievements of Germany as a mark of its superiority. Hence an explanation was needed to why they lost the war. The British may have been of some noble blood but were by no means as purely Aryan as the Germans: Hitler needed a scapegoat. And, who better than the long-hated Jews? Anti-Semitism had been a feature of German culture since the Middle Ages. This arose partly as a Christian persecution of the Jews deeming them as totally ‘other’, as dehumanised heretics or monsters. A fervently pious state, even after Luther founded the humanist faiths (exemplified by Max Weber) creating such Pietistic households as Kant’s, there was always an underlying resentment of the those who denied and killed Christ. Interestingly Hitler proclaimed himself Catholic in Mein Kampf, and was endorsed by the Catholic Church throughout his autocratic regime. It was the artists, Expressionist directors like Fritz Lang, who actually opposed Nazism—many fleeing to Hollywood. Not the Church. Hitler appealed to the traditions of German faith and racial hierarchy. He continued elevating the German people and oppressing and eradicating rival ethnic and racial communities under his rule. It was these factors which made Hitler’s patriotic and xenophobic speeches so popular in Germany: he spoke and they followed, feeling a deep resonance with what he was saying. Though he was an animated speaker, his speeches were never vaudeville precisely because of this. He was never Charlie Chaplin, despite emulating the star’s moustache, for what he said had a deep resonance with Germany’s past from which he hoped to change its future. The Nazi party was born of Germany: it did not invent itself but festered and grew into the latest manifestation of German culture. Hitler was stooped in its history and culture; he liked Wagner, Lang’s dystopian film, ‘Metropolis’, and read the works of Nietzsche (edited by his Nazi sister). With all this cultural prowess around him, his time spent fighting in WW1 and deep-seated beliefs in Aryan superiority, he simply could not tolerate Germany’s humiliation and tragic decline. He had to fulfil the aims of Germany at the turn of the 20th century, to become an expanded power of superior blood, and would not take no for an answer. In short, the Nazis belonged to a German tradition in their values and some of their practices and all new methods of governance they implemented under their regime were always engaged under this backdrop of tradition and conservatism. They simply progressed and followed the trajectory of pre-WW1 Germany, overcoming all and any infirmities imposed onto them. Sources: (1) Hitchens, C. (1999) Imagining Hitler (p.648 of ‘Arguably’) (2) Paine, T. (1791) Rights of Man (p.161)