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Henry Morgenthau, The German Character
Five chapters from Morgenthau’s book, Germany is our Problem, here published with an introductory note by Ellopos. Emphasis, in bold or italic letters, by Ellopos. Complete book in print.
52 Pages
Page 50
By 1930, the republic had lost so much of its peaceful disguise that the film "All Quiet on the Western Front," a pacifist picture based on one of the most popular of German books, was banned in Berlin. As the German people rushed headlong down the road to war in the thirties, it was obvious that their experience under the republic had not converted any substantial proportion of them to democratic principles. On November 6, 1932, one of the many Reichstag dissolutions and elections that were employed in this period, apparently for the sole purpose of discrediting popular government, returned 196 Nazi deputies to a house of 584. Lacking a majority, the Nazis were not called upon to form a government; but no one else could, and on January 30, 1933, Hitler moved into the Chancellery where a little less than ten years before General von Seeckt, with a single sentence, had turned thumbs down on his pretensions. The next day the Reichstag was dissolved again and new elections set for March 5. Before that date, the German people had ample evidence that the Austrian corporal really had meant all the horrible things he had been shouting at them for years.
Within five days of his accession to power, freedom of press and of assembly had been forbidden. By the end of February every right guaranteed under the Weimar constitution, which was still theoretically the law of the land, had been abrogated. A reign of terror swept the country. The Reichstag was burned, and plenty of people knew that the Nazis were the arsonists. Foes of the regime were beaten; Communists jailed; anti-Nazi meetings broken up.
Now a people who have faith in their own sovereignty do not tolerate this sort of thing. It is an unpardonably cynical view of humanity which can argue that any nation, even Germans, could be so intimidated by a gang of thugs that they would meekly vote by the tens of millions against their honest convictions. In the past just such tactics of terror in our own communities brought about the downfall of the Tweeds in American cities. But March 5, 1933, saw a very different response on the part of Germany's electorate.
A smashing vote of confidence for intolerance, terror and dictatorship was given at the polls. The Nazis added ninety-two new seats to their Reichstag representation, and could boast with truth that they were the real spokesmen of the people. No party in the history of the republic had ever returned such a large block of deputies to the parliament.
Cf. H. Arendt: totalitarianism reduces men to impersonal natural forces * German philosophers in support of Nazism * Beethoven and Mauthausen * The Superior Race of Germans * Kalergi, European Spirit must Precede Europe's Political Unification * La Construction de l'Europe selon Jean Monnet * Plan Fouchet * Mitterrand and Kohl urge European Political Union * Il Manifesto di Ventotene
