Books

When you have read so much as I have on Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler and you find your interest still held by a book in which the news of the past several months is recapitulated, organized and set in relation, one item to the other, then that book has met a test which should commend it to your attention.

Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of Foreign Affairs, has written a little book based not only on news from the papers of the past several months, but also on observation in foreign parts, so that, for him, the news of the past several months is illuminated by personally acquired data. His book bears the title of “Hitler’s Reich” and the subtitle of “The First Phase.” It is published by the Macmillan Company. Most, if not all, of this work appeared originally in Foreign Affairs, at which time it was commented upon in our Magazine review.

In Mr. Armstrong’s first chapter, called Smashing of Old Strongholds, he summarizes the thorough methods adopted in destroying the semblances of pre-Nazi Germany, and a brief outline of the human and material wreckage achieved by the Nazis, for when Otto Braun has to fly from Germany and a Hugenberg who helped Hitler climb the ladder is kicked out, those are achievements, so called. In the following chapter, Wotan and the Jews, Mr. Armstrong takes up the blindly confident wiping away of the historical past, which must now begin with Wessel and Schlageter—two of the most unsavory characters ever given attention, much less deification, by a nation—and which ditches into the discard all pre-Nazi achievement in art, letters, the sciences, medicine, law, music, the theater, journalism, statesmanship.

Mr. Armstrong summarizes the ######ible past and especially against the men, methods and aims of the past fourteen years” and on the following page informs us: “These young Nazis are proud to be ignorant, proud to despise the skill and attainments of the specialist.” They are compensating for their ignorance and intolerance by that phrase their leaders have given them, “thinking with blood.” Among these leaders are merely those who can express, in intenser form, the feelings of the mob; in them, says Mr. Armstrong, are elements of idealism, romanticism, enthusiasm, naivete and, we might add, of smoky mysticism. And there are those also, continues our commentator, who seek “adventure, power, revenge and profit at the expense of competitors and rivals.” And what is sheer bloodthirstiness in the mob is sadism in the leaders so that, in this revolution, there is perhaps less of a gap between the mentalities of leaders and led than in other movements.

The most coldly alarming chapter in the book is the one in which Nazi foreign policy is summarized. I do not think that Mr. Armstrong means to be alarmist, but the facts happen to be. Out of the mouths of their leaders does Mr. Armstrong cite the Nazi danger to the peace of Europe. These Nazis do not know the world, they do not wish to know the world; their only desire is to make their blood-wishing and blood-thinking reality. Whatever Hitler may say for the world’s consumption on the floor of the Reichstag, “it cannot be claimed that a general European war is excluded from the Nazi program. Conscious that they are super-men, and having made sure that they will not again be stabbed in the back by pacifists and Jewish traitors, they do not doubt that when the time comes they will win such a war.” The Nazi program will not be realized until 80 million Germans are under the sovereignty of the Reich again, say the Nazis; there are only 65 millions in the Reich today; the others are in Austria, the Corridor, in Alsace, in the Tyrol, in Danzig, even in Schleswig. Others demand a minimum of one hundred million Germans.

After a somewhat amusing comparison of the two lions—Mussolini and Hitler—Mr. Armstrong discusses the possible sources of weakness in the Nazi program, dwelling chiefly on the division in the ranks and making a good case for Hitler as a moderate in the anti-Jew campaign who has had to yield an ell or two to the more vicious Jew-haters. According to Mr. Armstrong the one-day boycott against the Jews was wrung as an unwilling concession from Hitler by those who wished to inaugurate a permanent boycott and many whose blood was heated for a pogrom. He tells us that party masses were out of hand on two occasions when there were storms of violence against Jews and that even Hitler had to quiet them with some concession to their violence. At the time of the drive against Green Shirts, Nationalists, Socialists, Catholics and Protestants, concessions were being granted the masses of the storm troopers to prevent more blood-letting. Mr. Armstrong refers to the “torrential but carefully phrased speech” made by Goebbels over the radio the night before the boycott as one of the chief indications of division in the ranks.

For the present: “To cross Hitler’s will openly today is impossible; any disillusionment of the country about him personally would destroy the whole movement.”