The Human Touch

ON THE EVE of the election and referendum which gave Hitler and his Nazi party the virtually helpless and virtually unanimous vote of the German people, the Nazis celebrated with what might be called, for them, due decorum, the tenth anniversary of their most overwhelming defeat. (It is more pleasant to recall a past defeat in present victory than to mourn a past victory in present defeat.) No other party, or group of missionaries, could have survived so crushing a beating. Ten years ago a small group of persons which included the then insignificant figures of Hitler, Goebbels, Feder and Streicher and of whom the best known was the somewhat batty Ludendorff, staged a beer hall revolution in Munich. They were dispersed, arrested, tried, jailed and—above all—ridiculed. Ten years ago to be a Nazi was to be either one of the least important things imaginable or one of the most ridiculous.

Snowballs gather speed as they gather momentum on their race down the hillside and they may suppose, if they possess what we call human intelligence, that their rate of speed and growth are self-generated and not derived from an outside source. Now a good deal of the Nazi statistics of victory may be explained or explained away on the snowball-momentum theory. Also, when people vote for a party—and we refer to the pre-1933 elections—they are voting not for the party they are voting for but against the party they are not voting for.

When the leaders and the members of the National Socialist Party can look back from the hilltop of 1933 to the valley of 1923, the scene must have the effect of inspiring them with the reflection that the hand of destiny is guiding them. The Nazis have not been the kind of gentry who would resign initiative to the hand of destiny; their meanest battles are not won without plotting, planning, intriguing, without full use of the strategies of bribery and propaganda. But nevertheless they must derive a sense of Fatality from their present state.

If Nazi-ism were a propaganda, a state of mind or of aberration that could be confined within the borders of a nation, its triumph within Germany would not be cause for concern that it is to men and women outside Germany. But Nazi-ism, inspired by its sense of mission and destiny, has got into the veins of German-speaking and German-thinking men and women all over Europe, even throughout South America, not to mention the United States, where there are many German-thinking men and women whose technical loyalty as Americans is daily being encroached upon by their spiritual loyalty to Hitlerism. Germans in Finland and in South America voted in last Sunday’s plebiscite.

Hitlerism, with its chief connotation of anti-Semitism, is not politely pausing at national boundaries. Germans within Germany and Germans outside of it are being taxed to pay the expenses of a would propaganda