We Need To Talk About Adolf
His points may not be proven but they are not entirely implausible - given the evidence he provides - but then he ruins the glamour of it all by over-claiming, reading far too much into probable coincidences. For example, it proves little if students' rooms were very close together at Trinity. Correlation is not causation. About half way through, the book switches to another agenda entirely after following a rather intelligent disquisition on Schopenhauer, Collingwood, Wittgenstein and magical thinking. This slides back and forth into the more doubtful territory of Hitler's alleged occultism which we cover in more detail at the end of this review.
There is certainly merit in exploring the influence of Schopenhauer on both Wittgenstein's more mystical aspects and certainly on Hitler's thought which was uncomfortably often far more sophisticated than our politically necessary demonisation of him ever permits. After all, who wasn't influenced by Schopenhauer in the age of the Kaiser. But Cornish then, as before, overplays his hand with a rather dubious, if often well argued in technical terms, attempt to rescue the 'no ownership' theory of mind (the base of a great deal of 'spiritual' and New Age nonsense) from Hitler and restore it as some kind of truth.
To be frank, the last half of the book was just downright boring - academic philosophy based on self-evidently false assumptions about the mind and rather disconnected from the previous half which had been a series of well researched if over-played historical researches. Equally, frankly, I simply skipped most of this second half because it soon became pretty clear that it was extended special pleading for nonsense. If anything, the net result was to diminish my previous appreciation of Wittgenstein (I never particularly liked Schopenhauer).
This book is now a quater of a century old. Since then, we have detected a strong revival of interest in Schopenhauer's Idealism amongst gloomy bourgeois nihilists as the hippy model of universal consciousness (always nonsense) transforms into despair at the world (equally nonsense). The turn back to Schopenhauer is an essentialist pose - a fear of engaging with what Nietzsche actually said against him and contra-Wagner - but it is one that suits the new breed of traditionalists and Kali Yuga Rightists who prefer Lovecraft to life and try not to talk about Adolf.
This book is not quite of that ilk. It is hard to gauge Cornish's politics though he clearly condemns antisemitism and does not like communism. But the fluffy Eastern approach to Mind that underpins the book seems directed at resisting reality by reinventing it, a very 'bourgeois' pose.
My resistance to all this is a matter of personality (I never deny this) but I see those who insist on the 'no ownership' theory of Mind as also representative of a personality type - so desperate for meaning in the universe that they will jump through hoops to get the one they need. So, all in all, despite the useful and suggestive research on the worlds of Hitler and Wittgenstein and the thoughtful references on magical thinking, this cannot take up space in my library any longer. 'Spiritual writing' is always going to be dead weight when space is scarce.
This issue is going to become one of ever more vital importance under conditions where the veracity of any claim being made about the world is increasingly subject to serious questions about the prior manipulation of information, as well as about its control by interested parties. We are in the middle of just such a crisis in relation to Russia's invasion of Ukraine with extremely high actual economic and potential nuclear costs of getting it wrong.
Shore refers to the contemporary Middle East in passing in his conclusions - the book was published in 2002 - and we have our own experiences during precisely that period of how information was supplied, blocked and hidden as inconvenient by officials. He covers each of six cases in intimate but not dull detail. I admire, above all, his courage in making intelligent judgments about what would most likely have filled those gaps where evidence is not direct and clear.
I have argued in a Lobster article long before this book was published that 'truth' in contemporary political analysis required both a rigorous attitude to the evidence but equally a sensible judgment on the gaps in the record. There is a tendency in the less intelligent historian to restrict themselves only to the evidence to hand yet where the gaps are is where something happened. We must adopt a Japanese approach to silences and voids as things of a sort. The skill lies in the forensic uncovering of evidence without making conspiratorial leaps or allowing ideology or partisanship get in the way.
Shore is a good historian and fulfils this primary requirement brilliantly. However, he goes further, as he should do, and becomes an equally brilliant intelligence analyst in interpreting the facts in the most probable way. Once or twice I might demur on his judgments - once or twice - but that goes with the territory. For example, he possibly over-eggs the 'terror' aspect of Naziism in policy-making as opposed to the impact of careerism and the standard bureaucratic obsession with position.
This is not to deny the terror represented by the Nazi regime or the reality of collaboration and resistance amongst the conservative elite - the case of Von Papen is instructive in how terror can work with almost scalpel-like precision in the hands of political genius like Hitler. It is simply to point out that second-guessing human motivation is perhaps a judgment too far and to say that much of the conduct Shore describes in closed political and bureaucratic systems is far from unique to national socialist Germany.
Our own experience of working inside the New Labour culture from 1992 to 1996 indicated precisely the same processes of competitive control of information, manipulation of facts, deliberate denial of access for bearers of inconvenient truths and so on. The rest is history. Almost all political and state systems operate in much the same way - as do corporations, churches, NGOs and probably clubs and societies - anywhere where individuals have a career or personal stake in the retention or acquisition of power. As for the history, Shore throws new insight on several problems that make this book an invaluable additional secondary source to set against the 'big histories' that most people will buy. I draw attention here to only two of many - the factional struggle about whether to support Ethiopia or not in its struggle against Italian imperialism in 1934 and the final decision of Hitler and Stalin to cut a deal before partitioning Poland.
The first case provides particular insights on the balance of power betwen traditional conservate realism and the more intuitive and ideological approach of Hitler. It is interesting that conservative realist and ideological aims were similar in terms of the ultimate issue at hand - ultimately anschluss with Austria - but the conservatives took a traditional line of national interest that saw Italy as threat to the dream of German unification. Hitler saw things differently, bigger perhaps, exploiting Italian resentments at Western refusal to respect its rights in order to build an axis of equally resentful powers (Germany, Italy and Japan) where anschluss could be positioned as relatively small beer to imperial domination of 'spheres'. This would fit with Overy's thesis of the Second World War being essentially a struggle betwen frustrated 'new' empires and complacent older ones. It is not too fanciful to see the struggle between traditional State Department realism and the hysteria of both neo-conservatism and liberal internationalism mirroring this story in our own time.
The second set of insights come from the account of the information flows surrounding the Nazi-Soviet Pact which is positioned in our conventional history as a particularly heinous act - it looks less so in the light of the information provided by Zachary Shore. On the contrary, Stalin now looks as if he had no alternative because of the blundering of that utter fool Chamberlain whose commitment to appeasement seems to have been much deeper than any of us might ever have thought. We can never know what might have happened if Chamberlain had not blundered, working behind the backs of his own nation and much of his party. Chamberlain gave Germany the opportunity to demonstrate to itself and have demonstrated by the facts to the Soviet Union that Britain would never provide the security guarantees for the Soviet Union that might have saved Poland.
Litvinov was only the first of many sacrifices to Chamberlain's errors of judgment. The Soviet Union left the decision to join with Germany very late but it had every cause to make that decision given the asinine handling of the situation by the British Government - I refer you to Chapter 6 which is damning. We have got into the habit of pouring all the blame for killing on the tyrants but blundering fools must also take their share of the blame. If Chamberlain had not been such a fool, it is quite possible that millions would not have died, or at least have had some more years of life. Never again should not just mean no war but no more blundering fools - regrettably they still continue to appear with alarming regularity. The blunders of the West that lead to the Russian invasion of uKraine and the self-defeating economic war against Russia are a contemporary case in point.
As Shore points out if indirectly, the information flow at the hands of Saddam was also a material fact in another fairly recent war. We now know that a misreading of a diplomat's statements were interpreted as giving the green light to an invasion (of Kuwait) that need not have happened. This brings us back to information flow in our culture and the importance of process, system and transparency (within limits). Elected politicians can and should define the national interest as the needs and desires of the people through the democratic process (which must be more than competing party cadres) But, as in war, the performance of policy needs to be left to the professionals. By all means get new professionals if the old ones are not up to the job but let them be professionals. Hitler's 'achievements' from a German nationalist perspective were quite remarkable but he was, in my opinion, pushing at an open door.
Most of Europe, fifteen years on from Versailles, knew that Germany had to be accommodated. There is scarcely a claim of the nationalists that might not have been 'sorted out' by professional diplomacy within ten or twenty years of a determined commitment to do so. What Germany required was Bismarckian conservatism or internal transformation from its militaristic and rather strange culture into something truly liberal. What it got was a violent emotional reaction to humiliation under a charismatic hysteric.
But underlying his tactical skills was a degree of strategic nonsense that had defeat in-built into it - the exact reverse of Stalin whose domestic ideology had ultimate defeat written into it while his realist foreign policy built a short-lived empire. Germans are ashamed of Hitler for some very good reasons - thuggery being one - but they should add to the charge sheet that they allowed a genuine ideologue to operate the machinery of state. We might hope that we would never make the same mistake today. Sadly the rise of the Western 'hawk' and liberal internationalism has shown us that we have.
Other than this period of interest that covers the twenties and early thirties of a woman who lived to her early nineties, the book tells us a lot about the gilded world of the wealthy English upper middle classes but is otherwise a foot note to British social and political history. It is this early period that fascinates, not as rubber-necking for insights into Adolf and his circle, but because what she thought and what she did during her idealistic tweenties and early thirties offers us a more complicated and curious narrative about mid-twentieth century British politics. Most will find it hard to come to terms with.
The facts are that fascism was never going to take root in the UK, that Mosley was a narcissist blind to political reality and that (as we have noted that Overy has suggested) an eventual imperial struggle between rising Germany looking eastwards and the older British Empire was always on the cards. The given narrative is overladen with good versus evil moral judgements that filtered across from the interwar British Left into the national consciousness and which then became justified by war and victory. Yet there were always alternative mental maps. Diana Mosley had one, the pacifists another.
What is clear from the evidence in the book (notably the transcript of her October 1940 meeting with the Government Advisory Committee deciding on her continued incarceration) is that Diana was intelligent, strong-willed and articulate. We may disagree with her but she was not stupid. We should step back a bit and look at the situation in the late 1930s and consider that there would be no knowledge of two very different types of atrocity that would emerge in the early 1940s - atrocities that arise out of the fact of all-out war and atrocities based on ideology.
Even today we find it hard to differentiate the two but they are distinct. Both progress in stages, becoming worse in the first case with resistance or desperation (as we are seeing in Ukraine) and in the second by the very nature of an ideology (Nazi antisemitism or Bolshevism). The key to the Mosley view of the world lies not in expecting them to have foresight but in seeing democracy to have failed (an argument beginning to reappear today) because the leaderships of the West failed to deal with poverty and joblessness. It explains Mosley's shift from Labour to fascism.
Diana was independently minded, horrified by the condition of the British people but unable to escape the racial and imperialistic mind-set of her class and generation. There is a fascinating assessment of Churchill in the October 1940 meeting from an insider from the same social set. It is spot-on. To her and her ilk, the task was to unify a nation to create jobs fit for heroes (hence her instinctive support for the authoritarian Lloyd George) where war could be avoided through strength and where the empire could be exploited by the homeland because, bluntly, white Britain was superior.
These views are so alien to our early twenty-first century world view that they are simply dismissed as evil or stupid but they were only an ironically more moral (in the strict meaning of the word) version of general attitudes even if those general attitudes were already changing. The targeting of the Jews was probably the most stupid mistake of the British fascists (a mistake Mussolini did not make until the end) because it cut across an instinctive British tolerance, admiration of Jewish achievement and a powerful lobby. Similarly, the racial idea (actually far from dominant in pre-war British fascist thinking) was based on bad science while its economic corporatism (taken from Italian fascism) cut across every English instinct for economic freedom except on the Left. The Left actually wanted something much tougher and got it in the wartime economy of Attlee and Bevin.
Fascism simply got nowhere. Yet listen to Diana's words and not all is wrong. She and Mosley were right that war would see the collapse of the British Empire and great power status and probably that an accommodation with Hitler over Danzig would have bought time for rearmament. They saw themselves not so much as pro-German (though they were) as pro-Western and pro-British where British interests lay in preserving Britain's economic and military ability to remain a Great Power in partnership with other strong European nations. The obvious corollary (ended by American and Soviet domination of the post-war world) was that Europe should maintain hegemony over the world and exploit it to advance it. It should be no surprise to find post-war Oswald Mosley becoming a strong pro-European.
In other words, although I personally disagree with the world view, it was a cogent world view that did not necessitate extermination camps (though I suspect it would have necessitated an authoritarian police structure of some kind). It also not only did not necessitate war from a British perspective, athough one suspects the reality would have been one of constant colonial wars to maintain control of resources and the abandonment of any moral principle surrounding Germany's and Italy's eastward expansions. Yes, it was wrong-headed at so many levels but, as I say, it was not entirely stupid and it should not be treated as stupid which leads to the interesting question of how a liberal State (albeit at war) could justify the imprisonment without trial of a woman, separating her from her small children.
The British Government's approach to the problem of the Mosleys is an object lesson in fear and, in part, loss of moral principle. The initial incarceration was panicked but comprehensible - after all, the Nazis used prominent fascists in Europe to create puppet governments. These puppet governments would gain the administrative support of the standing civil service (often with the implicit support of governments-in-exile) in order to keep the State functioning. But governments-in-exile were assuming that liberation might eventually come. If Britain fell, the puppet governments would (if they had not been so incompetent) eventually have become 'independent' governments under de facto Berlin influence and control. Keeping Mosley and his consort under control was mission-critical especially if resistance had to move north.
Similarly, the appalling conditions under which Diana Mosley and other fascist women and wives were kept in Holloway for many many months might not be justified in a perfect world but everyone was living a hard life with constant bombing and food shortages. Finally British tyranny was always one helluva lot less vicious in every way from what a dissident could expect in Germany or the USSR with no attempts at forced labour, torture or cruelty (although keeping a mother from her young child comes damned close). But complaints about 'whataboutism' are the last refuge of the modern scoundrel because you should judge a situation by what you claim to be your standards and not by the behaviour of foreign barbarians. In this respect, the British State comes out quite badly.
The Government had allowed itself to be ruled by a vindictive Leftist mob long after the danger of a puppet government had passed. It took far too long to recognise that the war was supposed to be about freedom of expression and speech. The blot (albeit a small one) reminds one of the later treatment of Turing in that a national security state was allowed to emerge that moved away from a material and immediate threat (a puppet government during an invasion threat) to an attempt at ideological control. We still have that mentality today amongst those driving us to confrontationb with Moscow. In some ways the British people were played in the late 1930s by elite groups just as they were in 1914 and are being today over Ukraine - this is normal. The winning narrative probably did reflect mass opinion by September 1939 but it was not always informed opinion. Just as today.
At the end of the day, the UK went to war ill-prepared perhaps because it did so too soon. The result saw tens of thousands of civilian and military British deaths, existential risk to the nation, the loss of a Great Power status and an empire and a permanent junior role to Washington. Perhaps this (as the current narrative insists) was a 'price worth paying' just as 13% inflation, rising interest rates, massive energy bills, two years of possible recession and a collapse of living standards for the poorest are allegedly a 'price worth paying' over Ukraine. But these decisions over what is a 'price worth paying' are always made by surprisingly closed elites (politicians, security apparat, special interests, the media, activists). These elites rarely actually pay much of that price. They dump that problem on their voters and the poor and the young.
We need the freedom to be able to explore all possible narratives with the fullest possible information before rolling in with any prevailing elite narrative. One hopes that the current neo-Cold War does not have dissidents like Mr. Galloway eventually banged up. I have moved far on from the book which is a good read with plenty for fans of both Downton Abbey (the upper class life style) and mid-twentieth century British history. De Courcy recreates a milieu and a personality with consummate skill. And my conclusion? Much the same as De Courcy's. Despite her views and her flaws, I found myself liking Diana (although not her narcissistic husband) without changing my position on her views as mostly (though not entirely) wrong-headed.
What came across most was the need to engage with these views and not just dismiss them as 'fascist' as a term of insult. It is necessary to ask why they emerged when they did, on what information and which parts were sound and which were not. Much of what she and Mosley believed is utterly irrelevant to day. Their views depended entirely on 'facts' that have ceased to exist - pre-Keynesian economics, an empire, 'successful' corporatist fascist experiments in Europe, indirect rule by an aristocratic elite, racial ideology. The empire (at least 'ours') is gone, economic decisions are neoliberal and global, the fascist experiments collapsed into chaos and incompetence, the aristocrats have mostly (not entirely) been replaced with careerists and technocrats and the culture wars privilege race and gender.
What remains? Not much. The Europeanism has resulted in a shambles with the chancelleries of Europe dancing to Washington's tune. A false claim of antisemitism in the UK destroyed the last socialist challenge to the system. Jewish influence, for good or ill, has never been stronger. The Mosleys may prove to be right in the end about the need for some economic planning but they shared that with the defunct socialists and wartime government. They were probably more right that we dare admit about mass immigration but we are not allowed to say so.
What remains is a memory, not a nostalgic one, of another way of seeing the world at a particular point in history that the British people rejected and almost certainly rightly so. And perhaps a slight bad taste in the mouth not so much at the fascism but at the needless panic about it. So long as we never stop asking ourselves whether the price dumped on us by elites is worth paying or not we should be fine. We may come up with the same answer as our masters but it should be our answer and not theirs.
Hitler's Spy Chief about Wilhelm Canaris has insights but, I am afraid, too
few insights to recommend it to the casual rather than the specialist
reader who may be unable to see through the speculation and the implicit
ideological positioning. However, when we reach 1938, there is a
subtle shift in the book from a narrative well told to yet another
strike in the never-ending war betwen revisionist conservatives and the
mainstream over the conduct of events after Munich. Interestingly,
given its biases, the story has the odd effect of giving some credence to
the old Marxist theory of national socialism as the last refuge of a
late imperial military-industrialism faced by the Bolshevik threat.
Canaris
was not an aristocrat but he was part of a bourgeois class that had
imbibed aristocratic values of war and duty (values that, of course,
would have been completely alien to actual aristocrats at any time
before the rise of the middle classes). What we see here is an
old story revisited almost by accident - one of classes who are
perfectly prepared to go to war with one another as competing nation
states for advantage but who rapidly collaborate internationally when a
threat to their hegemony appears from 'below'. Our current
condition is not too dissimilar from this although the ruling elite is
more likely to be represented by a graduate euro-socialist or bureaucrat
in an international agency or NGO than an officer in the imperial navy
or a landed gentleman running a ministry.
The evidence for this
class interpretation lies everywhere in the first third of the book and
beyond, pehaps most poignantly in the strange appearance of at least
three Jews at different times as agents of German and national socialist
espionage! There is Canaris' undoubted involvement in protecting
the cold blooded murder of Luxembourg and Liebknecht and there is his
personal network of alliances with arms manufacturers and bankers that
played a critical role in Nazi support for General Franco. Indeed,
one might reverse the usual claim that Hitler supported Franco in an
ideological drive to expand international fascism into a far more
realistic model where conservative nationalists inveigled the Nazis into
supporting one of their own.
Whoever Canaris was by 1938, he was
a ruthless player who may have pragmatically felt (like many German
conservative nationalists) that the nasty little oik running the country
was dragging the country to disaster but who was, equally, no stranger
to criminal acts. The revisionism that fuels the book from this
point on seems to be one of the recurrent 'problems' of history where
inconvenient truths have to be explained to salvage an interpretation
necessary for the self image of a particular element in society. I
am confidently expecting Labour memoirs and historiography to give
thoroughly revisionist perspectives in due course on the alleged
unwilling complicity of senior Labour left-wingers in the Blair 'regime'
and to claim their 'secret resistance'. Ho, hum!
It is true (I
think Bassett demonstrates this) that Canaris was horrified by the turn
of events within Germany after Kristallnacht. Canaris was not
particularly anti-semitic (indeed, most conservative nationalists and authoritarians are not) and also understood better than his bosses
that the early easy victories of Nazi aggression were not sustainable
without some sort of peace with either the Reds or the Empires. Strategically,
Germany can look to the West against the East or look to the East and
security. Both visions have played their part in German history since
Bismarck - as they do 'sotto voce' even today. It is interesting that both the AdF and the Left of the SDP have the same pro-Eastern stance while the wide centrist establishment ranging from the CDU-CSU through the Free Democrats to the SDP mainstream tend to the pro-Western. Canaris was
firmly (remember the violence against the Spartakists) against the East
because it was Bolshevik but he may well have had a different view had
Russia been Tsarist.
Ideology infected strategy here as
elsewhere. Once Germany had bitten off more than it could chew, there
was a relatively short period when flexible cynics might have tried to
'do a deal' with one set of enemies in order to crush collaboratively
the other. Bassett concentrates on this 'window of opportunity'
but too easily confuses the facts of the matter (the 'is' of the story)
with an implied 'ought' - oh how much happier we would all have been if
the generals had overthrown Hitler and a strong Germany resisted and
beaten Stalin back. Ho, hum again! Canaris was drawn to circles
with a similar conservative anti-Bolshevik view in the West and this
undoubtedly drew him into dialogues that any reasonable Nazi (indeed,
any reasonable German in a state of war) might reasonably have called
treacherous.
It is this 'treachery' that Bassett seems at pains to
justify. It is true that all spies are 'treacherous' to a degree in
that part of their job is to maintain lines of communication with the
enemy - whether IRA or Taliban or 'C' in London - so that deals may be
struck later. Unfortunately, this truth is spun here into
something that the evidence simply does not support. Bassett speculates
so that we see information that could be interpreted more reasonably in
one way being interpreted in another in order to praise the man for the
ideological reasons that we will come to. It is the nature of
espionage that we have very little evidence that is reliable and what
evidence that we have may derive from a deliberate intent to tell a
particular narrative. Similarly, any dealings with the enemy (the
separate peace feelers with London) are as likely to be part of an elaborate game of
maintaining options and advantage in which we simply cannot KNOW what
precisely was intended.
Contacts with London could be interpreted
in many way, of course, and not all of them treacherous. The treacherous aspects
do seem to have been there with Canaris but it would also seem that senior Nazi
figures were well aware of them and even (almost certainly in the case
of Himmler) happy to take later advantage if they could. Moreover,
none of the acts of Canaris that were designed to suggest the back door to London
for conservative nationalists need be interpreted in quite so noble
terms as Bassett implies. After all, to conservative nationalists
sacrificing some of their own hoi polloi might be regarded as a
perfectly reasonable price to pay for political advantage,
Similarly,
like good philosophers, spies can think two or more apparently
inconsistent things at the same time and can over-reach themselves in
doing so. We must remember that this was a man who not merely
collaborated with Heydrich, albeit as a bureaucratic rival, but who knew
him well before he became a Party figure and who lived next door to the
man and spent musical evenings with him. Canaris' knowledge of
the man may have helped to create seriously defensive moral principles
in his more conventional Abwehr but it might easily be interpreted that
Heydrich's SD was there to 'do the dirty work' so that the old guard
could keep its hands cleans. What I cannot believe is that
Canaris was so horrified by what Heydrich represented that he began to
'plot against the regime'. It really is not that simple. And whatever
Canaris was, he was a highly intelligent and rational player who loved
his career and being at the centre of things.
It is equally
probable that, like Gehlen later, he saw the way things were going a bit
earlier than most and simply wanted to hedge his bets so that he had a
job later. In the end, he miscalculated. It has to be said that he
accepted his fate (as far as we can understand) with enormous dignity. In
other words, the 'distance' of complicity and mentality between Canaris
and Heydrich is simply not proven but is merely suggested by
testimonies that owe a lot to the later need of his officer colleagues
in the New Germany to distance themselves from the thugs with whom they
had shared power.They are not liars but they are not telling the total
truth.
I would have been more inclined to give Bassett, and so
Canaris, the benefit of the doubt if there had not been the implicit
ideological agenda in the Introduction to the book (and in the closing
comments) and which begins to emerge in force in the account of matters
after 1938. Again, we must not go too far. My own view is that
Bassett demonstrates sufficiently that Canaris did retain certain
standards, did refuse to get down into the mud with his Nazi colleagues,
was part of the German nationalist readiness to overthrow Hitler and
did undertake a number of highly creditable acts in defiance of Nazi
ideology and hegemony. Where we seem to differ is that all this
is not enough to exonerate him or his class because there is enough
evidence even in this book that the conservative nationalists only
started to take a serious interest in countering national socialism when
it looked like defeat might bring crimes to account.
It is true
that Canaris wisely saw Hitler's forward foreign policy as potentially
disastrous but we should not make too much of this. After all, many
loyal Party men (I have been there!) know that their party is heading
for a disaster on the logic of the situation but continue to serve the
party regardless. Yes, we have evidence of private horror at
Nazi behaviour but much of this is cast in almost aesthetic and cultural
terms rather than in terms of the sort of 'outrage' that affects (or
infects) contemporary international relations discourse. The
picture that Bassett seeks to paint is one where a noble class of
conservative nationalists, implicitly transnational in their acceptance
of chivalric values but proudly patriotic, are outmanouevred by a bunch
of rabid gangsters and then nobly risk their lives to recover their
country from the fiends' coming apocalypse.
This ideology is part
of a wider European revisionism that is deeply conservative in
mentality. It implies that if only the Catholic Church (Bassett is
characteristically kind to the Pope), conservative gentlemen and public
servants, especially the military and allied services, had retained
power, then all would have been well. The conservatism of the book comes
through even in the rather pointed (and actually true) references of the
debasement of the gentlemanly breed of spies by Tony Blair and his
'dodgy dossier'.
One of Bassett's items of evidence for the
defence is that Canaris, faced with a similar demand (to that demanded
by New Labour) from Nazi officials (to assist the invasion of the
Netherlands) simply refused. I am afraid this does not make Canaris
'good' but merely reminds us just how dreadful Blair was! Canaris
is put into the same bracket of honour as 'C' - men of 'service who
stood up to politicians and served their country with as much ethical
consideration as the unethical trade of espionage permits. This
is, of course, romantic tosh but very much part of the self image of a
particular element in the ruling order that will talk of the Christian
West around High Table and at conservative European dinner parties much
as they did in the age of the Kaiser and Edward.
Now let's put
away this propaganda of a revival of a Christian-aristocratic vision of
Europe with the politicians firmly under the control of the subtle
counsellors in the bureaucracy who rely on the Vatican for moral succour
and on an 'ethic of service' to give the masses the administrative rule
they require. In fact, the German conservative nationalists of
the interwar period were wholly complicit in the rise of national
socialism but were simply incompetent at managing it or in understanding
its true nature. Far from effective, they were serially incompetent -
no less than their imperial equivalents in the British Conservative
Party before 1940. To this day, Chamberlain's naive and stupid
guarantee to Poland in 1939 must rank as one of the most stupid acts in
British history - it cost millions of British and imperial lives and
lost Britain its already weakening global hegemony. Perhaps the mission-creep of British guarantees to neo-nationalists in the Eastern bloodlands today might one day be seen in the same light.
To have
allowed war elsewhere and national feeling (which was strong) to buy
time for a major national rearmament programme designed to contain
Germany and then ally with the Soviet Union at the 'right time' seems
not to have occurred to the confused buffoon surrounded by incompetent
'service professionals'. One thanks someone for Churchill! As for
mainland Europe, the catholics, the aristocracy and the bureaucracy
were so blinded by terror of Bolshevism that they gave carte blanche to
populist gangsters who would kill their own as much as their enemies and
they gave this carte blanche willingly in fear of worse.
Nor
were they alone. Mussolini suggested a 'way forward' with his Papal
Concordat that horrified his own radical pagan supporters such as Evola.
The old revolutionary socialist marched on Rome and then made himself
head of the biggest protection racket in history. Franco was
treated as the 'coming man' (and was clever enough not to concede ground
to the Nazis) and the Church backed vicious dictators across Eastern
Europe and 'quislings' in the West as the Wehrmacht moved towards
Moscow. In one of the silliest analytical tricks of the
conservative revisionists, any crime is moderated because conservative
nationalists were less anti-semitic than the Nazis - basically, they
simply had none of the lust for extermination of their radical cousins.
This
is like the justification of the old man bonking a fifteen year old
school girl that he is not to be compared with a member of a ring that
abuses five year olds - true but it rather misses the point. Even
Hitler compromised with the old guard once he had shown what he was
capable of in hitting out at both conservative nationalists and his own
'Left' in the Night of the Long Knives. Though historians love to
suggest that the SS slaughter in 1934 created a sense of terror amongst
conservative nationalists, we must not forget that the main purpose of
the event was to create an understanding with the new Wehrmacht.
Von
Papen himself was held back from the slaughter as a chess piece in case
of need. He did not defect and (on the evidence of Bassett) even
considered it possible that he might be reappointed Prime Minister by
Hitler in order (we presume) to help broker a peace deal with the West
against Stalin. In other words, the conservative nationalists
were cowed perhaps in 1934 and came to understand their role as junior
partners with the radical nationalist state but they never gave up hope
of being senior partners again. They were still well in play
within the system and they never truly revolted except in their own
class interest (beautifully recast by the identification of that class
and cultural interest with that of their own nation). The self-delusion
here is almost magnificent.
Only at the end, to save their own
skins for the consequences, not merely of aggression but of gross
atrocities unmatched in war since the seventeenth century, did they seek
any means possible to counter the decisive statement from FDR that
German surrender had to be 'unconditional'. Bassett seems to
dislike this commitment to 'unconditionality' because he continues to
have faith in this class and to share their view that the division of
Europe between Anglo-Americans and Soviets was an unalloyed disaster.
I
do not - not because I like sovietism (on the contrary) but because the
true disaster for Europe would have been anything less than a decisive
defeat for the undemocratic instincts of the old feudal classes and an
opportunity to create new parties and new constitutions for the defeated
'ab initio' regardless of their much vaunted 'tradition'. In
the end, though much later, Eastern Europe was enabled to join this new
model with its own aristocratic and religious machinery collapsed and
with traditionalism only able to return as a petit-bourgeois pale
simulacrum of its previous claims to power. Even the fascistic Golden
Dawn in Greece is no Iron Guard.
The real danger for Europe is of a Vatican
resurgent (which it has been since its effective claim to have won the
Cold War in Europe for the West) backed by a sentimental 'service
ethos', to which a certain sort of conservative bourgeois is attracted,
in order to control the masses. This book acts as both a flawed
history of an interesting figure in twentieth century history but also
as an unintended warning of the new political romanticism that might
suggest that a failed ruling order still has something to offer Europe.
It does not.
Another biography Hitler's Piano Player is a better book about a much lesser figure. It is a competent and well written account of a politically naive, rather second-rate bit-player in the Nazi drama, Ernst Hanfstaengl who was, incidentally, a confidante in Berlin of the fascist Mitford sisters. What is interesting here is that an experienced working journalist is looking at the life story of a PR man who just happened to be pals with the biggest gangster in an era of gangsters and who scuttled out of fear and not conviction because he became an increasingly embarrassing buffoon.
What is truly fascinating is how nothing changes in terms of the sort of personality attracted to power and the techniques employed in media manipulation, The book should be read by anyone in the PR business or political communications who is under the illusion that they actually matter. There are many much better books on the Nazi era but we need such books on the buffoons to keep us all grounded.
How To Read Hitler is a very useful, short, sharp analysis of Hitler's ideology. It is an introduction through texts to what the man actually thought. There is the usual problem with trying to explain a way of thinking that is completely alien and requires a leap of imagination that 'taints' the leaper if it is successful, but Neil Gregor gets it 95% right. Recommended.
This brings back around to a relatively recent book on the issue raised by Cornish (see above) and which has fascinated conspiracy theorists and popular culture - the relationship between the Nazis and the occult. Just how real was the relationship and are those historians who disdain discussing the subject missing a trick. Hitler's Monsters, a controversial book, is well worth noting
(and reading) in this context. It is undoubtedly well researched. It contains, in one
place, a great deal of evidence for the irrationality that has invested
the Nazi era with such black glamour in subsequent popular culture.It
is also measured when it describes particular claims - such as those
related to Nazi flying saucers - giving us sound documented background
and excellent sources. We can feel broadly confident that Kurlander is
giving us a picture of the true state of affairs in each case.
The
flaws are,'strategic' not tactical. The 'tactical' history is
excellent. The evidence for flaws arises out of a clinical reading of
his interpretation of the facts, culminating in an epilogue that
collapses into the standard 'moral panic' amongst liberal intellectuals
about our current situation. Kurlander has broken a cardinal rule
of historiography at this final point - he forgets the uniqueness of
the past. History enables us to form opinions about the present in
preparation for the future but it cannot teach us too many lessons about our
present because we too are in a unique situation. It is rather like the utter silliness of likening events in the East today to events in interwar Europe - useful for psychological operations in dealing with the half-educated masses but completely useless for actually understanding what drives Russian decision-making or future likely outcomes and scenario-planning.
But this final
weakness might be overlooked as just part of 'late liberal capitalist
bourgeois anxiety' if one was not struck throughout the book by
Kurlander's constant over-egging of his pudding. This starts with the
title. 'Supernatural', for example, begs too many questions of definition. If
'supernatural' simply means an appeal to ideas that go beyond facts and
science, then all regimes are guilty of this in some form, notably
theocratic ones. Burleigh in this regard may well be right that National
Socialism developed the character of a secular religion. This is
certainly arguable.
A great deal of the book is taken up with two
themes that do not allow easy acceptance of the term 'supernatural' as
unique to the Nazis as political movement - the extent of bad scientific
thinking and the manner in which the Nazis exploited inherent German
expressions of irrationalism. In the first case, bad science is
just bad science. It does not always mean that the bad scientist is
looking to the supernatural but only that he has allowed social or
cultural norms to get in the way of good science. In the second
case, if a society is generally irrational, then a movement that arises
out of it cannot be singled out as peculiarly irrational unless it is
consistently (across the board) more irrational than the general
community.
National socialism would have to be demonstrated to
be an ideology that was consistently irrational (not just inept or
stupid) in a way that was more irrational than the community from which
it came to justify its uniqueness in this respect. I cannot see that
this has been demonstrated here. Kurlander is clearly right that
German irrationalism does seem to have been more intense than that of
other contemporary nations, perhaps analogous to the burst of New Age
thinking in the US much later, but surges of irrationality are not new
in Western culture. It could be argued that Germany was just
unlucky in that the irrationalisms of Europe's urban intellectuals going
through their own crises at the end of the nineteenth century got
magnified by popular media and crises of defeat and inflation in the
1920s.
This means that it is very plausible that national
socialism operated in more irrational ways than did its opponents but,
still, we have the problem that it also acted very rationally indeed. Most of its use of technology was sound and its ideology had its own
grim rational logic.What is true is that other cultures did not
see the emergence of a political force able to exploit cultural
irrationality in the way that national socialism did. Yet, while the
Nazi leadership cadres shared many of these irrational attitudes, the
key word here is exploit. There is no reason and much
evidence that Hitler and his Nazis were immensely adept at the political
exploitation of something that pre-existed the movement. Indeed, all
references to Goebbels suggests a man using community irrationality for
very pragmatic political ends.
As the book unfolds, the
references to Hitler, Heydrich, Bormann and Rosenberg tend to suggest
that we are just dealing with yet another ideology (albeit one with a
particularly malign aspect) which adopted the 'supernatural' in fits and
starts according to need and often with cynicism. Indeed,
Heydrich, Rosenberg and Bormann seem to have found it tiresome more
frequently than not. As Kurlander ably points out, these three seem to
have been more concerned to ensure a pre-existing general hysteria
became owned by the Party than promoting it further. I saw little
evidence (outside particular closed circles) of attempts to drive
greater irrationalism into the community, just a desire to control
existing propensities. Supernatural paganism seems to have been simply a
case of replacing one supernatural belief system (Christianity) with
another.
I am afraid, while recognising the different moral
values involved, I cannot honestly see Nazi paganism and 'German
Christianity' as inherently more supernatural than Catholicism, for
example. Too many Nazi leaders also get no or minimal mention in the
book (notably Goering, Keitel, Raeder, Donitz, Ribbentrop, Funk and
Speer) for us to believe that 'supernaturalism' was general. The
supernatural appears rarely in accounts by other historians for good
reason. Over and over again, the 'total nuttiness' argument
seems to rely on too few suspects representing only a component of the
whole rather than the whole, largely the exceptionally potty circle
around Himmler whose Ahnenerbe antics have enlivened popular culture
ever since.
This is where the 'border science' comes in and the
nonsense about super weapons that appeared at the tail end of the war.
The account is true enough and resources were wasted but it forgets that
the vast majority of war operations were conducted rationally, using
'real' science and technology. The fact that a part of the German
Navy, in desperation, permitted magical pendulums to try to find ships
at sea suggests an openness to the supernatural but a) this was clearly
an operational outlier and b) fits with the general model of a culture
prone to the magical of which Nazis were a part. After all, Churchill was not averse to the odd bout of 'mad science' (giant iceberg aircraft carriers) even if there was nothing magical about his sponsorships.
The Nazi regime
made serious major errors of judgment but these were largely the errors of judgement all
regimes could make, especially those under huge pressure of time and
resources and with a polycratic inability to make sound strategic
judgements under the rule of one self-educated monomaniac. The
Nazis offered an ideological enterprise (ideology being as absurd as any
religion) where part of the ideology involved ignorant misreadings of
science, where the pursuit of power was highly rational in technique and
which was embedded in a more irrational culture than average. None
of this suggests that the 'supernatural' was central to national
socialism but only that (and this argument is accepted) it was an
important component of the movement, used pragmatically for political
purposes but also seriously held as true by a faction of it with power.
So
much centres on Himmler and his circle in this respect that I would
have no doubts that a Himmler-led (or Hess-led) Party would have been
truly mad as the proverbial hatter and, yes, it is noted that Himmler
and Hess were both second in power in their respective eras. But
they were not first-ranking. Hitler comes out as sympathetic to many
'supernatural' ideas (but no more than my Fulham-born grandfather who
might have spoken of Mu or Lemuria), leaning on them only as tools for
power or as a desperate fall-back position as the cataclysm approached. And
which Hitler are we speaking of? That of his public speeches or that of
his 'table talk' whose provenance is dubious to say the least and is
far from direct evidence of his views.
To be fair to Kurlander,
he never fails to point out the more material causes of the disaster
when it matters nor does he suggest that supernaturalism was the first
cause or principle of National Socialism. My quarrel here is not with
the facts but the emphasis, the implicit over-egging. My old
historical mentor Norman Stone used to say that national socialism
resulted from the teaching of half-educated small town school masters.
There is certainly merit in Kurlander reminding us that these petty
intellectuals had some strange ideas. But this was the milieu of
Germany itself. German interpretations of theosophy (such as ariosophy)
and bio-dynamic agriculture and a lagging understanding of science
(including Darwinism) also competed with a high level of scientific
capability and pragmatism.
Bad science can come from anywhere as
we know from the infamous Lysenko case in the Soviet Union as can evil
experimentation - we know this from US experiments on syphilitic
African-Americans and by the CIA in relation to mind control. From
this perspective, national socialism must be recognised as an outgrowth
of the increased irrationalism of German culture (much as Kurlander
demonstrates) but it cannot entirely be defined culturally solely in
those terms otherwise Heydrich, Bormann and Speer could not have
prospered. In the end, when you separate the cultic nutters at
the top and their acolytes in the SS and some specialised contexts, you
find that the German volk are guilty of little more than bad science, moral turpitude and following stage magic and astrology. Yes, as Kurlander makes clear, Nazi leaders left room for scientific
astrology and magic in a way that would never happen with their
opponents but that perhaps just meant that they were open-minded. I saw
no evidence that most Nazis cared deeply about either.
History
is complicated. Our villains steadfastly refuse to be villainous in all
things just as the good guys turn out to have done some pretty vile
things. The Nazis are no different. The ideological environmentalism and
attitude to witch hunts might be said to put us to shame! In
the end, there are many reasons to vilify the Nazi regime but the
biggest one, other than the inherent callousness of its ideology, is
probably an essential strategic stupidity at multiple levels of which
its border science and mythic hysteria are just two. It was a horrible
accident of history.
On balance, the book is an excellent
introduction to the facts of the matter whose interpretation beyond the
closed circles outlined in the book should perhaps be handled
sceptically. Nazi Germany certainly had these irrational
aspects, stronger than elsewhere, but its critical and specific
importance to the regime, consistently held, beyond a generalised
ideology shared by a much larger volkisch community, is not proven.