HITLER’S USEFUL IDIOTS
Five members of the elite who helped create the Nazi monster
serving alongside the Nazis and still believing Hitler could be controlled. As Malinowski explains: “Most members of this power elite, in particular von Papen, underestimated Hitler and saw him as you would see a servant. When questioned about the decision [to make Hitler chancellor] by another nobleman, von Papen famously said: ‘But what do you want? We have hired him.’
“Many members of the German elites thought he was going to be the useful idiot who was going to play their games. They thought he could be controlled. And I come back to this metaphor of the horseman riding the horse, except that within three or four months, they discovered that they were the horse and that Hitler was the horseman.”
Fatal misjudgment
Less than two months after Hitler became chancellor, he introduced the Enabling Act that effectively marked the end of democracy and the start of the Nazi dictatorship. Measures rapidly followed that clamped down on political parties, trade unions and, of course,
Jews. The elites that had hoped to control
Hitler had misjudged him totally. Says Malinowski: “This was a bunch of powerful men overestimating their political intelligence and their capacities, and very much underestimating the technical intelligence of the Nazis and the ruthlessness and brutality with which they were going to dismantle and destroy the state, and use their power against their conservative allies.”
Some of those conservative allies, like von Schleicher, met their end in the Night of the
Long Knives of June 1934. This was a time of realisation for the German elite, as Malinowski says: “Now they understood that this monster they had helped create had come to a Frankenstein moment where it could no longer be tamed, and was redirecting its violence against its own creators.”
This was a far cry from how ‘hiring’ Hitler was supposed to have turned out. “The elite had sought to tame political extremism by binding it into the system, softening it, giving it more responsibility. The understanding was that when Hitler and other Nazi leaders were ministers and responsible for steering part of the economy or universities or whatever part of society, they would somehow calm down and react like normal statesmen.
“But this never happened. Hitler never reacted as a statesman in the traditional sense. The
Nazis were playing an entirely new game in terms of ideology and of making the unfathomable fathomable. And the killing of 6 million Jews and millions of others in the Second World War can be seen as the darkest part of this.”
In August 1934 von Hindenburg died, to be succeeded by Hitler himself. The last obstacle to total Nazi domination had been removed. But while the elite had been largely sidelined from political power, that didn’t mean they were all suffering under Nazi rule.
Aside, of course, from the many victims of Nazism, the early years of the Third Reich saw the majority of Germans thriving as the country’s economy entered into what looked like a fantastic boom. “Many members of the elites were the great profiteers and beneficiaries of the Third Reich,” says Malinowski. “The many examples of German army officers, armament industrialists or civil servants replacing sacked Jewish or socialist office holders in the state apparatus was just one aspect of this. It is often forgotten that the army, industry, universities and engineering were not necessarily directed and run by ‘Nazis’. They were run by power elites. There was a power compromise between industrialists, landowners, civil servants, academics, judges and the Third Reich, and for a long time it seemed to be going very well.”
So were the elite actually happy with how things turned out? “If you interviewed Germans in May 1945, you would always get the same story, which was: ‘We didn’t know, we didn’t want this, we couldn’t do anything, etc.’ And some people, like Franz von Papen, were tried at Nuremburg and they would say things like: ‘We did not really collaborate, or we just did our duty, or we did not like this but we did collaborate in order to prevent even worse things from happening.’ This is the main lie that conservative elites created after 1945, and it remains influential today.
“During the Third Reich itself, however, I think the views of most Germans were positive. They would say: ‘Well, this is deplorable and we do not like that they are beating up people, or the
“Now they realised that this Nazi monster they had helped create could no longer be tamed”
concentration camp of Dachau, the exaggerations; some of them are drunks and they’re not really cultivated; these are terrible people…’ But there was a general sense of admiration for what they were achieving. In two to three months, the leftwing parties had been broken; the communists and socialists had disappeared; the trade unions and parliament had been crushed. The wildest dreams of the conservatives had been exceeded.
“And then, if you go on a few years, Hitler seemed to be achieving everything that he tried. Poland was overrun in no time, and France – where a previous generation had fought for three months to advance 500 metres – was crushed within six weeks. Summer 1940 was an unexpected moment of absolute triumph where Hitler got support from basically everywhere, including most of the German power elites. Of course, you had anti-Nazis. But if we speak about the majority of the power elites, then the story between 1933 and 1941 is one of stable support, and sometimes of enthusiastic support.”
It was only when the war began to turn against the Third Reich that the real rupture between the German elite and Nazism began – a rupture that culminated in the July 1944 von Stauffenberg plot, which was led by conservative officers who were now prepared to risk their lives to bring down a regime that so many of their fellows had acquiesced with. “Heroes, no doubt, but a tiny minority within their own milieu,” as Malinowski puts it.
Almost 75 years from the fall of the Third Reich, the role of the elite in facilitating Nazism remains a live topic. Recently, descendants of the former German royals have been in negotiations with state authorities to claim back their historic property, and the decision could hinge on the extent to which the Kaiser’s son, Crown Prince Wilhelm, may have supported the Nazis in the 1930s. "It seems historians, lawyers and journalists will go back to questions that are still not entirely answered: who was responsible for January 1933 and what was the role of Germany’s elites in this process?" comments Malinowski.
Meanwhile, the far right is on the march again – in Europe and beyond. So what warnings might this history have for us today? Says Malinowski: “The most important lessons of 1933 and the Third Reich are about the dark sides of modernity and the general vulnerability of democracy. It’s a fragile system. Any democracy losing the support of the people will fail and a democracy losing the support of its elites will fail too – especially if these elites are working against the democracy and trying to find an ‘alternative’.
“This was the specific situation of the Weimar Republic, and it is the specific historical responsibility of the German power elites that they never came to any kind of peace treaty with the idea of a republic and democracy before 1945.”
“Within months of the Nazis’ rise to power, the wildest dreams of the conservatives had been exceeded”