As We Go Marching by John T. Flynn

Author:John T. Flynn [Flynn, John T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Faculty Press, Inc.
Published: 2011-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

Louis P. Lochner, Associated Press representative in Berlin from 1924 to 1941, says: “Hitler is convinced of the divine origin of his mission, convinced that he is commissioned by divine Providence to acquire for Germany the leadership of Europe for a thousand years.”9

Hermann Rauschning, who was president of the Danzig Senate until he broke with the party and whose books contain the most scathing repudiations of its behavior, says of the old party members that there was an honest belief among them that they were laboring in the cause of their country. Otto Strasser, brother of Gregor, leader of the socialist wing of the movement until murdered by Hitler, says that when Hitler began he was not an unprincipled demagogue but was genuinely convinced of the righteousness of his cause.

We cannot afford in so serious a matter to take our estimates of this movement from the caricaturists who make hideous pictures of the German leaders. History at the cartoon level isolates only the unpleasant features and events and then exaggerates them to gain its effect. There are men of dark and sinister character in national socialism—a burning and scornful nihilist like Goebbels, a predatory sybarite like Goering, ruthless and sadistic beings like Himmler, Ley, and Streicher. But there were great numbers of men who were, if not good men, at least no worse than certain important politicians to be found in this and other countries. The first apostles—Feder, Drexler, Harrer, and Dingfelder—were the common or garden variety of crackpot which flourishes in this country, where we have some precious specimens at this moment in positions of great influence. The stronger leaders who came later—Gregor Strasser and Kock, socialists, Darré, Frick, and Schacht, Thyssen, Hugenberg, were men representing special theories or powerful groups differing no whit from the type found here. There was that mixture of good, bad, and indifferent men, burning zealots of social theories, practical politicians, industrial, labor, farm, and class leaders of all sorts, approving or winking at acts of violence and sinister deals under the influence of the loose morals of revolutionaries. We are not unfamiliar with this phenomenon in America, where the most respectable citizens in the interest of party solidarity and victory do not draw away from collaboration with such persons as Jimmy Hines of New York, Pendergast of Kansas City, Frank Hague of New Jersey, and that precious collection of statesmen who rule Chicago.

We are accustomed now to look at the men who made national socialism possible through the medium of two monstrous acts—the European war and the persecution of the Jews. Here we have been trying to determine the political and economic content of national socialism and the forces that brought it to power. We are not examining the roots of the World War or the guilt of the attack on Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia. In a sense these aggressions were the inevitable consequence of the policy of militarism which national socialism adopted for various reasons and which leads always to war, so that had it not culminated in these attacks it would have struck its blows in some other direction.

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