Document created: 31 December 03
Air University Review, May-June
1972
Lieutenant Colonel
Philip M. Flammer
Heinrich Himmler once said that it is “the curse of the great to have to walk over corpses.” While the colorless Himmler, whose “life substance,” in the words of Joachim Fest, “was so thinly spread that he had to borrow from outside,” could hardly be called a great man himself, he spoke true of two of the greatest despots of all time, Hitler and Napoleon. For among the “accomplishments” of these two men easily the most spectacular was the waste of a few million lives in the name of “destiny.” “Throughout my life I have sacrificed everything—serenity, self-interest, and happiness—to my destiny” is the way Napoleon put it. To Hitler, “the miracle of our age” was “that you [Germany] have found me, that you have found me among some many millions!”
Napoleon, like Hitler, could rarely speak of glory, destiny, etc., except in the first person singular. “My will is that of the people;” he once said, “my right’s are the people’s; my honor, my glory, and my happiness cannot be other than the honor, the glory, and the happiness of France.” Consequently, he took scant notice of those doing the real sacrificing, and he entirely hid from himself the fact that his self-interest—”insatiable ambition” were the words two of his marshals used—was to him, at least, synonymous with his destiny. Thus, once the sacrifice to be made had been divorced from the objects to be sacrificed, he could easily “walk over corpses” without a troubled conscience. When some difficulty arose over the crowning of Josephine, for example, he announced, “She will be crowned, even if it costs me [emphasis added] 200,000 men.” On the other hand, Hitler felt that his mission of German expansion and solidarity must be imposed by force. In order to do so, he instilled ruthlessness in his people, a typical example being in his address to the Wehrmacht commanders on August 22, 1939: “Close your hearts to pity. Act brutally. Eighty million people must obtain what is their right. Their existence must be made secure. The strongest man is right. The greatest harshness.” Totally devoid of empathy, he once greeted the news that a large number of young officers were being lost in the war with the casual observation, “But that’s what the young men are there for!” Indeed, it is quite true that this egomaniac had a “fundamental inability to respect or even to grasp the rights of others and their claim to happiness.”
In recent months, two noteworthy books have appeared to set Napoleon and Hitler—along with select members of the latter’s entourage—in perspective. The first, entitled Napoleon, is a biography by the well-known French author André Castelot, who describes his work as an account “of the most unusual life story of all time.”* It may be so. Certainly his book is impressive, both for the remarkable detail on Napoleon’s private life and, even more important, for helping the reader to see the world as, apparently, Napoleon saw it. For example, Castelot devotes a great deal of space to Napoleon’s amorous adventures, for he, like Mussolini, had strong desires and was not inclined to patience. The civil code, naval warfare, etc., on the other hand, while items of far-reaching consequence in the long run, receive the same brief attention that Napoleon gave them.
* André Castelot, Napoleon, trans. Guy Daniels (New York: Harper & Row, 1971, $12.50), 627 pages.
Joachim Fest’s The Face of the Third Reich is easily one of the best books to appear in the last decade and certainly one of the most informative about the Nazi era.** His is an analytic approach to the personality and “psychological background” of the Nazi leaders, a courageous venture, for Mr. Fest is entering areas of character, motives, weaknesses, and strengths where conservative historians traditionally fear to tread. Yet such is Fest’s knowledge of his subject, including the psychological and political patterns of totalitarianism, that he writes with almost unquestionable authority.
** Joachim C. Fest, The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership, trans. Michael Bullock (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970, $10.00), xiii and 402 pages.
This reviewer, a trained historian, found Fest’s daring venture most rewarding. Indeed, in the very areas Fest describes lay the answers to some of the heretofore perplexing dilemmas about the Nazi leaders. Without this perspective, for example, it is almost incomprehensible to the modern member of a political democracy how Himmler, who hated hunting and whose dinner could be ruined by an account of the slaughtering, could sincerely say at one point: “Nature is so marvelously beautiful and every animal has a right to live,” only to say at another time, “Whether the other peoples live in comfort or perish of hunger interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture.” He often told the SS that “the Jewish people is to be exterminated”; yet in April 1945, just before the war ended, he warmly greeted a representative of the World Jewish Congress with the astonishing words, “Welcome to Germany, Herr Masur. It is time you Jews and we National Socialists buried the hatchet.”
Fest shows Himmler to have been a utopian idealist rather than the commonly accepted epitome of evil. Substituting politics and race for religion, he was strikingly like the blessed Cardinal Bellarmine, who would not take the lice from his clothes since the unfortunate creatures were doomed never to enjoy theological bliss. (The cardinal apparently saw no contradiction between his kindness to lice and his conscienceless commitment of a few thousand people to the stake for doctrinal unorthodoxy.) Himmler, for one, would have seen little difference between using the inquisition to ensure church unity and using mass genocide to ensure Aryan supremacy.
Two basic themes emerge from Fest and Castelot, neither of which should be surprising to modern man. One is the marriage of ambition with opportunity, with resultant corruption of power. The other is man’s striking willingness in times of stress and uncertainty to surrender his personal freedoms for totalitarian security, a theme so powerful that the celebrated Erich Fromm devotes a book to it, aptly entitled Escape from Freedom.
Napoleon, as Castelot makes marvelously clear, was governed by an all-consuming, insatiable ambition. At one point he writes, “As early as 1807 Napoleon had admitted that he loved power as a musician loves his violin. He wanted to enjoy that power without limitation; and he wanted to enjoy it alone.” In even more brutal words, Fest writes of Hitler, “. . . great as was the influence of outdated nationalist, ideological or missionary motives, it was the purely hegemonic aims that overlay all others. The urge to dominate Europe, and ultimately the world, although backed by ideological and racial arguments, was at bottom nothing more nor less than the desire to exercise sovereignty.”
Because he is writing about a single person, Castelot is in the better position to show the ultimate corruption of Napoleon by the power he so ardently desired and exercised. Yet Fest, no less than Castelot, shows how Hitler, like Napoleon, became a despot without realizing it or ever acknowledging it. In neither case is it surprising that the early oaths and promises to the French and German people were inevitably distorted and broken until the destiny of the French Empire and the Third Reich became synonymous with the destiny of the Emperor and the Fuhrer. Napoleon’s statement in 1814 that “it may cost me my throne, but I will drag the whole world down in its ruins” closely parallels Hitler’s fulminations about the fate of Germany in his last hours under the Reich Chancellery.
The overall corruption naturally carried with it other similarities. The towering rages, the inability to tolerate criticism of any kind, the shifting of blame to others, the win-or-lose-all philosophy—these abetted the gradual escape from reality to illusion. In short, neither appears, in the aggregate, to have been the sort of person one should choose for a hero. For a variety of reasons, fate has been kind to Napoleon. His legend has grown and been embellished until he is safely (and sacredly) enshrined in people’s minds and in an impressive tomb in Les Invalides. Hitler, on the other hand, primarily because he carried his nation to the point of complete collapse, left behind, as Fest puts it, “ruins, and nothing else.”
To the student of absolutism, the tyrannical behavior of Hitler and Napoleon would be expected. Indeed, their attitudes towards their exalted positions differed little from that of such claimants to ultimate sovereignty as Xerxes or Louis XIV. With Hitler and Napoleon, what is most striking is the difference in the two personalities, which lends credence to the view that such meteoric careers are largely the result of a fortuitous meeting between a unique opportunity and an opportunist’s ability to recognize and exploit it.
Napoleon is everywhere recognized as a military genius—no less a personage than Clausewitz called him the “God of War.” Hitler, on the other hand, had some understanding of offensive warfare, but his overall “moodiness and lack of self-control introduced a destructive element of unrest into all operations,” which, along with “his excessive distrust, disqualified him from any sort of generalship.” Napoleon was outgoing, almost an epicurean pagan, who overwhelmed people with his personality. He could easily and selfishly win the sincere affections of the most recalcitrant females. Hitler was a loner of extraordinarily unstable temperament, so inept with women that of the six who were close to him during his career, five attempted or committed suicide. His power lay not in his personality but in his rhetoric (one foreign diplomat confessed that, while listening to his stirring speeches, it had “repeatedly happened” that “for a few minutes he became a convinced National Socialist”) and in his skillful use of what he called the “secret doctrine.” Under this doctrine, “only the ignorant populace. . . took part in the actual fighting for ideas; it was really the methods by which these ideas were propagated that held the key to power or impotence.”
Overall, Napoleon was a man of undoubted genius, not only in respect to organization but also in capacity of intellect. Hitler had only contempt for the intellectual. He was “the hopeless prisoner of his own negative impulses,” and he had a “murky, amorphous personality which, with its deformities, dullness and petit bourgeois drabness, ensured shattering failure every time he devoted himself seriously to any occupation.” Fest would be the last to equate “the obviously inferior features of Hitler’s personality with lack of intelligence or actual stupidity.” He concludes, however, that “only respect for the dead and the ruins he left behind forbid us to dismiss this life as no more than a nauseating, vulgar and bloody horror story, which fundamentally is all it amounts to. . . .”
It is this disparity between genius and the commonplace that spotlights one of the lessons of tyranny. Obviously, the appearance and rise of such men stem only partly from personality traits. Opportunity, rising like a mist from the turmoil and insecurity of certain periods, is at least as important. The terrible insecurity resulting from the French Revolution’s devouring itself is matched by the early Twentieth Century’s “turning away of almost all European powers from reason and realism; the disenchantment with traditional values and ethical standards, accompanied by a lack of will to defend any moral and legal principles whatever; a shortsighted striving for advantage and security as well as, in particular, a susceptibility to illusion. . . .” Under such stress, the German people, in the words of Fest, “surrendered themselves ever more feverishly to the redeemer cult that was systematically developed around the person of the ‘Fuhrer.’”
All of which leads one to wonder what Napoleon could have done with the technical aids available to Hitler and what Hitler would have been without them.
The other basic theme, man’s propensity for sacrificing his freedom to another human whom he can worship as the ultimate in earthly wisdom and justice, is not directly mentioned by Castelot, although it is very much a part of his book. Fest, on the other hand, takes direct aim at this oft-mentioned weakness and wonders whether “the universal precondition for man’s self-renunciation, which is not something fostered only by totalitarian regimes but is joyfully embraced by millions of people of their own free will, is not his lack of intellectual and moral direction, his personal weakness, his blind hunger for the apparent certainties of a universal philosophy.”
If this is so (both Fest and Castelot make strong cases for it), the civilian and soldier the world over have much to learn from the study of those periods of stress and strain wherein the era is ripe for “the man” and the man appears to match the era. This is clear when one considers that of the three great revolutions—the French, the Russian, and the American—only the latter fell short of despotism, and that primarily because, unlike the others, it was not really ideologically oriented.
It goes almost without saying that both Castelot and Fest should make fascinating reading to the American soldier. The latter, often a “citizen soldier” in outlook, of necessity finds himself part of an inherently undemocratic organization pledged to protect a democratic one. If he finds himself concerned with problems of loyalty, the era of the French Revolution and Napoleon and the history of the Third Reich offer lessons of great consequence. It was the French Revolution that turned the supreme allegiance of the soldier from his monarch to the state, thus adding to his profession the sterling honor that inherently goes with existing for the protection and well-being of others. Napoleon showed how easily a man of genius could subvert the honor of soldiery to his own ends by convincing a troubled society that his personal advancement was synonymous with the best interests of the empire. Yet even the Emperor could not undo that which had been done, and Louis XVIII, on returning to the throne, had to accept the army as an instrument of the state rather than a personal possession.
Because of the technical aids available to him, Hitler proved a greater despot than Napoleon, and the sell-out of the army to this tyrant is one of the saddest and most remarkable stories in modern history. In theory, the German soldier was pledged to the state, yet that did not prevent him from taking (under pressure) the personal pledge of loyalty to Hitler, who was also using the assumption that the interests of the head of state and the state were synonymous. Unaware or unheeding of the warnings of history, including the statement by Cincinnatus some 2400 years ago that it is invariably fatal for any individual or nation to place its ultimate faith in one man as “the repository of wisdom and justice,” the officers and men generally clung tenaciously to their oath to the Fuhrer, even after he had broken his promises a thousand times over and his interests had obviously turned so far against the state as to provide for its ultimate ruin. Thus, the spineless and toady Field Marshal Keitel could see in the 20 July plot of 1944 against Hitler’s life “nothing but injured pride, frustrated ambition and office-seeking!” Yet, it was in a similar vein that the great professional officer, former Field Marshal von Rundstedt, when asked at Nuremberg whether he had ever thought of getting rid of Hitler, answered “firmly and unhesitatingly that he was a soldier, not a traitor.”
In one of the most impressive chapters in the book, entitled “General von X,” Fest gives his view of what was wrong with the German officer corps in general and the famed General Staff in particular. Hitler was to discover, he writes, that “the secret of its [the General Staff’s] soul. . . was a humiliation; an opportunism that thought itself crafty, totally devoid of convictions, almost exclusively concerned with self-interest, ‘ready for anything.’” As for the German officer corps, “. . . it was not solely the National Socialist party officer who damaged the reputation and prestige of the Army. It was no less the obsequiousness of so many, the total lack of moral courage in so many, that dulled the lustre of undoubtedly real soldierly and professional virtues and did more to dishonour the image of the officer corps than all the reproaches of its bitterest opponents.”
Maxwell AFB, Alabama
Lieutenant Colonel Philip M. Flammer (Ph.D., Yale University) is Associate Editor, Air University Review. After flying training, he was assigned to 1st Weather Group, Offutt AFB, Nebraska. Next at Hq Air Weather Service, Andrews AFB, Maryland, he was Chief, Historical Division. Except for two years at Yale under the AFIT program, he was wit the Air Force Academy History Department from 1958 until 1971. Colonel Flammer’s articles have appeared in Air University Review, Air Power Histories, and Military Review.
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