Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (February 1, 1946)
ON THE RECORD —
Bavaria voted largely as it did before Hitler
By Dorothy Thompson
The outcome of the elections in Bavaria was to be expected. The country, like most agricultural communities the world over, is conservative and, of course, Catholic. It voted largely as it did before Hitler.
But there is another angle to German public opinion. Despite the fact that propaganda has presented Naziism as a “right wing” movement, it declared itself to be, and so appeared in the people’s eyes, as the “German revolution.”
Its leaders were not conservatives, nor “bourgeois,” nor did they emerge from such ranks. They were either broken-down army officers or frustrated intellectuals. They attacked all previous standards of values. They broke with ancient German traditions. They removed from important positions not only Socialists and Communists, but the carriers of traditional German culture. They demolished independent courts of law and substituted for the most important cases their “People’s Tribunals.”
They broke down parental authority. They completely overturned moral values. They split the Protestant church and persecuted the Catholic. They arrested monks and nuns on trumped-up charges. They forbade members of the SS to maintain membership in any Christian church.
They terrorized dissenters among industrialists equally with dissenters among workers and made them both subject to a party-state whose decrees took the place of legitimate law and were the foundation of a “new morality.”
Those who had espoused Naziism, in advance of its coming to power, as a “conservative revolution” – such as that advocated by Zehrer and Fried, of “Die Tat;” the writer, Ernst Juenger; the official, Hermann Rauschning – rapidly or eventually repudiated Naziism as a Nihilistic flaunting of every conservative value.
Nor did the opposition to Naziism – the active, heroic opposition – come only from the left. Karl Goerdeler, on whose head Hitler set a price of 1,000,000 marks, was, translated into American terms, a Willkie Republican. What he thought we know, for he left a testament. A large group of active Hitler opponents, many of whom paid for their activities on the gallows, was financed and supported by the Bosch works, and included some of its engineers and executives.
The young Helmuth von Moltke was a liberal whose life had been devoted to republican democratic government, land reform, international law, and strong independent trade unions. He died on the gallows, according to his wife, “for Christian and European civilization.” He was a Protestant. Ulric von Hassell, who was also hanged, believed in a federation of Europe and a society based on revitalized Christian and humane principles. Wilhelm Leuschner was a radical reformer, but a hater of government by purge. Theodor Haubach, a more radical Socialist, came in the later years of his life to believe above all in the restoration of civilized values as a necessity for any fruitful change. Ludwig Beck was a professional army officer who believed that another war in Europe would end European civilization.
The list is long and could be extended to cover many columns, but suffice it to say that the files of the SS, Gestapo, SD and other espionage organizations consistently complain that the most stubborn resistance and the resistance hardest to deal with was that of the churches.
Millions of Germans looked forward to the end of Naziism as a liquidation of a bloody regime of revolutionary lawlessness, and longed, above all else, for the restoration of legitimate government, of traditional law, of religious and intellectual freedom and standards, of family life, of order, of serenity. For them the thought of another “revolution,” carrying with it yet another transvaluation of values, and yet another reign of terror and purges, is the invitation to madness.
Three anti-Fascist movements are emerging in Europe: Social Democracy, Christian Democracy and Communism. None of them is “capitalist,” though the first two want definitely to set limits to state interference and control. Communism, except where Communist leaders have been intrenched by foreign armies or backed by foreign pressures, has made remarkably little headway and has made most in the countries farthest removed from the Red Army – for instance, in France.
It is an illusion, furthermore, to believe that economic reform and otherwise social conservatism are incompatible. They are the left and right arms of the same healthy organism. For whereas it is true that without change there is no progress, it is equally true that without tradition there is no civilization.
There are as many things, perhaps more things, that the Germans want to go back to than things they want to go forward to. Conservative Germans never set up gas chambers for liquidating men, women and children, nor practiced scientific vivisection upon human beings, nor set fire to synagogues, nor preached the erotic principles of the stud farm, nor organized youth into sadistic thugs.
Naziism, on the other hand, did give Germany a planned economy, that idol of the modem liberal and that idol for which oceans of blood have been spilt, and not only in Germany.
Dostoevsky once predicted “the earth will weep for its old gods.” Much of it already does, and especially those countries which have looked closest into the eyes of some of the new gods.