A. J. P. Taylor, Germany’s Lost Leader: An Inquiry into the Causes and Consequences of European Discontents (Atheneum: 1961, 296 pp., $4.50)
Evaluating a statesman whose career was cut off prematurely is a challenging task. There are, for example, many opinions about what course Austro-Hungarian history would have followed if Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne, had not fallen to an assassin’s bullet in June 1914. Today’s world might well be very different, not only because the Great War almost certainly would not have broken out at that moment in time but because the heir apparently held very different views from his septuagenarian uncle, Emperor Franz Joseph I. The nephew would have ascended to the throne upon Franz Joseph’s death in November 1916 and perhaps would have taken the steps needed to rescue the Dual Monarchy from the decay that was so evident in the old emperor’s last years. We will never know. History tells only a single story.
In Germany’s Lost Leader, the eminent historian A. J. P. Taylor has taken up the challenge of divining the arc that history might have followed if Chancellor Adolf Hitler had survived the Rhineland Crisis of 1936, when the German General Staff, convinced that France would react militarily to troop movements into territory demilitarized by the Treaty of Versailles and that Germany could not win the ensuing war, seized control of Berlin in February 1936.
Hitler either committed suicide or was murdered. (Taylor presents strong evidence for the latter.) His death was followed by a year of military rule, then a referendum in which Germans voted by a large margin to invite Crown Prince Wilhelm to assume the title of “King of Germany”, “emperor” being regarded as too likely to shock Allied sensibilities. With the permission of his exiled father, Wilhelm III took up the role of constitutional monarch and presided over what Taylor characterizes as an “anti-socialist reaction” that led inexorably to the Russo-German War of 1939 to 1941, in which Germany and Poland, supported offstage by Britain and France, toppled the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and, as Taylor puts it, “returned Europe to the Capitalist Ascendancy that the Great War had unsettled”.
Conventional historiography has relegated Hitler to a minor place. His fall is seen as the inevitable outcome of the controversies aroused by his economic policies, his “militarism” and his alleged mistreatment of Germany’s Jewish population. Furthermore, several historians, Hugh Trevor-Roper most prominent among them, insist that Hitler planned to carry out the same anti-Bolshevist crusade as King Wilhelm.
Taylor comprehensively rejects such interpretations. He argues, first and foremost, that Hitler was an orthodox socialist, as demonstrated by the way in which he reshaped the German economy. While private ownership was left in place as a necessary concession to powerful reactionary forces, the owners of capital were stripped of all effective control, and their share of the usufructs was steadily reduced. The chancellor denounced Bolshevism, but, according to Taylor, that was a tactical stance not much different from the mutual animosity of Britain’s and America’s capitalist parties. “National socialism and international socialism represented trivially different paths to the same destination.”
Hitler could, on occasion, be brutal, as when he violently purged the ill-disciplined Sturmabteilung, an event that his enemies labeled “the Night of the Long Knives”. Stalin could be brutal, too. Taylor regrets that “the victory of socialism cannot always be a game of patty-cake” but observes that, unlike the daily brutality of capitalism, the limited episodes of socialist violence served a worthy and necessary end.
During Hitler’s political career, critics tarred him with two serious accusations that lingered after his deposition and death. They blacken his image to this day.
First, he was accused of antisemitism, even of wishing to “cleanse” Germany of Judaism. That he made many unambiguously antisemitic statements, Taylor concedes but also insists on placing them in context. Hitler lived in Vienna between 1907 and 1913, during the period when Mayor Karl Lueger’s Christian Social Party dominated the city’s politics. Lueger was a modernizer who utilized anti-Jewish rhetoric to win the votes of the Viennese lower classes but did little or nothing to embody that prejudice in policy. Taylor believes that Hitler learned from Lueger and deployed antisemitism to the same end, to attract voters who might otherwise have supported rival socialist parties. Unfortunately, the tactic got out of hand. Taylor deplores the expulsion of Jewish professors from universities, the legal profession and other sectors of society but asserts that those were private actions that Hitler neither inspired nor could have prevented.
Second, Hitler’s youthful tract Mein Kampf, a blend of autobiography and grandiose political theorizing, has been taken as an outline of the policies that he intended to pursue once in power. Written in 1924 and 1925, following an abortive coup d’état for which Hitler spent time in prison, the book advocates expanding Germany’s territory to accommodate a growing population. Lebensraum, as Hitler calls it, is to be obtained by Drang nach Osten, a “drive to the East”. The concept had floated around German nationalist circles since the 19th Century, inspired by medieval German conquests of the lands between the Elbe and the Oder. It stirred the blood. Taylor compares it to Hitler’s actual policies and finds no sign that the mature chancellor still held to the fantasies of the young agitator.
Chancellor Hitler did not, in practice, deviate far from the path of his Weimar Republic predecessors. He “wanted to free Germany from the restrictions of the peace treaty; to restore a great German army; and then to make Germany the greatest power in Europe from her natural weight”. It is significant that his monarchist successors had very similar goals. They even undertook their own Drang nach Osten, albeit without the objective of territorial acquisition, when they backed Poland’s truculent defiance of the USSR.
Taylor concludes with sober speculation about what “might have been”. Had Hitler been allowed to bring his program to completion, Europe’s two largest and most economically advanced nations would have been socialist, differing only in the extent to which they had brought the means of production fully under social control. Taylor does not doubt that Germany and Russia would have joined forces to resist and ultimately overthrow the hegemony of the capitalist powers. There would have been no Russo-German War, and it is highly probable that the successes of socialist government would have made their philosophy irresistibly attractive to peoples elsewhere.
One can’t be certain, of course. Hitler could have come to grief in any number of other ways. To Germany’s old guard, he was an outsider, indeed a usurper, whom they would never take into their bosoms. Sooner or later, they might have found a way to oust him. Supposing, though, that he had survived all perils and remained chancellor for another decade, there is one statement that can be made with confidence: Germany today would be in far better condition than under the present King Louis Ferdinand’s backward-looking reign.
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