The German people under the Nazis¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter argues that the Nazi regime, from its inception, systematically betrayed the middle-class base that had helped elevate it to power. Hitler crushed the working class with middle-class support, only to turn on the petty bourgeoisie in the 1934 June 30 purge, revealing the dictatorship as the ferocious agent of finance capital. The ruin of the middle class under Weimar was surpassed under Nazism, where crippling taxation and the destruction of this social layer accelerated beyond anything previously experienced. Incapable of resolving German capitalism’s crisis, the Nazi bureaucracy could only turn to war, forcing the masses to tighten their belts under the slogan “guns before butter.”
By the invasion of Poland, the Nazis’ mass base had largely evaporated. The working class had never supported them; the middle class was disillusioned. The 1939–40 victories produced only a temporary chauvinist wave, dissipated by the horrors of war against the Soviet Union. What paralysed the German masses from acting against the regime was fear of the consequences of Allied victory. Neither Stalin’s Soviet Union nor the Western Allies offered an attractive alternative; indeed, threats from the East were more frightening than those from the imperialist West. Stalin thus handed Goebbels a “secret weapon” for maintaining national unity.
Yet a unity founded on fear of defeat and backed by SS and Gestapo terror cannot endure amid mounting catastrophes. The Nazi Reich is disintegrating; Germany is now almost the last occupied country. Mass arrests of suspected opponents indicate the regime’s isolation. The Nazis increasingly resemble conquerors in a foreign land. Reports from Hamburg—Red Hamburg—describe SS men found knifed or with heads battered in, their weapons stolen. SS and Gestapo men dare not move singly at night in large industrial cities, but only in pairs or groups. These episodes mirror the intensity of hatred and thirst for revenge among the German masses.
All conditions for revolutionary upheaval are present. An accident sparking open collision between workers in one large industrial city and the Nazis would plunge all Germany into revolution. The situation resembles Italy before Mussolini’s fall, except that German masses fear the Allies. If they gain the opportunity to march, the German revolution will burst forth in a far more gigantic explosion than in Italy.