Hermann Rauschning, an early Nazi who broke with Hitler, encapsulated this point when he famously dubbed Hitler's movement "The Revolution of Nihilism." According to Rauschning, Hitler was a pure opportunist devoid of loyalty to men or ideas — unless you call hatred of Jews an idea — and willing to break oaths, liquidate people, and say or do anything to achieve and hold power. "This movement is totally without ideals and lacks even the semblance of a program. Its commitment is entirely to action...the leaders choose action on a cold, calculating and cunning basis. For National Socialists there was and is no aim they would not take up or drop at a moment's notice, their only criterion being the strengthening of the movement." Rauschning exaggerated the case, but it is perfectly true that Nazi ideology cannot be summarized in a program or platform. It can be better understood as a maelstrom of prejudices, passions, hatreds, emotions, resentments, biases, hopes, and attitudes that, when combined, most often resembled a religious crusade wearing the mask of a political ideology.4
Contrary to his relentless assertions in Mein Kampf, Hitler had no great foundational ideas or ideological system. His genius lay in the realization that people wanted to rally to ideas and symbols. And so his success lay in the quintessential techniques, technologies, and icons of the twentieth century — marketing, advertising, radio, airplanes, TV (he broadcast the Berlin Olympics), film (think Leni Riefenstahl), and, most of all, oratory to massive, exquisitely staged rallies. Time and again in Mein Kampf, Hitler makes it clear that he believed his greatest gift to the party wasn't his ideas but his ability to speak. Conversely, his sharpest criticism of others seems to be that so-and-so was not a good speaker. This was more than simple vanity on Hitler's part. In the 1930s, in Germany and America alike, the ability to sway the masses through oratory was often the key to power. "Without the loudspeaker," Hitler once observed, "we would never have conquered Germany."5 Note the use of the word "conquered."
However, saying that Hitler had a pragmatic view of ideology is not to say that he didn't use ideology. Hitler had many ideologies. Indeed he was an ideology peddler. Few "great men" were more adept at adopting, triangulating, and blending different ideological poses for different audiences. This was the man, after all, who had campaigned as an ardent anti-Bolshevik, then signed a treaty with Stalin, and convinced Neville Chamberlain as well as Western pacifists that he was a champion of peace while busily (and openly) arming for war.6
Nevertheless, the four significant "ideas" we can be sure Hitler treasured in their own right were power concentrated in himself, hatred — and fear — of Jews, faith in the racial superiority of the German Volk, and, ultimately, war to demonstrate and secure the other three.
The popular conception that Hitler was a man of the right is grounded in a rich complex of assumptions and misconceptions about what constitutes left and right, terms that get increasingly slippery the more you try to nail them down. This is a problem we will be returning to throughout this book, but we should deal with it here at least as to how it related to Hitler and Nazism.
The conventional story of Hitler's rise to power goes something like this: Hitler and the Nazis exploited popular resentment over Germany's perceived illegitimate defeat in World War I ("the stab in the back" by communists, Jews, and weak politicians) and the unjust "peace" imposed at Versailles. Colluding with capitalists and industrialists eager to defeat the Red menace (including, in some of the more perfervid versions, the Bush family), the Nazis staged a reactionary coup by exploiting patriotic sentiment and mobilizing the "conservative" — often translated as racist and religious — elements in German society. Once in power, the Nazis established "state capitalism" as a reward to the industrialists, who profited further from the Nazis' push to exterminate the Jews.
Obviously, there's a lot of truth here. But it is not the whole truth. And as we all know, the most effective lies are the ones sprinkled with the most actual truths. For decades the left has cherry-picked the facts to form a caricature of what the Third Reich was about. Caricatures do portray a real likeness, but they exaggerate certain features for a desired effect. In the case of the Third Reich, the desired effect was to cast Nazism as the polar opposite of Communism. So, for example, the roles of industrialists and conservatives were grossly exaggerated, while the very large and substantial leftist and socialist aspects of Nazism were shrunk to the status of trivia, the obsession of cranks and Hitler apologists.
Consider William Shirer's classic, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which did so much to establish the "official" history of the Nazis. Shirer writes of the challenge facing Hitler when the radicals within his own party, led by the SA founder Ernst Rohm, wanted to carry out a "Second Revolution" that would purge the traditional elements in the German army, the aristocracy, the capitalists, and others. "The Nazis had destroyed the Left," Shirer writes, "but the Right remained: big business and finance, the aristocracy, the Junker landlords and the Prussian generals, who kept tight rein over the Army."7
Now, in one sense, this is a perfectly fair version of events. The Nazis had indeed "destroyed the Left," and "the Right" did remain. But ask yourself, how do we normally talk about such things? For example, the right in America was once defined by the so-called country-club Republicans. In the 1950s, starting with the founding of National Review, a new breed of self-described conservatives and libertarians slowly set about taking over the Republican Party. From one perspective one could say the conservative movement "destroyed" the Old Right in America. But a more accurate and typical way of describing these events would be to say that the New Right replaced the old one, incorporating many of its members in the process. Indeed, that is precisely why we refer to the rise of the New Right in the 1970s and early 1980s. Similarly, when a new generation of leftists asserted themselves in the 1960s via such organizations as the Students for a Democratic Society, we called these activists the New Left because they had edged aside the Old Left, who were their elders and in many cases their actual parents. In time the New Left and the New Right took over their respective parties — the Democrats in 1972, the Republicans in 1980 — and today they are simply the left and the right. Likewise, the Nazis did indeed take over — and not merely destroy — the German left.
Historians in recent years have revisited the once "settled" question of who supported the Nazis. Ideological biases once required that the "ruling classes" and the "bourgeoisie" be cast as the villains while the lower classes — the "proletariat" and the unemployed — be seen as supporting the communists and/or the liberal Social Democrats. After all, if the left is the voice for the poor, the powerless, and the exploited, it would be terribly inconvenient for those segments of society to support fascists and right-wingers — particularly if Marxist theory requires that the downtrodden be left-wing in their orientation.
That's pretty much gone out the window. While there's a big debate about how much of the working and lower classes supported the Nazis, it is now largely settled that very significant chunks of both constituted the Nazi base. Nazism and Fascism were both popular movements with support from every stratum of society. Meanwhile, the contention that industrialists and other fat cats were pulling Hitler's strings from behind the scenes has also been banished to the province of aging Marxists, nostalgic for paradigms lost. It's true that Hitler eventually received support from German industry, but it came late and generally tended to follow his successes rather than fund them. But the notion, grounded in Marxist gospel, that Fascism or Nazism was the fighting arm of capitalist reaction crashed with the Berlin Wall. (Indeed, the very notion that corporations are inherently right-wing is itself an ideological vestige of earlier times, as I discuss in a subsequent chapter on economics.)