Hitler and his Court

Abstract

Now that the New Order is past, and the Thousand-Year Reich has crumbled in a decade, we are able at last, picking among the still-smoking rubble, to discover the truth about that fantastic and tragical episode. It is a chastening as well as an interesting study; for we discover not only the true facts, but the extent of our own errors. If we are to understand the extraordinary tale of Hitler’s last days, and appreciate the true character of Nazi politics, it is essential that we should first dispose of those errors. We must recognize that Hitler was not a pawn; that the Nazi state was not (in any significant use of the word) totalitarian; and that its leading politicians were not a government but a court — a court as negligible in its power of ruling, as incalculable in its capacity for intrigue, as any oriental sultanate.1 Further we must know the true political significance of the Nazi doctrine, and the extent to which it retained its purity and determined events in these last days; and the nature of Hitler’s struggle with the Army General Staff — the one dissident group which he could neither dissolve nor eliminate, and which, at one time, might have eliminated him. Unless such political facts and relations are understood, the events of April 1945 will be quite incomprehensible, and the labour of collecting and arranging that complicated mass of evidence will have been, in one sense, in vain: for while solving one mystery of fact, it will have added a greater mystery of interpretation.