Leon Trotsky
“For the first thirty years of his life, Adolf Hitler was
a nobody. Here lies the utterly compelling paradox.
Richard Evans
“Because I knew better, I was disturbed from the start by
the one-sided delegation of blame on German industry, banks, etc.”
Gotz Aly
Although the figure of Adolf Hitler looms large over Richard
Evans' new book, it is first and foremost a biographical study of Hitler's
inner circle. It offers a new way to understand the rise of Fascism in Germany
without conceding too much ground to other historians, such as the right-wing
Daniel Goldhagen, who blamed “ordinary Germans” for the rise of Nazi Germany.[1]
Never one to shy away from controversy, Evans, in his
introduction, makes the bold claim that without Hitler, there would have been
no attempt at a “Thousand Year Reich”, and the Holocaust would have never
happened. I am at a loss the see how Evans would have come to that conclusion.
I am pretty sure that the German bourgeoisie would have found a willing
executioner somewhere amongst its Petty Bourgeoisie.
But if we are going to indulge in counterfactuals, a
better one would be the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky once said, “
Had I not been present in 1917 in Petersburg, the October Revolution would
still have taken place – on the condition that Lenin was present and in
command. If neither Lenin nor I had been present in Petersburg, there would
have been no October Revolution: the leadership of the Bolshevik Party would
have prevented it from occurring – of this, I have not the slightest doubt! If
Lenin had not been in Petersburg, I doubt whether I could have managed to
conquer the resistance of the Bolshevik leaders ... But I repeat, granted the
presence of Lenin, the October Revolution would have been victorious anyway”.[2]
Evans draws upon previous writers, such as Joachim Fest’s
bestseller The Face of the Third Reich, published well over half a century ago. The
book is meticulously researched and uses large secondary literature as well as
recently published primary sources. As
Mary Fulbrook correctly states, Evans “ stands on the shoulders of giants,” acknowledging
his debt to Ian Kershaw, whose two-volume biography of Hitler has so far not
been surpassed.
However not wanting to be too negative Mary Fulbrook’s’
Bystander society, Laurence Rees The Nazi Mind and Gotz Aly Hitler’s beneficiaries
is now joined by Richards Evans in promoting a view point that not only Nazis but
large swathes of the German population were responsible for war and the
subsequent Holocaust. Indeed, Evans does not go quite so far as Daniel
Goldhagen so in her review Fulbrook, is critical of Evans's attack on
historians like Daniel Goldhagen, who shift the blame for the holocaust away
from the Nazis and blame “ordinary Germans”. She writes, “ Antisemitism of
varying hues is, of course, a refrain throughout, but oddly, the Holocaust
remains slightly out of focus, with only cursory and slightly misleading
summaries of key controversies, as between Christopher Browning and Daniel
Goldhagen. Evans rattles rapidly over several approaches, ending up – surely
unintentionally? – by implying that recent scholarly consensus around
“interpretations that stress the specificities of the German situation”
necessarily entails support for Goldhagen’s ahistorical reification of a
supposed German mentality of “eliminationist antisemitism”.
In noting the impact of the Law for the Restoration of
the Professional Civil Service of April 7, 1933, on “individuals of ‘non-Aryan
descent’ or in other words, Jews”, Evans, in effect, compounds Nazi assumptions
by omitting to point out that “non- Aryans” covered even individuals with only
a single Jewish grandparent, some previously unaware of any Jewish ancestry or
not considering themselves Jewish by religion, let alone “race”. The
intricacies of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 are similarly skated over too
briefly, inadvertently buttressing the notion of clear distinctions between
“Jews” and non-Jewish Germans. The complexities arising from historical
assimilation and high rates of conversion and intermarriage in Germany could
have been explored in more detail in the chapter on Luise Solmitz.”[3]
That Evans approaches the problem of German Fascism
through “the potted biographies of 18 men and five women” can only take one so
far. Although Evans does not subscribe that all Hitler’s henchmen were made up
of madmen or psychopaths, his grasp of how these men and women were not only
able to pursue a genocidal war and murder 6 million Jews in the Holocaust is
tenuous at best. The first step of any historian studying this subject is to
comprehend the forces that drive the social—or, more precisely, the
antisocial—activity of man. Unless this is undertaken first, then Historical
science and political theory will be seen to be helpless in the presence of
such unfathomable evil.
In his review of Evan’s book historian Richard Overy
makes this startlingly inaccurate point “Those who gravitated to the Nazi
movement and gained power and status as a result made a conscious decision.
Evans is at pains to emphasise that Germans did have a choice in whether to
reject the regime, or what it asked them to do, and he cites at the end the
story of a German woman from Hamburg who fled to Denmark in protest when her
Jewish employer was arrested. At the same time, he rightly reminds us that this
was a regime rooted, ultimately, in the exercise of terror. Under such
circumstances, the room for choice is limited. Outright rejection of the regime
meant a couple of SA thugs on the doorstep dragging you off for a beating, or
worse; choosing to oppose risked the guillotine or the camp. The number of
brave people who did reject was small. For most people, choice was
circumscribed.”[4]
Overy leaves out one minor detail: the defeat
of the German workers' movement. When fascism came to power, the working class
ceased to exist as an organised political and social force. Neither Evans nor
Overy examines the role of Stalinism and Social |democracy that led to the rise
of Fascism and the smashing of the workers' movement.
In Evans' book, the socialist movement is all but
invisible. Not a single reference is to be found, in the course of his book, to
Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Ferdinand Lassalle, August Bebel or Wilhelm
Liebknecht. He does not mention the anti-socialist laws of 1878–90 implemented
by the regime of Bismarck. The Social Democratic Party, the first mass party in
history, which by 1912 held the largest number of seats in the German
Reichstag, is not mentioned. There is no reference to the 1918 revolution or
the uprising of the Spartacus League. These omissions cannot be explained as an
oversight. Evans cannot deal with the German socialist movement because its
historical existence represents a refutation of the theoretical premise of his
book. There was a socialist opposition to German Fascism. The German working
class were betrayed by Stalinism and Social democracy.
As the Marxist writer David North points out, “ the
victory of fascism was not the direct and inevitable product of anti-Semitism,
but the outcome of a political process shaped by the class struggle. In that
process, the critical factor was the crisis of the German socialist movement,
which was, it must be pointed out, part of a broader political crisis of
international socialism. Hitler’s rise was not irresistible, and his victory
was not inevitable. The Nazis were able to come to power only after the mass
socialist and communist parties had shown themselves, in the course of the
entire postwar period, to be politically bankrupt and utterly incapable of
providing the distraught masses with a way out of the disaster created by
capitalism. Yet without an examination
of the emergence of the German socialist workers' movement, it is impossible to
understand the nature and significance of modern anti-Semitism.[5]
Although Evans is coming to the end of an illustrious
career, he still maintains his indifference to orthodox Marxism. Not only does
he ignore the writings of the Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky on the rise of German
Fascism, but a simple study of his other major works including the superb The Class, the Party and the Leadership
pamphlet would have yielded an infinitely better understanding of the rise of
German Fascism than countless academic studies that he has no doubt studied.
Trotsky writes, “There is an ancient,
evolutionary-liberal epigram: Every people gets the government it deserves.
History, however, shows that the same people may in the course of a
comparatively brief epoch get very different governments (Russia, Italy,
Germany, Spain, etc.) and that the order of these governments doesn’t at all
proceed in the same direction: from despotism – to freedom as was imagined by
the evolutionist liberals. The secret is this, that a people is comprised of
hostile classes, and the classes themselves are comprised of different and in
part antagonistic layers which fall under different leadership; furthermore,
every people falls under the influence of other peoples who are likewise
comprised of classes. Governments do not express the systematically growing
“maturity” of a “people” but are the product of the struggle between different
classes and the different layers within the same class, and, finally, the
action of external forces – alliances, conflicts, wars and so on. To this
should be added that a government, once it has established itself, may endure
much longer than the relationship of forces which produced it. It is precisely
out of this historical contradiction that revolutions, coup d’etats,
counterrevolutions, etc., arise.
The very same dialectic approach is necessary in dealing
with the question of the leadership of a class. Imitating the liberals, our
sages tacitly accept the axiom that every class gets the leadership it
deserves. In reality, leadership is not at all a mere “reflection” of a class
or the product of its free creativeness. Leadership is shaped in the process of
clashes between the different classes or the friction between the different
layers within a given class. Having once arisen, the leadership invariably rises
above its class and thereby becomes predisposed to the pressure and influence
of other classes. The proletariat may “tolerate” for a long time a leadership
that has already suffered a complete inner degeneration but has not as yet had
the opportunity to express this degeneration amid great events. A great
historic shock is necessary to reveal sharply the contradiction between the
leadership and the class. The mightiest historical shocks are wars and
revolutions. Precisely for this reason, the working class is often caught
unawares by war and revolution. But even in cases where the old leadership has
revealed its internal corruption, the class cannot immediately improvise a new
leadership, especially if it has not inherited from the previous period strong
revolutionary cadres capable of utilising the collapse of the old leading
party. The Marxist, i.e. dialectic and not scholastic interpretation of the
inter-relationship between a class and its leadership does not leave a single
stone unturned of our author’s legalistic sophistry.[6]
Richard Overy, at the end of his review, poses the
question Could it happen again? The simple answer to that question is that it
already has. Trump in America is the first fascist in the White House. In the English-language
edition of Why Are They Back? Historical Falsification, Political Conspiracy
and the Return of Fascism in Germany Christian Vandreier makes this point “In
Germany, for the first time since the end of the Nazi regime a far-right party
[Alternative for Germany—AfD] has 90 deputies in the federal parliament. “Why
Are They Back? is about how this shift to the right was politically and
ideologically prepared. “The fascists are not a mass movement but are a hated
minority. However, the ruling elite is once again promoting fascism and
right-wing ideology to suppress opposition to its militarism and worsening
social inequality… That is why an independent movement of the working class is
the only way to fight this danger.”
Notes
Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary
Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996)
Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany
(New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971),
F.L. Carsten, The German Workers and the Nazis
Why Are They Back? Historical Falsification, Political
Conspiracy and the Return of Fascism in Germany, Christian Vandreier
Trotsky, Diary in Exile (London 1958), pages 53-54. www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1989/trotsky1/00-preface.html#n2
The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel
Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing
Executioners-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html
The Rise of Trump and the Crisis of American Democracy- Mehring Books 2025
Chance and necessity in history: E.H. Carr and Leon
Trotsky compared
January 200 Ann Talbot
[1]
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust Paperback – 3
Mar. 1997
[2]
Trotsky, Diary in Exile (London 1958), pages 53-54. www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1989/trotsky1/00-preface.html#n2
[3] Ordinary people: The
Führer’s accomplices, high and low
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/history/twentieth-century-onwards-history/hitlers-people-richard-j-evans-book-review-mary-fulbrook
[4] Hitler’s People by
Richard Evans review-https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/hitlers-people-richard-evans-review
[5]
The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of
Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html
[6]
The Class, the Party and the Leadership https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/party.htm
