Living With Hitler: Liberal Democrats in the Third Reich by Eric Kurlander
Yale University Press, £25
Whatever happened to Germany’s liberals when Adolf Hitler rose to power? Unlike the socialists and communists, most escaped any form of persecution. Some, according to Professor Kurlander in this fascinating new study, actually experienced a “career renaissance”. The future President of the Federal Republic, Theodor Heuss, and Germany’s leading feminist Gertrud Baumer continued to edit learned journals and have their books and articles published. Weimar Democrat Hjalmar Schacht – who was subsequently acquitted at the Nuremberg trials despite having facilitated the expropriation of Jewish property – was appointed Hitler’s economics minister. Werner Stephen, one of the luminaries of German liberalism, became Josef Goebbels’ press attaché, while Rudolf Diels headed the Gestapo. Kurlander observes that liberal Germany played a major role in the demise of the Weimar Republic.
On March 23 1933 the Reichstag passed the infamous enabling law permitting Hitler to enact legislation without recourse to the legislature. He needed a two-thirds majority to do so. The Nazi Party and their nationalist allies could only muster 52 per cent of the votes. The myriad of liberal parties and the Catholic Centre Party voted in favour. With the Communist Party already proscribed, it was left to the Social Democrats to mount a solitary opposition to the imposition of Nazi dictatorship. Kurlander controversially argues that accommodation or, to be more accurate, collaboration had more to do with “ideological continuities” between German liberalism and Nazi policy.
Both ideologies shared common ground. Liberals and Nazis despised the Treaty of Versailles and sought the restoration of German hegemony in central Europe. Germany’s leading liberal intellectual, Frederick Naumann, the first leader of the German Democratic Party, pre-empted the Nazis and nationalists with an imperialist manifesto entitled Mitteleuropa. Liberals were also attracted by the Nazi emphasis on the separation of church from state, their social welfare programmes and their vow to respect women’s rights.
Others were motivated by self-interest. Theodor Heuss, together with Wilhelm Kulz, the Liberal Democratic mayor of Dresden, argued for an accommodation with Nazi “moderates” in order to stave off “political obsolescence”. Kurlander estimates that a clear majority thought it more prudent to work with Hitler rather than “drown alongside the Jews and Communists”.
Although few liberal protagonists subscribed to “eliminationist anti-Semitism” Kulander provides disturbing evidence of a willingness to reconcile German liberal policy with the Nazis’ supreme and most pathological hatred. One liberal ideologue, while unwilling to condone Nazi transgressions, implored his party to acknowledge Nazi achievements in diminishing the “destructive role of the Jewish boulevard press”.
Heuss protested when his name was included on a “list of shame” alongside the “rootless Jewish literati, against whom I have fought for these many years, and with whom it is hardly pleasant to go down in history”.
David Harounoff
