The Lessons of Hitler
This campaign poster from 1933 shows Adolf Hitler beside the Chancellor Paul von Hindenburg, the hard-fighting field-marshal who led German forces in World War I, and served as hardly more than a believable figurehead to lure Germans to support Hitler as his successor. The caption reads "The field-marshal and the corporal: Fight with us for peace and equality!" That the Nazis dared employ this level of self-serving deceit makes me feel sick.
Poorly-informed Americans give a knee-jerk reaction: "Hitler, that monstrous egomaniac and anti-seminte!" But what can modern-day Americans really learn, this many years later, from Germany's experience with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis? The answer is that they were smart, if not cunning, and they understood the inherent human dynamics that could further their quest for power.
I said Human dynamics, not so particularly German, like common human ambiguity, fickleness, and passion that dominate the mindset of the average human. The Nazis conjured up skilfully the latent envy-resentment dyad in all human-kind. They exploited those human elements in order to steer the politics of the nation away from high-minded, cognitively-reasoned programs and toward absolute power geared for world-conquest.
My father once described his life as "an ocean of emotion completely surrounded by debt." We live life to the fullest, max out our credit, and leave the leadership of the nation and the sweeping up of our mistakes to the politicians. We rarely pay attention to the means they use, what they really think of their fickle constituents, or the consequences we face for abdicating responsibility for ourselves. Nothing they say can allay our basic suspicion of their intentions, even while we remain helpless to their efforts to exploit or manipulate us.
The Nazi drive to power employed alternating fear- and pipe-dream psychology on German voters, and sprinkled their rhetoric in a way to fuel a lust for payback. They lured the Germans to surrender their poorly-understood civil rights, and led them to instigate a revolt against constitutional law for a few poorly-defined goals and benefits.
Please understand my words as a challenge to our weak-minded presumptions about America's own status quo—our it-can't-happen-here self-assurance. After all, we don't have Germany's "Untertan" complex. The writer William Shirer described it in his book Berlin Diary, which concerns his life as a radio-reporter in Berlin before the War. The Germans are "geborene Untertanen"—"submissive subjects from birth," dependent on the "authority and direction from a master above." Shirer said it "was all a German wanted in life."
This analysis is ridiculous and simplistic. Germany had emerged as a world power in the late-19th century, called the "Gründer-zeit" or "Establishment-Period." Skilled entrepreneurs teamed up with venture-capitalists, enabled by world-class universities, a stellar scientific establishment, and the scientifically-inclined inventors who grew up in it. Most importantly, Germany had political leaders who encouraged it all.
All of the best-known firms in Germany, like BASF, Bayer, Bosch, Mercedes-Benz, and others got their start during this period. In other words, Germany's growth to a world-power does not differ a lot from America's. And like America, Germany also had organized-crime and substantial migration from other countries, especially from Jews in Eastern Europe.
All this leads me to conclude that the Untertan-complex in Germany, for what it's worth, does not differ a whole lot from the Untertan complex in modern America. In a freedom-loving country, the Untertanen want pretty much what everyone else wants—to rise above their "geborene" status in the society; but they have to compete with people of their own rank and also with the people above them, for advancement.