Hermann Rauschning (5)

The role of the military

Rauschning deals at some length with the complicity of the German army with Nazism. His point of view here is rather different from what we are used to in the English-speaking world, with our long tradition—at least up to this point—of constitutional stability and supremacy of the civilian authorities. German constitutional democracy was a novelty, and had evidently broken down by the end of the Weimar Republic; and the German conservatives had never believed in democracy in the first place. In the absence of constitutional legitimacy, there is no absolute requirement that the military keep out of politics. The question is rather what principles it should follow in deciding whether to intervene. Rauschning supplies an interesting answer:

The resolve of the army to intervene in political developments and direct their course is to be explained simply by the recognition of its duty to guarantee the security and the military efficiency of the nation. There is no justification for attributing to the heads of the army any other motives than those connected with their professional duty, though this always included the summons to the leadership of the nation at a time of emergency.

. . . . Amid the tendencies to general dissolution, the army is everywhere the last refuge of the state. (pp 136–137.)

This implies that the German army had a professional duty to remove Nazism, which was leading Germany into reckless military adventures and revolutionary chaos. In fact, not only did the army acquiesce in the Nazi régime, it was itself "the strongest revolutionizing influence in Germany" (p. 132).

The First World War, Rauschning says, destroyed the traditional conservative ethos of the German army, which regarded war as a last resort. The habits of expediency learned during the war produced an officer corps that saw craftiness as its principal virtue. Because the war was a total one, it also introduced the idea of the need for a "permanent mobilization of the whole nation". Such an ideology of "all-comprehending militarism", of the subordination of peacetime life to the requirements of national defence, is highly compatible with Nazism. (As Rauschning emphasizes, permanent mobilization is actually likely to lead eventually to the exhaustion of national strength, but presumably this was not apparent to everyone in the military leadership, or it was regarded as too long-term a problem to worry about.)

Thus the new phenomenon of total war posed a fundamental dilemma. If the army was to retain its traditional moral basis, it would have to abandon the concept of permanent mobilization; yet this would leave Germany militarily vulnerable. (The solution to this would appear to have been some form of international arms limitation arrangement, but the institutions necessary for this did not yet exist. The League of Nations, the first major attempt to limit national sovereignty, was seriously flawed, as Mussolini and Hitler demonstrated.) As a result the army was irremediably split on the question of whether the revolutionary development towards total national mobilization should be opposed or supported. In such circumstances it could readily be dominated by the Nazis. Despite this, the army regarded the Nazi Party as a mere instrument that it could use for craftily guiding civilian politics, for ruling from behind the scenes without provoking popular opposition. This was a a "very superficial judgment of National Socialism" and a "disastrous subordination of broad policy to opportunist considerations of tactics" (p. 140).

As Hitler succeeded in bringing about the rearmament of Germany in violation of the Versailles Treaty, and later won astounding military successes in the first part of the war, the army succumbed to the temptation of power and fell into line behind the Nazi leadership. Only when military catastrophe loomed, in 1944, did the officer corps stir itself to make an unsuccessful bid to remove Hitler from power.