The Lost Generation Come To Power
Outside of Germany, most persons seem inclined to think that the “new world” envisioned by the Nazis would not be a very desirable abode. However, that does not alter the fact that we are here confronted by a revolution of the most radical kind, and that its leaders are revolutionists from the ground up. Furthermore, though most of them are still relatively young in years, they are all veterans hardened by prolonged adversity and scarred from many battles. They are the logical outcome of the quarter-century of hectic national life which we have already discussed. In my opinion, therefore, both they and their movement may be deemed normal by-products of an abnormal situation.
To give one instance of the grim school wherein they were fashioned, let me cite an episode from my own experience. In mid-summer of the year 1923, I sat in my room at the Hotel Adlon, discussing with a German the deplorable position to which his country had then been reduced. I had just come to Berlin from a trip through the Rhineland and the Ruhr, where I had watched the passive-resistance campaign against the French invaders, seen the black troops, and studied other aspects of that tragic affair. Now, largely in consequence of that desperate maneuver, the Mark was slipping fast to perdition, national bankruptcy was at hand, and utter ruin loomed in the offing.
As my guest discussed the seemingly hopeless situation, he was visibly in agony. Sweat stood out on his forehead. Suddenly, his mood changed utterly. Flinging back his head, he burst into truly blood-curdling laughter, best described by the German phrase galgenhumor – gallows-humor. Still shaking with his macabre mirth, he leaned forward and tapped me on the knee.
“Millions of us have already died, on the battlefield and from the British hunger blockade,” he chuckled. “Perhaps millions more of us will perish, and we shall surely be ruined. No one can tell what trials await us, and the world will do little to assuage our agony. But, no matter what happens, it will be mainly the weak and soft who will perish. Soon, the good-natured, easy-going, pot-bellied German will be no more. Dr. Stoddard, let me make you a prophecy. If this goes on, in about fifteen years you will see a New Germany, so lean, so hard, so ruthless, that she can take on all comers – and beat them!”
The desperate spirit of the cornered man I talked to on a long-gone summer day typifies merely one phase of the bitter schooling which made Germany’s present rulers what they are. In post-war Britain, a phrase was coined to depict their English counterparts. That phrase was: The Lost Generation. But if that were true of the war-scarred youth of Britain, how infinitely truer was it of German youth! Well, those war-youngsters are now in the saddle. So what we see in Germany is – the lost generation come to power.
From the moment I first looked at those rulers of the Third Reich, I felt there was something about them which, from my American viewpoint, was queer. As I analyzed them, I realized that it was a sort of twisted cynicism combined with a hard ruthlessness. And when I listened to their life-stories, I saw it could scarcely be otherwise. Most of them had entered the war as volunteers when they were mere boys. One, I recall, was only fifteen at the time; others were not much older. These burningly patriotic lads went through the hell of a losing war, culminating in crushing defeat. Then their abased spirits were given a savage tonic by joining the Free Corps formed to combat the attempt at a “Spartakist” [Communist] revolution. Joyously, they killed Communists for a while. After that, some of them tried to go to college or into business; but few of them could adapt themselves to the life of the Weimar republic which they hated and despised. Some of them went abroad, adventuring; the rest sulked and brooded until their ears heard a sudden trumpet-call. It is Nazidom’s brazen clarion: Deutschland, Erwache! “Germany, Awake!” They listened to Adolf Hitler’s oratory which stressed all the longings of their embittered hearts and they fell under his hypnotic spell. Into the ranks of the Storm-Troops they went, with additional years of fighting as they killed more Communists and “mastered the streets.” Then, at last, victory – and undisputed power.
-excerpted from Lothrop Stoddard’s “Into the Darkness”