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Volume IV · Page 507
| Stormtroopers in the early days of the Party,
and there would have been no need for concentration camps or the Gestapo, both
of which institutions were inaugurated as soon as the Nazis gained control of
the German State. But against those who looked with alarm and foreboding on the violences of nazism, there were those who could not resist the glory, pomp, and circumstance of war, nor the greed of unbridled domination. They accepted Hitler with fervor and passion because they believed Hitler could lead them to gratification of their bloated vanity and lust for power, position, and luxurious living. Nor have all forsaken their "successful" leader. Several of the defendants in this case have expressed their continuing belief in the Fuehrer. One could not bring himself to blame Hitler for any of the illegal deaths under discussion. Another regarded him as a great leader, if not a great statesman. Still another, when asked if he would have been satisfied if Hitler had succeeded in his aims, replied with a categorical affirmative. The defendant Klingelhoefer stated that he would have been happy if Hitler had won the war, even at the expense of Germany in ruins, with two million Germans killed and the entirety of Europe devastated. One other defendant told of his adoration for Hitler which apparently had not changed since 1945. The expression of such adoration offers convincing testimony on the mental attitude of the defendant at the time he received and executed the Fuehrer Order. That Hitler was a man of extraordinary capacities cannot be doubted, but his capabilities for harm would have been nil had he not had willing, enthusiastic collaborators like the defendants who accepted his mad out-pourings and hysterical maledictions against defenseless minorities, as if his pronouncements were the apostrophies of a semidivinity. These defendants were among those who made it possible for a megalomaniac to achieve his ambition of putting the world beneath his heel or to bring it crashing in ruins about his head. Some of these defendants, in following Hitler, may have believed that, in executing his will, they were serving their country. Their sense of justice staggering from the intoxication of command, their normal reactions drugged by the opiate of their blind fealty, their human impulses twisted by the passion of their ambitions, they made themselves believe that they were advancing the cause of Germany. But Germany would have fared better without such patriotism. When Samuel Johnson uttered his cynical line that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, he could well have had in mind a Hitlerian patriotism. Hitler struck the match, but the fire would have died a quick death had it not been for his fellow arsonists, big and little, who |
