990 Years To Go

The Reich which Adolf Hitler said would last a thousand years is ten years old this week. In one decade it has all but spanned a life's cycle, from depression's depths to a pinnacle of power on which it is now tottering. With 990 years to go, the Nazi Reich this week told its people: "We must keep cool. The situation is critical. We are facing an enemy superior in numbers, in everything. . . ."

Death of a Republic. On the evening of Jan. 30, 1933, the boots of the brown-clad Storm Troops beat like thudding drums along the Wilhelmstrasse beneath a flaming canopy of torches. Leaning far out over the Reich's Chancellery balcony, Adolf Hitler, with sparkling eyes, watched them march past. Battalion after battalion swung by, bands crashing out the song Die Fahne Hoch. ... In a nearby window, a rocklike silhouette, Reich President Paul von Hindenburg gazed on the parade with age-dimmed eyes.

The Weimar Republic fell. In the Nazi-packed Reichstag, on March 23, 1933, Hitler called for the Enabling Act, which emasculated the German Constitution, took the ground from under the feet of opposition parties. Tall, husky, greying Otto Wels, president of the Social Democratic Party, strode to the dais to protest the bill. "We are defenseless, but not without honor!" he cried. "If you really wanted social reconstruction, you would need no such bill as this!" Hitler spoke next: "You're too late! We don't need you any longer!" The bill was passed.

Social Democracy died; Otto Wels fled to Prague. Naziism rolled on. In June 1934, Hitler purged his Party ranks of dissidents, linked arms with big business and the military to give his government greater power. Hindenburg died; the Dictator became President. Wehrfreiheit was proclaimed--freedom to arm. A year after the new Wehrmacht was born, on March 7, 1936, a thin column of field-grey troops followed a blaring band across the Rhine to reoccupy the territories under French guard since Versailles. The officers carried in their pockets sealed orders to retreat if France resisted. France did not resist. In the Quai d'Orsay and in Whitehall the policy of appeasement was born.

The German Tragedy. In a book on Germany, The Silent War, published this week, Stefan Weyl and Jon B. Jansen, two young men of the Social Democratic underground movement, write: "The charge that has to be made against the German people is not that they never rose against the Hitler dictatorship. . . . That would have been expecting the impossible. . . . The tragedy for Germany and the world is that the German people, and especially the leaders of the Weimar Republic, were not politically mature enough to recognize what National Socialism really meant. . . . Nor is it an excuse for the Germans that for a long time leading people in the democratic countries did not understand the real nature of National Socialism either."

On the battlefields of Spain, side by side with the new Axis partner Italy, the youthful Wehrmacht tested its new fighting power. While German guns and German bombs killed Spaniards, German warships sailed the Mediterranean and Atlantic on "nonintervention" patrol. The Axis, conceived in 1934, proclaimed in 1936, was developed by state visits between Berlin and Rome, cemented by a military alliance in May 1939. And in the capitals of Western Europe appeasement grew.

National Socialism was Depression's angry child. Say Authors Weyl and Jansen: "In the elections of May 1928 the National Socialists polled a total of only 809,000 votes in all Germany. By September 1930 the brown flood had swollen to 6,500,000 votes. . . . At the end of July 1932, with more than 13,500,000 votes and 230 [Reichstag] deputies, the Nazis reached the peak of their legal power in the Weimar State."

Appeasement's Food. As they had in Germany, so the Nazis strode to power in Europe. In February 1938 Hitler purged his generals' ranks, took over supreme command of the fighting forces, welded diplomacy and military might to Nazi policy. Six weeks later Austria was annexed. The next summer Nazi fury was unleashed in Czecho-Slovakia; in September Munich gave away the Sudetenland. Back to London went Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waving a scrap of paper, croaking "peace in our time."

National Socialism grew to brutal manhood on appeasement's food. Hitler's Enabling Act had passed in 1933 because the Catholic Center Party voted for it, thinking that Hitlerism would run its brief course to ruin if left alone. Said a local Social Democratic leader whom Authors Weyl and Jansen call Kurt Riemann: "If we stick to the legal way our enemies will be destroyed, because right will be on our side." But Social Democracy was destroyed. "In the case of Germany the democrats of Weimar had relinquished the bastion without raising a hand in its defense; in the case of Czecho-Slovakia, it was the democrats of the world."

On the crest of a wave the Nazis rode into the fateful year of 1939. In March they took the remnants of the Czechoslovak State and appeasement died. On Sept. 1 German guns and bombs boomed forth the start of World War II. After Poland and the "phony war," Norway fell; Western Europe awoke--too late. On May 10, 1940, four years and two months after its first thin columns had marched into the Rhineland, the Wehrmacht roared into the Lowlands and France to Paris and the Armistice of Compiegne.

The Darkest Hour. Of the German Underground, Authors Weyl and Jansen write: "The collapse of the Western Front in 1940 ushered in the opposition's darkest hour in the war period.... Men and women who for years had worked in the Underground gave up their organizational connections. . . . 'Our attitude toward the Nazis and toward the regime has not changed one iota,' but what was the use?"

The year 1941 was still Hitler's year. His military and political alliances were now worldwide, built on the Tripartite Pact with Italy and Japan. His armies swept through the Balkans, across the African desert to Egypt's gates. But the Battle of Britain had been lost, "and in June 1941 the Fuehrer sought security elsewhere than in England's conquest. The Wehrmacht threw its might against Soviet Russia, rolled to Moscow's suburbs before winter fell. Then the tide turned.

Toward Revolution? In January 1943, Social Democrats Weyl and Jansen write of "The Coming Revolution in Germany": "We know that when the majority of the people is unwilling to continue to live under the existing rule, we have the first prerequisite for a revolutionary change. ... In Nazi Germany today this first prerequisite for revolution is to a great extent present. . . . The way to the revolutionary overthrow of the Nazi regime is still far, [but] the first steps ... are already behind us."

Jansen and Weyl, who have felt Naziism's heavy hand, forecast a reign of terror in the Reich before the Nazis' grip is loosed. This punishment, they believe, is inevitable and must be suffered. But they take issue with those who class all Germans as Nazi brutes whose record bars them forever from a place in future world affairs. They predict for Germany "a government of the people, by the people and for the people" which will be established by a democratic revolution. As Social Democrats and members of the Underground they speak for it:

"Revolutionary Germany will need no Lebensraum outside its own frontiers. It demands no share in colonial oppression. . . . The aim of ... German Socialists is a European Federation . . . which . . . will provide for self-determination by all nations, [with] its goal the free economic cooperation of nations which enjoy extensive autonomy but are not split up by customs and military barriers.

"Always before in German history the forces of democratic revolution have been stopped short before achieving their goal. This time the process must be carried through to its completion."

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