Hitler Coerces Support from Reluctant Social Classes

The German aristocrats, capitalists, and artists found Adolf Hitler to be boorish and oafish. Yet Hitler knew that he needed them, and that he would somehow have to bully them into supporting his political ambitions.

Historians have long pondered the mystery of how, and why, members of various German social classes eventually allowed Hitler to build his National Socialist government.

Getting industrialists to support a socialist like Hitler was indeed quite a challenge. As historian Jonah Goldberg writes,

While there’s a big debate about how much of the working and lower classes supported the Nazis, it is now largely settled that very significant chunks of both constituted the Nazi base. Nazism and Fascism were both popular movements.

The masses marching in the streets, carrying torches, starting fistfights, and throwing rocks weren’t from royal families or the nobility. They were the populist base of the Nazi Party.

The word ‘Nazi’ is an abbreviation for ‘National Socialism.’ The upper classes were opposed to both nationalism and socialism. The aristocracy had historically opposed nationalism, both because it placed the people’s allegiance to the nation above their allegiance to dynastic families, and because ‘nationalizing’ industries and economic sectors was a sure route to poverty.

The upper classes opposed both of Hitler’s ideological foundations, nationalism and socialism, and they opposed his tactics of intimidation, as Jonah Goldberg notes:

In Germany the aristocratic and business elite were generally repulsed by Hitler and the Nazis.

From 1919 to 1933, when Hitler and the Nazis finally seized power, it was largely a working-class mob who supported them. The ‘Brownshirts’ were not from elite classes.

After 1933, the underground opposition, which sought to hinder the Nazis and even to assassinate Hitler, had a disproportionately large number of members from the aristocracy.

Colonel von Stauffenberg, a key figure in the April 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler, came from a historic noble family.

Hitler was, simply, a populist:

The Nazis rose to power exploiting anticapitalist rhetoric they indisputably believed. Even if Hitler was the nihilistic cipher many portray him as, it is impossible to deny the sincerity of the Nazi rank and file who saw themselves as mounting a revolutionary assault on the forces of capitalism.

The Nazis exploited feelings of class envy. They had no desire to allow any type of free market. They intended to burden the people with crushing taxes.

Because Hitler wanted to crush freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and the freedom of thought, it was a logical and necessary extension of the Nazi program that he would also crush economic freedom.

The Nazis had no respect for the centuries-old heritage of the aristocratic families, and in fact, the Nazis harbored bitter resentment toward such families. That resentment would have, for many of the nobles, a murderous outcome.

Deciding the Future of Poland and Yugoslavia: the Teheran Conference

In November and December of 1943, the three leaders of the Allies - Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Franklin Roosevelt - met at Teheran in Iran to discuss both the next phase of the war as well as how they would organize large parts of the world after the war was over.

(Teheran is also sometimes spelled ‘Tehran.’)

World War II didn’t end until late 1945, but it was already clear in late 1943 that the Allies would win, so they began to make plans for a postwar world.

Eastern Europe was a topic at this meeting. Instead of wanting to liberate these countries from Nazi oppression, the Soviet Union wanted to keep them under socialist dictatorships. In the end, these countries would not enjoy freedom at war’s end. They would simply be ruled by a different regime.

Two cases were especially important at Teheran: Poland and Yugoslavia. In order to dominate these countries, Stalin had to trick Churchill into thinking that the USSR enslaving millions of Poles and Yugoslavs was a good idea.

Churchill was typically anti-Communist and pro-liberty. But in this case, the Soviet espionage agencies had managed to plant ‘moles’ inside the government of the UK.

These Soviet agents controlled and shaped the reports about Yugoslavia: reports which went to the key policy-makers inside England.

Inside Yugoslavia during WW2, the resistance effort against the Nazis was led by General Draza Mihailovich. His men used guerilla tactics against the occupying Nazi troops.

Toward the war’s end, a second would-be resistance leader emerged: Josip Broz Tito, a communist. Tito’s forces competed with Mihailovic’s, but Mihailovic’s troops did far more damage to the Nazis than Tito’s.

Tito wanted to be the unchallenged dictator of Yugoslavia at war’s end, while Mihailovic wanted a republic with freely-elected representatives. To ensure his chances at power, Tito started spending more time fighting against Mihailovic than against the Nazis.

Stalin gave Tito some help: Stalin’s spies inside the British government began falsifying reports about the Yugoslav situation and about the Polish situation. As historian Stan Evans writes,

In both states, fierce internal conflicts were developing between Communist and non-Communist factions for supremacy when the war was over, identical in key respects to the struggle shaping up in China. At the era of Teheran, the Yugoslav battle was the more advanced, though Poland wasn’t far behind it. Making the Yugoslav contest still more distinctive, the case for Communist victory there would be not merely accepted by the Western powers, but promoted by them, with Churchill incongruously in the forefront. The way this was accomplished provides a classic study in disinformation tactics and the vulnerability of the Western allies to such deceptions.

Churchill, who normally favored liberty over communism, had been fed misinformation by the Soviets. The communist spies inside the British government told Churchill that Tito was a more effective fighter, and would establish a free nation after the war. They told him, too, that Mihailovic was actually sympathetic to the Nazis, and would establish a dictatorship after the war.

Churchill was being played.

Eventually, the misled Churchill would consent to Tito’s rise to power. Yugoslavia would not be freed, but would suffer under communism as it had suffered under the Nazis.

Stalin’s network of intelligence operatives had done their job: Stalin had tricked Churchill into giving Yugoslavia to a murderous socialist dictator, and casting aside Mihailovic, the leader who could have achieved political liberty in that nation.

This is the type of fateful dealing which happened at Teheran in late 1943.

The War after the War: Liberating Eastern Europe

The series of conferences during WW2 - including Cairo and Tehran in late 1944, Malta and Yalta in early 1945, and Potsdam in late 1945 - included among their agenda items the future of eastern Europe. Once Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Germany had been liberated from Nazi control, who would govern them? And how would they be governed?

While it was clear that the advancing Soviet army gave Stalin a chance to exercise his imperialistic ambitions, the other Allies felt the need to give him some leeway, because they wanted to keep the anti-Nazi coalition strongly together.

The Allies knew that, if they did not appease Stalin, there remained the possibility that he would switch sides again, and the massive resources of the Soviet Socialist dictatorship would be placed at Hitler’s disposal. Additionally, the Allies wanted Stalin’s support in the Pacific, where the fight against the Japanese was even more brutal than the fighting in Europe.

The capital city of Iran can be spelled either ‘Tehran’ or ‘Teheran,’ and it was in this city that the Allies met in late November and early December 1943, as historians Herb Romerstein and Stan Evans write:

While military matters were the immediate topics at Teheran, postwar political and diplomatic issues would be considered also. Of special interest were the states of Eastern Europe that lay in the path of the Red Army advancing west from Russia, and what would happen to them when they were “liberated” by Soviet forces. Foremost among the nations getting notice in this context were Yugoslavia and Poland, the first the subject of extended comment by Churchill, the second stressed by Stalin as a security issue for Moscow.

At Tehran, then, Churchill backed Stalin’s man in Yugoslavia: Josip Broz Tito. The nickname ‘Tito’ had appeared when Josip Broz began a Soviet-backed communist group which hoped eventually to govern Yugoslavia.

From the time the Nazis had invaded Yugoslavia, Draza Mihailovich had been leading an underground resistance group in an effort to push the Nazis back out of Yugoslavia. The group was called the Chetniks, and Mihailovic - his surname is sometimes spelled without the final ‘h’ - rallied the cause of freeing Yugoslavia.

Because Hitler and Stalin were allies until June 1941, Tito, as Stalin’s agent, offered no resistance to the occupying Nazis until Hitler broke his alliance with Stalin.

In a stunning and masterful propaganda effort, Stalin suddenly directed his radio and print media to portray Tito as a resistance leader, and to denounce Mihailovic as a traitor who’d collaborated with the Nazis. The effort was so successful that even Churchill and the British government were fooled.

While Mihailovic continued his efforts against the occupying Nazis, Tito’s guerrillas attacked Mihailovic’s fighters. Tito conducted occasional token raids against the Nazis to support the propaganda effort portraying Tito as the true resistance hero.

Churchill agreed, at Teheran, that Tito would be the postwar leader of Yugoslavia, and so unwittingly delivered the Yugoslavs from Hitler’s dictatorship into Stalin’s dictatorship. Tito would function as Stalin’s puppet from 1941 until 1948/1949.

As soon as he consolidated power at the war’s end, Tito ordered Mihailovic to be arrested and executed after a show trial. Stalin’s misinformation effort had succeeded, and the western Allies had support Tito, a communist dictator, over Mihailovic, who had been the authentic leader of the anti-Nazi resistance.

China and the USSR: Unstable Alliances

The motives of the international communist conspiracy often caused it to make moves which surprised observers during its heyday between 1917 and 1991. In hindsight, there is an underlying logic to what seemed like unexpected changes.

Leaders like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were balancing ideology and opportunism. In borderline situations, the winner was usually whichever policy option did the most to obtain, retain, and maintain power for the Soviet Socialist dictatorship.

Allies of the USSR and enemies of the USSR could exchange roles in an instant. As historians Herb Romerstein and Stan Evans write,

Understanding who stood where in the often confusing propaganda battles of the Cold War depends on knowing what the interests of the Soviet Union were at any given moment and how these could abruptly change when the global balance of forces shifted.

The most notable example, of course, was the “Hitler-Stalin Pact,” a treaty of nonaggression between the Nazis and the USSR. Also known as the “Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact” or the “Nazi-Soviet Pact,” the treaty was signed in August 1939. The Soviets and the Nazis were then allies, and cooperated in the invasion and oppression of Poland.

This came as a surprise to the rest of the world because Hitler and Stalin had publicly opposed each other prior to August 1939. Stalin had decried Hitler as an imperialist. Hitler had denounced Stalin as a communist.

Just as the Hitler-Stalin Pact reversed, in a moment, the previous opposition between the two, so in June 1941, the situation reversed itself again in a flash. Hitler and Stalin, who’d been allies only a few days before, were now at war with each other.

This was not the only situation in which the USSR’s allegiances reversed themselves suddenly. Stalin, needing an organized China to prevent Japan from attacking the USSR, backed Chiang Kai-shek, even though Chiang was sustaining free China against Mao’s communist revolutionaries.

While Stalin’s ideology should have dictated him to befriend Mao, Stalin’s instinct for power directed him to ally with Chiang:

Less often noted but equally telling was the zigzagging Communist line on China. As seen, a main Soviet concern of the later 1930s was the danger of invasion from Japan, then on the march in Asia and long hostile to the USSR. This threat dictated a temporarily friendly view of China’s Chiang Kai-shek, then pinning down a million or so Japanese who might otherwise have invaded Russia. The same Soviet interest meant blocking an American modus vivendi with Japan concerning China, as this too could have freed up the empire for an assault on Soviet Asia. In both respects, Chiang’s then-high standing with U.S. opinion trumped notions of accommodation with Tokyo in the Pacific.

As in the case of Germany, so also in the case of China. In mid-1943, Stalin would suddenly drop his relationship with Chiang, support Mao, and direct the USSR’s efforts against Chiang.

When Mao Tse-Tung, whose name is also spelled ‘Mao Zedong,’ finally defeated free China in 1949, Stalin formed an official alliance with the communist dictator of China. But like all other communist alliances, it was an arrangement of convenience, which ended in the early 1960s, when the Soviets and the Maoists decided that they didn’t need each other.

Global Alienation: Governments and Their Citizens

The first decades of the twenty-first century have brought terrorism, erratic financial patterns, waves of international migration, and - in response - bizarre political movements. Traditional political groupings and coalitions are dissolving, and new constellations arising.

Around the world, political candidates are endorsing policy options previously thought to belong to mutually exclusive camps. Writing in London’s Financial Times, Martin Wolf notes that “Marine Le Pen of the National Front in France or Nigel Farage of the UK Independence party” are “politicians who combine the nativism of the hard right, the statism of the hard left and the authoritarianism of both.”

Wolf argues that national political processes have abandoned their responsibilities to the citizens of their respective nations, and have instead become part of a global constellation of political views:

The projects of the rightwing elite have long been low marginal tax rates, liberal immigration, globalisation, curbs on costly “entitlement programmes”, deregulated labour markets and maximisation of shareholder value. The projects of the leftwing elite have been liberal immigration (again), multiculturalism, secularism, diversity, choice on abortion, and racial and gender equality. Libertarians embrace the causes of the elites of both sides; that is why they are a tiny minority.

In the process, elites have become detached from domestic loyalties and concerns, forming instead a global super-elite

One of the foundational principles of the modern nation-state is that civil rights are for citizens. When non-citizens begin to consume a growing part of the nation’s material and political resources, voting citizens

are alienated. They are losers, at least relatively; they do not share equally in the gains. They feel used and abused. After the financial crisis and slow recovery in standards of living, they see elites as incompetent and predatory. The surprise is not that many are angry but that so many are not.

The argument can be made, and Martin Wolf cites lots of statistics in making it, that working-class wages have been stagnant for several decades across the industrialized world. If incomes in the upper lower class and the lower middle class lag behind the productivity of the total economy, and non-citizens are consuming a growing share of a nation’s wealth in the forms of social benefit programs from the government, the result is the rise of “populist” candidates, like “Ms. le Pen or Mr. Farage.”

The net effect of this shift is to draw attention to the concept of citizenship, a concept which has been neglected in recent decades. There is a difference between a citizen and someone who merely happens to live in a particular country.

Elections across Europe manifest the growing attractiveness of political parties who emphasize the rights of citizens. Wolf writes that:

Western countries are democracies. These states still provide the legal and institutional underpinnings of the global economic order. If western elites despise the concerns of the many, the latter will withdraw their consent for the elite’s projects.

Democracy takes various forms. In modern nation-states, its form is a republic with freely elected representatives.

Direct democracies, as schoolchildren know, work, at most, only in small villages. The structure of a republic not only deals better with larger populations spread over larger territories, but it also prevents a majority from abusing a minority.

But in any form of democracy, the foundational concept is that of citizenship. Without a clear understanding of citizenship, democracy is impossible.

Wolf argues that the growing resentment among citizen voters against the global elite is the result of emerging evidence that this elite has lost the vision that the purpose of a government is to protect the lives, freedoms, and properties of its citizens.

Feeling abandoned, feeling that the traditional political elites no longer seek to protect civil rights, voters look elsewhere. Populists are gaining followers, while the

Elites of the left have lost the allegiance of swaths of the native middle classes. Not least, democracy means government by all citizens. If rights of abode, still more of citizenship, are not protected, this dangerous resentment will grow. Indeed, it already has in too many places.

In Germany, chancellor Angela Merkel squandered her popularity by admitting into the country an immense flood of “Syrian refugees” - many of whom turned out to be neither Syrians nor refugees. When groups of Muslim men orchestrated gangrapes of German women in different cities at the same time, much of Merkel’s political capital evaporated.

Those political parties which are viewed as a part of the new populist wave, and not part of the old elite establishment, gained against Merkel’s party, the CDU/CSU, in subsequent elections. The party known as Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is one such party.

From Britain to France to Germany, populist parties emerge in response to the perception that citizenship has been devalued. This is happening in other nations as well. Voters are posing a question: what is the meaning of national citizenship in the twenty-first century?

Is the Planet in the Midst of Rebounding from the Little Ice Age?

Two events dominate the history, as opposed to prehistory, of the planet’s climate: the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ and the ‘Little Ice Age.’ These represent statistical outliers, the high points and the low points of measured global temperature.

These measurements are based on tree-rings, the recorded advance and retreat of glaciers, written records of rainfall and of snowfall, written records about when rivers and lakes froze over, etc.

For its purposes, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines the ‘Little Ice Age’ as lasting from 1450 to 1850, while the ‘Medieval Climate Anomaly’ runs from 950 to 1250.

These two eras both occurred before significant industrialization and before the use of fossil fuels in significant quantities, and can therefore be said to be non-anthropogenic.

The IPCC notes that “most glaciers around the globe have been shrinking since the end of the Little Ice Age.” If the Little Ice Age lasted approximately 400 years, and we are now a little more than a century since its end, current glacial retreat patterns may be attributed, in part, to the plant’s return to its equilibrium, i.e., to temperatures held prior to the Little Ice Age.

Beginning and ending points for the Little Ice Age cannot be precisely determined. It was a generalized trend. Some scholars mark the endpoint nearer to 1800 than 1850.

But, although an exact endpoint cannot be given, it nonetheless makes sense that the end of the Little Ice Age would mark the beginning of a non-anthropogenic warming trend around the globe. The IPCC reports that “most permafrost has been degrading since the Little Ice Age.”

It would be remarkable if, at the end of a four-century-long cold era, the plant did not warm. Tautologically, that is the definition of the end of a cold age: planetary warming.

As the two extremes of measured historic planetary temperature, the Medieval Climate Anomaly and the Little Ice Age constitute reference points for other eras, including the current one.

By contrast, previous Ice Ages were not historic, but prehistoric, there being no direct observations and written records of them.

What caused these two outliers? Any answer must be merely speculative, but some scholars note that ice core samples from polar regions show that wide swings in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, non-anthropogenic in origin, may have accompanied both the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period.

The Little Ice Age: the Implications of an Outlier

In the historical examination of climate change, two events form reference points in world history: the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period.

The Little Ice Age was a period of global cooling. Scholars are unable to give precise beginning and ending dates for such time segments, but it seems to have include a century or two both before and after the year 1600.

The Medieval Warm Period was also global in scope, and represented an extreme warming trend. Beginning shortly after the reign of Charlemagne, this era lasted several centuries.

Because both of these events - the term ‘singularity’ is justified - occurred prior to the recording of daily temperatures around the globe, they are documented by evidence such as the advance and retreat of glaciers, tree ring measurements, written observations of snowfall, and other data.

These two time spans are indeed outliers, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) notes in its report:

There is high confidence for droughts during the last millennium of greater magnitude and longer duration than those observed since the beginning of the 20th century in many regions. There is medium confidence that more megadroughts occurred in monsoon Asia and wetter conditions prevailed in arid Central Asia and the South American monsoon region during the Little Ice Age (1450–1850) compared to the Medieval Climate Anomaly (950–1250).

The Little Ice Age, then, represents an extreme condition, an outlier well beyond any data points which have been observed in the last two or three centuries.

It also represents a condition with significant duration.

Both the Medieval Warm Period - which the IPCC calls the ‘Medieval Climate Anomaly’ - and the Little Ice Age occurred prior to industrialization and prior to the use of coal and other fossil fuels in significant quantity. There is, then, no possibility of either time segment being anthropogenic.

If these two outliers - one much warmer, and one much cooler, than anything observed in recent centuries - are clearly not anthropogenic, then lesser variations in temperature can also be naturally occurring.