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It was a purpose that most non-Communist Germans could understand. For in the election that was to carry the Nazis to power the German Communist Party polled 5,970,833 votes. The Nazis fought Communism with the weapons of Communism. To oppose the Communist troops (Red Front Fighters), the Nazis used the Brown Shirts. In place of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Nazis offered the dictatorship of the Nazi Party. In place of Bolshevism's scapegoat, the bourgeois, the Nazis offered the Jew. In place of internationalism, the Nazis offered fanatical German nationalism. In place of one dominating class (the proletariat), the Nazis offered the people (Volk).
In place of unemployment, the Nazis offered an economy geared to war production, with jobs for all. In foreign affairs the Nazis clamored for a revision of the Versailles Treaty.
Chronology of Degradation. The scheme worked. How well, time quickly told:
¶ In 1928 the Nazis won twelve Reich stag seats; in 1930 they won 107; in 1932, 230.
¶ In January 1933, senescent President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor. ¶ In June 1934, Hitler carried through the Blood Purge and became absolute Führer of the Nazi Party. In August Hitler became absolute head of the German state.
¶ In 1935 the Saar returned to Germany.
¶ In 1936 Germany reoccupied the Rhineland and signed the anti-Comintern pact with Japan.
The same strategy that had succeeded in Germany was transferred to foreign affairs ; only, this time the Nazis sold protection against Russia.
In March 1938 Hitler seized Austria.
In September, he enticed Britain's aging, fatuous Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to Munich. There the Sudetenland was ceded to Germany as the price of "peace in our time." In March 1939, Hitler occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. A few days later, he took Memel from Lithuania. In April he made territorial demands on Poland.
Britain threatened war. On Aug. 23 Germany and Russia agreed to sign a non-aggression pact. A week after it was initialled, the Wehrmacht overran Poland. World War II had begun.
Last week, with their country four-fifths conquered by the Allies, Nazi fanatics were still forcing the Germans to fight on. There was little left to fight for or with.
Same Old Tune. From Germany TIME Correspondent Percival Knauth cabled:
"If Hitler is today lying dead on a street in Berlin, like Benito Mussolini on a sidewalk in Milan, there will be few people in Germany who will be mourning his passing. The few will be the Nazi Party's fanatic core who still believe in Naziism, and for that belief and for the sake of their own lives fight on. A growing majority of Germans, however, are looking on Adolf Hitler today with bitterness and angry despair as the man who gambled them and their lives away.
"This realization is dawning on Germans as they come out of the trance-like state in which they fought the war until the Allied armies crossed the Rhine. It is not the realization of their own measure of responsibility for what has happened to them; if that comes to them it might be their salvation. It is an awakening which is expressing itself in the old cry heard after the last world war: 'Wir sind belogen und betrogen warden'—'We have been lied to and betrayed.'