Rightist support to Hitler arising from a fear of the possible triumph of the Left

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Hitler came to power in an age of intense competition between communism and capitalism in Europe, marked as Left and Right respectively. The great depression of 1929, and the consequent unemployment had greatly worsened the political and economic situation. With already heightened fears arising from the 1917 Socialist revolution in Russia, the governments and forces of the Right in European countries where there were strong communist parties competing for the minds and loyalties of the people, reacted strongly against a possible triumph of the Left. Germany was one of them.

Hitler had joined the German Workers' Party (later renamed the National Socialist Party -- Nazi its German abbreviation ) in 1920. However, he was strongly anti-Marxist and an opportunist in his methods. During the 1930's, the main struggle for power in Germany came to be centered around three forces: the Nazi party (which had grown strong partly on account of violent and intimidator tactics which it followed -- it had its own private army the SA), the Social Democrats and the Communist Party. By his fiery oratory and agitatory techniques par excellence, he gained the confidence of the business and industrial magnates who gave him effective financial support against the Marxist Parties and elements, seeing in him the answer to anti-capitalism forces. Events corroborated this since after coming to power Hitler had nothing against monopoly capitalism as long as it stayed loyal to his regime. In the Nationalists of the extreme right who were irked mainly by the humiliating terms of the Versailles Treaty, Hitler likewise found a natural ally. His alliance with the nationalist leader Hugenberg greatly strengthened his position.

Hitler's pathological hatred for the Jews also had a lot to do with his anti Marxist views, as he saw the Jews behind the Communist movement in Germany. It is rather strange that he saw the role of the Jewry behind everything ranging from the Communist-Marxist parties and workers' movements to monopoly capitalism. [ Perhaps it is difficult to explain his behavior except through recourse to psychology, and there have been quite a few studies on this aspect of the Hitler phenomenon.] In the 1920's, there had been a difference in the attitude towards Germany of the French and British governments. France aimed at a maximum weakening of Germany so as to delay her military recovery, but the British were inclined to revert to the balance of power policies after World War I.

They even concluded a Naval Treaty with Germany in 1935 permitting them to maintain a certain strength level. Similarly, the Dawes Committee, set up under the American economist Dawes to study Germany ability to make war reparations, not only scaled German reparations downward but offered loans to Germany to restore her economy. His rise to power in 1933 owed a lot to those in the West who thought that he was or could be a bulwark against the Soviet Union. The British government inclined mostly to this view. When Hitler started re-arming Germany and stopped paying reparations due under the Versailles Treaty, they even thought that a strong Germany would on the one hand be a counterweight to balance a possible increase in power of France and act as a 'buffer' between Western Europe and the USSR on the other. It was evident that they realized that Hitler had his eyes eventually on the vast territories that lay across the USSR. The USSR had provided facilities to Hitler to test military weapons and train pilots not allowed under the terms of the Versailles treaty just as an expedient arrangement.

The sympathy and support of the Right to Hitler made it unnecessary for Hitler to ask for such military cooperation under the altered circumstances and he could get away with re-arming Germany and even militarizing the Rhineland. Subsequent studies about Hitler mostly lie between two extreme views about Hitler: · Revisionist histories rehabilitating the Fuhrer, but they have not made it into mainstream historiography, according to Ian Kershaw.1 1 Kershaw points out that not even the recent German conservative argument that Hitlerism was but a copy of Stalinism enjoyed more than temporary popularity.

The Marxist-Leninist histories, for which the Fuhrer was nothing but the agent of monopoly capital. As is well known, Hitler had all the makings of a dictator in him. His racial theories were sick and jaundiced. The great dilemma that haunts many analysts is how Hitler managed to win over an educated people like the Germans and make them stick till the bitter end. He demonstrates how naive almost all the politicians and the political writers of the time were concerning Hitler. "On the far left, they believed that his assumption of the chancellorship marked the final stage of the collapse of monopoly capitalism: the bourgeoisie, in despair, had turned to a butcher, willing to use extreme terror to stop the inevitable advance of the proletariat." But the support extended to Hitler by the Right, at both national and international level, was responsible most of all to his rise and the consequent enormous damage he did to his country and the world. The only man who foresaw the damage Hitler was to inflict in the future was Ludendorff, who foresaw all this in a letter addressed to President Hindenberg in January, 1933. On the Left, Leon Trotsky, then living in exile was one of the few to understand the danger that Hitler posed, calling the unparalleled defeat of the German proletariat the most important event in modern history since the assumption of power by the Russian proletariat."

Many in the west still believe that Hitler was an evil but also equate men like Lenin and Mao with him -- a far from fair comparison! Another writer, George Watson2 , regards Hitler's National Socialism as tantamount to socialism. Even the fact that Hitler was consistently anti Marxist, does not deter him from bringing in far fetched arguments in favor of his thesis.

References Excluded

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