The End and Ends
I am currently reading The End, about the last year of the Third Reich and the Nazi death spiral toward Germany’s absolute destruction. It is a fascinating, mass suicidal, political dynamic that was mirrored to an even greater degree of fanaticism by Nazi Germany’s Axis partner, the Imperial Japanese. Facing the prospect of certain defeat, the Germans with very few exceptions, collectively refused every opportunity to shorten the agony or lighten the consequences of defeat and stubbornly followed their Fuhrer to the uttermost doom. It made no sense then and still does not now, seven decades later.
Adolf Hitler’s personal authority over the life and death of every soul in Germany did not end until his last breath. When surrounded by Soviet armies, trapped in his Fuhrerbunker in the ruin of Berlin, all it took for Hitler to depose his most powerful paladins, Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler was a word. They still commanded vast military and paramilitary security forces – Himmler had been put in charge of the Home Army as well as the SS, Gestapo and German police – but when Hitler withdrew his support and condemned them, their power crumbled. Goering, the glittering Nazi Reichsmarchal and second man in the state, was ignominiously arrested.
Even in Gotterdammerung, the Germans remained spellbound, like a man in a trance placing a noose around his own neck.
Currently, the chattering classes of the United States are uneasily working their way toward a possible war with Iran, or at least a confrontation with Teheran over their illegal nuclear weapons program (some people will object that, technically, we are not certain that Iran has a weapons program. This is true. It is also irrelevant to the diplomatic dynamic created by Iran’s nuclear activities which the regime uses to signal regularly to all observers that they could have one). There is much debate over the rationality of Iran’s rulers and the likely consequences if Iran is permitted to become a nuclear weapons state. There is danger and risk in any potential course of action and predictions are being made, in my humble opinion, far too breezily.
In the run-up to war or negotiation, in dealing with the Iranians and making our strategic calculations, it might be useful to recall the behavior of the Germans.
March 13th, 2012 at 4:20 am
I am not sure it does not make sense. If you are facing a noose or a firing squad at the end, the most desperate and tenuous measures may more sense than trying to cut a deal. We told them unconditional surrender, to keep Stalin in the war and make sure the Germans did not get a third try. Faced with certain death either way, even phantasmal hopes and strategies founded on delusion may seem sensible as you are falling into the dark and final end of all you have tried to do. Also, Churchill himself said that a nation that goes down fighting may rise again, but that one that submits supinely is finished forever. If you are doomed and you have nothing tangible to pass on to your descendants, you can give them a myth of a heroic and bloody last stand against all odds, until the last landser is crushed under the treads of a JSII. Also, Hitler was after all the evil political of Holly Golightly. “She’s a phony. But she’s a real phony. You know why? Because she honestly believes all this phony junk she believes in.” Maybe at the end Hitler really believed his own bullshit because it was better than admitting that he was a hack and an opportunist who had made stupid blunders and the whole thing was for nought. The German people were in a similar situation, and more importantly, the war criminals and thugs were dragooning the population to resist. And finally, many of the Germans were fighting in the last weeks and months of the War simply to slow down the Russians to the Allies could get as far into Germany as possible, and so people could flee to the West. If you want to see what Germany actually looked like at the end, and to get a feel for what it was like, you must see the forgotten gem Decision Before Dawn (1951) starring Richard Baseheart.
March 13th, 2012 at 11:48 am
In what ways are the Nazi regime and the current Iranian regime similar?
I’m just curious as to what useful information we might take away from end of the Nazi regime.
March 14th, 2012 at 4:49 am
Hi Joey
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Nazi Germany and Iran are not alike except in that they are run by ideological extremists and antisemites, beyond that, very little. My point was not that they were similar but that expecting a state at a disadvantage and under pressure to take the “rational” choice in a situ may not be a good assumption. The war was lost in 1944, more Germans should have turned against Hitler, almost none did and the Allies had to take the war to the nth degree. We would like to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear weapons state, but breezy beliefs about the effects of a strike (or a proposed “grand bargain” ) are apt to be wrong. We need to proceed in a way that isolates the regime from the average Iranian so that Iran’s people do not feel compelled to defend Khameini like Germans did Hitler.
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Hi Lex,
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In the main, I agree with you. There’s the rationality of the man who burned all bridges. The germans who were party members and part of the regime were in that boat, they had to win, die, or flee into exile.
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Germans as whole might have gotten off more lighly had Hitler died in 1944 and the Nazi regime toppled by Wehrmaht conspirators. Stalin, at least according to Joachim Fest, sent out feelers to Berlin for a separate peace based on the 1914 borders prior to D-Day. his affinity for unconditonal surrender may have been conditional if this anecdote is accurate and he might have decided that he could live with Junker generals and conservatives who had “looked East” during the Rapallo years. Churchill might have been persuaded to cut a dealthat staunched Britain’s rapidly eroding financial position and tried to save the Empire.
March 15th, 2012 at 4:04 pm
Ah gotcha, your to subtle for me!
The problem with that scenario is the Iranian people are in favor of the program. So isolating the population from itself maybe a difficult problem!
June 29th, 2012 at 3:39 pm
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