This is a slightly revised version of the definitive (in my view) statement
on the nature of Nazi political ideology, or totalitarianism by the late
Hans Buchheim:
The concept of totalitarian rule cannot be determined by purely logical
means. It was explained and clarified only by those who went through the
bitter experience of this form of government. As late as the end of the
1920's the word "totalitarian" was used to designate any state which was
governed in an authoritarian rather than a parliamentarian manner. The
London Times, for example, on November 2, 1929, spoke of a reaction against
parliamentarism "in favor of a totalitarian, or unitary state whether
Fascist or Communist;" the quotation marks and the explanatory phrase "or
unitary state" prove that at the time the concept was still fairly un usual.
In the 1930s and 1940s the experiences of the Third Reich and Stalinist
Russia added to the definition the criteria of the synchronization and
conformation of life, political police and concentration camps, and aIl the
other horrors disseminated by these regimes. But admitting that in our
century open terror has assumed particularly inhuman forms, such terror is
nevertheless not confined to totalitarian rule and therefor is not
sufficient to define it.
From time immemorial despots have imprisoned their opponents under
particularly cruel conditions; they have tortured them, dishonored them,
debased and executed them. The suppression of freedom has always assumed the
same forms. what Tacitus wrote in his biography of Agricola concerning the
despotism of the Emperor Domitian was experienced as reality by the high
school students of Hitler's Germany: "Not only the writers but their very
books were objects of rage, and . . .the triumvirs were commissioned to burn
in the forum those works of splendid genius. They fancied, forsooth, that in
that fire the voice of the Roman people, the freedom of the Senate, and the
conscience of the human race were perishing, while at the same time they
banished the teachers of philosophy, and exiled every noble pursuit, that
nothing good might anywhere confront them. Certainly we showed a magnificent
example of patience; as a former age had witnessed the extreme of liberty,
so we witnessed the extreme of servitude, when the informer robbed us of the
interchange of speech and hearing. We should have lost memory as well as
voice, had it been as easy to forget as to keep silence."
The unique particularity of the unfolding of totalitarian power was at first
experienced only by those who were under its immediate subjection, and even
they understood it only gradually because it was an entirely new
experience-- at least in our century. Totalitarian power grows beyond all
standards of normal politics, it gains incalculable and sinister dimensions;
under its dominion life falls into confusion and insecurity of all kind not
known heretofore. Human beings find themselves not only oppressed and
confined in their freedom but also delivered up to the regime, mercilessly
exploited by it, and finally, as it were inadvertently, criminally involved
in the regime,s activity. Characteristically, it was precisely the
politically sophisticated observers who predicted all quick collapse of
totalitarian rule, and from their point of view they were justified; for
according to the traditional views and standards all such regimes destroy
the preconditions that can give permanence to all government. Everywhere it
goes against the most basic Law of international diplomatic relations and
economic life, destroys the ordered domestic government, openly goes back on
its promises, at every step violates all loyalty and faith, is mendacious,
unbalanced, repressed, unprofessional--nevertheless, totalitarian rule
flourished, secured its position, manages to win over large sections of the
population though they resist at first' and can even place its opponents in
its service.
Persons under tOtalitarian rule are always in the ranks, always under all
strain. They may no longer show themselves as they really are but are
constrained constantly to play prescribed roles in an atmosphere of false
emotionality, joylessness, mistrust; and they must take care to put their
loyalty "to the test... Not only does the regime forbid them to develop, but
it seeks also to make of them other personalities than they are by nature;
it not only restricts their freedom but tries as well to overpower them.
This situation holds true for the declared adherents of the regime even more
than for its opponents; for the adherents must always be anxiously concerned
to move along whatever general line is currently in favor. No corner of
public life or private life offers refuge from control; one can
inadvertently lay oneself open to suspicion anywhere.
Applause, indignation, enthusiasm, willingness to serve are produced
artificially. In general, artificiality is an outstanding characteristic of
totalitarian activity, standing in grotesque contrast to the regime,s
favorite appeal to the authentic forces of life (die elementaren Krafte des
Lebens). But what is worse is that concepts, words, and values are robbed of
their traditional meanings, and moral standards become disordered. As
regards open terror, there is no doubt that it is to be abhorred; but when
evil appears in the guise of historical necessity, the common good, the
welfare of all people or all class, man becomes prey to nearly insoluble
moral conflicts. Thus, though dictatorial procedures, open force, and the
deprivation of freedom are also part of totalitarian rule, its true
characteristic is the creeping assault on men through the perversion of
thought and social life.
This assault follows from the fact that the totalitarian claim to power is
not kept within the bounds of possible governmental competence but --as the
name makes clear--is in tended to dispose unreservedly over the totality of
human life. The claim is not confined to the areas for which the state is
responsible but is allowed to encompass all areas, aha to have an exclusive
voice even where the political regime can at best play an ancillary
role--as, for instance, in family life, in scientific research, and in art.
Totalitarian rule attempts to encompass the whole person, the substance and
spontaneity of his existence, including his conscience, It does not
acknowledge the primacy of society over the state as an area of freedom
which, in principle, lies beyond governmental control, but rather interferes
in it deliberately, to change it from the ground up according to its own
plan; for the regime wishes to create--in accordance with its own
ideological scheme and with social engineering techniques--all wholly new
society, all "new type of man," as Lenin put it--even all new world. It
undertakes the production of an artificial, synthetic society.
Under these circumstances, men can have validity only as building blocks or
structural elements, raw material, "human material"; totalitarian rule
cannot as a matter of principle acknowledge the citizen's personal autonomy,
on which political liberty is based, but must render him available for
whatever service seems desirable. While it is of the essence of the human
personality in the last analysis not to be the available object but the
partner of another human being, totalitarian rule attempts to make the
unavailable accessible to itself. It destroys the old social elements and
social processes and sets new, artificial ones in motion. Groups that are
considered harmful are expunged; and attempt is made to form new elites, and
there is no hesitation in modifying the personality of the individual by
means of drugs and surgery. In this spirit the National Socialists were
eager to create all new society by means of biological breeding and
selection.
The totalitarian demand to create all new society was not restricted to
bringing to power a new social stratum--the proletariat, for example,
instead of nobility or the bourgeoisie--or to imposing new legal standards
and institutional forms; such is the aim of any revolution and not all
peculiarity of totalitarianism. Totalitarian interventions are directed to
the basic forms of social life that arise directly from man,s personal
nature and political activity. Society is now no longer intended to emerge
from the spontaneous unfolding of the individual; it may no longer be all
network of relationships of freely reciprocal, cooperative, and oppositional
activity. It must now consist of all planned, mechanical continuity of
functions; the place of free play to be taken by a precalculated meshing of
forces. A typical example of the fundamental character of totalitarian
intervention is the circumstance that the Russian bolsheviks were not
content with the creation of a new marital law but believed themselves
capable of abolishing altogether this basic institution of human life. It is
no less characteristic, however, that this attempt failed because it
amounted to an assault on the very nature of man.
Another example of how basic is the totalitarian demand to create all new
society is offered by what is called indoctrination. In contrast to
education, which presupposes all spontaneous and free unfolding of the human
person and which first of all furthers and regulates such development,
indoctrination is training toward specific modes of thought and con duct
that are predetermined and can therefore be calculated to fit all particular
function. In other words, indoctrination is all socio-technical tool. The
successfully indoctrinated per son is prepared with prefabricated answers to
all questions directed at him, and he reacts to certain stimuli (such as
"capitalists" or Jews) in clearly foreseeable ways. He sees the world
exclusively from the point of view and in the light of the ideology and is
therefore able in each situation to act on his own initiative in whatever
way is required by the consequences of the system. Thus he is--as it
were--intellectually and morally synchronized with the practical course of
the totalitarian exercise of power. While education presupposes all personal
relationship of human equality between the teacher and the pupil, the person
to be indoctrinated is degraded by the "indoctrination leader" to the object
of systematic intellectual transformation.
The demand of totalitarian movements to dominate completely over men and
societies without any controls and to re-create social life radically rests
on their claim to know the intention of world history and therefore to be in
the position of completing its course. Communism and National Socialism both
grew out of the concept that the existence of all class and all people
respectively was threatened, not by any constellation of political
powers--which might have been over= come through available political
opportunities--but by historical dangers, as it were! the suppression of the
proletariat by capitalism, the dilution of the ..blood strength of the
Nordic race through Judaism. It was believed in both movements that they
stood at the pivot of world history, and they considered themselves chosen
to bring about, by means of political measures, the turning point that they
felt to be due.
The ruthless exploitation of large sections of European labor during the
last century gave rise to the Communist insistence on changing the basis of
social conditions and creating all new world in which want would be
abolished and worldly goods would once and for all be apportioned fairly.
Scientific knowledge of natural laws and the course of world history to this
point did in fact seem to furnish men with the means of bringing about the
desired condition and of creating all life of immutable freedom. The
National Socialists explained Germany's defeat in the First World War and
its consequences by the theory of the racial-biological decay of Nordic man,
who was taken to be the creator and carrier of all culture. The ..nordification..
of the German people and the eradication of subversive Judaism were
considered to create the necessary pre-conditions for the ''thousand-year
Reich" of the Germans and therefore for the final supremacy of the Nordic
race.
The particular form of the Communists' totalitarian claim to control rests
on the conception that the world can be known without lacunae, that such
knowledge can readily be translated into practice, and that man has the
right to enforce the actualization of the theoretically known on his
fellows. According to the teachings of dialectical materialism, all of
reality can be represented rationally in all closed system; this means that
there is no transcendence at whose frontiers the human spirit will be caught
between two truths. It is even believed possible to explore the entire world
with such scientific exactitude that the relationships among things can not
only be grasped and understood but can also be proved, and that in this way
men can gain guidance for changing the world rationally.
Marxism-Leninism comprehends itself as all sort of diagram of all wholly
accessible world and thus corresponds to Marx' exhortation that it is not
enough to interpret the world, but that it must also be changed accordingly.
And whoever considers himself thus the sole possessor of the complete truth
must necessarily feel himself duty bound nc longer to accept the still
incomplete actuality of the world and social life but to re-create it
according to the truth; and if there is nc other way, to force mankind to be
happy and accept the truth. Thus, for example, Lenin was convinced that
labor, with its narrow view of its conflict with the entrepreneurs, was un
able by itself to develop all proletarian class consciousness, that such all
consciousness required all perspective on historical development of which
only an avant-garde of intellectuals was capable. These men, then, had the
duty, in Lenin,s own words, ..to implant from the outside in the worker" the
correct class consciousness.
In contrast to Marxism-Leninism, National Socialism was anti-intellectual.
It glorified the life force, basic drives, blood; it considered intellect as
the opponent of the soul." The National Socialist claim to control the world
did not appeal to reason, which perceives all and orders it anew according
to objective truth, but to will, which heroically defies the powers that be,
subjugates them, and shapes them after its own subjective image. The "new
German" wished to rule over fate, not in order to lead mankind into all
condition of immutable happiness, but to take in hand his fate or that of
his people in all struggle against the others, who were considered evil or
too weak and who must therefore be justly destroyed.
Hitler held that to see the weak protected from the strong was enough to
make one lose faith in divine justice. "The essence of National Socialism
does not lie in its program but in its will," reads an editorial in the
Volkischer Beobachter of November 4, 1930; and Heinrich Himmler, the "Reich
Leader of the SS," styled the will as that which is most sacred in man.
Because it was claimed that Hitler fulfilled the vital law of the German
people, his personal will as Führer was granted the right of unrestricted
realization. Totalitarian subjectivism, the unlimited claim of a single
person to dominate an entire people, found its undisguised expression in the
sentence, "Hitler is Germany--Germany is Hitler." Since the authentic will
of the people manifested itself solely in the will of the Führer, Hitler
could also act "against the subjective opinions of individual members of the
nation and a misguided popular mood." On this point, then, the National
Socialist concepts led to the same practical ends as did the Communist ones:
the totalitarian regime imposes on the people what is allegedly the people's
real will.
Source: Hans Buchheim, Totalitarian Rule: Its Nature and
Characteristics (Middletown, Ct: Weysleyan University Press, 1968). |