Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

HITLER VERSUS NATIONAL SOCIALISM 653day made it clear to a gathering of S.A. men in the city of Dortmundthat he meant to devote himself above all to the moral resurrection ofGermany; the thing, he said, was to educate people, not to standinstitutions on their heads. And education, he declared, faithful to hisold theory of propaganda, meant a spiritual driving of the masses, untilthey knew no will other than that of the leadership: 'The German peoplemust put itself a hundred per cent in the service of our idea. .. . We musteducate millions of men to fit into our state. . . .'On July 14, the cabinet, which since March 23 had been making allthe laws without bothering the parliament or the President, issued adecree 'against the formation of new parties.' The first paragraph ran: 'InGermany the National Socialist German Workers' Party is the soleexisting political party.'The one-party system, which had been in power for years in Russia,Italy, China, and Turkey, had come to Germany. This system has beencalled dictatorship, meaning despotism, but this does not express itsessential character. A despotism ignores the will of the people; but thesenew states of the armed intellectuals take the will of the people soseriously that they create it and shape it themselves— or so they think;Hitler called this 'education.' For this they use the methods which theyhave preserved from the democratic surroundings of their origins.Although all other parties have been destroyed, the concept of the partyhas remained; elections, parliaments, messages to the people, consent ofthe legislative body, plebiscites — continue to be the salient features ofpublic life, and have even acquired a higher solemnity. The outwardforms seem scarcely changed, and Machiavelli might well be pleased;for his disciples, by using the methods of democracy more adroitly andcynically than the democrats themselves, have fathomed the banal secretthat one can do what one wants with men, as soon as one brings them towant it themselves.But the course of history reveals a higher secret. At the height of hisvictory, the victor retreated in many places, seemingly of his own freewill, changed his plans, disappointed his own followers, adapted himselfto necessity. And the true secret of political victory is contained in thisHegelian necessity: to know what one wants, and to want what thepeople want, but do not yet know.