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

732 DER FUEHRERMore generally they were unfit to occupy any responsible position —and their supreme leader knew this. When Hitler was still engaged in hisstruggle against the state, he had appealed to the 'Uprooted andDisinherited' and praised them as his best troops. Later, in his speech ofjustification for the events that were to follow, he contemptuously toldthese S.A. leaders, now for the most part dead, that they were people'who in 1918 had been shaken in their former relation to the state anduprooted, and had thereby lost all inner contact with a human socialorder.' They were people, 'who without realizing it had found theirprofession of faith in nihilism. Incapable of any real co-operation, readyto oppose any order, filled with hatred for any kind of authority, theirexcited and restless minds were appeased only by constant intellectualand con-spiratory preoccupation with the destruction of existinginstitutions.' These were Hitler's own words about his faithful, to whomhe had to be unfaithful, because power cannot be established without abreach of faith — a breach of faith both to people and to ideas.For a few months these men had been admired by the nation as thesinister embodiments of a mysterious but indisputably impressivepolitical force; as a Viking army which had suddenly emerged into thepresent from legendary times; as the host of freedom seeking the light,which they themselves thought they were. But gradually the character ofthese heroes became better known, and what scoundrels many of themwere was demonstrated in a thousand individual cases to be. Frighteningreports also trickled through from the concentration camps, and thepublic began obscurely to realize that the Fuhrer's picked troops hadorganized artificial hells in Dachau near Munich, in Oranienburg nearBerlin, in Duerrgoy near Breslau, and in Boergermoor in northwesternGermany; hells which surpassed in horror the former slave camps inBelgian Congo or Bolshevist Russia. It became known that inOranienburg cement cells were built in which camp inmates were keptstanding for many hours, sometimes days, in the darkness — uprightstanding stone coffins. It became known that in all the concentrationcamps flogging had been officially introduced as a punishment for lightoffenses; that for relatively innocuous violations of rules the penaltywas execution by hanging — officially this was