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

758 DER FUEHRERbe the victim of Hitler's Reichswehr policy; it is true that he had beendisobedient in this sense again and again in the course of the last fifteenyears.But Hitler's decision implied more than this personal settling ofaccounts. He put an end to the weakness in himself, the weakness ofhaving a friend who considered himself the Fuhrer's equal; by a deedwhich went beyond normal human standards he definitively raisedhimself above normal human beings. His belief that he was a sort ofProvidence given to his people in human form was no trifling matter;his sincerest admirers took this belief in deadly earnest. Baldur vonSchirach, the leader of the 'Hitler-Youth,' declared that his altar was notthe church, but the steps of the Feld-herrnhalle drenched in blood in1923, and he indicated that in his opinion this was the altar where Hitlerhad made his divine appearance. Only a few days before, Hess had onceagain proclaimed: 'We believe that the Fuhrer follows a higher call toshape the destiny of Germany. . . . He has always been right, he alwayswill be right.' A man as mundane as Goring, speaking on Hesselbergmountain in Franconia, an old pagan place of worship, before thousandsof people, shouted contemptuously in the face of the churches: 'Whenwas there ever deeper and more passionate faith in Germany than thereis today ? What faith was ever aroused more strongly than our faith inthe Fuhrer? Never has a greater miracle happened than in our time. TheAlmighty made this miracle through Adolf Hitler!' At the beginning of1934, when Hess swore in the entire party to Hitler in a mass spectaclewhich brought millions of people in thousands of German towns andvillages to the microphones, he said to them, before administering theoath: 'By this oath we again bind our lives to a man, through whom —this is our belief — superior forces act in fulfillment of Destiny. Do notseek Adolf Hitler with your brains; all of you will find him with thestrength of your hearts. Adolf Hitler is Germany and Germany is AdolfHitler.' — And, in Hitler's own words, 'Germany is our God on thisearth.'Twelve years earlier, when he had to serve a month in prison, he hadsaid that he went to his place of punishment like Christ to Golgotha.Now he had gone farther than Golgotha, farther than