Black Earth(18)

In 1934, Hitler was officially titled “Führer and Reich Chancellor.” This vague designation indicated that Hitler was the head of a racial body as well as the head of government. Hitler was a racial colonialist in theory and an opponent of the Weimar Republic in practice. In the name of racial consolidation he destroyed the republic’s basic freedoms and mocked its constitution. And yet its bureaucrats generally considered Hitler’s rule as a legitimate continuity of administration.

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Of course, the very notion of a party-state was self-contradictory. The Nazi party was founded on the assumption of endless racial conflict, whereas any traditional state asserts the right to control and limit violence. Conflict had to be maintained but at the same time channeled. The existence of the party-state depended, therefore, on Hitler’s second innovation, the entrepreneurship of violence.

The classic definition of the state, provided by the German sociologist Max Weber, is the institution that seeks to monopolize legitimate violence. In the 1920s and the early 1930s, Hitler sought to discredit the Weimar Republic by demonstrating that it could not, in fact, do this. His armed guards, known as the SA and SS, functioned before his takeover of 1933 as de-monopolizers of violence. When they beat opponents or started brawls, they were demonstrating the weakness of the existing system. Following the example of Benito Mussolini after his rise to power in Italy, Hitler kept his paramilitaries after he himself had won power. Often after a revolution the professional miscreants are subordinated to the state and become servants of order rather than its violators. But the SA and SS remained party organizations even after the state had been won. Although their members wore uniforms and had ranks, these did not indicate a particular place in a state hierarchy. The SA and SS were organizations of power, but not of a power confined by a conventional state. Their final authority was the good of the race, as defined by their Führer. After the takeover of 1933, they became entrepreneurs of violence, looking for ways and means of murder that would serve the larger project of racial empire even as the German state came under Nazi control.

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Yet this innovation, in its turn, posed a basic problem: How could the entrepreneurs propagate violence in Germany when what Hitler needed was a foreign war, and thus the strength within Germany to fight? How much blood could be shed in the very country that Hitler needed as his base for his global war in the name of race? If people accustomed to violence were to be trained in violence, where would that training be put to use? The rulers of the Soviet Union had earlier faced the same problems, and solved them elegantly. The conflict required by theory was to continue, but not on the lands controlled by the theorists. The communist party was meant to guide the workers through painful class conflict, but of course after the revolution such a thing could not be admitted to exist with the Soviet Union itself. The Bolsheviks therefore maintained that their state was a peaceful homeland of socialism that provided an example of future harmony for the rest of the world. Soviet foreign policy worked from the assumption that class conflict beyond the Soviet Union would eventually bring down world capitalism, and generate new allies. In the meantime, it was reasonable and legitimate for Soviet foreign policy to encourage this historical process. In other words, Soviet authorities monopolized violence within their own country, and exported the revolution.

Hitler’s third innovation, anarchy for export, was a similar solution to the conundrum of legitimizing and cultivating violence while preserving one’s own authority. After 1933, Nazi Germany was chiefly a base for further operations abroad, which would then transform Germany itself. German institutions were altered in part to transform Germans, but mainly to prepare the way for an unprecedented kind of violence beyond Germany. The revolution would proceed abroad, and when complete it would redeem Germans and allow them to elevate their own country. The German state had to be preserved precisely to allow the destruction of other states, an achievement that would establish the new racial order.

The outlines of this solution emerged in June 1934, a little more than a year after Hitler seized power, in the defeat of one set of violent entrepreneurs, the larger and more populist Sturmabteilung (SA), by another, the more elite bodyguard initially known as the Schutzstaffel (SS). The SA and its leader Ernst R?hm were faithful to Nazi ideology in its literal, antipolitical reading. R?hm imagined that his SA men would become a new kind of army, fomenting revolution inside Germany and abroad. He spoke of a second revolution to follow Hitler’s takeover of 1933. Hitler, by contrast, understood that a period of political transformation in Germany would have to precede the completion of the revolution by foreign war. In the Night of the Long Knives, the SS arrested and executed R?hm and other leaders of the SA, while propaganda denounced the victims as homosexuals. As so often in Nazi actions, the apparent conservatism was a cover for something truly radical. The legal theorist Carl Schmitt explained that Hitler was protecting the one true law, that of the race, by asserting himself against law as conventionally understood. By suppressing the SA, Hitler was able to appease the commanders of the German armed forces, who had seen the SA as a threat.