Read Online Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Timothy Snyder
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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 Röhm were faithful to Nazi ideology in its literal, antipolitical reading. Röhm 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 Röhm 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.
Whereas the SA had stood for Hitler’s youthful anarchism, the SS understood the need for a new sort of racial politics, radical but patient. The SS was not a direct rival to the German army nor a threat to order in Germany. Its commander Heinrich Himmler followed Hitler in seeing Germany as a realm of politics where change would come gradually. Rather than making claims for revolutionary power within Germany, then, the SS would take part in the destruction of states beyond Germany. This involved a future division of labor with the army rather than a present competition. The existence of useful German institutions had to be squared with the desirability of the law of the jungle; actions taken in the present in Germany had to prepare the way for the future conflict that was National Socialism’s essence. The German army would prepare the way by defeating armies, and then the SS would restore the natural racial order by destroying states and eliminating human beings.
This mission of deferred supremacy allowed the young men who joined the SS to reconcile racism with elitism, and careerism with a sense of destiny. They could believe that they were defending what
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 Röhm were faithful to Nazi ideology in its literal, antipolitical reading. Röhm 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 Röhm 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.
Whereas the SA had stood for Hitler’s youthful anarchism, the SS understood the need for a new sort of racial politics, radical but patient. The SS was not a direct rival to the German army nor a threat to order in Germany. Its commander Heinrich Himmler followed Hitler in seeing Germany as a realm of politics where change would come gradually. Rather than making claims for revolutionary power within Germany, then, the SS would take part in the destruction of states beyond Germany. This involved a future division of labor with the army rather than a present competition. The existence of useful German institutions had to be squared with the desirability of the law of the jungle; actions taken in the present in Germany had to prepare the way for the future conflict that was National Socialism’s essence. The German army would prepare the way by defeating armies, and then the SS would restore the natural racial order by destroying states and eliminating human beings.
This mission of deferred supremacy allowed the young men who joined the SS to reconcile racism with elitism, and careerism with a sense of destiny. They could believe that they were defending what
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