Hitler’s Henchmen: The Willingly Followers, Essay Example

January 30, 1933 – the first day Adolf Hitler had seized power, marks the beginning of an era adorned with organized destruction and co-ordinated savagery. Adolf on that day had been apprehensive and tensed – he could envisage the sudden death that waited for him if he is unable to restore the dignity of post Versailles Germany. According to his close friend and adjutant Julius Schaub, Hitler was jubilant on that day, and profusely acclaimed to the guests of German Chancellery building: No power on earth will get me out of this building alive!

Adolf Hitler, connoted as murderer of millions, a master who believed and propagated destruction and managed organised insanity – was a ruthless man. He believed in the psychology of ‘survival of the fittest’ and ‘to attain his objective by hook or crook’. However his actions and physical gestures towards his cause was cruel and contained objective psycho paranoia in the face of humanity. But to our dismay, going through the history of his childhood – it is obvious that he did not come to the world as a monster; neither was he the messenger of God to ‘bring order’ in the country. He was born as a innocent boy in 1889 in a small town of Braunau Amm Inn, Austria. More astonishingly Adolf Hitler was surrounded by a group of men (henchmen), special in command and confidence with Hitler; who were as ruthless and fanatical as their leader – most importantly they were normal human beings with families, wives and children – but in the proximity of Hitler they were institutions of legitimized terror. Our analysis would be that in the face of human negligence and ruthlessness of Hitler, what had influenced these Henchmen to follow him? In spite of being normal human beings, what ethos in Hitler induced them to the level of being equivalent monsters in crime?

The Henchmen – ‘Better described as masters of death’ or SS Men , wore  black uniforms with a skeleton’s head on their hats, the motto Unsere Ehre heisst Treue on their belts and their symbol was the double S-rune. They had sworn eternal faith to Adolf Hitler and they were his most ruthless henchmen, often seen as personifications of evil. These men were found to be psychologically normal. They were men of fine standing, husbands who morning and night kissed their wives, fathers who tucked their children into bed.  But murders, brutalities, cruelties, tortures, atrocities, and other inhuman acts were an everyday occurrence.

(http://www.deathcamps.info/Nazis/Default.htm)

The Holocaust

The war of Adolf Hitler and his hatred towards Jews is worth mention. In 1933 Jews were forced to quit their jobs, a special quota was formulated to banish the Jewish students from university, Jewish shops were boycotted; Nuremberg laws considered Jews as German subjects instead of citizens and they were barred from public life. Shops read, “No Jews allowed” and intermarriages were banned. The Polish Jews were thrown in oblivion in the Polish border, and they were kept in no man’s land. These atrocities fuelled a small Jewish rebellion which gave Hitler and his henchmen to attack the Jews. For two days revolt thawed Germany – stores were broken, shops ransacked and and twenty thousand Jews arrested. The riots was known as  Kristallnacht – the Night of Glass, for all the broken glass. Hitler had always been clear that he would tolerate no Jews in his kingdom. His plans “for annihilation of the Jews” and his threats to erase Jewish people from Germany hinted genocide.

Atrocities of Hitler and His Henchmen

The European Jews were the primary victims of the holocaust. The Holocaust was the systematic annihilation of six million Jews by the Nazi regime during World War II. In 1933 approximately nine million Jews lived in the 21 countries of Europe that would be occupied by Germany during the war. By 1945 two out of every three European Jews had been killed. However, the majority of massacre was done on the Jews, not to mention the death of half million gypsies, more than three million Soviet prisoners of War; 250,000 mentally or physically disabled persons and 1.5 million children. Thus Hitler and his Nazi regime with his henchmen in the forefront had been responsible for the bloody and gruesome holocaust. The passion for triumph and victory was even more important than the lives of hundreds of children. This monstrous and heinous activity of Hitler and his henchmen had been remembered in history as the holocaust.

(http://www.auschwitz.dk/Anker/Holocaust/)

Hitler’s Henchmen: Josef Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goring, Rudolph Hess and Albert Speer. These were the main men who formed Hitler’s group of henchmen and were responsible for the ascent of Hitler. They are known in history as partners of crime who became the perpetrators of a cruel and deadly German era. They and their radical vision of Swastika, are pertinent examples of inhuman vocal terror regime of the Nazi state. No w let us analyse with each of the characters why they had followed Hitler and associated with such harsh cruelty? What were the reasons behind such involvement? Why did they not stop Hitler in his atrocities?

Josef Goebbels

He was the master propagandist of the Nazi regime – he was vested the responsibility to shape the German minds and intellect to Pro Nazi regime and assumed the role of a dictator in the cultural life of Germany for twelve years. He was born in a strict Catholic family from Rheydt, in the Rhineland, on 29 October 1897 and received his education from a Roman Catholic school. He was rejected for military service because he had crippled his foot in childhood polio- a physical disability that had caused grave stipulation of anger and torment within his own self.  The physical inadequacy, black hair and his diminutive look made him conscious and he tried to conceal his deformation by ideological rectitude and his fathom for radicalism once he joined NSDAP in 1922. He was a complicated terse individual, with a general contempt for human race; an intent and passionate hatred for the Jews; and an overall pessimism stemming from his self hatred and inferiority complex- these feelings of despair, rage, destruction and inhuman carnage was an apostle of his own imagination and thus advocated well in the Nazi regime. He was one of the closest associates of Hitler and helped him in his political pursuit to gain the German regime. Hitler observed, “Dr. Goebbels was gifted with the two things without which the situation in Berlin could not have been mastered: verbal facility and intellect… For Dr. Goebbels, who had not found much in the way of a political organization when he started, had won Berlin in the truest sense of the word.” Hitler was indeed grateful to this propaganda master, who created the mysticism of Fuhrer- the image of a German messiah in Hitler. With his intricate instincts he manipulated the sentiments of unemployed Germans; a cynic man devoid of genuine convictions assumed the role of selling Hitler to Germans – portaging Hitler as the messiah to save the Germans from the clutches of Jews.

Soon Goebbels’s deeply rooted antagonism, his vicious malice to reap confusion and his power to impress public gave him total control of the communications media – i.e. radio, publishing, press, cinema and the other arts. He became actively involved in suppressing the media, “cleansing” the arts in the name of the Volkisch ideal, crucifying the editors and journalists to State control, eliminating all Jews and political opponents from positions of influence. He became a relentless Jew-baiter, demonizing the stereotyped figure of the “International Jewish Financier” in London and Washington allied with the “Jew-Bolsheviks” in Moscow, as the chief enemy of the Third Reich. At the Party Day of Victory in 1933, Goebbels attacked the “Jewish penetration of the professions” (law, medicine, property, theatre, etc.), claiming that the foreign Jewish boycott of Germany had provoked Nazi “counter-measures.”

(http://www.leninimports.com/josef_goebbels_bio.html)

Goebbels’s hatred of the Jews, was synonymous to the hatred for the clever and the intelligent factions, his deep rooted self complex and also as a strategy to create a common enemy, so that the public sentiments could be mobilised and used in their favour. Goebbels was one of the chief secret abettors of the “Final Solution,” personally supervising the deportation of Jews from Berlin in 1942 and proposing that Jews along with gypsies should be regarded as “unconditionally exterminable.” He combined verbal warnings that, as a result of the war, “the Jews will pay with extermination of their race in Europe and perhaps beyond”. He continued his attack on the Jews and it became bloodier in the Kristallnacht of 1938, the first open and unrestrained program to unleash Jews. He openly challenged Jewish massacre in his diary, “With regard to the Jewish Question, the Führer is determined to make a clean sweep of it. He prophesied that, if they brought about another world war, they would experience their annihilation. The annihilation of Jewry must be the necessary consequence. The question is to be viewed without any sentimentality. We’re not there to have sympathy with the Jews, but only sympathy with our own German people. If the German people have again now sacrificed around 160,000 dead in the eastern campaign, the originators of this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their lives.” Thus the role of Goebbels in the history of Holocaust is undeniable; and his ally with the sentiments and activities of Hitler just seems to fit in…As his departing speech, “We shall go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all time, or as the greatest criminals.”

(http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/goebbels.html)

Heinrich Himmler

The Reichsfuhrer-SS, head of the Gestapo and the Waffen-SS, Minister of the Interior from 1943 to 1945 and organizer of the mass murder of Jews in the Third Reich, Heinrich Himmler was born in Munich on 7 October 1900. He was the son a pious, authoritarian Roman Catholic schoolmaster. Himmler was a loner with atopic philosophical mysticism, with cranky brittle obsessions, occult, homeopathy and herbal remedies that reigned his life. He is better described as a narrow minded, rigid, narrow radical fanatic. In a speech in January 1937, Himmler declared that “there is no more living proof of hereditary and racial laws than in a concentration camp. You find there hydrocephalic, squinters, deformed individuals, semi-Jews: a considerable number of inferior people.” The mission of the German people was “the struggle for the extermination of any sub-humans, all over the world who are in league against Germany, which is the nucleus of the Nordic race; against Germany, nucleus of the German nation, against Germany the custodian of human culture: they mean the existence or non-existence of the white man; and we guide his destiny.” He was a curious and cold person with bizarre, romantic fantasy and often described as “a man of quiet unemotional gestures, a man without nerves,”. He suffered from psycho-somatic illness, intestinal cramps, headaches and almost fainted at the sight of a killing of hundred eastern Jews (including women) for his personal benefit on the Russian front. It was a bad experience for him and so he ordered a “more humane means” of execution the use of poison gas in specially constructed chambers disguised as shower rooms. The following extract shows the innate, inhuman nature of the man coupled with his allegiance to the thought and spirit of Hitler. Heinrich says in 1936,  “I know there are many people in Germany who feel sick at the very sight of this black (SS) uniform…We understand this and we do not expect to be loved…All those who have Germany at heart, will and should respect us. All those who in some way or at some time have a bad conscience in respect to the Führer and the nation should fear us. For these people we have constructed an organization called the SD (SS security service) and in the same way…the Gestapo (secret state police)…”

“Unconditional and highest freedom of will,” Himmler instructed his SS, “comes from obedience, from service to our Weltanschauung (world view), obedience which is prepared to render each and every sacrifice to pride, to external honor and to all which is dear to us personally, obedience which never falters but unconditionally follows every order which comes from the Führer or legally from superiors…” Thus, when the order came from Hitler to exterminate the Jews, they obeyed…We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us. Altogether, however, we can say that we have fulfilled this most difficult duty for the love of our people. And our spirit, our soul, our character has not suffered injury from it.”

http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/h-himmler.htm

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/himmler.html

Hermann Goring

Hermann Goering was born in Rosenheim, Bavaria on 12th January 1893. He was the son of a diplomat. He became interested in Politics In 1922 he heard Adolf Hitler and it was, as he later said, “A political love at first sight”. Goering became a member of the Nazi party leadership, where his personal charm, aristocratic background and war hero fame, helped him to climb the Nazi leadership and getting appointed as minister of the interior, in charge of the police. He immediately filled the police with Nazi party and gave orders to arrest or murders any anti Nazi factions. Goering was also among them who advocated the opening of concentration camps where the ‘political opponents’ could be imprisoned and killed without trial. He quickly abolished and made Germany a totalitarian police state.

(http://www.2worldwar2.com/hermann-goering.htm)

Rudolf Hess

He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, April 26, 1894, and was the son of a prosperous businessman. After hearing a sppech of Hitler in Munich beer hall, Hess joined the Nazi Party, and became the sixteenth member. After his first meeting with Hitler, Hess said he felt “as though overcome by a vision.” He served for many years as the personal secretary of Hitler but was never given a portfolio or official rank. In 1932, Hitler appointed him Chairman of the Central Political Commission of the Nazi Party and SS General as a reward for his loyal service. Hess was a shy, and an insecure man, with strenuous psychic activities…he was a fanatic follower of Hitler and in a speech said, “ With pride we see that one man remains beyond all criticism, that is the Führer. This is because everyone feels and knows: he is always right, and he will always be right. The National Socialism of all of us is anchored in uncritical loyalty, in the surrender to the Führer that does not ask for the why in individual cases, in the silent execution of his orders. We believe that the Führer is obeying a higher call to fashion German history. There can be no criticism of this belief.” Thus his total submission in Hitler and efficacy in his judgement shows that he had done everything at the insight of his commander. (http://thirdreich.net/Hess-Bio.html)

Albert Speer

He was born in Mannheim, Germany and was educated in architectural studies. He was also inspired by Hitler and his oratory powers made him to join Nationalist Socialist party in 1931 and in the process developed cordial relations with Hitler.  However his relations with Hitler strained when he disobeyed Hitler to destroy Nazi installations. He was one of the survivors of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal. He was the only man who considered the Nazi actions as immoral and regretted for being part of such a heinous regime.

(http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Speer1.html)

Works Cited

The Holocaust Chronicle Publications International LTD

Hitler Kershaw, Ian W. W. Norton & Company; 1st American edition.

Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death  Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel Greenhill Books 2006

Hitlers Henchmen, Guido Knopp, 2005

Gutman, (1990) Israel, ed.Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Vol. 3. Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim Publishing House.

Shirer, (1960)William.The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany.

Wistrich, Robert S.(1982) Who’s Who in Nazi Germany. London: Routledge http://www.deathcamps.info/Nazis/Default.htm