“Nazism is a stupefying product, which is very difficult to get rid of” – L’Express

It is a summary on Nazism signed by three of the best specialists in cultural history. In The Nazi World (Tallandier), Johann Chapoutot, Christian Ingrao and Nicolas Patin summarize the renewal of international historiography on the subject. From the aftermath of the First World War to the rubble of 1945, this pavement shows to what extent Nazism represented a “world in itself”, with its beliefs, its paranoias and its attractiveness. We can barely regret that a work intended for the general public as well as for educational use concludes with such a polemical epilogue which establishes a parallel with… neoliberalism, in the continuation of the work of Johann Chapoutot on Nazism like ” one of the matrices of modern management”.

At L’Express, Christian Ingrao, research director at the CNRS, deciphers a deadly ideology, details what we know about the chronology of decision-making for the “final solution”, and dismantles several preconceived ideas about accession to power of Hitler.

L’Express: How is Nazism a real “world in itself”? You point out that there have been few real repentances…

Christian Ingrao: After the defeat of Germany, there are compromised cadres who paid for their crimes. But sincerely repentant Nazis, who admitted that they should never have done this, there have been very few. And even when they recognized that the Shoah was an immense tragedy, they were never the ones responsible. This inability to give up raises questions about the attractiveness of this belief. Nazism is a stupefying product, from which it is very difficult to let go.

For what ?

With the First World War and a complicated end to the war, extending between 1918 and 1924, the Germans believed that their society was besieged by a thousand dangers, and that the world of enemies they had faced during 1914-1918 no had never disarmed. They were then seized by a collective fear of death. For its part, Nazism presents itself as a promise of the re-foundation of Germanness, of the advent of a new society, producing a transmutation of this anguish into utopia. It is this mechanism which explains the attractiveness of Weltanschauungor world view, Nazi, especially among young intellectual elites.

Nazism, on the other hand, claims to be based on scientific racism, on laws of nature which cannot be contested or denied in the political sphere. As Hitler and some early devotees like Himmler asserted, Nazism is applied biology, “applied racial anthropology.”

The movement presents itself as both “revolutionary”, while having counter-revolutionary ideological roots…

The Nazi movement called itself revolutionary, but it was a false revolution. For them, the “revolution” is national. This is to change the course of History and the long story of the German curse by 180 degrees. We are far from a social revolution like that of 1789 or that of the Spartacists in 1918. The revolution they intend to implement is the return to the origins of the Germanic race. It is about returning Nordic man to his prime nature.

How false is the idea that the working classes and the unemployed propelled the Nazi Party to power?

Here we must distinguish three different sociologies: those of executives, activists and voters. Among the voters, the workers are far from having voted massively for the Nazi party. This, in 1932, became the first party at the federal level due to the collapse of the traditional right, with voters who had become radicalized, rather petty bourgeois, bourgeois or from rural areas, and who moved from the right to the far right. There is also a generational dimension, which meant that young people voted NSDAP, and not DNVP, the party of the traditional nationalist right.

The Nazis knew how to address the generation of young people born between 1900 and 1910, who did not know the trenches, but were struck by defeat, the hyperinflation of 1923 then the crisis of 1929, and particularly to the young elites .

You also emphasize that it is a party of men, even by the patriarchal standards of the time…

It is an extremely nationalist and sexist party, which asserted itself in reaction to the license and permissiveness of the Weimar Republic. The Nazi party thus highlights the values ​​of virility, combat, courage, and reduces the place of women to the three “k”s: Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church). In My KampfHitler displayed crass misogyny, caricaturing “good women” and scorning them. Of the 300 Nazi deputies elected during the Weimar Republic, there were no women. But ofs New work has shown that despite this sexist screed, Nazi activism may have appeared, for a certain segment of women, as an attractive space for emancipation.

Another preconceived idea: the Nazis came to power only thanks to elections…

Power was won partially by the ballot box, by the streets and among the elites. There was a quasi-civil war that took place between 1930 and 1933, during which the Nazis tried to conquer public space through violence, opposing the communists. The Nazis never abandoned their practices of “political hooliganism” and intimidation. Hitler understood that violence creates fear and that, even while being responsible for this violence, the NSDAP can then present itself as an appeal to “calm and order”. At the same time, electoral successes are taking shape. In 1928, Joseph Goebbels described in his diary the 2.6% obtained in the legislative elections as a “great success”.

In 1930, the party rose to 18.3% of the vote. But all this is not enough. The Nazis certainly became the largest party in Germany in 1932 with 37.3% of those registered. But they are not the majority. Never has a majority of Germans voted for the Nazis in a free election. A third level was therefore necessary: ​​without the help of conservative elites, the Nazis would not have come to power. On the one hand, the Nazis knew how to make themselves compatible with the ethno-nationalist elites, particularly on the economic level, and, on the other, these elites of the traditional right, who believed they were playing a fool’s game in 1933, thinking they could control Hitler, showed absolute irresponsibility.

You also mention Hitler’s management, which multiplied the agencies and put Nazi dignitaries in competition…

This is institutional Darwinism. Historians of the second generation, called functionalists, showed that Nazism was a polycracy (system with several centers of power), with institutions competing against each other. This indicates that Nazism is not a totalitarian domination, with at the top, like an absolute master, a black archangel with a small mustache who gives the orders. On the contrary, there are jealousies, animosities, baronies, permanent tensions between institutions (party, State, police, Wehrmacht, agencies ad hoc…) with the result of an increase in radicalism in order to please Hitler. He himself was a leader with little presence and little competence, but knew how to surround himself with personalities ready to make up for his faults with their personal ambition, their skills and their work.

When did Hitler really want to mass exterminate the Jews? Was this his intention from the start, or was he pushed into it by the circumstances of 1941, notably with the failure of the Blitzkrieg in the East against the Soviet Union?

The debate has taken place between intentionalism and functionalism, but it is settled. In the 1970s, scholars still believed that the genocide decision was already imprinted in My Kampfpublished in 1925. More recently, others believe that this played out sometime in the summer of 1941, with the invasion of Russia which raised the question of what to do with the mass of Soviet Jews. Others, finally, date the decision of the “final solution” to the failure of the Blitzkrieg, the cessation of the offensive on Moscow and the entry into war against the United States.

It is certain, however, that homicidal decisions have been taken before. When, in the summer of 1940, the Germans considered sending millions of European Jews to Madagascar, this implied enormous mortality. We are already in an imaginary world of indirect extinction. For National Socialist leaders, poor economic and environmental conditions were expected to lead to a drastic reduction in deported Jewish populations. Then, in March 1941, the logistical choices made for the invasion of the USSR meant that no food should leave Germany to feed the Eastern army. This meant that tens of millions of residents of the Soviet Union’s cities would die of starvation. This was to condemn Soviet Jews to death in an indiscriminate manner, because they could only live in the western USSR residence zone. They were therefore doomed to induced extinction.

Operation Barbarossa, launched on June 22, 1941, was the scene of the transition from war crimes and mass murders to a genocide including women and children. It was in August 1941 that the annihilation of Soviet Jews was undoubtedly decided, because the SS wanted to have a logistical base in the west of the USSR to deport all the Jews of Europe within the circle Arctic polar. When the Blitzkrieg failed at the end of 1941, the death of all the Jews in Europe was seen by Hitler as revenge. If the war is total, then the Jews must first suffer the violence. The Wannsee conference, on January 20, 1942, coordinated the policies of the different territories and integrated the state apparatuses into the implementation of extermination. A final decision was taken in June 1942, when Himmler, under the influence of the assassination in Prague of Heydrich [NDLR : le responsable SS Reinhard Heydrich, tué par la résistance tchécoslovaque]states that the genocide must be completed within one year.

How was Hitler able to maintain his certainties until his suicide, even though his country was in ruins?

He never says to himself that he has failed. Despite the few nervous breakdowns he experienced during the last months of the regime, Hitler remained fully attached to his faith. In his eyes, Germany was defeated because its compatriots were not ready to go through this ordeal. But if they kept their racial laws, one day, the German race would be reborn, especially since in its eyes, the Nazis exterminated the Jews of Europe. Hitler has no doubts. He believes that the destruction of Germany must be completed so that anything can survive afterwards. It matters little to him that he has reduced his country to a field of ruins, because the temporality of Nazism is measured in centuries, in millennia, on the scale of the racial struggle.

In the epilogue of the book, you seem to present neoliberalism as a continuation of Nazism… Why did you end this extensive historical work with such a polemical and ideological conclusion?

We are simply saying that Nazism is an avatar of a modernity that began long before it. Nazism is not an accident, an aberration, but a paroxysm of modernity. There is of course a difference of degree and nature between Nazism and capitalist systems, but we find mental categories and technical instruments of world domination, of reducing beings, spaces and things to funds of energy and matter in which it is possible to exhaust to the point of exhaustion. In this sense, working on Nazism also means working on the dark sides of modernity.

“The Nazi world 1919-1945”by Johann Chapoutot, Christian Ingrao and Nicolas Patin. Tallandier, 625 p., €27.50.