Page:Observations On The Collapse Of The Hitler Regime In Germany And The Weak Points Of The Stalin Regime In The Soviet Union.pdf/1



Such a far-reaching event as the collapse of a state regime can be weighed only after historians and politicians have gained the temporal and spiritual distance necessary to arrive at a judgment which must serve the purpose of an objective historical inquiry. Only after human cessions have clamedcalmed [sic] down and emotional repercussions have given way to rational judgment will historians and politicians come to representations and conclusions which will stand against the criticism of posterity. With this reservation, the causes of the collapse of the Hitler regime will be briefly dealt with in the following analysis and some observations on the present situation of the Soviet Union will be added.

A..

An attempt to discover why the totalitarian regime in Germany ran aground leads to the depressing conclusion that, not the regime's moral defects, but rather the fact that Hitler unleashed a war and eventually lost it, was the real reason for the collapse of that regime. The study of history reveals the disappointing fact that even the worst and most criminal regime is able to hold its ground for a long time if it utilizes adequate security organs and does not suffer decisive military defeat. Thus, the everlasting efforts of the Russian people to overthrow tsarist absolutism were successful only after a war that was lost. Likewise the rule of the Fascists in Italy and the Nazi regime in Germany rot presumably have lasted for an indefinite time if those regimes had wantonly unleashed wars which doomed their fate.

Herewith arises the question of what specific characteristics of the Nazi regime generated war and led to its loss. The answer to this question must proceed from the fact that the Nazi regime did not owe its existence to the German people's free will expressed under normal political conditions but rather was forced upon them with the help of demagogic promises. Those promises were given at a moment when the German people were driven to despair by the situation prevailing in the country. Therefore, the Germans readily accepted every criticism of the existing regime and were prone to regard any change whatsoever as a deliverance. The bourgeois parties in Germany were too weak and ineffectual to offer the people a constructive way out of the difficulties created by the threat which an army of 7 million unemployed represented to Germany in 1933. Hence, the Germans, at that time, might have thrown themselves into the arms of another extreme, i. e. Moscow-inspired Communism, if Hitler had not succeeded in capturing the imagination of the masses by more palpable promises than those offered by the Marx–Lenin doctrine.