rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

44 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICHtablish authority . . . The deeper the dictator was originally rootedin the broad masses, the better he understands how to treat thempsychologically, the less the workers will distrust him, the more supportershe will win among these most energetic ranks of the people.He himself has nothing in common with the mass; like every greatman he is all personality . . . When necessity commands, he doesnot shrink before bloodshed. Great questions are always decidedby blood and iron . . . In order to reach his goal, he is preparedto trample on his closest friends . . . The lawgiver proceeds withterrible hardness . . . As the need arises, he can trample them [thepeople] with the boots of a grenadier . . . 86No wonder Hitler took to the young man. This was a portrait perhaps notof the leader as he was at the moment but of the leader he wanted to become– and did. For all his solemnity and studiousness, Hess remained a man oflimited intelligence, always receptive to crackpot ideas, which he could adoptwith great fanaticism. Until nearly the end, he would be one of Hitler’s mostloyal and trusted followers and one of the few who was not bitten by consumingpersonal ambition.Alfred Rosenberg, although he was often hailed as the ”intellectual leader”of the Nazi Party and indeed its ”philosopher,” was also a man of mediocreintelligence. Rosenberg may with some truth be put down as a Russian. Likea good many Russian ”intellectuals,” he was of Baltic German stock. Theson of a shoemaker, he was born January 12, 1893, at Reval (now Tallinn) inEstonia, which had been a part of the Czarist Empire since 1721. He choseto study not in Germany but in Russia and received a diploma in architecturefrom the University of Moscow in 1917. He lived in Moscow through the daysof the Bolshevik revolution and it may be that, as some of his enemies in theNazi Party later said, he flirted with the idea of becoming a young Bolshevikrevolutionary. In February 1918, however, he returned to Reval, volunteered forservice in the German Army when it reached the city, was turned down as a”Russian” and finally, at the end of 1918, made his way to Munich, where hefirst became active in White Russian emigre circles.Rosenberg then met Dietrich Eckart and through him Hitler, and joinedthe party at the end of 1919. It was inevitable that a man who had actuallyreceived a diploma in architecture would impress the man who had failed evento get into a school of architecture. Hitler was also impressed by Rosenberg’s”learning,” and he liked the young Bait’s hatred of the Jews and the Bolsheviks.Shortly before Eckart died, toward the end of 1923, Hitler made Rosenbergeditor of the Voelkischer Beobachter, and for many years he continued to propup this utterly muddled man, this confused and shallow ”philosopher,” as theintellectual mentor of the Nazi movement and as one of its chief authorities onforeign policy.Like Rudolf Hess, Hermann Goering had also come to Munich some timeafter the war ostensibly to study economics at the university, and he too hadcome under the personal spell of Adolf Hitler. One of the nation’s great warheroes, the last commander of the famed Richthofen Fighter Squadron, holderof the Pour le Merite, the highest war decoration in Germany, he found it evenmore difficult than most war veterans to return to the humdrum existence ofpeacetime civilian life. He became a transport pilot in Denmark for a time and