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PARTISAN REVIEW
Third Reich and Hitler's weakness is an obvious example. It is perfectly
true that Hitler (and Stalin) did not personally make every decision,
which would have been physically impossible. On issues that were not
central to his beliefs, Hitler would prevaricate or change his opinions
from one day to the next. He was not omnipotent. On some issues he
left the initiative to others, especially after the outbreak of the war. In
the meantime his aides were scheming against each other, quarreling and
fighting for influence. At times Hitler acted as a reluctant arbiter, at oth–
ers he did not want to be bothered at all. But it is ridiculous to imagine
that he presided over a bureaucratic chaos, leaving all initiatives to his
underlings, playing them out against each other.
Whether an individual is strong or weak, tall or small, clever or
stupid, is a relative statement. It depends on the yardstick used . Com–
pared to Orwell's 1984, Nazi Germany (and
a fortiori
fascist Italy) were
in a permanent state of anarchy. Compared with other systems known in
history, they were effective dictatorships. It is astonishing, all things con–
sidered, how much Hitler interfered and to what extent he was in con–
trol. A random look at the instructions emanating from his chancery
shows that he gave orders that Furtwangler, the famous conductor,
should not participate in the Salzburg festival of 1938; that residents of
Munich should be permitted to drink "strong beer," opposing a planned
reduction in its alcohol content. He ordered that a public statue at the
Rhine should be illuminated by night; that the iron bars at the windows
of a museum in Munich should not be painted black but bronze-gold;
that his aides should wear rubber soles; that Gerhardinger, an obscure
painter, should not be mentioned in the media; that prominent foreign
visitors should not be fed tinned mushrooms because of the danger of
poisoning (this in May 1942!); that foreigners should be given no angling
permits; that the monthly maximum fee for a rented garage should be
seven marks all over Germany. He wanted to know how many violins
the Vienna Symphony Orchestra had in 1942 and how much artificial
honey was produced in Germany; he ordered that Schiller's
Wilhelm T ell
should no longer be performed and that male personnel should no
longer serve in restaurants. He decided, among many other things, that
the physicist Heinrich Hertz, a half-Jew, should not become an unperson
and that the term
Kilohertz
should also be used in the future.
It could well be that Hitler's instructions concerning angling permits
for foreigners were occasionally disregarded on the local level , and that
in some places a rent higher than seven marks was charged for garage
rentals. And it is, of course, also true that on many subjects there were
no instructions at all. However, there is overwhelming evidence that on
