The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Spain, perhaps the most tradition-bound country in Europe, was also undergoing political convulsions. The history of Spain in the first years of the twentieth century reads very much like the history of Russia in the same period: a rigid class structure, a monarchy used to absolute power, a half-starved peasantry, and a steadily growing revolutionary movement. Spain stayed out of the First World War, but its armaments industry grew, and so did the power of the workers. In 1921, a Spanish army was trapped in Morocco and 12,000 were killed. Widespread unrest followed, which was terminated when General Primo de Rivera seized power in a coup. Rivera became dictator, with the approval of the king, Alphonso XIII (who introduced him to the king of Italy as ‘My Mussolini’). But even a dictator could not hold Spain together; Rivera resigned in 1930, unrest broke out again, and in 1931 the king fled. When a Republican (i.e. liberal communist) government took over, the peasants considered this as an invitation to seize the land from the landowners, and nothing the government did could restrain them for long. They had the bit between their teeth. It was a situation that seems to be recurrent in history. Like the slaves who revolted against Rome under Spartacus, the peasants declined all restraint. The landowners, understandably, objected to being plundered, and turned to the army for help. In 1936, there was an army rebellion, from which General Francisco Franco emerged as the leader. A bloody civil war followed, and continued until March 1939, when Franco became dictator. The war cost three-quarters of a million lives.

In Hitler’s Germany, the newly awakened national pride was demanding satisfaction for past humiliations – in this case the losses of German territory suffered at the end of the war; these included the Rhineland, Alsace and the ‘Polish corridor’. But the first objective of the Nazis was to unite Germany and Austria. There was a flourishing Nazi party in Austria; it seemed absurd that this German-speaking country, now no longer the heart of an empire, should remain a separate entity. In July 1934, a group of Nazis in Vienna engineered a coup and killed the Austrian chancellor Dollfuss. But at this stage Mussolini had no desire to see the collapse of a ‘buffer state’ between Italy and Germany and moved troops to the frontier; so did Yugoslavia. Hitler quickly disowned the coup and temporarily abandoned his plans for Austria. But the incident made him aware of the need for a stronger army; in the following year, in violation of the peace treaty, he reintroduced conscription. In March 1936, he took his first major gamble and ordered his troops into the Rhineland. His generals were nervous; the German army was only 20,000 strong, and if the French had retaliated, they would have been forced to withdraw. But the French did nothing. In November 1936, Hitler signed an anti-communist pact with Japan, and recognised the rebel government that General Franco had proclaimed in Spain. From the beginning of the Civil War Hitler lent Franco armed support.

With Mussolini now a firm ally – a Berlin-Rome-Tokyo ‘axis’ was formed in 1937 – Hitler turned all his energies to the problem of union with Austria. The Austrian chancellor Schuschnigg was bullied into giving the Nazi party of Austria more freedom. In March 1938, political manoeuvring forced Schuschnigg to resign, and the new Nazi chancellor, Seyss-Inquart, invited Hitler to send troops into Austria.

At the end of the First World War, Austria had lost part of its territory – the Sudeten mountains – to Czechoslovakia. Three million Germans lived there, and they wanted to rejoin the new Germany. Hitler made threatening noises, but he had to proceed cautiously – France, Britain and the Soviet Union had promised to aid Czechoslovakia in the event of an invasion. Then, to Hitler’s astonishment, the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, proposed to come and see him to find a ‘peaceful solution’. This meant that Britain was anxious to avoid war.

And after speaking to Hitler, Chamberlain joined with the French premier Daladier to notify the Czechs that they would have to hand over the Sudeten territory. The Czechs were enraged at the betrayal, but could do nothing. In Munich, Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain, Daladier and Roosevelt met to discuss the problem, and the Sudetenland was returned to Germany. Chamberlain returned to England and uttered the famous phrase about ‘peace for our time’.

In the British parliament, Winston Churchill warned that this policy of appeasement would lead to disaster; he was proved right sooner than even he expected. The Slovakian premier, Tiso, was deposed in a government crisis, and appealed to Hitler for aid for Slovak independence. Hitler responded by taking over most of Czechoslovakia, as well as a slice of Poland that the Czechs had always claimed. At the same time, Mussolini took over Albania. Now the only chance of stopping Hitler was for Britain and France to combine with the Soviet Union. And at this point, in August 1939, the Nazis staggered the world by announcing that they had signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin.

Now all that remained for Hitler was to take back the Polish corridor. Since the Poles would object to losing their link with the sea, this obviously involved invading Poland. On 1 September 1939, his troops marched across the border and his planes bombed Warsaw. Two days later, England and France declared war against Germany.

How had it all come about? Marx would undoubtedly have blamed capitalism – as Marxist historians continue to do; but this crisis had nothing to do with market forces or free enterprise. Tolstoy would have insisted that the ‘natural laws’ of history are responsible, unknown forces which are as unpredictable as the weather. But we have seen again and again that it is the will of individuals that changes the course of history. A ‘great man’ – a Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Peter the Great, Napoleon, Bismarck – sets out to achieve certain aims, and succeeds to a greater or lesser degree. Lesser men have less of an impact. But the essential clue always lies in the personality of the individual.

The crises of the post-1920s period were the direct result of the First World War. Without that there would have been no Russian revolution, no Italian and Spanish fascism, no German Nazism. And the First World War can be blamed almost entirely on the personality of one man: the Kaiser. And after the Kaiser came Hitler, another hysterical egoist. But if the Kaiser reminds us of Nero, Hitler is more like the adventurous ‘loner’ Lacenaire or the anarchist Ravachol. There is the same lonely individualism, the same hungry intelligence, the same sense of being an outcast and a misfit. But while Lacenaire and Ravachol blamed the bourgeoisie for all their misfortunes, Hitler found another scapegoat: the Jews. ‘Was there any shady undertaking, any form of foulness, especially in cultural life, in which at least one Jew did not participate? On putting the probing knife carefully to that kind of abscess one immediately discovered, like a maggot in a putrescent body, a little Jew who was often blinded by the sudden light’ (Mein Kampf, p. 60 of the English edition). He had already acquired a profound distaste for Marxism. When he worked as a builder’s labourer and listened to his fellow workers using Marxist arguments to disparage patriotism, religion and the law, his dislike of Marxism and his refusal to join a trade union led to threats to throw him from the scaffolding. So when he learned that most of the leading socialists and Marxists were Jews, it was like a revelation. ‘My long inner struggle was at an end.’ Now he had his scapegoat.

Hitler’s problem was the problem of all criminals: lack of self-control. Criticism or opposition drove him to hysteria. His old friend Kubizek wrote in a book about Hitler’s youth: ‘Adolf was exceedingly violent and highly strung. Quite trivial things, such as a few thoughtless words, could produce in him outbursts of temper which I thought quite out of proportion.’ And these rages, so characteristic of the Right Man, did not grow less frequent as he grew older. On both occasions when Neville Chamberlain went to see him, Hitler lost his temper and began to rant and scream. Close associates say that, when this happened, his face became suffused with blood and he seemed like a madman. Wartime cartoons of Hitler on all fours eating the carpet are not far from the truth. A Jewish youth shoots a German diplomat in Paris: Hitler orders a pogrom. An assassination squad kills his SS chief Heydrich; he orders the destruction of a whole village, although it had nothing to do with the killing. Some of his officers attempt to kill him with a bomb; he has dozens of the plotters garrotted with piano wire from meat-hooks, and orders the whole procedure to be filmed so he can watch it repeatedly.