The Consequences of Ideas

A week and a half ago I cracked open The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer: a massive encyclopedia of a book that I have dabbled with in the past, but never finished. Shirer had a front row seat as a reporter to the pre-war years of Nazi Germany (1934-1940), making his history unique and riveting. He is also a very gifted writer.

But I love origins. One of the reasons I love history so much is I am fascinated with how great things, or incredibly terrible things come about. The “Fall” may not interest me as much, it is the “Rise” that really grips me. What were the influences on a young Austrian youth wandering the streets of Vienna? What was the literature this man digested? What was the worldview he developed? What were the cultural and philosophical ideas already long in motion in the German mind that set the stage for what Shirer calls the very “logical” development of the Third Reich? Such reading will unquestionably be very dark, but it is necessary to understand in order that it can be avoided in the future.

One of the best chapters in the book has to be “The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich”. Many people are confused when they look at incredible evil in our world. Many wonder, “How could so many people follow blindly such depraved individuals like a Stalin or a Hitler?” Germany was in those days a very educated and predominately Christian nation. How does a country like that allow a man like Hitler to come to power and do the unspeakable atrocities he did?

In this chapter Shirer shows us that however dark Hitler's individual worldview was, it was not formed in isolation. "For the mind and the passion of Hitler--all the aberrations that possessed his feverish brain--had roots that lay deep in German experience and thought. Nazism and the Third Reich, in fact, were but a logical continuation of German history." Generally speaking, we do not like it when someone talks like this. We do not like tension and added complexities; we would rather simplify the matter and decry Hitler the raving demoniac that he was. But, nothing, nothing ever occurs in a vacuum devoid of external influences. We are all formed by the times and ideas of the times. We are formed by the culture we have been raised in--and Hitler, deluded as he was, was no different.

Shirer then charts a brief history of the German people, often divided and squabbling--ultimately culminating in the Prussian Germany. Interestingly enough, while France, England, and the US were all having revolutions towards democracy and parliaments--Germany remained as backwards and feudal as ever. Being divided into so many states, Shirer notes, isolated them from the "surging currents of European thought and development, and set Germany apart from and behind the other countries of the West." This partly why we see the people have no problem surrendering the Weimar Republic (which was more of a historical deviation than anything else) to the dictatorial regime Hitler led.

Prussia is an interesting case study, one I am interested in learning a bit further. In 1701 we see centralized power emerge in this northern frontier. Shirer writes: "By this time Prussia had pulled itself up by its own bootstraps to be one of the ranking military powers of Europe. It had none of the resources of the others. Its land was barren and bereft of minerals. The population was small. There were no large towns, no industry and little culture. Even the nobility was poor, and the landless peasants lived like cattle. Yet by a supreme act of will and a genius for organization the Hohenzollerns managed to create a Spartan military state whose well-drilled Army won one victory after another and whose Machiavellian diplomacy of temporary alliances with whatever power seemed the strongest brought constant additions to its territory." Wow. If that paragraph alone does not make someone want to buy a book on the history of Prussia or the Hohenzollerns, I am not sure what will!

Prussia arose as this machine-like military state--fueled by no culture but conquest. Majority of annual state funds went to the army--inciting Mirabeau to say, "Prussia is not a state with an army, but an army with a state." Absolute power in the hands of the ruler. A disciplined army. An enslaved people. If we are to understand anything of Germany in the 1930s we have to understand this historic identity. It is in Prussia that we see this bent toward duty, power, absolute statism--and even racism emerge in the Junkers (brutal land lords who assumed themselves a master race). This all culminated in what was known as the Second Reich, let by Otto Von Bismarck: a curiously interesting and terrible figure who rose Prussia to great national heights.

So Shirer writes: "The German Empire, as in reality an extension of Prussia. 'Prussia is the dominant factor... The will of the Empire can be nothing but the will of the Prussian state.' This was true and it was to have disastrous consequences for the Germans themselves. From 1871 to 1933 and indeed to Hitler's end in 1945, the course of German history as a consequence was to run, with the exception of the interim of the Weimar Republic, in a straight line and with utter logic."

But culture is one thing, the intellectual/philosophical foundations are another. That is what Shirer goes on to explain next.

Shirer writes that Fichte (1762-1814) "rallied a divided, defeated people and their resounding echoes could still be heard in the Third Reich. Fichte's teaching was heady wine for frustrated folk. To him the Latins, especially the French, and the Jews are the decadent races. Only Germans possess the possibility of regeneration." Already a century before the rise of Nazism we see racism is blossoming in the German university.

Hegel (1770-1831), who inspired Marx and Lenin, proclaimed that the state is all. "The state is the highest revelation of the 'world spirit'; it is the 'moral universe'; it is the 'actuality of the ethical idea...ethical mind...knowing and thinking itself'; the state 'has the supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the State...for the right of the world spirit is above all special privileges...'" Shirer goes on to quote Hegel further, "World history occupies a higher ground... Moral claims which are irrelevant must not be brought into collision with world-historical deeds and their accomplishments. The litany of private virtues--modesty, humility, philanthropy and forbearance--must not be raised against them...So mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower--crush to pieces many an object in its path."

Trieschke (1834-1896) said, "War is not only a practical necessity, it is also a theoretical necessity, an exigency of logic. The concept of the State implies the concept of war, for the essence of the State is power... That war should ever be banished from the world is a hope not only absurd, but profoundly immoral. It would involve the atrophy of many of the essential and sublime forces of the human soul..."

Nietzche (1844-1900), whom Hitler unabashedly admired said, "Society has never regarded virtue as anything else than as a means to strength, power, and order. The State is unmorality organized... the will to war, to conquest and revenge...Society is not entitled to exist for its own sake but only as a substructure and scaffolding, by means of which a select race of beings may elevate themselves to their higher duties... There is no such thing as the right to live, the right to work, or the right to be happy: in this respect man is no different from the meanest worm."

Factor all of that that with the influence of H. S. Chamberlain who was dubbed the Spiritual Father of Nazism, who was quite literally driven by a demon to develop his later works on race and history--which would promote “Aryans” to the chief race and fuel deep, evil anti-Semitism. Hitler was the only public figure at this evil man's funeral and his paper proclaimed that Germany had "lost one of the great armorers whose weapons have not yet found in our day their fullest use." But to be sure, they would find their use.

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R. C. Sproul once wrote a book entitled The Consequences of Ideas, and the title is so telling. Ideas are some of the most powerful things--and as Shirer reveals, bad ones, though perhaps not enacted by the originators--leave a jagged wake in history like nothing else. As look back over this chapter I could not help but think back to a dialogue in Brothers Karamazov where Ivan (the intellectual who promotes the a-moral, everything is lawful philosophy) is confronted by the sickly Smerdyakov who had committed a murder of the gravest proportions. The crude Smerdyakov puts the blame on Ivan for giving him the intellectual framework to commit the murder, as he tells Ivan: "Are you still trying to throw it all on me, to my face? You murdered him; you are the real murderer, I was only your instrument, your faithful servant, and it was following your words I did it." So while Ivan lacked the fortitude to commit the murder himself and live by his own philosophy--Smerdyakov, a low-life, lacks no such fortitude to put the a-moral philosophy, and murderous wishes of his hero into action. He was merely being Ivan's “instrument”. Essentially Dostoyevsky argues here that Ivan (perhaps representing the “everything is permissible” philosophers of his day) bears much of the guilt for the action he did not physically commit but was done in his name.

So is the case with many of these German thinkers. Their writings, while not committing physical murder/extermination, fueled the flames for some lesser men to enact what they promoted in lecture halls and in writing decades prior.

Ideas are powerful things. The warning to us as Christians is to hold every thought, every philosophy, every cultural norm captive to the Word of God. Nothing can be immune to its eternal verdict. We have to be willing to lay it all down—politics, convictions, even valuable traditions—if it conflicts with the words of God. Plain and simple.

To do that we have to 1) become people of the Book. We have to read it and let its words dwell in us richly. And we also have to 2) come to it with genuine humility that is willing to surrender all and prayerfully follow.

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is-his good, pleasing and perfect will.” Romans 12:2

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“The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich.” Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L Shirer, RosettaBooks, 2011. Kindle Edition.