HITLER AND NAPOLEON

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 59, Issue 4187, 18 September 1939, Page 8

HITLER AND NAPOLEON

AN EXAMINATION BY HISTORIAN. HAS HE ANY MILITARY CAPACITY? The remarkable achievement of Adolf Hitler in raising Germany in a few years from a state of despondency as a beaten nation to a great military Power which aspires to dominate Europe has encouraged the belief that as a world figure Hitler is as great as Napoleon, who for nearly twenty years dominated Europe, and made France the most powerful country in the world. The idea that there is any real parallel between Napoleon and Hitler is scornfully treated by Mr Philip Guedalla, in an article in the magazine section of the New York Times. “The amateurs of parallel in history are already asking whether there are any traces of Napoleon Bonaparte in Adolf Hitler,” he states.

“All autocrats inevitably invite comparison with that supreme exponent of autocracy. Indeed, it is not easy for any of them to escape a certain similarity of detail, since that is almost imposed upon them by the conditions of their occupation. One small impressive figure in a plain uniform surrounded by a flashy staff is very like another, whether it happens to be wearing a grey overcoat or a brown jacket with a Nazi armlet. A distinctive style of hair dressing is obligatory for persons who are anxious to be readily recognisable on all occasions by respectful audiences at long distances. And if their policy depends on acts of violence, and international outrage in 1809 looks much the same as one in 1939. “But such resemblances are barely more than superficial; and if the comparison is worth examining at all, one should look a little closer at the facts of both careers. Both men rose suddenly to power from obscurity. But how?

“The Corsican imposed himself on France because his military record revealed a soldier of pre-eminent ability. Under his command French armies had progressed in two campaigns from the Riviera to the Austrian Tyrol, passing from an incompetent defensive to the triumphal sweep of an invasion which eventually left Italy in French control. That ; meant that he had proved himself a supreme practitioner of the vital art I of war, by which the republic, threatI ened by the armies of half Europe,. | must defend itself and the revolution. 1 Here was the significance of General Bonaparte for France, as she confronted foreign enemies abroad. “It is not easy to detect much similarity in the accomplishments and methods that have endeared its j Fuhrer to the German people. His military record of command was nonexistent; and there is no indication that if war recurred he would be qualified to perform the exacting i functions of War Lord. Indeed, this , devotee of force had not displayed the faintest sign of martial talent in the testing years of the World War, when Germany’s adoifted son rose uneventfully as far as the unpretending ! rank of corporal. “His gifts—and they were undeni- | able—lay in more civilian directions. For he was a public speaker of formidable talent, judging by German standards. Other audiences in countries with a longer record of selfgovernment might well have been repelled by those interminable and incoherent discourses that culminated in a screaming diatribe against the objects of his hysterical dislike—the peace treaties, the Communists and the Jews. But they fell like music upon sufficient German ears to form the Nazi party; and, that once formed, a second aptitude of his came into play. “For he was eminently capable of functioning as the presiding genius of a political machine—half showmanship and half intrigue—by which the muddled stage of Germany’s politics was shortly overshadowed. Sometimes he was the showman, gratifying dazzled audiences with deafening parades of marching feet and lifted arms and trailing banners; and sometimes he was the showman himself—the mystic aboriginal in a sort of tribal trance, composed in equal parts of Wagner and inaccurate ethnology. It was all written down in the dishevelled pages of ‘Mein Kampf’— illogical, excitable and dull.” Mr Guedalla describes Napoleon as “swift, eager, trained to arms, intolerably logical, vindictive, histrionic on occasions, but armoured with enormous thicknes of self-control in crisis or disaster,” and he asks, “Could anything have been conceived that differed more completely from the queer, instinctive monomaniac by whom the destinies of Germany are handled ? ”

A MILITARY GENIUS? The fact that Hitler did not rise above the rank of corporal in the war of 1914-18 is not in itself proof that he does not possess military genius. In a war the rank and file do not obtain much opportunity for the display of military strategy on a big scale. But in the next war Hitler will have the fullest opportunity to exercise his military gifts, if any, for since February 4, 1938, he has been supreme commander of the German armed forces. On that date FieldMarshal Blomberg, Minister of War, retired from that administrative post and from active service, and General

von Fritsch, the military commander in chief, was placed on the retired list. There are lots of people in Germany ready to flatter Hitler by declaring that he is a military genius. On his 49th birthday (April 20, 1938), Dr Dietrich, the head of the German press department, published a glowing article in the course of which he said: —“This tremendous achievement is the work not only of a political but of a military genius. . . . His knowledge is considered remarkable even by experts. And for that reason he is not only the driving force and the soul of German military armament, but also its spiritual creator and inspirer. In his immeasurable labour on the military strength of the Reich, in his care for its defences and its arms, in his anxiety for the military protection of the German nation, he is the true soldier-leader of his people.”

An<d it is said that Hitler gave proof’ of great military gifts years beforq he became the virtual dictator of Germany. Herr Hermann Rauschning states iin his book “Germany’s Revolution of Destruction,” which was first published at Zurich in 1938: “Even before the arrival of National Socialism in power admiring stories were told in the higher circles of the party about Hitler’s great strategic gifts: he-.was supposed to have made stategic Suggestions of a really epoch-making nature in the East Prussian cpihmand, and to have given sound reasons for them. Such things have happened—with Cromwell centuries ago, and Trotsky in our time.” HITLER’S FAITH IN HIMSELF.

In an article in the July number of the “Nineteenth Century” Mr Har-

old Nicholson states:—“The whole apparatus of peace is to an alarmingextent centred upon one single point, namely, the desires, emotions and impulses of Herr Hitler. We must realise quite calmly that the destinies of Europe depended very largely upon the temperament of a single man. And in any estimate of the possibility of preserving peace that temperament must be examined as one of the determining factors.

“Herr • Hitler is not, in the first place, a political animal in the sense that Napoleon and Mussolini can be described as political animals. He is primarily a revivalist, in the sense that Mahomet was a revivalist. His -immunity to the ordinary indulgences of the flesh has enabled him to condense amazing pressure within those areas of personality which are generally reserved for the subsidiary passions. His capacity for hatred is superhuman. His ambition is without bounds.

“In the second place, Hitler is a mystic. He sincerely believes that he has been chosen by fate to render the German people the rulers of the world. He has the utmost confidence in his own somnambulist certainty, in that nachtwandlerische Sicherbeit, which hitherto has enabled him to prove that the hesitations of his experts were futuile in comparison to his own transcendental destiny. And he believes (and perhaps this is the most important factor of all) that he will shortly die. “Of his hatreds, and they are many, there is one which is perhaps the most fatal of all. His hatred for the Jews, for Schuschnigg, Niemoller, Benes, and, perhaps, even Mr Cham-

berlain, are dangerous in that they generate explosive gases such as are not justified by the provocation given. Yet of all his hatreds the most daemonic is his hatred of cowardice. The lives of many million citizens may be sacrificed in order that Hitler can prove to himself that he has never been afraid.”

HIS WORD WORTHLESS. It is of interest to contrast public statements made by Hitler with his acts, such as the annexation of Austria, the violation of the Munich Agreement and the occupation of Czechoslovakia by force. August, 1933.—“ As long as I am Chancellor there will be no war, save in the event of an invasion of our territory from without.” February 1, 1934. “The statements according to which Germany has the

intention of violating the frontier -of the Austrian State are senseless and entirely groundless.”

March 31, 1935. “Germany has neither the intention nor the desire to intervene in the internal politics of Austria, stil less to annex Austria.”

March 7,1936.—“ Germany has no further territorial claims of any sort in Europe. . . . Czechoslovakia, like Poland, always followed the policy of representing their own national interests. Germany does not desire to attack these States.”