Word: heidens
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...armed intellectuals come to submit to the leadership of this raving dervish?" Some of them, says Heiden, did not submit; many of them openly and disrespectfully opposed him. But Hitler, like Roehm, Hess and Göring, was a "betrayed" soldier (and a brave one, Heiden insists); like Rosenberg and Goebbels, he was a frustrated man of questionable intellect. Few, if any, of his fellow "intellectuals" could so absorb themselves in the life of the Party, so readily sacrifice to this chosen duty the pleasures and comforts of life. Above all, none could so meticulously appraise the exact temper...
...Sign from Heaven." The seed of Nazi ideology, says Heiden, was planted in 1864 by a French lawyer who wrote a satire on the dictatorship of Napoleon III. This book was rewritten by the anti-Semitic Russian secret police so that it appeared to be an outline of the methods by which the Jews hoped to conquer the world. Entitled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, it eventually fell into the hands of a youthful, anti-Semitic "intellectual" named Alfred Rosenberg. He called it "a sign from heaven" and took it to Germany in 1918. Its program...
They drew to them "the flotsam, the stragglers living on the fringe of their class . . . the unemployed . . . the declassed of all classes." In all ages, says Heiden, "this has been the way of counterrevolution: an upper layer that has lost its hold in society seeks the people and finds the rabble. The officers were out to find a demagogue, of whom it could be said that he was a worker. . . . They found their leader in the lowest mass of their subordinates. The spirit of history, in its fantastic mockery, could not have drawn an apter figure...
Hitler did not, as is commonly supposed, "hammer the same simple statement into the minds of millions; on the contrary, he played with the masses and titillated them with the most contradictory assertions." Heiden believes that "it is this art of contradiction which makes him the greatest . . . propagandist of his time. . . . He follows the shifting currents of public opinion," knowing always that "the weakness of this intellectual age" is its search for "the man who can master it. ... One scarcely need ask with what arts he conquered the masses; he did not conquer them, he portrayed and represented them...
Chief Engineer. Hitler deliberately fostered chaos, deliberately postponed his own rise to power until chaos made him Der Führer. When he finally did reach for power, it was as the herald of a "mass drama that was breaking over the nation." Heiden believes that few chose to deny the drama's "grandeur," whatever its brutality. "No political conviction could banish from the world the eternal march rhythm of the Horst Wessel song." And the money poured in when success seemed likely-"the power of accomplished facts called forth reluctant admiration...