The Change of Characteristics and the Paradoxical Victory of the Soviet Union
Chapter 5 Section 5
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This below is Chapter 5 Section 5:
The Change of Characteristics and the Paradoxical Victory of the Soviet Union
The term “change of characteristics” should not be understood to mean that Bolshevism took on the form of its opponent in the course of the war and conversely National Socialism took on that of Bolshevism. However, in both regimes developments and tendencies could be observed that were aimed at an internal rapprochement with the enemy. However, this did not weaken the enmity, but rather strengthened it, and even if one draws the lines into an ideal type, no identity emerges.
That Bolshevism was in the process of “nationalizing” or “state-controlling” itself was soon claimed or feared by enemies and friends alike: émigrés and unorthodox communists already agreed during the early 1920s that Bolshevism had become the champion of the traditional interests of the Russian state. The continued existence of a cadre army with a professional corps of commanders could be cited as proof, and even the term people’s commissars quickly lost the original meaning that these were positions for a short transitional period that were only intended to “close the store up,” as Trotsky might have expressed it regarding the entire bureaucratic apparatus. Stalin’s concept of socialism in one country was the next big step, and it provoked fierce opposition from a significant section of the old party guard. Of course, it did not fulfill the hopes of the émigrés at all; a reconciliation between the new and the old Russia did not come about and was not sought by the ruling party: officers returning home were arrested by the NKVD or immediately shot, and the strongest social force that could have formed the basis for reconciliation was destroyed as a class, namely the farmers, by depriving them of their independence. Not even the foreign technicians, who played such an important role in the country’s increasing industrialization, were safe from persecution. The party and its Marxist terminology still reigned supreme, and the strange mutability of the ideological language did not change this, with which the traditional postulate of the greatest possible equality possible was combated as “petty-bourgeois egalitarianism,” because the differentiation of wages and activities was recognized as an indispensable precondition for further industrialization. But was it still a pragmatic adaptation to changed circumstances when Stalin gave the signal for the persecution and extinction of Pokrovsky’s historical school with two essays in 1934? After all, Pokrovsky had been the most important representative of that genuinely Marxist way of thinking in historiography, which attacked all ruling classes and especially the ruling class of old Russia with as much bitterness as contempt and knew not to report enough of despotic tsars, exploitative landowners and cruel generals on the one hand and the exploited and abused masses of the people on the other. But now Stalin and soon numerous historians in his entourage pointed out that the history of the Russian Empire was by no means just a series of atrocities, but rather that a tremendous historical progress had been made, whose helpers, indeed pioneers, were often enough been the Tsars and their collaborators. A new and much brighter picture of Ivan the Terrible was now painted, and even Nicholas I’s regime could no longer be characterized exclusively as “bloody police terror.” In particular, the Tsars’ conquests were now viewed in a much more positive light, and the expansion of the Moscow’s heartland in all directions, which Karl Marx had seen as the most dangerous threat to Europe, was regarded as a paradigm of progress in history. In the Red Army’s new oath of allegiance from 1936, there was no longer any mention of an obligation to the world proletariat. Marshals of the Soviet Union had been at the head of the Red Army since 1935. The Great Purge significantly weakened the international character of the corps of commanders, and it was mainly young Russians and Ukrainians who rose to the top positions that became vacant. In June 1940, the ranks of general and admiral, which had until then been considered bourgeois or tsarist, were reintroduced, and the same year saw the decree classifying soldiers and commanders into two separate rations classes.
Nevertheless, the outbreak of war led to a qualitative change. In his speech on November 6, 1941, Stalin accused the German fascists, “who are devoid of conscience and honor,” primarily because they called for “the destruction of the great Russian (!) nation,” “the nation of Plekhanov and Lenin, Belinsky and Chernyshevsky, Pushkin and Tolstoy, Glinka and Tchaikovsky…Suvorov and Kutuzov.” In essence, this meant at least the spiritual reconciliation and unification of the old and the new Russia: the feudal generals, the bourgeois artists and the progressive and Marxist intelligentsia. Indeed, a number of voices could be heard among the émigrés, from Kerensky to Milyukov, advocating for the defense of Russia against the German attack. So it was more than just a name change when some rifle divisions were renamed Guard divisions in September 1941 and when entire Guard armies were formed over the next few years. In May 1942, the Order of the Patriotic War was established in two grades, and the Order of Suvorov was in turn awarded in three classes, the highest of which was intended “for generals and commanders who succeed in destroying the superior forces of the enemy in an attack.” While in Germany even the highest levels of the Knight’s Cross was awarded to ordinary officers, the Soviet Union’s highest decorations remained reserved for generals, and Wassow complained in German captivity about the egalitarianism of the Germans, while a Soviet general traveling in Great Britain in 1914 expressed his surprise that ordinary soldiers were allowed to sit in the same railway compartment as officers. It was therefore once again not a mere outward change in terminology when the commander corps was referred to as the officer corps for the first time in January 1943. The reintroduction of the broad shoulder boards of the Tsar’s army confirmed and promoted the development which implied a pronounced class separation between officers and men, although the simplest soldier still addressed the highest officer as “Comrade General.” In Stalin’s study now hung the portraits of Suvorov and Kutuzov, the tsarist generals who had fought and won against Napoleon. He himself assumed the highest military rank and was soon referred to by the Western Allies as “Marshal Stalin.”
The extraordinary esteem which Stalin gave to the cadres was probably also reflected in the statement he made in Tehran, provoking Churchill to contradict him: the entire strength of Hitler’s enormous armies consisted of around 50,000 officers, technicians and specialists; if they were shot, the German danger would have been eliminated from the world for an indefinite period of time. From this it was very easy to infer the opinion that the strength of the Soviet Union did not rest primarily on the millions of working people and ordinary soldiers, but on the leading layer of the senior officer corps and armaments specialists.
But national traditions were not only fully honored again in the army. In 1943, the Orthodox Church was also accepted as an ally: since the beginning of the war, the leaders of the church had been praying for the victory of the socialist fatherland, and now numerous churches were returned to worship, seminars for theological training were reopened, the newspapers and magazines of the Godless [also known as League of Militant Atheists] were reduced or discontinued due to a “lack of paper.” In September 1943, Stalin officially received the head of the Church, Metropolitan Sergei, in the Kremlin, and a short time later he was ceremoniously crowned Patriarch of the Russian Church in the Moscow Cathedral, after the office had been vacant for almost 20 years.
In the same year Stalin took the astonishing step of dissolving the Comintern. Two decades earlier, the opinion had been widespread in the Soviet Union and Europe that the Comintern was the headquarters of the world revolution and that the government in Moscow was merely one of its branches that had first won political power. Now it came to an inglorious end, long after no one had doubted that it had become a mere agency of the Soviet government. Now it no longer fit into the political line, and Stalin justified the dissolution to the Reuter press agency with the argument that it would expose the Hitlerite lie that “Moscow” intended to interfere in the lives of other states and to “bolshevize” them; precisely this dissolution would promote the work of the “patriots of all countries” to come together to form a “unified national freedom camp” regardless of party affiliation and religious beliefs. The Comintern thus became a victim of the popular front policy, which it had itself inaugurated in 1935 and which, in Stalin’s opinion, was now of fundamental importance for the “struggle against the danger of world domination by Hitlerite fascism.”
However, even now Stalin did not forego a supranational appeal. But this was no longer aimed at the proletariat of the world, but at the Slavic peoples. The announcement on the occupation of eastern Poland had already spoken of kinship, and now a “Panslavist Committee” was founded in Moscow, large posters calling for the unity of the Slavic peoples were carried in the usual parades, and Stalin said in a conversation with Milovan Djilas: “If the Slavs stay together and maintain solidarity, no one will be able to lift a finger in the future. Not one finger.” He made a similar statement to de Gaulle in December 1944: “The tsars pursued a bad policy. They wanted to dominate the other Slavic peoples. We have a new policy. The Slavs should be independent and free everywhere.”
De Gaulle also gave a very vivid description of the banquet held in his honor in the Kremlin. He and his companions walked up a monumental staircase, the walls of which were decorated with the same pictures as in the Tsarist times, to the banquet hall where Soviet ministers, diplomats and generals, “all in shimmering uniforms,” had gathered to enjoy an “unbelievably sumptuous meal” where the tables sparkled “in unimaginable splendor.” After dinner and international toasts, Stalin rose thirty times to drink to his closest associates and senior officers. He mixed praise and threats, and for de Gaulle it was a foregone conclusion that the person being called would freeze in fear if he was addressed as follows: “You have to use our aircraft. If you do it badly, you know what will happen to you.” At no time in his life could Hitler have treated his field marshals in the manner of an oriental despot. Numerous other reports—such as those by Djilas, by Svetlana Alliluyeva and Khrushchev—leave not the slightest doubt that the “first workers’ state in the world” had become, at least during the last years of the war, a glamorous and triumphant group of highly decorated dignitaries who obeyed the word of an absolute ruler.
The obvious objection is that all of this was a matter of externals and tactical means that could be disposed by the ruling party at any time if they seriously jeopardized the unchanged goals and established concepts. With regard to the “Panslavist Committee” the correctness of the argument is obvious, and Stalin’s autocracy was bound to come to an end in the foreseeable future. The Orthodox Church had become a docile instrument, the loyalty of the communist parties all over the world was beyond question, and it therefore must have seemed that the Comintern could be brought back into being at any time. But even if one assumed that Stalin still only lived in three small rooms, that the generals were just waiting to be able to take of their epaulettes and medals in order to become unrecognizable in the classless world society, and that Zhdanov had already written the appeal in which he wanted to call the proletariat of the world to revolt against the capitalists, there was no getting around the fact that the Soviet Union had the help of all those traditions, forces and tendencies in the years from 1941 to 1945 and in to a great extent before had had to appeal to the help of all those traditions, forces, and tendencies on which the enemy had relied on from the very beginning. It had had to present itself as a state-socialist or national-socialist country because it wanted to survive, and there was enough reason to suspect that it actually was such a country and that it could not simply return to its beginnings, even if it wanted to. The suspicion became a certainty for those who saw pictures of the boys of the page corps, who, in uniforms that showed nothing of their youthfulness, lined up among the pictures of generals and marshals, carefully following the instructions of a massive officer. And nothing sounded less like hypocrisy or tactical instrumentality than the words Stalin said to Djilas during the war: “Above all, there was something abnormal, unnatural about the very existence of a general communist dream at a time when the communist parties should have been striving for a national language and fighting under the condition prevailing in their countries.” In Stalin’s opinion, Lenin was obviously mistaken when he believed in 1917 that the era of world proletarian revolution was imminent.
Does this insight lead to the conclusion that National Socialism achieved internal victory when it suffered one defeat after another on the battlefield? This conclusion would only be compelling if National Socialism had actually been national or state socialism. Compound words give a clear meaning only when the accent is really on the noun and the added adjective merely expresses an additional, although essential, definition. But National Socialism was never primarily socialism, i.e. a movement primarily determined by the motives of an internal class conflict, but rather a social nationalism of the fascist type, in its most radical manifestation. Even in its final form, it remained in the footsteps of its beginnings, which had brought a political-revolutionary popular movement into a precarious symbiosis with established ruling classes. But precisely because of this it had tendencies within that pointed to a new type. They would have been completed if it had no longer seen Bolshevism as an image of horror, but primarily as a role model. In the last years of the war, National Socialism took decisive steps in this path, but without bringing it to a conclusion other than in hypothetical considerations.
Bolshevism and communism had certainly been a model for the National Socialists from the beginning, but primarily only with regard to the methods of fighting, i.e. above all propaganda. However, methods and content could hardly be clearly separated when Goebbels noted in his diary in March 1942 that the Führer had a great deal of respect for Russian warfare: “Stalin’s brutal crackdown saved the Russian front. We must use similar methods in our warfare in order to be able to hold out own against them. We have sometimes lacked this toughness and we have to try to replace it.” Less than a year later, a behavior that had been regarded as proof of blind fanaticism and uncultured bestiality at the beginning of the war had become a model, namely the collective suicide of soldiers who saw themselves in a hopeless situation. Hitler’s verdict was unmistakable when he received the news of Field Marshal Paulus’ surrender on February 1, 1943. “They surrendered absolutely true to form,” he said. “Because in the other case, you get together, form a hedgehog and shoot yourself dead with the last bullet. If you imagine that a woman has the pride to go out, lock herself up and immediately shoots herself because she only hears a few insulting words then I have no respect for a soldier who shrinks away from it and would rather go into captivity.” With these words, Hitler equated very different facts and thus brought the war back to primitive conditions which “European civilization” he so often referred had wanted to overcome. A little later he also presented Stalin and Bolshevism as a model for the internal structure of the regime. In a Reich and Gauleiter meeting at the beginning of May 1943, he first praised Stalin’s purge of the Red Army, which had eliminated all defeatist tendencies and considerably strengthened its fighting strength, in contrast to the expectations that he initially had himself. Then he continued: “Stalin also has the advantage over us of not having any social opposition. Bolshevism has also eliminated this through liquidation in the last 25 years… Bolshevism got rid of this danger in time and can therefore direct all its strength against the enemy. Internally there is practically no more opposition within the country.” In doing so, Hitler was, as it were, wiping out the foundation of his system. Had he and his followers not derived their strongest and most enduring emotions from the “annihilation of the national intelligentsia” that had taken place in Russia and seemed to be threatened for Germany? What else had been the basis of his successes up to 1941 than the intact army and the functioning administration that had come to him from the Weimar Republic and ultimately from the Empire? If the “social opposition” was the fundamental evil, i.e. the entirety of the circles whose sympathy and approval he had tried to gain throughout his life, what then became of his accusations against “Jews and Bolsheviks”? Was the difference between his regime and that of the Bolsheviks then only that one of the civil war parties, namely the Freikorps, would have prevailed in Germany just as completely as the enemy party in Russia, “liquidating” all opponents and all lukewarm people? In fact, Hitler and his closest followers tended more and more beyond radical fascism to a regime that would be just as radical internally towards the still largely preserved social structure as Bolshevism and that would thereby also create the possibility of pursuing its foreign policy goals with revolutionary ruthlessness. There is no name for such a regime because Hitler was only able to realize it in rudimentary form. The term “National Bolshevism” is unsuitable as a label, because it always had an alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union as its primary goal. Furthermore, “nationalism” must remain the noun, because although Hitler expanded the term to include the Aryan race, he never became confused about it. For lack of a better term, one could speak of Bolshevik Nationalism, i.e. of a nationalist or racial biological system which, in contrast to the existing social differentiations, moves just as radically toward liquidation and strives just as resolutely for ideological and social homogeneity as Bolshevism had done, although certainly a homogeneity which from the outset requires a strict hierarchy and unconditional discipline. Undoubtedly, remarkable steps towards this kind of egalitarianism were taken in Germany. The relationship between men and officers in the Waffen-SS was much more comradely and informal than the corresponding relationship in the Wehrmacht. But the soldiers of the Wehrmacht also received the same rations, from simple soldiers to field marshals, and this fulfilled the postulate that was one of the most important prerequisites for the revolution of 1918. It was not unbelievable when, in view of the work of the prisoners of war, it was said that the entrepreneurs today were representatives of the German people—a sentence that corresponded to a demand of Karl Marx, who, however, had not spoken of the “people” but of the “workers.” Goebbels’ speech on February 18, 1943, with its call for total war, had elicited such a great response mainly because it seemed to announce the abolition of all “privileges,” and the same was true of Hitler’s speech on April 26, 1942 , which, according to a situation report from the SD, had met with enthusiastic applause, especially in “inferior circles” and in “worker circles,” because of its violent attacks against the judiciary and the civil servants. Hitler’s and Himmler’s main demand, however, was “fanaticism,” and the political commissar of the Red Army gradually became the model for this. Hitler now publicly and privately attacked the “lazy, decadent upper classes” or this “vermin of bourgeoisie,” and Himmler explicitly declared it an advantage “of the Russian” that he had “an army that was politicized down to the last coolie, that is, an army imbued and led by ideology.” This is how the National Socialist Leadership Officer was created, and although it certainly did not receive the position that the political commissars in the Red Army had had until the office was finally abolished in October 1942, Hitler evidently saw him as the most important factor in the “completely closed worldview body” into which the people and the Wehrmacht would have to merge. He therefore viewed “intellectuals, scientists” as useless for this position, even as “completely worthless and harmful.” Hitler’s personal esteem for Stalin (which was matched on Stalin’s side by a similar but differently justified high regard for Hitler) was combined with admiration for the power of worldview: this was the only way to explain that the Russians were the “only really great opponents of Germany,” because Russia has a worldview and at its head is an undoubtedly important man, he said to Antonescu in January 1943.
Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 and the discovery of the widespread conspiracy that had been its premise and, despite the accidental failure in the Wolf’s Lair, had nevertheless led to serious consequences at individual points (such as in Paris), now unleashed a flood of measures and invectives, which affected not least the bearers of the most famous names in German and Prussian history: Moltke and Kleist, Yorck von Wartenburg and Tresckow, von der Schulenburg and Schwerin, and furthermore those social forces that had survived as such or in leading representatives under the cover of the political-totalitarian regime: the high bureaucracy and the churches, the trade unions and the parties. After all, Stalin had had the marshals, commanders and generals who had made themselves suspicious in his eyes shot; Adolf Hitler had Field Marshal von Witzleben and the generals von Hase, Stieff and Hoener hanged. And he was not content with punishing the guilty. Rather, he had family imprisonment introduced and thus initiated the destruction of an entire class. In his speech at the Gauleiter meeting in Posen on August 3, 1944, Himmler was able to say: “The Count Stauffenberg family will be wiped out down to the last member.” Although Stalin had allowed several members of Tukhachevsky’s family to die in the camps, he had never accomplished such an extermination and had certainly not called for it in a speech. So Himmler felt compelled to defend himself before the Gauleiters against the accusation that such a procedure was Bolshevik: “No, don’t take offense, it’s not Bolshevik at all, it’s very old and was common practice among our ancestors.” But he did not draw the obvious conclusion that Bolshevism was the first to resort to archaic behavior and that National Socialism was now copying Bolshevism. And he did not dare draw the obvious conclusion when he claimed that Germany had triumphed in the West because it had been “revolutionary” towards these bourgeois states. Did Bolshevism achieve victory over Germany because it was the more revolutionary movement than National Socialism? In any case, Robert Ley’s view could be extended to this, who in a speech on July 22 raged against the “blue-blooded pigs” and demanded, to great applause, “that the revolution make up for everything it has failed to do.” The thesis of Vlasov and his German friends that Russia could only be defeated by Russia had been disregarded; did they now have to come to the conclusion that Bolshevism could only be defeated by Bolshevism?
When Hitler held the last conversations with Bormann and Goebbels in February and March 1945, which were later published under the title “Hitler’s Political Testament,” he practiced serious self-criticism for the first time in his life, and it actually amounted to the formation of one term such as “Bolsho-nationalism.” German policy was largely made by generals and diplomats who were “men of yesterday” and “reactionary philistines.” The task would have been to liberate the French workers and mercilessly sweep away a “calcified bourgeoisie, these heartless and unpatriotic fellows.” Germany should also have been willing to call on the Islamic peoples to revolt and liberate them. However, Hitler forgot that proposals of this kind had been made and that he himself had always rejected them because he wanted to show consideration for Mussolini and Petain. And had he not also taken Marshal Antonescu’s side against the “Iron Guard”?
As much as Hitler sought to sketch out the outlines of a more radical and revolutionary path, at least in retrospect, he could not conceal in his last intimate statements and public pronouncements that his strongest emotions remained unchanged and continued to be directed against Judaism as the great power of dissolution of the “natural order” and against Bolshevism as a plague and a monstrosity.
Therefore, he still considered it a credit to humanity for having “lanced the Jewish boil,” because this war, more than any previous one, was an “exclusively Jewish war.” When news reached him after the Anglo-American invasion in 1944 that “Soviets” had been declared in southern France, he said that this communist wave would spread throughout the French territory and that the English and American troops would eventually be infected by it; something similar had happened in Arkhangelsk at the end of the last war, and today the whole of France is inhabited by a completely undisciplined and Bolshevik population. But how vivid and authoritative the memory of the end of the war in 1918 and the Russian Civil War remained was demonstrated in the most astonishing way in that briefing on February 1, 1943. At that time he had predicted that the officers captured in Stalingrad would soon appear as propagandists on Russian radio, and he had given the following reason for this: “You have to imagine: he comes into Moscow, and imagine the ‘rat cage’! Then he signs everything. He will make confessions, make appeals.” The past of the Russian Civil War, which had now become a mere memory for almost everyone else, had not passed for Hitler, and he still perceived that Bolshevism, which stood before his eyes in the form of Stalin’s National Socialist state as an admired role model, as the horror of decay and incomprehensible atrocities that so many people in Germany had seen in 1920.
No idea was more obvious than the fact that only a few of his followers were prepared to seriously take Bolshevism as a model, but that no one united the opposing sentiments as much as he himself did and that in this respect he was completely alone. But Hitler was not therefore wrong, and at the end of February 1945 he cited a cause for his failure that he had never mentioned before: no longer the “betrayal” of the old officers and the resistance of the “reaction,” nor the social system that had prevented a truly total war until the very end, but the German people as such, which was unstable and susceptible to influence more than any, and which had lapsed from one extreme to the other in its past.
This was the first paradox of the Soviet Union’s victory over Germany: in 1917, Maxim Gorky had accused Lenin and Trotsky of seeing the Russian people only as material for their plans for world liberation; Adolf Hitler, on the other hand, had solemnly promised shortly afterwards to serve the German fatherland and only the German fatherland. Now Hitler rejected the German people as bad material, and Stalin praised the Russian people, whose will to assert themselves against Hitler’s and Rosenberg’s plans he had ultimately embodied.
The second paradox is to be seen in the fact that victory was only possible with the help of the oldest enemy, the main Anglo-Saxon powers of capitalism, which only made a significant direct military contribution in the final phase, but nevertheless tipped the scales through their air raids and through the huge deliveries of war material.
The third paradox lay in the fact that Stalin was able to put into his service all those forces and sympathies in his own country and in the countries of the Allies that Lenin had sought to destroy completely and which would have been represented far more genuinely by Vlasov, that he in other words, put his regime on the path of state or national socialism in the time of greatest need, while Hitler was only able to take a few steps on the opposite path to greater social radicalism because it was the postulated that mass of bolsho-nationalist fanatics did not exist in Germany and could not exist after five years of war.
Thus the German-Soviet War was the most important and decisive part of the Second World War, but as a war of Bolshevism and National Socialism it is inadequately and incorrectly understood if one ignores the changes to which both parties and both regimes were subject. But one final statement must be put in the form of a question because it is connected to the most puzzling of all Hitler’s decisions.
Certainly, the Soviet Army had won new victories since the summer of 1943, the greatest of which was the destruction of Army Group Center in June/July 1944. But in December 1944 the German armies were still on the Vistula, and in East Prussia the Soviet divisions had succeeded only in making a temporary breach, but this had caused stunned horror among the East German population because it seemed to prove that the Russians were indeed waging a campaign of extermination and revenge against all Germans as such. The starting point for a new attack would undoubtedly be the Baranow bridgehead south of Warsaw. At the same time, the Americans and English had advanced to the western border of the Reich. Then Hitler gathered his last reserves and unleashed his final offensive, not against the Soviet bridgehead, but against the Allied positions in Belgium. The Ardennes offensive, which ultimately targeted Antwerp as the major supply port, was initially such a success that Hitler was able to tell his generals that Germany would undoubtedly deal with each of the three war opponents in no time. But Eisenhower was able to overcome the setbacks quickly, and when at the request of Churchill and Roosevelt the Soviet offensive broke out on January 12, Hitler had no reserves left to throw at it and the Soviet troops made their way to Berlin about as short a time as it took the German armies to get from the border to Moscow in 1941. And what the Japanese had not done in 1941, the Americans and British were now doing: they were advancing on the enemy capital from the other side. There is some evidence to suggest that Hitler launched the Ardennes offensive because he hoped to make the Western Allies willing to make peace. In fact, almost up to the day of Hitler’s suicide and the conquest of Berlin, Stalin believed that an agreement between Germany and the USA or England that was directed against himself was possible. In these final weeks of the war, Himmler clearly proved to be the Westerner he had always been at heart. Goebbels, on the other hand, seemed to be seeking an agreement with the Soviet Union. It is therefore not clear what Hitler wanted to achieve with his final decisions and thoughts. Undoubtedly, Germany would have been divided into occupation zones even if Hitler had decided on a Baranov offensive instead of the Ardennes offensive. There is no likelihood that the Americans, who believed they needed Soviet help against Japan, would have given in to Churchill’s wishes after the occupation of all of Germany and violated the 1944 agreement on the division of the occupation zones. But the East German population would have been spared the terrible fate that befell them not only as a result of the actions of the Red Army and the Allied extermination attacks on Dresden, but also as a result of the errors and omissions of the German party authorities. Hitler, however, said to his armaments minister Albert Speer when he tried to get him to withdraw the destruction order, which corresponded exactly to Stalin’s order of 1941 except that there were no rooms where anything could be transported: “If the war is lost, the people will also be lost. It is not necessary to take into account the foundations that the German people need for their most primitive survival…Because the people have proven to be the weaker, and the future belongs exclusively to the stronger Eastern people.” This statement fits in well with similar statements, including the one just quoted, and it at least indicates that for Adolf Hitler, at the end of his life, the former image of terror had completely become a—now unattainable—role model, albeit within the framework of a nationalistic worldview that cannot be really called an ideology. Nevertheless, he had undoubtedly not stopped hating Bolshevism. But that was only one paradox among many paradoxes, and one contradiction among many contradictions. Paradoxes and contradictions filled the era, but they were more concentrated in Hitler and his National Socialism than in any other figure or phenomenon of the 20th century.