rumbold Archives - Patricia Roberts-Miller

Why did British so many political leaders and media argue for getting along with Hitler as soon as he took power?

In two earlier posts about the British ambassador to Germany, Horace Rumbold, and several despatches he wrote back to the Foreign Office, I pointed out that he correctly understood and predicted Hitler’s goals and actions, and he did so on the basis of public and published statements on the part of Hitler and the Nazis. Anyone fluent in German could have drawn the same conclusions, and anyone not fluent in German just had to have a translator. It’s common for people to assume that Hitler was tolerated by Britain because British political leaders and media were misled about his goals and aims, or engaged in wishful thinking. But, actually, quite a few actively supported him and understood him pretty well. They tolerated (or supported) him because they sympathized with him more than they sympathized with his victims.

I emphasized Rumbold’s report on his May 11, 1933 meeting, and argued that Hitler relied on standard internet asshole moves, like deflection (especially through whaddaboutism), open embrace of an irrational argument, and blue lies. Being an internet asshole means, basically, discourse is about proving your commitment to your group rather than proving your case.

In the last part of his despatch, Rumbold describes Hitler’s reaction when Rumbold pointed out that Nazi persecution of the Jews had alienated a lot of people, just when Germany was beginning to get more sympathy. And the short version of this post is that, as in this meeting, Hitler was open in meetings about his antisemitism—he couldn’t stop himself–, so anyone who met with him had all the evidence they needed to know that he was completely committed to a judenfrei Germany. They just didn’t care.

In his dispatch, Rumbold says that he mentioned that the Nazi treatment of the Jews had resulted in a revulsion of sympathy for Germany, and

“The allusion to the treatment of the Jews resulted in the Chancellor working himself up into a state of great excitement […] as if he were addressing an open-air meeting. “There is an immense amount of unemployment in Germany, and I have, for instance, to turn away youths of pure German stock from the high schools. There are not enough posts for pure-bred Germans, and the Jews must suffer with the rest. If the Jews engineer a boycott of German goods from abroad, I will take care that this hits the Jews in Germany. [….] Before leaving this subject the Chancellor added that the understood that Jews wishing to settle in Palestine must be in possession of the sum of £1,000. If the German Government had required the possession of a similar sum in the case of the Eastern Jews, who had entered Germany since the war, there would be no Jewish question in this country. As it was the Jews had brought every form of disease into Germany and made for the demoralization of the country generally.

[….] My comment on the foregoing is that Herr Hitler is himself responsible for the anti-Jewish policy of the German Government and that it would be a mistake to believe that it is the policy of his wilder men whom he has difficulty in controlling. Anybody who had had the opportunity of listening to his remarks on the subject of Jews could not have failed, like myself, to realise that he is a fanatic on the subject. He is also convinced of his mission to fight Communism and destroy Marxism, which term embraces all his political adversaries.”

So, Hitler moves from an argument that is rhetorically framed as though it is an issue of fairness “the Jews must suffer with the rest” to an argument rhetorically framed as legitimate self-defense to whaddaboutism to rabid antisemitism of a kind socially acceptable to many Brits. Before I walk through that argument more slowly, I have to point out that the second paragraph of that long quote is the most important for understanding the real lesson of Hitler: how racism is always rhetorically reframed as concerns about dangerous political commitment, social hygiene, and/or reducing crime. What most people don’t know is how important the notion of “executing partisans” (that is, killing socialists) was for justifying mass killings of Jews in what Timothy Snyder calls the Bloodlands. Nazis’ political agenda of serial genocides was, in public, always rhetorically framed as exterminating communism.

But, let’s get back to the first paragraph.

We’re still talking about internet asshole. One of the most frustrating things about arguing with someone committed to arguing irrationally is that they appropriate the verbal cues of fairness and rationality, while they’re irrationally arguing for their in-group being entitled to better treatment. But they hide their argument within modifying phrases.

Like all internet assholes, Hitler buried his weakest claims in adjectival phrases—pure German stock, pure-bred Germans—so he has an argument for entitlement rhetorically framed as an argument for fairness. This isn’t fairness as equal treatment across groups, but fairness as an entitled and powerful group being allowed to hold onto its power. It’s “fairness” as “a system that preserves a hierarchy we think is right.” So, it’s “fairness” as “our group being dominant.”

As I said, his most problematic claims are buried.

Let’s be clear: there is and never was any such thing as “pure German stock.” Hitler was relying on Madison Grant’s completely incoherent argument about race. Grant’s argument was that there were three white races: Nordic (what Hitler called Aryan), Alpine, and Mediterranean (what Hitler would have considered non-German speakers in Central and Eastern Europe), and he argued that inter-mixing of these races led to the destruction of a civilization. In other words, like a toddler who can’t stand the peas to touch the mashed potatoes, Grant believed that inter-mixing of races was bad. Yet, by his own narrative, the races were intermixed at various points, since the “higher” race slowly arose from a mixing of the “lower,” and the best civilizations were ones created by intermixing. A longer explanation of how bad his argument was is here.

It’s interesting that Hitler was not “pure German stock” even by his own standards. “Pure German stock” was a blue lie that Hitler sincerely believed, and that he phenotypically violated. His followers didn’t care. Hitler, very clearly not an Aryan, became the political leader to make Aryanism triumph. This isn’t particular to Hitler or his followers. Suckers often join a cult of a person not a Christian because they think he’ll make Christianity triumph or a financially unsuccessful person whom they believe will lead them to thrive financially.

Setting that aside, what his argument assumes is that Jews can’t be pure Germans. And that is the argument that needed to be proven on his side, and he never did because he never could. If a non-Aryan Austrian like Hitler can be a leader of pure Germans, why can’t German citizens be German? Hitler could never make that argument coherently, so he never tried. He just made arguments that rested on the premise that Germans who were Jews didn’t count as German. And that is the first step in politicide, religicide, classicide, or genocide, and people all over the political spectrum engage in it: declare your critics not really German, or American, or Christian, or whatever. They are people who keep us from the goal of a pure community, and so should be eliminated.

We need to stop doing that.

But, back to the May 11 memo, since I really want to post this on May 11.

What Hitler assumes, which is what all racists assume, is a zero-sum contest among races, and that not being dominant means being subordinate—equality is being dominated. But, more important, he assumes that people only look out for their own group. Thus, he can’t even begin to imagine that any non-Jews are objecting to the treatment of Jews, so the protest must be “engineered by Jews.”

As in the other two topics mentioned in the previous posts, he initially denies, then admits, and then deflects the accusation against him.

He denies the accusation by pretending that he is concerned with fairness, but his next argument confirms exactly what he started out denying—discrimination against Jews (since he’s saying “pure German stock” should have preference), and then he threatens retaliation for action that would itself be the consequence of the persecution he denied and then confirmed. It then shifts into a particularly irrelevant piece of whaddaboutism, before he exposes himself as having exactly the views he is accused of having.

The swipe about Palestine is typical. Hitler often made a point to representatives of other countries that their nations often had restrictive immigration regarding Eastern Europeans, especially Eastern European Jews (such as the US 1924 Immigration Act). And Hitler would say that they would do the same thing he was, but they didn’t have to, since they’d never let the Jews in in the first place.

It’s another argument that looks as though it has a point, but it doesn’t have one that is relevant. Britain did have the restrictions he mentions regarding immigration to Palestine, but, as far as I can tell, they didn’t require money to immigrate to the UK itself.

But, Hitler probably often found himself talking to someone who wished Britain did have such restrictive immigration, and so they would sympathize with his desire. Anti-semitic and anti-Slavic prejudices were widespread in Europe generally, including Britain.. And, while these people, ranging from Lord Londonderry to Viscount Rothermere (owner of the Daily Mail), might bemoan the most excessive violence, they wouldn’t empathize with the victims. Like Hitler, they considered various “races” (such as Jews and Slavs) essentially criminal and communist. And, like Hitler, they used the term “Marxism” for all their political adversaries. Thus, like the argument about Germans being victimized because they weren’t allowed to dominate, Hitler’s argument about Jews—as incoherent as it was—would resonate with some people because they didn’t really need the argument to be made; they already agreed.

Hitler as internet a-hole

In an earlier post, I talked about how Hitler appealed to the sense that some groups are entitled to dominate others—a sense shared by a lot of the major figures of his time, who were, therefore, willing to see him as someone with whom they could work. I mentioned that Hitler also relied heavily on deflection, especially whaddaboutism, that enabled him to normalize Nazi violence and persecution and to deflect his own personal responsibility, and I was using a despatch written by Horace Rumbold (British Ambassador to Germany) of a meeting May 11, 1933.

This is the second post about that meeting.

Rumbold reports

The Chancellor then went on to talk about the recent revolution in Germany, which, he said, had probably been unique, inasmuch as it had been accompanied with the minimum of violence and bloodshed. He maintained that not even a pane of glass had been broken in Berlin. Two printing-presses belonging to the Communist party had been destroyed, and perhaps some twenty people in all killed throughout the country. He seemed to remember that matters had been very different in Ireland in 1921, when the law courts had been burnt down and there had been much loss of life. He added very bitterly that between the years 1923 and 1932, 360 of his supporters had been treacherously murdered and some 40,000 injured.

Hitler insisted that the SS and SA “were in no sense military formations, and that he had forbidden them to indulge in military exercises of any kind.”

I’ve spent a lot of time arguing with jerks, and I find this kind of jerk the most frustrating. They’re frustrating because what they’re saying looks like an argument—it has claims, and it has data that are linguistically related to the claims. The data and claims are, however, not logically related to one another. Some of the data is true, or true enough, but not relevant, and the relevant data is false—a deliberate lie, in fact. And then we have claims that might be hyperbole, or they be lies (the idea that their revolution was unique, only two printing presses destroyed, the number of his supporters murdered or injured). The data looks precise (360 deaths, two printing presses) but the important terms are so vague that he actually has a lot of room for equivocation (why only mention Berlin, what does “much loss of life” mean, what exactly is “the revolution”). Hitler doesn’t care that his claims and data are false, and his overall argument illogical. He has no sense of being responsible for what he’s saying or doing. Arguing with him is like trying to play chess with someone who openly pockets pieces and refuses to admit to it. Violating the rules of argument is part of the pleasure.

So, what do you do?

It might be worth engaging with him simply for purposes of trying to undermine his rhetorical effectiveness with third parties—at Rumbold’s May 11 meeting, the only other person in the room is Hitler’s third-rate toady, Baron von Neurath, and Rumbold chooses not to argue. But, what if there are observers to whom you want to expose Hitler’s irrationality and dishonesty?

The rhetorical advantage of being a liar like Hitler is that he has nothing to lose by continuing to lie. If he gets caught in a lie, he can simply claim it was hyperbole—or what is called a “blue lie,” and so it will cost him nothing with his base. The whole point of the charismatic leadership relationship is that it is an irrational commitment to an irrational genius. It is a profoundly religious relationship, in which the leader is worshipped, and so the leader benefits from the kind of thinking common in religions—about claims not needing to be literally true, or empirical facts; they are “true” to the extent that they are consistent with the central beliefs of the religion.[1] The religion of which Hitler is the high priest is the religion of Nazism, and one of the central tenets of Nazism is that Germans are the victims of liberalism, socialism, alien races, and the Versailles Treaty. Because they are the real victims, they are justified in any action they take against the people who have tried to exterminate them. Or who criticize them.

When Rumbold said that there was discrimination against Jews (which Hitler had both denied and bragged about—that’s the next post) and “instanced the names of Professor Einstein and Herr Bruno Watler.” Hitler replied that “Professor Einstein had attacked his Government violently from American soil” and that any English scientist who did the same “would risk molestation in England.” In the first place, no. In the second place, Hitler is equating verbal criticism with attacking, and using that Einstein criticized Nazi Germany as evidence that their prior abuse of him was justified. When arguing with someone like Hitler, this weird warping of time is common—the question was whether Germany was discriminating against Jews, and Hitler said expelling Einstein was justified because Einstein criticized Nazi Germany after being expelled.

So, Hitler’s argument is: there isn’t discrimination against Jews; there is discrimination against Jews, but it’s justified; and, besides, England would do the same (so whaddaboutism based on a hypothetical). Rumbold takes the bait of disagreeing about the last point, making Hitler’s deflection rhetorically effective. They’re now on the issue of whether Britain persecutes people who criticize the government—a point that has nothing to do with whether Nazis do.

This shift is one of the major functions of whaddaboutism—to shift the burden of proof from the weaker case to the other. It’s more or less an admission that a position is indefensible.

Hitler’s earlier whaddaboutism is even more interesting rhetorically. Usually, the whaddaboutism is the kind he engages in about Einstein—it enables the rhetor with a weak case to go on the attack. So, it’s tu quoque—you do it too. He does some of that (the reminder of violence in Ireland in 1921), but his argument about the non-violence of the revolution ends up in whaddaboutism with anti-fascists.

It has the same structure as the argument about Einstein, but without Rumbold saying anything to dispute him:

Hitler makes a false claim (it was unique because it was accomplished with a minimum of bloodshed; there is no discrimination against Jews) that he then contradicts (there were at least 20 people killed; they expelled Einstein); and he justifies this new claim by saying that other people did just as much or worse and therefore this violence was justified. In this case, the violence was the number of Nazis killed and injured during the violence instigated by Nazi groups.

Just as Hitler isn’t responsible for anything he says, so Nazis aren’t responsible for anything bad. It’s never their fault because it is never purely their actions. When it comes to anything bad, then Hitler has a monocausal narrative, and any actors other than Nazis are responsible for the Nazi behavior. Even if deflecting responsibility this way requires some fairly strange time travelling responsibility.

It struck me as very strange when I was reading proslavery rhetors how much they deflected responsibility. They were patient, but about to lose control, and if they did, it would be the fault of abolitionists (or slaves) that they lost control. They genuinely seemed to see themselves as continually exerting heroic self-control that they were about to lose. And nothing was their fault—not slavery, not the conditions of slavery, not the slave codes, not slave rebellions, not even their losing their own tempers and beating slaves. It’s the rhetoric of an abuser.

It makes sense, in its own weird way, that the person who amounts to the idol of an ideology of irrational commitment to the will, violence, and domination would be incapable of making a rational argument. And I think internet a-holes who are similarly incapable of defending their beliefs rationally are similarly commitment to a kind of moral nihilism—there is no morality other than domination. The reason that it strikes me as weird is: why do people who admire domination so much, and who see an irrational argument that silences interlocutors because of how incoherently stupid it is as a victorious domination, whine so fucking much about being victims?

[1] This isn’t a criticism of religion. I consider myself a religious person, and I have beliefs that are not falsifiable or rationally defensible. But, when we start to use that kind of thinking for a political leader, we have created a second God. And I’m not a polytheist.

Why would people like us have supported appeasing Hitler?

nazi propaganda poster saying "death to marism"

This was going to be one post, but it turned into several. And it’s a set of posts, not about how appeasing Hitler was right (it wasn’t), but about how people like us actively supported Hitler, or actively supported appeasing him.

It’s common for people to express outraged bewilderment at British politicians and figures who appeased Hitler—we claim not to understand how they could have been duped by him, how they could not have seen him for who he really was. We like to explain appeasement either by saying that Hitler was a rhetorical magician, whose persuasive skills were overwhelming, or by saying that the people who didn’t take him seriously enough were fools engaged in wishful thinking. Neither is the case. In fact, many of us would have supported appeasing Hitler. If we try to tell a story of an irresistible rhetor or hopelessly gullible political leaders, then we are the gullible ones.

In other words, this isn’t about Hitler, and it isn’t about Chamberlain. It’s about us.

Hitler, like many manipulative people, didn’t persuade others, as much as he gave them the tools that enabled them to persuade themselves of something they already wanted to believe. Those strategies (and those people) allowed Hitler to normalize Nazi behavior and deflect his personal responsibility for what couldn’t be normalized.

On May 11, 1933, the British Ambassador to Germany, Horace Rumbold, met with Hitler. Hitler had only been in the government since that January, and dictator since that March, but Rumbold already had him correctly sized up. Rumbold described the meeting in a dispatch back to the Foreign Office (Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919-1939, Second Series, Volume V #139) and his description of it shows how Hitler’s rhetoric worked (and, in this case, didn’t work) and with whom.

The meeting was fairly typical of meetings with Hitler—he did most of the talking, got unhinged on the subject of Jews, deflected (especially through whaddaboutism), and lied or exaggerated when he couldn’t deflect. After the Reichstag Fire, the Nazi government arrested anyone considered communist, a category that included labor union activists. Nazi persecution of Jews was well known, as well as violence against communists.

Because he had read Mein Kampf and been listening to speeches by Hitler and other major Nazis, Rumbold knew exactly what Hitler planned. In a memo written not long before this meeting (Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919-1939, Second Series, Volume V #36), Rumbold had summarized Hitler’s philosophy (long quotes from Rumbold are the full paragraphs in italics):

He starts with the assertion that man is a fighting animal: therefore the nation is, he concludes, a fighting unit, being a community of fighters. Any living organism which ceases to fight for its existence is, he asserts, doomed to extinction. A country or a race which ceases to fight is equally doomed. The fighting capacity of a race depends on its purity. Hence the necessity for ridding it of foreign impurities. The Jewish race, owing to its universality, is of necessity pacificist and internationalist. Pacificism is the deadliest sin, for pacificism means the surrender of the race in the fight for existence [….] The race must fight: a race that rests must rust and perish. The German race, had it been united in time, would now be master of the globe today. The new Reich must gather within its folds all the scattered German elements in Europe [….] The ultimate aim of education is to produce a German who can be converted with the minimum of training into a soldier [….] Again and again he proclaims that fanatical conviction and uncompromising resolution are indispensable qualities in a leader [….] Germany needs peace until she has recovered such strength that no country can challenge her without serious and irksome preparations.

He was right, as we know. It’s important to point out that his correct interpretation of Hitler and the Nazis was grounded in evidence available to anyone fluent in German—the public and published statements of Hitler and the Nazis. It’s also important to point out that, while Hitler had very recently (around 1932) begun talking in terms of self-determination rather than conquest, shifted to dog whistles about his racist policies, and took to lying about violations of the Versailles Treaty, he never retracted, apologized for, or even qualified his previous very clear statements about German hegemony, the desire for a pure and militarized Germany, the need for violence, the equation of Jews and communism, and so on.

People do change their minds, of course, and so the notion that Hitler wasn’t the hothead he had been in the twenties isn’t obviously wrong. But he only stopped making all those arguments two or three years before becoming Chancellor, and he never retracted them. When people change their minds, they openly retract what they previous said. He changed his rhetoric, and not his mind. He didn’t change his rhetoric because he wanted to hold on to the base he’d created with his militaristic and racist rhetoric; he’d risk losing them if he retracted those sorts of statements. When a political figure suddenly changes their rhetoric, then we have to figure out which sets of statements s/he meant, and one relatively straightforward one is: they believe the one they’ve never retracted, even if they’re stopped saying it or are saying the opposite.

But, back to Rumbold’s despatch about the May 11 meeting.

Rumbold says that Hitler complained about the “Polish Corridor:”

He only wished that the Corridor had been created far more to the east. (This is the same remark as that which he recently made to the Polish Minister). The result of the creation of the Corridor had been to provoke grave dissatisfaction in Germany and apprehension in Poland, for the Poles realized that it was an artificial creation. Thus a state of unrest was kept alive.

So, what is Hitler doing?

First, he wasn’t a mastermind of rhetoric. Someone genuinely skilled in rhetoric wouldn’t harangue people in small meetings, but he was notorious for that—not only for, as he does in this meeting, doing almost all the talking, but actually slipping into giving a speech. He was highly skilled at one kind of rhetoric—he was good at making a speech that moved a crowd. Even William Shirer, the Berlin correspondent for American media, says that he sometimes found himself temporarily moved by Hitler’s speeches, and he knew exactly who Hitler was and what he wanted. Paradoxically (given what we know about Hitler), what came across so effectively in the big public speeches was that Hitler was completely, passionately, authentically, and even irrationally committed to the cause of Germany (the in-group). We don’t expect rational discussions of policy options in large public speeches (although maybe we should); we are particularly prone to the rush of the charismatic leadership relationship. And that’s what Hitler offered.

In one-on-one situations, charismatic leadership works less well—that Hitler was irrationally committed to the cause of Germans wasn’t especially interesting to the British Ambassador. What does work, but only for people who are looking to be persuaded, are the strategies that Hitler uses: projection, whaddaboutism, lying, exaggeration.

Take, for instance, Hitler’s comments about the “Polish Corridor.” The idea that there are “natural” boundaries, which the Polish Corridor violated, is part of Hitler’s racist notions about some “races” being entitled to territory. Of course the boundaries are artificial—that is, made by humans—because that’s what boundaries always are. Poles weren’t worried about the boundaries being artificial; they were worried about German aggression. Hitler’s passive—a state of unrest was kept alive—makes it seem as though Poles were partially responsible for the state of unrest. Were the Poles completely confident about the borders, there would still be a state of unrest because of Hitler’s rhetoric about German entitlement. Poles weren’t apprehensive about the boundaries; they were apprehensive about Nazi aggression. Hitler projects his unrest he creates onto the Poles.

This strategy would work with an interlocutor who believed that states have “natural” boundaries, or that the boundaries set by the negotiations at the end of the Great War were artificial or unfair to Germany. This way of presenting the situation would also work with someone who didn’t really believe that Poles were people who should be considered, or at least not considered as having the same natural rights to self-determination and a nation-state as, say, Germans.

What many people now forget is that the Austro-Hungarian Empire had collapsed with the Great War, and one consequence was the rebirth (or creation, depending on your narrative of history) of various nation-states that hadn’t existed for several lifetimes. Poland and Czechoslovakia were two of those nation-states. Given the vexed and sometimes violent history of 19th century conflicts over nationalism, language, and oppression, some boundaries had been deliberately designed to keep Germans a minority. Were he talking to the kind of racist who believed that Germans were better people than Slavs, Hitler’s implicit argument about the boundaries would seem reasonable. As it happens, he wasn’t at that moment, but he often was. So, one reason that major political figures argued for appeasing Hitler was that they agreed with him that Germans should be politically dominant in central Europe because Slavs were, you know, so Slavic. They would, therefore, overlook that a state of unrest was kept alive because of German leaders like Hitler, and instead be willing to see the situation—self-determination for Slavs designed to keep a minority German population from dominating—as artificial, with some vague sort of “both sides are at fault” way of framing the situation.

These people wouldn’t necessarily think Germany should take over all the areas previously controlled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but they would be sympathetic to Germany calling a situation artificial if it kept German speakers from political domination. They might object to Germany dominating Europe, but not what they (wrongly) imagined to be racial Germans dominating the political situations in most Central and Eastern European countries.

We now forget (or don’t know) how widespread what we now know are bullshit narratives about “race” were in that era. Race, which even the most respected and cited scholarship on race couldn’t define consistently, was incoherently associated with language, and sometimes phenotype (but only when that was politically useful). Books like Passing of the Great Race (1916) or The Rising Tide of Color (1921) were tremendously popular in the US and Britain, and they were pearl-clutching jeremiads about the danger to civilization from Central and Eastern Europeans—that is, from Slavs and, worst of all, Slavish Jews. That was the whole point of the extremely restrictive 1924 Immigration Act—it was designed to reduce the number of people coming from Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe.

Hitler’s griping about the “artificiality” of the Polish Corridor was grounded in the belief that people who self-identified as German (what he would have called “Aryans”) should not be politically dominated by Slavs. And that argument would work with anyone who agreed with the unhappily common premise that politics should not be people from different groups arguing from their different perspectives, but people who have the right point of view being dominant.

So, for our fantasy that we would never have supported Hitler, the important question is: do we believe that ideal political deliberation has people with radically different points of view, people we really dislike and look down on, arguing with one another, or do we think it consists of our in-group being “naturally” (ontologically) entitled to political domination?

If the latter, then we would have loved Hitler, as long as we agreed with him as to what in-group was entitled to political domination.

Just in case I’ve been unclear: if we condemn Hitler, but believe that only our group has a legitimate political stance, and that our group is entitled to domination, then we don’t really condemn Hitler. We would have been open to persuasion to his narrative about the victimization of Germans, since we believe that a group can be victimized simply on the grounds that it isn’t as dominant as it feels entitled to be.

One of the reasons that people supported Hitler–including people shocked that he did what he’d said he would do were he in power–was that they agreed with his premise that there is an in-group that should have all the political power. If we agree with that premise, but disagree as to which group it is, we’re close enough to Hitler that we’re just splitting some very fine hairs.