On his own, the mediocre postcard illustrator

and would-be artist would have remained

forever a nobody.
And that is the crucial difference between
Hitler and the other dictators mentioned
above. Those leaders dispensed entirely with
any kind of democratic legitimization.
Popularity was secondary for those men.
Hitler, by contrast, enjoyed the broad
support, confidence, admiration - indeed the
love - of the Germans until the very end of
his days.
Hitler's power was based on the
unconditional allegiance of the population.
The Germans put their trust in Hitler. And
that is how he was able to make his
worldview, his politics, his hate, his war, and
his crimes those of an entire nation.
Niccol Machiavelli said that love or fear
were the most effective tools in securing
power. But "perhaps it is best," the
Florentine political theorist said, "to wish to
be both loved and feared." It was that
amalgamate of feelings that bound the

Germans to Hitler. But why? What did this

man from the small Austrian town Braunau
convey so effectively to his people?
Hitler's appeal has always been, and
continues to be, attributed to his charisma.
Hitler himself used the term providence, as if
there was a mythical bond between the
Fhrer and his people. But there was nothing
heavenly about the Germans' entanglement
with Hitler. As in every lasting relationship, it
began with a spontaneous connection, which
emerged from shared cultural and
mythological legacy. But there were also
tangible elements. His charisma was a
pretext, masking the joint interests of the
Germans and Hitler. What connected the
Fhrer and his people was fear of the modern
age, or in other words, the future.
Modernism meant the endeavor to subject all
thought and action to reason, thereby
making decisions and actions comprehensible
and verifiable. This is an attitude that
requires the rejection of any metaphysical
rationalization.

Modern thought was never able to develop as

fully in Germany as it did elsewhere in
Europe. The baby of the Enlightenment,
epitomized by Kant, Lessing and many
others, was thrown out with the bathwater of
the anti-Napoleonic Wars of Liberation. The
vast majority of the German bourgeoisie was
more interested in aligning itself with the
nationalist idealism of German philosophers
Fichte and Arndt, or Richard Wagner's newly
invented world of Germanic myths. Indeed,
they veritably fled to those comforts, instead
of subjecting their political, social and
cultural awareness to objectively verifiable
criteria.
That attitude gained currency following the
trauma of defeat in World War I and the
socio-economic crisis it brought in its wake.
Instead of rationally tackling and overcoming
the difficulties that loomed at the beginning
of the 1920s, the Germans sought escape in
an intoxication of chauvinism - the same
jingoism that had already contributed so
much to their misery during World War I and
thereafter.

The Germans felt, and indeed were,

threatened by modernism, since they had, to
a great degree, closed their eyes to the
principles of lucid reason. Hitler also
considered himself a victim of modernism
and blamed it for his early failures to that
point. Hitler and his National Socialist
movement gave true voice to the fears of the
German middle class. He told the Germans
that the Jews were the one and only cause of
all their misery. And the Jews were, in fact,
the undisputed beneficiaries of modernism,
whether as democrats, capitalists,
intellectuals or communists.
But Hitler was not satisfied just to denounce
the Jews. His goal was to lead his people into
a war of liberation from the Jews, activating
the anti-Semitism dormant in Germany.
Indeed, more than any other group, the Jews
embodied and cultivated modernism.
Although it's rarely discussed these days,
back then there were significant economic,
social and intellectual differences between
the German Gentile and the Jewish
communities. The Nazis fueled those conflicts
until they escalated into a majority war

against the minority, which found its ultimate

expression in coldly executed mass murder.
The Germans were not murderous antiSemites contrary to the claim of Daniel Jonah
Goldhagen. But they looked the other way,
tolerated and even profited from the
genocide.
Hitler waged war with modern tactics. The
enthusiasm he and his cohorts showed for
the newest techniques in propaganda, mass
mobilization and weapons of war has long
obscured the fact that the Nazis and their
Fhrer availed themselves of those tools only
as a means to an end, and that end was a
campaign to exterminate modernism and its
adherents. Hitler's ultimate goal never
changed - a return to the earth, to "blood and
soil", to the idealized world of the Teutons.
The "total war" the Nazis proclaimed in 1943
was the brainchild of propaganda minister
Joseph Goebbels. Millions of Germans
participated enthusiastically, steadfast until
the bitter end in their loyalty to Hitler. What
resistance there was, made up largely of elite
army officers, lacked all support among the

masses. So Claus von Stauffenberg and his

comrades-in-arms who made an attempt on
Hitler's life, on July 20, 1944, were forced to
dissimulate and pretend to defend the
authority of the state.
Nazi propaganda claimed a supranatural
unity between the Fhrer and the people:
"Germany is Hitler, and Hitler is Germany."
While the totality of that alliance may be
exaggerated, there is no doubt that Hitler
could not have done what he did except by
joining forces with the Germans.