Evil Psychopaths, page 21
The Nazis campaigned for the elections, building up anti-Communist hysteria and increased their share of the vote to forty-three per cent. Again, however, they had to form a coalition government. Hitler now introduced the Enabling Act which allowed the cabinet to introduce measures without first gaining the approval of the Reichstag. It was to last for four years and represented his first step on the way to total power. On 14 July 1933, the Nazi party was declared the only legal political party in Germany and the power of the state governments was abolished.
Between 30 June and 2 July 1934, Hitler carried out a purge of the leadership of his SA stormtroopers, in which a number of its members represented a threat to him. This became known as the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ and around eighty-five people are reckoned to have died during it, although the final death toll may actually have been in the hundreds.
When President von Hindenberg died in August 1934, the cabinet declared the presidency dormant and transferred the powers of head of state to Hitler as Fuhrer and Reichskanzler. He was now in command of the armed forces whose officers and men swore an oath not to Germany or the constitution but to Hitler himself. A plebiscite voted overwhelmingly in favour of the changes. Hitler was now unchallenged dictator of Germany.
Hitler implemented a massive expansion of industrial production as well as a huge campaign of improvement to Germany’s infrastructure. Numerous dams, autobahns, railways and other civil works were constructed and he sponsored architecture on a massive scale. The 1936 Olympic Games gave him an opportunity to demonstrate so-called Aryan superiority to the world. Of course, he did not allow for the extraordinary feats of the black American sprinter, Jesse Owen, who disproved his theories by winning four gold medals and infuriating Hitler in the process.
Hitler had written about Germany’s need for Lebensraum (living space) in the east in Mein Kampf and it was a critical element of his foreign policy. He also advocated Anschluss (merger) with Austria, restoration of the pre-World War I frontiers, abolition of the restrictions on the German armed forces, return of Germany’s former African colonies and a German zone of influence in eastern Europe.
He tried to build an alliance with Britain with the aim of obtaining Britain’s support for an increase in the size of army Germany was allowed, an increase that would help him in his plan to destroy Russia. However, Britain refused to be drawn in and said it would prefer to wait ten years before it could provide such support.
In March 1935, he rejected the part of the Versailles Treaty limiting Germany’s armed forces, publicly announcing an increase in the army to 600,000, six times the number permitted. He also introduced the Luftwaffe and increased naval strength. The League of Nations condemned these acts, but no one did anything.
On 15 September 1935, Hitler made a speech at the Nuremberg party rally in which he announced new laws regarding Germany’s Jewish population. The Nuremberg Laws banned sex and marriage between ‘Aryan’ Germans and Jewish Germans and deprived ‘non-Aryan’ Germans of German citizenship.
Germany and Italy declared an Axis in October 1936 and Japan entered the Axis later in the year.
In 1939, Hitler began systematically killing Jews in concentration or ‘death’ camps. He had already made efforts to purify the German race by killing children with physical and developmental disabilities in a programme known as T4. Between 1939 and 1945, somewhere between eleven and fourteen million people, including six million Jews, died in the camps, in ghettoes and in mass executions. The methods used were poison gas, starvation and disease while working as slave labourers.
In 1938, Anschluss happened when Hitler persuaded Austria to join together in a Germanic union. His next target was the German-speaking Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. On 30 September 1938, a one-day conference in Munich between Hitler, British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, French premier, Daladier, and Mussolini came up with the Munich Agreement which gave Hitler what he wanted – the Sudetenland. Chamberlain famously claimed that they had secured ‘peace in our time’. Hitler ignored the agreement and invaded the Czech half of the country in March 1939.
Poland was next and German tanks rolled into western Poland on 1 September. Hitler had by this time made a non-aggression pact with Russia and the plan was to divide Poland between them. However, Britain had already guaranteed Polish independence and Chamberlain declared war on 3 September. Hitler at last had the war he had wanted all along.
In April 1940, German forces invaded Denmark and Norway. In May, they took Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg and then attacked France which surrendered on 22 June by which time Mussolini’s Italy had joined in on the German side.
Hitler planned to invade Britain, but first wanted to bomb the country into submission. It was not to be, however, and his Luftwaffe lost the Battle of Britain to the men Winston Churchill, by then Prime Minister of Britain, called ‘the few’. Meanwhile, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria joined Hitler and Mussolini’s Axis.
On 22 June 1941, in Operation Barbarossa, Hitler launched an attack by three million German troops on the Soviet Union, tearing up the pact that Hitler had signed in 1939. He made huge gains – the Baltic States, Belarus and the Ukraine amongst them.
On 11 December, however, as his troops bore down on Moscow, he faced a new threat when the United States entered the war following Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor. But by now, things were starting to go wrong. The Germans lost at the second Battle of El Alamein, and the German 6th Army was wiped out at Stalingrad. He then lost in the huge Battle of Kursk.
His military judgement was coming into question and seemed to be increasingly erratic. Meanwhile at home, the economy was deteriorating and Hitler’s health was beginning to suffer. His left hand trembled noticeably and it has been suggested that he suffered from Parkinson’s disease. Others say that he had syphilis.
By June 1944, the Russians were pushing his armies back west and the Allies were advancing on Berlin from east, west and south. In July, a group of officers tried to assassinate him in his headquarters at the Wolf’s Lair at Rastenberg by planting a bomb under a table. Hitler survived and launched ruthless reprisals, around 4,900 people being executed. Later that year, it was clear that Germany had lost the war, but he refused to allow his troops to retreat. He still hoped that he could negotiate a separate peace with the British and the Americans, but he was becoming dangerously irrational in such beliefs.
In April 1945, as Soviet troops attacked the outskirts of Berlin, Hitler’s followers, in his bunker, the ‘Führer’s Shelter’, below the Reich Chancellory, urged him to flee into the mountains. He refused, however, preferring to make a last stand in the capital.
His colleagues were now plotting against him. On 23 April commander of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring, argued that with Hitler stranded in Berlin, he should assume leadership of the Reich. Hitler had him arrested and stripped of his government positions. On 28 April, Hitler was furious when he learned that SS leader Heinrich Himmler was trying to negotiate with the Allies. He ordered his arrest and had his representative in Berlin shot.
On 29 April, Hitler dictated his last will and testament. He had earlier learned of the shooting of Benito Mussolini earlier that day. The next day, when the Russians were only a few hundred metres from his bunker, Hitler committed suicide, shooting himself in the mouth while at the same time biting into a capsule of cyanide.
His body and that of Eva Braun, whom he had married the day before, was put into a bomb crater, doused with petrol and burned.
The Thousand Year Reich he had strived to create had lasted just twelve years.
Joseph Stalin
It was 1 March 1953 and the previous night had been a long one. Lavrentiy Beria, Georgy Malenkov, Nicolai Bulganin and Nikita Khruschev had dined with Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union since 1924. That morning, however, there was no sign of Stalin; uncharacteristically, he had not emerged from his room. No one was bold enough to knock on his door or enter his room until ten o’clock that night, by which time ‘Uncle Joe’ as the western press liked to call him, had been lying on the floor of his room for some considerable time, having suffered a stroke that had paralysed the right side of his body. Three days later, the ‘Coryphaeus of Science’, the ‘Father of Nations’, the ‘Brilliant Genius of Humanity’ and ‘Great Architect of Communism’ – who was also behind the deaths of anywhere between three and sixty million people – died, aged seventy-four.
His life had been extraordinary. He had been a trainee priest, a poet, a weatherman, a newspaper editor, a bank robber and, of course, an ardent revolutionary who had played a large part in introducing Communism to Russia. Then, as leader, he had eliminated all of his opponents to make his position at the head of his government unassailable, helped to defeat the Nazis – albeit, at huge cost to the Russian nation – and, after the war, had turned Russia into one of the world’s two superpowers. Just four years after his death, the Soviet Union had put the very first artificial satellite into orbit around the Earth.
Despite the iron grip with which he held the country, the terrible gulags where more than 3 million opponents were incarcerated, the secret police, the denunciations and purges, a recent survey found that more than thirty-five per cent of Russians would vote for him if he were alive today and, in a national poll to find the most popular person in Russian history and culture, Stalin topped the list.
He was born in Gori, Georgia in 1878 to an Ossetian cobbler and his wife whose business and marriage fell apart when the father became an alcoholic. The young Stalin spoke Georgian for the first eight or nine years of his life, only learning Russian at the church school he attended and where he did well. Around this time, he was knocked down by a horse-drawn carriage, receiving permanent damage to his left arm, an injury that later exempted him from fighting in World War I.
In 1894, at the age of sixteen, he was awarded a scholarship to the Georgian Orthodox Deminary at Tiflis where the teachers tried to impose Russian language and culture on students. Stalin was drawn to Georgian nationalism at this period. He also became a well-known poet, his work appearing in local newspapers.
His rebellious nature began to show at the seminary where he was punished several times for reading banned material – both foreign novels and Marxist literature. It became elementary, however, when the seminary suddenly raised school fees to a level that Stalin and his mother could not afford. He left the seminary in 1899, shortly before the exams. A short while later, he discovered the writings of Vladimir Lenin and his life’s path was chosen – he would be a revolutionary.
He found a job at the Tiflis meteorological Observatory that, although it paid badly, allowed him time to indulge in revolutionary activities, organising strikes, leading demonstrations, writing articles and delivering speeches. It was a dangerous time to be a revolutionary; the Tsar’s secret police, the Okhrana, were always on the lookout for the ring-leaders and many were arrested. When they looked as if they were about to pick him up, he decided to go into hiding and from then on lived off donations from friends and associates in the movement.
He moved to Batumi and found employment at an oil refinery and is believed to have been involved in arson at the refinery in 1902. The bonus the workers should have received for putting out the fire, was not forthcoming, as the management were certain the fire had been started deliberately. Stalin led the workers in a series of strikes that escalated into street fighting with Cossack soldiers. In one action, thirteen striking workers were killed and Stalin portrayed them in pamphlets and speeches as martyrs. Eventually, he was arrested and exiled to Siberia for three years.
He arrived in December 1903 but just five weeks later, he escaped and travelled back to Tiflis. He was anxious to throw himself back into politics. The Social Democrats had now split into two factions – the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks who were led by Lenin and behind whom Stalin put his support.
He founded a Georgian Social Democratic party and travelled the region holding meetings and giving speeches. He began to come to the attention of the Bolshevik leadership in Russia.
A revolution broke out in the Russian Empire in January 1905 following the slaughter of 200 workers taking part in a demonstration in Baku. Stalin led a group of armed Bolsheviks during this upheaval, running protection rackets to raise funds for the party and stealing whatever they could get, including printing equipment. When the revolution finally died out with the Tsar still in power, Stalin continued his activity, fighting against the Mensheviks from platforms and stages across Georgia. He organised armed militias that continued to extort money from the rich and waged guerrilla warfare on the Cossacks.
He was chosen to be one of the three Caucasus representatives at the Bolshevik Conference in Finland in January 1906 and it was there that he first met Lenin on whom he made a very good impression. Returning to Georgia, he resumed his work and helped to organise the assassination of a Cossack general as well as continue his fund-raising through robbing banks and extortion. He was at the Fourth Conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour party in April 1906 where he was disappointed to hear the conference ban bank robbery as a means of raising party funds. In July 1906, he found time to get married, to Ekaterina Svanidze and she would give birth to their son, Yakov, the following March.
In 1907, he travelled with Lenin to attend the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which was important because it confirmed the Bolshevik supremacy in the party and discussed communist revolution in Russia. Stalin also encountered his great rival, Leon Trotsky, at this conference. It was a defining time for Stalin who began to shift his attention away from the more parochial atmosphere of Georgia towards Russia and, tellingly, he began to write in Russian. His ambitions lay elsewhere. He also staged a huge robbery - 250,000 roubles, worth around £1.5 million in today’s terms. He and his gang ambushed a convoy carrying the money and the ensuing gunfire and explosion of home-made bombs killed around forty people. As for the party ruling that there should be no more bank robberies, Stalin had temporarily resigned from the party to carry out the heist.
Ekaterina, his wife, fell ill around this time, and died, leaving him so devastated that his friends, fearing he might kill himself, took away his pistol.
He continued to organise strikes and ordered the murder of many right-wing supporters of the Tsar. To the annoyance of the Bolshevik intellectuals, money still came from kidnappings and extortion, but by now he was too powerful and influential to be opposed. It came to an end, however, in April 1908 when the Okhrana eventually tracked him down. He spent seven months in prison and had a further sentence of two years in Siberia to serve, but after just seven months, he disguised himself with women’s clothes and escaped to St. Petersburg, travelling back to Georgia a few months later.
In 1910, he was again apprehended and this time he was banned from the Caucasus for five years and sent into exile again to complete his previous sentence. He was released in July 1911.
In 1912, the Bolsheviks left the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and became a separate political grouping. Stalin was co-opted onto the party’s central committee after a number of other members were arrested. He edited the Bolshevik newspaper, Zvezda, renaming it Pravda, but before long had been arrested and exiled yet again. He escaped after just thirty-eight days and returned to St. Petersburg.
He worked to bring the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks together, writing editorials and articles in Pravda supporting the idea, but Lenin was displeased and moved him from the editorship to leading the Russian Bureau of the Bolshevik Party. Around this time, he wrote an essay entitled Marxism and the National Question and for the first time published it under the alias Stalin. Until that time he had used the name ‘Koba’. It was the name of a Robin Hood-type hero in a novel by Alexander Kazbegi.
A spy within the Bolshevik ranks betrayed almost the entire central committee of the party to the Okhrana and they were all arrested and exiled, Stalin to the isolated Siberian province of Turukhansk where he spent six months. The authorities learned, however, that he was about to escape and sent him to a hamlet on the edge of the Arctic Circle where he had to live by fishing and hunting. He also enjoyed an affair during his two years there with a thirteen-year-old girl with whom he fathered two children.
Following the February Revolution in 1917, Stalin was released from exile and, back in St. Petersburg, while the majority of the party leadership remained in exile, seized control of Pravda. To begin with he supported the government of Alexander Kerensky in its pages, but Lenin’s return brought a change in party thinking and the paper began to call for the downfall of Kerensky’s regime. In the meantime, he was elected to the Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee.
Fighting broke out between Bolshevik militias and Kerensky’s men and the offices of Pravda were surrounded. He ordered his men to surrender and then smuggled Lenin to Finland. With Lenin absent, Stalin assumed the leadership of the party, being re-elected to the Central Committee and being given the job of editor-in-chief of the party press.
Kerensky faced a threat from inside his own party in September 1917 and looked to the Bolsheviks for help, arming them and allowing them to recruit a small army. When the threat dissipated, however, Kerensky found himself with the problem of an armed and militant Bolshevik army commanded by Stalin. Lenin decided the time was ripe for a coup and by 8 November, Kerensky’s cabinet was under arrest.
The Bolsheviks formed the Council of People’s Commissars and Stalin was given the job of People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs, with the objective of winning over the myriad non-Russian ethnic groupings of the Russian Empire.
But soon, civil war had broken out, Lenin’s Red Army facing the White Army, mostly made up of anti-Bolsheviks. Stalin was given control of Red Army operations in the Caucasus. His ruthlessness showed through. He was distrustful of many of the former Tsarist officers in the Red Army and had many counter-revolutionaries executed. Entire villages were burned to force the peasants into submission. He had dissenters and deserters from the Red Army publicly executed.
