Word: heiden
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...that he treated Himmler (also Ribbentrop, Hess, Ley, et al.) simply to protect his own family. He was also instrumental, he says, in sending thousands of victims of German concentration camps to safety into Switzerland and Sweden. Documents reproduced in his Memoirs, and an introduction by Biographer Konrad (Hitler) Heiden, indicate that his claims are true. So also may be his reports of tall Nazi ambitions. Samples...
...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...
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...
...intellectual" world of the 20th Century, reasons Heiden, is the first to believe in "the open sesame of technology," to see the ideal national state as "a state for mechanics." So when Hitler called for the coordination of all national activities, few feared in this icy, calculating phrase the machine-tooled mind that regarded people as the mass-tools of a chief engineer. Those who belonged to the "intellectual" age approved; those who did not were misled. "No trade-union leader called for determined resistance [because] the education of the working masses in the ideals of the economic...