Free Thinking Small by Andrea Hiott Page A

kinds of people and too many liberal ideas, and the new government was just another force weakening Germany. In Vienna, he’d seen pamphlets saying something similar about racial dilution—a popular topic in both Europe and the United States at the time—and he now adopted an extreme version of this idea as his own, blending it into his political ideology.
    Hitler was not the only one getting caught up in such ideas at the time. Democracy had been so built up during the time of the First World War, but when reality set in afterward, it did not live up to expectations, and many felt it was not going to last. As historian Richard Overy has pointed out, during the 1920s and ’30s, a significant number of people in Britain, the country thathad been the pinnacle of democracy in Europe up till then,
     felt that there was a crisis of civilization at hand and that they would soon experience the end of capitalism, and perhaps the end of democracy as well. “The obituaries were, as it turned out, written in indecent haste,” 2 Overy writes, “but at the time a great deal of British opinion, across the class divides, believed on the basis of the evidence all
     around them that capitalism’s days were numbered.” At the time, there was also a surging interest in issues such as eugenics—a biological argument that set levels of desirability on particular genetic traits. Hitler’s promotion of this perceived importance of blood and race would be an extreme manifestation of such concerns, but many respected and distinguished people considered themselves eugenicists in those days, including the economist J. M. Keynes and
     the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. One eugenicist in Britain named Marie Stopes, for example, cut off all contact with her son simply because he’d married a woman who had to wear eyeglasses: She said her son had “willfully ruined a fine genetic inheritance.” 3 As Overy writes, “the power of the popular biological
     argument was evident in its most extreme form in Hitler’s Germany, but the phenomenon was international.” 4
    Hitler went a step further, however, combining the biological argument with a political and economic one. He was against capitalism, which made him antidemocratic, and being against democracy eventually became the same (in his mind) as being against the Jews, and being against the Jews was the same as being against the Communists (because, again, in his mind all Communists were also Jews). Somehow, with this warped logic, he believed that the same people who were behind
     finance capital were also the ones trying to destroy the country with Marxist doctrines forecasting the end of capitalism. Everything he hated merged together into one.
    Diversity was the main culprit in Hitler’s eyes; he felt there was too much debate and compromise because there were too many diverse voices being heard, and it was this repulsive diversity that democracy and capitalism represented. He wanteda pristine, pure state. And so, even though Hitler was still not a German citizen, and even though he did not have blond hair, he decided that blond-haired German citizens were destined to become the
     master race. It’s hard to say exactly what kinds of insecurities had gone into such thinking, but whatever might have been going on inside his head, on the surface he was finding his poise and control, schooling himself in the art of rhetoric and propaganda at every turn. He now sought and accepted offers to speak with relish, sometimes giving as many as ten speeches a day, speeches with titles like “Social and Economic Catchwords” and “Emigration,”
     which were well-attended and which helped him begin to make a name for himself with the higher-ups in nationalistic circles. When it came to speaking to crowds of people, he discovered he had a great deal of skill.
    Hitler was only the fifty-fifth member of the German Workers Party, later renamed the National Socialist Party, or NSDAP, the Nazis.