A Cipher Who Went Along
Es Geschah In Deutschland (“It Happened In Germany”).
by Lutz Graf Schwerin Von Krosigk.
Tübingen, Rainer Wunderlich. 384 pp.

Ulrich Von Hassel, a German diplomat who was executed by Hitler for his complicity in the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944, wrote in his posthumously published diaries: “Respectable people were shocked to read names like . . . Schwerin-Krosigk among the authors of the decree prescribing penalties for the Jews. These men apparently cannot see how they are degrading themselves. . . .”

A reading of Schwerin von Krosigk’s reminiscences furnishes yet another proof, if proof were needed, that those Germans (and non-Germans) who hoped that the lamb, moderate nationalism, would swallow the Hitlerite wolf were the victims of a peculiar illusion. Nurtured on Moeller van den Bruck’s Teutonic Utopia, the conservative German right lacked clear thinkers and, with the exception of Ernst Jünger, writers of any boldness or verve. There is nothing quite so dreary in the whole history of European party politics as the mélange of philistinism, xenophobia, and greed that they embodied. It was in this stifling milieu that Schwerin von Krosigk rose to eminence: a disgruntled Junker, something of a financier, a bit of a cultural man, he impressed the bosses of Hugenberg’s German National party—for the most part hidebound, unscrupulous men of business—as much with his lively, highly exploitable intelligence as with his aristocratic breeding. Being a much traveled man—he had spent some time at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar—and so less of a xenophobe than the rest, he served as an excellent advertisement abroad; and being pliable, without a mind of his own, he could be trusted to get along with the Nazis (whose imminent seizure of power was no secret to the German Nationalists) and temper their hotheaded radicalism. As it happened, the Nazis got the best of the bargain. A cipher in the position of minister of finance was exactly what the Nazis wanted: a well-bred cipher, moreover, who knew how to blot himself out completely the moment he took office. It was men like Schacht and Speer who held the strings of the new economy, not Schwerin von Krosigk.

Weizsäcker and Schmidt, two other recent memoirists¹ who once played important roles in the Nazi hierarchy, were simply shallow time-servers. Schwerin von Krosigk has depth, but that depth is groundless in every way. Hitler could not knock the bottom out of his world, or replace it with a false one, since it never had any bottom to begin with. And we are cheated, in this work, of the grounds of its author’s thoughts or actions. There is nothing of moment he has to say on any head, including his own. Events passed through him turbulently, it seems, but without leaving a trace—or, from the historian’s point of view, a usable sediment. He is hardly what Trevor-Roper once declared him to be, a ninny. He is that paradox, largely German if not altogether so: an agitated, tortured vacuum.

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A Book such as this can appeal only to the dullest of tastes, and the reviewer is embarrassed to find passages fit for quotation. There is no flavor more difficult to convey than the flavor of insipidity, especially in short compass. But the following two statements may serve; they show how uniquely Schwerin von Krosigk succeeds in marrying depth of emotion with complete vacuousness.

Speaking of a diplomat whose skill in connivance and collusion was altogether beyond his own feeble powers, von Krosigk writes: “Laval’s fate was to be a sad one. The terrible excitement caused by the war and the long occupation had to vent itself on those men who seemed guilty of ‘collaboration’ with the conquerors against their own people. Yet actually Laval was less concerned with ‘loyal’ collaboration than with the interests of his own defeated country, and he managed to fight for these interests in a manner both tough and resourceful. . . . If promises that had been made him were never redeemed, the fault does not lie with Laval: it is Hitler who should be blamed, with his contempt for treaties and that profound distrust of Laval he shared with Ribbentrop. . . . It was inevitable that among the men called to account [at Nuremberg] there should be found, besides criminals and traitors, persons who acted as they did from a sense of duty; whose only ‘crime’ consisted in what President Grant once described as ‘failures which are errors of judgment, not of intent. ’ Future generations will judge men once more by their motives rather than by their actions. . . . It may be that his own people will never exonerate Laval from egotism and ‘corruption, ’ but it must be said, in all honesty, that he was one of the first ‘Europeans.’ ”

And this, in connection with Himmler: “The order of the SS was to embody the idea of a new elite, held together by a common style and attitude towards life rather than a common political aim. Here, as in no other group, do we find a true esprit de corps, a terse and pithy use of words, disdainful of superlatives and feats of rhetoric. . . . These men spoke a language of honor and loyalty, a language any soldier could understand. Himmler showed that he had absorbed his master’s teachings when he propagandized the idea of such an order. . . . There were quite a few who, disgusted with the plebeian character of the party, searched for associations different in form as well as spirit. And it was by no means the worst elements that came thronging . . . to rally around the new banner.”

The man who speaks here is not concerned with justice, nor compassionate, nor obdurate; he is not the kind of crypto-Nazi we all know so well by now. Not to redress balances in a world of unbalance, or to practice charity in a world of law, were these memoirs written; yet Schwerin von Krosigk is anything but an unregenerate sinner. His innocence is such that it precludes both virtues and vices: in a sense, his record—this unremembering record—is clean. Adam before the Fall, he has never left Paradise; and if his Paradise is the fool’s, the greater the pity.

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¹ Weizsäcker’s and Schmidt’s books were reviewed, respectively, in the January 1952 and April 1952 numbers of COMMENTARY.

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