(The War College files, for example, show that not one single officer was assigned full-time to study of these problems during 1925-1935. For the entire period 1919-1929, there are listed only two War College research papers on the subject. Yet the American Army was far from negligent. It was an excellent army, though crippled by outright poverty of personnel and materials. The Army was simply American, and like the rest of America for a while took the world for granted.) The National Socialist German Workers' Party, as Hitler called his movement, was a conglomerate built up around a few determined fanatics. The Nazis do not appear to have believed their own doctrines to anything like the degree to which the Communists believed theirs. From the first, the Nazis regarded propaganda very consciously as a new, fierce instrument which led to the accomplishment of _modern_ power. The Communists had proclaimed that democracy was a fake; the Nazis agreed. The Communists had shown that a minority with a sacred mission of its own invention could get mass support for a government that claimed to be _for_ the people, even though it was obviously not by the people nor _of_ them. The Nazis took this as a model. The Communists had shown that a modern man-god could be set up and worshipped in a twentieth-century state, and called leader (_Vozhd_ in Russian). The Nazis elevated the Soviet practice all the way into a principle, the principle of the leader (_Führer_ in German). The Communists had shown that an organization calling itself a _party_, actually a quasi-religious hierarchy with strong internal discipline, definite membership, and active organizational components, could control fifty times its own membership. The Nazis organized the same general sort of party, copying the Italian Fascists in part, but copying more from the direct example of the German Communists right in front of them. The Communists had shown that such a movement needed to have youth branches, women's organizations, labor sections, clubs of its own, and so on, calling this "mass organization." The Nazis copied this too. The machinery of Naziism was in many ways a copy of Communism, applied to allegedly different ends, (the Nazis had an Aryan myth; the Communists had their pseudo-economics). But the important thing about them both was the destruction of the _end_ by the _means_; the problem of getting and keeping power despite the people was so obsessive that propaganda became all-important. Theoretically, the _end_ (to the Nazi, German world rule; to the Communist, the fulfillment of history in universal communism) was the most important thing. But since any means at any time which led to that end was good, and since the Party bosses were the sole ones who could determine whether a particular action led to the very remote end or not, the outcome in both Russia and Germany became the conscienceless seeking of power for its own sake.