As I noted above, the particular restrictions he had been able to impose on himself up to that point, in a spirit of asceticism, became unnecessary. And if he continued to observe some of them; if among other things, he obstinately abstained from alcoholic beverages and tobacco, it was out of natural disposition rather than out of a concern for discipline. And if he also refused to eat any meat, it was because deep down he—the artist and friend of animals—had a deepening disgust with the ugliness and horror of the slaughterhouse and the butchery. That said, he lived from then on as a harmoniously balanced man, mingling, without embarrassment or astonishment, with the most refined society if he deemed it necessary for his work or if, after hours of contact with his rough SA and the people, he found there a source of relaxation.
He enjoyed the company of women and, like Siegfried, the prophet Mohammed, Krishna, the incarnate God, and other illustrious fighters ‘against Time’, he knew love, sporadically at least, it seems, when he had the time! Above all, he lived for all the satisfactions that art in all its forms could give him; art that he placed so high that he didn’t admit that a man who was insensitive to it should ever take over the leadership of a National Socialist state. People who, like the French writer Malraux—who certainly cannot be suspected of any bias toward him!—met him at social gatherings and embassy dinners, admit that he was ‘witty’, even ‘humorous’ and that he ‘knew how to dance’ in the sense of Nietzsche’s definition of the term.
But at the same time, he remained first and foremost a man of his fight. And he seems to have been increasingly aware of the need for those who led this struggle under him and in collaboration with him to have a share in the secret knowledge of more than human origin. Hence his dream of a hierarchical German Empire—and beyond it, a hierarchical world according to the spirit of Tradition: a ‘caste system on a planetary scale’ to use the expression of a Hindu, an intelligent admirer of the German Third Reich.
Hence, too, his efforts to create the Order: ‘a veritable lay priesthood’ as Rauschning wrote, which was to be the guardian of Tradition at the top of the social pyramid of the Great Reich and, after the inevitable collapse, at the top of that of the faithful survivors.
This Order, as I have said, was the Schutzstaffel or ‘Echelons of protection’, commonly referred to by its initials—SS—which the Führer wanted to be both ‘militant’ and ‘triumphant’ in the sense in which these terms are applied to the Church in Catholic theology; that is to say, warlike and concerned above all with the defence and expansion of the Aryan elite’s strongholds in this world, and having attained at least a certain degree of being, separating it from the rest of mankind as the ‘chosen ones’ are separated from the ‘world’, the initiated from the uninitiated, in all traditional societies.
Without the existence of such an Order, the reversal of false values on all planes, including the material plane, was inconceivable.