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Month: May 2022

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David Irving Racial right Richard Weikart

On the Boromirs

A commenter drew my attention to the most recent interview with Richard Weikart. I just watched the interview and at minute 35:40 Weikart said something that contradicts the impression I have of American white nationalism: ‘They are overwhelmingly anti-Christian’.

Most American white nationalists are either Christian or sympathetic to Christianity. Rare in American white nationalism is the person like Alex Linder who sees Christianity as evil, and there is no longer a truly central figure in that movement, as the late William Pierce, who has a negative image of Christianity.

It is a pity that there are no surveys to know the exact percentage of Christians or Christian sympathisers in white nationalism. But the impression I get after reading a dozen years of white nationalist sites is that, except for Linder, there is no major figure who truly abhors Christianity (Kevin Alfred Strom’s webzine is not as vehement as Linder in its criticism of Christianity).

Although brief, a good example of Christian racialists was seen recently in what was said to me in the comments section of The Occidental Observer, to which I have already referred a couple of times. The moderator didn’t let my last comment pass. In addition to answering his third question to one Occidentan, I suggested he read Pierce’s story of the race. It doesn’t matter that that answer of mine didn’t appear in TOO, as long as I was at least able to defend myself against the slanders that racialist Christians were casting on me.

As a good Christian, Weikart (who is almost exactly my age by the way), is anti-racist. The interview I heard today was very enlightening because it shows how the Christian religion clouds the otherwise clear understanding of such scholars. If I could answer Weikart I would tell him that regarding the leading white nationalist sites, the webzines of Jared Taylor, Kevin MacDonald and Greg Johnson, he won’t find overtly anti-Christian positions. Even a racialist site as much visited as Taylor’s according to the latest statistics I saw, Hunter Wallace’s, is openly Christian.

Given that Christianity is inherently anti-racist, the question that comes to mind is how much longer American white nationalists will continue to ignore the issue. People like Weikart, a good scholar of Hitler, are fascinating in that they show that, from the Christian POV, he is more consistent by being anti-racist than racist. Wallace may be looking to square the circle, but the other pundits mentioned in the previous paragraph simply ignore the CQ, the Christian Question. The West’s Darkest Hour will continue to be ignored by racialist Christians and even racialist non-Christians because an honest discussion about the religion of our parents is a taboo subject in the dissident right.

Changing the subject, today I received a mail from David Irving. The second volume of his biography of Himmler will be published next year. I am very much looking forward to reading it… It is infinitely more important to know Hitler and Himmler well than the Boromirs who covet the One Ring to the point of self-destruction. I hope that Weikart’s book, which will reach me this month, will help me in this endeavour.

Update of May 29: The comments are now closed on that TOO thread, and the moderator finally let my response to Occidentan pass. But it took some days for my comment to be approved.

Categories
Hitler's Religion (book) Richard Weikart

Weikart’s book

Last year a commenter called to my attention a passage from Hitler’s Religion by Richard Weikart:

Worse yet, he [Hitler] actually threatened to obliterate Christianity later in the second volume. After calling Christianity fanatically intolerant for destroying other religions, Hitler explained that Nazism would have to be just as intolerant to supplant Christianity:

A philosophy filled with infernal intolerance will only be broken by a new idea, driven forward by the same spirit, championed by the same mighty will, and at the same time pure and absolutely genuine in itself. The individual may establish with pain today that with the appearance of Christianity the first spiritual terror entered in to the far freer ancient world, but he will not be able to contest the fact that since then the world has been afflicted and dominated by this coercion, and that coercion is broken only by coercion, and terror only by terror. Only then can a new state of affairs be constructively created. (Mein Kampf, Chapter V)

Hitler’s anti-Christian sentiment shines through clearly here, as he called Christianity a ‘spiritual terror’ that has ‘afflicted’ the world. Earlier in the passage, he also argued Christian intolerance was a manifestation of a Jewish mentality, once again connecting Christianity with the people he most hated. Even more ominously, he called his fellow Nazis to embrace an intolerant worldview so they could throw off the shackles of Christianity. He literally promised to visit terror on Christianity. Even though several times later in life, especially before 1934, Hitler would try to portray himself as a pious Christian, he had already blown his cover.

Hitler’s tirade against Christianity in Mein Kampf, including the threat to demolish it, diverged remarkably from his normal public persona. He was usually more circumspect, refraining from open criticism of Christianity. However, many of his colleagues testified that Hitler’s personal opinion about Christianity did not match his hypocritical public stance; Hitler, for his part, thought religion itself was hypocritical.

Gilad Atzmon, a Jew whose relatively recent books have been reviewed by the racial right, said that the intolerant fanatics win.

He is right: and that was why Julian the Apostate failed: he was a very tolerant emperor towards Christians, Jews and pagans. The priest of the 14 words, on the other hand, is as intolerant as the Christians who destroyed the classical world.

As I said last year to the commenter who quoted the passage above, ‘Although Richard Weikart is ideologically an enemy, he is infinitely more honest about Hitler’s anti-Christianity than Richard Carrier. I guess I’ll have to get a copy of Weikart’s book…’

I just ordered it from Amazon.

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Lord of the Rings Quotable quotes

Forbidden ring

by Adit

Christianity used to have a lot of political clout, and they think they [the American white nationalists] can somehow harness that clout. It reminds me of the Lord of the Rings where it is suggested they could wield the ring against the enemy. ‘No one here can wield the ring: it only answers to its master’. Ethno-nationalists can’t wield Christianity because it is Universalist. If you try it will only corrupt and consume you. I wish they could get that through their heads.

Categories
Henry Picker Martin Bormann Tischgespräche

The Führer’s monologues (ix)

This edition

The texts published here are all part of Martin Bormann’s collection of Führergespräche (Führer talks). They are printed in unabridged form, retaining their chronological order. As a rule, Heim summarised the content in a note immediately after each conversation. Only in a few cases did he add statements to later notes, resulting in slight deviations in the chronology (e.g., table talk #91). Only the regularly recurring opening formulas were deleted: ‘The boss expressed himself at tea in approximately the following lines of thought’ or: ‘The boss expressed himself in the sense of, among other things, the following lines of thought’.

Spelling has been normalised; corrections of obvious spelling mistakes, especially in personal names, are not marked. The omissions in the text appear in the original. It is unclear whether Heim left the gaps because he did not remember the information correctly, or whether there are other reasons for the omissions.

The records of Heim’s conversations that Henry Picker transcribed and included in his edition of the Tischgespräche are all marked with an asterisk after the document number. Given the errors and oversights that Picker made in transcribing or printing his documents, these texts should in future be cited according to the edition available here. The editor did not consider it necessary to point out all the deviations and oversights, as this would have impaired the readability of the source and bloated the annotation apparatus.

Document 6 of 9 August 1941, which Picker included in his edition, is not in the collection of interview transcripts. Nor was it written by Heim, as Picker claims. Whether these Grundsätze der Offiziers-Ehrauffassung were formulated based on the keywords and guiding ideas given by Hitler himself must remain an open question. They do not belong in this collection and are not included in the first edition of Tischgespräche edited by Gerhard Ritter.

Four of Hitler’s monologues (#41, 61, 62 and 213) were recorded by Martin Bormann himself. In character, they are more file notes and were partly dictated as such. However, since the head of the Party Chancellery himself classified them as ‘Führer Talks’ and placed them chronologically in his collection, they have been included in this edition, as have documents #203 to 212, which were prepared by one of Bormann’s assistants after Heim’s departure.

All other documents were dictated and signed by Heim.

Our commentary on Hitler’s monologues has been kept deliberately brief. The editor has refrained from interpreting expressions of opinion on questions of history, politics, worldview or art, as this would have more than doubled the annotation apparatus.

Categories
Protestantism Racial right

TOO, OD and CC on Xtianity

Regarding what I was saying a couple of days ago about an exchange of mine in The Occidental Observer, it is curious that when I criticise Christianity, some racialists resort to smearing me rather than answering my arguments.

On another racialist forum, Occidental Dissent, a commenter who some time ago said I was right about Christianity (though he added I was pretty severe) commented yesterday: ‘­­I am not a Believer but I wouldn’t mind living in a strict Christian theocracy if that form of government knew how to deal with the jews, coloreds, communists and queers’. That hypothetical is a pipe dream: history shows us that Christian theocracies have never implemented Aryan preservation in the West. Then the editor of that webzine intervened in that comments section:

Feel free to show me the data where White identity is correlated with secularism or paganism. If there is a sizeable audience for this, I have never seen any evidence of it. There is no such thing as a White pagan ethnostate or a White secular ethnostate because there is no support for it. BTW, White identity has always been associated with Protestantism here. There was never a point when that was not the case. The very idea of racial purity comes from Protestant settlers who didn’t want to mix with the natives.

First of all, there was indeed a pagan state exclusively for Nordid whites. The Nazi government was quasi-pagan (my next line of research will be precisely Hitler’s anti-Christian POV and Himmler’s paganism). Secondly, if the Americans had been as purists as the Nazi leadership, they wouldn’t have allowed that anti-racist, anti-slavery propaganda flourish in the US, something that OD’s editor knows very well. (In 1688 some Quakers signed an antislavery petition in Pennsylvania: a little mustard seed that, over the centuries, grew into the huge tree of today.) Third, even without having developed an explicitly racial ideology, Sparta and Republican Rome were de facto ethnostates for the Nordid types. Finally, white identity has always been associated with Protestantism in the US because Catholics have been mixing since Constantine, but Protestant churches now admit even blacks to the white altar!

The Occidental Dissent article is a response to yesterday’s article in Counter-Currents ‘What Christian Nationalism Looks Like in Current-Year America’ by Robert Hampton. What Hampton says about Christian nationalists is worth a look. In addition to considering the stance of these Christian nationalists as ‘Israelite LARPing’, Hampton said:

In reality, Christian nationalism is an evangelical, multiracial, philo-Semitic circus… Some figures associated with the movement will highlight the dangers of illegal immigration or Critical Race Theory, but it’s not their central focus. They’re in a spiritual struggle to make America Christian again. This is not a euphemism for making America white again. The central identity they want for Americans is the Christian faith, not the racial identity of the men who built this country. What unites us is religion, not race. This identity can include all people, regardless of color. All that matters is that one professes a fundamentalist version of Christianity.

However, there is one phrase I disagree with Hampton:

Christianity is still the faith of the vast majority of white people, and it would be stupid to wage war against it.

This seems to me like telling the loved one of a heavy smoker that it is stupid to wage a war against smoking; that he has to find another way to prevent cancer instead of lecturing him about giving up his bad habits. So bad are Xtian habits that Hampton writes: ‘A lot of what fundamentalist Christians believe doesn’t align with our struggle, for example their worship of the state of Israel and their strange fixation on adopting non-white kids’.

As old visitors know, this thing, raising coloured kids, is the real sin against the holy ghost. What I don’t quite understand is why anti-Christian racialists like Kevin Alfred Strom keep saying things like: ‘The primary enemy we face as a people, beyond any question, is the Jewish power structure’. Is it because they are stuck in William Pierce’s school and haven’t yet crossed the Rubicon?

The inversion of values brought about by Christianity from the 4th century c.e. onwards is the root of our fall. We wouldn’t have these problems (now even influential Jews) in a modern society that had emerged not from the Christian Middle Ages, but from a parallel quantum world in which the descendants of Spartans or Republican Romans had discovered science, modern technology and eventually National Socialism.

Categories
Catholic Church Chess Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Merovingian dynasty

Christianity’s Criminal History, 147

– For the context of these translations click here –

 
Ignorant, criminal on a grand scale and a good Catholic

It is true that we cannot judge that epoch, an epoch of ignorant, superstitious, fallacious and bloody people, with our modern—oh so ethical—modern standards: we must not act anachronistically against history! But can we and should we still measure that era, a thoroughly Christian era, by Christian criteria, by certain biblical criteria, such as the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount or the commandments of the Decalogue? And precisely because we look at it in this way, shouldn’t we recognise it by its fruits?

The Catholic author Daniel-Rops, too, feels a prevailing sense of ‘horror’ at ‘the continually repeated spectacle of crimes that are frankly unspeakable’. ‘Everywhere there is blatant violence, ready to explode at any moment. Nothing stops it: not family ties, not the precepts of the most elementary decency and not even the Christian faith’. Not even that? Didn’t the faith allow all that to go on? Didn’t it provide what we might call the supreme consecration, the endorsement of the status quo? Didn’t the faith pray for the rulers, the generals, the cutthroats? Didn’t it pray before wars, during wars, and after wars? Didn’t it participate in wars and plundering, or make continual donations to the Church from the spoils of war or plunder? Didn’t it fatten the powerful on the misery of the masses?

The Church unreservedly sided with the scoundrels and butchers. And while the violent acts of the kings are more and more unbridled, the chain of blood vengeance never ends, the murders of relatives multiply precisely among the great ones: the Catholic son kills the Catholic father, the brother kills the brother who is as Catholic as him, the Catholic uncle kills the Catholic nephew, and while the robberies of the Merovingian kings occur, the annihilated enemies who were Germanic princes, and the snatched booty of gold, jewels and weapons could hardly be hidden any longer under the underground vault of the palace of Braine; the episcopate saw in those crowned Catholic criminals the legitimate representatives of state authority, the representatives of God on earth.

Since the Church sided with the Merovingian potentates from the beginning as their ally, it was able to develop as it hadn’t done for a long time. Its influence grew, and both the secular and monastic clergy became incredibly wealthy. And to a large extent the almost permanent catastrophes, and the terror that rarely ceased, greatly favoured the appearance of donations to the Church. ‘As people expected protection and help from them, and were continually threatened by looting, arson, murder and violence, they turned to the Church and its saints’ (Bleiber).

The Church thought nothing of opposing this. Its wheat increased. It was only between 475 and the beginning of the 6th century that the number of Gallic monasteries increased tenfold; but in the first half of the following century more abbeys were built there than ever before or since. And looking back to the middle of the 7th century, a modern researcher even speaks of ‘an episcopal and monastic state’ (Sprandel). The episcopate, which was a ‘great power’ not only economically but also politically (Dopsch), played almost as decisive a role in the kingdom as the absolute sovereign monarchy did in the Church. The two were closely linked and intertwined, for the ruler also had to show himself devotissimus of the Church and, at least in the Carolingian period, was regarded ‘as a clergyman’ (Brunner).
 

______ 卐 ______

 

Editor’s note: Chess, as it is known today, emerged in Medieval Europe as an evolution of a Persian game which in turn evolved from an Indian game (the earliest reference to the latter is found in the Mahabharata: an epic-religious text of the Aryans from the 3rd century BC).

As can be seen in the picture, two bishops flank the king and queen in the original formation of the game, already in its European incarnation.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
The whole period, cruel in the extreme and extraordinarily fraudulent, was at the same time very ‘pious’. Attendance at Sunday mass was widespread ‘at the ringing of the bells they crowded into the churches’ (Pfister). Eucharistic communion became almost as widespread. Church singing was zealously cultivated. Almost everyone attended the processions. Catholic festivals were celebrated as great popular festivals. People prayed before they began to eat, and not a glass of water was drunk without first making the sign of the cross. And it was not only God who was prayed to, but all imaginable saints were invoked continually. Numerous churches were built with marble columns and marble-covered walls, stained glass windows and many paintings; the rich even had their own domestic chapels. The kings dealt with saints, as Theuderic I did in 525-526 with St Gallus in Cologne (who set fire to a temple there, ‘because none of the foolish pagans were to be seen’ after which the arsonist took refuge in the royal palace). Childebert I visited a saint. Queens, like Radegund for example, washed the feet of bishops. Crass superstition was commonplace. Relics from Rome and Jerusalem were hoarded, and pilgrimages were made, looking for health, to the supposed tombs of the apostles.

In a word, there was a deep conviction ‘of the reality and power of the living God’ (Heinsius). There abounded ‘a vigorous and fresh faith in God and his providence; one dealt with the divine, not as an abstraction or an idea, but as a very real force. This conviction prevailed among all, shared by ecclesiastics and laymen without distinction’. The first half of the 7th century was openly regarded as ‘a flourishing period of the Frankish Church’ (Hauck), which was seen to be ‘deeply rooted in the people of the Franks’ (Schieffer), and the bishops and episcopal synods ‘applied to the work’ (Boudriot).

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Monologe im Führerhauptquartier

Monologe im Führerhauptquartier, 17

Führerhauptquartier

14 auf 20. 8. 1941, nachts
H/Fu.

Wenn man dem deutschen Volke etwas Gutes wünschen will, dann wäre es, alle fünfzehn bis zwanzig Jahre einen Krieg zu haben. Eine Wehrmacht, deren einziges Ziel es ist, den Frieden zu erhalten, führt zu einem Soldat-Spielen – man betrachte nur Schweden oder die Schweiz -, oder sie wird eine Gefahr im Sinne revolutionärer Einstellung.

Wenn man mir vorhält, hundert- oder zweihunderttausend Menschen sind durch deine Kriegführung ums Leben gekommen, so kann ich dem entgegenhalten: Durch meine bisherige Tätigkeit hat die deutsche Nation schon über zweieinhalb Millionen Menschen mehr bekommen; verlange ich zehn Prozent davon als Opfer, habe ich neunzig Prozent gegeben; ich hoffe, daß wir in zehn Jahren mindestens zehn bis fünfzehn Millionen Deutsche mehr auf der Welt sind; ob Mann oder Frau, ist gleichgültig; ich schaffe die Lebensvoraussetzungen.

Das Leben ist grausam. Werden, Sein und Vergehen, es ist immer ein Töten; alles, was geboren wird, muß wieder sterben, ob durch Krankheit, Unfall oder Krieg, es bleibt das gleiche. Nur können die, denen der Krieg Wunden geschlagen hat, einen Trost finden darin, daß ihr Opfer um der Zukunft des Volkes willen gebracht ist.

Viele große Männer waren die sechsten, siebenten Kinder! Wenn ich einen Menschen töte, der da ist, weiß ich, was verlorengeht. Was durch die Geburten-Beschränkung getötet wird, weiß ich nicht. Der Mensch, den ich vor der Geburt töte, ist das ewige Rätsel. Die Kriege führen zum Geburten-Reichtum, sie sind die Lehre, nicht in den Fehler zu verfallen, mit einem Kind sich zufrieden zu geben.

Es darf nicht von England abhängen, ob die Völker des Kontinents zu leben haben. Die Ukraine und dann das Wolga-Becken werden einmal die Kornkammern Europas sein. Wir werden ein Vielfaches dessen ernten, was jetzt auf diesem Boden wächst. Dabei hatte Rußland mit seinen 170 Millionen Menschen im Zarenreich nie Hunger gelitten. Und auch mit Eisen versorgen wir Europa. Wenn Schweden einmal nicht will, gut, dann nehmen wir es aus dem Osten. Die belgische Industrie kann ihre Erzeugnisse – billige Gebrauchsgegenstände – gegen Getreide aus diesen Gebieten tauschen; aus Thüringen und dem Erzgebirge zum Beispiel können wir unsere armen Arbeiterfamilien herausnehmen, um ihnen große Räume zu geben.

In den besetzten ukrainischen Gebieten strömt das Volk in die Kirchen. Ich hätte nichts dagegen, wenn, wie jetzt, alte russische Bauern den Gottesdienst halten; dagegen müssen wir überlegen, ob wir die Priester wieder kommen lassen; im Priestertum hat, wie ich einer Denkschrift entnehme, die russische Opposition die Basis zu einer panslawistischen Bewegung gegeben geglaubt.[1]

___________

[1] Auf welche Denkschrift sich Hitler hier bezieht, ist nicht zu ermitteln. Die deutsche Militärverwaltung verhielt sich in Rußland den Kirchen gegenüber zunächst wohlwollend. Auch der Reichsminister für die besetzten Ostgebiete wollte aus taktischen Gründen Rücksicht nehmen. In seinen Instruktionen vom 8. 5.1941 hieß es: »Kirchenpolitisch kann durch Toleranzedikte eine Freiheit des rein religiösen Glaubens gewährleistet werden ohne jede staatliche Verpflichtung«. (IMG Bd. XXVI, 1030-PS, S. 597). Bormann und Heydrich widersetzten sich diesen Plänen. Hitler erklärte in einer Besprechung am 16. 7. 1941, »die Tätigkeit von Kirchen käme keinesfalls in Frage« (IMG Bd. XXXVIII, 221-L, S. 93).

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PDF backup

WDH – pdf 431

Click: here

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Game of Thrones Kevin MacDonald

Throne revisited

Three years ago, on 19 May 2019, the finale of Game of Thrones, ‘The Iron Throne’, premiered. Because of how popular this HBO series became among normies, I’ve tried to use Tyrion’s message in the finale about the stories we tell ourselves.

What strikes me most is that the story being told by American white nationalists is, like the story told to the plebeian German under the Nazi regime, the story that the Jews wrote for our consumption, the New Testament: a story where the heroes and protagonists are Jewish.

It reminds me that I recently watched the special edition DVD of the 1959 film that won so many Oscars: Ben-Hur. Commenting on the opening of the film with images from Nazareth, Charlton Heston was talking to another film pundit, who remarked that the people in red clothing were the ‘bad guys’ of the movie, i.e. the Romans. It was implied that the good guys were the Jews!

It is alarming that American racialists keep coming up with these stories in which the Aryans are the bad guys and the Jews the good guys, as if telling us such stories had nothing to do with the empowerment of the Jews in the West!

Never mind that Game of Thrones is rubbish (I criticised each of the 73 episodes in On Beth’s Cute Tits). What matters is my use of the finale to say something that reminds me of Goethe’s words: The hardest thing to see is what is in front of you.

And indeed, today’s racialists, unlike Hitler, are unable to see what is right under their noses: that to tell us a Jewish story for two thousand years is pure poison for racial preservation, and that the first thing we must do is to tell us the Aryan story.

Categories
Third Reich Tischgespräche

The Führer’s monologues (viii)

Given the uncompromisingness in the implementation of his ideological goals, Hitler encountered permanent resistance from all opposing forces in Europe. The struggle against communists, socialists and pacifists, waged from the beginning, became steadily tougher during the war. More complicated was the confrontation with the liberal and conservative forces of the bourgeoisie, who expressed more and more reservations as the war progressed and circumvented or delayed numerous orders. They could rarely be forced or ousted because they could not be replaced as experts in their fields of activity. Disgruntled by this, Hitler repeatedly criticised civil servants, teachers, professors and intellectuals who did not take into account the requirements of the time.

The intensification of the Weltanschauungskampf (worldview struggle) is particularly evident in the accusations against Christianity and the Christian churches. Since Christians fundamentally respect every human being as a creature of God, many of them rebelled against the practices of racial, ethnic and occupation policies when they realised that these were not temporary exaggerations or excesses, but a planned approach. Not only the small group of those who actively resisted became a danger for the National Socialist leadership, but also the constantly growing number of Christians who, out of conscientious objection, refused the regime in whole or in part.

The accusations against the churches and Christianity were so sharp not least because Hitler was by no means areligious and believed in a Creator, but in contrast to the Christians was convinced that he knew and could do His will. From his point of view, the churches were acting completely unnaturally by observing the commandment of love, which included the incurably ill, people of different skin colour and race, and unbelievers. For him, therefore, Christianity was ‘pre-Bolshevism’ (table talk #40). In Hitler’s view, Paul had transformed and used the teachings of Christ to undermine and bring down the Roman Empire from within. Through the demand for equality of all people, the uprising of the lowly and the inferior had been initiated: the ground was prepared for overthrow and destruction. ‘Pure Christianity’, Hitler concluded, ‘leads to the destruction of humanity, it is naked Bolshevism in metaphysical dressing’ (table talk #66).

The verbal radicalism of the attacks against Christianity was also determined by the fact that Hitler knew exactly that he could not wage a determined church struggle during the war. He was well aware of the power that the churches still represented. A great conflict, therefore, was bound to lead to deep anxiety among the population and evoke great dangers during the war. Therefore, it seemed advisable merely to register the opposition of the bishops, clergy and church laity and to postpone the reckoning until a later time (# 130).

Hitler’s sharp front against Christianity was by no means approved of by all, even within the NSDAP and its branches. Ministers who had gained their office through the party broke ranks. Even in the SS there were still leaders and members who had not left the church and who were bound to come into serious conflict in the event of a dispute. It was no different in the corps of political leaders up to the highest ranks. This example—others could be brought up—shows that the NSDAP was not a monolithic bloc, and that there was no basic consensus even on decisive questions. In the Weltanschauungskampf Hitler could not rely unconditionally on his party; rather, he was dependent on other forces and power-bearers to carry out his plans and orders.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s Note: This wonderfully shows that it was not time to wage war! It was time to consolidate the Nazi state and educate the masses about Christianity: something that white nationalists across the Atlantic haven’t yet managed to do. (That’s why I consider them semi-normies, as I said yesterday.)
 

______ 卐 ______

 
But other groups of Germans were certainly not unreservedly prepared to make the goals of the National Socialist state their own. In Hitler’s national community (Volksgemeinschaft), the social contradictions and the old ideals were by no means overcome, as has been shown, but only pushed back; they broke out again when rapid rearmament and military expansion overstretched popular forces. Even before the war began, the enthusiasm of the national bourgeoisie that it had shown in the face of the reintroduction of universal conscription and the foreign policy successes of the Third Reich was waning. Regimentation, growing restrictions on economic, intellectual and cultural activity and the constant threat of external conflict led to a revival of faded principles. The working class, which to a large extent had recognised the efforts to revive the economy as well as the improvement of social benefits, increasingly rebelled against the restrictions on the choice of employment and the enforcement of their wage demands. The more powerless they felt in the face of decisions to extend working hours and worsen employment conditions, the more they became aware of the disintegration of trade union organisations.

In Hitler’s thinking, ideological goals had absolute priority, so he ignored the concerns and wishes of the population as soon as his rule was securely established. His regime became uncompromising, the subordinate leaders and generals were to be ‘ice-cold dog snouts’ and ‘unpleasant people’ (#98) when it came to accomplishing the tasks set. Convinced of the rightness of what he was striving for, he allowed no leniency or forbearance. He understood people with their faults and weaknesses, but forbade himself and others to take them into account. His regime was not in the service of the people, but the people were made to serve his worldview.

In recent years, various attempts have been made to revise the image of Hitler. According to them, the leader of the Third Reich appears as the man of peace, the patron of the arts and the builder of a new, more beautiful Europe.[1] Evidence for these theses can certainly be found in the monologues published here. And there is no doubt that Hitler knew how to win over and inspire people for himself and his goals right up to the end. But anyone who reads these conversation notes carefully, cannot ignore the fact that he wanted to build the happiness of future generations on the misfortune of those whom he declared enemies or who did not act and believe as he did. On the way to his future, not only enemies but also enthusiastic followers and faithful followers were left behind as victims.

_________

[1] I will mention here only one book, representative of many others, by the architect Hermann Giesler: Ein anderer Hitler. Erlebnisse–Gespräche–Reflexionen. Leoni am Starnberger See, 1978.