Editor’s Note: The following is Kerry Bolton’s introduction to the upcoming new edition of Francis Parker Yockey’s The Enemy of Europe, to be published by Centennial Edition.
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The Second World War ended with Europe under the domination of two extra-European powers: the United States and Soviet Russia. Most of the post-war far Right regarded America as the lesser of two evils and sided with Washington in the newly-emerging Cold War. In The Enemy of Europe, Francis Parker Yockey rejected this consensus and argued instead that Europe’s identity and destiny were endangered far more by American than Russian domination.
Yockey wrote The Enemy of Europe in 1948 as the third volume of Imperium. In 1952, he revised the material on Russia in light of the “Prague treason trials” that he analyzed in his essay of that year, “What is Behind the Hanging of the Eleven Jews in Prague?”[1] Yockey argued that the Prague trials, which included eleven Jews among fourteen defendants, marked a definitive turn of the Soviet bloc against Jewish interests.[2]
Yockey argued that the United States was more dominated by Jews and more implacably hostile to Europe than the USSR. Thus, it was pointless for Europeans to hope that the Culture-distorting regime in Washington would be overthrown. A “nationalist revolution” could not even be envisaged in the US, according to Yockey. From at least 1951, Yockey had sought to convince the “European elite” that America alone was the enemy of Europe. He stated, “Let us not attack phantoms, let us attack the real enemy of Europe: America.”[3]
Yockey’s views were much misunderstood by the Right, who could only see Russia as the existential enemy. Even Sir Oswald Mosley failed to grasp the new world situation and regarded the US as the lesser evil that was required to protect Western Europe from the ultimate horror of a Soviet invasion. Conversely, Otto Strasser adopted a view similar to Yockey’s, but it is unknown whether he had been influenced by Yockey’s thinking. “If only Europe is left alone,” wrote Strasser, “Europe can and will take care of any threat from Russia — or from anywhere else.”[4]
Yockey published The Enemy of Europe in Germany in 1953. He simultaneously published a German translation, Der Feind Europas, in two hundred copies, which he planned to distribute to the leaders of the Socialist Reich Party (SRP) and other leading German nationalists.
The Socialist Reich Party (SRP) was founded in 1949. The party immediately acquired two members in the Bundestag when they defected from other parties. Major General Otto Remer, the party’s deputy leader, was the most energetic campaigner. He was soon banned from Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia, where the SRP was most popular. The US occupation authorities noted the SRP opposition to the Western alliance and their advocacy of a united Germany within a united Europe. In 1950, SRP members were banned from state service, the US State Department fearing that the party could democratically assume power. SRP meetings were violently broken up by police, and a pro-SRP newspaper, Reichszeitung, was banned.
Remer stepped up his denunciation of the US occupation and the Western alliance while refraining from condemning the USSR and the Soviet-occupied German Democratic Republic (DDR). The US State Department noted this, commenting, “The party is suspected of willingness to effect a large compromise with Russia in order to unify Germany.”[5]
When the US decided on a policy of integrating Germany into the Western defense system, Remer launched a campaign with the slogan Ohne mich! (“Count me out!”), which drew a ready response from war veterans resentful of their post-war predicament in the Western zone. It attracted popular support across all sections of German society, much to the consternation of the US government and the American news media, the latter of which ran sensationalist articles on a “Nazi-Communist alliance.”[6]
Remer went further than a “neutralist” position and stated that in the event of war, Germans should not cover an American retreat if the Russians drove them back. He stated that he would “show the Russians the way to the Rhine,” and that SRP members would “post themselves as traffic policemen, spreading their arms so that the Russians can find their way through Germany as quickly as possible.”[7] On October 23, 1952, the SRP was banned after winning sixteen seats in the state parliament of Lower Saxony and eight seats in Bremen.
In the US, where H. Keith Thompson, with Yockey’s assistance,[8] was campaigning for Remer and the SRP’s legal rights, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was interested in rumors of Frederick Weiss’ links to Soviet agents and Rightists in Germany. Weiss stated to the FBI that Yockey had left the US for Germany in January 1953. He stated that he believed Yockey had gone to Germany to have The Enemy of Europe translated into German.[9] The German secret service, K-16, in turn seized and destroyed all copies of The Enemy of Europe. No copies of the English original survived, and only a few copies of the German edition were distributed. The present English edition is a reverse translation from the German edition.
Yockey saw the Asian horde from the eastern steppes as having occupied half of Germany with American contrivance, believing that Russia’s world-mission was destructive. Indeed, his outlook on Russia in Imperium reflected an atavistic anti-Slavism, with the revival of the old calls for Western Lebensraum in the East. On the other hand, the United States, as the carrier of Culture-pathology, rotted the Culture-organism spiritually, morally, and culturally. Russian hegemony was only surface deep and could be overthrown or subverted. American hegemony, however, was a cancer and had to be cut out. Yockey’s outlook on Russia was pragmatic and in keeping with the German elite’s tradition of Realpolitik from the preceding centuries. As a Spenglerian, Yockey was well acquainted with Oswald Spengler’s assessment of Russia when Spengler foresaw even in 1922 — the year of the Treaty of Rapallo — that Russia would soon overthrow the Marxian importation and return to its own soul, at which time German business, military, and political interests would be able to reach an alliance with Russia against Versailles and the Entente powers.[10]
American-Jewish Bolshevism versus Russian Bolshevism
Like Spengler, Yockey saw the Russian as a “barbarian,” but not in a derogatory sense. It refers to a “young” race that maintains the vigor of adolescence. “The barbarian is rough and tough… not legalistic or intellectualised. He is the opposite of decadent. He is ruthless and does not shrink back from destroying what others may prize highly,” Yockey wrote in Der Feind. Bolshevism, imported from the West largely by Jews, had been modified during its time in the Russian steppes, Yockey states. The Americans, on the other hand, had become culturally primitive in their detachment from Europe and “over-civilized” because of their preoccupation with “peace, comfort, and security.” The seeming paradox of being both culturally primitive and over-civilized shows the influence of German historicism on Yockey’s thinking, in the tradition of Spengler and others, which is little understood in the world of Anglophone academia, which sees history as akin to a tape-worm slithering along a path called “progress.” In German historicism, there is a dichotomy between Kultur and Zivilization, reflecting the inner (spiritual and moral) and outer (materialistic and technical) qualities of a Volk, respectively.
American and Russian Bolshevik ideologies nevertheless possessed a common obsession with technics and production. Spengler had written a great deal on the similar spirit of Communism and capitalism in The Decline of The West, Prussian Socialism, The Hour of Decision, and elsewhere. Heidegger alluded to it in 1935: “Russia and America, seen metaphysically, are both the same: the same wretched frenzy of unchained technology and the boundless organization of the average man.”[11] Aldous Huxley understood it as well, with his Brave New World depicting a synthesis of capitalism, Freudianism, and Communism.
However, for Europe, Yockey wrote in Der Feind, “the following distinction is important: American-Jewish Bolshevism is the instinctive destruction of the West through primitive, anti-cultural ideas… through the imposition of Culture-distortion and Culture-retardation. Russian Bolshevism seeks to attain the destruction of the West in the spirit of pan-Slavic religiosity, i.e., the Russification of all humanity.” What we are seeing are two antithetical messianic outlooks, and these moreover their historical conclusions have yet to be realized.
Yockey states in Der Feind: “Thus American-Jewish Bolshevism poses a real spiritual threat to Europe. In its every aspect, American-Jewish Bolshevism strikes a weak spot in the European organism.” The “Michel-stratum” — that is, the inner enemy — comprises much of the leadership stratum of post-war Europe, representing “the inner-America,” that is motivated by “the purely animal American ideal” of comfort, security, and conformity.” If this serenity is upset, bayonets can reimpose it. What Yockey wrote of in 1952 is now boasted of as the lethality of “American culture” by the spokesmen of the “American millennium… Russian Bolshevism is therefore less dangerous to Europe than American-Jewish Bolshevism.” Unless one is familiar with the metaphysical outlook of this current, it makes no sense: “American Bolshevism”? We are considering a spirit, not a party political manifesto. Bolshevism is defined as a means of destruction; a pathogen of culture and soul.
There is in Europe an “inner-America” that appeals to the decadent elements of the West, but there is no “inner-Russia.” The Communist parties had already stopped serving any Russian interests, and it was “political stupidity” if Moscow kept using Marxism as a means of exporting its influence, as it had lost its value. When Russia turned against Jewry after the Second World War, the fate of every Communist party in the West was sealed, Yockey writes. Stalin had already eliminated the Comintern in 1943 as a nest of traitors. The leadership of the German Communist Party likewise died collectively in Russia, not in Hitler’s Germany. The Critical Theorists found refuge from Hitler not in the USSR, but in the US, courtesy of the State Department and the Rockefeller Foundation, from which they proceeded to take over academia in the US. These Jewish-Marxist destroyers were universally rejected by the USSR, and the Soviet press condemned Herbert Marcuse at a time when he was being heralded as a great intellectual in the US, where he inspired New Left riots from Chicago to Prague (while the conservative Right cried “Soviet plot”).
The Prague treason trials were a definitive statement to the world concerning the Soviets and Jewry, but the process had been underway since the Trotskyites started being purged in 1928. Additionally, the significance of the USSR’s rejection of America’s post-war plans for the United Nations Organization and the so-called “internationalization” of atomic energy under the “Baruch Plan” was also not lost on Yockey, but was — and continues to be — on those mostly Anglophone Rightists who could not transcend their ideological quagmire. As a result, Yockey was attacked with much vitriol by Anglo-Nazis such as Arnold Leese.
The US, for its part, recruited Mensheviks, Trotskyites, and liberals to assault European culture with jazz and Abstract Expressionism in what is now referred to as the “Cultural Cold War.” It was claimed that these epitomized the benefits of American democracy, while the USSR condemned them as “rootless cosmopolitanism,” being without folk roots, and as “internationalist.” That is how Yockey could refer to “American Bolshevism” and consider it as more dangerous to the Western culture-organism than “Russian Bolshevism.” Today, exponents of the “American millennium” glory in America’s world “revolutionary mission” to destroy all vestiges of tradition through the irresistible lure of decadence.
The fundamentally Bolshevist character of the US in spirit was affirmed when Sedova Trotsky, after resigning from the Fourth International, announced her allegiance to the US during the Cold War, and stated that her late husband would have done the same. Other Mensheviks such as the esteemed Dr. Sidney Hook flocked to the American side against the USSR and redefined American conservativism, to the extent that when Dr. Christopher Lasch repudiated the Left in the early 1970s and sought out a genuine “conservatism” in the US, he could not find it. Yockey had already seen through the farce and racket of “American conservativism” in the 1950s.
Yockey’s view of the impact of a Russian-occupied Europe, by which he meant the non-Slavic landswas that it would be analogous to the “barbarian” invasions of other civilizations, such as the Northern invasion of Egypt, the Kassite conquest of Babylonia, the Aryan conquest of the Indus, and the Germanic invasions of Rome. Conquest did not destroy these cultures; rather, the barbarians were absorbed into the Culture-organism or they were expelled. Further, Yockey stressed that sometimes the barbarian becomes the custodian of the values of the host culture, such as when the defeated hosts have become too etiolated to maintain their own traditions. It also happened over millennia in China through “dynastic cycles.”[12] The barbarian brings uncontaminated vigor and the prospect of cultural renewal rather than destruction, distortion, retardation, or parasitism.
The other possibility for a Late Civilization threatened by a barbarian invasion is that the outer enemy impels it to unite around its traditional ethos, and in this way it is also reinvigorated. Yockey held out the possibility of either option vis-à-vis Russia, while the US represented not so much a military occupation as a flooding of the Culture-organism with disease. Yockey referred to the “ethical syphilis of Hollywood,” for example.
Europe-Russia symbiosis
Yockey contended that Russia only occupied one-tenth of (non-Slavic) Europe after the Second World War, and that this was only made possible due to the contrivance of the “Washington regime,” motivated by a pathological hatred of Europe. This was still a time when the New York-Washington regime had dreams of harnessing the USSR to a one-world state via the UN and the Baruch Plan.
In the event of a Russian occupation of Europe, Yockey saw two possibilities: first, endless uprisings until Russia grew tired and left; or second, a relatively lenient regime that could be infiltrated, causing the “Europeanization” of Russia within a few decades to a more meaningful extent than the Petrinism of prior centuries. This would “eventually result in the rise of a new Symbiosis: Europe-Russia. Its final form would be that of a European Imperium.”
Here we read the most unequivocal statement of what Yockey envisioned for Russia, which differed from his Slavophobic sentiments: the prospect of a “Europe-Russia Symbiosis” that would be the foundation for unity from the Atlantic to the Urals, through the force of historical necessity rather than through Western Lebensraum.
Yockey further stated that in the event of a Russian occupation of Europe, the first victims would be the local Communist parties, as the types attracted to these could not be trusted. Stalin had already recognized this through his abolition of the Comintern and the elimination of those foreign Communists who were naïve enough to seek refuge in the USSR. They were Marxist theorists, whereas Russia’s true religion was not Marxism, but Russia. It has since been pointed out that Russian Bolshevism owed more to Alexander Herzen than to Marx, and one might also point to Marx’s own anti-Russian attitude, which influenced the development of Russian Bolshevism away from what was seen as a rival German-Jewish current in socialism. Bolshevism was Russian messianism under another guise.[13]
In Yockey’s view, rather than destroying Europe, Russian occupation would eliminate the “inner enemy,” “the Michel-stratum,” and “thus liberate all creative forces within Europe from the tyranny of the Past.” Petty-statism would go with the traitors, who were being kept in power by American bayonets: “The barbarian, whether he wished it or not, would complete the spiritual unification of Europe by removing the only inner-European obstacle to that unity. From the Spiritual to the Political is but one step.” Should Russia try to incorporate Europe into its empire, it could only do so by according Europe “significant concessions,” including autonomy as a unit. Should brute force be used, that would provoke a united reaction analogous to the barbarian uprisings against Roman occupation.
Yockey’s accordance with German geopolitical thinking
Yockey was writing for a political elite, to inspire them to keep struggling at a time when Europe was in ruins and many of the political, military, and cultural leaders who survived were dispossessed and persecuted. The immediate message was: Do not fight for the enemy of Europe, the American-Jewish Symbiosis, even if this means collaboration with a Russian occupation. This was a message that many elements of the German Right heeded, and the reason for the interest the American authorities had in Yockey. It was also an opinion widely held in Germany.
Yockey purveyed Der Feind to Germans at precisely the time that there was highly paranoid thinking in American governing circles in regard to the prospect for rapprochement between Germany and Russia. Yockey’s outlook in Der Feind was in keeping with Germany’s tradition of Realpolitik and its alliances with Russia — namely, between Peter the Great and Frederick the Great, when Russia had switched to the Prussian side in 1762; of Bismarck’s Rückversicherungspolitik (“Reinsurance Policy”);[14] the Treaty of Rapallo; and the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which had been greeted with genuine enthusiasm in German military and diplomatic circles.
After Napoleon’s defeat in 1812, General Johann David Ludwig von Yorck, commander of the Prussian Corps of the Napoleonic Army, negotiated a separate peace with the Russians in defiance of the Prussian King and the Treaty of Paris, which had committed Prussia to supporting France against Russia. This was the Neutrality Pact of Tauroggen, which made a lasting impression on Germany’s officer corps. It so happened that one of Yockey’s numerous aliases while traveling the world, avoiding military intelligence and the FBI, was (Franz) Ludwig Yorck.
Even in mainstream circles in Germany at that time there was a desire for a united Europe, independent of the US, that would have a collaborative attitude towards the USSR, from which it was hoped there would be major concessions. One of the primary German newspapers stated:
In order to jump out from her present isolation, she [the USSR] can, exactly as the Rapallo Treaty did thirty years ago, place Germany as a defensive buffer between the East and the West. From the politico-economic point of view, she could repeat the old game for world power by concluding long-term agreements with German industry and by renewing her trade with Germany. Thus, Russia might re-open the door to the world market.[15]
If we Germans would come to feel that the other powers, openly or tacitly, try to hinder German equality and re-unification, the (Western) treaties would quickly turn out to have been built on quicksand… The fact that we are tied up with the NATO pact does not make it impossible for Europe, as soon as it is strong enough and the international situation has changed, to one day become independent from every side.[16]
For its part, the newspaper Christ und Welt, aligned with Chancellor Adenauer’s Christian Democratic Union, stated:
Continental Europe would break from the Atlantic Pact if the Soviets agree to withdraw their forces behind the Pripet Marshes and release not only the Eastern Zone of Germany but the whole of Eastern Europe into the European Union. A Western Europe, standing on its own feet and possessing its own powerful forces, can begin with developing its colonial empire in Africa. Such a Europe, whatever its ties might be with America, could afford to carry out such an independent policy because it will have the strength of a third power.[17]
Father E. J. Reichenberger[18] wrote in 1952 that the reunification of Germany “cannot be achieved without the consent of the Russians.” Moscow’s primary aim was
not the spread of Communism in Germany, but to make Germany an Ally. We cannot see the reason why Germany should not line up politically with Russia, especially after the Western democracies found nothing objectionable against Russia as an Ally. For Germany, the political question is therefore: From which side has Germanyto expect the better bargain in the long run?
He reminded German-American readers that the US and the Allies had “robbed German foreign assets, stole German patents, and eliminated German competition on the world market.” His worldview was moreover similar to what Yockey and other European liberationists were stating: that Communism and Western democracy are variations of the same materialism which would be transcended by the German Weltanschauung.[19]
The demand for neutrality in any conflict with Russia was the norm among Germans of all classes at a time when the US was trying to reinstall the martial spirit in Germans, should they be needed as cannon fodder. Just after the outbreak of war in Korea, the New York Herald Tribune reported from Germany:
There is a widespread impression abroad that the German people would jump at a chance to get into uniform again and try a few more Blitzkriege. Every political and labor leader with whom this correspondent spoke in the principal cities of West Germany said that those who hold that impression are sadly mistaken.[20]
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung likewise published an article urging a policy close to what Yockey and his comrades were advocating:
We do not need to call the attention of the experienced men in the Kremlin to the fact that a strong and unified Western Europe can defend its independence against every side. Why should the Kremlin not be interested in such independence?… If the world, which is today split into two parts, could be reshuffled into a number of independent power groups, it may prevent this horrible conflagration for mankind. A flexible and prudent Russian policy could, for instance, grant German reunification in exchange for the independence of Europe, which could be defended against every side. In such a case, the reunification of Germany would become a guarantee for peace. The treaties which are presently signed will not prove to be an obstacle toward reunification if the Russians remain interested in such a solution.[21]
It is notable that in the calls for German unification throughout various quarters, the vision is one of Germany within a united Europe. The US was calling — indeed demanding — European unification, but on the basis of opposition to the USSR. But even liberal Germans saw the prospects for a united Germany within a united Europe that could assure peace with a neutral, and even collaborative, approach to the USSR.
Russia’s policy of conciliation
Why did the Germans have such a hopeful attitude towards the possibilities of a Russo-German accord? On March 10, 1952, Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had delivered the so-called “Soviet note” from Stalin to German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and the Western occupying powers. James Cartnal describes its background:
On March 10, 1952, the Soviet deputy foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, sent to the delegates of the three Western occupying powers of Germany diplomatic correspondence which included a draft peace treaty for Germany. The provisions outlined in this Soviet diplomatic note were sweeping. According to the Soviet note, Germany would be reunified, thus ending its aberrant division, and given an opportunity to establish itself as an independent, democratic, peace-loving state. In addition, all democratic parties and organizations in Germany would have free activity, including the right to assembly, free speech, and publication. The Soviet note also provided civil and political rights for all German citizens; this included all former members of the German Wehrmacht, and all former Nazis, excluding those serving court sentences for crimes against humanity. The Soviet draft peace treaty called for the withdrawal of all armed forces of the occupying powers, mandated the liquidation of all foreign bases of operation within Germany, and prevented reunited Germany from joining any kind of coalition or military alliance directed against any power which took part with its armed forces in the Second World War against Germany. Germany’s territories were defined, according to the Soviet diplomatic note, by the borders provided by the provisions of the Potsdam conference. Furthermore, the Soviet draft peace treaty allowed Germany to develop its own national armed forces (land, sea, and air) necessary to provide for the defense of the country and permitted the formation of a German arms industry, limited by the provisions provided in the final German peace treaty.
The Soviets hoped to convene a four power conference designed to make peace with a united German state. The four power conference envisioned by the Kremlin never took place. Instead, the Russian initiative led to an exchange of diplomatic correspondence between the Soviet Union and the three Western occupying powers that continued throughout the summer of 1952. This “battle of the notes,” as British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden termed it, revealed that the Soviets and the West held widely differing views regarding the necessity of free, all-German elections preceding any discussion relating to the reunification of Germany.
The “battle of the notes” left unanswered important issues of the Soviet note of March 1952; the Soviets proposed no specific limits for German remilitarization and offered no definition as to what constituted a democratic, peace-loving, and independent state. At the end of the summer of 1952, Soviet attempts to resolve the German question would not achieve success; Germany would remain divided and each section would become more firmly anchored in its respective bloc over the next three and a half decades.[22]
Debates ensued as to whether Stalin could be trusted. Without a “Soviet threat,” there was no foundation on which to justify the subjugation of Europe by the Washington-New York regime other than to again change policy and return to the legend of the “Prussian threat.” Stalin was willing to meet most of Adenauer’s demands, yet Adenauer placed subordination to the US before a free and united Germany and Europe. Regarding the reaction to the “Soviet note,” Gromyko recalled that
the reaction of the Western powers was unenthusiastic. In Bonn, however, common sense deserted Adenauer and his circle altogether, the Soviet proposals became an object of propaganda, and the reunification of Germany was lost in the scrimmage.
No other government in the post-war period made such a gross political miscalculation. Without doubt Adenauer lost a historic opportunity. The Federal Republic, moreover, became a part of the anti-Soviet Western military bloc — at a time when the USSR and Germany were still technically in a state of war. This was ended only on 25 January 1955 by an order of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.
Adenauer continued his policy of lost opportunities. In 1957 he rejected an East German proposal which put forward the idea of a German confederation.[23]
Could Stalin have really been trusted with anything of the kind? Probably yes.
The USSR, after the initial bloodletting and brutalization of the occupation, halted its barbaric ravishing of Europe, while the Morgenthau Plan was being enacted de facto, given that the US was still hoping that there was a chance of incorporating the USSR into a new post-war order as a junior partner.
A significant example of the difference in spirit between the USSR and the US towards Europe is the former’s intervention in favor of the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, who was always popular in the Soviet Union. Hamsun supported Hitler and collaborationist Prime Minister Vidkun Quisling during the war. One writer has recounted:
At the end of 1945, the Soviet Minister for foreign affairs, Molotov, informed his Norwegian colleague Trygve Lie, that it ‘would be regrettable to see Norway condemning this great writer to the gallows.’ Molotov had taken this step with the agreement of Stalin. It was after this intervention that the Norwegian government abandoned plans to try Hamsun and contented itself with levying a large fine that almost bankrupted him. The question remains open: would Norway have condemned the old man Hamsun to capital punishment? The Norwegian collaborators were all condemned to heavy punishments. But the Soviet Union could exert a strong and dreaded influence in Scandinavia in the immediate post-war period.[24]
Particularly symbolic was the fact that the USSR offered Rudolf Hess his release if he would endorse the DDR. In 1952, the year of the “Soviet note,” Lothar Bolz, the DDR’s Deputy Minister-President , Karl Hamann, as well as Minister of Trade and Supplies Otto Grotewohl, met with Hess to discuss whether he would be willing to play a leading role in a reunified and neutral Germany. German historian Werner Maser states that Otto Grotewohl told him about the meeting on the understanding that it would not be mentioned until after Grotewohl’s death.[25] Hess was taken from Spandau to meet the DDR leaders when the USSR assumed its monthly jurisdiction over the Spandau prison fortress. Maser records that Stalin wished “to temper justice with mercy in the German matter and to grant Hess a prominent position within the framework of reconstruction and the efforts towards the reunification of Germany.”[26] If Hess would state that the DDR’s policy was the same as the “socialism” to which he had always adhered, he would be immediately released from Spandau and would play a part in the leadership of a reunited Germany. Hess rejected the offer, although he “welcomed… the efforts of the DDR and the Soviet Union to preserve German patriotism, and had listened attentively to what his interlocutors had to say on the programs of the political parties referred to…” He nevertheless regarded the acceptance of such an offer as a betrayal of Hitler’s memory. Grotewohl found it hard to understand why Hess rejected the offer to help rebuild Germany as a free man.[27]
The reference to Hess listening “attentively to what his interlocutors had to say on the programs of the political parties referred to” concerns the creation of a nationalist party that would have been part of the DDR’s government.
At a meeting between Stalin and the leaders of the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED) in the Soviet zone that was held on January 31, 1947, Stalin asked how many Germans across all the occupation zones were “fascist elements,” and about “what influence did they retain in the Western zones.” Grotewohl replied that it was a difficult question to answer, but that he could give Stalin lists of former National Socialist party members “in leadership positions in the Western zones.” Stalin had not asked this question with the view of purging Germany of “fascists,” but with the possibility of reforming former National Socialist Party members into a party that would promote nationalism and socialism within the context of a Soviet Germany. He was also interested in the possible voting patterns of “fascist elements” should there be a plebiscite on German unification. Grotewohl’s view was that they were “all reactionaries.” Stalin’s view was different. Would it be possible to organize the “fascists” in the Soviet zone under a different name? He pointed out to the SED leaders that their policy of “exterminating fascists” was no different from that of the Americans, stating: “Maybe I should add this course [of organizing a nationalist party] so as not to push all of the former Nazis into the enemy camp?”[28]
Grotewohl dogmatically objected that if the “fascists” were reorganized into their own party, such a move would be “incomprehensible to the working masses” in the Western zones. Stalin replied that showing the “Nazis” in the Western zones that their comrades under the Soviets were not being purged would provide a positive impression that “not all of them will be destroyed,” stating that he wanted to recruit “patriotic elements” for a “fascist party,” especially among “secondary figures of the former Nazi Party.” There would be nothing reactionary about establishing such a party, as many “Nazis” had “come from out of the people.”[29]
Ulbricht thought Stalin’s idea plausible by focusing on the socialist aspect of National Socialism, especially among idealistic youth. Stalin explained that he did not aim to integrate “fascist’ elements into the SED, but to encourage them to form their own party in alliance with the SED. Former “Nazis” were voting for the conservative parties in the Soviet-occupied zone, fearful that the establishment of a Soviet state would mean their liquidation. Stalin wanted to demonstrate that their situation under a Soviet Germany would be different. He also did not share the view of German Communist leaders that the “fascist elements” were all bourgeois. He stated that “there should be relief for those who had not sold out” to the Western occupation, and that “we must not forget that the elements of Nazism are alive not only in the bourgeois layers, but also among the working class and the petty bourgeoisie.” The new party, which would be part of an SED-led “national front” coalition, would be called the “National Democrats.”[30] To other objections, Stalin responded that the “fascist elements” were no longer concerned with acquiring “living space” in the East.
In February 1948, the Soviet Military Administration (Sowjetische Militäradministration in Deutschland, or SMAD) announced the end of denazification. In March 1948, the prosecution of Germans for alleged “war crimes” was formally ended. The same month, the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NDPD) was formed. The DDR was announced in 1949 and established through elections in the Soviet-occupied zone after the failure of the USSR and the Western occupiers to agree on terms for elections on the reunification of Germany.
With the NDPD’s creation, Stalin stated that the party would “erase the line between non-Nazis and former Nazis.” On March 22, a newspaper was launched to pave the way, the National-Zeitung, which announced that “while in other areas there remains the atmosphere of the denazification of Germany, in the eastern part the people’s eyes light up again. Simple party comrades no longer have to be timid and fearfully look around as if they were pariahs.” The party was founded three days later under the chairmanship of Lothar Bolz, who held the post until 1972. Bolz had been a member of the pre-war German Communist Party and was one of the few German Communist leaders to have survived Stalin’s hazardous hospitality for Communist refugees.[31] During much of that time Bolz served in the government of the DDR, including as Foreign Minister (1968-1978). The Vice Chairman of the NDPD was Heinrich Hohmann, who had joined the National Socialist party in 1933, and was also a co-founder of the League of German Officers, which formed the NDPD’s initial nucleus. The NDPD’s program was stridently nationalistic, as much so as the Socialist Reich Party, which was being outlawed in the Federal Republic:
America violated the Treaty of Potsdam and plunged us Germans with malice into the biggest national distress of our history… But the American war may and shall not take place! Germany must live! That’s why we National Democrats demand: the Americans to America. Germany for the Germans! The Federal Republic of Germany is a child of national treason… That’s why we National Democrats demand: German unity over the head of the government of national treason in Bonn, as a basis for peace, independence, and prosperity for our entire German fatherland.[32]
The party reached a peak of 230,000 members in 1953, and during the 1980s still had a significant membership of 110,000. In 1948 the party sent 52 members to the DDR’s parliament, the Volkskammer. The party drew on ex-NSDAP members and army veterans to support its campaigns. One such appeal from the party in 1952 included the names of 119 officers from the Wehrmacht, SS, the Hitler Youth, the League of German Maidens (BDM), and the German Labor Front.[33]
The NDPD’s origins go back still further to the National Committee for a Free Germany that was formed by German officers captured by the Soviets during the Second World War. Returning to the Soviet Zone after the war, these officers formed the NDPD’s leadership and held high positions in the DDR for many years. For example, NDPD co-founder Colonel Wilhelm Adam was a veteran of both world wars. His nationalist politics went back to membership in the Young German Order in 1920 and the NSDAP in 1923, and he had participated in Hitler’s Munich Putsch. He was also a member of the conservative German People’s Party (DVP) during 1926-1929. In 1933, he joined the Stahlhelm and the Sturmabteilung. Captured in 1943 at Stalingrad, Adam joined the National Committee for a Free Germany, and when he returned to the Soviet Zone in 1948, he became an adviser to Saxony’s state government. In 1952, he became a Colonel in the Kasernierte Volkspolizei (KVP), which later became the DDR People’s Army. He was honored in 1968 with the Banner of Labor and with the title of Major General in 1977. There were many others of a similar background who were honored by the DDR.
Conclusion
This is the milieu in which Yockey travelled, and why the American authorities were so interested in his activities. Along with his German mentor in the US, Frederick Weiss, who published “estimates” of the world situation in the Spenglerian mode, the line he and Yockey adopted was in accord with a wide circle of those seeking German and European liberation and unity: the recognition of the USA as der Feind, and reaching an understanding with Russia to secure concessions. This outlook had been purveyed as far back as 1948 by Der Weg in Argentina, representing what H. Keith Thompson said to this writer was the “higher authority,” sensationally called Die Spinne and Odessa by the world news media. But beyond that, the idea had taken root among Germans high and low. Yockey’s Der Feind thus gave historical-philosophical depth to popular feelings.
Otto Remer never repudiated his contention that Germany and Europe had to turn to Russia. After continual legal harassment and a long exile in Spain, Remer returned to West Germany. In 1983 he established the German Freedom Movement (Die deutschen Freiheitsbewegung, or DDF), dedicated to Russo-German accord. Its manifesto, The Bismarck-German Manifesto, is subheaded “German-Russian Alliance Rapallo 1983,” which continued the neutralist line from Remer’s SRP days three decades earlier. The manifesto, echoing Yockey’s ideas on the “Culture-distorting regime” of Washington and New York, states that “[t]he American way of life is for us synonymous with the destruction of European culture,” and that Germany “would not be used as the tip of the NATO spear… We will not participate in a NATO war against Russia.”
As with Yockey’s other writings, Der Feind has not dated in its method of analysis. The world situation has worsened with the collapse of the Soviet Empire. The spartan lifestyle that had been imposed in the Soviet Empire means that today, the peoples of that region are the only white remnant that has been uncontaminated by “the ethical syphilis of Hollywood,” and hence the frenetic manner by which “the enemy of Europe” attempts to contaminate these regions — some of whose states, such as Hungary, consciously resist it. “The Enemy of Europe” is now the world-enemy (and Yockey envisaged that in his final essay, “The World in Flames”[34]) whose primary weapon, as American strategist Ralph Peters gloated, remains what Yockey called “Culture-distortion” backed by military force. While certain terms have changed and the political front-men are different, the great political issues remain: the existential conflict between the US and Russia; the role of Israel; the place of Europe and the West in that conflict; and the relationship between the West and the US, which is heralded as the “leader of the West” while being nothing but the leader of Culture-distortion, parasitism, and retardation.
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Notes
[1] Originally published anonymously in the National Renaissance Bulletin. The latter was the newsletter of the National Renaissance Party led by James H. Madole, who was at the time closely associated with Yockey’s US-based mentor, the German immigrant Frederick Weiss, a veteran of the First World War.
[2] During the trial, the defendants were implicated as part of a Jewish cabal that included US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter; Moshe Pijade, described as “the Titoist Jewish ideologue” in Yugoslavia; and David BenGurion and Moshe Sharett in Israel. They were said to be part of a plot against Czechoslovakia planned in Washington in 1947 by President Harry S. Truman, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and former Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. Communist Party secretary Rudolf Slansky was described in the indictment as “by his very nature a Zionist.” Paul Lendvai, Anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe (London: Macdonald & Co., 1972), 243-245.
[3] Yockey, “The Death of England,” Part 2, Frontfighter, No. 13, June 1951, 3.
[4] Otto Strasser, “The Role of Europe,” in Mosley: Policy & Debate (Euphorion Books, 1954).
[5] Martin Lee, The Beast Reawakens (London: Little, Brown & Company, 1997), 58.
[6] Edmond Taylor, “Germany: Where Fascism & Communism Meet,” The Reporter, New York, April 13, 1954.
[7] US State Department report, June 22, 1951; cited by Lee, ibid., 65.
[8] Thompson registered as an American agent for the SRP in 1952. When the party was banned, Thompson, with Yockey’s assistance , formed the Committee for International Justice and the Committee for the Freedom of Major General Remer, to assist Remer and others being prosecuted in Germany, and also helped the families of war veterans.
[9] Edward A. Brandt, FBI file no. 105-23413-26, October 22, 1954.
[10] Oswald Spengler, “The Two Faces of Russia & Germany’s Eastern Problems” (1922) in Spengler: Prussian Socialism & Other Essays (London: Black House Publishing 2018).
[11] Quoted in Javier Cardoza-Kon, Heidegger’s Politics of Enframing: Technology and Responsibility (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 22.
[12] Bolton, The Decline & Fall of Civilisations (London: Black House Publishing, 2017), 260-269. Amoury de Riencourt, The Soul of China (Honeyglen Publishing, 1989).
[13] See: Mikhail Agursky, The Third Rome: National Bolshevism in the USSR (London: Westview Press, 1987).
[14] It stated that each would remain neutral if one were attacked by another power.
[15] “What Can Russia Win if She Plays Her Trump Card?,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 15, 1952.
[16] Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 5, 1952.
[17] Christ und Welt, December 27, 1951.
[18] Father E. J. Reichenberger was the leader of the Catholics in Czechoslovakia prior the Second World War, and an opponent of National Socialism and Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland. After the war, he became the leader of Sudeten German emigres, the primary spokesman of German deportees from Eastern Europe, and a fierce critic of Allied policies against Germany, including the concept of “collective guilt.” Despite his anti-Nazi credentials, his being honored by the Vatican as a member of the Pontifical Secret Chamber, and receiving numerous awards such as the Badge of Honour from Austria, he was smeared for his defense of Germany after the war.
[19] E. J. Reichenberger, Nord-America, April 17, 1952.
[20] Joseph Newman, New York Herald Tribune, August 27, 1950.
[21] Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 30, 1952.
[22] James Cartnal, “Dispelling a Myth: The Soviet Note of March 1952.”
[23] Andrei Gromyko, Memories (London: Hutchison, 1989), 196.
[24] Anonymous, “Knut Hamsun: Saved by Stalin?,” Counter-Currents, July 6, 2010.
[25] The event is described by Wolf Rüdiger Hess in My Father Rudolf Hess (London: W. H. Allen, 1986). Note 6 in the chapter “Special Treatment” states that Maser left a typewritten note on his meeting with Grotewohl when Maser was working at the Institute for Research into Imperialism, East Berlin Humboldt University, which was directed by the pre-war “National Bolshevik” Ernst Niekisch, who was present at the meeting between Maser and Grotewohl.
[26] Wolf Rüdiger Hess, ibid., 251.
[27] Ibid., 252-253.
[28] Historical and Documentary Department, Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The USSR and the German Question: 1941-1949 (Documents from the Archives of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation, M. “International Relations,” 2003), 244-253.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Stalin liquidated the entirety of the Central Committee of the German Communist Party that had fled to the USSR seeking refuge from Hitler.
[32] NDPD Program, June 1951.
[33] NDPD Appeal for German Unity, Fourth Party Congress, 1952.
[34] Reprinted in Kerry Bolton & John Morgan (eds.), The World in Flames: The Shorter Writings of Francis Parker Yockey (Centennial Edition Publishing, 2020).
