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Category: Albert Speer

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Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 4

(excerpts)

by Richard Weikart

Many Christian leaders in the 1930s and 1940s, both within and outside Germany, recognized Hitler was no friend to their religion. In 1936, Karl Spiecker, a German Catholic living in exile in France, detailed the Nazi fight against Christianity in his book Hitler gegen Christus (Hitler against Christ). The Swedish Lutheran bishop Nathan Soderblom, a leading figure in the early twentieth-century ecumenical movement, was not so ecumenical that he included Hitler in the ranks of Christianity. After meeting with Hitler sometime in the mid-1930s, he stated, “As far as Christianity is concerned, this man is chemically pure from it.”

Many Germans, however, had quite a different image of their Führer. Aside from those who saw him as a Messiah worthy of veneration and maybe even worship, many regarded him as a faithful Christian. Rumors circulated widely in Nazi Germany that Hitler carried a New Testament in his vest pocket, or that he read daily a Protestant devotional booklet. Though these rumors were false, at the time many Germans believed them…

Most historians today agree that Hitler was not a Christian in any meaningful sense. Neil Gregor, for instance, warns that Hitler’s “superficial deployment of elements of Christian discourse” should not mislead people to think that Hitler shared the views of “established religion.” Michael Burleigh argues that Nazism was anticlerical and despised Christianity. He recognizes that Hitler was not an atheist, but “Hitler’s God was not the Christian God, as conventionally understood.” In his withering but sober analysis of the complicity of the Christian churches in Nazi Germany, Robert Ericksen depicts Hitler as duplicitous when he presented himself publicly as a Christian…

However, when we turn to Hitler’s view of Jesus, we find a remarkable consistency from his earliest speeches to his latest Table Talks. He expressed admiration for Jesus publicly and privately, without once directly criticizing Him. But his vision of Jesus was radically different from the teachings of the Catholic Church he grew up in. For him, Jesus was not a Jew, but a fellow Aryan. He only rarely stated this explicitly, though he frequently implied it by portraying Jesus as an anti-Semite. However, in April 1921, he told a crowd in Rosenheim that he could not imagine Christ as anything other than blond-haired and blue-eyed, making clear that he considered Jesus an Aryan. In an interview with a journalist in November 1922, he actually claimed Jesus was Germanic…

While Hitler appreciated Jesus because he considered him a valiant anti-materialistic anti-Semite, I have never found any evidence that Hitler believed in the deity of Jesus. Richard Steigmann-Gall bases his mistaken claim that Hitler believed in Jesus as God on a mistranslation of Hitler’s April 22, 1922 speech (some of which we discussed earlier in this chapter). According to the Norman Baynes’ edition of The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, during that speech Hitler stated about Jesus, “It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to the fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as sufferer but as fighter.” The term that is translated “God’s truth!” is wahrhaftiger Gott, a common German interjection that is rendered in some German-English dictionaries as “good God!” or “good heavens!” In the original German edition, wahrhaftiger Gott is set off in commas, indicating that it is indeed an interjection… Steigmann-Gall uses this mistranslation to argue that Hitler believed in the deity of Jesus. Apparently, he did not understand the colloquial expression used…

While Hitler’s positive attitude toward Jesus—at least the Jesus of his imagination—did not seem to change over his career, his position vis-a-vis Christianity is much more complex. Many scholars doubt that as an adult he was ever personally committed to any form of Christianity. They interpret his pro-Christian utterances as nothing more than the cynical ploy of a crafty politician. Almost all historians, including Steigmann-Gall, admit that Hitler was anti-Christian in the last several years of his life…

Even when he publicly announced his Christian faith in 1922 or at other times, Hitler never professed commitment to Catholicism. Further, despite his public stance upholding Christianity before 1924, he provided a clue in one of his earliest speeches that he was already antagonistic toward Christianity. In August 1920, Hitler viciously attacked the Jews in his speech, “Why Are We Anti-Semites?” One accusation he leveled was that the Jews had used Christianity to destroy the Roman Empire. He then claimed Christianity was spread primarily by Jews. Since Hitler was a radical anti-Semite, his characterization of Christianity as a Jewish plot was about as harsh an indictment as he could bring against Christianity. Hitler was also a great admirer of the ancient Greeks and Romans, whom he considered fellow Aryans. Blaming Christianity for ruining the Roman Empire thus expressed considerable anti-Christian animus. Hitler often discussed both themes—Christianity as Jewish, and Christianity as the cause of Rome’s downfall—later in life.

Hitler’s anti-Christian outlook remained largely submerged before 1924, because—as Hitler himself explained in Mein Kampf—he did not want to offend possible supporters…

But by the time Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in 1924-25, he was walking a tightrope. His political ally, General Ludendorff, was increasingly hostile to the Catholic Church, as were many on the radical Right in Weimar Germany. Hitler did not want to follow them into political oblivion—and indeed Ludendorff did end up politically isolated, perhaps in part because of his antireligious crusade. But Hitler was also sensitive to the anticlerical thrust within and outside his party. Thus, after warning his followers in the first volume of Mein Kampf against offending people’s religious tastes, he threw caution to the wind in the second volume by sharply criticizing Christianity. In one passage, he complained that both Christian churches in Germany were contributing to the decline of the German people, because they supported a system that allowed those with hereditary diseases to procreate. The problem, he thought, was that the churches focused on the spirit and neglected the physical basis of a healthy life. Hitler immediately followed up this critique by blasting the churches for carrying out mission work among black Africans, who are “healthy, though primitive and inferior, human beings,” whom the missionaries turn into “a rotten brood of bastards.” In this passage, Hitler harshly castigated Christianity for not supporting his eugenics and racial ideology.

Worse yet, he 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.

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… In January 1937, Goebbels was with Hitler during an internecine debate on religion and reported, “The Führer thinks Christianity is ripe for destruction. That may still take a long time, but it is coming.”

In reading through Goebbels’ Diaries, Hitler’s monologues, and Rosenberg’s Diaries, it is rather amazing how often Hitler discussed religion with his entourage, especially during World War II. He was clearly obsessed with the topic. On December 13, 1941, for example, just two days after declaring war on the United States, he told his Gauleiter (district leaders) that he was going to annihilate the Jews, but he was postponing his campaign against the church until after the war, when he would deal with them. According to Rosenberg, both on that day and the following, Hitler’s monologues were primarily about the “problem of Christianity.” In a letter to a friend in July 1941, Hitler’s secretary Christa Schroeder claimed that in Hitler’s evening discussions at the headquarters, “the church plays a large role.” She added that she found Hitler’s religious comments very illuminating, as he exposed the deception and hypocrisy of Christianity. Hitler’s own monologues confirm Schroeder’s impression…

When Hitler told his Gauleiter in December 1941 that the regime would wait until after the war to solve the church problem, he was probably trying to restrain some of the hotheads in his party. But he also promised the day of reckoning would eventually come. He told them, “There is an insoluble contradiction between the Christian and a Germanic-heroic worldview. However, this contradiction cannot be resolved during the war, but after the war we must step up to solve this contradiction. I see a possible solution only in the further consolidation of the National Socialist worldview”…

At a cabinet meeting in 1937, Hitler commented, “I know that my un-Christian Germanic SS units with their general non-denominational belief in God can grasp their duty for their people (Volk) more clearly than those other soldiers who have been made stupid through the catechism.” Hitler’s contempt for Christianity could hardly have been more palpable.

Hitler’s press chief, Otto Dietrich, confirmed Frank’s impression. In private, according to Dietrich, Hitler was uniformly antagonistic to Christianity. Dietrich wrote in his memoirs:

…Primitive Christianity, he declared, was the “first Jewish-Communistic cell”…

Dietrich stated, “Hitler was convinced that Christianity was outmoded and dying. He thought he could speed its death by systematic education of German youth. Christianity would be replaced, he thought, by a new heroic, racial ideal of God.” This confirms the point Goebbels made in his diary—that Hitler hoped ultimately to replace Christianity with a Germanic worldview through indoctrination of children…

[Albert] Speer recalled a conversation in which Hitler was told that if Muslims had won the Battle of Tours, Germans would be Muslim. Hitler responded by lamenting Germany’s fate to have become Christian: “You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?” As this conversation reveals, Hitler saw religion not as an expression of truth, but rather as a means or tool to achieve other ends—namely, the preservation and advancement of the German people or Nordic race. In April 1942, Hitler again compared Christianity unfavorably with Islam and Japanese religion. In the case of Japan, their religion had protected them from the “poison of Christianity,” he opined…

In fact, Hitler contemptuously called Christianity a poison and a bacillus and openly mocked its teachings… After scoffing at doctrines such as the Fall, the Virgin Birth, and redemption through the death of Jesus, Hitler stated, “Christianity is the most insane thing that a human brain in its delusion has ever brought forth, a mockery of everything divine.” He followed this up with a hard right jab to any believing Catholic, claiming that a “Negro with his fetish” is far superior to someone who believes in transubstantiation. Hitler… believed black Africans were subhumans intellectually closer to apes than to Europeans, so to him, this was a spectacular insult to Catholics… Then, according to Hitler, when others did not accept these strange teachings, the church tortured them into submission…

Another theme that surfaced frequently in Hitler’s monologues of 1941-42 was that the sneaky first-century rabbi Paul was responsible for repackaging the Jewish worldview in the guise of Christianity, thereby causing the downfall of the Roman Empire. In December 1941, Hitler stated that although Christ was an Aryan, “Paul used his teachings to mobilize the underworld and organize a proto-Bolshevism. With its emergence the beautiful clarity of the ancient world was lost.” In fact, since Christianity was tainted from the very start, Hitler sometimes referred to it as “Jew-Christianity”… He denigrated the “Jew-Christians” of the fourth century for destroying Roman temples and even called the destruction of the Alexandrian library a “Jewish-Christian deed.” Hitler thus construed the contest between Christianity and the ancient pagan world as part of the racial struggle between Jews and Aryans.

In November 1944, Hitler described in greater detail how Paul had corrupted the teachings of Jesus…

Hitler’s preference for the allegedly Aryan Greco-Roman world over the Christian epoch shines through clearly in Goebbels’s diary entry for April 8, 1941… “The Führer is a person entirely oriented toward antiquity. He hates Christianity, because it has deformed all noble humanity.” Goebbels even noted that Hitler preferred the “wise smiling Zeus to a pain-contorted crucified Christ,” and believed “the ancient people’s view of God is more noble and humane than the Christian view.” Rosenberg recorded the same conversation, adding that Hitler considered classical antiquity more free and cheerful than Christianity with its Inquisition and burning of witches and heretics. He loved the monumental architecture of the Romans, but hated Gothic architecture. The Age of Augustus was, for Hitler, “the highpoint of history.”

From Hitler’s perspective, Christianity had ruined a good thing. In July 1941 he stated, “The greatest blow to strike humanity is Christianity,” which is “a monstrosity of the Jews. Through Christianity the conscious lie has come into the world in questions of religion.” Six months later, he blamed Christianity for bringing about the collapse of Rome. He then contrasted two fourth-century Roman emperors: Constantine, also known as Constantine the Great, and Julian, nicknamed Julian the Apostate by subsequent Christian writers because he fought against Christianity and tried to return Rome to its pre-Christian pagan worship. Hitler thought the monikers should be reversed, since in his view Constantine was a traitor and Julian’s writings were “pure wisdom.” Hitler also expressed his appreciation for Julian the Apostate in October 1941 after reading Der Scheiterhaufen: Worte grosser Ketzer (Burned at the Stake: Words of Great Heretics) by SS officer Kurt Egger. This book contained anti-Christian sayings by prominent anticlerical writers, including Julian, Frederick the Great, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Lagarde, and others. It was a shame, Hitler said, that after so many clear-sighted “heretics,” Germany was not further along in its religious development… A few days later, Hitler recommended that Eggers’s book should be distributed to millions because it showed the good judgment that the ancient world (meaning Julian) and the eighteenth century (i.e., Enlightenment thinkers) had about the church.

This notion that Christianity was a Jewish plot to destroy the Roman world was a theme Hitler touched on throughout his career, from his 1920 speech “Why Are We Anti-Semites?” to the end of his life. It made a brief appearance in his major speech to the Nuremberg Party Rally in 1929, and reappeared in a February 1933 speech to military leaders. In a small private meeting with his highest military leaders and his Foreign Minister in November 1937, Hitler told them that Rome fell because of “the disintegrating effect of Christianity.” From the way that Hitler bashed a generic “Christianity” as a Jewish-Bolshevik scheme, it seems clear that he was targeting all existing forms of Christianity…

During a monologue on December 14, 1941, Hitler divulged a decisive distaste for Protestantism. That day, Hitler learned Hanns Kerrl, a Protestant who was his minister for church affairs, had passed away. Hitler remarked, “With the best intentions Minister Kerrl wanted to produce a synthesis of National Socialism and Christianity. I do not believe that is possible.” Hitler explained that the form of Christianity with which he most sympathized was that which prevailed during the times of papal decay. Regardless of whether the pope was a criminal, if he produced beauty, he is “more sympathetic to me than a Protestant pastor, who returns to the primitive condition of Christianity,” Hitler declared. “Pure Christianity, the so-called primitive Christianity… leads to the destruction of humanity; it is unadulterated Bolshevism in a metaphysical framework.” In other words, Hitler preferred Leo X, the great Renaissance patron of the arts who excommunicated Luther, to the Wittenberg monk who called the church back to primitive, Pauline Christianity. According to Rosenberg’s account of this same conversation, Hitler specifically mentioned the corrupt Renaissance Pope Julius II, Leo X’s predecessor, as being “less dangerous than primitive Christianity”…


(Note of the Editor: Left, The monument of Julius II, with Michelangelo’s statues of Moses, with Rachel and Leah). Many anti-Semites in early twentieth-century Germany despised the Old Testament as the product of the Jewish spirit, and Hitler was no exception. He saw the Old Testament as the antithesis of everything he stood for. In his view, it taught materialism, greed, and deception. Further, it promoted racial purity for the Jews, since it taught them to avoid mingling with other races…

Moreover, Hitler lamented that the Bible had been translated into German, because this made Jewish doctrines readily available to the German people. It would have been better, he stated, if the Bible had remained only in Latin, rather than causing mental disorders and delusions…

Many SS members followed Himmler’s example and encouragement to withdraw from the churches, and Hitler lauded them for their anti-church attitude. Hitler once advised Mussolini to try to wean the Italian people away from the Catholic Church, lest he encounter problems in the future. When Mussolini asked how to do this, Hitler turned to his military adjutant and asked him how many men in Hitler’s entourage attended church. The adjutant replied, “None”…

In the end… he [Hitler] had utter contempt for the Jesus who told His followers to love their enemies and turn the other cheek. He also did not believe that Jesus’s death had any significance other than showing the perfidy of the Jews, nor did he believe in Jesus’s resurrection.

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Albert Speer Catholic Church Hitler's Religion (book) Richard Weikart

Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 3

(excerpts)

by Richard Weikart

In many of his private conversations and monologues, as well as in some of his public speeches, Hitler sounded like a rationalist, using science to undermine religion. Also, he denied a personal afterlife…

Hitler’s freethinking bent seems to go back to his youth and may have come from his father, who was also disgruntled with the church. When reflecting back on his childhood religion classes in a January 1942 monologue, Hitler claimed that he “was the eternal questioner.” He read a lot of freethinking literature, and he challenged his religion teacher with his findings, allegedly driving his teacher to despair. He would continually ask his teacher about doubtful themes in the Bible, but the teacher’s answers were always evasive. One day Hitler’s teacher asked him if he prayed, and he responded, “No, Sir, I do not pray; I do not believe that the dear God has an interest if a pupil prays!” Hitler also reported that he hated the mendacity of his religion instructor, who once told Hitler’s mother in front of him that Hitler’s soul was lost. Hitler responded by telling his teacher that some scholars doubt there is an afterlife. In February 1942, Hitler confessed that he had not believed in Christianity since he was about thirteen to fifteen years old. According to Hitler, “None of my [school] comrades believed in the so-called communion any longer.” Hitler regaled his secretaries with accounts of his youthful exploits, including stories about embarrassing his religion teacher, whom he considered unkempt and filthy. He told his secretaries that he developed an aversion to clergymen from his earliest youth…

This was not the only time Hitler praised Enlightenment philosophers. During a monologue in October 1941, he lamented that current discussions about religion were in a miserable state compared to the writings of the French Enlightenment or to Frederick the Great’s discussions with Voltaire. Nine months later, he told Bormann that of the books that Bormann had given him to look at, he was especially interested in Frederick the Great’s books, Briefe über die Religion (Letters on Religion) and Theologische Streitschriften (Theological Polemics). Hitler commented that it would be valuable if all Germans, especially leaders and military officers, could read these works by Frederick, because then they would see that Hitler was not alone in his “heretical thoughts.” Hitler obviously thought highly of Frederick, not only for his military exploits and tenacity but also for his Enlightened religious views. Hans Frank noticed this tendency, too, testifying that Hitler increasingly identified with Frederick the Great’s Enlightened rationalism, which completely suppressed his childhood faith. The theologian Paul Hinlicky claims that Hitler’s conception of God was shaped by Enlightenment thought, asserting, “Hitler embraced the rationalist, watch-maker God typical of deistic (not ‘theistic’) thought whose stern and ruthless law he discovered anew in Darwinian natural selection. In this way, Hitler renounced the God identified by biblical narrative”…

In 1927, Hitler corresponded with a Catholic priest who had previously supported Nazism but by this time had some misgivings. Hitler contradicted the priest’s claim that Christianity had brought an end to Roman barbarism. Instead, Hitler insisted that Christianity was even more barbaric than the Romans had been, killing hundreds of thousands for their heretical beliefs…

Hitler attacked those in the churches who opposed his regime, indignantly claiming that their resistance was “nothing more than the continuation of the crime of the Inquisition and the burning of witches, by which the Jewish-Roman world exterminated whatever offered resistance to that shameful parasitism.” In a February 1942 monologue, Hitler mocked the Christian story of God sending His Son to die for humanity. Then, after Christianity became established, Hitler complained, Christians used violence to force everyone to believe…

Another way that Hitler paralleled Enlightenment rationalism was by stressing the variety of religions in the world. Hitler saw the presence of numerous religions in the world as a major hurdle to believing in any particular one. The basic idea was that since there were so many different religions, each claiming to be the sole and exclusive truth, most religions were necessarily wrong. Why, then, believe in one particular religion, just because by accident you happened to be raised in the society that embraced it? In a monologue in October 1941, Hitler expressed this point clearly. Where he got his statistics from is uncertain, but he claimed that there were 170 large religions in the world, so at least 169 must be wrong. The implication, however, was that all 170 were probably wrong. Then he claimed that no religion still being practiced was older than 2,500 years, while humans have existed for at least 300,000 years (having evolved from primates). This implied that religions were temporary phenomena of questionable validity. A few months later, he made similar remarks, claiming that human conceptions of Providence are constantly shifting. Only about 10 percent of people in the world believed in Catholicism, he claimed, and the rest of humanity had many different beliefs. This time, he gave the figure of 500,000 years for the existence of the human species, noting that Christianity only existed during an “extremely short epoch of humanity.”

In his 1935 speech to the Nuremberg Party Rally, he argued that religious ideas and institutions are inseparably linked to the continued existence of its practitioners and thus are not eternal truths. Religions, according to Hitler, are only valid to the extent that they contribute to the survival of the people (Volk) practicing them…

Five years earlier, he had given his first Nuremberg Party Rally speech after taking power and at the time presented his racial ideology as scientific. “In nature,” he explained, “there are no inexplicable accidents…. Every development proceeds according to cause and effect.” Therefore, in order to triumph as a Volk, Germans needed to discover the “eternal laws of life” and conform to them. Some of the most important laws of nature, Hitler explained, are that races are unequal and culture depends on the biological quality of the people, not on their environment. These two ideas—racial inequality and biological determinism—were prominent among German biologists and anthropologists, so in this case Hitler’s views were consistent with the science of his day…

After coming to power, Hitler continued to prioritize science over religion. When meeting with Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, Hitler reminded him that the world was changing, and he thought the Catholic Church should change with it. He reminded the cardinal of the Church’s past conflicts with science over its belief in a six-day creation and the geocentric theory of the solar system. Then he told Faulhaber that the Church must abandon its opposition to Nazi racial and eugenics legislation, because such policies “rest on absolute scientific research”…

When he was a boy, his religion teachers would teach the creation story from the Bible, while his science teachers would teach the theory of evolution. As a pupil, he recognized that these teachings were completely contradictory. He admitted that the churches in recent times had saved face somewhat by retreating to the position that biblical stories could be interpreted symbolically. However, he took the side of science and evolutionary theory against religion and the churches’ doctrines.

Another reason that some people might mistake Hitler for an atheist was his aforementioned rejection of a personal afterlife. Based on his interaction with Hitler, Walter Schellenberg, one of the most influential SS officers during World War II, testified the following:

Hitler did not believe in a personal god. He believed only in the bond of blood between succeeding generations and in a vague conception of fate or providence. Nor did he believe in a life after death. In this connection he often quoted a sentence from the Edda, that remarkable collection of ancient Icelandic literature, which to him represented the profoundest Nordic wisdom: “All things will pass away, nothing will remain but death and the glory of deeds.”

In his New Year’s Proclamation in 1943, Hitler publicly insinuated that he did not believe in an individual afterlife, telling his fellow Germans, “The individual must and will pass away, as in all times, but the Volk must live on.” According to Albert Speer, one of Hitler’s closest friends who met with him not long before he committed suicide, Hitler faced his own death without any hope of an afterlife. Hitler told him, “Believe me, Speer, it is easy for me to end my life. A brief moment and I’m free of everything, liberated from this painful existence.” Hitler clearly did not think there was any kind of personal afterlife and certainly had no inkling of any divine judgment after death…

In February 1942, in the midst of a screed accusing Christianity of destroying the noble, ancient world, Hitler blamed the Jews for introducing the “beastly idea” that one’s life continues in a future world. The Jews used this promise of life after death as an excuse, according to Hitler, to exterminate life in the present world. Hitler contradicted this allegedly Jewish view, asserting that persons cease to exist at death…

In Mein Kampf, Hitler claimed that true Aryan religion must uphold “the conviction of survival after death in some form.” This, however, still underscores the fuzziness of his conception of the afterlife, since “in some form” is rather vague and openended. It could mean a personal afterlife, but it could also simply mean continuing to exist in one’s descendants or in matter rearranged. The latter seems closer to the position Hitler stated elsewhere…

He reiterated this point in a January 1928 speech, where he posed the question crucial to all religions, “Why is the individual in the world at all?” He answered that we do not know why we are living, but we do know that we have an instinct not only to live, but also to continue our existence in to the future. This is “the yearning to immortalize oneself in the body of a child.” The highest humans—and Hitler clearly thought the Aryans were the highest—extend this desire to preserving the entire species, not just one’s own children.

The view that Hitler saw the afterlife as an impersonal return to nature or the Volk is reinforced by an entry in Goebbels’ diary during December 1941. The entry is especially intriguing because it was one of the only times that Goebbels noted a point of disagreement between Hitler and himself about religion. Goebbels claimed that in his view—but not in Hitler’s—the average German needs to regard the afterlife as a continuation of the individual. “One cannot make do by saying, he goes again into his Volk (people) or into his native soil (Mutterboden).” In this discussion, Goebbels states that Hitler did not believe in an individual afterlife, and he implies that Hitler took the position that afterlife simply means returning to the blood and soil from which one came.

The view that the afterlife is simply a continuation of life in future generations was reflected in an SS pamphlet on funerals. It quoted Himmler, who stated that death held no terror, because it found meaning in the continuation of life. He explained, “The individual dies, but in his children his people (Volk) grow beyond him even during his life. Because we love the future of the life of our people (Volk) more than ourselves, we freely and bravely consent to go to the death, wherever it must be.” This notion of an impersonal afterlife was not uncommon in Nazi circles. It was so widespread that Pope Pius XI criticized the Nazi view of the afterlife in his 1937 encyclical. Pius complained, “Immortality in a Christian sense means the survival of man after his terrestrial death, for the purpose of eternal reward or punishment. Whoever only means by the term, the collective survival here on earth of his people for an indefinite length of time, distorts one of the fundamental notions of the Christian Faith and tampers with the very foundations of the religious concept of the universe, which requires a moral order”…

Hitler’s vague notion of God inspired him because he considered God the creator and sustainer of the German Volk. When Hitler used the term Volk, he was referring to the Germanic people as a racial entity, so Volk was synonymous with the Aryan or Nordic race (terms also used interchangeably). But it was also conveniently ambiguous, making it a great propaganda tool appealing to Germans who might differ in their interpretations of it. It could mean all the German people belonging to the unified German nation, or it could mean all those who were ethnically German, or it could even mean all those having Nordic racial characteristics, even if they were ethnically Danish or Dutch or Norwegian or Polish. Hitler preferred this last definition and tried during World War II to construct a Greater Germanic Reich that incorporated all those identified as members of the Nordic race, no matter their nationality. However, most Germans opted for one of the first two definitions…

Hitler made the connection between God and the German Volk so often that Max Domarus, who edited a massive four-volume collection of Hitler’s speeches, claimed Hitler’s God was a “peculiarly German God,” not the God worshipped by most other people throughout the ages…

Domarus added this insightful footnote to the passage: “In this context as well it is evident that Hitler understood the term ‘Almighty’ to refer to a god that existed exclusively for the German people.” Of course, Hitler believed that God existed everywhere, but he also believed the Volk was God’s special people with a special mission, and he tried to instill this faith in his fellow Germans. Rather frequently Hitler encouraged his fellow Germans to believe that their work and struggle on behalf of their people was assured of success, because God was with them. In June 1937, while boasting of his achievements and preparing for future conquest, Hitler exhorted his compatriots to expect that God would bless them if they tenaciously worked for Germany…

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Note of the Editor:

Here is, with the honourable exception of GLR, the astronomical failure of American racialism. Only if they worked to restore Germany’s honour—the exact reverse of the anti-Nazi West of our day—could God help them.

Let us remember the words of Michael O’Meara: ‘The greatest of the “conservative” thinkers, Joseph de Maistre, pointed out long ago that the French Revolution led the revolutionaries rather than was led by them. For he believed that certain Providential forces rule our lives. These forces he saw in Christian terms, but others, like Heidegger, for instance, saw them in terms of Being, over which humans have no control. In either case, the force of Providence or Being or Destiny has a power that has often made itself felt in our history. For this reason, I have little doubt that Europeans will eventually throw off the Judeo-liberal system programming their destruction. I’m less confident about we Americans, given the greater weakness of our collective identity and destiny. But nevertheless even we might be saved from ourselves by this force—as long as we do what is still in our power to do’.

But O’Meara failed in one of his articles to honour the German Chancellor and his Reich because of, I suspect, the Catholicism of his Irish parents. Like many other Americans, he clung somehow to the Semitic god of the Christians.

The salvation of the Aryan consists in honouring Hitler and no longer Jesus. Then, and only then, the true God will help them.

Nicht in kalten Marmorsteinen,
Nicht in Tempeln, dumpf und tot:
In den frischen Eichenhainen
Webt und rauscht der deutsche Gott.

 
 
 
 
 

Not in cold marble stones,
Not in temples dull and dead:
In the fresh oak groves
Weaves and rustles the German god.

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Albert Speer Americanism Ancient Rome Architecture Berlin Charlemagne Conspiracy theories Destruction of Greco-Roman world Hate Judea v. Rome Racial right Third Reich Tom Sunic William Pierce

Love Germania. Hate the US. – I

Five years ago, trying to communicate with the commenters of The Occidental Observer, Jack Frost said: ‘Although it might be possible to develop a racist interpretation of Christianity (e.g., what the Nazis tried), I’ve never seen a convincing theological justification of it. The fact that all major churches and 99%+ of all who today call themselves Christians reject racism ought to tell you something… You probably want to hang on to most of Christianity as it has been “traditionally” practiced in relatively modern times, while discarding only the anti-racism. Everyone who ever tried that has failed, but I guess you don’t see that as a problem. Then again, the cognitive dissonance issue is nearly as problematic. In order to accept being called a racist or a Nazi with equanimity, normal American whites would have to reconcile that with their country’s history of being violently opposed to racism of any kind, from the Civil War forward. They would have to admit to themselves and to others that all of that blood shed in trying to stamp out racism had been shed in vain, and in fact, worse than in vain, in an evil cause. They would have to admit that their ancestors were evil, and that they themselves had also been evil before they saw the light and became racists’.

Frost thus tried to argue with the Christian white nationalists of the US. Now let’s talk about a normie at the south of Rio Grande.

A guest at my home, a chiropractor, said this week that the covid-19 pandemic is an international conspiracy to force everyone to be vaccinated and implanted with a chip for social control purposes. What is the difference between this nutter and many who, in the white advocacy forums, advance the craziest conspiracy theories? Doesn’t this have to do that all these people, normies and nationalists, are like the Jew Andrew Solomon (i.e., they violate the Oracle of Delphi’s commandment, they don’t know themselves)? If they knew themselves they would know that many of their internal demons (read: conspiracy theories), and even the idea they have about the (non-existent) Hebrew god they worship, is nothing more than the shadows transferred from the parental image. Paleological thinking has not been completely surpassed in the West, not even among racialists. Even high IQ Jews commenting on racial issues grotesquely distort reality.

Consider Ron Unz for example. This Jew likes to brag that he is against the official narrative about World War II and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Nothing could be farther from the truth, as most Americans believe that Oswald did not act alone. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of books about the murder promote conspiracy theories, in addition to blockbuster movies like the filth filmed by Oliver Stone. What Unz doesn’t want to see is that no one reads what he calls the official Warren Report. Instead, they consume all the prolefeed for the proles on JFK with which the System has stupefied the Americans.

It is true that I no longer enter the sites of white nationalism, but I do click on the threads of the commenters when they link to this site. In one of these threads I saw that Jack Frost, who now comments under another pseudonym in Unz Review, accepts the official story about Caligula, which paints him as a monster. Let us remember what Evropa Soberana tells us in the essay that I have promoted the most on this site, which teaches us to understand JQ at its origins. I quote from the chapter ‘Rome against Judea; Judea against Rome’ in The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour:
 

Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (‘Caligula’)

In 38, Caligula, the successor of Tiberius, sends his friend Herod Agrippa to the troubled city of Alexandria, to watch over Aulus Avilius Flaccus, the prefect of Egypt, who did not enjoy precisely the confidence of the emperor and who—according to the Jew Philo of Alexandria—was an authentic villain. The arrival of Agrippa to Alexandria was greeted with great protests by the Greek community, as they thought he was coming to proclaim himself king of the Jews. Agrippa was insulted by a crowd, and Flaccus did nothing to punish the offenders, despite the fact that the victim was an envoy of the emperor. This encouraged the Greeks to demand that statues of Caligula be placed in the synagogues, as a provocation to Jewry.

This simple act seemed to be the sign of an uprising: the Greeks and Egyptians attacked the synagogues and set them on fire. The Jews were expelled from their homes, which were looted, and thereafter segregated in a ghetto from which they could not leave. They were stoned, beaten or burned alive, while others ended up in the sand to serve as food to the beasts in those macabre circus shows so common in the Roman world. According to Philo, Flaccus did nothing to prevent these riots and murders, and even supported them, as did the Egyptian Apion, whom we have seen criticising the Jewish quarter in the section devoted to Hellenistic anti-Semitism.

To celebrate the emperor’s birthday (August 31, a Shabbat), members of the Jewish council were arrested and flogged in the theatre; others were crucified. When the Jewish community reacted, the Roman soldiers retaliated by looting and burning down thousands of Jewish houses, desecrating the synagogues and killing 50,000 Jews. When they were ordered to cease the killing, the local Greek population, inflamed by Apion (not surprisingly, Josephus has a work called Contra Apion) continued the riots. Desperate, the Jews sent Philo to reason with the Roman authorities. The Jewish philosopher wrote a text entitled Contra Flaccus and, along with the surely negative report that Agrippa had given to Caligula, the governor was executed.

After these events, things calmed down and the Jews did not suffer violence as long as they stayed within the confines of their ghetto. However, although Flaccus’ successor allowed the Alexandrian Jewry to give their version of the events, in the year 40 there were again riots among the Jews (who were outraged by the construction of an altar) and among the Greeks, who accused the Jews of refusing to worship the emperor. The religious Jews ordered to destroy the altar and, in retaliation, Caligula made a decision that really showed how little he knew the Jewish quarter: he ordered to place a statue of himself at the Temple of Jerusalem. According to Philo, Caligula ‘considered the majority of Jews suspects, as if they were the only people who wished to oppose him’ (On the Embassy to Gaius and Flaccus). Publius Petronius, governor of Syria, who knew the Jews well and feared the possibility of a civil war, tried to delay as long as possible the placement of the statue until Agrippa convinced Caligula that it was a poor decision.

In 41, Caligula, who already promised to be an anti-Jewish emperor, was assassinated in Rome, which unleashed the violence of his German bodyguards who had not been able to prevent his death and who, because of their peculiar sense of fidelity, tried to avenge him by killing many conspirators, senators and even innocent bystanders who had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Claudius, the uncle of Caligula, would become the master of the situation and, after being appointed emperor by the Praetorian Guard, ordered the execution of the assassins of his nephew, many of whom were political magistrates who wanted to reinstate the Republic.

This is the probable cause of the unprecedented historical defamation of this emperor: the texts of Roman history would eventually fall into the hands of the Christians, who were mostly of Jewish origin and viscerally detested the emperors. Since, according to Orwell, ‘he who controls the past controls the present’ the Christians adulterated Roman historiography, turning the emperors who had opposed them and their Jewish ancestors into disturbed monsters. Thus, we do not have a single Roman emperor who has participated in harsh Jewish reprisals who has not been defamed by accusations of homosexuality, cruelty or perversion. The Spanish historian José Manuel Roldán Hervás has dismantled many of the false accusations against the historical figure of Caligula (The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour, pages 59-63, italics added in this last paragraph).

Roldán-Hervás’ book is in Spanish. But English speakers who are interested in a view of the facts that sticks a little more to history than popular calumnies in the Judeo-Christian era can read the Wikipedia article on the Roman emperor. (Although Wikipedia is enemy territory, they sometimes write comparatively neutral articles. At least the lead paragraph of the article on Caligula, for example, does not describe him as a monster.)

I have said several times that to save the white race from extinction it is necessary to rewrite the history of the West, so I use the symbol of the weirwood tree and the raven that, unlike the normies, can see the past. Following the crow’s lead, it is not only necessary to reclaim the pagan emperors such as Caligula and Nero within a new narrative. Concurrently we must take down from the pedestal those figures that Christianity placed on top, something that I would like to illustrate with Charlemagne.

The only living historian for whom I have respect told me that he would rate Charlemagne well up in the top five most evil characters of European history. I recently acquired Thomas Hodgkin’s The Life of Charlemagne, which I recommend to those who have swallowed the Christian version of this evil man. If we keep in mind the message of the historical sections in The Fair Race, we will see that even after the Aryan apocalypse of the 4th and 5th centuries, there were still many Germanic tribes in the 6th and 7th centuries who refused to worship the god of the Jews. Charlemagne forced these uncontaminated Aryans to worship the enemy god: a historical milestone that, for the 3-eyed raven, has to do directly with the philo-Semitic state that the entire West is currently suffering. (We could imagine a parallel world in which at least part of the Aryan populations had not been worshiping, for more than a millennium, the volcanic demon that appeared to Moses in a desert.)

Christianity, or more accurately the secular ethics that was inspired by Christian ideals after the French Revolution, has hypnotised all whites, racists included. Rarely do I criticise William Pierce, the best mind the United States has produced. But it is about time to do it. The Frost quote at the top of this article nails it. After The Turner’s Diaries, the anti-Christian Pierce cucked with his second novel, Hunter, by putting a Christian preacher as the spark that could awaken Americans from their torpor. That’s a failure to grasp the crow’s view about the CQ!

Now that, thanks to the insight of the three-eyed crow I have broken with American White Nationalism, I have no choice but to start getting acquainted with German National Socialism…
 

Berlin, 1936

Hitler has been in power for three years, a period during which hundreds of kilometres of roads and thousands of houses have been built for the German people. In 1936 the Führer ordered to launch his most ambitious project: the architect Albert Speer would erect a gigantic city in the old centre of Berlin.

In the spring of 1936, Hitler was inspecting the construction of a highway alongside Albert Speer when he suddenly said: ‘I still have left for commissioning an important building, the most impressive of all’. At the time that was no more than a comment, because there were more urgent international policy issues to attend to. Hitler had decided to test England and France by sending German troops to the Rhineland region, whose control Germany had lost in World War I and which was to remain demilitarized under the Treaty of Versailles. London and Paris reacted with weak protests, and Hitler knew then that he might be on the hunt for new territory.

In June Hitler was ready to reveal to Speer his architectural plans for Berlin. The first thing he did was to warn him that he should skip the bureaucracy. ‘The city council is impossible,’ he said. ‘From now on, you make the plans’. Then he gave him two pieces of paper the size of two postcards and added: ‘Take these two drawings and when you have something ready, show it to me’. Hitler’s drawings depicted an enormous triumphal arch and an even larger vaulted hall, with a capacity of 180,000 people. These constructions would be located at the ends of a five-kilometre long avenue inspired by the Champs Elysées in Paris. ‘I made these sketches ten years ago and have kept them because I have never had doubts that one day I would build these two buildings. And that’s what we’re going to do now’, he confided to Speer, who left the meeting thoughtful and surprised.

The architect was thirty-one years old and, in just a decade, he had starred in a meteoric career: from an unemployed draftsman living from his father to a celebrated architect of the National Socialists.

Speer first saw Hitler at a rally in Berlin in the 1930s, and he was dazzled by his charisma, which led him to join the National Socialist Party and work there as an assistant. After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, he was commissioned to reform the party headquarters in Berlin. His colossal style earned him immediate recognition. When Hitler saw his works, he commissioned him to reform the Zeppelin Field in Nuremberg and, before it was completed, assigned him the following task: rebuilding Berlin as Germania, the capital of the Third Reich that was to last a thousand years.

According to the Führer’s instructions, the works were to be completed by 1950. Speer had a vague notion of the dimensions Hitler was thinking of. To be sure, he enlarged the drawings and compared the size of the buildings with that of the people who appeared there. He also realised that the cupola Hitler had planned for the Grosse Halle was too flat and instead projected an enlarged version of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The triumphal arch, to which the Führer had added a simple balustrade, ended up with a forest of columns.

After several months, Speer had his sketches ready. Out of respect for Hitler’s designs, he did not sign them and left the space blank for the Führer to do so, but Hitler declined the honour.

It didn’t take long for Speer to realise that building a five-kilometre version of the Champs-Elysées in Berlin, with the Grosse Halle on one end and the Arc de Triomphe on the other, was not so easy. Unless it was integrated into a more ambitious city project, the grand avenue would seem out of place. The plan quickly took on gigantic proportions. Speer decided to create two axes (north-south and east-west) that would intersect in the centre, near the Grosse Halle, and would have an airport at each of the four points. Around the city a ring road would extend, within which there would be other circular highways, forming rings. The access roads would come out of the centre, like the spokes of a wheel. The plan included the complete restructuring of the railway network, which would have only two main stations, Nordbahnhof (North Station) and Sudbahnhof (South Station). Areas with roads considered obsolete would be free for other purposes.

The project also included residential neighbourhoods, a university, a hospital area, new parks, and several subway lines. Hitler was delighted but, as the months went by, it became clear that he was particularly interested in Victoria Avenue, included in the north-south axis. In meetings where they talked about the project, he listened patiently to all the news and then asked: ‘Where do you have the plans for the Avenue?’ They saw each other several times a week, in the late afternoon, when the Führer had finished the work of the day, and they could spend hours hunched over pianos and models. ‘One day Berlin will be the capital of the world’, Hitler predicted, and imagined the visitors stunned and intimidated by the magnificence of those buildings.

Hitler had Speer’s office placed near the Reichstag, so that just by walking through a garden, he could go see him and also the thirty-meter-long model of Germania. This was divided into several modules mounted on wheels, so that the Führer could move them and enter the city. He also used to bend down to observe the model at eye level.

He delighted in imagining ministries, exhibition halls, and office buildings of major German corporations; also the new opera, the palaces and the luxurious hotels. ‘I was participating in that reverie willingly’, Speer later wrote. On one occasion, those responsible for air defence heard about the 290-meter-high Grosse Halle project. One of them warned that enemy planes would use the building as a target to attack Berlin, but Hitler ignored it. ‘Goering has assured me that no enemy aircraft could enter Germany. We are not going to let this kind of thing interfere with our plans’, he said. The leader and architect tried to keep the project a secret. Hitler feared the possible reaction of Berliners when they were told that at least 50,000 houses had to be thrown away to make way for new construction; but the mayor of Berlin, Julius Lippert, knew the plans and showed his opposition, which led to Hitler’s removal from office to move on.

The works started in 1939, with columns of workers moved to the centre of Berlin to demolish the buildings. The inhabitants of the area had to abandon their homes and were housed in houses that had belonged to the now expelled Jews. Speer had granite brought from Norway and Sweden, as he believed that this material would impregnate Germania with the magic of the Greek and Roman architecture (see YouTube clip above, ‘What did ancient Rome look like’) and give it an image of greatness and eternity. In 1941, Swedish stone producers signed an agreement with Germany to sell 10 million cubic meters of granite to it. This guaranteed supply for 10 years, but few deliveries were ever made. Just a year later, in 1942, the Third Reich announced that it could no longer receive granite. Germania’s work had been suspended and the workers were assigned to much more urgent tasks. The Germans paid for the purchases of the material, but left the granite stacked in the nations of origin with the intention of collecting it once they won the war.

To secure victory over the Allies, Hitler had appointed his favourite architect, Speer, as the new Minister of Armament. Thanks to his organizational skills, Speer managed to multiply war production by resorting to different methods, including the use of prisoners from concentration camps as slave labour. During the Nuremberg Trials, Speer denied having any news about the extermination of Jews or the concentration camps. At the end of the process, he managed to avoid the death penalty, but was sentenced to twenty years in prison, which he served in Spandau prison in Berlin. When he was released, Speer went to the Tempelhof airport and crossed the area that was intended to be Victory Avenue.

Had it not been for American intrusion in Europe, the Führer’s palace would have occupied an area of two million square meters. As I said, it had to be finished by 1950, the year in which Hitler had planned to start inhabiting it. Today’s white advocates could have visited it!

But due to the Americans Hitler had to commit suicide to prevent the humiliation at Nuremberg. The buildings were demolished. The granite blocks were never collected. After the war they were stored for years in different ports until, in the end, they were acquired by tombstone manufacturers. In this way, a large part of Germania, Hitler’s dream, ended in different European cemeteries. Thus Germania (like the moral of the whole white race) ended up turned literally into tombstones…

Let us now return to the issues at the beginning of this article. To understand this site, it is essential to remember the message of Soberana’s master essay on the surreptitious war that Judea waged against Rome during the Christian takeover of the classical world. It is also necessary to understand that, once Soberana’s vision has been assimilated (whom I have compared to the raven who sees the past as it happened), many so-called civilisation builders of the Christian era become monsters (for example, Charlemagne) and many monsters become murdered heroes (for example, the anti-Semite Caligula).

This transvaluation of values is only possible by seeing the past as it actually happened.

From this angle, which can also be seen in Pierce’s only non-fiction book, the so-called ‘barbaric’ invasions of the Germans in Rome that culminated in 410 AD were, in fact, Aryan invasions on a treacherous city that had been conquered by a Semitic cult. By transvaluing values, the ‘barbarians’ would now be the miscegenated Romans that had been brainwashed by the Semitic bishops to the extent of destroying their classical culture (the German incursions into Rome may have once again brought light into Europe had it not been for what Charlemagne would do centuries later).

The way Judea defeated Rome was very similar to the way Jews in the West have been acting since Napoleon emancipated them: by controlling the narrative with which whites see themselves. In the 4th and 5th centuries subversion was carried out through theologians and Semitic bishops who gained enormous power to educate princes from Constantine forward. From this angle, the imperial Rome of the last centuries is similar to imperial America since Jewry’s presence began to become evident in the media. Charlemagne’s favourite book was St. Augustine’s The City of God Against the Pagans, an ideology that Charlemagne used to genocide the Saxons and convert the Saxon survivors to the Semitic cult. Similarly, as Tom Sunic has written in Homo Americanus, the Americans’ initiative to intervene in World War II was, ultimately, a theologically motivated undertaking. I must quote from Chapter V: ‘In Yahweh We Trust: A Divine Foreign Policy’:
 

Homo Americanus (chapter excerpts)

It was largely the Biblical message which stood as the origin of America’s endeavour to ‘make the world safe for democracy’. Contrary to many European observers critical of America, American military interventions have never had as a sole objective economic imperialism but rather the desire to spread American democracy around the world…

American involvement in Europe during World War II and the later occupation of Germany were motivated by America’s self-appointed do-gooding efforts and the belief that Evil in its fascist form had to be removed, whatever the costs might be. Clearly, Hitler declared war on ‘neutral’ America, but Germany’s act of belligerence against America needs to be put into perspective. An objective scholar must examine America’s previous illegal supplying of war material to the Soviet Union and Great Britain. Equally illegal under international law was America’s engaging German submarines in the Atlantic prior to the German declaration of war, which was accompanied by incessant anti-German media hectoring by American Jews—a strategy carried out in the name of a divine mission of ‘making the world safe for democracy’.

‘The crisis of Americanism in our epoch,’ wrote a German scholar, Giselher Wirsing, who had close ties with propaganda officials in the Third Reich, ‘falls short of degeneracy of the Puritan mindset. In degenerated Puritanism lies, side by side with Judaism, America’s inborn danger’…

In the first half of the 20th century American Biblical fundamentalism resulted in military behaviour that American postmodern elites are not very fond of discussing in a public forum. It is common place in American academia and the film industry to criticise National Socialism for its real or alleged terror. But the American way of conducting World War II—under the guise of democracy and world peace—was just as violent if not even worse.

Puritanism had given birth to a distinctive type of American fanaticism which does not have parallels anywhere else in the world. Just as in 17th century England, Cromwell was persuaded that he had been sent by God Almighty to purge England of its enemies; so did his American liberal successors by the end of the 20th century think themselves elected in order to impose their own code of military and political conduct in both domestic and foreign affairs. M.E. Bradford notes that this type of Puritan self-righteousness could be easily observed from Monroe to Lincoln and Lincoln’s lieutenants Sherman and Grant…

Whereas everybody in American and European postmodern political establishment are obliged to know by heart the body count of Fascist and National Socialist victims, nobody still knows the exact number of Germans killed by American forces during and after World War II. Worse, as noted earlier, a different perspective in describing the US post-war foreign policy toward Europe and Germany is not considered politically correct… [in spite of the fact that] the American mistreatment of German POWs and civilians during World War II must have been far worse than that on Iraq after 2003.

Just as communism, following the Second World War, used large scale terror in the implementation of its foreign policy goals in Eastern Europe, so did America use its own type of repression to silence heretics in the occupied parts of postwar Europe… The American crusade to extirpate evil was felt by Germans in full force in the aftermath of World War II. Freda Utley, an English-American writer depicts graphically in her books the barbaric methods applied by American military authorities against German civilians and prisoners in war ravaged Germany. Although Utley enjoyed popularity among American conservatives, her name and her works fell quickly into oblivion…

In hindsight one wonders whether there was any substantive difference between warmongering Americanism and Communism? If one takes into account the behaviour of American military authorities in Germany after World War II, it becomes clear why American elites, half a century later, were unwilling to initiate a process of decommunisation in Eastern Europe, as well as the process of demarxisation in American and European higher education. After all, were not Roosevelt and Stalin war time allies? Were not American and Soviet soldiers fighting the same ‘Nazi evil’?

It was the inhumane behaviour of the American military interrogators that left deep scars on the German psyche and which explains why Germans, and by extension all Europeans, act today in foreign affairs like scared lackeys of American geopolitical interests…

A whole fleet of aircraft was used by General Eisenhower to bring journalists, Congressmen, and churchmen to see the concentration camps; the idea being that the sight of Hitler’s starved victims would obliterate consciousness of our own guilt. Certainly it worked out that way. No American newspaper of large circulation in those days wrote up the horror of our bombing or described the ghastly conditions in which the survivors were living in the corpse-filled ruins. American readers sipped their fill only of German atrocities. [Freda Utley, The High Cost of Vengeance (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co. 1949), p. 183]

Utley’s work is today unknown in American higher education although her prose constitutes a valuable document in studying the crusading and inquisitorial character of Americanism in Europe.

There are legions of similar revisionist books on the topic describing the plight of Germans and Europeans after the Second World War, but due to academic silence and self-censorship of many scholars, these books do not reach mainstream political and academic circles. Moreover, both American and European historians still seem to be light years away from historicising contemporary history and its aftermath. This is understandable, in view of the fact that acting and writing otherwise would throw an ugly light on crimes committed by the Americans in Germany during and after the second World War and would substantially ruin antifascist victimology, including the Holocaust narrative.

American crimes in Europe, committed in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, included extra-killings of countless German civilians and disarmed soldiers, while tacitly approving serial Soviet genocides and mass expulsions of the German civilian population in Eastern Europe… As years and decades went by, crimes committed by the Americans against the Germans were either whitewashed or ascribed to the defeated Germans…

The exact number of German causalities during and after the Second World War remains unknown. The number of German dead varies wildly, ranging from 6 to 16 million Germans, including civilians and soldiers… It is only the fascist criminology of World War II, along with the rhetorical projection of the evil side of the Holocaust that modern historiographers like to repeat, with Jewish American historians and commentators being at the helm of this narrative. Other victimhoods and other victimologies, notably those people who suffered under communism, are rarely mentioned… According to some German historians over a million and a half of German soldiers died after the end of hostilities in American and Soviet-run prison camps…

The masters of discourse in postmodern America have powerful means to decide the meaning of historical truth and provide the meaning with their own historical context. Mentioning extensively Germany’s war loses runs the risk of eclipsing the scope of Jewish war loses, which makes many Jewish intellectuals exceedingly nervous. Every nation likes to see its own sacred victimhood on the top of the list of global suffering. Moreover, if critical revisionist literature were ever to gain a mainstream foothold in America and Europe, it would render a serious blow to the ideology of Americanism and would dramatically change the course of history in the coming decades.
 

My two cents

What Stalin and the Anglo-Saxons did in World War II produces a phenomenal hatred in me. For the second time in history since Charlemagne, the possibility of Aryan liberation thanks to Germania was crushed… by other Aryans. Today the United States, like the Judaised Rome since the times of Constantine, is the enemy to overcome. It is time to start preaching an infinite hatred for the new Great Whore that must be crushed in the coming apocalypse.

I call the people of the Americanised alt-right ‘Jew-obeyers’ because they have internalised the Christian prohibition to hate. I have recently learned that The Occidental Observer published an article on hate but let me guess: Did that article blame Christianity one hundred percent for the psyop against hating (remember I no longer read alt-right articles)? Instead of a conservative webzine like The Occidental Observer I prefer the words Kai Murros said about hate. Listen to Murros in a very short clip where a couple of bars of Parsifal’s music can be heard: here. Or what Alex Linder wrote:

Hate is not some useless organ like the appendix. It’s there for a reason. Why does Christianity do all it can to talk us out of necessary and functional drives? Well, the answer is that it’s a bit of software meant to disable our enemy recognition module. Christianity preaches blind love, and that love is murdering the West.

Categories
Albert Speer David Irving Monologe im Führerhauptquartier

Are the table talks genuine?

uncle adolf
 
Editor’s note: I am relocating this August 5, 2015 comment by Jack Frost to this day so that it is the first post that a visitor hits when clicking the category on Hitler’s table talks. I won’t delete the old August thread but I have disabled comments on this specific article. Reason: I don’t have time to discuss with those Christian neonazis who cannot tolerate even the possibility that the talks may be genuine.
 

David Irving has considerable expertise in this matter, and he says they’re genuine.

Likewise Albert Speer, who was present at some of these dinner talks, attests to them in his memoirs. But also, perhaps even more convincing, the talks are the blindingly original insights of a true master.

These views of Christianity* are not derivative of anyone else’s opinions, certainly not Schopenhauer’s, and while at odds with certain of his public statements, are quite consistent with other things known about Hitler, particularly his anti-Semitism. Surely a forger wouldn’t have gone this route.

In the first place, he would have had to do original thinking that is quite uncharacteristic of forgers, and in the second place an ordinary forger would have been careful not to make any statements that were inconsistent with other things known to have been said or written by Hitler.

Their very originality speaks to their veracity. Of course, this can be turned around. People who want to believe Hitler was actually a Christian disingenuously ask why, if this was his real opinion, didn’t he put it in Mein Kampf or mention it in any of his public speeches?

But the answer is obvious. Hitler was a politician, and had to be all things to all people. No politician with such views could have been open about them in a Christian nation.

Accordingly, to Christians of his day, he appeared to be a Christian. Such hypocrisy was more or less built into the task he had set for himself.

_____________

(*) These were Frost’s August 4, 2015, 5:15 PM quotes on the same thread. Alas, as usual Dr MacDonald has now deleted the whole comments thread!

Categories
Albert Speer August Kubizek David Irving Heinrich Himmler Monologe im Führerhauptquartier Reinhard Heydrich Third Reich Zweites Buch

What is the best Hitler biography?

by Andrew Hamilton




I’m not a National
Socialist, but…
I have read a few
books on Hitler.

Regarding Hitler,
I agree with
Irmin Vinson:



I consider Hitler less a model to be followed than an avalanche of propaganda we must dig ourselves out from under. Never in human history has a single man received such sustained vilification, the basic effect and purpose of which has been to inhibit Whites from thinking racially and from acting in their own racial self-interest, as all other racial/ethnic groups do. Learning the truth about Hitler is a liberating experience. By the truth I mean not an idealized counter-myth to the pervasive myth of Hitler as evil incarnate, but the man himself, faults and virtues, strengths and weaknesses. (“Some Thoughts on Hitler”)

Since literally thousands of worthless books have been churned out about Der Boss, how does one sift through the massive pile of crap on the hopeful assumption that, “Hey, with all this manure, there must be a pony in here somewhere!”?

A “good” biography by my definition is an objective, truthful account, not a comic book fabrication about a lunatic, one-testicled rug chewer, or a thinly-disguised religious fable in which Hitler (= Satan/Nazis/Germans/white people) crucifies 6 million Jews (= God’s chosen people, elbowing the Lord Jesus Christ aside) by fantastic and diabolical means before efficiently employing the grisly remains to manufacture bars of soap and lampshades for the amusement of Hitler and his henchmen, or to lighten the burden of wartime rationing.

Hopefully, the book would be well-written and fun to read, as well.

If there’s a reliable bibliographical essay along these lines, I am unaware of it.


Ian Kershaw’s biography

What brought this perennial question—What is the best Hitler biography?—to mind recently was an article about English historian Sir Ian Kershaw in the Guardian (UK) newspaper asserting that the author’s two-volume, 2,000-page (prolixity is the norm in Hitler studies) biography of Hitler published to wide acclaim a decade ago, “is likely to remain the standard life for a generation.”

The biography is: Volume 1, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (London: 1998), and Volume 2, Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis (London: 2000). A single-volume abridgement, Hitler: A Biography, appeared in 2008.

This pattern of two-volume books and abridgements, plus multiple translations, editions and printings of the same book at different times, often with different titles, continually bedevils the researcher.

Kershaw, who comes from a white, working-class background, does not inspire confidence. Among other things, he’s a knight (OBE), though he claims to be “embarrassed” by the “neo-feudal title.”

During the so-called Historikerstreit (Historians’ Dispute) in Germany from 1986 to 1989, Kershaw teamed with academic mentor Martin Broszat, an anti-German German, to publicly attack other German historians—Ernst Nolte, Andreas Hillgruber, Michael Stürmer, Joachim Fest and Klaus Hildebrand—as apologists for the German past.


“Comic Book” Titles as a Screen

One heuristic I use is to reject any book with a ridiculous or patently propagandistic title.

Using that guideline, the New York Times did Kershaw no favor when it titled its shallow reviews of his two Hitler volumes “The Devil’s Miracle Man” and “When Depravity Was Contagious,” respectively.

Examples of other self-destructive titles are The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (1977; 1993), Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (1998), Hitler: The Pathology of Evil (1998), Adolf Hitler: A Chilling Tale of Propaganda as Packaged by Joseph Goebbels. (1999), Adolf Hitler: A Study in Hate (2001), and Hitler and the Nazi Leaders: A Unique Insight into Evil (2001).


Books I own

I read Konrad Heiden’s critical Der Fuehrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power (1944) in high school. Its first chapter, “Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion,” was my introduction to Alfred Rosenberg. I remember being enthralled by the book. Heiden was at least half-Jewish (his mother). He eventually fled Germany and settled in the United States, where he died in 1966. In Hitler’s War David Irving warns against reliance upon Heiden’s and several other biographies “hitherto accepted as ‘standard’ sources on Hitler” without further elaboration.

Another book I read while young is journalist William Shirer’s 1,245-page The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (1960). It sold more than 2 million copies and won the National Book Award. I read the whole thing, but with nothing like the zest I read Der Fuehrer. Unfortunately, Shirer’s work is empirically and ideologically flawed.

Robert Payne, author of The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler (1973), was a freelance writer, not an academic or journalist. He was enormously prolific. I looked him up in Contemporary Authors and learned that he authored over 110 novels, biographies, and histories. If he began at age 20, he wrote (and published) more than two books per year until he died at age 72. Evidently his pace exacted a price on accuracy. Besides purveying conventional ideological and racial animus, the biography contains glaring factual errors, some very big indeed.

Two spurious memoirs frequently cited by mainstream historians are Hermann Rauschning’s Conversations with Hitler (1940) (US title: The Voice of Destruction and Fritz Thyssen’s I Paid Hitler (1943) (neither of which I own), both published by a Hungarian Jew, Churchill confidant, and world federalist named Emery Reves.

Rauschning’s fabricated Conversations with Hitler has been relied upon by William L. Shirer, Robert Payne, Jewish historians Leon Poliakov, Gerhard Weinberg, and Nora Levin, Alan Bullock’s Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952) (the first comprehensive biography, Bullock’s Hitler dominated scholarship for years; it also possesses the kind of title that’s a red flag to me; I do not own it), and Joachim C. Fest’s Hitler (Germ. 1973, Eng. trans. 1974), among others. For background on this see Mark Weber, “Rauschning’s Phony Conversations With Hitler: An Update,” Journal of Historical Review (Winter 1985–86), pp. 499 ff.

Nevertheless, as David Irving points out, “Historians are quite incorrigible, and will quote any apparently primary source [memoirs, diaries, autobiographies, etc.] no matter how convincingly its false pedigree is exposed.” When “serious” biographers rely upon works like Rauschning’s, their books should be approached cautiously, if at all.

Fest’s Hitler, the first major biography since Alan Bullock’s in 1952, and the first ever by a German author, became the bestselling book in Germany upon its publication; the next year it was translated into 17 languages. A prominent German journalist, broadcaster, and anti-Nazi, Fest was one of a troika of Establishment editors who re-wrote, or co-wrote, German armaments minister Albert Speer’s famous memoir, Inside the Third Reich (Germ. 1969; Eng. trans. 1970). (Speer was imprisoned at Spandau from 1946 to 1966.) The book, a worldwide bestseller, made a fortune for Speer and earned widespread praise for its disavowal of Hitler. According to David Irving, Speer had a secret agreement with his German publisher, Ullstein Verlag, to pay 25% of all royalties and proceeds to the State of Israel.

About Fest’s Hitler Irving wrote, “Stylistically, Fest’s German was good; but the old legends were trotted out afresh, polished to an impressive gleam of authority.”

As noted above, Fest fought on the conservative side of Germany’s Historian’s Dispute in the 1980s, denying the “singularity” of the Holocaust (which, however, he believed in). His Wikipedia entry provides lengthy quotations that strike a contemporary reader as heretical.

Finally, a friend kindly gave me his copy of Timothy W. Ryback’s Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life (2008), which is both interesting and informative.


Recommendations of a dissident: William Pierce’s National Vanguard Books Catalog (December 1988)

I’ve often used this valuable reference over the years. It is essentially an elaborate college syllabus. Subdivisions include “European Prehistory, Archaeology, & Folkways,” “European Legend, Myth, and Religion,” “History of Western Civilization,” “Western Art,” and so on. Its 125 carefully-selected titles provide in-depth knowledge and a comprehensive overview of the white race and Western civilization.

With the exception of Mein Kampf, only three Hitler biographies are included in Pierce’s catalog, none of them standard ones. Two are: Heinz A. Heinz, Germany’s Hitler (London: 1934), and Hans Baur (Hitler’s personal pilot), Hitler at My Side (1986).

The third, Otto Wagener’s Hitler–Memoirs of a Confidant (1985), was written in 1946 when Wagener was a British prisoner. It was not published until many years after his death by the late Yale historian Henry Ashby Turner, Jr. Pierce described the book as “By far the most informative and positive memoir by a confidant of Hitler since August Kubizek’s The Young Hitler I Knew” ([German 1953, English 1955], another memoir NV had previously sold).

A notable feature of Wagener’s memoir is that, according to historian Gordon Craig’s New York Times review, it strongly emphasizes Hitler’s pro-British views and depicts the Führer as “an ‘unwitting prisoner’ of Göring, Goebbels and Himmler, powerless to prevent his true intentions from being distorted by evil associates for their own criminal purposes”—claims by an eyewitness that parallel David Irving’s controversial views.


Mein Kampf (My Struggle) and Zweites Buch (Second Book)

Though not biographies, strictly speaking, I own 1950s-era drugstore paperback copies of Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 1941–1944 (1953) and Felix Gilbert, ed. and trans., Hitler Directs His War (1950).

According to David Irving, the transcripts published as Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 1941–1944 are genuine. (Though Irving doesn’t say it, the book he discusses, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944, is the same as mine, but with a different title—I warned you it’s complicated!)

I recommend clicking on the preceding link to get a feel for how important it is to understand the provenance and reliability—the evidentiary basis—of even “mainstream” books and texts you might otherwise assume are problem-free. To his credit, Irving is keenly aware of the difficulties posed by mainstream books and official documents housed in archives. They cannot simply be accepted at face value.

I should nevertheless quote the following from Irving’s web page:

The Table Talks’ content is more important in my view than Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and possibly even more than his Zweites Buch (1928). It is unadulterated Hitler. He expatiates on virtually every subject under the sun, while his generals and private staff sit patiently and listen, or pretend to listen, to the monologues.

Along with Sir Nevile Henderson’s gripping 1940 book Failure of a Mission: Berlin, 1937-1939, this was one of the first books that I read, as a twelve year old: Table Talk makes for excellent bedtime reading, as each “meal” occupies only two or three pages of print. My original copy, purloined from my twin brother Nicholas, was seized along with the rest of my research library in May 2002.

He adds: “Ignore the 1945 ‘transcripts’ published by Hugh Trevor-Roper in the 1950s as Hitler’s Last Testament [The Testament of Adolf Hitler—Ed.]—they are fake.” That book purports to be Martin Bormann’s notes on Hitler’s final bunker conversations.

Mein Kampf was originally published in German in two volumes, the first in 1925 and the second in 1927. English translations combine both volumes into one.

I read Mein Kampf thoroughly in 1988, as my well-marked copy indicates. (The fact that it was ’88 is coincidental!) However, the book did not have an impact on me intellectually or emotionally. I wasn’t a national socialist then (much less a National Socialist) and am not one now. Nor do I view Hitler as a quasi-sacred figure.

Part of the reason for the book’s lack of effect may be due to the particular translation I purchased. In the original German the book was a runaway bestseller and the source of much of Hitler’s private fortune. Even acknowledging the political factors involved, one cannot dismiss the possibility that it reads better in German than in its English translations. The quality of a translation determines how well a book “travels” from one language to another. Both fidelity to the original (accuracy) and transmission of the spirit or feel are necessary. I have experienced translations that capture the originals marvelously, and others where even classic works appear dead on the page.

I bought my copy of Mein Kampf without prior research and ended up purchasing the 1939 Hurst and Blackett translation by James Murphy.

Murphy, a former Irish Catholic priest, was hired by the German government to make the official English translation, but the project was scuttled after a dispute. Murphy continued the translation nevertheless, and it appeared independently in Britain in 1939.

I later learned that many English-speaking National Socialists prefer Ralph Manheim’s 1943 Houghton Mifflin translation (which I have not read). It is possible that Manheim better catches the spirit of Hitler’s original, because he was also the translator of Konrad Heiden’s Der Fuehrer which so enthralled me as a boy.

In his catalog, William Pierce categorized Mein Kampf as “semi-autobiographical,” calling it “a beacon and a guide to every healthy soul in this dark age, to everyone who seeks understanding and light.” He described the differences between the English translations this way:

Manheim translation: Accurate, but marred by anti-Hitler introductions and derogatory footnotes.

Murphy translation: No hostile comments, but the translation is not as faithful to the original text.

After Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote what has become known as the Zweites Buch (Second Book) (1928), an extension and elaboration of his foreign policy aims. It also sets forth his views of the Soviet Union, France, Great Britain, and the United States. The book was written to clarify his foreign policy objectives for the German public after the 1928 elections. However, his publisher advised him that, from a sales point of view, the time was not propitious for bringing it out. By 1930 Hitler had decided that it revealed too much about his intentions, so it was never published.

In 1935 it was locked away at his order in a safe inside an air raid shelter. There it remained until the fall of Germany in 1945, when it was discovered by the American invaders. Its authenticity was reportedly vouched for by Josef Berg and Telford Taylor.

In 1958 the manuscript of the Zweites Buch, having again fallen into obscurity, was rediscovered in American archives by Jewish historian Gerhard Weinberg. Weinberg, whose family left Germany for the United States in 1938, is the author of numerous anti-German academic books and articles and a vigorous Holocaust promoter. He is Shapiro Senior Scholar in Residence at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Weinberg strongly supported the ethnic cleansing of Germans from Eastern Europe after WWII, which resulted in an enormous number of white deaths.

Unable to find a US publisher for the book, Weinberg turned to a fellow Jew in Germany, Hans Rothfels; a German edition of the Second Book was issued in 1961. (A pirated copy translated into English appeared in New York the following year.) An authoritative English edition did not appear until 40 years later: Gerhard L. Weinberg, ed., Hitler’s Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf (New York: Enigma Books, 2003).

Because I had never heard of this book until 2003, I thought the whole story a bit strange. It is unclear how many scholars apart from Weinberg have examined the original manuscript, or what methods of authentication were used. However, David Irving sold the 2003 edition at one of his lectures, and has indicated at least implicitly on several occasions (some quoted here) that he accepts the book as genuine.


David Irving

David Irving’s Hitler’s War is interesting on several levels.

An independent, non-academic historian, Irving has been victimized to an unimaginable degree over many decades by the Jewish power structure, including a global panoply of government agencies, apparatchiks, courts, police, and academic and media shills eternally at its beck and call. His suffering is mind-numbing proof of the bizarre, Orwellian world we live in. Blacklisted and bankrupted, his personal prosperity and former high reputation are in ruins.

His book, as usual, is long: 985 pages (2002 ed.), and again there is the thorny problem of multiple volumes and editions of a single biography floating around. Hitler’s War was first published in 1977, and its prequel, The War Path, in 1978. In 1991 a revised 1-volume edition incorporating both books was issued as Hitler’s War. In 2002, a revised “Millennium Edition” was published under the title Hitler’s War and the War Path, incorporating the latest documents from American, British, and former Soviet archives. This is the one I own.

In an introductory Note Irving states that in the Millennium Edition he has not revised his earlier views, but merely refined the narrative and reinforced the documentary basis of his former assertions.

Famed for working almost exclusively from official archival documents, diaries, private letters, and other original source material, his method has the downside of somewhat impeding smooth narrative flow. However, this is compensated for by the rich source material. Almost incredibly, Irving admits:

I have dipped into Mein Kampf but never read it: it was written only partly by Hitler, and that is the problem. More important are Hitlers Zweites Buch, (1928) which he wrote in his own hand; and Hitler’s Table Talk, daily memoranda which first Heinrich Heim (Martin Bormann’s adjutant, whom I interviewed) and then Henry Picker wrote down at his table side, and the similar table talks recorded by Werner Koeppen (which I was the first to exploit, in Hitler’s War).

In his introduction, notes, and on his website, Irving reveals the care necessary in dealing with even supposedly reliable documentary materials, never mind historians’ work (which he typically ignores). German memoirs, for example, have been extensively tampered with by publishers, Allied authorities, and others. When using them Irving attempts to work from the original typescripts rather than published texts. Even documents contained in government archives have been altered, removed, or otherwise manipulated. His many discussions about such issues are highly instructive.

Irving is not a “Holocaust denier” as Jews claim, though he does not believe in every jot and tittle of their religious narrative as everyone else does.

One of Irving’s most controversial claims is that “antisemitism” in Germany was “a powerful vote catching force,” “an evil steed” that Hitler had no compunction in riding to the chancellorship in 1933. But once in power, “he dismounted and paid only lip service to that part of his Party’s creed.” The “evil gangsters” under him, however—Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Joseph Goebbels—continued to ride it even when Hitler dictated differently.

Although Irving maintains that a Jewish Holocaust of sorts did occur (unfortunately, he is exceedingly vague, evasive, and even contradictory about its details, and denies any interest in it), he says that Hitler’s evil henchmen dreamed it up and carried it out entirely without Hitler’s knowledge or approval. Thus, while Irving is a Hitlerphile, he is extremely harsh toward “bad guys” like Himmler (in particular), Heydrich, and Goebbels. The reader may perhaps see how Irving’s central thesis is hard to… accept.

Irving has published a critical biography of Goebbels and is currently working on one about Himmler. Himmler’s elderly daughter Gudrun has publicly expressed her fear that Irving will perform a hatchet job on her father in an attempt to salvage his (Irving’s) reputation.

In fairness to Irving, Jewish historian Felix Gilbert, editor of Hitler Directs His War (above), wrote that “during the war, Hitler cut himself off from all his former associates and interests and closed himself in at his headquarters with his military advisers. The center of Hitler’s activities became then the daily conferences on the military situation.” This suggests possible great autonomy on the part of Himmler and others, at least after the inception of the war. Irving, however, tends to emphasize disloyalty, deceit, and manipulation by Himmler and others rather than Hitler’s isolation or distraction. Still, as previously noted, Otto Wagener’s Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant also presents a picture of Hitler’s relationship to his top lieutenants even in the early days of the regime that is similar to Irving’s.

The most important thing to note is that Hitler’s War is not a biography per se, but a military history of WWII from Hitler’s perspective. My primary interest, however, apart from biography, is the racial, political, philosophical, and social aspects of Hitler’s Germany rather than the conduct of the war.


John Toland’s Hitler

La Crosse, Wisconsin-born John W. Toland is another independent scholar who wrote a major biography of Hitler: Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography. Something of an intellectual renegade in his later years, he managed to stay beneath the radar screen of controversy. His books remain popular and highly regarded. His best-known book, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945 (1970), won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Based upon extensive original interviews with high Japanese officials who survived the war, it was the first book in English to tell the history of the war in the Pacific from the Japanese rather than the American point of view. (Toland married a Japanese woman.)

Toland’s mildly controversial Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath (1982) offered a quasi-revisionist view of the Roosevelt Administration’s scapegoating of the Pearl Harbor commanders and subsequent cover-up. The Pearl Harbor book led to Toland’s association with the Holocaust revisionist Institute for Historical Review (IHR), at whose meeting he spoke.

After Jewish terrorists firebombed the Institute on the Fourth of July, 1984, destroying its warehouse and inventory of books (American authorities “never found”—or punished—the perpetrators), Toland wrote to the IHR:

When I learned of the torching of the office-warehouse of the Institute for Historical Review I was shocked. And when I heard no condemnation of this act of terrorism on television and read no protests in the editorial pages of our leading newspapers or from the halls of academia, I was dismayed and incensed. Where are those defenders of democracy who over the years have so vigorously protested the burning of books by Hitler? Are they only summer soldiers of democracy, selective in their outrage? I call on all true believers in democracy to join me in public denunciation of the recent burning of books in Torrance, California.

Toland’s Adolf Hitler was based upon a great deal of original research, including previously unpublished documents, diaries, notes, photographs, and interviews with Hitler’s colleagues and associates. I have had difficulty identifying a good copy of the biography for sale on Amazon due to the headache of multiple editions and reprints I mentioned earlier.

As near as I can determine, the initial publication was Adolf Hitler, 2 vols. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1976). However, sellers often list it for sale on Amazon while really having only one volume (which one is usually undeterminable) in stock. On the other hand, one seller informed me that he checked his 1976 edition in the warehouse, and it appeared to be a complete book in one volume. My impression is that the reprint (I assume it is unrevised), Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography (Doubleday, 1992), is the same book in a single volume.

Toland’s biography was well-received by both reviewers and the public. In his autobiography Toland wrote that he earned little money from his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Rising Sun, but was set for life thanks to the earnings from Adolf Hitler.

Patrick Buchanan penned a column about the book in 1977, after which he was widely condemned for “praising Hitler.” Daniel Weiss of the Virginia Quarterly Review wrote that “In some respects the Hitler who emerges is almost too human, too normal.”

Mark Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review and a longtime WWII revisionist who reads German, writes:

I’m sometimes asked which biography of Hitler I think is best, or which I recommend. In my view, the best single biography of Hitler, and the one I most often recommend, is the one by John Toland, Adolf Hitler. It’s especially good in helping the reader to understand Hitler’s personality and outlook. Kershaw’s biography is detailed, but it’s also very slanted and leaves out a lot.

It would be a mistake to assume that Weber’s recommendation is the result of Toland’s brief connection with the IHR. Adolf Hitler was written several years before that relationship developed. Moreover, in 1977, when David Irving offered a thousand pound reward to anyone who could produce a single wartime document showing that Hitler knew anything about the Holocaust, Toland published an emotional appeal in Der Spiegel urging his fellow historians to refute Irving.

It is unlikely that Toland’s book is “pro-Hitler.” Certainly, reviewers have not attacked it as such.


Conclusion

I guess I’ll go with Toland’s biography, evidently the most objective, despite owning several others instead. Although I’ve only scratched the surface, it is apparent that enormous effort is required to merely survey the field before diving in to actually get a handle on The Most Evil Man Who Ever Lived.

And what is the likely outcome of such an effort? Well, David Irving, who has spent the better part of a lifetime studying the Führer, concluded:

What is the result of twenty years’ toiling in the archives? Hitler will remain an enigma, however hard we burrow. Even his intimates realised that they hardly knew him. General Alfred Jodl, his closest strategic adviser, wrote in his Nuremberg cell on March 10, 1946: “I ask myself, did you ever really know this man at whose side you led such a thorny and ascetic existence? To this very day I do not know what he thought or knew or really wanted.”

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