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Category: David Irving
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Himmler DVD
Today I got, and watched, David Irving’s ‘The Life and Death of Heinrich Himmler’ (English, 82 mins): a superb lecture that may serve as a prelude to the second volume on Himmler (alas, since Irving recently became ill, we can’t be sure he will finish it).
The central part of the DVD is of paramount importance, so much so that I will link to the first endnote of the featured post, ‘The Wall’, the page promoting the DVD on Irving’s site. So important are Irving’s claims about the so-called Holocaust that I don’t think I should upload any more posts this weekend, to invite visitors to purchase that DVD.
If whites, including white nationalists, are as insane as Marco and Blinken (cf. my other post today), it is because they are not exterminationists like Himmler. Too bad the Allies murdered him.
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Supporting David Irving
by David Irving’s family
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Last October, after arriving in Florida, David Irving fell ill and has been in declining health ever since. He is now back at his home in the UK and requires round-the-clock care, a demand we’ve had to arrange privately due to constraints with the National Health Service. He was hospitalised for nearly two months, enduring the kind of challenges we never anticipated he would face. It is with sadness that we must accept that David is now unable to engage in his life’s work. His unwavering dedication to unveiling Real History has not only defined his career but also enriched the minds of readers worldwide. David’s situation, however, has placed us at a crossroads where the path forward demands collective support. This is an appeal to safeguard the essence of a man whose life’s work has been to bring us closer to the nuanced truths of our past. Your donations will be pivotal in two primary areas: Medical Care and Support: Your contributions will ensure that David receives exemplary care to manage his condition and uphold the highest quality of life. Preservation and Continuation of His Work: Financial support is also imperative to safeguard David’s extensive body of work. To participate in this crucial effort, please donate. Here, you’ll find all the necessary information to make your contribution. Regardless of size, every contribution is a step towards sustaining David’s impact on historical literature. Your support and solidarity in this challenging time are invaluable. We will keep you informed of his health and well-being as he faces this stage of his life with dignity. He is in good hands. Warm regards, David Irving’s family |
I’m very pleased to announce that our selection of HTML Books now contains works by renowned World War II historian David Irving, including his magisterial Hitler’s War, named by famed military historian Sir John Keegan as one of the most crucial volumes for properly understanding that conflict.
With many millions of his books in print, including a string of best-sellers translated into numerous languages, it’s quite possible that the eighty-year-old Irving today ranks as the most internationally-successful British historian of the last one hundred years. Although I myself have merely read a couple of his shorter works, I found these absolutely outstanding, with Irving regularly deploying his remarkable command of the primary source documentary evidence to totally demolish my naive History 101 understanding of major historical events. It would hardly surprise me if the huge corpus of his writings eventually constitutes a central pillar upon which future historians seek to comprehend the catastrophically bloody middle years of our hugely destructive twentieth century even after most of our other chroniclers of that era are long forgotten.
Carefully reading a thousand-page reconstruction of the German side of the Second World War is obviously a daunting undertaking, and his remaining thirty-odd books would probably add at least another 10,000 pages to that Herculean task. But fortunately, Irving is also a riveting speaker, and several of his extended lectures of recent decades are conveniently available on YouTube, as given below. [Editor's note: They have already been censored on YouTube, but can be viewed on BitChute.] These effectively present many of his most remarkable revelations concerning the wartime policies of both Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler, as well as sometimes recounting the challenging personal situation he himself faced. Watching these lectures (here and here) may consume several hours, but that is still a trivial investment compared to the many weeks it would take to digest the underlying books themselves.
When confronted with astonishing claims that completely overturn an established historical narrative, considerable skepticism is warranted, and my own lack of specialized expertise in World War II history left me especially cautious. The documents Irving unearths seemingly portray a Winston Churchill so radically different from that of my naive understanding as to be almost unrecognizable, and this naturally raised the question of whether I could credit the accuracy of Irving’s evidence and his interpretation. All his material is massively footnoted, referencing copious documents in numerous official archives, but how could I possibly muster the time or energy to verify them?
Rather ironically, an extremely unfortunate turn of events seems to have fully resolved that crucial question.
Irving is an individual of uncommonly strong scholarly integrity, and as such he is unable to see things in the record that do not exist, even if it were in his considerable interest to do so, nor to fabricate non-existent evidence. Therefore, his unwillingness to dissemble or pay lip-service to various widely-worshiped cultural totems eventually provoked an outpouring of vilification by a swarm of ideological fanatics drawn from a particular ethnic persuasion. This situation was rather similar to the troubles my old Harvard professor E.O. Wilson had experienced around that same time upon publication of his own masterwork Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, the book that helped launch the field of modern human evolutionary psychobiology.
These zealous ethnic-activists began a coordinated campaign to pressure Irving’s prestigious publishers into dropping his books, while also disrupting his frequent international speaking tours and even lobbying countries to bar him from entry. They maintained a drumbeat of media vilification, continually blackening his name and his research skills, even going so far as to denounce him as a “Nazi” and a “Hitler-lover,” just as had similarly been done in the case of Prof. Wilson.
During the 1980s and 1990s, these determined efforts, sometimes backed by considerable physical violence, increasingly bore fruit, and Irving’s career was severely impacted. He had once been feted by the world’s leading publishing houses and his books serialized and reviewed in Britain’s most august newspapers; now he gradually became a marginalized figure, almost a pariah, with enormous damage to his sources of income.
In 1993, Deborah Lipstadt, a rather ignorant and fanatic professor of Theology and Holocaust Studies (or perhaps “Holocaust Theology”) ferociously attacked him in her book as being a “Holocaust Denier,” leading Irving’s timorous publisher to suddenly cancel the contract for his major new historical volume. This development eventually sparked a rancorous lawsuit in 1998, which resulted in a celebrated 2000 libel trial held in British Court.
That legal battle was certainly a David-and-Goliath affair, with wealthy Jewish movie producers and corporate executives providing a huge war-chest of $13 million to Lipstadt’s side, allowing her to fund a veritable army of 40 researchers and legal experts, captained by one of Britain’s most successful Jewish divorce lawyers. By contrast, Irving, being an impecunious historian, was forced to defend himself without benefit of legal counsel.
In real life unlike in fable, the Goliaths of this world are almost invariably triumphant, and this case was no exception, with Irving being driven into personal bankruptcy, resulting in the loss of his fine central London home. But seen from the longer perspective of history, I think the victory of his tormenters was a remarkably Pyrrhic one.
Although the target of their unleashed hatred was Irving’s alleged “Holocaust denial,” as near as I can tell, that particular topic was almost entirely absent from all of Irving’s dozens of books, and exactly that very silence was what had provoked their spittle-flecked outrage. Therefore, lacking such a clear target, their lavishly-funded corps of researchers and fact-checkers instead spent a year or more apparently performing a line-by-line and footnote-by-footnote review of everything Irving had ever published, seeking to locate every single historical error that could possibly cast him in a bad professional light. With almost limitless money and manpower, they even utilized the process of legal discovery to subpoena and read the thousands of pages in his bound personal diaries and correspondence, thereby hoping to find some evidence of his “wicked thoughts.” Denial, a 2016 Hollywood film co-written by Lipstadt, may provide a reasonable outline of the sequence of events as seen from her perspective.
Yet despite such massive financial and human resources, they apparently came up almost entirely empty, at least if Lipstadt’s triumphalist 2005 book History on Trial may be credited. Across four decades of research and writing, which had produced numerous controversial historical claims of the most astonishing nature, they only managed to find a couple of dozen rather minor alleged errors of fact or interpretation, most of these ambiguous or disputed. And the worst they discovered after reading every page of the many linear meters of Irving’s personal diaries was that he had once composed a short “racially insensitive” ditty for his infant daughter, a trivial item which they naturally then trumpeted as proof that he was a “racist.” Thus, they seemingly admitted that Irving’s enormous corpus of historical texts was perhaps 99.9% accurate.
I think this silence of “the dog that didn’t bark” echoes with thunderclap volume. I’m not aware of any other academic scholar in the entire history of the world who has had all his decades of lifetime work subjected to such painstakingly exhaustive hostile scrutiny. And since Irving apparently passed that test with such flying colors, I think we can regard almost every astonishing claim in all of his books—as recapitulated in his videos—as absolutely accurate.
Aside from this important historical conclusion, I believe that the most recent coda to Irving’s tribulations tells us quite a lot about the true nature of “Western liberal democracy” so lavishly celebrated by our media pundits, and endlessly contrasted with the “totalitarian” or “authoritarian” characteristics of its ideological rivals, past and present.
In 2005, Irving took a quick visit to Austria, having been invited to speak before a group of Viennese university students. Shortly after his arrival, he was arrested at gunpoint by the local Political Police on charges connected with some historical remarks he had made 16 years earlier on a previous visit to that country, although those had apparently been considered innocuous at the time. Initially, his arrest was kept secret and he was held completely incommunicado; for his family back in Britain, he seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth, and they feared him dead. More than six weeks were to pass before he was allowed to communicate with either his wife or a lawyer, though he managed to provide word of his situation earlier through an intermediary.
And at the age of 67 he was eventually brought to trial in a foreign courtroom under very difficult circumstances and given a three-year prison sentence. An interview he gave to the BBC about his legal predicament resulted in possible additional charges, potentially carrying a further twenty-year sentence, which probably would have ensured that he died behind bars. Only the extremely good fortune of a successful appeal, partly on technical grounds, allowed him to depart the prison grounds after spending more than 400 days under incarceration, almost entirely in solitary confinement, and he escaped back to Britain.
His sudden, unexpected disappearance had inflicted huge financial hardships upon his family, and they lost their home, with most of his personal possessions being sold or destroyed, including the enormous historical archives he had spent a lifetime accumulating. He later recounted this gripping story in Banged Up, a slim book published in 2008, as well as in a video interview available here.
Perhaps I am demonstrating my ignorance, but I am not aware of any similar case of a leading international scholar who suffered such a dire fate for quietly stating his historical opinions, even during in darkest days of Stalinist Russia or any of the other totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Although this astonishing situation taking place in a West European democracy of the “Free World” did receive considerable media exposure within Europe, coverage in our own country was so minimal that I doubt that today even one well-educated American in twenty is even aware it ever happened.
Editor’s Note: Below, excerpts from the third chapter, ‘A Witch in the Family’, of David Irving’s book on Heinrich Himmler (available through Irving’s bookstore here).
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Himmler’s missing 1940 diary appeared on the auction block in Munich in 2006; we were languishing that year in a Vienna prison cell, convicted of ‘reviving the Nazi Party’ through views expressed sixteen years earlier. The original is now deposited under glass, like a rare poisonous beetle, in the museum of a medieval castle called Wewelsburg, of which we shall eventually hear more. We know that Professor Michael Wildt worked on Himmler’s 1937 diary in Moscow, and we obtained copies of the 1941 and 1942 diaries from the NA and the same archives.
There is one other trove to be mentioned: the papers of Himmler’s wife and daughter. Years ago, an Englishman won them at an auction in New York. Chaim Rosenthal, a crooked cultural attaché at the Israeli consulate, offered to the naïve Englishman to convey these to the U.K., but hastened back to Tel Aviv instead. He donated them to Tel Aviv university. Upon realising that they were twice-stolen property, the Israeli university quiet properly returned them, though to Rosenthal and not their rightful owner.
* * *
Not every child is blessed to have a school headmaster as a father, although Heinrich Himmler may not have considered it good fortune at the time. Heinrich had been born into such a teacher’s family in Munich, just two hundred and eighty days into the Twentieth Century upon which he was to leave such an indelible mark; some of his ill-starred contemporaries including Hans Frank and Martin Bormann were also born in 1900…
Their ancestral line stretched back over the centuries, its nodes and gridlines populated by a motley cast of businessmen, gendarmes, and schoolmasters. Heini’s own experts would trace them back to before Charlemagne. One of Heini’s female ancestors named Passanquay had been burned at the stake as a witch. Reinhard Heydrich would derive satisfaction from informing him in May 1939 of another unfortunate, Margareth Himbler, of Markelsheim, burned as a witch on Apr 4, 1629…
Having retired at sixty-five with the venerable rank of Geheimrat, or privy counsellor, the professor would die on October 29, 1936, before Heini’s fame had turned to infamy. His wife, Frau Geheimrat Anna, was remembered as a gentle little woman, a churchgoer. ‘She could not have hurt a fly,’ said one who knew her. They had been living on the second floor of No. 6, Hildegard Strasse, when she produced Heini, their second boy, on October 7, 1900… A few months later, in March 1901, they moved to a new apartment above a pharmacy in Liebig Strasse, in a genteel area of Munich.
A tall carved statue of Christ stood in the entrance hall—an heirloom left to their mother, and the boys crossed themselves each time before it, just as their parents did. Heini set up an Ahnen-Zimmer, an ancestral shrine, where he spent hours studying his ancestors… The photos show him already wearing the round-eyed glasses which were to become iconic later in his life.
He made many friends at the Gymnasium. One was Wolfgang Hallgarten, three months his junior and son of a New York Jew (but raised as a Lutheran). Heini occasionally visited their home; the boys’ governess Luise Essert discovered his passion for hot chocolate. It was a wealthy, enlightened household. Thomas Mann and Bruno Walter the conductor were among other guests, and the young physicist Werner Heisenberg played his cello within its walls. ‘We knew him from 1910 to 1913,’ wrote Hallgarten of Heinrich Himmler, rising rather notably to his defence in the 1950s, ‘the years when we were all students at the Royal Wilhelm Gymnasium in Munich’… ‘I for my part failed to discover the slightest anti-Semitic streak in him’, reminisced Hallgarten, referring to those shared childhood years at school. For many years he assumed that the fearsome Himmler that people spoke about was a brother, and not the boy he had known…
An older brother, named Gebhard like their father, had been born toward the end of the century which the world had left behind—on July 29, 1898 to be precise. A third son, little Ernst Hermann Himmler, arrived five years after Heini. He was born two days before Christmas in 1905. ‘Ernstl,’ as they called him, married Paula during World War Two, and would disappear on its last day, killed in action. Ernst had joined the Volkssturm, Germany’s ‘Home Guard,’ and when the Soviet Army attacked Berlin’s Charlottenburg district he went out, rifle in hand, to defend the Radio building with the rest of his staff and was not seen again…
‘If my parents’ house was an extraordinarily liberal, free, quiet one,’ recalled Karl, on trial for his life half a century later, ‘then the Himmler house was that of a strong orthodox Catholic schoolmaster, whose son was brought up strictly and kept very short of cash.’ Karl Gebhardt would accompany Heini throughout his life…
The Himmlers were a church-going family. They prayed together, and stayed together. His parent’s influence remained overbearing. Heinrich was received into the Catholic church on April 1, 1911; he placed in his private papers a printed ‘First Communion’ certificate based on a painting of Christ at the Last Supper; he went frequently to Mass and received Holy Communion kneeling at his father’s side, he celebrated his own family name-days and those of the Bavarian royal family. When Gebhard fell dangerously ill with pleurisy in 1914, they promised a pilgrimage to Burghausen and a special Mass if he recovered, and they kept their promise. Heini went to church every morning, and mentioned each visit in the diary in case the Lord had not caught sight of this little lamb attending His House…
This was not without its effect on the impressionable youngster. How he envied Gebhard when he turned on July 29 and signed up for the Landsturm, the reserve: ‘O, to be out there with the rest of them!’—meaning the fighting front. Instead he stayed behind, teaching Ernstl to swim, and went for walks to more churches and monasteries with his pious mother. Once they climbed up to see the church atop the Marienburg; Heini counted the steps on the way down, to where in 1143 a Cistercian monastery had been founded: 265 steps, he found. He entered the number in his diary…
* * *
Young Heini applied for a commission in the navy, we are told, but the navy turned him down, because of his poor eyesight… As Germany’s war fortunes declined, the request was refused. Heini left school on October 8, 1917 and began training as a Fahnenjunker with the 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment ‘Von der Tann’ in Regensburg. He formally entered military service on January 2, 1918. Still of indifferent physique, he found the training demanding…
With the war over… his godfather Prince Heinrich had been killed in action. In Bavaria the Communists had seized power, overthrown the Wittelsbach monarchy, and established a republic under the Jew Kurt Kamonowsky, better known as Kurt Eisner.
He began to sport a small toothbrush moustache, and this was no accident. Men who had entered the war with handlebar moustaches had trimmed them to fit the gasmask issued after they came under mustard-gas attack. The toothbrush moustache became the unstated badge of the western front veteran… He moved to Munich, where he would start his further education and eventually become involved, much against his will, in politics.
* * *
As for his father, we have a final glimpse of this extraordinary pedagogue. By now nicknamed Quince Face by his pupils, because of his jaundiced pallor, he retired with high honours aged sixty-five in 1930. In 1989 the writer Alfred Andersch published a semi-autobiographical novel, The Father of a Murderer. It was a fictional account of a school class dominated by a terrifying and sadistic Old Man Himmler, a class ending with Alfred’s summary expulsion…
Heini’s father died in 1936. He had never been the pedagogic sadist depicted by Andersch and his profitable pen, but a stern man of quiet discipline and abiding religious fervour, inspired by a genuine pietas bavarica. The Germans however like their comfortable stereotypes: The Andersch novel was filmed and is now required reading for German schoolchildren.
Stereotypes will continue to blur the image of Heinrich Himmler, confusing though it is. They choke history like bindweed in a jungle, through which we have first to hack and clear a path.
Editor’s Note: Below are excerpts from the second chapter, ‘Flawed’, of David Irving’s book on Heinrich Himmler (available through Irving’s bookstore here).
Like water splashes, the relics of Himmler’s life lie splattered around the globe. His household papers and some diaries are in Russia, his childhood epistles to his parents are stolen property in Israel, and his photo albums in Stanford, California – taken illegally by American Red Cross girls billeted in his lakeside villa in Gmund; the scores of letters to his mistress ‘Hedwig’ are owned by a soldier’s son who lived in Chestnut Street, Chicago, where we read them. Each tells us something about Himmler’s character: The Nordic runes he used to sign those letters… the manner in which he wrote a neat caption for each photo in ink using a Gothic script that is all but illegible now to his countrymen…
His interests were manifold. In early years he set aside time to immerse himself in archeology, in the occult, and the religions of the Far East. For Christmas 1938, he sent over to Hitler a book entitled Death and Immortality in the World View of Indo-Germanic Thinkers. He hoped it would mark a high point in the festivities, and signed it personally for his ‘Fuhrer’… In May 1938 Himmler despatched a year-long expedition to Tibet, headed by German zoologist Ernst Schäfer, to explore the story of a primaeval Germanic race which had inhabited the region.
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Editor’s Note: With the benefit of hindsight, and taking into account what I said yesterday about Robert Morgan’s interpretation of the American Civil War, it seems clear to me that the German expedition shouldn’t have been directed at distant Tibet, but at the United States of America, home of the Jewish golden calf in NY, Hollywood and media that would so influence the war, and of the Anglo-Saxon traitors who, led by Lincoln, had already waged a fierce anti-white war on the other side of the Atlantic.
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The British lies about Himmler, and his unseemly end, would outlast many who believed them. We shall find a different picture of Himmler emerging from the pages which follow…
SS Standartenführer (Colonel) Hans Lingner, commander of the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division was heard to remark months before the end in 1945: ‘It is generally said that Himmler is hated by the people. But that isn’t the case at all.’ He had heard of a speech Himmler once made with great applause to armament workers. ‘Afterwards even the most plain-spoken fellows went up and asked him to shake hands with them, it really came straight from their hearts. He’d be the right man for post-war. I believe, too, that he’d be able to make the change over. He would be able to see that everything has gone to the devil anyway, that our first duty now is to maintain the bare existence of the people…’
Carl Jacob Burckhardt remarked at the League of Nations to Roger Makins, Britain’s man in Geneva, a few weeks later that Himmler was ‘disgusted by the anti-Semitic outrages.’ Makins learned that Hitler too was ‘not pleased’ by the Kristallnacht… Himmler’s chief of staff Karl Wolff would say years later that he had become harder only as the Second World War progressed. He was an amiable human being who became what he was only as a result of the war’s rising climate of barbarism and brutality, said Wolff. His concern for his men was genuine, but carefully calculated. He knew how to ingratiate by a display of compassion and understanding…
There was one aspect on which all the sources agree. Himmler acquired no personal wealth. Even army officers admitted that he was incorruptible, and stood out from others in that respect. ‘He is the only man about whom you don’t hear anything bad,’ Major-General Bock von Wülfingen was heard admitting, to nods of approval from his fellow generals late in 1944. ‘He has neither lived in luxury, nor in great style.’ Himmler regarded financial wrong-doers as the worst, and punished them ‘mercilessly’ (as his bodyguard Josef Kiermaier put it). ‘Money spoils the character,’ he was heard to scoff. It was a paradox that Himmler, whose Operation Reinhardt from 1942 to 1943 would involve robbery on an unparalleled scale, should display anger at the petty thieving of others…
Himmler had bought a small lakeside villa at Gmund after the National Socialists came to power, on the shores of the Tegernsee lake in Bavaria; it cost around 65,000 Reichsmarks, not an impossibly large sum, but his income was only modest and it took him six years to clear the debt. Visiting him in 1938, his Ordonnanzoffizier Diether Lönholdt found the villa set some way back from the road, on the southern exit from Gmund; it was a two-storey building, with Himmler’s office on the ground floor. Josef Kiermaier, the police bodyguard who joined his staff in June 1934, often saw him there – usually in the summer or at Christmas. ‘Staying down at Gmund the Reichsführer lived with his wife and daughter, whom he adored,’ recalled Kiermaier. The Himmlers were popular with their neighbours: ‘His modesty and simplicity in dealing with the locals helped him gain their respect’…
In peacetime Berlin, Himmler’s routine had hardened. He was at his desk at ten, and his adjutant began showing in visitors – a late visitor would find his appointment cancelled – not just postponed. At two p.m. he and his circle ate in the canteen, a simple repast after which he worked on until eight p.m.; after supper he carried on until one or two in the morning. He recorded his punishing routine remorselessly in his diary, and once even repeated it to his mistress. ‘He’s a glutton for work,’ grumbled an army major, ‘and expects the same from others. They don’t have any private life.’ Asked where Himmler lived, the major revealed: ‘In Berlin, only he’s always rushing around elsewhere, he is totally driven, he works almost more than the Fuhrer.’ (The awed almost is to be remarked upon)…
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Editor’s Note: A true ‘priest of the fourteen words’!
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‘Foreign countries,’ said Meyer, with a trace of pride in his voice, ‘have realised that Himmler is top dog in the Reich. Goring is just a child.’ Kurt Meyer is now seen as one of the finest division commanders that Germany produced; when he died in 1961 fifteen thousand people attended his funeral in Hagen.
Barely noticed amongst his major sins, Himmler had a minor flaw. He displayed not even a passing interest in the arts. Risking disfavour at the highest level, he made no secret of his view that two hours could be spent more profitably than in the concert hall or theatre. This did not escape Hitler’s notice, and in 1945 he dismissed Himmler’s ambitions with one crushing remark: He is totally unmusikalisch – unmusical (or perhaps, ‘tone-deaf’). Albert Speer shared this judgment, saying, ‘He was unable to appreciate art.’
As a full-grown man, Himmler did have some friends – they came to visit, went hunting with him, or succumbed to his passion for fishing. His family albums have pictures of punting parties on their local lake – Himmler clad in felt hat and Lederhosen; Himmler seated on a flower-decked meadow at a picnic surrounded by family and friends, days before the ruinous attack on the Soviet Union. Shown the caricatures appearing in enemy propaganda, of Himmler the hangman, he just chuckled.
In fact he was not devoid of a certain grim sense of humour. At the end of November 1940, he joined a shooting Party in the Sudetenland, including Alexis Aminoff of the Swedish foreign ministry. On the first day, as they set out from Berlin in the customary large limousines, he stressed to Aminoff, seated next to him, the common Nordic bonds linking Germans and Swedes, and the many successful intermarriages including that of Goring for example. Unaware of Himmler’s identity, Aminoff countered that the Swedish press was free, and not in the grip of a secret police, whereupon Himmler identified himself with that jovial grin. The Swede weaseled his way out – he found this hard to believe, surely the real Himmler was always attended by a large bodyguard? ‘Inside Germany,’ the Reichsführer assured him, ‘I have no need of any bodyguard.’
The Party proceeded to wreak due slaughter on some three hundred cock pheasants on an estate formerly belonging to Archduke Frederick of Austria, and then at a shoot near Magdeburg, where one hundred boar(s) and sixty deer were no less sportingly put to death.
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Editor’s Note: Hitler was astonished to learn of these hunting escapades of Himmler and others. The Reichsführer may have been a priest of the 14 words, but Hitler was the priest of the 4 words as well (‘Eliminate all unnecessary suffering’).
I won’t read the first chapter for the moment because I am pained by David Irving’s hypothesis: that the Allies assassinated Himmler when he was taken prisoner, that it wasn’t suicide. But I will be reading my hard copy of this thick volume over the next few weeks until I finish it. So far as I have read the second chapter, Irving’s style is very readable, and I think anyone who considers himself sympathetic to National Socialism should buy it from the author’s bookstore.
The editing is splendid, and trying to read such magnificent books in PDFs is an outrage, as it is precisely these books that deserve to be in our personal library, with plenty of footnotes in our own handwriting.
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On the Boromirs
A commenter drew my attention to the most recent interview with Richard Weikart. I just watched the interview and at minute 35:40 Weikart said something that contradicts the impression I have of American white nationalism: ‘They are overwhelmingly anti-Christian’.
Most American white nationalists are either Christian or sympathetic to Christianity. Rare in American white nationalism is the person like Alex Linder who sees Christianity as evil, and there is no longer a truly central figure in that movement, as the late William Pierce, who has a negative image of Christianity.
It is a pity that there are no surveys to know the exact percentage of Christians or Christian sympathisers in white nationalism. But the impression I get after reading a dozen years of white nationalist sites is that, except for Linder, there is no major figure who truly abhors Christianity (Kevin Alfred Strom’s webzine is not as vehement as Linder in its criticism of Christianity).
Although brief, a good example of Christian racialists was seen recently in what was said to me in the comments section of The Occidental Observer, to which I have already referred a couple of times. The moderator didn’t let my last comment pass. In addition to answering his third question to one Occidentan, I suggested he read Pierce’s story of the race. It doesn’t matter that that answer of mine didn’t appear in TOO, as long as I was at least able to defend myself against the slanders that racialist Christians were casting on me.
As a good Christian, Weikart (who is almost exactly my age by the way), is anti-racist. The interview I heard today was very enlightening because it shows how the Christian religion clouds the otherwise clear understanding of such scholars. If I could answer Weikart I would tell him that regarding the leading white nationalist sites, the webzines of Jared Taylor, Kevin MacDonald and Greg Johnson, he won’t find overtly anti-Christian positions. Even a racialist site as much visited as Taylor’s according to the latest statistics I saw, Hunter Wallace’s, is openly Christian.
Given that Christianity is inherently anti-racist, the question that comes to mind is how much longer American white nationalists will continue to ignore the issue. People like Weikart, a good scholar of Hitler, are fascinating in that they show that, from the Christian POV, he is more consistent by being anti-racist than racist. Wallace may be looking to square the circle, but the other pundits mentioned in the previous paragraph simply ignore the CQ, the Christian Question. The West’s Darkest Hour will continue to be ignored by racialist Christians and even racialist non-Christians because an honest discussion about the religion of our parents is a taboo subject in the dissident right.
Changing the subject, today I received a mail from David Irving. The second volume of his biography of Himmler will be published next year. I am very much looking forward to reading it… It is infinitely more important to know Hitler and Himmler well than the Boromirs who covet the One Ring to the point of self-destruction. I hope that Weikart’s book, which will reach me this month, will help me in this endeavour.
Update of May 29: The comments are now closed on that TOO thread, and the moderator finally let my response to Occidentan pass. But it took some days for my comment to be approved.
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The Führer’s monologues (vi)
A detailed discussion of the content of Hitler’s monologues can be dispensed with in this context given the extensive recent Hitler research. However, even in the context of a brief sketch, references to facts that belong to the secured state of knowledge cannot be avoided.
First and foremost, Hitler bears witness to himself in his discussions, especially during the long evening and night hours when he spoke his thoughts ‘into the impure’. The man who was at the zenith of his power, who dominated large parts of Europe and directed the deployment of his armies in Russia, who could look back on a series of steady successes lasting more than ten years until the crisis of the winter of 1941/42, undoubtedly possessed high intellectual abilities. With his present knowledge in the field of military affairs, armament and technology, he always made a strong impression on those around him. This was no less true for problems of art and especially history and politics. On the other hand, he showed much less interest, as a long-standing confidant confesses, in questions of the ‘humanistic field of knowledge’.[1] Thanks to his extraordinary memory and remarkable knowledge of literature, Hitler achieved insights and findings in specialised fields that commanded the respect of many experts. He was usually superior to them in his ability to grasp the core of a problem immediately and to reduce complicated relationships to a simple denominator. Above all, Hitler not only knew but, according to the testimony of Grand Admiral Raeder, ‘formed views and judgements from it that were often remarkable’.[2] He was able to think in large contexts and was in many respects far ahead of his advisers, for example on the question of motorizing the German army.[3]
Hitler’s monologues at his headquarters bear witness to these abilities only to a limited extent. Examples are his terse remarks on questions of environmental protection, the warning against the consequences of unrestrained exhaustion of the earth’s reserves of raw materials (Monologue 1), the demand for better utilisation of the countries’ natural resources (15, 16), or even the realisation, by no means common at the time, that the automobile would overcome borders and link peoples together more strongly than before.
For Hitler, motorisation was an important step ‘on the way to a new Europe’ (2). The correctness of these and other insights are not affected by the fact that he hindered this development through his policies. Knowledge, worldview and political practice collided.
The extent to which the ‘Führer and Reich Chancellor’ was aware of this tension will not be clear. Even during his monologues at the Führer’s headquarters, he never forgot the necessary restraint regarding his intentions and plans. Even in the smallest of circles he did not betray any secrets, did not reveal doubts or uncertainty. At no time did he weigh up the pros and cons with his advisors before making major decisions, nor did he make it clear what the motives were for his actions in concrete political and military situations.
Heim’s notes testify to Hitler’s great self-control, but also his suspicious reserve. The guests at the table were given no indication of the information coming from Germany and abroad, how the German people reacted to the sacrifices and deprivations, and what repercussions the severe crisis of the winter of 1941/42 had on the population of the occupied territories and the allied states. In general, Hitler’s thoughts were far more on the past or the future than the present. With great willpower, he repressed the problems and worries of everyday life at the dinner table and acted as an attentive host, casually talking about Bruckner and Brahms or appropriate nutrition or reporting on events or figures from the early days of the NSDAP.
In this behaviour, however, another trait of Hitler’s becomes visible. He was not a political pragmatist who concentrated on solving the issues of the day, but the representative of a world view that he wanted to help to achieve victory. That is why he looked to the future, especially in times when a lot was coming at him. Convinced that he knew the ‘eternal law of nature’ (117) and that his mission was to help it come to fruition, he made great efforts to free himself from burdens and difficulties, to defy resistance and often even facts that did not fit into his concept. He knew very well the limits imposed on human action, but believed that through energy, especially through an unshakeable and uncompromising belief in his mission, he could push them far out and force people as well as powers under his spell.
Hitler was convinced that the epoch of the bourgeoisie was over and that the bourgeois nation-states would not survive the war. In his opinion, in the world war of the present day, they would inevitably disintegrate—since they lacked inner strength and a unifying force—and the vital and unconsumed layers of the nations would then strengthen the camp that fought with particular determination and faith. Just as National Socialism had prevailed in the internal political struggle against far superior forces of the parties and the means of the power of the state, so it had to assert itself in the war with the utmost determination and readiness to believe. Not the superior weapons, but the more devout fighters would ultimately bring about the decision.
On 27 January 1944, Hitler very clearly and firmly told the field marshals and commanders that it was precisely this devout readiness of each soldier that mattered. ‘It is completely unknown to many’, he declared, ‘how far this fanaticism goes, which in the past moved so many of my party comrades to leave everything behind them, to allow themselves to be locked up in prisons, to give up a profession and everything for a conviction… Such a thing has only happened in German history in the time of the religious wars, when hundreds of thousands of people left their homes, farm and everything and went far away, poor as church mice, although they had previously been wealthy people—out of a realisation, a holy conviction. That is the case again today’.[4]
There is no doubt that the National Socialists had an advantage over the bourgeois parties of the Weimar Republic because of their readiness to believe and devote themselves. And Hitler certainly helped his party overcome defeats and serious crises by never giving up, showing confidence especially in difficult situations and thus lifting his followers. Part of his strength lay in this steadfastness and belief in his mission (32). In the same way, Hitler also tried to convey to the German people during the war the feeling of superiority and the conviction of final victory. This undoubtedly succeeded to a great extent, as long as the expectations did not contradict the realities. In the long run, however, willpower and strength of faith were not enough to withstand the growing pressure of the war opponents. Among the concrete power factors on the opposite side that became more and more apparent was the internal stability of the Soviet Union, the efficiency of the Red Army and the economic strength of the country, the unity and willingness to resist of the British population, the industrial potential of the USA, the will of the nations of Europe conquered by Germany to live and to be free.
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Note of the Editor: Free? Western nations today are slaves of an ethno-suicidal religion spawned by the Allies right after WW2!
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It cannot be assumed that Hitler failed to recognise these realities, as his statements in the Führer’s headquarters would lead one to believe. Even in the conversations in his inner circle, he did not lose sight of the psychological effect of his words. Remarks such as that the Americans are ‘the dumbest people imaginable’ (82), assertions about England’s growing difficulties (81, 88) or Germany’s perpetual superiority in weapons technology (84) were intended first and foremost to strengthen the self-confidence of those around him. He felt it necessary to counteract the sober assessments of the situation by his political advisers, who, in his opinion, inhibited the momentum of the soldiers and the population through their restraint and caution. Hitler was convinced that he had only achieved so much thanks to his ‘mountain-moving optimism’ (79).
More fundamental importance is attached to the statements on questions of domestic policy and worldview. The leader of the Third Reich was a bitter enemy of the revolution with its egalitarian and democratic driving forces. In his opinion, it was destructive and its bearers belonged to the negative selection of the people. Again and again one finds the assertion that the judiciary had nurtured criminality during the First World War, that in 1918 it was only necessary to open the prisons and already the revolution had its leaders (18, 52, 60). In other contexts, however, the achievements of the revolution are praised. It did away with the princes (20), broke up the class state, challenged the monopoly of the educated and propertied bourgeoisie and thus opened up opportunities for advancement to empower people from the lower classes (26, 50, 56). Sometimes even credit is given to the revolutionaries. Given the ‘stupid narrow-mindedness’ of the Saxon bourgeoisie, for example, the influx of workers to the KPD in that country was very understandable (13), just as communists like Ernst Thälmann generally elicited much more sympathy from him than aristocrats like the Austrian Prince Starhemberg (13), who had even taken part in the 1923 putsch in Munich in his entourage.
In all this, however, Hitler left no doubt in his discussions about how closely he felt bound to the nation-state tradition of the 19th and early 20th centuries and intended to complete what had been developed and propagated before him in the way of large-scale concepts and imperial ideas. However, he was convinced that he would only achieve this goal if he could rely on a broader, more powerful and more vital support class. The bourgeoisie and the old ruling classes seemed unsuitable for this. In unusually harsh terms, he criticised the former German ruling houses as well as the ruling princes of Europe (9, 20, 55), the nobility, the officer corps (13,28,31), the diplomats (121), civil servants and lawyers (14,48,130), the intellectuals and scientists. Again and again, the bourgeoisie in toto is accused of half-heartedness, cowardice and incompetence (13,20). The capitalist system is not spared either (15). ‘The economy’, Hitler declared bluntly, ‘consists everywhere of the same scoundrels, ice-cold money-earners. The economy only knows idealism when it comes to workers’ wages’ (39).
Well-known representatives of German industry and some bourgeois experts who heard such and even harsher statements by Hitler considered him a radical zealot or even a Bolshevik in disguise.[5] This view, however, does not get to the heart of the problem any more than the opposite view, which wants to conclude from words of appreciation for entrepreneurs and praise for the efficiency of the German economy and its promotion that Hitler was dependent on these circles. In these monologues there is no evidence that Hitler wanted to serve the interests of capital. He did not bind himself to any class, he hardly took into account the interests of certain groups and strata. In the National Socialist state, classes were to be eliminated and thus all the forces of the people were to be set free, and all sections of the population were to be given opportunities for advancement and activity. All groups were to be united in the Volksgemeinschaft, the national community a new higher unit.
However, since in the National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft the rights and functions of the social groups were not finally defined, nor were the NSDAP and its branches assigned any clearly defined tasks, it functioned as long as everyone derived advantage from it and saw part of their interests and demands realised. As the demands grew, there were signs of fatigue, resignation and communal refusals. Hitler increasingly found himself criticising state organs (107), civil servants (41, 59), judges (130, 177), party leaders and ministers for being too lenient towards individual and group interests. However, as long as there was still a basic consensus among the majority regarding the goals for which they were fighting, the state and party leader imposed his will unchallenged in all decisive questions.
That this succeeded so unreservedly was undoubtedly due to the dynamism that the leader of the NSDAP had unleashed in Germany. He did this based on the realisation that in times of social upheaval, economic and political change, authorities and institutions reacted too slowly and sluggishly, that experts in all fields had insufficient answers and solutions to offer, and that as a result of the confidence in the state and its organs was severely shaken. If unconventional methods were practised in such situations, if alternatives were developed with unused forces, then these would receive an advance of confidence from the outset. Hitler built on this. Through the establishment of special offices, the granting of special powers and special orders, the National Socialist regime gained a remarkable momentum, initially even a momentum that lasted in some areas into the first years of the war.
However, this process also caused considerable difficulties. A seemingly endless chain of competence disputes and rivalries developed, leading to friction, disorganisation and, in many cases, failure. Hitler, to secure the support of all forces for the speedy implementation of his plans, triggered this dynamic and held on to the system even when the disadvantages became openly apparent. David Irving concludes, therefore, that he was far from being the all-powerful leader and that his influence over those directly under him diminished, especially under the extreme stresses of war.[6] This thesis is correct insofar as Hitler’s will did not always and in all areas penetrate to the lowest state and party organs, and was also interpreted and understood differently due to a lack of ideological unity in the party. In the monologues presented here, he complains about the failure of the SA leaders (79), the high-handedness of individual Gauleiters, and the inadequate implementation of his orders. But it is wrong for Irving to conclude that the conduct of the war so absorbed Hitler’s strength and concentration that he left the areas of domestic and occupation policy to his responsible ministers and confidants, especially Himmler, Goebbels and Bormann. The reader of these monologues can convince himself of the opposite.
Without him, the Führer and Reich Chancellor believed, Germany could pack up (79), and important decisions had not been made (32). Hitler was also convinced of his indispensability at his headquarters; he was excellently informed and did not fail to intervene wherever he thought it necessary. He criticised clumsy formulations in an editorial by Reich Minister Goebbels, registered events in individual districts, paid attention to the promotion of the arts, forbade attempts at administrative simplification in the war, ordered the shooting of the arsonist of the ‘Bremen’, supervised and reprimanded the judgements of German courts, took note with indignation of the sermons of the Bishop of Münster. As the minutes of the Speer Ministry meetings and many other testimonies show, Hitler allowed himself to be informed down to the last detail and made his own decisions, especially in domestic matters. No one knew better than he that the war could only be fought if a majority of the people followed it, or at least accepted the inevitable. For this very reason, he devoted extraordinary attention to the tasks of domestic policy, especially domestic security.
Even more important is another consideration. Hitler waged the war because it was the consequence of his worldview: the living space of the German people was to be conquered and secured for many generations. He spoke about this very forcefully again and again in his headquarters. Only this gain of land would create the prerequisite for solving the social question. By offering each individual the opportunity to fully develop his abilities, the National Socialist programmer hoped to reduce or eliminate the tensions and rivalries in the community (140). In this war of worldviews, Hitler did not lose sight of the goals for which he was waging it. The most important was the consolidation of National Socialist supremacy in Europe and the expansion of German influence in the world. General questions of occupation policy in East and West, as well as cooperation with allied states and peoples, belonged in this context. In Hitler’s view, German rule could only be secured if it succeeded in winning over as many people of ‘Germanic blood’ in the world as possible (125). The prerequisite for strengthening one’s nationality, however, was the repression and elimination of all those who were considered inferior and alien to the community: Jews, Slavs, Gypsies and others. Finally, it was a question of suppressing the influence of those circles that did not recognise war as the ‘law of life of peoples’, that did not want to accept the ‘right of the strongest’ in social coexistence, nor race and descent as criteria in professional competition: Christians, Marxists, pacifists. In these areas Hitler never delegated responsibility, but reserved every fundamental decision for himself. Irving’s assertion that Hitler was not informed about essential measures precisely in this area, which was central to him, cannot be substantiated. An analysis of the monologues points’ in the opposite direction.
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[1] Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler, wie ich ihn sah. Munich-Berlin 1974, p. 160 f.
[2] Erich Raeder, Mein Leben. Vol. 2, Tübingen 1957, p. 110.
[3] Fritz Wiedemann, Der Mann, der Feldherr werden wollte. Velbert and Kettwig 1964, p. 102.
[4] Excerpts from this speech can be found in the appendix to the collection of Bormann’s Führer Talks.
[5] Walter Rohland – Bewegte Zeiten. Erinnerungen eines Eisenhüttenfachmanns (Memories of an Ironworks Expert). Stuttgart 1978, p. 82 reports on a statement of displeasure by Hitler during a meeting. Afterwards he had declared, ‘If only I had destroyed the entire intelligentsia of our people like Stalin, then everything would have been easier!’
[6] David Irving,. London 1977, p. XV.
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A response to Ives
– This is a reply to a previous comment this morning –
Ives:
I made a big mistake in letting your first comment pass. The habit of trying to argue with white nationalists things that have already been much discussed on this site, made me forget what I promised in the last paragraph of my post the day before yesterday.
But I will no longer forget what I promised.
Just as a courtesy of passing a couple of your comments before I start implementing what I have promised, I’ll reply to what you say about Hadding Scott.
Hadding, with whom I discussed the issue of the so-called holocaust in a long thread at The Occidental Observer, is, unlike Alex Linder, a magnificent example of how axiological neo-Christianity prevents one from seeing what happened in WW2.
You might be interested to read an article explaining my position on David Irving. As Robert Morgan tried to convey to the racialists at The Occidental Observer six years ago: ‘In our culture, shaped as it has been by Christianity, the premier innocent victim is and always has been Jesus. He laid the groundwork; established the archetype. It’s inconceivable that the Holocaust racket would have been as successful as it has been in a non-Christian culture’.
And please, please, pay more attention to the letters in red in my sticky post. Thank you.
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Noon update: This is the crux of my above-linked article:
What is certain is that the Holocaust would not have produced any debilitating psychological effect on non-Christian whites. (By Christianity I mean ‘Christian morality’. Most atheists in the West are still Christian, even if they don’t believe in God or Jesus.) Being emotionally affected by the Holocaust presupposes that you think:
1) Victims and losers have intrinsically more moral value than conquerors and winners
2) Killing is the most horrendous thing a human can do
3) Killing children and women is even more horrendous
4) Every human life has the same value
None of these statements ring true to a man who rejected Christian morality. In fact, even if the Holocaust happened, I would not pity the victims or sympathize with them. If you told the Vikings that they needed to accept Jews on their lands or give them gold coins because six million of them were exterminated in an obscure war, they would have laughed at you!