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Category: Heinrich Himmler

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Heinrich Himmler Holocaust Holodomor Red terror

Time to use the spear, not the shield!

The recent exchange between Greg Johnson and Hadding Scott on the Holocaust is proof that at least some revisionists are deceiving themselves. Take a look at this:

A rational person who has agreed to the common understanding of what the word Holocaust means, and has given a little thought to the matter, would have to concede that Anne Frank was a victim [of] a wartime disease epidemic. The same kind of disease epidemic has occurred in many European wars… [—Hadding, way below]

So Hadding is saying that Anne Frank died of a natural cause, typhus epidemics, omitting to say that her body defenses were weakened as a result of being interned at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp!

Enjoy the whole exchange and pay special attention to Hadding’s semantic flim-flam (no ellipsis added between unquoted comments):

♣

Hadding said…

Holocaust revisionism primarily challenges the facts of the Holocaust narrative, usually focusing on death totals and techniques of extermination.

I am not aware of any important revisionist focused, as Greg Johnson says, on quibbling about death-totals. Jews always would like to say that revisionists are just quibbling about numbers, but serious revisionism has a much more radical criticism than that.

Second, Holocaust death totals are never going to be revised to zero.

The position of Professor Robert Faurisson is precisely that the Holocaust death-toll is zero. He is able to say this because he begins by defining the word Holocaust: an alleged program of the German government to kill all of Europe’s Jews. There is no evidence for such a program.

The question of how Jews died is crucial. Jews that died of typhus, like Ann Frank, are not legitimately counted as Holocaust victims, because in their deaths they were not intended victims of any program.

How is the German government supposed to have killed Jews in this program? Usually at least 4 million are claimed to have been killed in gas-chambers, either with HCN gas (Auschwitz-Birkenau) or diesel exhaust (Aktion Reinhardt). The other methods by which Jews are alleged to have been killed, hanging and shooting, cannot be unambiguously represented as part of a program to kill all Jews: when the Einsatzgruppen shot Jews on the Eastern Front in retaliation for guerrilla actions, or Jews in camps were hanged for sabotage, it did not have to be interpreted as the expression of an intention to kill all Jews. The gas-chamber story however is unambiguous. The gas-chamber story therefore is the Holocaust.

Because the gas-chamber story is the Holocaust, we can say that the death-toll of the Holocaust is precisely zero.

You can say that a lot of Jews died during the war (although Mark Weber becomes very irresponsible when he concedes that “millions” lost their lives) but there is not one that can be demonstrated to have been gassed. More to the point: there is no alleged homicidal gas-chamber that withstands forensic scrutiny.

When a criminal accusation has no evidence to support it, when key evidence ostensibly supporting the accusation turns out to be fraudulent, we take the position that the accusation is false.

Greg Johnson said…

Hadding, I deal with your points in section 5 above [Greg refers to his recent featured article at The Occidental Observer], in the third point of the bulleted list. Claiming that the Holocaust did not happen on the basis of a strict definition of the term (the plan to kill all Jews) strikes ordinary people as morally obtuse quibbling about definitions, which ignores the facts that (1) Jews were singled out for especially harsh treatment by the Germans, and (2) countless innocent Jews lost their lives because of that policy. In the end, that is all one need claim to say that the Jews suffered their greatest tragedy at the hands of the Third Reich during World War II. Even if the genocidal intent, the gas chambers, etc. go the way of human soap and lampshades, that fact is never going to disappear, so it is indeed fortunate that the fortunes of White Nationalism do not depend on Holocaust revisionism.

Hadding said…

The principle that a clear discussion has to begin with a clear definition of what is being discussed derives from Socrates and Plato. Staying in the realm of mushy, malleable terms, one can never really resolve anything.

Anybody who thinks that establishing what is to be proven is “morally obtuse quibbling” needs to be excluded from the discussion of adults.

I don’t care that most people’s thought-processes are mush. I am not going to compromise for them. You can’t really win those people anyway, until you control their TV shows. I am interested in the people that are able to think.

And there are White Nationalists who are not Holocaust revisionists. Indeed, there are some who hope that the revisionists are wrong.

I wonder who those people could be? The few such individuals that I have encountered over the years were very crude. To think this way would seem to require the combination of unusual degrees of thoughtlessness and callousness. I imagine such a person to be a low-grade criminal-type.

Is this a type of person whose opinion we should value?

Greg Johnson said…

Hadding, I should have said “normal” people rather than “ordinary” people. Normal people think that reducing the Holocaust death total to zero merely by stipulating a particular definition of the Holocaust is morally obtuse quibbling about definitions.

I think it is morally obtuse quibbling about definitions, which is something different than dealing with historical facts, namely the facts that the Germans singled the Jews out for harsh treatment and that many innocent Jews died because of these policies. That is the worst thing that ever happened to the Jews, and it will continue to be a millstone around our people’s neck until we deal with the real sources of Jewish power and white weakness.

Hadding said…

My view is that H-revisionism is not part of an intellectually sound defense of WN, whatever soundness H-revisionism might possess as a field of historical research.

You’re going to be dragged into that issue whether you want it or not. To respond that it has no relevance because you’ve drawn an imaginary chalk-line that puts Hitler (“Old Right”) on one side and Greg Johnson (“New Right”) on the other is not going to convince anybody, for one thing because nobody, so far as I know, has ever used the term Old Right that way before. Everybody is going to see you as trying to dodge the issue.

Hadding, I should have said “normal” people rather than “ordinary” people. Normal people think that reducing the Holocaust death total to zero merely by stipulating a particular definition of the Holocaust is morally obtuse quibbling about definitions.

Okay so I am abnormal because I demand clarity?

You said what you meant the first time. Ordinary people means people who don’t do much thinking. The Holocaust story has been able to survive largely because people don’t want to think about it. They would rather agree to give the Jews some money to take away the gory pictures than to investigate whether what is being said is valid or not. It is reprehensible that our thinking class has allowed the Jews to get away with this.

Any intelligent discussion of the matter must begin with a definition of what is being discussed. The fact that a typhus casualty like Anne Frank can be passed off as a famous “victim of the Holocaust” shows that failure to think through what is meant by the word Holocaust, i.e. failure to define the term, is a large part of the problem.

If you reject the proposition that terms have to be defined before a rational discussion can occur then I have to ask from what kind of sorry institution you got your doctorate, because, while you are manifestly able to churn out large quantities of verbiage as needed to meet word-counts and term-paper due-dates, the foundation of clear discourse has somehow been neglected.

Greg Johnson said…

RE “not dealing with the Holocaust” or “running away from the Holocaust”: you are begging the question, since I take pains to argue that WNs do need to deal with the Holocaust, but Holocaust revisionism is not the way to do it.

Hadding said…

since I take pains to argue that WNs do need to deal with the Holocaust, but Holocaust revisionism is not the way to do it.

You advocate a lame conservative response, which means not challenging the assumptions, even when you know that they are false. Idealistic people will have only contempt for this.

Greg Johnson said…

Hadding, you need to deal with my arguments rather than simply try to stick negative labels on them.

Hadding said…

Since I explained what I meant by conservative rhetoric (not challenging the enemy’s assumptions) it should be pretty much self-evident that this is an accurate description.

Greg Johnson said…

Hadding, I argued at great length what you label “challenging the enemy’s assumptions” (i.e., Holocaust revisionism) is not a winning hand for white nationalism. You don’t challenge that argument. You just try to hang a negative label on it. Well, if this be conservatism, then I’ll make the most of it, since my argument still stands unchallenged. Really, I am disappointed that you can’t come up with something better than this.

1. The distinction between the New Right and the Old Right is real, not imaginary, so it really does not matter what people who are ignorant or indifferent to truth say about it.

2. Google: Anne Frank Holocaust victim.

About 630,000 results come up. Yet you claim that she was not a Holocaust victim because she did not die in a gas chamber, or because the Germans were not trying to kill every Jew on the planet. Sensible people look at that kind of argument and conclude that they are being flim-flammed.

Hadding said…

Back in 2001, a very well-informed gentleman sat me down to explain Holocaust revisionism. The first words out of his mouth were, “No serious revisionist denies that a very large number of innocent Jews died as a result of the Third Reich’s policy of deporting Jews to concentration camps.” I said, “Stop right there. That’s all I need to hear. I didn’t need to hear any more…

That’s pretty stupid Greg. Now for some “morally obtuse quibbling.”

What is a large number of Jews? What is the relationship between the fact that they were deported and the fact that they died? Was it deliberate or accidental? Is what happened to the Jews in this situation a unique event that deserves a special name like “Holocaust” or was it similar to events that befell various other populations in modern times?

I will also say that the omission of the name of the “very well-informed gentleman” is interesting. Who was that man?

Honestly, Greg, I think you are overly sensitive to Jewish suffering. A man tries to tell you what happened and you say, “Stop right there! That’s all I need to hear!”

You need to “step over” that squeamishness and deal with the fact that what happened to Jews in WWII was not unique or special. It was not an attempt to kill all the Jews. Get your head on straight. Then when somebody mentions the Holocaust you can say with serene confidence, “There was no Holocaust.”

Greg Johnson said…

A “serene confidence” won through self-induced imbecility. I’ll pass.

Hadding said…

What you’ve passed on is putting thought ahead of sentimentality. You’ve passed on thinking like a man.

You pretend to be some kind of ideological kin to Jonathan Bowden but you really didn’t grasp what Bowden meant by “stepping over.” Here’s the passage from his speech, Nietzschean Ideas: it’s a short dialog to demonstrate how one ought to respond to moralizing, followed by a statement about what people usually do instead:

You just say, “Liberalism is moral syphilis, and I’m stepping over it.”
“Well I don’t like the sound of that! You sound like a bit of a Fascist to me!” And I’d say, “There’s nothing wrong with Fascism. Nothing wrong with Fascism at all.”

Everyone now adopts a reverse semiotic and runs against what they actually think in order to convince people that don’t agree with them anyway.

You, Greg Johnson, are doing and advocating the opposite of what Jonathan Bowden advocated, even while copying his phrase and pretending to be influenced by him.

Bowden is “stepping over” liberalism as “moral syphilis,” while you embrace and hang on to your squeamishness and even moralize to others that they should be squeamish too.

Bowden asserts that there is “nothing wrong with Fascism,” while you abuse his expression “stepping over” as a rhetorical excuse for distancing yourself from Fascism because you lack the fortitude to side with Bowden. You lack the fortitude to say that there is nothing wrong with Fascism.

You even engage in the “reverse semiotic,” as Bowden calls it, [for] trying to make our enemies’ rhetoric work for us. If Bowden were here, I think he’d be none too pleased with the pretense that you are implementing his ideas.

Greg Johnson said…

I cite one point by Jonathan Bowden that I agree with, and you pop up citing other points where we disagree, and pretend it is somehow a problem with my position. It really is childish.

I agree with Jonathan on the idea that the primary problem of the Holocaust is moral.

I disagree with him RE Fascism: there’s plenty wrong with historical Fascism. We should maintain what is good in it, but we can do better.

No, I am not running a “reverse semiotic”: I am saying what I really believe. So stop bobbing and weaving and making things up and start dealing with the actual argument.

Hadding said…

You and Bowden are utterly opposite. Bowden puts a high value on thinking and masculinity. You represent dodging issues while using some specious excuse.

You are using a reverse semiotic, for example, when you justify your use of the term Holocaust with Google hits. That is not a result of any thinking on your part. You are not authentic, you are not thinking; instead you are trying to operate within the enemy’s rhetoric and assumptions. That is a reverse semiotic.

Greg Johnson said…

Hadding, I accept your confession of bad faith and inability to deal with my arguments.

Hadding said…

Backhanded insults from Greggy:

1. Hadding is not normal.
2. Hadding is morally obtuse.
3. Hadding has “self-induced imbecility.”
4. Hadding speaks in “bad faith.”
5. Hadding is unable to deal with Greggy’s arguments.

I think I’ve dealt very concisely with your slop. Forgive me for not providing excess verbiage for you to nitpick so that you can distract attention from my core points.

Greg Johnson said…

The Google search is a good tool to determine public opinion. If you ask any of our brainwashed brothers and sisters to name one person who died in the Holocaust, I guarantee Anne Frank would top the list. Since these are the people whose minds Holocaust Revisionists presumable wish to liberate, one needs to know what they think.

Now, imagine what kind of figure Hadding cuts when he says, huffily, that Anne Frank did not die in the Holocaust, because (a) she did not die in a gas chamber and the Holocaust is defined as killing Jews in gas chamber, or (b) there was no Holocaust, because the Holocaust means the attempt to kill all Jews, and the Nazis did not do that.

I submit that anyone who took that sort of tack would be seen, correctly, as a flim-flam man. But let me ask some of the other commentators here: what do you think of Hadding’s tactic? Does it free our people of the burden of Holocaust guilt, or does it make revisionists look bad?

Or do you all just ignore him?

Greg Johnson said…

White guilt and self-punishment induced by the Holocaust is a serious impediment to white survival.

So we have to attack this problem. There are basically two ways to do it.

First, one can attack the Holocaust itself via revisionism.

Second, one can attack the psychological and moral roots of the guilt and self-punishment.

The problem with revisionism is that it cannot revise away the fact that the Germans singled Jews out for harsh treatment and a lot of Jews died as a result. The only thing that can be revised away are the lies and myths told about these events after the fact. But no serious revisionist denies these facts, and those facts are Holocaust enough for Jews to be guilt tripping us until the sun burns out.

Does anybody need any clarification of this argument so far? So we need to attack our susceptibility to the guilt-tripping.

Exposing the nefarious lies told about these facts does not deal with the problem, because the victims did not tell the lies. The survivors did. And the victims will still be pitied, even if the survivors are revealed to be contemptible liars and swindlers.

So again, we need to focus on immunizing ourselves to susceptibility to the guilt-tripping.

Arguing that the word “Holocaust” does not apply to the innocent Jewish casualties of the Third Reich is merely a semantic flim-flam, since all those poor dead Jews are still there tugging at our heart-strings, no matter what we call it, or how they were killed, or the motives for the killings, or the stories told about the killings long after the war—which are the subjects of revisionism.

Even if not a single hair on an innocent Jewish head were harmed in the Third Reich, whites would be guilt-tripping and self-flagellating over slavery, the American Indians, and the passenger pigeon.

So again, we need to deal with the moral and psychological roots of the problem.

Hadding said…

Since this is a swipe specifically directed at me, let me just see if I can give a clearer response than I’ve given already.

Arguing that the word “Holocaust” does not apply to the innocent Jewish casualties of the Third Reich is merely a semantic flim-flam, since all those poor dead Jews are still there tugging at our heart-strings, no matter what we call it…

It’s not about what word is to be used. You’re not grasping at all what is accomplished by defining the word Holocaust before we discuss it. If we define our terms, we gain the possibility of clear discussion. From clear discussion you can get clarification of thoughts, so that people may end up with a radically different understanding of a matter as a result of discussing it.

Most people think that “Holocaust” means the attempt by the German government to kill all the Jews. In particular, they understand this to mean killing with gas-chambers. That definition has implications. We can reasonably ask whether various aspects of what passes for the Holocaust make sense under that definition.

How does a typhus epidemic make sense as part of a government’s attempt to kill all the Jews, when the epidemic could not be limited to Jews? A rational person who has agreed to the common understanding of what the word Holocaust means, and has given a little thought to the matter, would have to concede that Anne Frank was a victim a wartime disease epidemic. The same kind of disease epidemic has occurred in many European wars, as far back as the Great Plague of Athens in the Peloponnesian War. But death in a disease-epidemic is really not what we mean we say “the Holocaust.”

What has been more powerful than any other piece of “evidence” in securing popular belief in the Holocaust have been the films and images of emaciated people, dead and alive, from concentration camps captured by the Western Allies. Then you find out that the places where those films were made are no longer claimed to have been killing centers, and that what the images show is the effect of a typhus epidemic. So, since we have defined the term Holocaust as a deliberate attempt to kill all the Jews, we suddenly find that what has convinced most people that the Holocaust occurred is really not evidence for it at all. Those images have been used as spurious evidence to convince the public that the Holocaust story, specifically the gas-chamber story, was true, when a little bit of information and rational consideration reveals that they prove no such thing.

A reasonable person at this point may understand that he has seen essentially no evidence for this claim called “the Holocaust” that he always accepted as true.

Definition of terms is the prerequisite for clear discourse. Sometimes when you clarify the meaning of a word and compare the meaning to specific examples, you find out that what the word was supposed to signify doesn’t exist. This is not “flim-flam”: this is philosophy.

Greg Johnson said…

[responding to another commenter]

1. Yes, I argue that “Whites should concede that Jews suffered during World War II.” It is true, and no serious revisionist denies it, and that is all Jews need to keep playing violins and tugging at the heartstrings of morbidly conscientious whites until we cease to exist.

2. You then state:

“then you go on to believe that this warrants the continued application of ‘The Holocaust’, as if there was something exceptional about Jewish suffering and as if among all of the peoples that suffered in that war, they are so clearly individuated as a people as to warrant the dignity of a separate name and distinct narrative for their experience.”

I think there is a major confusion here.

First, I will charitably assume that, unlike Hadding, you are not merely objecting to the term “the Holocaust” and pretending that such autistic semantic quibbles matter.

Second, the major point of my article is that Whites need to stop caring so much about dead Jews. We need to stop thinking like Jews (i.e., in a Judeo-centric way) and come up with a white-centered perspective on genocide, because whites are being destroyed right now by soft, cold genocide. Moreover, Jews are the major architects of that genocide. Jews have (and continue) to subject whites to genocide on a far larger scale than anything that happened to the Jews in WW II. Once we start thinking that way, we are immune to the Holocaust guilt trip.

Third, everything is unique metaphysically speaking. But everything is also comparable to everything else. Jews insist that the Holocaust is both unique (which is trivially true) and incommensurable (which is false). That is just a projection of Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism, which the rest of humanity needs to identify and reject. Jews can sell this absurdity because they have the power and money to do so. We need to immunize our people so they stop buying it.

3. You are misrepresenting my views on Israel. Philosophically speaking, if ethnonationalism is true and good, it applies to Jews too. I think we need to be consistent and principled on that point.

But that does not imply any sort of political support of Israel: no aid, no alliances, nothing. Of course it doesn’t exclude them either. For it is conceivable that a WN state might find such things to be in their interests (really in their interests).

As for any relations between WNs today and Jews: I make it very clear that the European nationalists who suck up to Jews are fools who are being played. Jews are the most powerful people on the planet. White nationalists have no power at all. Nobody makes alliances with the powerless. So when Jews try to establish friendly ties with White Nationalists, there can be only one agenda: the subversion of White Nationalism.

Hadding said…

First, I will charitably assume that, unlike Hadding, you are not merely objecting to the term “the Holocaust”…

I have explained very clearly that this is not what I am about. I define terms so that they can be discussed intelligently.

This accusation of merely trying to change what things are called as a kind of “flim-flam” is really projection on your part.

♣

Read the 500+ responses to Greg Johnson’s piece at TOO here.

As to whether or not millions of Jews died as a result of the “harsh treatment” they received in the Third Reich, this is my strategy: Stop using revisionism as a shield against the Jews’ accusations (“I didn’t do it!”). Use your spear instead (“You started the massive killing of white civilians, fucking kikes!”). As explained in my response to Greg in the above-linked thread:

So we need to rethink the issue and find a new way. [—Greg Johnson]

The “new way” is so obvious. Forget revising the Holocaust story. Focus on what the Jews actually did: Yagoda killed more innocent people than those attributed to Himmler.

As someone who used to comment at TOO [Wandrin] has said: Hitler didn’t win an electoral majority. He won most seats and was given the Chancellorship by the German elite in 1933: the year after the Jewish Bolsheviks deliberately starved six million Ukrainians to death. Can there be any real doubt that the threat of the Bolshevik terror influenced both the German voters and the decision to give Hitler the Chancellorship? Why isn’t this taught in the schools?

Tens of millions killed in the first industrial scale mass murder in history from 1917 onwards—the Red Terror and War Communism under Lenin and Trotsky’s leadership long before Stalin—culminating in the deliberate starvation of six million Ukrainians in 1932 as revenge for past anti-Jewish pogroms. Why isn’t this taught in the schools?

Trillions of dollars and millions of man-hours have gone into creating a global memorial to the Holocaust—films, books, indoctrination of millions of school children, countless museums—and absolutely nothing to commemerate the tens of millions murdered by the Jewish Bolsheviks? Not only a Holocaust in its own right but the primary cause of the subsequent Fascist reaction they say came out of inherent evil of the Aryan nature: a position that would be impossible to sustain if Jewish involvement in the Bolshevik holocaust was more widely known.

So, compare and contrast the collective memorial to the Jewish dead with the collective non-memorial to the non-Jewish dead and you have Talmudic morality caught in the headlights.

Every single penny they spent on building Holocaustianity then works for us. Every film, every book, every museum highlights their denial of the Bolshevik holocaust and the value they place on non-Jewish dead: Zero.

Use this to destroy their moral authority first and then their power to enforce taboos…

Time to use the spear, not the shield!

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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Fifteen comments about this article can be read at Counter-Currents Publishing.