web analytics

Category: ‘Hitler’ (book by Brendan Simms)

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 40

Rare Hitler pictures.

During this period, Hitler continued to elaborate and develop his strategic thinking. Throughout 1923, he lambasted international capitalism—Jewish and non-Jewish—as the source of Germany’s ills. Hitler provided a brief foreword to Gottfried Feder’s book on the subject describing it as a ‘catechism’ of National Socialism. The salience of anti-capitalism, fears of expropriation and exploitation and enslavement by foreign masters is very clear in the party’s ‘work of the committee for food security of the National Socialist movement’, which Hitler blessed in the summer of 1923. It defined the ‘internal enemy’ as ‘profiteering in the system of the national economy’, the ‘idea of class conflict’ and ‘immoral tendencies in government and law-making’. It lamented the crucifixion of the German middle class by the ‘massive fraud’ of ‘our money economy’, the general ‘spirit of speculation’ and the ‘terror of the capitalist idea’. The document made no direct mention of Bolshevism or the Soviet Union. It recommended—with Hitler’s approval—that the state protect the ‘basic assets of the nation’, namely ‘foodstuffs and manpower’ through ‘an anti-capitalist legislation in the fields of land and settlement, housing, but also in the first instance in the field of the supply of necessities’. This would require the ‘exclusion of foreign capital from German land and soil, businesses and cultural assets’.

Like the Ludendorff circle, Hitler was much less worried about the fate of German minorities and the peripheral lands of the Reich than about the fate of the core area, which he believed to be threatened with subjection and even extinction. Hitler was also beginning to look at long-term solutions to Germany’s predicament. He rejected the common notion of an ‘internal’ colonization of sparsely populated German lands in favour of territorial expansion. ‘The [re-]distribution of land alone,’ he warned in the spring of 1923, ‘cannot bring relief. The living conditions of a nation can at the end of the day only be improved through the political will to expand.’

The concept of Lebensraum is already clearly visible here, though the term itself was not used.

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Free speech / association

Hitler, 39

Hitler’s position at this time was complicated. He was still virtually unknown in most of Germany. The main Berlin newspapers ignored him and his party. They didn’t even report on the riotous Deutscher Tag at Coburg, whose resonance was confined to south Germany. Hitler had very few funders outside of Bavaria, with the notable exception of the Ruhr industrial baron Fritz Thyssen, who contributed substantially in the course of 1923. That said, within the non-particularist Bavarian right­ wing nationalist milieu, Hitler now enjoyed a commanding position. He was well known in Munich, which Thomas Mann described in a 1923 letter to the American journal The Dial as ‘the city of Hitler’. His speeches drew large and ecstatic crowds. Karl Alexander von Müller, who heard him speak for the first time at the Löwenbräukeller in late January 1923, describes the ‘burning core of hypnotic mass excitement’ created by the flags, the relentless marching music and the short warm-up speeches by lesser party figures before the man himself appeared amid a flurry of salutes. Hitler would then be interrupted at almost every sentence by tempestuous applause, before departing for his next engagement.

Over the next few months, the tempo of Nazi events and activities increased. There were in excess of 20,000 NSDAP members at the start of 1923, and that figure more than doubled over the next ten months to 55,000; the SA nearly quadrupled from around 1,000 men to almost 4,000 during the same period. Hitler himself was so prominent that the NSDAP was widely known as the ‘Hitler-Movement’, the term under which his activities were now recorded by the Bavarian police. He had become a cult figure. The Völkischer Beobachter became a daily paper in February 1923, giving preferential treatment to the printing of Hitler’s speeches. Two months later, it began marking the Führer’s birthday, an honour not accorded any other Nazi leader. He had long given up the humble role of drummer. Hitler spoke once again of the need for a dictator. The German people, he claimed, ‘are waiting today for the man who calls out to them: Germany, rise up [and] march’. There was no doubt from the context and rhetoric that he planned to play that role himself. His followers styled him not merely the leader of the national movement but Germany’s saviour and future leader. The Oberführer of the SA, Hermann Goring, acclaimed him at his birthday rally on 20 April 1923 as the ‘beloved Fuhrer of the German freedom movement’. Alfred Rosenberg described him simply as ‘Germany’s leader [Führer]’.

Conscious of his tenuous position within the Catholic Bavarian mainstream, Hitler continued to try to build bridges to the Church, or at least to its adherents. ‘We want,’ Hitler pledged, ‘to see a state based on true Christianity. To be a Christian does not mean a cowardly turning of the cheek, but to be a struggler for justice and a fighter against all forms of injustice.’ The NSDAP did succeed in making some inroads among Catholic students at the university and the peasantry and in winning over quite a few clerics, including for a while Cardinal Faulhaber, but for the most part Hitler made little headway.

There are two things we might comment on in this passage.

First, we are living in a world of soft totalitarianism. We can already imagine a National Socialist party in Europe today that could recruit thousands of members! That would not even be possible in the US, despite its hypocrisy in claiming that its amendments allow citizens both free speech and freedom of association (in reality, Uncle Sam allows neither, as we saw a few years ago in Charlottesville).

The other issue is this saying that true Christianity doesn’t turn the other cheek but fights injustice. While a hundred years ago it was possible to use this kind of rhetoric in the more conservative sectors of Bavarian society, today it is impossible. The mainstream Christian churches follow the zeitgeist of our century, without exception. I am not criticising Hitler’s use of this rhetoric. But under the circumstances, post-1945 National Socialism must reinvent itself.

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 38

Part Two

F R A G M E N T A T I O N

In 1923-7, Hitler grappled with the forces of disintegration in Germany. The most immediately threatening of these remained German particularism, which was largely indistinguishable in his mind from separatism. Hitler was also deeply exercised by the supposed racial fragmentation of the German people. This he attributed partly to deep political divisions, aggravated by foreign and Jewish support for parliamentarism, and partly to the historical legacy of confessional strife. Hitler attempted to head off these dangers through a putsch in Munich. In his subsequent speeches and writing, Hitler contrasted this miserable vista with the natural coherence of the Anglo-American world, which now dominated Germany more than ever, not just militarily, but economically and culturally as well. Last but not least, during his prison term at Landsberg and after his release, Hitler fought the threatened fragmentation of the NSDAP. It was only with difficulty that Hitler re­-established his authority over the ideological direction of the movement and the party apparatus, a process that was not yet complete by the late 1920s.

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 37

For the first eighteen months or so after his political emergence in 1919, Hitler seems to have conceived of the revival of Germany as a long-term process, in which he would play a supporting role, and which he might not live to witness himself. Even after his shift from Trommler to Fuhrer in mid 1921, he advocated a steady process of ideological transformation rather than an insurrectionary takeover. During this period Hitler was an attentiste, waiting for his propaganda and the march of events to turn the German population in his direction. ‘People are still far too well off,’ he remarked to Hanfstaengl, ‘only when things are really bad will they flock to us.’

In the second half of 1922, however, in the first of many temporal shifts in Hitler’s career, he began to envisage a much shorter timeline. A new urgency crept into his rhetoric and actions; evolutionary languor gave way to revolutionary fervour. Germany, he argued, needed a ‘dictator’, that is, ‘a man who if necessary can go over blood and corpses’. His regime ‘could then be replaced by a form of government similar to that of the Lord Protector’, which in turn could be followed by a monarchy. This recourse to English history, which gives a sense of Hitler’s range of historical reference, was a clever pitch for conservative backing for a coup which would give him dictatorial power, but held out the prospect of an evolution via a German Cromwell and a General Monk to the restoration of the monarchy. Driving this process was Hitler’s growing conviction not only that he alone could save the country, but that a perfect storm of domestic challenges and external threats made it imperative that he do so soon. Time was speeding up. Germany was out of joint, and Hitler was more and more convinced that only he could put things right.

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 36

There was an important shift in Hitler’s spatial thinking around 1922, however. He came to see eastward expansion as the solution. ‘In terms of foreign policy,’ Hitler said in December 1922, ‘Germany should prepare for a purely continental policy’ and ‘avoid violating British interests’. ‘One should try to destroy Russia with the help of Britain,’ he continued. ‘Russia,’ Hitler went on, ‘would provide sufficient soil for German settlers and a wide area of activity for German industry.’ Though he had not yet alighted on the phrase Lebensraum, a further major plank of Hitler’s thinking, the need for territorial enlargement to the east in order to secure the food supply of the German people and staunch the haemorrhage of emigration, was now in place. This was a policy primarily driven by fear and emulation of Anglo-America rather than anxiety about eastern communism or a desire to eliminate the Jews living there…

Hitler had said much less than one might expect about the Soviet Union, and his fear of communism was dwarfed by that of capitalism. Even more remarkably, though there were some routine scatter-gun imprecations against the Poles in specific contexts to do with disputed territories in the east, he had shown no signs of a blanket hostility towards Slavs in general or the Russian people in particular. What later became the Lebensraum conception was visible, but only in outline. His intellectual formation was not yet complete.

His authority in the party, by contrast, was now well established.

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 35

Hitler sometimes liked to say that the hard part was reviving Germany domestically; thereafter, dealing with her foreign enemies would be easy. In reality, he was under no illusions.

A nationalist revival would make Germany ‘capable of making an alliance’ again, but this was only a necessary, not a sufficient condition to secure her position in the world. That would require actual allies. Temperamentally, Hitler was not averse to a Russian alliance, preferably without the communists, but if necessary with them. ‘We must try to connect to the national [and] anti-Semitic Russia,’ he demanded, ‘not to the Soviets.’

That said, in August 1920, nineteen years before the Hitler-­Stalin Pact, he remarked that he would ‘ally not only with Bolshevism but even with the devil in order to move against France and Britain’. He feared, however, that this attempt to break free through a Russo-German pact would simply be crushed by the British and French. A British alliance was far more desirable, if that country could be kept out of the hands of the Jews.

Instead, Hitler looked further afield, at least conceptually. He hoped that he could confront the forces of international financial capitalism with the united front of the ‘International of the productive’, to mobilize ‘voices for the defence of the rights of the productive peoples’. Germany would spearhead this effort, by purifying itself first. Hitler demanded no less than a pan-Aryan international anti-Semitic front. Inverting the Communist Manifesto’s famous slogan, he announced: ‘not proletarians of all countries unite, but anti-Semites of all countries unite!” Aryans and anti-Semites of all peoples,’ he elaborated, ‘unite to fight against the Jewish race of exploiters and oppressors of all peoples.’ He repeated these injunctions in various forms on many occasions throughout the early 1920s, and indeed beyond. Though Hitler never suggested that Nazism was ‘for export’, he was clear from the beginning that his programme required a high degree of international cooperation among international anti-Semites to compensate for Germany’s weakness.

In the long run he believed that none of this would make any difference unless Germany solved the question of ‘space’.

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Benito Mussolini

Hitler, 34

[Hitler] enthused about Italy, where Mussolini and his fascists seized power in late October 1922 through his iconic ‘March on Rome’. Shortly after, Hitler remarked coyly: ‘one calls us German fascists’, adding that he did not want to go into ‘whether his comparison is true’. He was soon more forthright, demanding ‘the establishment of a national government in Germany on the fascist model’. A year later, he told an interviewer from the Daily Mail that ‘If a German Mussolini is given to Germany, people would fall down on their knees and worship him more than Mussolini has ever been worshipped.’

Hitler now broke with the mainstream nationalist and revisionist consensus, which demanded that Italy surrender German-speaking South Tyrol. He argued that any new ‘national government’ would only be able to establish itself if it secured some major victories. These would be hard to achieve on the economic front, Hitler believed, and so the best bet was the incorporation (Anschluss) of Austria. This would require not only British but Italian approval. Moreover, Germany should align itself more generally with Mussolini’s Italy, ‘which has experienced its national rebirth and has a great future’. For both of these reasons, he condemned the ‘palaver’ about South Tyrol of the other nationalists in the strongest terms, emphasizing that ‘there are no sentiments in politics, only the cool calculation of interest’.

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) French Revolution Savitri Devi

Hitler, 33

Le Serment du Jeu de paume by Jacques-Louis David (c. 1791), depicting the Tennis Court Oath.

More immediately relevant to Germany’s predicament were the dramatic recent examples of national revival, where peoples had bounced back from decline or catastrophic defeat. Perhaps surprisingly, Hitler was open to inspiration from France. ‘The French Revolution was national and constructive,’ he argued, ‘whereas the German one wanted to be international and to destroy everything.’ Hitler took a similarly positive view of later French radicalism. ‘When France collapsed at Sedan,’ he wrote, ‘one made a revolution to rescue the sinking tricolour!’ ‘The war was waged with new energy,’ he continued, and ‘the will to defend the state created the French Republic in 1870’, thus restoring ‘French national honour’. This shows that Hitler’s fundamental objection was not to the ‘ideas of 1789’, which he hardly ever mentioned. His real trauma—to which we will return later—was the fragmentation of Germany beginning with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.

The way I quote from Brendan Simms’ book may seem strange. I read through it and, when I come across a passage that requires comment, I pause and comment on it here.

The passage above, for example, strikes me as remarkable because it shows us a young Adolf who was unaware that the egalitarian ideas of 1789 were already symptomatic of a cancer in which Christian ethics were secularised to be metastasised in subsequent centuries. Recall that the French had been inspired by the American Revolutionary War of 1775-1783 and that in turn these American ideals were inspired by Protestant ethics (those who haven’t read Tom Holland’s Dominion should at least read our excerpts now). The young Hitler, naturally, didn’t have all this in mind. He was first and foremost a politician, not exactly a philosopher and certainly not, to use my metaphor, a visionary who sees the remote past in a cave north of the Wall (for example, to realise that Protestantism is behind today’s mass psychosis if we psychoanalyse the West from the remote past).

One of the things that distinguishes me compared to the American organisation founded by George Lincoln Rockwell is that, unlike the Commander, I am convinced that National Socialism must be understood as an organism in continuous development. And NS is developing even in the darkest age of the West in which Savitri Devi used the metaphor of ‘gold in a furnace’, in the sense that all the chaff burns in the burning furnace and only the element gold, which being a chemical element cannot burn there, will survive it.

Although Savitri came up with this metaphor at a time when the denazification of Germany was in full swing, in our time it could be said that the fire of that furnace has already burnt up all the chaff, except for people like us who continue to believe in Uncle Adolf’s ideals.

But Uncle Adolf couldn’t have known what we now know! His untimely death in 1945 prevented him from realising the levels of anti-white delirium to which the white man would fall after the decades-long process of trying to demonise NS throughout the West!

A mature NS man has to take into account the darkest hour for the white man and explain it. One oblique way to do this is to realise that American white nationalism has gone astray. It is at a dead end, as I said this morning in this thread.

It is high time to be humble; to retrace our steps from that alley, and return to the main avenue leading us to a National Socialism of the 21st and 22nd centuries. But I don’t see that humility anywhere on the racial right…

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 32

Hitler was also increasingly interested in the United States, which he came to regard as the repository of (in his view) all the best European racial elements, including the supposedly better sort of Germans. He remarked that, unlike Germany, which admitted swarms of eastern Jews, ‘yellow people are not allowed to settle in America’. In August 1922 he was introduced to Kurt Lüdecke, who had spent some time on business in the United States and whom Hitler would later send as an emissary across the Atlantic. In the middle of that month, Rudolf Hess wrote on Hitler’s behalf to the legendary automobile manufacturer, and fervent anti-Semite, Henry Ford for support. Moreover, Anglo-America was also becoming interested in Hitler. He had appeared on the radar of the British Foreign Office as early as 1920, and by later 1922 he was firmly established in their minds as a figure to be reckoned with, but there was no attempt to make contact with him.

By contrast, the United States embassy, probably influenced by Mussolini’s coup in Italy, decided to take a closer look at this rising politician. In November 1922, the US assistant military attaché to Germany, Captain Truman Smith, came down from Berlin and met with Hitler on 20 November. Hitler argued that he was America’s best chance of keeping the Bolsheviks out of Germany, condemned monarchy as ‘an absurdity’, claimed that ‘dictatorship’ was the only answer, denied any plans for a war against France and railed against ‘the present abuse of capital’. To be sure, these were all things that the American wanted to hear—apart from the remarks on capitalism—but they also represented Hitler’s genuine views. One way or the other, the two men—both Wagnerians—seem to have hit it off. A ‘marvelous demagogue’, Smith wrote a few days later. ‘I have rarely listened to such a logical and fanatical man. His powers over the mob must be immense.’

It was Smith who put Hitler in touch with Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl immediately after their meeting. Hanfstaengl epitomized the relationship between Germany and the United States, which was to play such a central role in Hitler’s thinking and policy over the next twenty years or so. Hanfstaengl’s maternal grandfather, Wilhelm Heine, had emigrated to America as a liberal refugee from the failed 1848 revolution. He reached the rank of brigadier-general in the Union Army and served as a pallbearer at Lincoln’s funeral. Hanfstaengl’s father owned a large art business in Munich. Hanfstaengl himself was partly brought up in the United States, where he attended Harvard University and was personally acquainted with the young Franklin Delano Roosevelt. From 1912, he had run the New York branch of his father’s business. Hanfstaengl spent the war—which killed a brother fighting on the German side—in America. The business was ruined by the American entry into the conflict and the associated ‘Trading with the Enemy Act’. Hanfstaengl became an enemy alien: the insider had become an outsider.

Over the next year, Hanfstaengl and Hitler were in almost daily contact. Hanfstaengl impressed upon Hitler not only the immense industrial and demographic power of the United States, but the fact that every German had a close relative there or in some other part of the world, something of which Hitler was already well aware. He argued that the party needed to reach out to the world through a coordinated foreign press policy. Hanfstaengl now became effectively the NSDAP’s external media liaison officer. He also entertained Hitler with his piano, playing from a repertoire which included not only Wagner but Harvard football marches. Captain Mayr later recalled the ‘American methods of salesmanship’ used to push out the Nazi message. The United States thus increasingly became a model as well as a rival.

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 31

If Hitler saw Germany’s salvation in a domestic revival, this did not make him blind towards foreign models. Indeed, the international context within which all his thinking was embedded made him particularly interested in the strength of rival powers. Hitler’s principal model here was Britain. ‘The British,’ he admitted, ‘are entitled to feel proud as a people.’ Britain’s vitality was based on the ‘extraordinary brilliance’ of her population. They had the ‘British national sentiment which our people lacks so much’ and they had maintained ‘racial purity in the colonies’, by which he meant the general absence of intermarriage between settlers and colonial administrators and the native population .Unlike the belated German national state after 1871, Britain enjoyed ‘a centuries-long political-diplomatic tradition’. Unlike Germany, she had grasped the true connection between politics and economics. ‘England has recognized the first principle of state health and existence,’ Hitler argued, ‘and has acted for centuries according to the principle that economic power must be converted into political power’ and ‘that political power must be used to protect economic life’. ‘There are things that permit the British to exercise world domination,’ he explained: ‘a highly developed sense of national identity, clear racial unity, and finally the ability to convert economic power into political power, and political power into economic power’.

There were, however, two profound contradictions in Hitler’s thinking about Britain. First of all, he dubbed the country a ‘second Jewry’, which sat ill with his otherwise respectful attitude. Hitler regarded British Jews as primarily urban, and so well integrated ‘that they appeared to be British’, which prevented the growth of anti-Semitism there. If true, then this might—in Hitler’s reasoning—account for British hostility to the Reich, but he did not explain why this uniquely high level of Jewish penetration did not render her even weaker than Germany. This paradox at the heart of Hitler’s view of the United Kingdom was never resolved.

This is interesting and I feel I must give my opinion.

My view differs not only from the liberal (at its extreme pole, the Woke) or the common conservative (at its extreme pole, the white nationalist). It also differs from Hitler, as we can see from the masthead, ‘The Wall’, in the sense that discovering that Jesus didn’t even exist, but that one hundred per cent of the NT was Jewish literary fiction, takes us further away from even the northern side of the wall, to follow the masthead’s metaphor.

I still admire Hitler as the greatest politician Western history has ever produced, but I emphasise the anti-Christian Hitler who only revealed himself to his close friends and in some after-dinner talks (see Weikart’s book): not exactly the Hitler of his public speeches or Mein Kampf.

And that is the point. As Simms reveals throughout his book, Hitler’s thinking evolved from the basically monocausalist letter to Gemlich (i.e., like the Judeo-reductionism of the contemporary white nationalist) to a realisation of international chess: something like the realist John Mearsheimer school of international relations. (Besides having written a book on the immense power of the Jewish lobby, Mearsheimer understands international chess as well as Hitler did; though Mearsheimer does so from the American POV, not the German, let alone the racial one.)

Therefore, what Simms says requires a response. This academic, of course, is neither aware of the JQ nor the CQ and, like psychologist Richard Grannon about whom I spoke yesterday, Simms doesn’t give a damn about the current British Establishment promoting the interbreeding of English roses with orcs, as I witnessed a decade ago with the ubiquitous propaganda I saw on the streets, especially on billboards.

We could say that while it is true that before WW2 the English maintained to some extent the ethnic pride that Hitler saw, after 1945 the monsters from the Christian Id so overwhelmed that pride that it engendered an ethno-suicidal mania (remember that the first orcs were invited to the island by the ethno-traitor government in the second half of the 1940s). Hitler himself, had he survived the war, would have been shocked by this new twist of the collective Aryan unconscious, and would surely have revised his early views on England.

In other words, National Socialism is not a tightly closed system but continually evolving, even in our century, thanks to the post-1945 NS bequeathed to us by Savitri Devi. Simms continues:

Secondly, there was the apparent contradiction that Britain had risen to greatness under the parliamentary system he so despised. There are grounds for believing, however, that he believed representative government suitable for the British but not for the Germans. ‘If all Germans belonged to the tribe of the Lower Saxons [that is the tribe from which the English trace much of their descent—and the only one which Benjamin Franklin had considered fully white]’, he remarked, ‘the republican state form might be the most suited’ to enabling the state ‘to weather all storms and to draw on the best elements for running the country’. ‘Because that is not the case [in Germany],’ Hitler continued, ‘the German people will always need an idol in the shape of a monarch.’ It was an early indication of Hitler’s profound anxiety about German racial fragmentation in the face not so much of Jewry, as of the globally dominant Anglo-Saxons.