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Category: ‘Hitler’ (book by Brendan Simms)

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Racial right

Hitler, 30

Hitler therefore espoused ‘socialism’, but not as the Social Democrats, the Independent Socialists or the communists knew it. ‘National’ and ‘social’, he argued, were ‘two identical terms’. ‘True socialism teaches the most extreme performance of one’s duties,’ Hitler explained, ‘real socialism in the highest form of the Volk.’ ‘Marxism is not socialism,’ he claimed, ‘I shall take socialism away from the socialists.’ This was what the words ‘worker’ and ‘socialist’ in the party’s name meant. There was ‘no room’, Hitler said, for ‘class-conscious proletarians’ in the party, just as there was no place either for a ‘class-conscious bourgeois’. He repeatedly reached out to workers. All this explains Hitler’s ambivalence towards communists, whom he regarded not only as good men led astray, but as temperamentally more congenial than the lukewarm bourgeois who clove to the safe middle path.

This is indeed interesting, for it shows the gulf between German National Socialism and American white nationalism: something George Lincoln Rockwell didn’t understand because biographies like Simms’ didn’t exist in his time. (Although this English scholar is anything but a NS sympathiser, his prose portrays the ideals of the Führer better than the crude and simplistic propaganda that was circulated in the US in Commander Rockwell’s time.)

‘I would rather be strung up in a Bolshevik Germany,’ he averred, ‘than be made blissful in a French southern Germany.’ One observer noted that Hitler ‘was courting the communists’, saying that ‘the two extremes, communists and students, should be brought together’. The centre ground, he claimed, was full of useless ‘lickspittles’ (Schleimsieder), whereas ‘the communists had fought for their ideal with weapons and only been led astray’. They only need to be led towards the ‘national cause’. With German communists, Hitler hated the sin, but loved the sinner.

Alas, any attempt to imitate German NS on the other side of the Atlantic would run into formidable difficulties. Imagine how (almost) impossible it would be to convince the racial right that, for the fourteen words, capitalism is even worse than communism and that the worship of Mammon must be transvalued to these Hitlerian ideals if the sacred words are to be fulfilled (read the last page of The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour).

To boot, a century ago Hitler was referring to a Germany composed basically of Aryans. In today’s polluted America, such a transvaluation couldn’t even be preached without openly stating that the proposed socialism is solely for the benefit of Aryans. In other words, to implement Hitler’s ideals on this side of the Atlantic the dictators of the new state would first have to become Himmlers to achieve an ethnic cleansing similar to the Pierce Diaries.

Can you see why I no longer visit the sites of the American racial right? Almost all white nationalist information sources are cleverly written to pacify whites back into the Christian and neo-Christian fold. And it all has to do with what we on this site have called slaves of our parents’ introjects. I know no one understands me on this point but my autobiographical findings, or what I have written about mental disorders (for example what I said yesterday in my postscript about narcissism), provide the key to understanding how these introjects still hold the Aryan in bondage.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Democracy John Stuart Mill

Hitler, 29

Hitler rejected the ‘purely economic way of looking at things’, which he called the ‘greatest mistake of German policy in the past decades’. ‘The hoped-for peaceful seizure of [world] power through our economy,’ he continued, ‘has been a failure.’ ‘Industrialization [and] the peaceful capture of the world,’ Hitler claimed, were doomed to fail, because one ‘did not consider that there can be no economic policy without the sword [and] no industrialization without power’. ‘The economy,’ he explained, ‘is only of secondary importance.’ ‘The main thing,’ Hitler stressed, ‘is national pride, [and] love of country.’ The primacy of politics in Hitler’s thinking could not have been more clearly expressed.

Calvin Coolidge was born in Massachusetts, a state founded by English Puritans. Compare the above quote with that famous phrase by Coolidge, the 30th president of the US: ‘The business of America is business’ in the sense that his was the nation of pure materialism. I remember, when I lived in California in the 1980s, the words of President Ronald Reagan, who wanted a globalised world where ‘the market reigned supreme’.

The key question, Hitler stated, was not the state form itself, but what arrangement served the German people best in its quest to escape external subjection. Here there was remarkably little shift in his views throughout the early 1920s. The issue was not, he argued in April 1920, whether Germany should be ‘a monarchy or a Republic’, but rather ‘which state form was best for the people’. ‘We need a dictator of pure genius if we want to rise again.’ ‘We do not fetishize forms of government,’ he explained in November 1921, ‘the only thing that is decisive is the spirit which sustains it. The only consideration must be the welfare of the entire German people.

Compare this with the forums of American white nationalism, which endorse democracy and in recent years have suggested that their visitors vote for this or that candidate. And the racialists on the other side of the Atlantic are no better. At the only BNP rally I have attended I spoke to a couple of senior members, who informed me that their aims were strictly democratic, not fascist.

He called for the nationalization of the entire banking and financial system, and thus the ‘breaking of interest slavery’, a term he had borrowed from Gottfried Feder. His aim here was not so much public ownership in the Marxist sense, as national control over the levers of international financial manipulation. Hitler had not yet called for the physical destruction of world Jewry, but the elimination of German Jewry was already implicit, at least in the context of a future war, in case they might once again act as fifth columnists. In the Gemlich letter of September 1919, he had already called for the ‘complete removal of the Jews’, and in a letter of August 1920, one correspondent reports that Hitler believed that ‘the bacillus’ must be ‘exterminated’ in order to ensure the survival of the German people. One way or the other, his domestic policy was essentially foreign policy.

Compare this with the first American president, who stated that it would be bigoted, in the new nation, to discriminate against Jewry. So who caused their empowerment in today’s world?

Unlike the Judeo-reductionism in vogue in white nationalism and even the Gemlich letter of September 1919, the conceptual framework for understanding the West’s dark hour can already be gleaned from texts by Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill.

In On Liberty Mill concludes that in former times, when it was proposed to burn atheists, charitable people used to suggest their confinement in a madhouse. Mill said that he wouldn’t be surprised if they saw that in his day because of the ‘tyranny of the majority’ that Jefferson and Madison so feared: a tyranny that doesn’t tolerate eccentricity.

And this is the central problem, since egalitarian tyranny is based on the feelings of the majority, and that feeling was programmed in the Aryan collective unconscious since the time of Constantine, with those Pauline words that there is no longer a Jew or a Greek, etc.

In On Liberty Mill didn’t so much propose to defend the rights of the eccentric individual—an atheist in Victorian England for example—against the state. He proposed to defend his rights against society itself: a giant Leviathan. That is why the First Amendment has failed utterly, in the US, to defend us. The majority society, even without the arm of the state, can cancel the dissenter (as it cancelled the previous incarnation of The West’s Darkest Hour when it was hosted elsewhere).

For Mill, his great mission was to say what he thought of modern society, especially of the power of public opinion over the outsider. As in Christendom, the collectivist solution proposed by Rousseau and post-French Revolution Europe fears the Other and allows no edges. However, a homogeneous construct determined to establish a norm of equality is a form of despotism. Liberal collectivism is opposed not only to National Socialism but to Pindar’s ideal Become what you are!, realise yourself; and it is also opposed to the Romantic ideal of the individual’s right to unfold his full potential, exemplified in Goethe.

On social pressure (which, if we use the parable of the sower, prevents the National Socialist seed that Rockwell wanted to sow in the US from blossoming) Tocqueville wrote that the kind of oppression by which democratic nations are threatened is very different from what has ever existed. He added that we shall find no prototype of this in historical memory; that he sought in vain for an expression to convey the idea of this new socio-political animal, and that the old words ‘despotism’ and ‘tyranny’ were inappropriate. ‘We are faced with something new’, he wrote.

Tocqueville’s remarks left a deep imprint on the thinking that Mill would express later in On Liberty, who confessed that he had noticed that the aim of democracy wasn’t, as claimed, to protect the interests of everyone but simply the interests of the majority (what Voltaire called canaille, and I call Neanderthals).

Tocqueville and Mill noticed some unintended consequences of modern democracy. In democratic nations the political force of the majority, the canaille, has become a force that surpasses that of the old tyrannies; though the manner of exercising such force is far more subtle, and infinitely more difficult to detect than that of a classical tyranny. The reason for this is that the values of the majority surround us as much as the ocean surrounds the fish. The invisibility of this soft totalitarianism is the corollary of democracy, the rule of the demos: the omnipresent people or mass.

The mass, the ‘Neanderthals’, form their opinion through the school and the Jew-controlled media. Mill believed that the self-educated individual was the antidote to this new form of mass control. For example, no organisation denounced the Inquisition over the centuries of its existence. It was individuals, often isolated individuals, who saw the crimes of the Imperial Church; and from Mill’s century to ours only individuals like Solzhenitsyn have been able to expose, in a big way, other kinds of crimes. That’s why Mill loved the distinct individual so much and feared the blind masses, and he was suspicious of democracy as potentially the most oppressive form of government.

The predominant note in Mill’s writings is not utilitarianism. On Liberty is the clearest exposition of the views of those who desire a tolerant society for the different individual; for example, he who advocates race realism. Mill was the intellectual answer to Rousseau. What he came to value most was the spark of individual genius, the human anomaly; and in On Liberty, which he began writing in 1855, he loved the independent thinker, the solitary worker; the dissident, the eternal questioner of established values, the one who questions the dogmas of the masses and their prejudices; in a word, the outsider who today is personified in he who doesn’t subscribe to the dogma of egalitarianism of race, gender and sexual orientation.

I would like to end this comment with the words I addressed to Gaedhal on Monday: ‘One of the things that white nationalists have never understood is that Europe should already be under one German Reich. Neither the Europeans nor the Americans nor the Australians are capable of governing themselves without a good Führer, as seen with this triumph of democracy and Judeo-liberal values after WW2. Savitri taught me to see an inverted world like the inverted pyramids, which I even illustrated in her book with triangles on pages 172 and 177’.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 28

Hitler rejected the standard solutions to Germany’s predicament. He wondered whether Zionism might be a solution to the ‘Jewish Question’, but quickly came down against the idea. Hitler saw in Jewish aspirations for statehood proof of their sense of national identity, despite all their international rhetoric. ‘The Jews,’ he wrote, were ‘one people’, who ‘identified themselves as a people (Zionists)’. The ‘proof’ of this, Hitler continued, was ‘Palestine’.

Hitler was deeply sceptical, though, that the Zionist project could succeed, because it was completely inimical to the nature of Jewry. The ‘Aryan’ concept of the state, he claimed, was ‘territorial’, while the parasitic Jews could only feed off existing states, not establish one of their own. The Jew ‘cannot build a state’, he argued, because he was ‘incapable of building a state’. Moreover, even if such a state could be erected, Hitler believed that it would merely increase the Jewish threat. ‘The planned Zionist state “Jerusalem”,’ he argued, should not be regarded as an area of Jewish national settlement, but rather as ‘the headquarters for Jewish world power plans for exploitation and nefarious activity’.

For the rest of his life, in fact, Hitler stuck to the view that the establishment of a Jewish state, in Palestine or anywhere else, would simply create another focal point for world Jewry.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Sturmabteilung (SA)

Hitler, 27

Significantly, the first mission of his new paramilitary formation, undertaken even before it was christened the SA, was an attack not on the Jews, communists or Social Democrats, but on a meeting of [particularist —Ed.] Ballerstedt’s Bayernbund in the Löwenbräukeller in the summer of 1921 under the banner ‘we will not betray Bavaria’. Hitler led an assault in which Ballerstedt was manhandled and the police were eventually called to break up the fight. His violent behaviour earned him a short jail sentence. By contrast, it is not documented that Hitler ever personally laid hands on an individual Jew, either then or subsequently. Hitler’s campaign against Bavarian federalism in general and his vendetta against Ballerstedt in particular continued throughout the 1920s and remained a preoccupation until he had him killed during the ‘Night of the Long Knives’.

Hitler’s view of foreign policy was, as we have seen, strongly ideological. That said, he was also beginning to develop a keen sense of geopolitics. In part, this followed the prevailing discourse of Germany’s central location in Europe and her consequent vulnerability to ‘encirclement’. He spoke of ‘the position of our fatherland, which was geographically one of the most unfortunate in Europe’. Hitler inveighed repeatedly against the ‘encirclement attempts of the Entente against Germany’. Where Hitler went much further than the nationalist mainstream was over the growing question of space, the Raumfrage, references to which increased exponentially during the early 1920s. In mid April 1920, Hitler lamented that ‘the world was so unjustly distributed’. Four months later, he noted that Germany suffered from a crippling lack of space by comparison with Britain, which controlled about one-quarter of the entire globe. By March 1921, Hitler decried the injustice that Britain, with a smaller population, controlled ‘three-quarters of the entire world’, while more populous Germany had to make do with considerably less space. This sense of connection between Germany’s ‘disadvantageous military location’ and the ‘impossibility of securing the food supply in Europe’ stayed with Hitler to the end.

The cause of this unequal distribution, he believed, was global capitalism and its associated system of world governance. ‘The international exploitation of capitalism must be combated’, Hitler demanded, as well as that of ‘international loan capital’. ‘We want to turn world slaves into world citizens,’ he announced. This required ‘the liberation of our German people from the fetters of its international world enslavement’. This in turn meant that Germany would have to regain its military freedom of action. ‘The German is either a free soldier,’ Hitler argued, ‘or a white slave.’ He therefore called upon the German people to relearn the old adage that ‘whoever does not want to be a hammer must be an anvil’, adding that ‘we are an anvil today, and were being beaten until the anvil became a hammer’, that is a ‘German sword’. The idea that Germany must become a ‘hammer’ to avoid remaining an ‘anvil’ was a common trope at the time and one to which Hitler returned on a number of occasions.

In short, Hitler saw the root of Germany’s evils in her external subjection… Any prospect of a vigorous German foreign policy, Hitler claimed, ‘is predicated on a radical domestic political change’. In this context, the defeat of 1918 could be put to good use. Just as the catastrophe of 1806 had led to the Wars of Liberation in 1813, Hitler hoped that defeat in 1918 and the humiliation of Versailles would be followed by a national revival; ‘fall’, ‘purification’ and ‘rebirth’ were common tropes in Weimar Germany. Hitler’s rhetoric consciously mimicked that of the great patriotic martyr Palm, a Nuremberg bookseller who was executed by Napoleon in Hitler’s hometown of Braunau for penning the rousing tract ‘Germany in its deepest humiliation’…

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 26

Worse still than the old European imperialism of western powers, according to Hitler, was the Jewish aspiration to world domination, of which the Germans were the principal victims. Drawing on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, he claimed to see a grand plan to control the world. The ultimate aim of policy towards Germany and other independent states, Hitler stated at the beginning 1921, was the creation of a ‘Jewish world state’. He came back to this theme repeatedly over the next two years, when he spoke of the ‘Jewish-imperialist plans for world domination’, the ‘Jewish world dictatorship’ and the ‘final aim [of the Jews]: world domination [and] the destruction of the national states’. In his notes for one speech, Hitler made the connections absolutely clear in point form: ‘World domination with a Jewish capital—Zion—that means world enslavement: world stock exchange—world press—world culture. World language. All for slaves under one master.’ In this way, Hitler closed the circle of western imperialist, Jewish and capitalist enemies of the Reich…

Left, Zion (1903), Ephraim Moses Lilien. ‘Zion’ (Hebrew: צִיּוֹן Ṣīyyōn, Septuagint, Σιών, is a placename in the Hebrew Bible, often used as a synonym for Jerusalem as well as for the Land of Israel as a whole. —Ed.

It is in this context that Hitler’s evolving attitude to communism and the Soviet Union should be seen. At times, he suggested that Bolshevism and international capitalism were working together. He spoke of the way in which Jewish capitalism allegedly used Chinese ‘cultural guardians’ in Moscow, and black ‘hangmen’s assistants’ on the Rhine, while the Soviets in Genoa ‘walked arm in arm with big bankers’. The Jews, Hitler claimed, ‘had their apostles in both camps’ and thus agents on both the ‘right’ and the ‘left’. From time to time, Hitler claimed that communism was the main threat. It is also true that after the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War, the threat of international communism loomed larger in his mind than it had in 1919. Hitler now called for ‘the overcoming and extermination of the Marxist worldview’. ‘Developments in Russia must be watched closely,’ he warned, because once the communists had ‘consolidated their power’ they would ‘probably turn it against us’…

Despite all this, Hitler still did not regard capitalism and communism simply as two equal sides of the same Jewish coin… More generally, his rhetoric and attention were still overwhelmingly directed towards the threat posed by the western powers and international finance capitalism.

For this reason, Hitler was bitterly opposed to any form of internationalism, not just because he despised it in principle, but because he considered it humbug. In part, this hostility was directed towards the German left, whose blind faith in universal principles, Hitler argued, had left Germany defenceless during the world war and its aftermath. For this reason, he argued, ‘[we should] free ourselves of the illusion of the [Socialist] International and [the idea of ] the Fraternity of Peoples’. Hitler’s main objection to internationalism, however, was that it simply served the interests of the western imperial powers.

Where was international law, he asked, when Louis XIV had plundered Germany in the late seventeenth century, when the British had bombarded neutral Copenhagen in 1807 and starved and oppressed the Irish, or when the Americans had displaced the native Indians. It had not escaped Hitler’s attention that ‘in the home of the inventor of the League of Nations [Wilson’s America] one rejects the League as a utopia, a madness’. There was not even a racial solidarity among whites, Hitler lamented, because France had sent ‘comrades from Africa in solidarity to enserf and muzzle the population on the Rhine’. For this reason, Hitler rejected the whole notion of international governance, claiming that ‘The League of Nations is only a holding company of the Entente which wants to secure its ill-gotten gains.’

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 25

International capital and the victor powers—the two were indistinguishable in Hitler’s mind—had thus reduced Germany to the status of a ‘colony’. The purpose of Versailles, he argued, was ‘to make Germany ripe’ for its fate as ‘a colony of international capital’, to ‘soften up our people’ in order to make them ‘international slave workers’. He lamented that Germany was a ‘wage slave of international capital’. Germany was no more than a ‘colony of the international Jewish finance syndicate’, Hitler argued, thus making the German people ‘the slave of the outside world’. In April 1922, he fumed that ‘we practically no longer have an independent German Reich, but really just a colony of the world outside’…

All this was embedded in a broader, though idiosyncratic, critique of European imperialism. On the one hand, Hitler was bitterly critical of the British Empire . ‘Where was the law,’ he asked, ‘when England flooded China and India with opium and North America with spirits in order to undermine these people the better to dominate them?’ He also charged that Britain had ‘reduced the Irish people from 8.5 to 4.5 million [through the potato famine]’, and had ‘cynically allowed’ some 29,000 Boer women to die a miserable death in the ‘concentration camps of South Africa’. He paid black people the back-handed compliment that he would rather have ‘100 Negroes in the hall than one Jew’. On the other hand, Hitler objected not so much to colonialism as to what he would later call the ‘negrification’ of the Germans…

The notion that Germany was being enslaved and reduced to the status of an African colony was widespread at the time, not just in far right circles. Viktor Klemperer, a Jewish veteran of the same division in which Hitler had served, who was later a victim of Nazism, wrote that as ‘The way the Entente powers talk of and to Germany makes me as bitter as if I personally were being treated like a negro’; on another occasion he compared the situation of the Reich with that of the Congo. Many Germans experienced occupation, reparations and the presence of enemy colonial troops as a form not only of subjugation but of emasculation, a sentiment which extended from the far right to the SPD and even women’s rights groups concerned about sexual violence. The Weimar Germany in which Hitler operated was thus both colonized and post-colonial in an era of continuing western imperialism. Defeat by the western powers had turned the international racial order upside down.

There had in fact been long-standing Anglo-Saxon doubts about the whiteness of Germans. As far back as 1751, in his Observations concerning the increase of Mankind, peopling of countries etc., Benjamin Franklin had included them along with the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes as a people of ‘swarthy complexion’. He ‘excepted’ only the ‘Saxons’—probably meaning the Lower-Saxons, whose ancestors had settled England. These, Franklin said, ‘with the English, make the principal body of White People on the face of the earth’. More recently, in 1916, the prominent American theorist Madison Grant published his lament for The Passing of the Great Race, which also identified Germans and Scandinavians as of clearly lower racial value than the Anglo-Celts, though preferable to eastern Europeans, Jews or blacks; of this, more later.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 24

Moreover, in Hitler’s view the war was by no means over. Germany was still the victim of international capitalism, whose continuing power he repeatedly attacked. He spoke of ‘international stock exchange and loan capital’ as the main ‘beneficiaries’ of the peace treaty. Ever since the ‘collapse of the Reich’, Hitler claimed, the country had fallen under ‘the rule of international, fatherlandless capital, independent of person, place and Nation’. [emphasis by Ed.]

Left, portrait of Adam Smith by John Kay. Considered by some as ‘The Father of Economics’ or ‘The Father of Capitalism’, Smith, who popularised the idea that capital has no flag, wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776 (look at the year of publication of his magnus opus!).

Except for the European Tom Sunic and the American Michael O’Meara, it strikes me that the bulk of white nationalist pundits have been blinded to see something so obvious: that, without a flag, sooner or later the Anglo-Saxon economic system was going to betray their ethnicity.

This is compounded in the American myth of those who emigrated fantasising about a city on a hill, self-understanding themselves as the new Israelites to the extent of admiring the real Jews and rolling out the red carpet to them in subsequent centuries. Why, unlike O’Meara and Sunic, can the racial right not see that they, along with the rest of the Anglo-Americans, have been empowering the enemy through this fatherlandless, flagless capitalist ideology? Hitler did get it:

International conferences—such as Genoa in April 1922—were simply condemned as ‘stock exchange conferences’. Hitler saw Jewish international capitalism and western democracy as linked. ‘International Jewish stock exchange capital, ‘he believed, ‘was the driving force of these western-democratic states.’ He set up the ‘equation’ of ‘democracy-capitalism-Jew’. For all these reasons, he argued, National Socialism was a ‘new force whose aim could always only be anti-capitalist’.

Hitler was not completely opposed to all forms of capitalism, though he sometimes gave that impression. He contrasted the blanket hostility of Social Democrats and Marxists to capitalism in general with his own distinction between allegedly pernicious and largely Jewish ‘international loan capitalism’ and nationally oriented ‘productive industrial capitalism’.

‘Factories and industrial capital,’ he told an audience of SA, ‘is national’ and ‘the capital of every country remains national’. For clarity, he stressed that National Socialism ‘struggled against every form of big capital, irrespective of whether it is German or Jewish, if it is grounded not in productive work, but in the principle of interest, of income without work or toil’.

Moreover, Hitler added, the NSDAP ‘battled the Jew not only as the sole bearer of this [form of ] capital’, but also because he ‘prevented ‘ the ‘systematic struggle’ against it. In Hitler’s view it was the determination of international capitalism to subjugate independent national economies which had led to the world war and the brutal peace settlement. This was the context in which he interpreted Allied attempts to control the Reichsbahn, the German national railways. Hitler accused the Jews of trying to ‘grab’ them, as part of a policy whose ‘final aim was the destruction of our national economy and the enslavement of our workforce’.

The Allied determination to annihilate Germany, Hitler believed, was demonstrated by their continuation of the blockade after the end of hostilities. ‘One wants to destroy us completely,’ he claimed, ‘one wants to make our children sick and to allow them to waste away’…

‘The Entente,’ he lamented, ‘advises us to emigrate in order to feed ourselves, and to make way for the Eastern Jews.’ Hitler, in other words, feared that Germany would become the victim of what is today called ‘population replacement’.

He frequently urged his audience to think of the ‘thousands of German emigrants’. This was the great trauma underlying Hitler’s whole world view: the continued haemorrhaging of the best elements of the Reich who had left the Fatherland in order to enlarge the population of Germany’s rivals, with the fatal results that had been seen in the Great War. Worse still, he argued, these best elements were being replaced by the Jewish dregs of central and eastern Europe in a kind of negative selection, designed to further undermine the racial coherence of the German people.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 23

What linked all these explanations in Hitler’s mind was the power and the malevolence of the Jews, the main controllers of an ‘international capitalism’ that needed ‘ever more objects of exploitation’. It was they who under their Jewish ringleader Lord Northcliffe (who was in fact not only not Jewish but a fervent anti­-Semite) had whipped up the British press into a frenzy against Germany before 1914. It was the ‘international Jewish newspaper corporations’, Hitler claimed, who had prevented a Russo-German rapprochement. It was they who owned the large American companies supplying the Allied war effort and who tricked the ‘peaceful’ American people into war with Germany against their better natures and best interests. It was the Jews who tried to manipulate Germany’s food supply and who ‘precipitated the revolution through hunger’. All this happened because the ‘New York Stock Exchange’—the ‘Headquarters of World Jewry’—was determined to crush Germany, the last remaining Nationalstaat which was ‘not yet completely ruled by stock exchanges’. In short, Hitler remained firmly wedded to the idea of a deadly synthesis between world Jewry, international capitalism and Anglo-America as Germany’s nemesis.

In the last sentence, you can see three enemies of Germany from Hitler’s POV, which contrasts with what we sometimes see in the discussion threads of white nationalist forums, where they basically talk about a single enemy: Jewry. And we are still talking about exoteric Hitlerism, aimed at the masses.

In the case of the esoteric Hitlerism led especially by Himmler, a mere ten-page pamphlet aimed at the SS, which by the way can be read on pages 501-510 of The Fair Race, already puts the Christian churches, too, in the dock.

What I like about Simms’ book is that the profile he portrays of the German chancellor is more complex than the simplistic view we see in some racialist forums in vogue today.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 22

The NSDAP programme—for example point 13[1] with its attack on ‘trusts’—was ferociously anti-capitalist and so, as we have seen, was much of Hitler’s rhetoric. Despite Hitler ‘s willingness to moderate his message to business audiences, emphasizing his anti-French and anti-Bolshevik themes, business was not reassured. Paul Reusch, a major Ruhr baron, noting the Nazi nationalization plan, remarked that ‘we have no reason to support our own gravediggers’. The party remained dependent on donations from the Bavarian Reichswehr, either in cash or in kind in the form of weapons or vehicles, and from a motley group of smaller donors, mainly traders, retailers and small businessmen.

Given the shortage of funds, the growth of the party and especially its propagandistic reach was impressive. There were significant gains in membership: 4,300 by the end of 1921, and more than 20,000 a year later… There was a real quantum leap in early 1922, when Hitler regularly spoke to between 2,000 and 6,000 listeners in the larger beer halls. A high point was the Deutsche Tag in Coburg in October, which culminated in a massive brawl with hostile demonstrators…

The purpose of all this activity was not the creation of a party organization capable of winning elections, still less that of a force capable of mounting an armed challenge to the Weimar Republic. Instead, Hitler’s main aim remained the establishment of ideological coherence in the movement. ‘The final strength of a movement,’ he claimed in mid February 1922, lay ‘not in the number of its local groupings but in its internal cohesion’…

Hitler claimed that ‘there was no fruitful work to be done in parliament’, and that ‘individual National Socialists would be corrupted by the swamp of parliamentarism’.

Throughout the early 1920s, therefore, Hitler used his speeches to rehearse and develop his ideology. During this period his words—which were, of course, acts in themselves—were more important than his deeds. The recent defeat and its causes remained the central preoccupation. Hitler repeated his conviction that the war had been caused by an Anglo-American capitalist conspiracy. Sometimes, he attributed the ‘original sin’ to Britain, whose commercial and colonial ‘envy’ of the Reich had driven a ‘policy of encirclement’ against Germany, and whose press had vilified her before and during the war as a nation of Huns and barbarians. On other occasions, he targeted the United States. ‘Not least because the social welfare and the cultural development [of the German Empire] was a thorn in the eyes of the American trust-system,’ he thundered in March 1921, ‘we had to disappear from view.’ Hitler repeatedly contrasted ‘Germany’s social culture’ with American capitalism. He reserved particular scorn for US president Woodrow Wilson as the ‘agent of international high finance’…

Fighting France, and especially the British Empire, was bad enough, but what had ultimately tipped the scales was US intervention. This, Hitler was convinced, would have taken place with or without the U-boat war. Having previously been a ‘passive’ supporter of the Entente through the supply of armaments, the Americans intervened when Britain and France were on the verge of defeat in order not to lose the ‘billions’ which it was owed by the Allies. ‘America was called in,’ he claimed, ‘and the power of international big capital thereby became openly involved’…

___________

[1] Editor’s Note: ‘We demand nationalization of all businesses which have been up to the present formed into companies (trusts).’

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 21

Munich was thus an ambivalent habitat for the young NSDAP. It was stony ground for the Nazis not only politically and culturally, but also physically. The authorities began to take an ever dimmer view of Hitler’s activities, especially when these disturbed public order. He spent two stretches in prison. He lost an important ally with the resignation of Ernst Pohner as president of the Munich Police in September 1921. A month later, Hitler was summoned to police headquarters for a serious caution following a series of street brawls and beer-hall battles.

The Volkischer Beobachter was repeatedly banned for publishing inflammatory articles. In March 1922, after his conviction for a breach of the peace, the Bavarian minister of the interior, Dr Franz Schweyer, seriously considered deporting Hitler to Austria, and the minister president, Count Lerchenfeld, made it clear to Hitler that he was in Bavaria on sufferance. The police watched Hitler closely.

Hitler remained determined to establish himself in Munich, but only as a beacon to inspire the rest of Germany and as a base from which to take over the Reich as a whole. ‘Munich must become a model,’ he wrote in January 1922, ‘the school but also the granite pedestal’ of the movement. ‘We do not have a Bavarian mission today,’ Hitler announced six months later, ‘rather Bavaria has the most important mission of its entire existence.’

Bavaria, on this reading, was not separate but rather ‘the most German state in the German Reich’. Munich was a sanctuary and a bulwark, certainly, but above all it was a sally-port. The special role Hitler envisaged for Bavaria in Germany was thus not as a separate or autonomous entity, as the federalists and particularists wanted, but as the vanguard of national renewal. ‘Not “away from Berlin”,’ Hitler intoned when discussing the relationship between Bavaria and the Reich, ‘but rather “towards Berlin”’ in order to ‘liberate it from the seducers of the German people’.

It would soon become clear that was a very different agenda to that of the generally monarchist and particularist Bavarian military and political elites.