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Category: ‘Hitler’ (book by Brendan Simms)

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) New Testament

Hitler, 20

Recently, five people who tweet at X liked a tweet in which a visitor to this site, Ørdnung, quoted some words of mine: ‘It could even be argued, as I do in the featured post, that Hitler and Rosenberg themselves could be bridges to an even more refined NS than the one they promoted’ (I originally said this in ‘Bridges’). The following passage from Simms’ biography of Hitler illustrates it perfectly:

In other ways, Hitler and the NSDAP sat uneasily in the Munich mainstream, which was dominated by Catholicism and the Bavarian People’s Party (BVP). The BVP had complete command of the local parliamentary political scene. All of the sixty-five BVP Landtag deputies were Catholic, six of them clerics; all but one of its twenty Reichstag members were Catholic, two of them clerics. While the party was confessionally homogeneous, it was socially diverse, representing Bavarians from all classes, and was determined not to break away from the Reich but also to resist the Weimar Republic’s vision of a more centralized state. Despite his Austrian—essentially south German—roots Hitler found it very difficult to break into this constituency. It was for this reason he attempted to reach out to the churches through his concept of ‘positive Christianity’. Hitler claimed that Jesus had been ‘slandered’ by the same people who were scourging Germany today—the Jews. ‘We should follow the example of this man,’ Hitler argued on another occasion, ‘who was born poor in a cabin, who pursued high ideals and whom for this reason the Jews later crucified.’ ‘The Christian religion is the only possible ethical basis of the German people,’ he said soon after, adding that it was important to avoid any tension between the confessions, because ‘religious divisions’ had been one of ‘the worst things to happen to the German people’. Though Hitler made some headway with Bavarian Catholics in the early 1920s, it was a demographic with which he struggled to connect until the end of his life.

Emphasis added! Hitler and his people stayed close to the Wall, to follow the metaphor of my featured post. What we now need to do is go much further north; study the New Testament in depth from the POV of scholars like Richard Carrier and Richard Miller, and realise that the ‘positive Christianity’ of the Nazis was a hallucination (as hallucination is the Christianity of today’s White Nationalists).

Once we know that it was the Jews themselves who wrote it and that the figure of Jesus is mythical (here I am closer to Carrier than to Miller), we are finally in a position to reject the Bible in toto. No ‘positive’ Christianity. That’s an impossible chimera.

Salvation for the Aryan is found in the cave of the three-eyed raven, the greenseer who, patiently scanning the career of Pontius Pilate in Judea, realised that not even a very human Jesus existed. It had all been a Jewish invention to invert Roman values. And if the Third Reich failed, it was because, in a West flooded with Christian ethics, the Germans didn’t realise something so elemental. In the same featured post is the link to my short post ‘Old Town’, which explains why once Hitler reached power in Germany it was time for metapolitics rather than politics (invasions, wars, provoking the Anglo-American Christians, etc.).

A more enlightened National Socialism than that of the last century is what we certainly need…

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

Hitler, 19

In August 1921, Hitler established a formal party paramilitary formation, which was named the SA or Sturmabteilung on 5 October 1921, with headquarters in 39 Schellingstrasse, Munich. The first commander was Emil Maurice, who had already distinguished himself in brawling at Hitler’s side, or on his behalf. The main task of this new force was to protect NSDAP meetings and disrupt those of the other side. Cyclist, motorized and mounted sections were established, with weapons and training being provided by the Reichswehr. The latter hoped to draw on the SA, as on other right-wing groupings, in the event of civil unrest or a French invasion. The initial growth of the Sturmabteilung was modest, reaching about 700-800 men in twelve months, and about 1,000 at the beginning of the following year…

As far as modern Western nations are concerned, all patriotardism is grotesque. Compare this tolerance of Weimar Germany with what happened not long ago in Charlottesville! People like Gregory Hood and Jared Taylor have been patriotards incapable of seeing something so elementary as far as the US is concerned. And let’s not talk about the UK, where the three racialists who had forums and whom I met on my last trip were jailed for thoughtcrime! (In addition to the two mentioned in my previous posts, Jez Turner, who served a thirteen-month sentence for ‘anti-Semitic’ pronouncements, has apparently been released although he hasn’t replied to my latest emails.)

In some ways, Bavaria was a congenial habitat. It considered itself a ‘centre of order’ in the Weimar chaos, an arcadia of conservative and patriotic values. Hitler was protected and supported by the Bavarian Reichswehr, which only loosely acknowledged the precedence of the national authority at this time, and whose loyalties lay firmly in Munich rather than Berlin. The president of the Munich Police, Ernst Pohner, and the Chief of the Political Police, Wilhelm Frick, were NSDAP supporters…

This was George Lincoln Rockwell’s big mistake: believing that American politicians, like the FBI director, were on his side. The US is not Weimar Germany! I must admit that on this issue Gregory Hood was right, as we saw in ‘Hitler, 12’.

Incidentally, the only post in this series that is not linked to the category ‘Hitler (book by Brendan Simms)’ is precisely Hitler, 12: where I quote Hood’s article on Commander Rockwell in full. I didn’t put the category for the simple reason that I don’t quote Simms’ book there. But I thought it was important to include Hood’s article in this series about Hitler’s biography because it is vital to understand why NS failed on this side of the Atlantic. Simms continues:

Gregor Strasser joined the party in October 1922. That same month, Hitler first met Hermann Goring, a charismatic and well-connected fighter ace, who opened many doors to business and high society.

Hitler and Gregor Strasser.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Alexis de Tocqueville

Hitler, 18

In chapter 3 of Brendan Simms’ book on Hitler we can read:

Hitler now moved to reorganize and expand the NSDAP. By the end of 1921, membership stood at about 6,000. The party moved from Sterneckerbräu to larger premises at Corneliusstrasse 12. Local groups were founded in Hanover, Zwickau and Dortmund. Hitler tightened his control over the party, including the cells outside Germany. In the spring of 1922 the Austrian and Bohemian NSDAP accepted Hitler’s authority. Collegial decision-making was abolished…

Ideological purity rather than control for its own sake seems to have been his main concern.

The day before yesterday I mentioned a recent article by Matt Parrott just to quote a few comments from its comments section, but I omitted the subject of the article: the recent demise of a racialist party in his country that had barely been formed.

Early critics of the United States told great truths about that country: truths that now seem much harder to see. Alexis de Tocqueville in his famous book wrote that freedom of speech did exist in the newly formed nation across the Atlantic, as long as opinion was confined to the paradigm accepted by most Americans.

Born on July 29, 1805, into a family of royalists that lost several of its members during the period known as The Terror of the French Revolution, the fall of Robespierre in 1794 spared Alexis’s parents from the guillotine. For that reason, he was suspicious of the revolutionaries all his life, and let’s remember that the ideologies that led to the founding of the US and modern France were twinned.

Alexis accepted a government mission to travel to the United States to study its prison system; his stay there lasted nine months. The fruit of this trip was a work on American prisons but his stay served him to deepen his analysis of the American political and social systems, which he described in his work Democracy in America (1835-1840).

Let us now think about the above quote from Simms’ book on the party that Hitler founded and Parrott’s piece. It is curious how the Old World without a First Amendment to the US Constitution, written in such clear prose, was de facto more tolerant than what is now happening in the New World. Someone might retort to me that Europe is currently more intolerant about us than the US, and it is true. But we should not forget the free speech gag laws that the Allies imposed in Germany and Austria after WWII.

Only when the dollar collapses and the US government has to withdraw the huge number of military bases it has around the world, including those still existing in Germany, will it be possible to see again the Teutonic character unmolested by the country Alexis visited.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 17

(Left, NSDAP membership book.)

The NSDAP, he [Hitler] claimed, had been established on ‘the basis of an extreme racial outlook and rejects any form of parliamentarism’, including its present-day incarnation. It was intended to be quite different from all other ‘so-called national movements’, and so constructed that it would best serve to wage ‘the battle for the crushing of the Jewish-international domination of our people’. The NSDAP was also a ‘social or rather a socialist party’, whose statutes laid down ‘that the seat of its leadership was Munich and must remain Munich, now and for ever’.

This programme, Hitler continued, had been agreed as ‘immutable and inviolable in front of an audience of a thousand people, and invoked as a granite foundation in more than a hundred mass meetings’. Now, Hitler claimed, these principles had been violated by plans to merge with another party, by the agreement at Zeitz to move the headquarters to Berlin and by the prospect that they would be abjured in favour of the programme of Otto Dickel, which he condemned as a ‘meaningless, spongy [and] stretchable entity’. Specifically, Hitler objected to Dickel’s belief that Britain was emerging from under the thumb of the Jews and to his admiration for the Jew Walther Rathenau. He was interested in propaganda, not organization, and the power of ideas, not bureaucratic power…

Hitler averred that he made these demands ‘not because I crave power’ but because he was convinced that ‘without an iron leadership’ the party would soon degenerate from a National Socialist Workers Party into a mere ‘Occidental League’. Hitler had originally wanted to control the message rather than the party, but he now realized that he could not do the former without ensuring the latter.

It is not quite clear whether Hitler resigned with the intent of forcing the leadership’s hand, or whether he left in despair and decided to lay down the law only after attempts to win him back showed the underlying strength of his position. Even then, his demands were more modest than they sounded, being subject (as the law required) to membership vote. The ‘dictatorial powers’ were not requested for the running of the party in general but limited to the sphere that Hitler was primarily concerned about, namely the re-establishment and maintenance of ideological coherence. This is what underlay his demand to purge deviators, to oversee the absorption of other groups and the retention of Munich as an ideological ‘Rome’ or ‘Mecca’. The outcome, in any case, was the same. Hitler triumphed all along the line. Drexler caved in…

Hitler’s struggle with Drexler is common to most emerging political movements: the clash between the need for growth and the maintenance of ideological purity, which was the side which he took with such vigour. In July 1921, Hitler won his first political battle. He had become a politician. Whether Hitler had sought leadership or had leadership thrust upon him, it was clear that he now was increasingly not merely the de facto but the formal chief of the NSDAP. If he had once seen himself as a mere ‘drummer’ of the movement for the new Germany, he now aspired to be its leader.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 16

During this period Hitler collaborated with a range of figures, not all of whom were party members, in an informal and often non-hierarchical way. His closest associate was Rudolf Hess, a First World War veteran who had grown up in Egypt; the date of their first encounter (which was probably in May 1920) is disputed, but we know for a fact that he joined the NSDAP in July 1920.

A key interlocutor was the Reichswehr officer Ernst Rohm, whose meetings are documented from early 1920, though the first contacts may have taken place a lot earlier.

Hitler had frequent dealings with the staff of the Völkischer Beobachter, especially its executive editor, the playwright Dietrich Eckart, and his deputy Alfred Rosenberg, a Baltic German refugee from the Russian Revolution, who would influence Hitler’s view of the Soviet Union; the editor was his old regimental comrade Hermann Esser. In a rare gesture, Hitler explicitly acknowledged his debt to Eckart for his help with the Völkischer Beobachter, and to Rosenberg for his ‘theoretical deepening of the party programme’.

In late 1920, Hitler met Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, who had witnessed and been appalled by the massacre of the Armenians as a German consul in the East Anatolian town of Erzurum during the First World War. It was probably from him that Hitler got his determination that the Germans should not become a ‘people like the Armenians’, that is, the butt of foreign oppressors.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 15

Hitler giving a speech to supporters in a beer cellar, by Hermann Hoyer.

Over the next fifteen months, Hitler engaged in an intense programme of speeches in the major Munich beer halls; he practised his poses in front of a mirror.

By the end of the year, he had made twenty-seven appearances in Munich, and twelve outside, including Bad Tolz, Rosenheim and even Stuttgart. The audiences ranged in number from 800 to about 2,000. During late September and the beginning of October 1920, Hitler made repeated trips to Austria and to support the National Socialist Party in neighbouring Wurttemberg in their election campaign. In early 1921, a speech on Versailles at the Zirkus Krone was heard by about 5,600 people. One eyewitness, his first biographer Konrad Heiden, recalled that the secret of the success of his speeches was that the audience became ‘participants’ rather than ‘listeners’.

There were some missteps. Hitler’s opportunistic attempt to address a Munich crowd of 20,000 or so uninvited at a general rally outside the Feldherrnhalle in February 1921 was drowned out by the massed bands who struck up as he began to speak. It is also worth remembering that many members had never seen or heard Hitler in person. In general, though, his profile grew steadily, and he began to overtake the best-known orators, such as Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart, as the public face of the party. Despite his somewhat mysterious aura—Hitler refused to allow any photograph of him to be taken—he had become a recognizable ‘name’ in Bavarian politics . His relationship with the Reichswehr in Bavaria, which had effectively incubated him, remained good even after he had left the ranks.

In mid May 1921, Hitler met with the prime minister, Gustav von Kahr, marking his political recognition by ‘official’ Bavaria. He had ‘made it’.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Racial right

Hitler, 14

By early 1920, Hitler had found two new homes. On leaving the army, he found lodgings as a sub-tenant of Ernst and Maria Reichert in Thierschstrasse no. 41, in the inner Munich suburb of Lehel. It was a very modest berth in a working- and lower-middle-class neighbourhood. Hitler was an easy-going resident, who never locked his doors and allowed the Reicherts to use his gramophone and books during his frequent absences. We do not know what exactly he read, but the best-thumbed surviving volumes from his collection relate to history and art, whereas those on race and the occult gave the impression of being unread. [emphasis added]

As we said recently, it is the poet who creates nations, not the scientist (e.g. the scientific books on race realism published by Jared Taylor). ‘The historical course offered by myth, in contrast to the inherently passive determinism of scientific rationalism’, writes Michael O’Meara, ‘is a choice for heroes, not for bookworms or computer hobbyists’. Also, history is the most important subject in the eyes of the raven, who spends his life fused to the Weirwood looking at the past of his civilisation. Like Bran, the raven’s pupil, Hitler perfectly understood this.

His new professional and political home was the DAP, which was renamed the ‘National Socialist German Workers’ Party’ (NSDAP) in the course of 1920. Hitler was by now a recognized quantity on the local right-wing scene…

Hitler believed political organization without propaganda was pointless. His main concern at this point was to use the party as a platform to disseminate and elaborate his ideas. He was involved in the drafting of the twenty-five point NSDAP (technically DAP) programme in February 1920, though it is unclear whether he can claim sole authorship. The first four related to national integrity, foreign policy and territorial expansion; the next four concerned race, mostly strictures against the Jews. Hitler turned Wilson’s idea of ‘self-determination’ back on the Allies with his call for ‘the unification of all Germans in a Greater Germany on the basis of the right of peoples to self-determination’. More than that, he demanded ‘Land and soil (colonies) to feed our people and to settle our surplus population’, the first unambiguous documented articulation of what subsequently became the Lebensraum concept. The geographic location of these future ‘colonies’ was not specified but at this time Hitler seems to have had overseas territories in mind…

Hitler paid close attention to the iconography underpinning the message. A black swastika of his design on a white circle with red background was first flown as the official party emblem at a meeting in Salzburg in August 1920. In one of his very few excursions into the occult, Hitler praised the swastika—as a ‘symbol of the sun’ which sustained a ‘cult’ of light among a ‘community based on Aryan culture’, not only in Europe, but in India… as well. The use of the old imperial black, white and red colours was a calculated affront to the black, red and gold of the Weimar flag.

‘The red is social,’ he later explained, ‘the white is national, and the swastika is anti-Semitic.’ By mounting the symbol diagonally, Hitler cleverly conveyed a sense of dynamism and movement.

Four months later, he oversaw the purchase of the Volkischer Beobachter newspaper and the Franz Eher Verlag, financed in part by a loan from a Reichswehr slush fund guaranteed by Dietrich Eckart, which gave the party a media platform with a print run of 8,000-17,000 appearing three times a week; after many ups and downs, the Volkischer Beobachter became a daily on 8 February 1923.

Here it is noticeable that the white nationalists haven’t really broken ideologically with the ethnocidal System. If they had broken away with it, they would have had the initiative to, at the very least, come up with a new flag very different from the American flag, as well as having incredibly different heroes. In my previous post, I quoted what Robert Morgan said yesterday. This is what we read on pages 175-176 of my book Daybreak: ‘Stars and Stripes? As Morgan explained to us, the personalities sculpted on Mount Rushmore represent ideals that would eventually lead to white decline’:

The Old America is dead? I don’t think so. Symbolic of the Old America, and chiseled into Mt. Rushmore, are four American ‘heroes’, whose exploits demonstrate the white man’s biggest problem: himself. First we have George Washington, who magnanimously freed his slaves, but only after his death, after which he had no further use for them. How many white Americans have been robbed, murdered, or raped by the descendants of those slaves? Quite a few, no doubt.

Thanks George!

Then comes Lincoln, who authorized the murders of hundreds of thousands of whites on his way to freeing the slaves and then turning them loose on his countrymen. His admirers say that, like Martin Luther King, he had a dream. But Abe’s dream was that all of the negroes would volunteer to leave these shores. How racist! Amazingly, and no doubt a big surprise to Abe, few wanted to do so.

Thanks a lot, ‘honest’ Abe!

Then we have Thomas Jefferson, a randy old fellow who was probably nailing his quadroon slave Sally Hemings, and likely had a child by her. His was the colonial prototype for the long American tradition of race mixing (a.k.a. white racial suicide).

Thanks Tom! You set a fine example.

Last is Teddy Roosevelt, the original progressive. He was an advocate for women’s suffrage, yet another step in the direction of the hallowed American cause of ‘equality’, and it’s painfully obvious how that turned out. Also, he favored a powerful federal government, just as do progressives today. To fund such a government he favored the income tax, a noose into which the American public eagerly thrust its neck.

The current unrest is only more of the same white racial self-destruction. So the Old America isn’t dead. Its spirit is just flying new flags, reorganized under the banners of BLM and antifa. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

An 1849 epigram by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, it means: ‘The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing’. As long as the American racial right doesn’t produce a new flag with colours different from those chosen by Hitler, but that the new flag displays the swastika, their movement will be la même chose: the American way of white ethnocide.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 13

For now, Hitler regarded the Slavs as the victims of Jewish capitalism, a fate they shared with the Germans, and hoped for the restoration of the ‘true’ Russian spirit in the Soviet Union. There was no sign yet of any territorial ambitions in the east. Pity, not hostility, was Hitler’s main sentiment towards Russians at this point .

At the end of March 1920, Hitler took off his army uniform for good. By then, some of the main outlines of his world view, expressed consistently in private correspondence, public meetings and newspapers articles alike, were clearly visible: fear of the western allies, especially Britain, a profound demographic anxiety about the United States, a violent hostility to international capitalism, a sense of the subversive effects of socialism and communism, and, of course, a virulent anti-Semitism.

None of these sentiments were visible before 1914. Fear of Britain and the ‘world of enemies’ was first expressed at the start of the conflict. The rest were a response not to defeat as such, or even to the revolution, but to the consequences of defeat. It was the Versailles settlement which brought home the meaning of November 1918. This was the subject of his first known political speech and its consequences dominated his later thinking. Unlike for most nationalists, territorial losses were the least of Hitler’s concerns: as we have seen, he was far more worried about the long-term impact of perpetual debt bondage, the continued blockade and a resulting surge in emigration.

In other words, it was not the war that made Hitler, or even the revolution, but the peace.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) George Lincoln Rockwell Racial right

Hitler, 11

Strikingly absent from Hitler’s thinking immediately following the war, and indeed for some time thereafter, was any serious anxiety about Russian power or the Soviet Union. This is not surprising, given that Germany’s main enemy had been the western allies, and the fact that Russia had been defeated by 1917. Hitler was not even worried about communism as an external threat. The impact of the Baltic emigre and ferocious anti-Bolshevik Alfred Rosenberg during this period was not significant and, in any case, the two men did not even meet until a few months later. Like many Germans, Hitler saw Bolshevism as a disease, which had knocked Russia out of the war, and then undermined German resistance a year later. He did not fear a Soviet invasion, not even after the victory of the Reds in the Civil War. Instead, Hitler fretted that communism would destroy the last vestiges of German sovereignty in the face of the Entente. ‘The threatened Bolshevik flood is not so much to be feared as the result of Bolshevik victories on the battlefields’, he warned, ‘as rather as a result of a planned subversion of our own people’, which would deliver them up to international high finance.

At this point Simms puts endnote 43 of his third chapter, and at the end of the book we can read the sources of Hitler’s words. But as I have said, in these quotations from some passages of Hitler I omit both the endnotes and the bibliographical sources.

Significantly, Hitler wasted no words on the Soviet Union in his early statements from 1919 save to predict that it was set to become a ‘colony of the Entente’. This means that capitalism and communism were not simply two equal sides of the anti­-Semitic coin for Hitler. Bolshevism was clearly a subordinate force. Its function in the Anglo-American plutocratic system was to undermine the national economies of independent states and make them ripe for takeover by the forces of international capitalism.

I find Simms’s revisionism in his biography of Hitler so fascinating that just as in ‘Hitler 6’ I interpolated 9,000 words from another author’s book to show my disagreements with Simms (in the sense that even a Jewish scholar shows the genuine motivations of Germans in the face of Jewish subversion), in ‘Hitler 12’ I will interpolate a 4,500-word article by Gregory Hood.

That article, ‘Rockwell as Conservative’, published ten years ago in Counter-Currents, is perfect for understanding the maturity I have undergone in recent years regarding the primary aetiology of white decline.

Rockwellian Nazism was America’s fascist movement par excellence when I was a child. He hated commies as much as US Senator Joseph McCarthy during the late 1940s through the 1950s. Hood shows that George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of Rockwellian Nazism, was ideologically closer to American conservatism than is generally accepted on the racial right.

I would suggest starting the reading of that 2013 article, ‘Rockwell as Conservative’ from the ninth comment in the comments section: the response from Martin Kerr, who inherited the organisation Rockwell created, as well as the brief responses from Greg Johnson.

Just because I am going to interpolate that long article by Gregory Hood into this magnifying glass review of Simms’ book doesn’t mean that I agree with what Hood has said in other articles. On the contrary: Robert Morgan and I have criticised him very harshly because, like other white nationalists, Hood is clueless on the Christian Question.

Nevertheless, his article ‘Rockwell as Conservative’ is great for understanding why Rockwell and the neo-Nazis have failed and will continue to fail. Hood’s POV aside, the continuing failure is because, unlike Hitler, these Americans haven’t transvalued their values.

But even that is another matter. What concerns us for the moment is only Hood’s criticism of Rockwell. Like today’s white nationalists, Commander Rockwell never noticed the major etiological factors of Aryan decline, only the minor ones. Otherwise, he would never have defended, as Hood does, the American flag.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Emigration / immigration

Hitler, 10

Hitler was well aware of the industrial strength of the British Empire and the United States, but in his view the struggle against the Anglo-Americans during the First World War was not decided solely by material factors. His vision of international politics was essentially human-centred. On Hitler’s reading, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been an epic demographic contest which the German Empire had spectacularly lost. She had failed to provide an outlet for her excess population either through economic or through territorial expansion, with the result that millions of Germans had emigrated. Meanwhile, her enemies built up huge empires which they could parlay into strength on the European battlefield. Hitler lamented ‘that the Entente sent alien auxiliary peoples to bleed to death on European battlefields’. He had personal experience of this, having confronted (British) Indian troops in 1915 and (French) Algerian Zouaves in 1918. Hitler’s anxiety deepened on beholding the Africans and Moroccans who formed part of the French occupation forces in the 1920s. He accused France of ‘only waiting for the warm season to throw an army of 800-900,000 blacks into [our] country to complete the work of the total subjugation and violation of Germany’. Hitler’s concern was thus not only racial, but strategic: that France would use the human reserves of Africa to oppress Germany, a weapon no longer available to Germany as she had lost her much smaller overseas empire as a result of the war.

The main threat posed by the European empires, however, was not the deployment of men from the ‘subject races’, but from the white settler colonies. Some of the most formidable British troops on the western front had come from Canada, Australia and New Zealand. They were numerous, well fed, fit, highly motivated, and often extremely violent. Worse still was the fact that the Germans whom the Reich had exported in the nineteenth century for want of land to feed them had come back to fight against her as American soldiers during the war. In later speeches, as we shall see, Hitler repeatedly came back to the moment he had encountered his first American prisoners. The emigration question was the subject of his second known major speech in September 1919, and it also underlay his next disquisition, which was on the internal colonization of Germany. His thoughts on that subject so impressed his sponsor Captain Mayr that he announced his intention ‘to launch this official report abridged or in full in the press in a suitable manner’. Emigration was part of daily life in post-war Germany, so much so that a whole newspaper in Munich, Der Auswanderer (‘The Emigrant’), was devoted to the topic.

That said, although contemporary concern with the emigration issue went well beyond Hitler, it does not seem to have enjoyed a particular salience in the broader inquest into the war. It thus represents his distinctive contribution to the debate on German revival and one of the most important lessons he drew from the war. Henceforth the emigration question, and the associated American problem, lay at the very heart of Hitler’s thinking.