‘Hitler’ (book by Brendan Simms) – Page 6

In Martin Kerr’s list of books recommended in his introduction to National Socialism, we can see this subheading, ‘Books Hostile to National-Socialism but Still Containing Valuable Information’. In line with this literary advice this year I bought a book, Hitler: Only the World Was Enough by English biographer and historian Brendan Simms. Half a year ago I had already written something about Hitler but now, that I am willing to read it carefully, I could start a new series.

Simms’ book, once purged of its anti-Nazi sentiments, serves me wonderfully for the point of view of The West’s Darkest Hour: the Anglo-American world has been the villain of our film. This viewpoint contrasts dramatically with what George Lincoln Rockwell believed, and is much closer to the position of Francis Parker Yockey.

Hitler: Only the World Was Enough begins with a magnificent epigraph, some words from the Führer himself: ‘In the end man takes his livelihood from the earth, and the earth is the trophy which destiny gives to those peoples who fight for it’. Lebensraum!

Some of the final chapters contain striking titles: ‘England is the motor of the opposition to us’, ‘The struggle against the Anglo-Saxons and plutocracy’, and ‘The Fall of Fortress Europe’.

The prologue contains the key to deciphering Simms’ thesis. Hitler’s biographer informs us that on July 17, 2018, brigade adjutant Fritz Wiedemann wrote that Private First Class Hitler dropped off two American prisoners at the headquarters of 12 Royal Bavarian Infantry Brigade. Simms adds: ‘This, then, is when all it began’ because these doughboys were the descendants of German immigrants, lost to the Fatherland for lack of living space (not enough Lebensraum). In subsequent discourses, Hitler repeatedly came back to the moment, in the mid-summer of 1918, when the first American soldiers appeared on the battlefield of France: ‘Well-grown man, men of our own blood, whom we have deported for centuries, who were now ready to grind the motherland itself into the mud’. In Hitler’s mind, only the Lebensraum east was ultimately to become the remedy because he wanted to imitate the US somehow, an extensive ‘spacial formation’ he said elsewhere.

Already in the Introduction, Simms gives brief reviews of the major works on Hitler and criticises their authors for not having seen this reality, including Alan Bullock, Joachim Fest, Ian Kershaw, Peter Longerich and other standard biographers of the anti-Nazi System under which we live: biographers who deal with other facets of Hitler’s personality. Simms then sets out his thesis.

What he offers us is an intellectual biography of Hitler, from his first conception of Germany’s history and its role in the world in the wake of defeat in World War I, to his conviction that the main enemy was neither communism nor the Soviet Union, nor even international Jewry, as has hitherto been repeated even in racialist forums; but Anglo-Saxon capitalism and, primarily, the United States. While most historians have argued that Hitler underestimated the American threat, Simms shows that Hitler embarked on a pre-emptive war against the United States precisely because he considered it the main adversary and the only one that could destroy Germany. The Third Reich domination of virtually all of Europe, the war against the USSR and the annihilation of European Jewry were chapters in a race against time to turn the Reich into a power capable of confronting Anglo-Saxon leadership and, if not defeating it, at least achieving a bipolar world balanced between the stark Anglo-Saxon finance capitalism and a German Reich rooted in the Germanic racial tradition.

Simms’ thesis is not entirely original. As we also read in the Introduction, Adam Tooze has shown to what extent the US must be considered the main reference for the Third Reich from its very beginning. In the Intro Simms also mentions the sources he used for his massive biography of Hitler. In addition to the official texts, he includes the memoirs and diaries of those close to the Führer. But he is very emphatic in stressing that

While the connection between Hitler’s anti-Semitism and his anti-capitalism is often noted, and has been the subject of some individual subjects, its centrality to his worldview, and the extent to which he was fighting a war against ‘international high finance’ and ‘plutocracy’ from start to finish, has not been understood at all.

To understand it I would advise the visitor of this site to familiarise himself with the realism of theorists such as John Mearsheimer, who teaches us how States think and how they relate to each other.

On Sunday I had to get out of my house to avoid the music at a party my nephew was throwing. I had nothing better to do than spend a few hours at the most prestigious bookshop south of the city. I had originally planned to buy some of Plutarch and Xenophon on Sparta, but there were no good editions. I leafed through Darwin’s autobiography and was surprised that his wife censored a sentence of earlier editions where Charles said that the doctrine of eternal damnation was odious (in my diary I noted that this is why white people are dying out: it wasn’t even possible for these 19th-century little women to rebel against the most odious thing!). I was also browsing through a new study on the painter Giorgio de Chirico, of whom I have collected several paintings on this site. Finally, I stumbled across a new 2019 biography of Uncle Adolf: Hitler: Only the World Was Enough by British author Brendan Simms.

Although the authors of Dominion and Criminal History of Christianity are normies, I have been using their books to illustrate precepts of ours that have nothing to do with the liberalism of Tom Holland or Karlheinz Deschner, and I did the same with Richard Weikart’s Hitler’s Religion. The point is that people like us are never published by the System. And when we use a public platform, as I did with the books that appear in ‘Our Books’, the System simply cancels our accounts. Then there is the issue that all these normie authors, approved by the System, are thus capable of writing super-erudite treatises, like Hitler: Only the World Was Enough by Simms.

Brendan Simms, professor of history, University of Cambridge.

I bought his book because we are informed that, according to the author, Anglo-Saxon capitalism, primarily the United States, was Hitler’s main enemy, not Jewry. The premise is fascinating, but unlike the writings of people on our side, such as Francis Parker Yockey who held a similar premise, Simms has to utter the hackneyed anti-Hitler duck-speak from the first few pages of the book and the final chapter, to receive the imprimatur of a good publishing house. Nevertheless, like Weikart’s book on Hitler’s pantheistic religion, such normie authors provide a plethora of new research that is easy to use for altogether different purposes.

Unlike Holland’s Dominion, I won’t be able to quote from Simms’s book because the 2021 copy I bought is a Barcelona translation of the English original. Nevertheless, this Simms interview sheds some light on Hitler’s view of Anglo-America.

Of course, Simms repeats the religious figure of six million holocausted Jews ignoring videos, which can also be seen on YouTube, of how the Jewish press was already playing with the 6-million figure when talking about Russian pogroms before the Third Reich.