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Category: Mein Kampf (book)

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Arthur de Gobineau Bible Deranged altruism Eugenics Heinrich Himmler Hitler's Religion (book) Jesus Mein Kampf (book) Miscegenation Racial studies Richard Weikart

Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 7

Editor’s note: Here are some excerpts from the seventh chapter of Richard Weikart’s book.
 

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Under the leadership of Madame Blavatsky, theosophy had tried to blend a mystical racism with a scientific view of an evolutionary hierarchy of races. Despite professing the brotherhood of all humanity, theosophy taught racial inequality, and Blavatsky even endorsed the extermination of inferior races. Lanz also drew inspiration from non-mystical, non-occult sources, such as the physician and racial theorist Ludwig Woltmann. Before founding his own journal, Lanz wrote an extended review of Woltmann’s book, Die politische Anthropologie, for a freethinking journal and waxed enthusiastic about Woltmann’s racist doctrine of Nordic superiority. Woltmann’s book had been written for a prize competition for the best work on the political and social implications of Darwinian theory. He synthesized Darwin’s theory of natural selection with Arthur Gobineau’s theory of the racial superiority of the Nordic race.

[Left, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882), a French aristocrat.] Woltmann was a biological and racial determinist, believing that not only physical characteristics, but also mental and moral traits, are hereditary. Thus, one’s destiny is predetermined in one’s biological makeup. Race, according to Woltmann, is the key to historical development, because some races—the fair-skinned Nordic one especially—were superior. The Nordic race, he stated, is “the highest product of organic evolution,” and they were the founders of civilization. Further, he believed that races arose through an ongoing racial struggle for existence, and, like Gobineau, he thought that racial mixing was deleterious, leading to racial decline.

Though Lanz used the term Aryan rather than Nordic, many of his ideas about race were similar to those of Woltmann and other Nordic racists. Lanz believed that “race is the driving force behind all deeds,” determining the destiny of all peoples, or Völker. Racial wisdom was thus the paramount value, motivating him to establish a religion of race. Lanz warned that the Aryan race was threatened with decline, and his religion aimed at rescuing and preserving this endangered, but valuable, race. The key peril confronting Aryans was racial mixture. One of the more bizarre claims that Lanz made—based on his mystical interpretation of the Bible—was that the Fall happened when Eve copulated with an animal, producing progeny who were half-ape and half-human. These “ape-people” that Eve bore were the ancestors of the inferior races around the globe, such as black Africans, and their animal blood tainted all inferior races. This Fall involved racial mixture with a vengeance, and it dehumanized all non-Aryans, who supposedly had admixtures of animal blood coursing through their veins.

Unlike Hitler, who despised the Hebrew Bible as the effluvium of the Jewish mind, Lanz claimed that Moses was a Darwinist who—if interpreted in the proper mystical sense—taught Aryans how to triumph in the racial struggle through conscious racial selection. Lanz maintained that the Jews had succeeded historically despite their inferiority because they had appropriated the biblical wisdom that was really intended for Aryans. Aryans should embrace the Bible, including the Old Testament, “as the hard, racially proud and racially conscious book, which proclaims death and extermination to the inferior and world domination to the superior (Hochwertigen).” Unfortunately, Lanz continued, a false kind of love had been incorporated into the Bible by some misguided souls.

Elsewhere, Lanz elaborated that the kind of neighborly love and compassion that most people equated with Christianity, and which appeared in the Bible, was based on a misinterpretation hypocritically taught by the inferior races, the so-called “ape-people.” The word “neighbor” in the Old Testament really meant, he assured his fellow Aryan racists, one’s racial comrade. Thus the command to love our neighbor really “means that we only have to love our racial comrades, thus those who stand closest to our kind and our race.” In a 1907 issue of Ostara, he warned his fellow Aryans that they were committing race suicide by extending generosity to those of inferior races. Rather, they should always discriminate racially in their charitable giving. (Apparently, Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan meant nothing to Lanz—or to Hitler.) Ominously, Lanz compared racially inferior people to weeds needing to be pulled. A major theme in this pamphlet and many others was the need to introduce eugenics measures to improve the race.

Many of Lanz’s doctrines became core tenets of Hitler’s worldview: the primacy of race in determining historical developments, Aryan superiority (with the Aryans being the sole creators of culture), the Darwinian racial struggle, the need for eugenics policies, and the evils of racial mixing. Hitler also shared Lanz’s view that Aryans had developed an ancient civilization in the mythical Atlantis. In a passage of Mein Kampf that decries racial mixing in a manner reminiscent of Lanz’s writings, Hitler admonished the state to elevate the status of marriage, which under the present system was supposedly contributing to biological decline. By hindering the marriages of those he dubbed inferior, he hoped marriages could “produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape.” By claiming that racial mixture could result in human-ape hybrids, Hitler was pulling a page out of Lanz’s repertoire. No wonder [Wilfried] Daim was struck by the similarities between Lanz and Hitler and supposed that Hitler’s ideology hailed largely from Lanz’s writings. Given all these parallels, most historians acknowledge the likelihood that Lanz’s Ariosophy influenced Hitler’s ideology, either directly or indirectly.

But another like-minded Ariosophist in Vienna, Guido von List, was probably even more influential among early twentieth-century Pan-German nationalists than his colleague Lanz. He introduced the swastika symbol into Aryan racist circles before Lanz, and his ideas were widely discussed in the Pan-German press in Vienna. List and Lanz propagated similar occult racial ideologies, and they belonged to each other’s organizations. Before becoming entranced with occult thinking, List wrote for Pan-German publications. He carried this intense nationalist and racist heritage with him into his occult Aryan religion.

Like Lanz, he claimed he was recovering ancient Germanic wisdom that had been lost, and he wanted to replace Catholicism with his mystical faith. He preached Aryan supremacy, the need to engage in the struggle for existence against other races, and eugenics measures to improve the vitality of the Aryan race. In 1908, he explained the core of his message: “The high meaning of this custom [of ancient Aryans] lay in the intention of a planned, widespread breeding of a noble race, which through strict sexual laws would also remain racially pure.” List wanted to reconstitute an ancient Germanic priesthood with esoteric knowledge that could elevate the racially purified and ennobled Aryans to dominate the globe.

We do not know if Hitler had any direct contact with List or the List Society when he lived in Vienna. Brigitte Hamann, however, believes that Hitler’s racial ideology had more in common with List than with Lanz. List, for example, taught that the Aryans evolved into a superior race during the Ice Age. They were steeled in body and mind by the harsh conditions, and they had to wage a bitter battle against the elements. Natural selection eliminated the weak, sickly, and less cooperative, leaving the robust, healthy, and more moral members to propagate their superior biological traits. Hitler narrated a similar tale of Aryan origins in his 1920 speech, “Why Are We Anti-Semites?” List also viewed nature as the source of divine power, and according to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, he reduced all morality to just one ethical precept: “Live in accordance with Nature.” Hitler’s ethical views also stressed conformity to nature and its laws…

In August 1918, shortly before the end of the war, he [Rudolf von Sebottendorff] founded the Thule Society in Munich as an organization to foster German nationalism and Aryan racism. The Thule Society adopted the swastika as its symbol and “Heil” as its greeting, thus contributing to later Nazi practices.

In June 1918, Sebottendorff acquired the Münchner Beobachter as the mouthpiece for the Thule Society. In order to attract young Germans to his movement, he featured sports articles in this newspaper. However, its real purpose was to advance his racist and ultranationalist views, so he also published articles on these themes. One early article he wrote was “Keep Your Blood Pure,” which sounds remarkably similar to Hitler’s racial philosophy in Mein Kampf. In this essay, Sebottendorff asserted that race is the key to understanding history. He was incensed that Christianity had led some Germans to embrace racial equality. He wrote,

Encouraged by Christianity they propagated the doctrine of the equality of humans. Gypsies, Hottentots, Brazilian natives, and Germans are supposedly completely equal in value. Too bad the great teacher, nature, teaches otherwise. It teaches: This equality is nonsense. It is the greatest lie that humanity has ever been talked into. To the destruction of us Germans. There are higher and lower races! If one values the racial mish-mash, the “Tschandalen” [this was Lanz’s term for inferior human races that had resulted from a human-ape hybrid] the same as the Aryans—the noble humans—then one commits a crime against humanity… Wherever one looks in the past, the bearers of Germanic blood have always been the bearers and creators of culture.

The affinities with Hitler’s worldview are obvious: racial inequality, the role of nature in confirming racial inequality, and the Aryans as the sole creators of culture. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Sebottendorff boasted that he had laid the intellectual foundation for Nazism.

Sebottendorff’s view of Christianity was similar to Hitler’s, too. He criticized many of its features, especially its tendency to promote human equality. While appreciating Luther’s anti-Semitism, he noted that it was nonetheless deficient, because it was based on religious, not racial, considerations. He also dismissed the notion that people should turn the other cheek. Rather, he proclaimed, they should strike back until their opponent remained on the ground. Strangely, Sebottendorff thought Jesus approved of this pugnacity, for he continued, “That was also the opinion of our Savior: He came to bring the sword”…

A different movement, neo-paganism, also held sway over some leading Nazis, especially Himmler and Rosenberg. Neo-paganism, the attempt to resurrect the old Germanic gods and goddesses, sometimes overlapped with occultism, though some neo-paganists were staunch opponents of it. Both schools of thought were anti-Christian in their orientation. The occultist Sebottendorff, for example, tried to resurrect the worship of Wotan and other ancient Germanic gods. Himmler and Rosenberg saw neo-paganism as a way to bring Germans back to their original pre-Christian religion. Neo-paganism countered the universalizing tendencies of Christianity and emphasized the distinctiveness of the Aryan race, even in their religion.

Despite all these historical connections between Hitler and occultists, the popular idea that Hitler was an occultist—or at least powerfully influenced by occultism—faces serious objections…

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Abraham Lincoln American civil war Hitler's Religion (book) Mein Kampf (book) Richard Weikart

Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 6

Editor’s note: This is the first regular article after the June 8th accident: some excerpts from Richard Weikart’s chapter ‘Did Hitler derive his anti- Semitism from Christianity?’
 

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Hitler blamed the Jews for just about everything that he opposed: communism, capitalism, internationalism, liberalism, materialism, egalitarianism, pacifism, and, of course, Christianity. That sneaky rabbi Paul had formulated his version of Christianity, Hitler believed, on the “Jewish-Bolshevik” principles of human equality. When Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, he complained that the Christian churches were not sufficiently anti-Semitic. He asked, “In the Jewish question, for example, do not both denominations [Catholic and Protestant] today take a standpoint which corresponds neither to the requirements of the nation nor to the real needs of religion?” A few paragraphs later, he remarked that Protestantism was better than Catholicism in defending the national interests of Germany, but it was still deficient, because it “combats with the greatest hostility any attempt to rescue the nation from the embrace of its most mortal enemy, since its attitude toward the Jews just happens to be more or less dogmatically established.” For Hitler, Christianity was essentially Jewish and thus weakened the German effort to combat the Jewish threat. He certainly did not see his anti-Semitism as congruent with the teachings and policies of the Christian churches…

Anti-Jewish animus was sometimes tempered by the Christian ethic of loving one’s neighbor and even one’s enemies. Also, Christians often opposed the biological racism that flourished in intellectual circles in the late nineteenth century. Historian Leon Poliakov remarks, “Judeo-Christian tradition was both anti-racist and anti-nationalist.” If one reads the biological racist literature of early twentieth-century Germany, one frequently finds that racist ideologues criticized the Christian churches for their racial egalitarianism.

Christian anti-Semites differed from racial anti-Semites because Christians usually did not object to the Jews as a biological entity; rather, they opposed their religion. If Jews would give up their Jewish religion and be baptized into the Christian faith, they would be accepted as full-fledged members of German society, as they often were. But the secular, racial form of anti-Semitism that flowered around 1900—and which Hitler embraced— regarded conversion and assimilation as the absolute worst things that could happen, because then Jews would intermarry with Germans. Hitler believed this would pollute the German bloodline with inferior hereditary traits. Thus, the key difference between Christian anti-Semitism and racial anti- Semitism was that the former wanted to assimilate the Jews into German society while the latter believed it was necessary to eliminate them physically from Germany. Racial anti-Semites usually did not see the churches as allies in their campaign against the Jews.

NS propaganda: “Baptism did not make him a
non-Jew” from Ernst Hiemer, Der Giftpilz (1938).

One of the leading figures in developing the racist anti-Semitism that became prominent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was Wilhelm Marr, who coined the term anti-Semitism. Marr warned in a popular book in 1879 that the Jews were conquering the Germans in a racial war. This battle of the Germans against the Jews “was from the beginning no religious [war], it was a struggle for existence, that was waged against the foreign domination of Jewry.” Marr, a harsh critic of Christianity, depicted his theory about the racial struggle against Jews as a secular, scientific standpoint. Because he believed the Jews were a race, not a religion, he advocated segregation and discrimination, not assimilation, as the cure for the “Jewish question”… Marr’s antireligious, racist version of anti-Semitism gained many adherents at the end of the nineteenth century, especially as biological racism exploded in popularity among secular-minded intellectuals…

In the period 1919 to 1923, one of the main topics in Hitler’s speeches was the Jewish threat. In August 1920, Hitler delivered a programmatic speech in Munich on “Why Are We Anti-Semites?” Hitler depicted the Aryans or Nordic people as a race that developed in the northern parts of Europe. Because of the harsh climate, the Aryan race developed a diligent character, viewing labor as a duty to the community. Also, the tough conditions of life weeded out the weak and sickly among them, giving them greater physical stamina and contributing to the development of an inner life. The Jews, on the other hand, never developed an appreciation for labor.

In sum, Hitler said, “We see that here two great differences lie in the race: Aryanness means a moral conception of labor and through it what we hear so often today: socialism, sense of community, common welfare before self-interest—Jewry means an egoistic conception of labor and thereby mammonism and materialism, the exact opposite of socialism!”

Hitler emphasized these moral and immoral traits of Aryans and Jews were biological and hereditary. In answering the question, “Why Are We Anti- Semites?,” Hitler made clear that he opposed the Jews’ supposedly hereditary immoral qualities, especially their laziness and greed. His anti- Semitism was not based on religious considerations. To be sure, he did mention a couple of passages from the Hebrew Bible, but these were used to illustrate Jewish greed and immorality, not because he opposed their religious beliefs or practices. Not only do we find zero Christian anti- Semitic themes in this speech, but Hitler specifically distanced himself from Christianity by accusing the Jews of spreading Christianity, a theme he would take up often later, but usually in private, not in public forums…

The secularized version of anti-Christian anti-Semitism that became prominent in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Germany was grafted onto the earlier Christian version of anti-Semitism. Centuries-old caricatures of the Jews were reinterpreted as Jewish biological traits. Further, the Christian churches in Germany and Austria continued to peddle a good deal of anti-Jewish animosity in the early twentieth century, thus giving succor to the Nazi anti-Semitic juggernaut. Both Christian anti-Semitism and anti-Christian anti-Semitism—thus, both religion and secularization—were necessary conditions for the advent of the Nazi Holocaust. The anti-Semitic message that Hitler preached, however, was far more anti-Christian than Christian.

 

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Editor’s note: In this chapter I begin to glimpse the tragedy of the leading NS ideologues and their compromise with the Christian masses of Germans.

The fact is that, publicly, they could not speak out. And they themselves believed in an Aryan and fictitious Jesus because there was no research like Richard Carrier’s (see the video linked in the sticky post).

That’s why they focused so much on the JQ—the CQ was taboo in Nazi Germany, as it still is now in American white nationalism.

For example, it is common on the racial right to distort the driving force that moved the Yankees to war with southern racists, something that Robert Morgan has taken issue with a galaxy of conservative commenters on The Unz Review for some time now.

The following is his last exchange this month but, as I don’t yet know how to modify the theme code of this new incarnation of WDH (the software automatically italicises all indented quotes and turn the indented quotes brown), I won’t indent Morgan’s next quotes or those he argues with:
 

Robert Morgan: Jared Taylor is such a brazen liar I decided to make an annotated version of his remarks about Lincoln.

“Lincoln didn’t like slavery, but he didn’t like blacks, either.”

Yet Lincoln was more responsible than any other man for freeing them and turning them loose on white people. I ask you, is this the action of a man who hated blacks?

“Once they were free, he wanted them gone.”

Correction: he once or twice said he wanted them gone, but his actions prove he didn’t.

“In 1862, when you’d think he was busy fighting a war, he was worrying about how to get rid of black people.”

But not worrying very much, apparently. In his last public address before being assassinated, he called for them to be made citizens and given the vote. It should be easy to see from this facile turnabout that at heart, Lincoln was no racist, but a dyed-in-the-wool racial egalitarian.

“He appointed James Mitchell as United States Commissioner of Emigration [of negroes] to find a place, far away, where all blacks would go. Mitchell invited a delegation of blacks to the White House so Lincoln could ask them to clear out.”

And here we come to the nub of the matter. Any “plan” that relied on all the negroes volunteering to leave was not a plan at all, only a pipe dream.

“This was the first time blacks had set foot in the White House on official business and not as servants, slaves, or workmen.”

In other words, on terms of equality with whites. Another first from Jared Taylor’s hero, “Honest” Abe. I suppose it’s fitting, in a way, that a liar such as Taylor should admire Lincoln, one of the greatest and most successful liars to ever hold the American presidency. And that’s saying something!

“He told the blacks that it was only because their people were in this country that Yankees and Confederates were slaughtering each other.”

Let’s note that this is the exact opposite of what Taylor and other Civil War revisionists argue. They are quite fond of making the astonishingly stupid claim that the Civil War had NOTHING at all to do with slavery. Why, it was only an attempt to save the Union, doncha know! LOL.

“He told them he had picked out a nice place for them in Central America, and asked them to convince all other blacks to pack up and go there.”

Asked them! To convince all the other blacks to pack up and go there! LOL. Yes, very realistic! If Lincoln actually believed that had a snowball’s chance in hell of happening then he must have been even stupider than the average “white nationalist” who buys into the lie that Lincoln didn’t like negroes.

“But, somehow, it’s today’s Democrats—not Lincoln in 1862—who are ‘the real racists’.”

Jared Taylor’s comical attempt to portray the Great Emancipator as “the real racist” is an epic fail.

Sollipsist: “No matter how big you make the word NOTHING, it still fails to accurately represent the factual and historical arguments that correctly identify slavery as a catalyst rather than a first cause.”

Robert Morgan: Lincoln says it’s the ONLY cause. Again, as Taylor puts it: “He told the blacks that it was only because their people were in this country that Yankees and Confederates were slaughtering each other. ”

How’s that for “factual and historical”? So who’s lying here? JT? Lincoln? Both?

Sollipsist: “It would be progress just to get most people to the point at which they’d realize (or maybe even grudgingly admit) that economics, manufacturing concerns, and centralized political control had ANYTHING to do with sending 600,000+ people to their death.”

Robert Morgan: In The Battle Hymn of the Republic, the Union soldiers sang the line Let us die to make men free! N.b., they didn’t claim to be willing to die for manufacturing concerns, for economics, for tariffs, for centralized political control, or even to save the Union. Their cause was freeing the slaves. Without this moral cause, it’s hard to see how they would have justified the war, either to themselves or anyone else.

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Catholic Church Child abuse Hitler's Religion (book) Joseph Goebbels Judeo-reductionism Mein Kampf (book) Racial right Richard Weikart Rudolf Hess

Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 1

Goebbels’ Diaries

Joseph Goebbels, based on his frequent and extensive conversations with Hitler, recorded numerous times in his diary that Hitler was anti-Christian and wanted to destroy the churches. A few days after Christmas in 1939, he conversed with Hitler and reported, “The Führer is deeply religious, but entirely anti-Christian. He sees in Christianity a symptom of decay. Rightly so. It is a strata deposited by the Jewish race.”

The first chapter of Richard Weikart’s book is entitled ‘Was Hitler a Religious Hypocrite?’ In the white advocates’ internet movement, Carolyn Yeager has been the most faithful in holding in high esteem the memory of Hitler and his Reich. But like many Christian white nationalists, she has failed to notice the hypocrisy of the Führer’s public pronouncements when compared to his private pronouncements. I recommend Weikart’s book to those racialist Christians who are stuck with Hitler’s public image.

Who was the historical Hitler? Since, in many respects, Hitler is the antithesis of the archetypal Jesus, we can recall a verse from Mark’s gospel that portrays him: ‘He spoke to them only in parables, but to his disciples privately he explained everything’.

Plenty of evidence suggests Hitler was concerned lest he offend the religious sensibilities of the German public. In a lengthy passage in Mein Kampf, he warned against repeating the disastrous course that caused Georg von Schönerer’s Pan-German Party to nose dive. Schönerer was an Austrian politician in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who wanted to unite all Germans in a common empire. His fervent German nationalism brought him into conflict with the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire, which would dissolve if Schönerer had his way. He also promoted a biological form of anti-Semitism, wanting to purify the German people by getting rid of this allegedly foreign race. In 1941, Hitler told his colleagues that when he arrived in Vienna in 1907, he was already a follower of Schönerer. By the time he wrote Mein Kampf, he agreed fully with Schönerer’s Pan-German ideals, affirming, “Theoretically speaking, all the Pan-German’s [Schönerer’s] thoughts were correct.” However, he blamed Schönerer for not recognizing the importance of winning the masses over to Pan-Germanism and harshly criticized him for launching the Los-von-Rom (Away-from-Rome) Movement, which called on Austrians to abandon the Roman Catholic Church. Schönerer opposed Catholicism because he considered it an internationalist organization that undermined nationalism.

This reminds me of what Henry VIII did in separating the Church of England from papal authority.

He believed it posed a danger to the German people since it included many different nationalities, including his enemies: the Slavic groups in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Schönerer himself personally left the Catholic Church in January 1900 and joined the Lutheran denomination. Though he occasionally lauded Luther and Protestantism, his concern was purely political. According to Andrew G. Whiteside, a leading expert on Schönerer, he remained a pagan at heart and was indifferent to Christianity; though sometimes he claimed to be a Christian, at other times he admitted, “I am and remain a pagan.” Another time, he stated, “Where Germandom and Christendom are in conflict, we are Germans first… If it is un-Christian to prefer the scent of flowers in God’s own free nature to the smoke of incense… then I am not a Christian.” According to Whiteside, “none of the Pan-German leaders was in the least religious.”

Hitler viewed the Los-von-Rom Movement as an unmitigated disaster because it unnecessarily alienated the masses from the Pan-German Party, precipitating its decline. Hitler suggested the proper political course would be to imbue ethnically German Catholics (and Protestants) with nationalist sentiments so they would support a “single holy German nation,” just as they had done during World War I. Hitler also rejected Schönerer’s anti-Catholic crusade because he insisted that a successful political movement must concentrate all its fury on a single enemy. A struggle against Catholicism would dissipate the Nazi movement’s power and sense of conviction it needed to carry on its fight against the Jews.

Wow, this puts me closer to Schönerer than to Hitler, even though, privately, Hitler believed the same as Schönerer did about the religion of our parents.

But we must try to understand Hitler. In the case of Henry VIII, the winds of the zeitgeist on the British Isle were in his favour. The Austrians and Catholic Germans weren’t prepared for such a step, and in any case, German Lutheranism was as harmful to the Aryan cause as Roman Catholicism. If someone wants, like Hitler, to do politics, he has to compromise.

While Hitler faulted Schönerer for alienating the masses through his anti-Catholic campaign, he was not thereby endorsing Catholicism. Overall, he supported Schönerer’s ideological goals and only objected to his inopportune tactics: “[The Pan-German movement’s] goal had been correct, its will pure, but the road it chose was wrong.” What Hitler learned from Schönerer’s tactical mistake was that political parties should steer clear of interfering with people’s religious beliefs or attacking religious organizations: “For the political leader the religious doctrines and institutions of his people must always remain inviolable; or else he has no right to be in politics, but should become a reformer, if he has what it takes! Especially in Germany any other attitude would lead to a catastrophe.” Hitler thus warned any anticlerical members of his party to keep their antireligious inclinations private, lest they alienate the masses.

Hitler’s compromise took a toll that is noticeable even in American white nationalism: what I have been calling monocausalism on this site.

By focusing, at least in the Reich’s public pronouncements, solely on Jews as the Enemy #1 of the Aryan, the public NS ideology exonerated Christians. I won’t reprove what Hitler did, because rather than being a religious reformer he chose to be a politician; and every politician has to compromise. But this tactic left a gap in racial ideology that to this day hasn’t been filled. (Since American white nationalists aren’t politicians but internet commentators, unlike the NS of the previous century they could break down the barrier between private and public, and start saying what Hitler said privately about Christianity, which they don’t.)

In 1924, when Hitler was interned in Landsberg Prison after his failed Beer Hall Putsch, his fellow prisoner and confidante Rudolf Hess talked with other Nazis about religion. Hitler did not join the conversation; afterward, he told Hess that he dared not divulge his true feelings about religion publicly. Hitler confessed that, even though he found it distasteful, “for reasons of political expediency he had to play the hypocrite toward his church.” From the early days of his political activity, Hitler recognized that being a religious hypocrite had its political advantages.

In his diaries, Goebbels confirmed that Hitler camouflaged his religious position to placate the masses. Based on his conversations with Hitler more than a year before the Nazis came to power, Goebbels wrote that Hitler not only wanted to withdraw officially from the Catholic Church but even wanted to “wage war against it” later. However, Hitler knew withdrawing from Catholicism at that moment would be scandalous and undermine his chances of gaining power. Rather than commit political suicide, he would bide his time, waiting for a more opportune moment to strike against the churches. Goebbels, meanwhile, was convinced the day of reckoning would eventually come when he, Hitler, and other Nazi leaders would all leave the Church together. If Hitler was being frank with Goebbels, then his public religious image was indeed a façade to avoid offending his supporters.

It couldn’t be clearer.

In a diary entry from June 1934, Rosenberg also explained how Hitler masked his true religious feelings for political purposes… According to Rosenberg, Hitler divulged his anti-Christian stance and “more than once emphasized, laughing, that he had been a heathen from time immemorial,” and that “the Christian poison” was approaching its demise. Rosenberg explained, however, that Hitler kept these views top secret.

Multiple sources, not only his monologues that we have begun to translate, portray what Hitler said to his ‘apostles’ in private in contrast to his ‘parables’ to the people.

In a major speech on the sixth anniversary of the Nazi regime (the same speech where he threatened to destroy the Jews if a world war broke out), Hitler remonstrated against the “so-called democracies” for accusing his government of being antireligious. He reminded them that the German government continued to support the churches financially through taxes and pointed out that thousands of church leaders were exercising their offices unrestrained. But what about the hundreds of pastors and priests who had been arrested and thrown into prison or concentration camps?

A fair question.

The only religious leaders persecuted by his regime, he smugly said, were those who criticized the government or committed egregious moral transgressions, such as sexually abusing children.

It is a myth that American Boston journalists were the first in the West, at the beginning of this century, to expose the Can of Worms that is the Catholic Church: it was the Germans. We can imagine how many Catholic children would have been spared if Hitler had won the war…

“Nor is it acceptable,” Hitler told the churches, “to criticize the morality of a state,” when they should be policing their own morals (the Nazi regime was at this time conducting trials of Catholic clergy for sexual abuse). He continued, “The German leadership of state will take care of the morality of the German state and Volk.” In Hitler’s view, morality was the purview of the state and its political leaders, not religious institutions and religious leaders. Any pastor or priest teaching his congregation morality contrary to Nazi policy or ideology could be labeled a political oppositionist, even if he was simply teaching moral precepts that Christians had been teaching for centuries.

Highly commendable, but because he lost the war we never settled accounts with Christianity: something Hitler planned to do after the war.

Categories
Martin Kerr Mein Kampf (book)

History of American NS, 3

Critical assessment of the pre-war movement

The first period of development of American National Socialism came to an end with the entry of the United States into the Second World War. Although some tiny remnants of the pre-War movement continued through the War years and into the post-War period, for all practical purposes, the attack on Pearl Harbor by Germany’s Japanese ally put an end to the American movement as a force on the political scene. A great divide separates pre-War National Socialism from its post-War counterpart. Therefore, before resuming a chronological account of NS development, it is appropriate to examine the strengths and weaknesses of the pre-War movement, its successes and failures.

 
Strategic overview

With the benefit of eighty years of historical perspective, we can say that there were two optimal strategies that the Movement could have pursued in the pre-War period.

1. American National Socialists could have dedicated themselves to supporting National Socialist Germany by adopting a low profile, and working to weaken the economic boycott against the Reich, and fostering German-American friendship. Those who wanted to play a more active role in building National Socialism could have relocated to Germany. This strategic role for the Movement is the one favoured by Adolf Hitler.

2. Alternately, American comrades could have focused their resources and energy on building an authentic American NS movement, rooted in the broad masses of White America, that would have been separate from, but allied to, the Hitler movement in Germany. This is the course favoured by Peter Stahrenberg of the American National Socialist Party, and a small segment of the American movement.

But neither of these two strategies were pursued in a focused manner. Instead, American National Socialists, who were overwhelmingly German in ethnic or national origin, chose to support the German-American Bund. The Bund’s strategy (to the degree that it had any grand strategy) was to serve as a home for Germans in exile from their fatherland. It imitated the NSDAP in every way it could, and conducted no outreach to non-German-American Whites. It dressed its members in stormtrooper uniforms and attempted to reenact the German NS kampfzeit on American soil. Its public activities included marches and meetings, which often ended in brawls with Jewish and Marxist opponents. Such battles were then reported in newspapers, magazines and newsreels.

Although the coverage was always negative, the media gave an exaggerated portrayal of the Bund’s strength, implying that it posed a real threat to American democracy. Perhaps this publicity was in some way psychologically and emotionally fulfilling to ordinary Bund members. But if it pleased the Bund it was a black eye to Hitler, who was trying to convince America and Western Europe that the New Germany was not the menace its enemies claimed it was.

Other Bund activities were low key and internal, such as those that strengthened the folk identity of German-Americans through an emphasis on German language and custom. But in the long run, these activities did not contribute to establishing National Socialism as a native movement on the shores of the New World.

From hindsight we can judge that the pre-war movement was a strategic failure in every sense. It failed to provide substantial aid to National Socialist Germany, and it undercut Hitler’s efforts to have normal diplomatic and economic relations with the US. Rather than building support for National Socialism among White Americans, it played into the Jews’ false narrative: Hitler was a dangerous, evil mastermind, and the ‘Bundists’ were his willing goons and thugs. The Bund’s image convinced ordinary citizens that Hitler harboured sinister and aggressive designs on the US, and that the Bund itself constituted a ‘fifth column’ that would aid the German military in the conquest of America in the event of an invasion. No concerted effort was made to explain National Socialism – either as a worldview or a political-economic system – to the American public.

In consequence, ordinary White Americans believed the lie that Hitler posed a threat to their lives and liberties. Little wonder that George Lincoln Rockwell dropped out of college in the months before Pearl Harbor, so that he could join the US Navy and help ‘stop Hitler’ from conquering America!
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s note: The racialists who believe in ‘optics’ seem to be saying: Jews control the media and have created a false view of reality. We must behave under that vision, so as not to appear as Hollywood Nazis before the brainwashed public.

That’s a rather twisted way of seeing things. In my opinion, the public relations (PR) problem of the Bund members was the same problem of the Germans on the other side of the Atlantic: Christianity!

Mein Kampf wasn’t remotely as comprehensive a text as, say, the collection of articles by several authors in The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour (I merely added a preface). As John Gardner said in my recent post ‘Yggdrasil’:

Surprisingly, I was unable to find any coherent and helpful works in English translation from the Third Reich explaining how National Socialism might save us. Most of the major works of that period, including Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century and Hitler’s Mein Kampf are dreadful tomes, which fail to recognize our basic predicament.

In German National Socialism there wasn’t an equivalent, under the pen of its Führer, of Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. The closest thing to it is an unsigned SS pamphlet which we reproduced in The Fair Race: a pamphlet that mentions the churches as the enemy together with liberals, commies and Jews.

Keep in mind how Savitri had been quoting Hitler’s intimate talks in our series. Hitler couldn’t say openly what he said privately because the majority of Germans were Christians. The Führer bloated his PR text, Mein Kampf, with many unreadable pages not written by him, so much so that David Irving didn’t read it so as not to distort his view of the historical Adolf!

Hitler did that because the people weren’t ready for the pure and naked truth that could be expressed in a brief manifesto (remember that in his intimate table talks there are more passages critical of Christianity than of Judaism). The net result is that the American Nazis of yore lacked a comprehensive manifesto, and the same could be said of Rockwell.

Paraphrasing Mark’s gospel, publicly Hitler didn’t speak to the masses without a parable; but he explained everything in plain language to his apostles. Under this dynamic, the only correct practice for German Americans was to do what some did: return to Germany and submit to the orders of the state. Personally, if I had been one of them and had to stay in this continent, I’d have formed a publishing house to explain NS in the plainest way we could imagine; say, by translating into English those pamphlets I have been quoting. That would have been much better than what they did!

But in this, failure to found a publishing house, everyone erred including William Pierce as we shall see in future instalments of this series. Kerr continues:

______ 卐 ______

 
Following the war, the tattered and beleaguered remnants of the pre-war movement tentatively came together to resume the struggle. But there were no Bund members among them. Of the 25,000 or so members that the Bund had at its height, none chose to actively resume the fight when the war was done. In the 1960s, Lincoln Rockwell waited in vain for a mass influx of former Bund members, whom he hoped would provide an initial membership base for his nascent NS party. I, personally, knew a half-dozen or so members of the original German Hitler Youth who joined the National Socialist White People’s Party and took part in its demonstrations in the 1970s, but I never met a single former member of the Bund’s Order Division or its youth organization who did so. August Klapprott, his family, and a handful of his comrades provided behind-the-scenes advice and moral support to the NSWPP. I am told that former Bund members also provided the initial impetus to the formation of Gerhard Lauck’s NSDAP-AO. But beyond that, the Bund failed to provide leadership, direction or even a meagre physical presence to the post-war movement.

Tragically, this failure was not foreordained, but largely was the result of the moral shortcomings of two key Movement leaders, Heinz Spanknoebel and Fritz Kuhn

 
The moral failings of Spanknoebel and Kuhn

The three leading figures in pre-War American National Socialism were Fritz Gissibl, Heinz Spanknoebel and Fritz Kuhn. Spanknoebel and Kuhn were cut from the same cloth: both men were energetic and intelligent, with strong personalities and a flair for the dramatic. The two were sincerely dedicated to building National Socialism in the US, but only on the condition that National Socialism itself was subordinate to their agendas. While they demanded obedience from their followers in the name of Adolf Hitler, they were not loyal to Hitler in an absolute sense.

Both Spanknoebel (as the leader of Gau-USA) and Kuhn (as Bundesleiter) falsely told their followers that they had a mandate from Hitler to lead the American movement. While they were misrepresenting themselves to their followers as being the executors of the Fuehrer’s instructions, they were charting a course for the Movement that they knew contravened Hitler’s express wishes. Simply put, they thought that they knew better than the Führer, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Their ultimate loyalty was not to Hitler, but their egos.

In the end, Spanknoebel came to heel and voluntarily subordinated himself to the will of the Führer. His wartime service in the SS and eventual death in a Soviet gulag largely expiates his earlier hubris. But even so, the damage that he did to American National Socialism proved irreversible.

Kuhn, for his part, picked up where Spanknoebel left off, charting a course for the Bund that negated its domestic potential and made it a parody of the NSDAP. As with Spanknoebel, even in the face of direct criticism from the German movement, Kuhn wilfully pursued a course of development that he found personally gratifying, but which was a dead-end for National Socialism in the New World.

Kuhn’s decision to cheat on his wife with a mistress, whom he then supported with Movement funds, further underscores his fundamental flaw: when a conflict arose between what was best for the Bund, and what Kuhn believed to be in his interests, he followed the dictates of his ego.

In contrast to Spanknoebel and Kuhn is Fritz Gissibl, founder of Teutonia and briefly leader of the Friends of the New Germany. Gissibl was quiet and unassuming compared to the other two men. But though he lacked their flair, he was a hundred per cent loyal to Hitler, not just in word, but indeed as well. He carried out the directives that he received from the NSDAP in leading the American movement as well as he could.

In 1936 he returned to Germany, where he worked with Deutsches Auslands Institut in encouraging other expatriate Germans to return to the Fatherland. When the war came, he joined the SS, rising to the rank of Obersturmbannfuehrer. His ultimate fate is uncertain, some sources saying that he perished on the Eastern Front in 1944, while other people claim that he survived the war and was imprisoned for 18 months in a Soviet ‘denazification’ concentration camp. Either way, the Bund would have pursued a different course of development if he had been the Bundesleiter, a course that would be in keeping with Hitler’s will.

 
A chink in our armor

The failings of Spanknoebel and Kuhn point out a weakness in National Socialist doctrine that needs to be addressed. Under the leadership principle, a person in a position of authority has both absolute authority and the concomitant absolute responsibility in carrying out the job assigned to him. Someone who fails in successfully executing his mission is subject to removal from office. But what happens when that person is the supreme leader? Who removes him then? In the case of the pre-war American movement, there was no mechanism in place to remove a national leader who placed his subjective desires above the objective good of the cause. Indeed, in the absence of any oversight, it is not clear whether the senior leadership of the FND or the Bund were even aware that Spanknoebel and Kuhn were disobeying the instructions given to them by the NSDAP.

 
Tactical successes

Although the pre-war movement was a strategic failure in building National Socialism in America, it enjoyed success on a tactical or operational level on several fronts.

We have previously noted that the Bund established a nationwide organizational structure that included 163 local chapters in 47 of the 48 states. It had 18 summer youth camps and facilities that provided for Bund members to live in a National Socialist community year-round if they desired. There was a weekly bilingual newspaper and other publications. In the 1930s, America had a population of roughly 100 million – less than a third of what it has today. Thus, the Bund membership of 25,000 would be 75,000 in today’s terms. The 3,000 men of its Order Division would be 9,000 strong. Especially impressive was the Bund’s success in organizing its local chapters as folk communities, which included cultural, social and youth activities. There was a place in the Bund for women, children, veterans and the elderly – not just for military-age males.

 
August Klapprott’s critique

In the 1970s, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity on two occasions to speak privately at length with August Klapprott concerning the Bund. Klappott’s credentials were impressive: leader of the Bund in the eastern third of the US; editor of the Free American; proprietor of the largest Bund camp – Nordland – in New Jersey; and head of security at the mammoth Madison Square Garden rally. In the final months before the entry of the US into World War II, Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze, who had succeeded Fritz Kuhn as leader of the group, quietly drifted away, allowing his erstwhile comrades to fend for themselves. It was August Klapprott who stepped in and helped to lead the Bund during its final days.

I asked him what he thought were the greatest successes and failures of his movement. It is interesting to note that he refused to criticize Kuhn by name, even 30 years later: such was his sense of personal loyalty to his former leader. But although he did not criticize Kuhn by name, he was not slow in criticizing his policies.

Klapprott said that, in retrospect, the uniformed marches and street battles with communists were counterproductive. At the time they took place, however, he said, this was not so clear. The Bund had the legal right to conduct its public activities and to defend itself when physically attacked. The bad reputation that this brought to the Bund was unavoidable, he said, as the Jews controlled the media and would have painted the Bund in a bad light, no matter what its activities were.

He told me that, realistically speaking, the Bund did the best that it could under difficult circumstances. Even if it had forgone activities that brought it negative publicity, and concentrated on low-profile support of Hitler’s Germany, the outcome would have been the same: the Japanese would still have attacked Pearl Harbor, and four days later Hitler would still have declared war on the US.

I found another critique by Klapprott especially surprising. Although he had organized Camp Nordland, the most successful of the Bund’s facilities, he said that the underlying premise of the Bund’s camps was flawed. The Bund sank every available dollar into purchasing the land for the camps. Consequently, the Bund was always strapped for cash. When the time came for it to defend itself from legal attacks by the government, sufficient funds were not at hand for a full-scale legal defence. And in the end, the government just seized the Bund’s properties anyway, so that that the financial investment that the camps represented was lost without benefiting the Movement.

The Bund maintained four camps in the state of Michigan alone, for example. It would have been better, he said, for the Bund to have had fewer but larger camps, and to have rented the land. That way, money could have been set aside to fend off federal attacks.

I asked him for his opinion of non-Bund NS groups, such as Peter Stahrenberg’s American National-Socialist Party, that sought to build an authentically American NS movement. Klapprott was scornful of such efforts, saying that they drained manpower and resources from the Bund, and in the end, amounted to nothing. On this point, I must disagree with comrade Klapprott, for if this course of action had been followed from the beginning, the movement could have survived the war intact in some form.

 
Summing up

Regardless of the personal failings of its leaders, and despite the strategic blunders that rendered it ineffective in building National Socialism in America in the long run, there is something positive to learn from the Bund’s history. The lesson of the Bund is this: It is possible to build a functioning National Socialist movement in the United States [bold by Martin Kerr], even in the face of aggressive semi-legal persecution by the federal government and the open hostility of the media, the Jews and other committed anti-NS forces.

The America of 2017 is not the America of 1937, and today’s NS movement would have to adapt itself accordingly. But it could be done.

Categories
Mein Kampf (book) Real men Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book)

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 10

It seems to me that I hear from all sides the objection that has been made to us from the very beginning of the Movement, from the very first speeches of the Master, from the first edition of the Book. I am quoting the words, written in black and white on page 507 of the Book, words which I too have recalled so many times, in public and private meetings, before, during and after the Second World War:

Political parties tend to compromise; the Weltanschauungen never do. Political parties take into consideration the opposition of possible opponents; the Weltanschauungen proclaim their own infallibility. [1]

If this is not the most cynical glorification of intolerance, what is? And I remember—and how!—from the response of all the enemies of National Socialism, from the enthusiasts of good Parliamentary Democracy to the most rabid Communists, also theoretical defenders of ‘human rights’, to the slightest suggestion of identical treatment of all ‘committed’, including the Hitlerites: ‘There can be no question of tolerating the intolerant…’

Are we really ‘intolerant’? And did the Führer, in the passage quoted, or elsewhere, exalt intolerance? Yes, he did. But it is not the same intolerance that I have tried to describe throughout the preceding pages. It is the response to it, the reaction against it, which is very different.

In ancient times, before the virus of Jewish intolerance was spread throughout the world, we were tolerant as well as racist, as were all the Indo-Europeans and all the peoples of the world, including the Jews themselves, before the great Mosaic reformation. I will say more: without it our Movement, with its intransigence and aggressiveness, would not have existed—would not have had any justification. For it can only be understood in an age of accelerated decadence.

It is the supreme, desperate reaction—the reaction of people who have nothing to lose, since whatever comes of their revolution cannot be worse than what they see around them—against this decadence. Now this decadence is, as I have tried to show, linked to two attitudes that complement each other: the superstition of ‘man’ and to the superstition of ‘happiness’. It is these two superstitions which give rise to intolerance of the type I have described above, not really ‘that of the Jews’ (with the exception, no doubt, of the prophets), but that of all the doctrines with roots in Judaism: that which the Jews use, after having aroused it in other peoples, to incite those peoples to fight for them, without even knowing it.

Intolerance can only be fought with the help of other intolerance based on another faith, just as terror can only be fought with terror: a terror exercised in the name of another idea.

Editor’s Note: I’ve already embedded a clip of the 1959 film Ben-Hur in a previous post, but it’s worth rewatching.

It is at this point that white nationalists err big time, as it is schizophrenic to try to awaken the masses of whites to the JQ and at the same time behave like Sextus, not like Messala: a revolutionary idea must be fought with another revolutionary idea.

Most white nationalists are so traitors to their race that they really think like Sextus (watch the clip: here).

We fight the intolerance of the devotees of ‘man’ and those thirsty for ‘happiness’—both directly born of Judaism, and the humanitarian rationalists with scientific pretensions, fed by the same two superstitions. We are fighting against it with our intolerance, which has arisen not from the naive desire to make all men happy in this world or any other, but from the will to keep pure and strong this human minority, the biological elite that our Aryan race represents, so that one day (probably after the end of the present time-cycle) a community may emerge which is as close to our idea of the overman—without faults or weaknesses—as the tigers are to the idea of the perfect feline.

It does not matter to us whether the individuals who make up this biological elite are ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’! The Strong have no interest in personal happiness. Their function is to ensure, from generation to generation, both the continuity of the race in its beauty and virtues, in its health, and the continuity of faith in natural values. The pride they feel in fulfilling this function, and the pleasure of defying those who would draw them to other tasks, must suffice for their ‘happiness’.

Happiness in the sense that the vast majority of people in consumer societies understand it, i.e., material comfort plus the satisfactions of the senses and the heart, is good for the beasts who, deprived of the word, and therefore of the possibility of looking back on themselves, feel no particular pride in fulfilling their functions and have neither ideological adversaries to harass, nor ‘re-educators’ to challenge. It is, as I said at the beginning, their right. Even the ‘man’ of the inferior races should disdain to seek it—all the more so the average Aryan, and especially the Strong.

Moreover, our intolerance, like that of the orthodox Hindus, is manifested on the plane of life, of action, not on that of pure thought, for we do not believe that the basic propositions of our Weltanschauung are true: we know it. We are undoubtedly irritated by those uninformed people who persist in denying them—those who, for example, proclaim loudly that ‘race does not exist’.

We feel no more hostility towards them than towards madmen who go away repeating that two and two make five. We see that if we add two pebbles to two pebbles, and count the whole, we inevitably find four pebbles. And although this belongs to another order of ideas—the domain of natural science, and not to that of mathematics—we also see, and very clearly, that there are, among all the people who are called Indo-Europeans, or Aryans, common, well-defined traits. That some fools—or parrots, repeating what they have been fed on television by anti-racist propaganda—deny this does not change the facts. It is not to ‘save’ these fools, or parrots, from error, for the sake of their souls, or out of respect for their ‘reason’, that we would crack down on them if we had the power to do so, but only to prevent the repercussions their speeches might have in society, and especially among the young.

Their ‘reason’ is so unreasonable—and so little ‘theirs’!—that we have no respect for them. And we are not interested in the fate of their souls, if they have any. But the survival of our race—still so beautiful, wherever it has remained more or less pure—and the possibilities of assertion and action that a future, however threatening it may seem, interest us deeply. It is in the name of these that we would, if we had the power, take ruthless measures against them. In a society long since imbued with our spirit, in which every anti-racist, egalitarian, pacifist statement, contrary to the divine wisdom of Nature—every expression of the superstition of ‘man’—would be received with irresistible laughter, like a crude fairground joke, or with total indifference, even more deadly, perhaps we would not take action against our adversaries, but would let them yap all they want. They would not be dangerous, and would soon tire of it.

_________

[1] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, German edition 1935, p. 507.

Categories
Mein Kampf (book)

Hitler & Christianity

by Perkunas

In the article ‘Are the table talks genuine?’, the question was raised: ‘Christian disingenuously ask why, if this was his real opinion, didn’t he put it in Mein Kampf or mention it in any of his public speeches?’

Actually, Hitler did do that. There is a specific passage in Mein Kampf where Hitler says Christianity a ‘spiritual terror’ that came into the far freer ancient world, and a parallel and complementing statement to this passage is present in Hitler’s Table Talk. Here I quote the original German Version (1943 Edition):

Auch das Christentum konnte sich nicht damit begnügen, seinen eigenen Altar aufzubauen, sondern mußte zwangs-läufig zur Zerstörung der heidnischen Altäre schreiten. […] Man kann sehr wohl den Einwand bringen, daß es sich bei derartigen Erscheinungen in der Weltgeschichte meist um solche spezifisch jüdischer Denkart handelt; ja, daß diese Art von Unduldsamkeit und Fanatismus geradezu jüdische Wesensart verkörpere. Dies mag tausendmal richtig sein, und man kann diese Tatsache wohl tief bedauern und mit nur allzu berechtigtem Unbehagen ihr Erscheinen in der Geschichte der Menschheit als etwas feststellen, was dieser bis dahin fremd gewesen war […] Der einzelne mag heute schmerzlich feststellen, daß in die viel freiere antike Welt mit dem Erscheinen des Christentums der erste geistige Terror gekommen ist, er wird die Tatsache aber nicht bestreiten können, daß die Welt seitdem von diesem Zwange bedrängt und beherrscht wird, und daß man Zwang nur wieder durch Zwang bricht und Terror nur mit Terror. Erst dann kann aufbauend ein neuer Zustand geschaffen werden. (Mein Kampf, 5. Kapitel Weltanschauung und Organisation. Auflage 1943, Verlag Franz Eher Nachf., G.m.b.H., München, Zentralverlag der NSDAP., Frz. Eher Nachf., G.m.b.H., München).

Translation (italics added):

Even Christianity could not be satisfied with building its own altar, but inevitably had to go to the destruction of the pagan altars. […] One can very well raise the objection that such phenomena in world history are mostly of a specifically Jewish way of thinking; yes, that this kind of intolerance and fanaticism embodied a downright Jewish nature. This may be correct a thousand times, and one can deeply regret this fact and, with all too justified discomfort, see its appearance in the history of mankind as something that had hitherto been alien to it. […] Today the individual may painfully discover that the first spiritual terror came into the much freer ancient world with the appearance of Christianity. But he will not be able to deny the fact that the world has been oppressed and dominated by this compulsion ever since, and that compulsion can only be broken by compulsion and terror by terror. Only then can a new condition be created.

We can see here Hitler says that Christianity, in destroying altars of the classical world, displayed a ‘specifically Jewish way of thinking’ (original German: spezifisch jüdischer) and ‘embodied a downright Jewish nature’ (original German: geradezu jüdische verkörpere), and asserts this as a ‘fact’ (original German: Tatsache).

And next Hitler says Christianity introduced ‘spiritual terror’ into the much freer ancient world. Again, he asserts this as a fact. The words he uses above, ‘oppressed’ and ‘compulsion’, are extremely incriminating. What is more: incriminating is, according to Hitler, that the world has been oppressed and driven by compulsion only since the advent of Christianity; before Christianity’s advent the world was far freer in the Ancient World.

Now in Adolf Hitlers Monologe im Führer-hauptquartier 1941-1944 there is a parallel and complementing statement to the one present in Mein Kampf. In the latter Hitler says: ‘Today the individual may painfully discover that the first spiritual terror came into the much freer ancient world with the appearance of Christianity’. In Adolf Hitlers Monologe we find:

‘Daß die antike Welt so schön, so heiter und unbeschwert war, erklärt sich daraus, daß sie von zwei Seuchen verschont geblieben ist: der Syphilis und dem Christentum!’ (19. 10. 1941, nachmittags).

Translation: ‘That the ancient world was so beautiful, so cheerful and carefree can be explained by the fact that it was spared from two epidemics: syphilis and Christianity!’

And regarding his speeches, in more than one speech Hitler did say Christianity destroyed the Roman Empire, and also compares Christianity with Bolshevism.

‘We know that the Jew used Christianity […] because he knew that this new religion questioned all earthly power and so it became an axe at the root of the Roman state, the state which was built on the authority of the public servant. And he [the Jew] became its chief bearer and propagator’ (Adolf Hitler, Speech, 13 August 1920, Hofbräuhaus Hall, Munich).

‘I could go back to the emergence of Christianity, to facts, according to which an idea can take hold of mankind until states finally break because of it. Closer to us is a look at the development of Marxism in Germany’ (Adolf Hitler, August 4, 1929).

‘It was only the disintegrating effect of Christianity and the symptoms of age which appear in every country that caused ancient Rome to succumb’ (Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Meeting with the head persons of the Armed Services on November 5, 1937).

A worldview conquered a State and, starting from there, will slowly shatter the whole world and bring about its collapse. Bolshevism will, if its advance is not halted, expose the world to a transformation as complete as the one Christianity once effected (Adolf Hitler, Industry Club in Düsseldorf, January 27, 1932).

Editor’s note: Again, italics have been added by the commenter.

Categories
Heinrich Himmler Jesus Joseph Goebbels Mein Kampf (book) Nature Reinhard Heydrich Rudolf Hess Schutzstaffel (SS) Swastika

Religious aspects of National Socialism

In the previous post today, I quoted a commenter who explained why the bulk of white nationalists in America don’t admire Hitler. His comment resulted in a sort of eureka moment for me as to solving another mystery: why these nationalists don’t have ‘pagan’ William Pierce’s Who We Are as their leading bestseller.

The sad answer is that these nationalists sold their souls to the devil: Judeo-Christianity, even those secular nationalists who refuse to place their parents’ religion on the bench of the accused.

It’s worth rephrasing what the Wikipedia article, ‘Religious aspects of Nazism’, says, purging from it of all anti-white crap that that damned online encyclopaedia promulgates, and adding some observations of my own:

Historians, political scientists and philosophers have studied National Socialism with a specific focus on its religious aspects.

Among the writers who alluded before 1980 to the religious aspects of National Socialism are Albert Camus, Romano Guardini, Denis de Rougemont, Eric Voegelin, Klaus Vondung and Friedrich Heer. Voegelin’s work on political religion was first published in German in 1938. The French author and philosopher Albert Camus made some remarks about National Socialism as a religion and about Adolf Hitler in particular in L’Homme révolté.

Outside a purely academic discourse, public interest mainly concerns the relationship between National Socialism and Occultism, and between National Socialism and Christianity. The persistent idea that the National Socialists were directed by occult agencies has been dismissed by historians as modern cryptohistory. The interest in the second relationship is obvious from the debate about Adolf Hitler’s religious views—specifically, whether he was a Christian or not.
 

National Socialism and occultism

There are many works that speculate about National Socialism and occultism, the most prominent being The Morning of the Magicians (1960) and The Spear of Destiny (1972). From the perspective of academic history, however, most of these works are ‘cryptohistory’. Academic historians did not consider the question until the 1980s. Due to the popular literature on the topic, National Socialist black magic was regarded as a topic for authors in pursuit of strong sales. In the 1980s, however, two Ph.D. theses were written about the topic. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke published The Occult Roots of National Socialism (1985) based on his thesis, and the German librarian and historian Ulrich Hunger’s thesis on rune-lore in National Socialist Germany (Die Runenkunde im Dritten Reich) was published in the series Europäische Hochschulschriften.

Goodrick-Clarke’s book is not only considered without exception to be the pioneering work on Ariosophy, but also the definitive book on the topic. The term ‘Ariosophy’ refers to an esoteric movement in Germany and Austria of the 1900s to 1930s. It clearly falls under Goodrick-Clarke’s definition of occultism, as it obviously drew on the western esoteric tradition. Ideologically, it was remarkably similar to National Socialism. According to Goodrick-Clarke, the Ariosophists wove occult ideas into the völkisch ideology that existed in Germany and Austria at the time. Ariosophy shared the racial awareness of völkisch ideology, but also drew upon a notion of root races, postulating locations such as Atlantis, Thule and Hyperborea as the original homeland of the Aryan race (and its purest branch, the Teutons or Germanic peoples).

The Ariosophic writings described a glorious ancient Germanic past, in which an elitist priesthood ‘expounded occult-racist doctrines and ruled over a superior and racially pure society’. The downfall of this hypothesised golden age was explained as the result of the interbreeding between the master race and the untermenschen (lesser races). With the exception of Karl Maria Wiligut, Goodrick-Clarke has not found evidence that prominent Ariosophists directly influenced National Socialism.

But Goodrick-Clarke considers the National Socialist crusade as ‘essentially religious’. His follow-up book Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric National Socialism and the Politics of Identity examined ‘ariosophic’ ideas after 1945 and ‘neo-völkisch movements’.

 
National Socialism and Christianity

After National Socialist Germany had surrendered in World War II, the US Office of Strategic Services published a report on the National Socialist Master Plan of the Persecution of the Christian Churches. Historians and theologians generally agree about the National Socialist policy towards religion, that the objective was to remove explicitly Jewish content from the Bible (i.e., the Old Testament, the Gospel of Matthew, and the Pauline Epistles), transforming the Christian faith into a new religion, completely cleansed from any Jewish element and conciliate it with National Socialism, Völkisch ideology and Führerprinzip: a religion called ‘Positive Christianity’.

This, of course, was tried before, back in… 144 C.E.! Marcionism depicted the God of the Old Testament as a tyrant or demiurge. Marcion’s canon, the first Christian canon ever compiled, consisted of eleven books: a gospel, which was a form of the Gospel of Luke; and ten Pauline epistles. Marcion’s canon rejected the entire Old Testament, along with all other epistles and gospels. In my opinion, NS Positive Christians failed in this. It was a good try but ultimately it is impossible to combine water with oil. It is a very explainable mistake in the recent nation that had just awakened to the most elemental racialism.

Alfred Rosenberg was influential in the development of Positive Christianity. In The Myth of the Twentieth Century he wrote that:

  • Saint Paul was responsible for the destruction of the racial values from Greek and Roman culture;
  • the dogma of hell advanced in the Middle Ages destroyed the free Nordic spirit;

This is absolutely pivotal to understand white demoralisation (and it is a pity that our site is the only racialist site which has accused this doctrine of the havoc it caused among us)!

  • original sin and grace are Oriental ideas that corrupt the purity and strength of Nordic blood;
  • the Old Testament and the Jewish race are not an exception and one should return to the Nordic peoples’ fables and legends;
  • Jesus was not Jewish, but had Nordic blood from his Amorite ancestors.

The latter point of course was another mistake. Neither Rosenberg nor Hitler or anyone at the top of the elites knew that Jesus didn’t even exist. Only recent scholarship has debunked the idea that Jesus, even an all-too human Jesus, existed (read, e.g., this book).

The National Socialist Party program of 1920 included a statement on religion as point 24. In this statement, the National Socialist party demands freedom of religion (for all religious denominations that are not opposed to the customs and moral sentiments of the Germanic race). Also, the paragraph proclaims the party’s endorsement of Positive Christianity. Historians have described this statement as ‘a tactical measure, cleverly left undefined in order to accommodate a broad range of meanings’, and an ‘ambiguous phraseology’.

This is a topic of some controversy. John S. Conway holds that The Holy Reich has broken new ground in the examination of the relation between National Socialism and Christianity, despite his view that ‘National Socialism and Christianity were incompatible’. The National Socialists were aided by theologians, such as Dr. Ernst Bergmann, who committed suicide after the Allied forces captured Leipzig. Bergmann, in his work, Die 25 Thesen der Deutschreligion (Twenty-five Points of the German Religion), expounded the theory that the Old Testament and portions of the New Testament of the Bible were inaccurate. He proposed that Jesus was of Aryan origin, and that Adolf Hitler was the new messiah.

 
Religious beliefs of leading National Socialists

Within a large movement like National Socialism, it may not be especially shocking to discover that individuals could embrace different ideological systems that would seem to be polar opposites. The religious beliefs of even the leading National Socialists diverged strongly.

The difficulty for historians lies in the task of evaluating not only the public, but also the private statements of the National Socialist politicians. Steigmann-Gall, who intended to do this in his study, points to such people as Erich Koch (who was not only Gauleiter of East Prussia and Reichskomissar for the Ukraine, but also the elected praeses of the East Prussian provincial synod of the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union), and Bernhard Rust, as examples of National Socialist politicians who also professed to be Christian in private.

 
Adolf Hitler’s religious views

Adolf Hitler’s religious beliefs have been a matter of debate; the wide consensus of historians consider him to have been irreligious, anti-Christian and anti-clerical. In light of evidence such as his fierce criticism and vocal rejection of the tenets of Christianity, numerous private statements to confidants denouncing Christianity as a harmful superstition, and his strenuous efforts to reduce the influence and independence of Christianity in Germany after he came to power, Hitler’s major academic biographers conclude that he was irreligious and an opponent of Christianity.

Historian Laurence Rees found no evidence that ‘Hitler, in his personal life, ever expressed belief in the basic tenets of the Christian church’. Ernst Hanfstaengl, a friend from his early days in politics, says Hitler ‘was to all intents and purposes an atheist by the time I got to know him’. However, historians such as Richard Weikart and Alan Bullock doubt the assessment that he was a true atheist, suggesting that despite his dislike of Christianity he still clung to a form of spiritual belief.

Hitler was born to a practising Catholic mother, and was baptised into the Roman Catholic Church. From a young age, he expressed disbelief and hostility to Christianity. But in 1904, acquiescing to his mother’s wish, he was confirmed at the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Linz, Austria, where the family lived. According to John Willard Toland, witnesses indicate that Hitler’s confirmation sponsor had to ‘drag the words out of him almost as though the whole confirmation was repugnant to him’. Rissmann notes that, according to several witnesses who lived with Hitler in a men’s home in Vienna, Hitler never again attended Mass or received the sacraments after leaving home. Several eyewitnesses who lived with Hitler while he was in his late teens and early-to-mid 20s in Vienna state that he never attended church after leaving home at eighteen.

Nonetheless, in Hitler’s early political statements he attempted to express himself to the German public as a Christian. In his book Mein Kampf and in public speeches prior to and in the early years of his rule, he described himself as a Christian.

As we have seen, the National Socialist party promoted Positive Christianity, a movement which rejected most traditional Christian doctrines such as the divinity of Jesus, as well as Jewish elements such as the Old Testament. From this angle, contemporary Christian nationalists in the US are a century behind compared to Nazi Germany! Consider, for example, how the administrators of Occidental Dissent and The Daily Stormer still subscribe to traditional Christianity, not even to a sort of Positive Christianity (as Hitler said, America is Judaised and negrified to the core).

In one widely quoted remark, Hitler described Jesus as an ‘Aryan fighter’ who struggled against ‘the power and pretensions of the corrupt Pharisees’ and Jewish materialism. While a small minority of historians accept these publicly stated views as genuine expressions of his spirituality, the vast majority believe that Hitler was sceptical of religion and anti-Christian, but recognised that he could only be elected and preserve his political power if he feigned a commitment to and belief in Christianity, which the overwhelming majority of Germans believed in.

Privately, Hitler repeatedly deprecated Christianity, and told confidants that his reluctance to make public attacks on the Church was not a matter of principle, but a pragmatic political move. In his private diaries, Goebbels wrote in April 1941 that though Hitler was ‘a fierce opponent’ of the Vatican and Christianity, ‘he forbids me to leave the church. For tactical reasons’.

Hitler’s remarks to confidants, as described in the Goebbels Diaries, the memoirs of Albert Speer, and transcripts of Hitler’s private conversations recorded by Martin Bormann in Hitler’s Table Talk, are further evidence of his irreligious and anti-Christian beliefs; these sources record a number of private remarks in which Hitler ridicules Christian doctrine as absurd, contrary to scientific advancement, and socially destructive.

Once in office, Hitler and his regime sought to reduce the influence of Christianity on society. From the mid-1930s, his government was increasingly dominated by militant anti-church proponents like Goebbels, Bormann, Himmler, Rosenberg and Heydrich whom Hitler appointed to key posts. These anti-church radicals were generally permitted or encouraged to perpetrate the National Socialist persecutions of the churches. The regime launched an effort toward coordination of German Protestants under a unified Protestant Reich Church (but this was resisted by the Confessing Church), and moved early to eliminate political Catholicism. Hitler agreed to the Reich concordat with the Vatican, but then routinely ignored it, and permitted persecutions of the Catholic Church.

Jehovah’s Witnesses were ruthlessly persecuted for refusing both military service and allegiance to Hitler’s movement. Hitler said he anticipated a coming collapse of Christianity in the wake of scientific advances, and that National Socialism and religion could not co-exist long term. Although he was prepared to delay conflicts for political reasons, historians conclude that he ultimately intended the destruction of Christianity in Germany, or at least its distortion or subjugation to a National Socialist outlook.
 

Rudolf Hess

According to Goodrick-Clarke, Rudolf Hess had been a member of the Thule Society before attaining prominence in the National Socialist party. As Adolf Hitler’s official deputy, Hess had also been attracted to and influenced by the biodynamic agriculture of Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy. In the wake of his flight to Scotland, Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the security police, banned lodge organizations and esoteric groups on 9 June 1941.

The Thule Society took its name from Thule, an alleged lost land. Sebottendorff identified Ultima Thule as Iceland. In The Myth of the Twentieth Century, the most important National Socialist book after Mein Kampf, Alfred Rosenberg referred to Atlantis as a lost land or at least to an Aryan cultural center. Since Rosenberg had attended meetings of the Thule Society, he might have been familiar with the occult speculation about lost lands; however, according to Lutzhöft (1971), Rosenberg drew on the work of Herman Wirth. The attribution of the Urheimat of the Nordic race to a deluged land was very appealing at that time.
 

Heinrich Himmler

Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler: ‘We believe in a God Almighty who stands above us; he has created the earth, the Fatherland, and the Volk, and he has sent us the Führer. Any human being who does not believe in God should be considered arrogant, megalomaniacal, and stupid and thus not suited for the SS’.

This of course was Himmler’s blunder, as theistic visions of the providence stem from monotheistic Judaism. Also, from my point of view, a personal god—i.e., the mythical Judeo-Christian god—should be written thus: (((God))).

On the other hand, credited retrospectively with being the founder of ‘Esoteric Hitlerism’, and certainly a figure of major importance for the officially sanctioned research and practice of mysticism by a National Socialist elite, Heinrich Himmler, more than any other high official in the Third Reich (including Hitler) was fascinated by pan-Aryan (i.e., broader than Germanic) racialism. Himmler’s capacity for rational planning was accompanied by an enthusiasm for the utopian, the romantic and even the occult. Although Himmler did not have any contact with the Thule Society, he possessed more occult tendencies than any other National Socialist leader. The German journalist and historian Heinz Höhne, an authority on the SS, explicitly describes Himmler’s views about reincarnation as occultism.

The historic example which Himmler used in practice as the model for the SS was the Society of Jesus, since Himmler found in the Jesuits what he perceived to be the core element of any order, the doctrine of obedience and the cult of the organisation. The evidence for this largely rests on a statement from Walter Schellenberg in his memoirs (Cologne, 1956, p. 39), but Hitler is also said to have called Himmler ‘my Ignatius of Loyola’. As an order, the SS needed a coherent doctrine that would set it apart. Himmler attempted to construct such an ideology, and to this purpose he deduced a Germanic tradition from history.

In a 1936 memorandum, Himmler set forth a list of approved holidays based on pagan and political precedents and meant to wean SS members from their reliance on Christian festivities. The Winter Solstice, or Yuletide, was the climax of the year. It brought SS folk together at candlelit banquet tables and around raging bonfires that harked back to German tribal rites.

The Allach Julleuchter (Yule light) was made as a presentation piece for SS officers to celebrate the winter solstice. It was later given to all SS members on the same occasion, December 21. Made of unglazed stoneware, the Julleuchter was decorated with early pagan Germanic symbols. Himmler said, ‘I would have every family of a married SS man to be in possession of a Julleuchter. Even the wife will, when she has left the myths of the church find something else which her heart and mind can embrace’.

Only adherents of theories of National Socialist occultism or the few former SS members who were, after the war, participants in the Landig Group in Vienna would claim that the cultic activities within the SS would amount to its own mystical religion. At the time of his death in 1986, Rudolf J. Mund was working on a book on the Germanic ‘original race-cult religion’. However, what was indoctrinated into the SS is not known in detail.
 

National Socialist archaeology

In 1935 Himmler, along with Richard Walther Darré, established the Ahnenerbe. At first independent, it became the ancestral heritage branch of the SS. Headed by Dr. Hermann Wirth, it was dedicated primarily to archaeological research, but it was also involved in proving the superiority of the ‘Aryan race’.

A great deal of time and resources were spent on researching or creating a popularly accepted historical, cultural and scientific background so the ideas about a superior Aryan race could be publicly accepted. For example, an expedition to Tibet was organised to search for the origins of the Aryan race. To this end, the expedition leader, Ernst Schäfer, had his anthropologist Bruno Beger make face masks and skull and nose measurements. Another expedition was sent to the Andes.

When I lived in Gran Canaria, an island off Africa, a Spanish woman told me that Himmler’s researchers had much interest in researching the Nordic aboriginals of the Canary islands: blonder and lighter than the Spaniards themselves.

 
Das Schwarze Korps

The official newspaper of SS was Das Schwarze Korps (‘The Black Corps’), published weekly from 1935 to 1945. In its first issue, the newspaper published an article on the origins of the Nordic race, hypothesising a location near the North Pole similar to the theory of Hermann Wirth (but not mentioning Atlantis).

Also in 1935, the SS journal commissioned a Professor of Germanic History, Heinar Schilling, to prepare a series of articles on ancient Germanic life. As a result, a book containing these articles and entitled Germanisches Leben was published by Koehler & Amelung of Leipzig with the approval of the SS and Reich Government in 1937. Three chapters dealt with the religion of the German people over three periods: Nature worship and the cult of the ancestors, the sun religion of the Late Bronze Age, and the cult of the gods.

According to Heinar Schilling, the Germanic peoples of the Late Bronze Age had adopted a four-spoke wheel as symbolic of the sun ‘and this symbol has been developed into the modern swastika of our own society [NS Germany] which represents the sun’. Under the sign of the swastika ‘the light bringers of the Nordic race overran the lands of the dark inferior races, and it was no coincidence that the most powerful expression of the Nordic world was found in the sign of the swastika’.

Very little had been preserved of the ancient rites, Professor Schilling continued, but it was a striking fact ‘that in many German Gaue today on Sonnenwendtage (solstice days) burning sun wheels are rolled from mountain tops down into the valleys below, and almost everywhere the Sonnenwendfeuer (solstice fires) burn on those days’. He concluded by saying that ‘The Sun is the All-Highest to the Children of the Earth’.
 

SS-Castle Wewelsburg

Himmler has been claimed to have considered himself the spiritual successor or even reincarnation of Heinrich the Fowler, having established special SS rituals for the old king and having returned his bones to the crypt at Quedlinburg Cathedral. Himmler even had his personal quarters at Wewelsburg castle decorated in commemoration of Heinrich the Fowler. The way the SS redesigned the castle referred to certain characters in the Grail-mythos (cf. what I’ve said on this site about Wagner’s Parsifal).

Himmler had visited the Wewelsburg on 3 November 1933 and April 1934; the SS took official possession of it in August 1934. The occultist Karl Maria Wiligut (known in the SS under the pseudonym ‘Weisthor’) accompanied Himmler on his visits to the castle. Initially, the Wewelsburg was intended to be a museum and officer’s college for ideological education within the SS, but it was subsequently placed under the direct control of the office of the Reichsführer SS (Himmler) in February 1935. The impetus for the change of the conception most likely came from Wiligut.

Categories
Indo-European heritage Mein Kampf (book) Real men Schutzstaffel (SS) Tacitus Vikings

Holy wrath, 4

by Evropa Soberana

In Old Norse mythology, the einherjar means literally ‘army of one’ or ‘those who fight alone’; those who have died in battle and are brought to Valhalla by valkyries.

 
Another quality that was attributed to the berserkergang possessed was the ‘disable the arms of the adversary’, which probably implied that the berserkers were so fast, so invulnerable and inspired such terror in their enemies that they seemed to be paralysed with fear or that their blows were not effective.

Also, it is very likely that the aura of anger from a charging group of berserkers was ‘felt’ at a great distance by enemy soldiers as if it were an expansive wave, as the Roman historian Tacitus wrote while speaking of a Germanic männerbund whose members were called Harii, a word that, among Iranians and Indo-Iranians, meant ‘blondes’ and which is related to the einherjar of Valhala:

It will be enough to mention the most powerful, which are the Harii, the Helvecones, the Manimi, the Helisii and the Nahanarvali. Among these last is shown a grove of immemorial sanctity. A priest in female attire has the charge of it. But the deities are described in Roman language as Castor and Pollux. Such, indeed, are the attributes of the divinity, the name being Alcis. They have no images, or indeed, any vestige of foreign superstition, but it is as brothers and as youths that the deities are worshipped.

The Harii, besides being superior in strength to the tribes just enumerated, savage as they are, make the most of their natural ferocity by the help of art and opportunity. Their shields are black, their bodies dyed. They chose dark nights for battle, and, by the dread and gloomy aspect of their death-like host, strike terror into the foe, who can never confront their strange and almost infernal appearance. For in all battles it is the eye which is first vanquished [1].

We observe here the importance of the symbolism about the dark among these men. The night is essential in this symbolism because it symbolizes the dark age, this dark winter in which we were born for good or bad. The day, with the rays of the sun, the gold, is propitious for the will, for the courage, for the conscious struggle, to drive the spear into the enemy, to plunge the sword into the earth; in a word, to possess, to take over. The day represents the right hand; the order, the ritual and the ‘dry way’. The night, on the other hand, with its darkness, moon, stars, water and silver is more propitious to magic, to a certain chaos, to be allowed to be possessed, to raise arms to heaven instead of sinking them into the earth and therefore it is more related to the left hand and the ‘wet way’.

Since man is no longer a god, he must strive to become, at least, a blind instrument of the gods. For this, he must be emptied of all egocentric individuality in order to allow the divine outburst, that is, ‘to propitiate Odin to touch him with the tip of his spear’. And the first way to achieve this was through the establishment of severe discipline, asceticism and organisation.

Let us remember, with respect to the importance of the night, that Adolf Hitler himself spoke in Mein Kampf about the difference of the effect of his speeches among the crowds in the morning and at night. For him, the afternoons, and especially the evenings, were the ideal moment to give a speech and to assert his magnetism. Let us also note that, in the SS, the predominant colours in the uniforms and in their symbolism were black and silver. Symbolically, they were covered by night with darkness, with thunder and with lunar and star light.

Whoever had once been possessed by the berserkergang was already marked with a lifetime sign. From then on, the trance not only came to be invoked before the fight, but could also fall on him suddenly in moments of peace and tranquillity, transforming him in a matter of seconds into a ball of hate, adrenaline and subhuman cries striving for destruction.

Thus, Egil’s Saga describes how Egil’s father, a berserker, suddenly suffered possession of the berserkergang while peacefully playing a ball game with his son and another small one. The warrior, horribly agitated and roaring like an animal, grabbed his son’s friend, lifted him into the air and slammed him to the ground with such force that he died instantly with all the bones of his body broken. Then he went to his own son, but he was saved by a maid who, in turn, fell dead before the possessed.

In the sagas, the stories of berserkers are dotted with tragedies in which the uncontrolled berserkergang turns against those closest to the possessed. If we had to find a Greek equivalent, we would have it in the figure of Hercules, who during an attack of anger killed his own wife Megara and the two children he had with her, which motivated his twelve tasks as penance to expiate his sin.

In the field of mythology we have many examples of the fury of the berserkers. The Saga of King Hrólf Kraki speaks of the hero Berserker Bjarki, who fought for the king and who, in a battle, was transformed into a bear. This bear killed more enemies than the five select king champions. Arrows and weapons bounced off him, and he tore down men and horses from the forces of the enemy King Hjorvard, tore apart with his teeth and claws anything that stood in his way so that panic seized the enemy’s army, disintegrating their ranks chaotically.

This legend, which is still a legend, represents the fame that the berserkers in the North had acquired as small groups but, by their bravery, perfectly capable of deciding the outcome of a great battle.

Now, what is the explanation for these events, which far exceed the normal? How should we interpret the berserkergang? In our days, those who always look with resentful distrust at any manifestation of strength and health, have wanted to degrade it. For many of them, the berserkers were simply communities of epileptics, schizophrenics and other mentally ill people.

This ridiculous explanation is altogether unsatisfactory, as epilepsy and schizophrenia are pathologies whose effects cannot be ‘programmed’ for a battle like the berserkers did, and under epileptic or psychotic episodes it is impossible to perform valiant actions or show warlike heroism. An epileptic does more damage to himself by biting his tongue and falling to the ground than destroying the ranks of a large enemy army, and can also be reduced by a single person. Others have suggested that, as in the movies, the berserkers were alliances of individuals who had undergone genetic mutations, or the survivors of an old disappeared Germanic lineage, organised in the form of sectarian communities. Others even take into account the ‘shamanic’ explanation, according to which berserkers were possessed by the totem spirit of a bear or a wolf.

________________

[1] ‘Germania’ in Germania and Agricola by Tacitus, translated by Alfred J. Church, Ostara Publications (2016), page 17.

Categories
Ancient Greece Eduardo Velasco Mein Kampf (book) Miscegenation Nordicism

Nordicism and National Socialism, 4

by Evropa Soberana

Cover of Gutes Blut – Ewiger Quell
(Good blood – eternal spring), an SS
propaganda booklet that deals mainly with
Nordicism and eugenics through images.

 
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) does not need introduction.

It is therefore outrageously unjust to speak of the pre-Christian Germans as barbarians who had no civilization. They never have been such. But the severity of the climate that prevailed in the northern regions which they inhabited imposed conditions of life which hampered a free development of their creative faculties.

If they had come to the fairer climate of the South, with no previous culture whatsoever, and if they acquired the necessary human material–that is to say, men of an inferior race–to serve them as working implements, the cultural faculty dormant in them would have splendidly blossomed forth, as happened in the case of the Greeks, for example. But this primordial creative faculty in cultural things was not solely due to their northern climate. 

For the Laplanders or the Eskimos would not have become creators of a culture if they were transplanted to the South. No, this wonderful creative faculty is a special gift bestowed on the Aryan, whether it lies dormant in him or becomes active, according as the adverse conditions of nature prevent the active expression of that faculty or favourable circumstances permit it. 

Mein Kampf, 1924, Volume II, Chapter 2.
 

A complete assimilation of all our racial elements would certainly have brought about a homogeneous national organism; but, as has been proved in the case of every racial mixture, it would have been less capable of creating a civilization than by keeping intact its best original elements. 

A benefit which results from the fact that there was no all-round assimilation is to be seen in that even now we have large groups of German Nordic people within our national organization, and that their blood has not been mixed with the blood of other races. We must look upon this as our most valuable treasure for the sake of the future. During that dark period of absolute ignorance in regard to all racial laws, when each individual was considered to be on a par with every other, there could be no clear appreciation of the difference between the various fundamental racial characteristics.

We know to-day that a complete assimilation of all the various elements which constitute the national being might have resulted in giving us a larger share of external power: but, on the other hand, the highest of human aims would not have been attained, because the only kind of people which fate has obviously chosen to bring about this perfection would have been lost in such a general mixture of races which would constitute such a racial amalgamation. 

Mein Kampf, Ibidem.
 

If Nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in such a case all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile. 

History furnishes us with innumerable instances that prove this law. 

It shows, with a startling clarity, that whenever Aryans have mingled their blood with that of an inferior race the result has been the downfall of the people who were the standard-bearers of a higher culture. In North America, where the population is prevalently Teutonic, and where those elements intermingled with the inferior race only to a very small degree, we have a quality of mankind and a civilization which are different from those of Central and South America. 

In these latter countries the immigrants—who mainly belonged to the Latin races—mated with the aborigines, sometimes to a very large extent indeed. In this case we have a clear and decisive example of the effect produced by the mixture of races. But in North America the Teutonic element, which has kept its racial stock pure and did not mix it with any other racial stock, has come to dominate the American Continent and will remain master of it as long as that element does not fall a victim to the habit of adulterating its blood. 

Mein Kampf, 1924, Volume I, Chapter 11.
 

Ten generations of Germans left without the corrective and educative effect of military training and delivered over to the evil effects of those dissensions and divisions the roots of which lie in their blood and display their force also in a disunity of world-outlook–these ten generations would be sufficient to allow our people to lose the last relics of an independent existence on this earth. 

The German spirit could then make its contribution to civilization only through individuals living under the rule of foreign nations and the origin of those individuals would remain unknown. They would remain as the fertilizing manure of civilization, until the last residue of Nordic-Aryan blood would become corrupted or drained out.

Mein Kampf, 1924, Volume II, Chapter 14.
 

I shall have no peace of mind until I have succeeded in planting a seed of Nordic blood wherever the population stand in need of regeneration. 

If at the time of the migrations, while the great racial currents were exercising their influence, our people received so varied a share of attributes, these latter blossomed to their full value only because of the presence of the Nordic racial nucleus. Thus it is that we have acquired a sense of poetry, a tendency to nostalgia, which finds its expression in music. 

But it is thanks to those attributes that are peculiar to our race and which have been preserved in Lower Saxony that we have been able harmoniously to absorb extraneous characteristics—for we possess one faculty which embraces all the others, and that is, the imperial outlook, the power to reason and to build dispassionately.

Hitler’s Table Talk, May 12, 1942.

Categories
David Lane Mein Kampf (book)

The Fourteen Words

by Albus

‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children’.
It seems to be uncertain that David Lane coined this phrase, and when. If he was the one, maybe he took the inspiration from Ben Klassen who had written in the year 1973 in his book Nature’s Eternal Religion, the founding work for the race religion Creativity:

It is the highest right, the foremost law in Nature to fight for our survival at all costs. We must secure the existence of the White Race on the face of this planet for all time.

Klassen, again, who advocated not less than strict segregation of the races, had read Mein Kampf in German, and wanted all good parts of the world to be populated only by white people. Hitler‘s words had been:

What we have to fight for is to secure the existence and propagation of our race and our people, the feeding of its children and to keep pure its blood…

My translation; in German: „Für was wir zu kämpfen haben, ist die Sicherung des Bestehens und der Vermehrung unserer Rasse und unseres Volkes, die Ernährung seiner Kinder und Reinhaltung seines Blutes (…)“; Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf, Zwei Bände in einem Band, 172.–173. Aufl., Zentralverlag der NSDAP Frz. Neher Nachf., 1936, Erster Band, S. 234.
Sounds pretty similar to The Fourteen Words, doesn’t it? So who is the spiritual father?