web analytics

Category: Mein Kampf (book)

Categories
Destruction of Greco-Roman world 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
Alfred Rosenberg Heinrich Himmler Jesus Joseph Goebbels Mein Kampf (book) 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 Evropa Soberana (webzine) Latin America 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?

Categories
Mein Kampf (book)

NS poster, 2

This is a typical early National Socialist poster from 1921. The first National Socialist posters had bright red backgrounds and a lot of text. This one announces that Hitler will speak; gives the topic, and notes that Jews are prohibited from attending. In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote:

“We chose red for our posters, since it is vivid and was the colour that most aroused our opponents. It forced them to notice and remember us.”

Categories
Catholic Church Christendom Final solution Inquisition Italy Mein Kampf (book) New Testament Protestantism Psychology Switzerland Table talks (commercial translation)

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 81

the-real-hitler

 

Night of 3rd-4th February 1942

Christianity as a Jewish psyop for whites—After Jews disappear from Europe the world will recapture its sense of joy.
 

My thirteen months of imprisonment had seemed a long time—the more so because I thought I’d be there for six years. I was possessed by a frenzy of liberty. But, without my imprisonment, Mein Kampf would not have been written. That period gave me the chance of deepening various notions for which I then had only an instinctive feeling. It was during this incarceration, too, that I acquired that fearless faith, that optimism, that confidence in our destiny, which nothing could shake thereafter.

It’s from this time, too, that my conviction dates—a thing that many of my supporters never understood—that we could no longer win power by force. The State had had time to consolidate itself, and it had the weapons. My weakness, in 1923, was to depend on too many people who were not ours…

There are towns in Germany from which all joy is lacking. I’m told that it’s the same thing in certain Calvinistic regions of Switzerland. Near Würzburg, there are villages where literally all the women were burned. We know of judges of the Court of the Inquisition who gloried in having had twenty to thirty thousand “witches” burned. Long experience of such horrors cannot but leave indelible traces upon a population.

One cannot succeed in conceiving how much cruelty, ignominy and falsehood the intrusion of Christianity has spelt for this world of ours. If the misdeeds of Christianity were less serious in Italy, that’s because the people of Rome, having seen them at work, always knew exactly the worth of the Popes before whom Christendom prostrated itself. For centuries, no Pope died except by the dagger, poison or the pox.

saint-paul-preaching-in-athensI can very well imagine how this collective madness came to birth. A Jew was discovered to whom it occurred that if one presented abstruse ideas to non-Jews, the more abstruse these ideas were, the more the non-Jews would rack their brains to try to understand them. The fact of having their attention fixed on what does not exist must make them blind to what exists. An excellent calculation of the Jew’s part. So the Jew smacks his thighs to see how his diabolic stratagem has succeeded.

He bears in mind that if his victims suddenly became aware of these things, all Jews would be exterminated. But, this time, the Jews will disappear from Europe. The world will breathe freely and recover its sense of joy, when this weight is no longer crushing its shoulders.

Categories
Mein Kampf (book) William Pierce

1968 Pierce article

The necessity of staying legal

wlp_bas_relief

“Revolution & legality”
Editorial by Dr. William L. Pierce
National Socialist World Journal
Winter 1968

 
Two classes of concepts which are fundamentally different in nature, yet often confused, are those having to do with doctrine and those concerned with tactics. The former are independent of changing circumstances and conditions; the latter are strongly dependent on these things. We make an extremely grave error when we treat a doctrinal point as if it were a tactical matter, but we also make a serious error when we assign to some tactical consideration the attributes of a point of doctrine.

NS-worldThe National Socialist movement has generally been considered to be an element of the “right wing,” albeit an extreme element. Indeed, we apparently share a number of things with other right-wing elements, such as anti-Marxism, a respect for tradition, and support for the forces of law and order, That last has meant, among other things, that we have constrained ourselves to the use of “legal” methods only in our struggle.

Now, whereas our anti-Marxism is implicit in our National Socialist doctrine, our self-restriction to legal methods is tactical in nature.1 Because the movement has, however, since 1923, insisted upon “legality” in its relationship with constituted authority, some may have fallen into the error of thinking that this insistence stems from doctrinal considerations about the sanctity of “law and order.” Under certain conditions this error can lead to disastrous consequences. Since the occurrence of these “certain conditions” in the foreseeable future is by no means a merely academic possibility, it may be worthwhile to examine this problem in detail.

In terms of the most fundamental National Socialist criterion, the question is: Is the support of the constituted authority and the maintenance of law and order in the best long-term interest of the race? And the self-evident answer is, that this depends upon the nature and the aims of the particular constituted authority in question. For while it is true that when a State is fulfilling its proper function as defender and champion of the racial interests of its people the aims of race and law and order become identical, those aims no longer coincide when the State strays from its proper role. In this respect the teachings of the Leader are quite clear:

The State is a means to an end. This end is the preservation and advancement of a community of physically and spiritually homogeneous living creatures. This preservation itself includes, firstly, subsistence as a race and thus permits the free development of all powers slumbering within that race… States that do not serve this purpose are mistakes, nay, monstrosities. The fact of their existence does not alter this any more than the success of a crew of buccaneers can justify piracy… We must make a sharp distinction between the State as a vessel and the race as its content. This vessel has a purpose only so long as it can preserve and protect the content; otherwise it is worthless.2

Strictly speaking, only a National socialist State can fully satisfy our criterion: any other State formation can only approximate the ideal role of the State as defender and champion of the racial interests of its people; and in this light the present day Western democracies can only be described as monstrosities.

If a State can be carried through a peaceful evolution toward its proper role, then this course should be followed, for we certainly do not seek a state of anarchy and chaos as an end in itself. There are always dangers inherent in such a situation: more than one revolution has gone astray during its violent phase, emerging from the conflict with an altogether different character than upon entering.

On the other hand, neither must peaceful revolution be sought as an end in itself. Where it does not provide a realistic and practical course of action, it must be abandoned without hesitation for other means.

Considering the present array of State formations with which we are faced, the question which naturally arises is this: is it conceivable that any of these degenerate and racially destructive entities can be smoothly transformed into a National Socialist State? Or must we think in terms of a total leveling of the present structures before we can hope to begin building a new structure on sound foundations? Whatever our answer, it must be based only upon an evaluation of the possibilities inherent in the various paths leading to our ultimate racial goals, and not upon any false conception of our obligations toward any presently existing State authority.

Again, the Leader has spelled this out for us:

State authority cannot exist as an end in itself, or every tyranny in this world would be sacred and untouchable. If, by the instrument of governmental authority, a people is being driven to its destruction, then rebellion is not only the right but the duty of every member of that people… In general, it must never be forgotten that the highest purpose of man’s existence is not the maintenance of a State, let alone of a government, but the preservation of its own kind. Let that be in danger of suppression or destruction, and the question of legality is but subordinate. Then, though the methods of the ruling power be a thousand times “legal,” the self-preservation of the oppressed is always the noblest justification for a struggle using any and every weapon.3

Why, then, the insistence up till now on “legality” in our struggle? The answer is that we are faced with the same difficulty today that confronted the Movement forty-five years ago in Germany: the enemy, with the repressive powers of the State at his disposal, is far stronger physically than we. In any shooting match with the State authority, we are bound to lose decisively, just as we lost on November 9, 1923.

The fact that the anarchist elements among the Jews are able to use illegal means with relative impunity in their assault upon “the Establishment” should not mislead us into thinking that the same tactics will work for us. In the first place, we do not have the allies in the Establishment that they have. We cannot provoke large-scale violence and disorder and receive a gentle slap on the wrist in reprisal, as they can. In the second place, we and they have entirely different aims. Since their purpose is, above all, to destroy the existing order of things, they have a much greater freedom of action than we have; they can carry out their purpose with a much looser organizational structure than we can ours, and thus they are relatively less susceptible to counterattack.

We are “legal” now because we dare not be otherwise; we are yet too weak to defy the State authority successfully. At the same time, as long as we are weak and ineffective the State feels no real threat from us, and, therefore, no pressing need to destroy us. But our relationship to the State is changing, and we are entering a new and critical phase of our development—one in which we are becoming too strong for the State to ignore, yet not strong enough to defend ourselves from its attacks. These attacks will progress from quasi-legal harassment, intimidation of our members and supporters, and interference with our mail to illegal arrests and criminal charges based on falsified evidence, the withdrawal of police protection, and—eventually—outlawry through special legislation. Whenever in the course of these developments we allow ourselves to be provoked into illegal counteraction, we provide the State with the powerful weapon of self-justification.

Yet, the conflict seems inevitable, for before our struggle is over each and every criminal comprising the System will have a pretty good idea just what fate awaits him at our hands. Very few are likely to deceive themselves into believing that we are “just another Party,” with which they can reach an “understanding” which will leave the System largely intact. They will almost certainly realize that a triumphant National Socialism will mean not only a permanent end to their whole way of life, but an end to life itself for many of them. This knowledge will not incline them to yield gracefully to us.

Despite what lies ahead, however, we must strenuously avoid yielding to the temptation to retaliate prematurely to the provocations that beset us. When we do take the very grave step of illegal action, it must only be because the further progress of the Movement demands it—not because we can no longer repress the urge to satisfy our thirst for vengeance or because irresponsible elements in the Movement have not been kept under close enough rein.

Thus, the key to success in the struggle ahead is self-discipline. While it is the time to be “legal” we must stolidly endure whatever the State sees fit to inflict upon us. And when it is time to revolt, we must be prepared to unleash all the furies of hell on the State until it yields.

W.L.P.

____________________________

  1. And our respect for tradition is often tactical rather than doctrinal; it makes a great deal of difference about which traditions we are talking.
  2. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, II, Chap. 2.
  3. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, I, chap. 3.
Categories
Franklin D. Roosevelt Joseph Stalin Mainstream media Mein Kampf (book) Metaphysics of race / sex Savitri Devi Schutzstaffel (SS) William Pierce Winston Churchill

The measure of greatness

by William Pierce

 

uncle-adolf-fans
 
April 20 of this year [this was a 1989 National Vanguard article] is the 100th anniversary of the birth of the greatest man of our era—a man who dared more and achieved more, who set his aim higher and climbed higher, who felt more deeply and stirred the souls of those around him more mightily, who was more closely attuned to the Life Force which permeates our cosmos and gives it meaning and purpose, and did more to serve that Life Force, than any other man of our times.

And yet he is the most reviled and hated man of our times. Only a few tens of thousands of men and women, in scattered groups around the world, will celebrate his birthday with love and reverence on April 20, while all of the scribblers and commentators of the controlled news media, the controlled politicians, and the controlled churchmen will pour out their hatred and venom and lies against him, and those lies will be believed by hundreds of millions.

What is the measure of greatness in a man?

Only the most vulgar and doctrinaire democrat would seriously equate greatness with popularity—although in any polling of average citizens on their choice for the greatest man of the century there are certain to be substantial numbers of votes for Elvis Presley, John Kennedy, Billy Graham, Michael Jackson, and various other high-visibility lightweights: charismatic entertainers on the stage of politics, rock concerts, spectator sports, or what have you.

More serious citizens would pass by the lightweights and choose men who have changed the world in some way. We would hear choices like Franklin Roosevelt (“he saved the world from fascism”), Albert Einstein (“he taught us about the nature of our universe”), and Martin Luther King (“he helped us achieve racial justice”), depending upon whether one’s personal inclinations lay more in the direction of politics, science, or racial self-abasement, respectively.

But if the poll asked instead for the most evil man of the century, or the most hated man, or the man having the most negative influence, at least three-quarters of the blue-collar and the white-collar pollees alike would name one man: Adolf Hitler. This, however, would be merely a reflection of the role assigned to him by the controlled mass media, rather than a truly informed and reasoned choice.

All of this raises several very interesting issues. There is, for example, the question of how we came to the preposterous state of affairs prevailing today, wherein we place the destiny of our nation, our planet, and our race in the hands of a mass of voters whose powers of judgment are manifested in such things as the type of television entertainment their preferences have pushed into prime time and the type of men they have elected to public office. And there is the equally weighty question of how, knowing the ease with which this mass is misled, we permitted virtually all of the media of mass information and entertainment to fall into the hands of a race whose interests are so diametrically opposed to our own.

Perhaps even more pertinent to a consideration of human greatness, however, is the question of how our system of values came to be turned on its head, so that Franklin Roosevelt is regarded as a hero and Adolf Hitler as a villain, not only by the stolid and stunned masses, but also by a majority of the supposedly “educated” elite, many of whom pride themselves on their intellectual independence.

Whether we judge the greatness of a man by his intrinsic qualities of character and soul or by his accomplishments, Adolf Hitler had greatness of a very high order—if we use the standards which have been traditional in our race.

We cannot, of course, make comparisons with all the “mute, inglorious Miltons” whose lack of notable accomplishment has made them anonymous, despite the sterling inner qualities they may have possessed. But when Hitler’s character is held up beside those of other 20th-century political leaders, he stands as a giant among pygmies.

At the prosaic level, we can note his ascetic personal habits, compared with Winston Churchill’s habitual drunkenness and notorious self-indulgence; or his personal loyalty to those who had been his comrades in the days of political struggle, compared with Joseph Stalin’s habit of murdering his former comrades by the dozen, as potential rivals, as soon as he no longer needed their services; or his direct, frank, and straightforward manner, compared to the cunning deviousness which was Franklin Roosevelt’s trademark.

At the spiritual level, the inner differences between Hitler and his contemporaries are even more striking. Hitler was a man with a mission, from the beginning. The testimony of his closest associates, from his boyhood days to the end of his life, agrees with the observations of more distant and impartial observers: Hitler had a mystical sense of destiny, a sense of having been singled out and called by a higher power to devote his life to the service of his race.

His childhood companion August Kubizek has related extraordinary evidence of this when Hitler was only 16 years old (August Kubizek, Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund [Graz, 1953], pp. 127–35). Twenty years later, while he was in prison after an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the government, Hitler himself wrote of his motivation in a way which suggested the range of his vision:

What we must fight for is the security of the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the maintenance of the purity of our blood… so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted them by the Creator of the universe.

Every thought and every idea, every doctrine and all knowledge, must serve this purpose. And everything must be examined from this point of view and used or rejected according to its utility. Then no theory will stiffen into a dead doctrine, since it is life alone that all things must serve…

The National Socialist philosophy finds the importance of mankind in its basic racial elements. In the state it sees on principle a means to an end and construes that end as the preservation of the racial existence of man…

And so the National Socialist philosophy of life corresponds to the innermost will of Nature, since it restores that free play of forces which must lead to a continuous mutual higher breeding, until finally the best of humanity, having achieved possession of this earth, will have a free play for activity in domains which will lie partly above it and partly outside it.

We all sense that in the distant future humanity must be faced by problems which only a highest race, become master people and supported by the means and possibilities of an entire globe, will be equipped to overcome…

Thus, the highest purpose of a National Socialist state is concern for the preservation of those original racial elements which bestow culture and create the beauty and dignity of a higher mankind. We, as Aryans, can conceive of the state only as the living organism of a nationality which not only assures the preservation of this nationality, but by the development of its spiritual and ideal abilities leads it to the highest freedom…

A National Socialist state must begin by raising marriage from the level of a continuous defilement of the race and give it the consecration of an institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape…

It must set race in the center of all life. It must take care to keep it pure. It must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. It must see to it that only the healthy beget children…

The National Socialist state must make certain that by a suitable education of youth it will someday obtain a race ripe for the last and greatest decisions on this earth…

Anyone who wants to cure this era, which is inwardly sick and rotten, must first summon the courage to make clear the causes of this disease. And this should be the concern of the National Socialist movement: pushing aside all narrowmindedness, to gather and to organize from the ranks of our nation those forces capable of becoming the vanguard fighters for a new philosophy of life…

We are not simple enough to believe that it could ever be possible to bring about a perfect era. But this relieves no one of the obligation to combat recognized errors, to overcome weaknesses, and to strive for the ideal. Harsh reality of its own accord will create only too many limitations. For that very reason, however, man must try to serve the ultimate goal, and failures must not deter him, any more than he can abandon a system of justice because mistakes creep into it, or any more than medicine is discarded because there always will be sickness in spite of it.

We National Socialists know that with this conception we stand as revolutionaries in the world of today and are branded as such. But our thoughts and actions must in no way be determined by the approval or disapproval of our time, but by the binding obligation to a truth which we have recognized. (Mein Kampf)

Hitler’s opponents, Churchill and Roosevelt, were party politicians, with the minds and souls of party politicians. Great, impersonal goals, just as truth, meant nothing at all to them. The only thing that counted was the approval or disapproval of their times: the outcome of the next election, a good press claque, votes. Only Stalin shared in any way Hitler’s disdain for approval; only Stalin was motivated to any degree by an impersonal idea. But the idea that Stalin served was the alien, destructive idea of Jewish Marxism. And while Hitler served the Life Force with the instincts of a seer, Stalin served Marxism with the instincts of a bureaucrat and a butcher. A comparison of careers leads us to a similar ranking of greatness of soul. Churchill and Roosevelt were born into the political establishment. They fed at the public trough for years, in one office after another, grabbing greedily at opportunities for a bigger serving of swill. But it was circumstance, not their own efforts, which thrust them onto the stage of world history.

Stalin hacked out his own niche in history to a much greater extent than his western allies, and he was an incomparably stronger man than either of them. He was tough, ruthless, infinitely cunning, and utterly determined to prevail, no matter what the obstacles. Even so, his struggle for prominence and power was entirely within the Bolshevik party and its predecessors. He was the consummate bureaucratic infighter, not the innovator or the lone pioneer.

Only Adolf Hitler started literally from nothing and through the exercise of a superhuman will created the physical basis for the realization of his vision. In 1918, recovering in a veterans’ hospital from a British poison-gas attack, he made the decision to enter politics in order to serve that vision. He was a 29-year-old invalid, with no money, no family, no friends or connections, no university education, and no experience. Liberals, Jews, and communists ruled his country, making him and all those to whom he might appeal for support outsiders.

Five and one-half years later he was sentenced to five years in prison for his political activity, and his enemies thought that was the end of him and his movement. But less than nine years after being sentenced he was Chancellor of Germany, with the strongest and most progressive nation in Europe at his command. He had built the National Socialist movement and led it to victory over the organized opposition of the entire Establishment: conservatives, liberals, communists, Jews, and Christians.

He then transformed Germany, lifting it out of its economic depression (while Americans, under Roosevelt, continued to line up at the soup kitchens), restoring its spirit (and much of the territory which had been taken from it by the victors of the First World War), stimulating its artistic and scientific creativity, and winning the admiration (or, in some cases, the envy and hatred) of other nations. It was an achievement hardly paralleled in the history of the world. Even those who do not understand the real significance of his creation must concede that.

And what was the real significance of Hitler’s work? One of his most earnest admirers in India, Savitri Devi, has given us a poetic answer to that question. She wrote:

In its essence, the National Socialist idea exceeds not only Germany and our times, but the Aryan race and mankind itself and any epoch… it ultimately expresses that mysterious and unfailing wisdom according to which Nature lives and creates: the impersonal wisdom of the primeval forest and of the ocean depth and of the spheres in the dark fields of space; and… it is Adolf Hitler’s glory not merely to have gone back to that divine wisdom—stigmatizing man’s silly infatuation for “intellect,” his childish pride in “progress,” and his criminal attempt to enslave Nature—but to have made it the basis of a practical regeneration policy of worldwide scope, precisely now, in our overcrowded, overcivilized, and technically overevolved world, at the very end of the dark age” (Savitri Devi, The Lightning and the Sun [National Socialist World No. 1, p. 61]).

More prosaically, Hitler’s work, in contrast to that of his contemporaries, was above politics, above economics, above nationalism. He had mobilized a powerful, modern state and placed it at the service of our race, so that our race might become fit to serve as an agent of the Life Force.

Perceptive and idealistic young men from every nation in Europe—and from many nations outside Europe as well—recognized this significance, and they flocked to serve him and to fight for his cause, even at the cost of censure and ostracism from their more parochial and narrowminded countrymen. There was never before an elite fighting force to match the SS, which by the end of the Second World War had more non-Germans than Germans in it.

The war, of course, is counted as Hitler’s great failure, even as the proof of his lack of greatness, by his detractors. It merely proves that he was a man, not a god, even if a divine will worked through him, and that he could not perform miracles. He could not defend himself forever, with the governments of nearly the whole world allied in a total war to pull him down and destroy his creation, so that they and the interests they served could return to “business as usual.” Even so, he gave a far better account of himself than any of his adversaries.

And what will count in the long run in determining Adolf Hitler’s stature is not whether he lost or won the war, but whether it was he or his adversaries who were on the side of the Life Force, whether it was he or they who served the cause of Truth and human progress. We only have to look around us today to know it was not they.