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Film Final solution Reinhard Heydrich

Heydrich, 1

In these unbelievably crazy times when Western elites are bringing us closer and closer to a nuclear apocalypse, why not intersperse my re-readings of Little Lulu (see what I said yesterday in the comments section) with other fictional dialogues, but this time Reinhard Heydrich’s? Yes: nothing could be more opposite than the Lulu stories I read when I was ten, and Heydrich! But because of the crazy days, both characters now come together in my mind…

At the height of his career, Heydrich held the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer and General der Polizei. Heydrich was also Reichsprotektor of the Czech Republic. If many normie historians consider him the darkest figure of the Nazi elite, we must study him closely, as Christianity reversed all our values.

Hitler described Heydrich as ‘the man with the heart of iron’. As a consequence of his repressive actions, throughout his career Heydrich was known by various nicknames: ‘The Executioner’, ‘The Butcher of Prague’, and ‘The Blond Beast’. As the founding leader of the Sicherheitsdienst he investigated resistance to the National Socialist Party to combat it through arrests, deportations and executions.

Heydrich was also responsible for the Einsatzgruppen, the special commandos who accompanied the advancing German armies and carried out mass executions of communists, intellectuals and Jews by firing squad or gassing. In late 1941, after he arrived in Prague as Reichsprotektor, Heydrich sought to eliminate opposition to the German occupation by deporting and executing members of the Czech resistance.

Heydrich was attacked and seriously wounded near Prague on 27 May 1942 by a Czech commando as part of Operation Anthropoid. The commando had received special training from British ethno-traitors and was sent to the Czech capital by the government-in-exile to assassinate the Reichsprotektor. Heydrich died from his wounds a week later.
 

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The Wannsee Conference (German: Die Wannseekonferenz) is an Austro-German television film by Heinz Schirk, released in 1984. It portrays the Wannsee Conference in docu-fiction form, with Reinhard Heydrich as the main character.

The film describes in real time (over 90 minutes) the meeting in Wannsee of Third Reich executives and officials in charge of planning, under Heydrich’s direction, the final solution of the JP. As there is no verbatim transcript of the meeting, the dialogue was necessarily fictionalised. However, I find it so fascinating that I will be commenting on it in several posts.

‘Heydrich’ said:

The Führer is especially disappointed about England. He hoped they would acknowledge our legitimate requests: Living space in the East, appropriate status in Europe, solution to the Jewish question through emigration. We could have reached an agreement. We are of the same race. The Jews have taken over Downing Steet as well. The Führer has lost all patience. Why spare our Jews when we are obliged to settle accounts with world Jewry?

Yes: in Europe the English were (and are) the ethno-traitors par excellence. At 16:07 Heydrich acknowledges that Himmler himself fainted during an execution of the final solution programme, and adds:

Nothing dishonourable in that. It proves we Germans are humans. But it is dishonourable not to carry out what the future of our people demands [exterminationism], whether it is pleasant or not. It is dishonourable to be a weakling—which we in the SS are not.

Those who belong to the American racial right are dishonourable not only because they fail to embrace exterminationism as the way forward, but because these Christians and neochristians seek to ‘baptise’ Heydrich and the others involved in the final solution by denying the historicity of the ethnic cleansing that the Third Reich began to implement in the conquered territories to the East.

Let us be clear: the Russians wouldn’t now be empowered with nuclear weapons if the Anglo-Americans hadn’t committed the greatest blunder in recorded history! But even more serious is the Christian ethos that reigns in virtually all Westerners, including atheists.

I confess that I have recently felt very great respect for several rabbis who have been explaining why the genocide perpetrated by the Israelis in Gaza is an honourable enterprise. I would suggest that visitors to this site watch these videos, which have even made their way onto YouTube. Of course, the rabbis say these things from the point of view of what is good for the Jews in general and the Israelis in particular. It is the same logic as Heydrich’s but from the other side.

In other words: the genocidal passion of the Book of Joshua is the healthy thing. Pure social Darwinism! On the other hand, the universalist love that St Paul preaches to the gentiles is wicked, especially since this Jew knew fairly well that such love could only harm the Romans and benefit the Jewish people. But since the values have been reversed since Constantine and his successors, now whites see everything backwards. That’s why I recently wrote a psychobiography of Nietzsche: he was the first to detect this psychological trick.

Don’t get me wrong! I am not saying that we should go bananas like Argentine President Milei and go to a rabbi to have our foreskins cut off. What I am saying is that we should imitate the winners: the exterminationist rabbis but from Heydrich’s side. Can’t white nationalists see something so obvious, something that Nietzsche saw so clearly since 1886 in texts already quoted in my anthology The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour?

Heydrich is our ‘rabbi’ so to speak: the one we have to listen to even if the dialogue of the German-speaking film is as fictitious as the Lulu stories I keep re-reading….

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Amerindians Heinrich Himmler Reinhard Heydrich Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book)

Reinhard Heydrich

The following is one of the passages I reviewed today from the translation of Savitri Devi’s book. It clearly shows what the transvaluation of values is:

One can compare the action of the Einsatzgruppen against the Jews in Germany and in the countries occupied by the armies of the Third Reich with that of the Einsatzgruppen in the Eastern territories.

In both cases, according to the instructions given by Reinhard Heydrich in May 1941 to the leaders of the latter, the aim was to ‘mercilessly destroy all past, present and future opposition to National Socialism’ that is, to eliminate as many actual or potential enemies of the new Germanic faith and Empire as possible. In both cases, the action revealed a scale of values in complete opposition to all anthropocentrism or a scale of values completely devoid of hypocrisy. War is in itself the negation of any anthropocentric faith or philosophy—especially war between men of different races and civilisations, some of whom regard the habitat of others as necessary, or favourable, to their development.

Himmler remarked that the Anglo-Saxon pioneers in North America had ‘exterminated the Indians and only wanted to live on their native land.’ And the fiercest anti-Hitlerites are forced to admit that he was right, and that there is no ‘respect for the human person’ in the attitude of the founders of the US towards the real Americans. It is all too easy, after the fact, when you have installed your democracy over the entire surface of a continent practically emptied of its inhabitants, whose race you have destroyed in the most cowardly way by alcohol, it is easy then, I say, to proclaim that the age of violence is over; to forbid others to carve out a ‘living space’ for themselves as you have carved out one for yourself and, should their effort end in failure, to bring them before a parody ‘International Tribunal’ as ‘criminals against humanity.’

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Final solution Holocaust Reinhard Heydrich Third Reich

The Führer’s monologues (vii)

In his Anmerkungen zu Hitler, Sebastian Haffner argued that the character of the National Socialist leader was determined early on and ‘astonishingly always remained the same’. This is especially true of the basic ideological positions.[1] The proof was provided by Eberhard Jäckel in his study on Hitler’s Weltanschauung.[2]

Here we will only briefly touch on the thoughts that Hitler developed in the monologues recorded by Heim. The defeat of 1918, he thought, and the harsh terms of the peace treaty so wounded the national pride and self-confidence of the German people that they exerted all their strength to get out of the distress. Without the uncompromising attitude of the victorious powers of the First World War, it would never have been possible to inflame the national passions to such an extent, to achieve the will tension to regain the former world status. Hitler, in contrast to many of his followers and voters, sought it, however, only as a prerequisite for the establishment of a larger Reich, which at the same time was to become the organising power of a new Europe. To achieve this goal, no state should be in a position to oppose these aspirations. Hitler was deeply convinced that the land ‘according to eternal natural law’ belonged to the one who conquered it, ‘because the old borders did not offer sufficient possibilities for the growth of the people’ (table talk #117).

According to Hitler’s worldview, the first and most important prerequisite for the expansion of Germany’s sphere of power was the strengthening of the people’s vital energies, and the mobilisation of their readiness to fight. Since Hitler could not imagine history without war, he considered it necessary to educate the people to affirm the struggle for existence. He therefore consistently wanted the German people to wage war every fifteen to twenty years (table talk #17). Only in this way would they be able to summon up the utmost strength and maintain the necessary toughness. To get young and old, poor and rich, citizens and workers to identify with the National Socialist regime, to get them to unreservedly link their private existence with that of the state privileges were abolished, discrimination ended, and educational and promotional opportunities improved. Above all, the entire population was to be given access to the nation’s cultural assets. However, the National Socialist leadership reserved the right to determine what art was, and which works of music, poetry and painting corresponded to the consciousness of the people. In addition, Hitler expected everyone to take advantage of their opportunities, to make full use of the possibilities offered to them. If he failed to do so, if he deliberately withdrew from the struggle for life as demanded by the state, all support and tolerance would be withdrawn. The same applied to the people as a whole. Hitler spoke of them with appreciation and respect, and praised their diligence, loyalty and many other positive qualities. But he demanded that they accept the struggle and prove themselves in it. If they did not fight resolutely and bravely, if they showed symptoms of weakness, there was no excuse: ‘If the German people are not prepared to stand up for their self-preservation, fine: then let them disappear!’ (table talk #114)

Hitler himself spared no effort and no means to increase the strength and readiness to fight, but above all the inner unity of the nation. This was served by the attempt to bring as many people of German nationality as possible into the Reich from the occupied areas of Europe and other states, to have ethnic Germans or volunteers from related nations fight in units of the Wehrmacht or the Waffen-SS, and to enlist minorities or individual members of foreign nations, as far as they were considered assimilable, for cooperation.

The declared enemies of the regime were fought with the same uncompromising zeal that was used to select those who were considered useful and qualified according to ideological principles. These included, among others, Czechs, Poles, Russians and, first and foremost, the Jews. Hitler repeatedly emphasised with emphasis that there was no leniency for ‘aliens from the community’. It has recently been claimed that the deportation and murder of the European Jews took place without the knowledge of the German head of state.[3] According to another view, the order to kill them was only given after the conflict between rival forces had become so disastrous that there was no longer any alternative.[4] In my opinion, both theses are untenable. The assumption that the decision to the ‘final solution to the Jewish question’ in Europe was taken by Hitler in the face of the realisation that the war could no longer be decided militarily[5] is not confirmed either in these records or in other sources.

Hitler was the undisputed leader, he made or approved all essential decisions, including the most momentous of the whole war. The ‘removal’ of the Jews from Europe corresponded to the consistency of his worldview, as all his statements on this subject show. And the consequence of his actions from 1939 to 1941 can also be seen in the orders and measures he gave. The Einsatzgruppen that followed the German armies into Russia had clear instructions. On 31 July 1941, Heydrich was instructed to develop a concept for the removal of the Jews from the entire German sphere of power and influence. The fact that expulsion was no longer on the agenda is shown by the impediment and, from October 1941, the ban on all emigration. On 15 October the systematic deportation of Jews from Germany and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia began.

Ten days later, on 25 October, Hitler declared in the presence of Himmler and Heydrich at the Führer’s headquarters: ‘Before the Reichstag I prophesied to Jewry that the Jew would disappear from Europe if the war was not avoided. This criminal race has on its conscience the two million dead of the World War, now hundreds of thousands again. Don’t tell me: We can’t send them into the mire! Who cares about our people? It is good if we are preceded by the terror of eradicating Judaism. The attempt to found a Jewish state will be a failure’ (table talk #44). Without a doubt, all the fundamental decisions were made at this time. Heydrich then made the technical and organisational arrangements so that in November he could invite the state secretaries of all the ministries involved to the house on Wannsee for a meeting on 9 December 1941. The date for the conference had to be postponed given the events on the Eastern Front, but the ‘Final Solution’ was not. It began in December 1941.

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[1] Sebastian Haffner, Anmerkungen zu Hitler. Munich 1978.

[2] Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler’s Weltanschauung. Entwurf einer Herrschaft. Tübingen 1969.

[3] David Irving believes that Bormann, Himmler, Goebbels and others ruled the Reich while Hitler waged his war (Hitler’s War, p. 251). However, he fails to provide any convincing evidence for this.

[4] Martin Broszat, Hitler und die Genesis der »Endlösung« (Hitler and the Genesis of the ‘Final Solution’). On the occasion of David Irving’s theses. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 25, 1977, p. 746 ff.

[5] Haffner, Anmerkungen zu Hitler (op. cit.) p. 157.

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Autobiography Child abuse Heinrich Himmler Holocaust Joseph Goebbels Reinhard Heydrich Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book)

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 61

This seems to be all the more true since before the war, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSA) Subgroup IV 134 was itself involved in close cooperation with the Haganah, the underground Zionist organisation, in sending Jews from the Reich to Palestine, which was then under the British Mandate, despite the opposition of the government in London. Thus, in 1938 and the first months of 1939, almost four hundred thousand Jews left German territory, in full agreement with the National Socialist authorities.[1] I am not talking about those who left without being forced to, from 1933 to 1938, or before 1933.

Moreover, the famous Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, which best reflect the spirit of Hitler’s revolution and the purest Aryan racism, while denying Jews (as indeed all non-Aryans) the possibility of acquiring German nationality and forbidding them ‘to fly the German colours or to hoist the national flag of the Reich’, gave them the right ‘to hoist the Jewish colours’. The exercise of this right, it was specified, was ‘placed under the protection of the State’ [2] which clearly proves that at that time, despite their historical role as ‘ferment of decomposition’, Israelites were still considered in National Socialist Germany as foreigners to be distrusted and kept at a distance, but not as ‘vermin’ to be destroyed.

Things would change in 1941 and especially in 1942 and more and more as the Second World War became more relentless, more ‘total’. And this, above all, thanks to those ‘millions of non-Jews, friends of the Jews’, of which Samuel Untermeyer had foreseen, almost ten years before, the benevolent collaboration with his brethren of race in their fight to the death against the Third Reich.

For as early as May 1940, the massive attack by the British air force, deliberately directed against the German civilian population, began. The English general Spaight boasts about it in his book Bombing Vindicated. And the deluge of phosphorus and fire only intensified after the US entered the war, turning entire German cities into infernos night after night. It is estimated that about five million German civilians, women, old men and children, died during these ferocious bombardments: crushed under the smoking rubble or burnt alive in their shelters invaded by the liquid, flaming asphalt that poured in from the molten streets.

The Führer had not, as early as 1933, the day after the ‘declaration of war’ by several of their number in the name of all of them, interned all the Jews in Germany, as he could have done then.[3]

He felt strong enough to be generous, and besides, the light side outweighed the unforgiving side in his psychology. He had let all those who wanted to go—go with their money, which they immediately used to turn world opinion against him and his country. He had done everything, tried everything, to make it easier for them to put down peaceful roots outside the Germanic living space.

But no government had agreed to welcome them en masse into its territory or its colonies. Now it was war. And it was a Jewish war, as they themselves proclaimed to anyone who would listen: a war waged by Aryans, whose (misunderstood) sense of self-interest, narrow and jealous nationalism, and above all that superstition of ‘man’ inherited from both Christianity and Descartes, had been exploited by Jewish propaganda for years, a war against the Germans as ‘enemies of humanity’ and against the National Socialist Weltanschauung as ‘the negation of man’. It was hell unleashed against Germany by the Jews in the name of ‘man’.
 

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Editor’s note: Hell unleashed against Germany by the Jews? It is very difficult for an autobiographer like me, who has analysed his parents for decades, to see the Second World War as a Jewish war. It is obvious that it was a war of Aryans betraying themselves.

When I was a teenager, my mother’s slander against me was horrendous (she had lost her mind). But it was my father’s folie à deux that destroyed me (see details in Letter to mom Medusa, a book whose English translation I advertise on the sidebar). My father was not a simple victim of ill advice, but an active agent in believing everything to his Medusa wife. Since he could have chosen not to let himself be stung by the snakes of her wife’s scalp, but let himself be poisoned for decades, I cannot forgive him, or say that the ‘poor’ Anglo-Americans were victims of ill advice by the Jewish slander against the Germans.

Savitri and today’s anti-Semitic racialists believe the latter in order not to see the evil of their co-ethnics, although Savitri at least blamed Christianity for our misfortune as well. The difference between me and Savitri is that I blame much more anyone who let himself be infected by the Christian ethics regarding the Jewish Holocaust than she blamed. Just remember her words above: ‘thanks to those millions of non-Jews, friends of the Jews, of which Samuel Untermeyer had foreseen…’

Obviously, I am influenced here by the immense tragedy of my life, and how Christianity played a pivotal role in the destruction of my adolescence and my twenties (cf. the fifth book). The tragedy that killed the other two victims of my family (cf. the books about the deceased Corina and Leonora in my autobiography) made me see human nature differently. And it is almost impossible for visitors to understand the point of view of this site without having read From Jesus to Hitler: a new literary genre that I have inaugurated.
 

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No one, of course, except those who ‘live in the eternal’, can claim to know the innermost thoughts of Adolf Hitler. However, it is logical to assume that the hardening of his attitude towards the Jews, which began in 1941 and continued later, was a violent reaction against the superstition of ‘man’ and all the morality that goes with it, in the face of the daily and ever-increasing horror of the ‘phosphorus cleansings’, as their perpetrators, the Anglo-American bombers, called them.[4] If this was the application of the man’s morality, bent on crushing National Socialism by burning alive, women and children included, the people who had acclaimed it and brought it to power, then why hesitate any longer to oppose it, to the very last consequences, the immemorial morality of the Jungle: that of the struggle to the death between incompatible species?

The Führer may not have ordered the massive suppression of Jews, without distinction of sex or age, both in the conquered areas of the East (where they were very often confused with the most dangerous snipers and saboteurs) and in the concentration camps. But he allowed his most radical collaborators to act—such as Goebbels, whom he had severely reprimanded [5] the day after the well-known night of the popular pogrom of 9-10 November 1938, known as Kristallnacht. Heinrich Himmler and Reinhardt Heydrich merely executed the suggested measures, for which the Führer accepted full responsibility.
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[1] Brissaud: Hitler et l’Ordre Noir (op. cit.), page 307.

[2] Article 4 of the Third Nuremberg Law.

[3] If, by the mouth of its responsible representatives, any nation declares war on France, will not all the nationals of that nation, domiciled in France, be immediately interned?

[4] Sauvageon, a post-war author, gave this cynical title to one of his novels.

[5] Grimm: Warum? Woher? aber Wohin? (op. cit.), page 84.

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Ethnic cleansing Final solution Holocaust Reinhard Heydrich Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Third Reich

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 59

One can compare the action of the Einsatzgruppen against the Jews in Germany and in the countries occupied by the armies of the Third Reich with that of the Einsatzgruppen in the Eastern territories.

In both cases, according to the instructions given by Reinhard Heydrich in May 1941 to the leaders of the latter, the aim was to ‘mercilessly destroy all past, present and future opposition to National Socialism’[1] that is, to eliminate as many actual or potential enemies of the new Germanic faith and Empire as possible. In both cases, the action revealed a scale of values in complete opposition to all anthropocentrism or a scale of values completely devoid of hypocrisy. For war is in itself the negation of any anthropocentric faith or philosophy—especially war between men of different races and civilisations, some of whom regard the habitat of others as necessary, or favourable, to their development. Himmler remarked that the Anglo-Saxon pioneers in North America had ‘exterminated the Indians and only wanted to live on their native land’.[2]

And the fiercest anti-Hitlerites are forced to admit that he was right, and that there is no ‘respect for the human person’ in the attitude of the founders of the US towards the real Americans. It is all too easy, after the fact, when you have installed your democracy over the entire surface of a continent practically emptied of its inhabitants, whose race you have destroyed in the most cowardly way by alcohol, it is easy then, I say, to proclaim that the age of violence is over; to forbid others to carve out a ‘living space’ for themselves as you have carved out one for yourself and, should their effort end in failure, to bring them before a parody ‘International Tribunal’ as ‘criminals against humanity’.

This is easy. But it is an indictment of lies; of bad faith. It also accuses a secret and sordid envy: that of the dwarf towards the giant; that of the plutocrat in search of new markets, towards the warrior capable of frank and detached violence; that, too, of all the proud citizens of shaky colonial powers towards the conquering Third Reich, at the height of its glory.

In both actions—that of the Einsatzgruppen in Poland and Russia, and that against the Jews everywhere—the leaders of the Third Reich had men from conquered countries treated or allowed to be treated as the founders of the US had treated the Redskins, but with less tartuffery. They openly admitted that ‘the tragedy of greatness is to create new life by treading on corpses’:[3] corpses of which it doesn’t matter how many if the ‘new life’ is closer to its divine prototype; if it is more faithful to the supreme values than the life that is disappearing. And they sincerely believed it was, or would be (and indeed it would have been, if Germany had won the war).

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Editor’s Note: Some who come to comment on this site continue to do so without understanding that we are in a fight with the white nationalist POV. Here again is what we have said so many times:

This is a site for apprentices to fourteen-word priests (or a priestess, if a woman wants to become someone very similar to Savitri Devi, which I consider highly unlikely).

The gulf between the priest and the white nationalist is that the former has already transvalued Christian values to pre-Christian values, and regards the genocide of enemies as highly moral and laudable. The latter suffers from what we call ‘ogre of the superego’ inspired by Christianity, thus imagining the Nazis as if they weren’t killers but good Christians (like the Americans).

Those who want to know the real history of the Third Reich would do well to note that, among Reich sympathisers, the most knowledgeable don’t go around denying the genocides committed by the Nazis (e.g., Max Weber and David Irving). Or don’t they still notice these German words?

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[1] Quoted by André Brissaud in Hitler and the Black Order, 1969 edition, page 319.

[2] Confidences in Kersten (see Kersten’s book, Les mains du miracle, page 319).

[3] André Brissaud, Hitler and the Black Order, 1969 edition, page 309.

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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
Conservatism Lothrop Stoddard Reinhard Heydrich Revilo Oliver

Revilo Oliver

Below, three selected passages from “The Forgotten Conservative,” a 2009 article in Taki’s Magazine:

 
For Oliver, the answer is clear: race is fundamental. In “History and Biology,” American Opinion (1963), Oliver highly recommends Lothrop Stoddard’s The Revolt Against Civilization Stoddard, “one of the most brilliant of American writers,” argued that the colored races pose a threat to the white race, and Oliver enthusiastically agrees. For him, racial struggle is primary, and he regards ethical obligations as limited to one’s own race. For him, this view was unquestionable. In response to a correspondent to National Review who asked why one should give primary emphasis to the needs of one’s own race, Oliver was puzzled. Was this not how everyone in fact acted?

* * *

He [Oliver] became, as he had not been in earlier times, a fervent supporter of Adolf Hitler and praised the “clear-sighted realism” of Reinhard Heydrich.

* * *

Given the record of his later years, it is small wonder that contemporary conservatives prefer to ignore Oliver.

Categories
Catholic Church Charlemagne Reinhard Heydrich Table talks

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 145

the-real-hitler

4th July 1942, at dinner

German Embassy at the Vatican—The Concordat must be ended—Faulty manœuvres by the Wilhelmstrasse—I refuse open war with the Church—the Bishops will soon fawn on the State.
 

Should we decide to recall our present representative from the Vatican, I can see no adequate reason for sending any fresh incumbent to this Embassy. The relations between Germany and the Vatican are based on the Concordat. But this same Concordat is no more than the survival of agreements reached between the Vatican and the different German States, and, with the disappearance of the latter and their incorporation in the German Reich, it has become obsolete.

Once the war is over we will put a swift end to the Concordat. It will give me the greatest personal pleasure to point out to the Church all those occasions on which it has broken the terms of it. One need only recall the close cooperation between the Church and the murderers of Heydrich. Catholic priests not only allowed them to hide in a church on the outskirts of Prague, but even allowed them to entrench themselves in the sanctuary of the altar.

The development of relations between State and Church affords a very instructive example of how the carelessness of a single statesman can have after-effects which last for centuries. When Charlemagne was kneeling at prayer in St. Peter’s, Rome, at Christmas in the year 800, the Pope, giving him no time to work out the possible effects of so symbolic an action, suddenly bent down and presto popped a golden crown on his head! By permitting it, the Emperor delivered himself and his successors into the hands of a power which subjected the German Government and the German people to five hundred years of martyrdom.

Today, as always, there are responsible people to be found who are careless enough to allow a crown of gold to be popped on to their heads, and one cannot exaggerate the enormous effects which such an action, seemingly trifling at the time, can later produce.

Much in the same class and equally stupid is the idea of the Wilhelmstrasse that every note from the Vatican must be answered. The very act of answering is tantamount to an admission of the right of the Vatican to interfere in German domestic issues—if only in ecclesiastical issues—and to maintain official correspondence with us.

When once the Concordat and its financial obligations have been repudiated, and the Church becomes dependent on the offertory, it will pocket a bare 3 per cent of the money it at present gets from the State, and all the Bishops will come creeping and begging to the Reichsstatthalter.

It will be the duty of the Reichsstatthalter to make it quite clear after the war that he will deal with the Church in exactly the same way as he deals with any other national association, and that he will not tolerate the intervention of any foreign influence. The Papal Nuncio can then return happily to Rome, we shall be saved the expense of an embassy at the Vatican, and the only people who will weep tears over the jobs that have been lost will be the Foreign Office!

Categories
Ancient Rome Catholic Church Heinrich Himmler Homosexuality Real men Reinhard Heydrich Schutzstaffel (SS) Tacitus

National Socialism on homosexuality

Heinrich Himmler
Speech to the SS Group Leaders
(18 February 1937)


When we took over power in 1933, we came across the gay clubs. The registered members totalled two million; conservative estimates by processing officials go as high as two to four million homosexuals in Germany. Personally I think the number was not that high because I do not believe that all those who were in the clubs really were personally homosexual.

I would like to go over with you a couple of ideas on the issue of homosexuality.

Among the homosexuals there are those who take this view: What I do is nobody else’s business, it is a purely private matter. However, all things which happen in the sexual sphere are not the private affair of the individual, but impinge upon the life and death of the nation. A people which has many children has the qualifications for world power and world domination. A people of good race which has too few children has a sure ticket for the grave, for insignificance in 50 to 100 years, for burial in two hundred and fifty years.

However, even apart from this number—I have taken up only the numerical issue—this nation can go kaput from something else. We are a Men-state (Männerstaat), and, with all the faults which this Men-state has, we must staunchly hold on to it, for the constitution of the Men-state is the better one.

There have also been in history Women-states. You have surely heard of the word matriarchy. There were Amazon-states not only in fable but in fact. There were matriarchal constitutions in the friezes—especially among sea-peoples. We can follow their traces and emergence even up to our time. It is no mere coincidence that Holland gladly lets itself be ruled by a queen and that in Holland the birth of a daughter, the Queen, is more welcomed than the birth of a son. This is no peculiarity, but derives from the ancient instincts of maritime peoples. [Translator’s note: Among maritime peoples the men are often away at sea, and hence the women tend to be unusually independent, if not actually rulers. This tendency has been noted by observers of Iceland after the banking crisis in 2007. It was primarily the women there who rose up and demanded punishment of the bankers.]

For centuries, for millennia, the Germanic peoples and especially the German people have been officially ruled by men. This Men-state, however, is now in the process of going kaput on account of homosexuality. In the field of government I see the main error in the following: the state, the organization of the people, the army and whatever else is connected with state institutions, all these attain their positions based on merits, apart from human shortcomings. Even the occasional, quite unrealistic attainment of an official post after the “First” (Einser) in the judicial examinations is nevertheless still a selection based on merit. The selection in this case is made according to merit because first the First is taken, and then the Bruckeinser [exam] and finally the Second [exam], etc., are taken.

In the positions of the state and the economy, in which women are employed, no honest man will be able to claim that the position is gained purely on the basis of merit. [For example], in the moment when you choose a typist and you have two candidates before you (a very ugly 50-year old one who types 300 syllables [per minute], almost a genius in this field, and another who is 20 years old, racially sound and pretty and who types only 150 syllables), and you take the pretty young 20-year old candidate who types fewer syllables.

Well, one can laugh, for this is harmless and proves meaningless because, if she is pretty, she will soon get married; and besides the position of stenographer is not crucial for the state; it now has others to choose from.

But in the moment when this principle—not to pick purely on merit: a sexual principle takes root in the Men-state—, the destruction of the state begins. I will take an example from life. I want to emphasize that I say: from life. I want to interject here in this matter that I doubt that any place on the present inhabited earth has gained so much experience in the field of homosexuality, abortion, etc., as we have in Germany as the Secret State Police. I believe that we can really speak as the most experienced people in the field.

Councillor X is homosexual and is not selecting on the basis of the merit-principle the assessors that he needs for his office in the government. He will not choose the best lawyer. He will not say that assessor Y may not be the best lawyer, but he has received a good score, has been in the practice of law, and, what is much more significant, looks good racially and is ideologically in order. No, he does not take a well-qualified and good looking assessor, but rather seeks out the one who is also a homosexual. These people know each other with a glance across a room. If at a dance you have 500 men, within a half hour they have mutually picked out those who have the same disposition as they. How that happens, we normal people cannot at all imagine.

The councillor seeks out the assessor who has the worst score and who is also ideologically out of order. He does not ask about his performance, but recommends him to the director of the ministry for appointment. He praises him and justifies his recommendation in detail. The assessor is now hired, for it will never occur to the director of the ministry to ask for greater details and to examine the hiring more closely because from the outset as an old official he assumes that the councillor’s recommendation is based on merit. The idea that the assessor has been recommended due to the similarity of his sexual predisposition does not enter the head of a normal man.

It does not stop with these two because the assessor, who is now a governmental official, will proceed on the same principle. If in a Men-state you have a man with such a disposition in any position of authority, you are sure to find there three, four, eight, ten or even more men of similar disposition; for one draws in another, and watch out if there are one or two normal men among these people; they are basically damned, they can do what they want but they will be ruined. Let me give you an example of a comrade from this very circle, for whom it went like this. SS-Obergruppenführer von Woyrsch was present in Silesia at the time of his struggle with the homosexual SA-Gruppenführer Heines and the homosexual Gauleiter and Oberpräsident Brückner. Since he was the man who upset this wonderful accord, he was persecuted not because, as was said, he is not like us, but always on moral, political, ideological—National-Socialist grounds.

Homosexuality therefore undoes in the state every merit, every basis for merit, and destroys the state in its foundations. That is not all: the homosexual is a thoroughly mentally-ill man. He is soft, he is in every crucial regard a coward. I believe that he can be brave here or there in war; in the field of civil courage however they are the most cowardly men that there are.

Interconnected with this is the fact that the homosexual lies pathologically. He is not lying—to take an extreme example—as a Jesuit. The Jesuit lies for a purpose. He says anything whatever with a beaming face and knows that he is deceiving you. He has a moral foundation: for the glory of God, majorum dei gloriam. The end justifies the means. There is a whole moral philosophy, a moral doctrine that Saint Ignatius worked out.

The Jesuit therefore is lying and knows it; he does not forget for a moment that he is lying. The homosexual however lies and believes it himself. If you ask a homosexual about something: Have you done that? Answer: No. I know of cases where homosexuals interviewed by us said: with my sacred oath, in honour of my mother, or may I immediately drop dead here if this is not true. Three minutes afterwards, when with the help of our evidence we said to him, “Please, and this?” [irrefutable evidence], he unfortunately did not topple over, but is still alive.

I never understood that in the beginning. In the years 1933-34 we approached these matters like ignorant fools because that was and is a world so strange to a normal man is that he can hardly imagine it. Gruppenführer Heydrich and I and some other people had to really learn in the field and only thanks to bad experiences. I asked myself at the beginning if the fellows were lying. Today it is quite clear to me that they cannot help it. I therefore think no more of asking a homosexual: can you give me your word? I do not anymore because I know that I will get a false word. At the moment in which he says something with watery eyes, the homosexual is convinced that it is true. In my experience homosexuality leads to an absolute, I would almost say, mental insanity and madness.

The homosexual is of course the most appropriate object for every kind of extortion, firstly because he is himself liable to arrest, but secondly also because he is a soft fellow and thirdly because he lacks will and nerve. Moreover, the homosexual has an insatiable desire to communicate in all areas, especially in the sexual area. You usually find that the one who gets caught then tells you uncontrollably all the names he knows. Since there is no fidelity in the love of man for man, the homosexual tells everything unrestrainedly and does so in the hope that he can perhaps save his own skin thereby.

We need to be clear about this. If we continue to have this vice in Germany without being able to fight it, then that is the end of Germany, the end of the Germanic world. Unfortunately we do not have it as easy as our ancestors.

The homosexual, who was called Urning, was sunk in the swamp. The professors who find these bodies in the swamp are determined not to realize that in ninety out of a hundred cases they have before them a homosexual who, with his robe and all, was sunk in the swamp. [Chechar’s note: Himmler is referring to Tacitus’ study on ancient Germanics: “Traitors and deserters are hanged; cowards and those guilty of unnatural practices are suffocated in mud under a hurdle.”] That was not a penalty, but rather just the extinction of an abnormal life. That had to be removed, as we pull out nettles and throw them in a pile and burn them. There was no feeling of revenge, but the person in question had to go.

Nordeuropa, Truppenunterhaltung

So it was with our ancestors. With us unfortunately that is, I have to say, no longer possible. Within the framework of the SS I would like to explain very clearly the following. I stress this point: I know exactly what I am saying. This of course is not intended for leaders’ meetings, but you can repeat it conversationally in individual discussions with one person or another:

In the SS today we still have about one case of homosexuality a month. In the entire SS in a whole year approximately eight to ten cases occur. I have now decided upon the following: in each case these people naturally will be publicly degraded, expelled, and handed over to the courts. Following completion of the punishment laid down by the court, by my orders they will be sent to a concentration camp, and they will be shot in the concentration camp while trying to escape. I will make this known by order to the unit to which the person in question belonged. I hope thereby to finally have done with persons of this type in the SS, so that we will at least keep pure the good blood which we have in the SS and the on-going recovery of the kind of blood which we are cultivating for Germany.

But this does not solve the problem for all of Germany. One should harbour no illusions about the following. If I bring the homosexual to court and have him locked up, the case then is not finished, for the homosexual comes out of prison just as homosexual as he went in. Therefore the whole issue is not cleared up.

queers-camps

It is cleared up only to the extent that this vice has been denounced, in contrast to the years before our seizure of power. Although we had the paragraphs before the war, during the war, and after the war, in reality nothing happened. I can best make that clear by an example: in the first six weeks of our activity in this area in 1934 we brought more cases to court than had the entire police department in Berlin in 25 years. No one should come and say that the problem got big only because of Rohm. He of course was a big setback, but the problem flourished before the war, during the war, and even after the war.

Now you see you can regulate everything possible with state and police measures. One can manage the prostitute problem which in and of itself is quite harmless in comparison to this other problem. That is a matter that by certain measures can be brought under sustainable control for a civilized nation. We will be exceedingly generous in this matter because one cannot, on the one hand, want to prevent all the youth from drifting toward homosexuality and, on the other hand, block for them every [sexual] outlet. That is madness. In the end every blocked opportunity to meet up with girls in big cities, even if it is for money, has therefore a big downside.

Amid all these considerations we must not forget that Germany has unfortunately become (up to two-thirds of it) an urban nation. The village does not have these problems. The village has its natural and healthy regulation of all these issues. There despite the clergyman, despite Christian morality, despite a thousand years of religious education, the youth climbs through the bedroom window of the girl. The problem is thus put in order. There are a few children born out of wedlock; a few of them are sprinkled about the village, and the minister is glad of it, for that gives him a topic for the pulpit. The boys do the same thing as before and—do not be fooled—as was done in our past. The whole theory which one has rightly built up that the Germanic girl, if she is unlucky enough not to get married until 26 or 30-years old, lived up to that time as a nun, is a myth. The blood laws, however, were strict, that no guy and no girl was allowed to mess around with someone of inferior blood. That law was relentlessly and strictly observed. Furthermore this was strict: marital fidelity. If that was broken by the woman, the death penalty was imposed. For from that there was a danger that foreign blood come in.

That was all natural; the social order then was clean and decent and acted in accordance with the laws of nature and not as our order today against the laws of nature.

As I said, the questions which belong to this sector can somehow be brought into order. The more that we facilitate early marriage, that our men can get married by the age of 25, the more the other problem decreases: it then takes care of itself. The issue of homosexuality, however, cannot bring itself into order. Obviously I can forth-lock up all the male prostitutes in Germany and put them in a camp.

I only pose to myself the question: if I lock up 20,000 hustlers from the big cities, will I bring back to a normal way of life the maybe three or four thousands of these who are young enough (17 to 18) by means of discipline, order, sports, and work? It has been done successfully in quite a number of cases. But the moment when the hustlers are not there—I am not going to lock up the homosexuals—then there is a risk that the millions of homosexuals will seek new victims for themselves. So this is a sword that cuts both ways.

We will gather up all of these 17 to 18-years old boys, except for those who are already totally spoiled, and bring them into a camp. We will try to make these boys reasonable again, something which, as I said, has already been done successfully in a large number of cases.

All this does not solve the whole problem. The only solution I see is as follows: we cannot let the qualities of the Men-state and the benefits of male society diminish through errors. We have overall, in my opinion, a much too strong masculinization of our whole life. I feel as though I were witnessing a catastrophe when I see girls and women—especially girls—who march through the area with wonderfully well packed knapsacks. That can lead to trouble. I view it as a catastrophe when women’s organizations, communities of women, and women’s federations become active in an area; that destroys all feminine charm, all feminine dignity and grace. I view it as a disaster if—I am talking about things in general, for it does not apply to us [in the SS] directly—we foolish men want to turn women into logical instruments of thought and educate them in everything, which is only possible if we also masculinize them [so far] that in time the difference between the sexes, the polarity, disappears. Then the path to homosexuality is not far.

The question now is posed: the SS says it is an order. The party also says it is an order. These claims are not at all mutually exclusive. We are very clearly and expressly a National Socialist order of definitely Nordic men and a sworn community of their kin (Sippe). We are firstly a soldier order, a National Socialist soldier order, bound by rearing and blood to Nordic blood, a tribal community (Sippengemeinschaft), if you will. Previously one would have said: an association of nobles (Adelsgenossenschaft). I do not purposely use this expression. But I want to say by using it that our task has to do with the breeding and rearing of people (das Menschenzüchterische), while the task of the political order has to do with the political leading of the people.

The moment in which it is clear to me that the party is a political order, it must take on more and more a spiritual meaning and less and less a military meaning, that of packed knapsacks and falling in line, etc. That applies right down to individual nuances.

I come back to this point again. I said we are masculinizing all of life too much. I will cite a few examples, to which you can probably add some drawn from your personal experience and from experience with different children.

Corbis

I view it as disastrous for a people when boys tell their mothers: “When we are marching in the Hitler Youth, see to it that you do not pass by. I would greet you, yes, but the others would laugh, I would then be considered a mama’s boy and a weakling.” I view it as disastrous for a people when a boy is ashamed of his sister and his mother or is directed to be ashamed of women, in this case of the women who are closest to him, of his mother and of his sister who is becoming a woman. When a boy who is in love with a girl is mocked more than the normal amount, is designated as not fully respectable and as a sissy, and if one says to him: a guy does not bother with girls, he won’t bother with them. There are then only friendships with other youths. Men dominate in the world: so the next step is homosexuality.

These are the thoughts of Herr Blüher [a notorious pederast], which then prove that: “In general, the greatest form of love is not between man and woman; with that there are children; that is something animalistic. The greatest form is the sublimated love between man and man. It is only from this that the greatest things in world history have come about.” But that is the outrageous hypocrisy of these people who stake claim to Alexander the Great and Bismarck. There are no great men whom the homosexuals do not claim for themselves: Caesar, Sulla, etc. I think Don Juan is not yet claimed, but otherwise pretty much all. That is now served up in palatable form to the young people who are already in a hugely masculinized movement and because of the men-camps have no opportunity to get together with girls. In my opinion we need not be surprised that we have gone down the road to homosexuality.

I see a fundamental change only through the following:

1) This is something particularly urgent for us in the SS: We absolutely must re-educate the SS man and boy to become a chivalrous man or a young gentleman. That is the only way in which we can draw the line very clearly so that we do not fall into Anglo-Saxon and American conditions. I once told an English woman who had said that she found it terrible that men greet women first: “With you probably the hens do the courtship display around the rooster! Does this seem with you to be different from normal?” A consequence of the over-privileged woman is that in America no man any more dares to look at a girl, since otherwise he will be brought before the marriage court and made to pay for it. In America homosexuality is absolutely a defensive measure for the men because they have fallen into such slavery to the women. The woman can behave like an axe there: she just starts hacking away on something. She is never rebuked: the best example of a tyranny by women!

There is no danger among us, however, that the chivalry of the man be overplayed and exploited by the other side, since the women in Germany by habit and education are not inclined to do that. In any case we must educate our young always to be chivalrous men who stand up for women.

I recently said to a Hitler Youth leader: “You are usually so un-Christian, but your attitude toward women is the purest Christianity that is at all possible.” A hundred and fifty years ago someone at a Catholic university wrote a doctoral thesis with the title: “Does a woman have a soul?” From this the whole tendency of Christianity emerges: it is directed at the absolute destruction of women and at emphasizing the inferiority of women. The entire substance of the priesthood and of the whole of Christianity is, I am firmly convinced, an erotic union of men (Männerbund) for the erection and maintenance of this 2000-year old Bolshevism. I reach that conclusion because I know very well the history of Christianity in Rome. I am of the conviction that the Roman emperors, who eradicated (ausrotteten) the first Christians, did exactly the same thing that we are doing with the communists. These Christians were then the worst yeast which the great city contained, the worst Jewish people, the worst Bolsheviks that there were.

anchor-fish

The Bolshevism of that time had now the power to become great on the carcass of the dying Rome. The priesthood of the Christian church which later subjugated the Aryan church in unending conflicts goes on, since the 4th or 5th Century, longing for the celibacy of priests. It relies on Paul and the very first apostles who derogate the woman as something sinful and permit or recommend marriage as merely a legal way out of prostitution—that is in the Bible—, and derogate the procreation of children as a necessary evil. This priesthood continues along in this way for several centuries until in 1139 the celibacy of priests is fully implemented.

I assume that in the monasteries the homosexuality ranges from 90 or 95 to 100 percent. If today the trials that concern homosexuality among priests went on again and if we would treat the priests as [we do] any citizen in Germany, then I would undertake to guarantee for the next three to four years 200 or more such trials. The realization of the trials fails to take place not because there is a lack of cases, but because we just do not have as many officials and judges as we would need to employ. Within the next four years very conclusive evidence will be produced—I hope—that the Church organization in its leadership, its priesthood, is for the most part a homosexual erotic men-union (Männerbund) that on this basis has been terrorizing humanity for the past 1800 years, demands from it the greatest blood sacrifice, and has been sadistically perverse in its utterances in the past. I need only to recall the witch and heretic trials.

The German woman, not the man, has borne the greater sacrifice of blood in the witch and heretic trials. The priests knew exactly why they burned 5000-6000 women: exactly because they emotionally held fast to the old knowledge and the old doctrine and emotionally and instinctively could not be dissuaded, while the man had already converted by logic and thought: “There is no point. We are going under politically. I adapt, I let myself be baptized.”

I come back to our issue. I see in the whole movement an excessive masculinization and in this excessive masculinization the seedbed for homosexuality.

I ask you now, if you have the opportunity to discuss these ideas in detail—but not before the entire officer corps!—, to talk about these things with one man or another. Please make sure that our men, as it has been initiated by me, come together at the summer solstice celebration with the girls to dance.

I think it absolutely essential that we now and then arrange a dance for the young candidates in the winter to which we don’t invite girls who are in any way bad, but rather the very best—and where we give the SS-man the opportunity to dance with girls and to be happy and merry with them. I think this is particularly important for the single reason that [it helps to assure that] no one ever comes down the wrong road in the direction of homosexuality. That would be a negative reason. But I think it important also for a positive reason: we should not be surprised if this or that SS-man marries a completely wrong and racially worthless girl if we do not give the men the opportunity to get to know worthy, racially sound girls.

With the youth I see the need absolutely to take care that the boy of 16-17 years comes together with girls for a dancing lesson or some other event during communal evenings. The age of 15-16 years—that is a fact from experience—is the age at which the boy is on the tipping point. If he has a dancing lesson heartthrob or a childhood crush on some girl, he is won over, he has been drawn away from the dangerous plane

I thought myself obliged to speak to you once on these issues, my group leaders. This matter is deadly serious and cannot be solved with tracts and moral theories.

Gentlemen! A misguided sexuality brings about the craziest thing that the mind can imagine. To say we are animalistic is an insult to animals, for animals do not do such things. So, this question about properly guided sexuality is a question of life [or death] for every people.

__________________________

Translated especially for Neues Europa by G.F.H.
Syntactically revised and abridged for WDH

Categories
Albert Speer August Kubizek David Irving Heinrich Himmler Monologe im Führerhauptquartier Reinhard Heydrich Third Reich Zweites Buch

What is the best Hitler biography?

by Andrew Hamilton




I’m not a National
Socialist, but…
I have read a few
books on Hitler.

Regarding Hitler,
I agree with
Irmin Vinson:



I consider Hitler less a model to be followed than an avalanche of propaganda we must dig ourselves out from under. Never in human history has a single man received such sustained vilification, the basic effect and purpose of which has been to inhibit Whites from thinking racially and from acting in their own racial self-interest, as all other racial/ethnic groups do. Learning the truth about Hitler is a liberating experience. By the truth I mean not an idealized counter-myth to the pervasive myth of Hitler as evil incarnate, but the man himself, faults and virtues, strengths and weaknesses. (“Some Thoughts on Hitler”)

Since literally thousands of worthless books have been churned out about Der Boss, how does one sift through the massive pile of crap on the hopeful assumption that, “Hey, with all this manure, there must be a pony in here somewhere!”?

A “good” biography by my definition is an objective, truthful account, not a comic book fabrication about a lunatic, one-testicled rug chewer, or a thinly-disguised religious fable in which Hitler (= Satan/Nazis/Germans/white people) crucifies 6 million Jews (= God’s chosen people, elbowing the Lord Jesus Christ aside) by fantastic and diabolical means before efficiently employing the grisly remains to manufacture bars of soap and lampshades for the amusement of Hitler and his henchmen, or to lighten the burden of wartime rationing.

Hopefully, the book would be well-written and fun to read, as well.

If there’s a reliable bibliographical essay along these lines, I am unaware of it.


Ian Kershaw’s biography

What brought this perennial question—What is the best Hitler biography?—to mind recently was an article about English historian Sir Ian Kershaw in the Guardian (UK) newspaper asserting that the author’s two-volume, 2,000-page (prolixity is the norm in Hitler studies) biography of Hitler published to wide acclaim a decade ago, “is likely to remain the standard life for a generation.”

The biography is: Volume 1, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (London: 1998), and Volume 2, Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis (London: 2000). A single-volume abridgement, Hitler: A Biography, appeared in 2008.

This pattern of two-volume books and abridgements, plus multiple translations, editions and printings of the same book at different times, often with different titles, continually bedevils the researcher.

Kershaw, who comes from a white, working-class background, does not inspire confidence. Among other things, he’s a knight (OBE), though he claims to be “embarrassed” by the “neo-feudal title.”

During the so-called Historikerstreit (Historians’ Dispute) in Germany from 1986 to 1989, Kershaw teamed with academic mentor Martin Broszat, an anti-German German, to publicly attack other German historians—Ernst Nolte, Andreas Hillgruber, Michael Stürmer, Joachim Fest and Klaus Hildebrand—as apologists for the German past.


“Comic Book” Titles as a Screen

One heuristic I use is to reject any book with a ridiculous or patently propagandistic title.

Using that guideline, the New York Times did Kershaw no favor when it titled its shallow reviews of his two Hitler volumes “The Devil’s Miracle Man” and “When Depravity Was Contagious,” respectively.

Examples of other self-destructive titles are The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (1977; 1993), Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (1998), Hitler: The Pathology of Evil (1998), Adolf Hitler: A Chilling Tale of Propaganda as Packaged by Joseph Goebbels. (1999), Adolf Hitler: A Study in Hate (2001), and Hitler and the Nazi Leaders: A Unique Insight into Evil (2001).


Books I own

I read Konrad Heiden’s critical Der Fuehrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power (1944) in high school. Its first chapter, “Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion,” was my introduction to Alfred Rosenberg. I remember being enthralled by the book. Heiden was at least half-Jewish (his mother). He eventually fled Germany and settled in the United States, where he died in 1966. In Hitler’s War David Irving warns against reliance upon Heiden’s and several other biographies “hitherto accepted as ‘standard’ sources on Hitler” without further elaboration.

Another book I read while young is journalist William Shirer’s 1,245-page The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (1960). It sold more than 2 million copies and won the National Book Award. I read the whole thing, but with nothing like the zest I read Der Fuehrer. Unfortunately, Shirer’s work is empirically and ideologically flawed.

Robert Payne, author of The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler (1973), was a freelance writer, not an academic or journalist. He was enormously prolific. I looked him up in Contemporary Authors and learned that he authored over 110 novels, biographies, and histories. If he began at age 20, he wrote (and published) more than two books per year until he died at age 72. Evidently his pace exacted a price on accuracy. Besides purveying conventional ideological and racial animus, the biography contains glaring factual errors, some very big indeed.

Two spurious memoirs frequently cited by mainstream historians are Hermann Rauschning’s Conversations with Hitler (1940) (US title: The Voice of Destruction and Fritz Thyssen’s I Paid Hitler (1943) (neither of which I own), both published by a Hungarian Jew, Churchill confidant, and world federalist named Emery Reves.

Rauschning’s fabricated Conversations with Hitler has been relied upon by William L. Shirer, Robert Payne, Jewish historians Leon Poliakov, Gerhard Weinberg, and Nora Levin, Alan Bullock’s Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952) (the first comprehensive biography, Bullock’s Hitler dominated scholarship for years; it also possesses the kind of title that’s a red flag to me; I do not own it), and Joachim C. Fest’s Hitler (Germ. 1973, Eng. trans. 1974), among others. For background on this see Mark Weber, “Rauschning’s Phony Conversations With Hitler: An Update,” Journal of Historical Review (Winter 198586), pp. 499 ff.

Nevertheless, as David Irving points out, “Historians are quite incorrigible, and will quote any apparently primary source [memoirs, diaries, autobiographies, etc.] no matter how convincingly its false pedigree is exposed.” When “serious” biographers rely upon works like Rauschning’s, their books should be approached cautiously, if at all.

Fest’s Hitler, the first major biography since Alan Bullock’s in 1952, and the first ever by a German author, became the bestselling book in Germany upon its publication; the next year it was translated into 17 languages. A prominent German journalist, broadcaster, and anti-Nazi, Fest was one of a troika of Establishment editors who re-wrote, or co-wrote, German armaments minister Albert Speer’s famous memoir, Inside the Third Reich (Germ. 1969; Eng. trans. 1970). (Speer was imprisoned at Spandau from 1946 to 1966.) The book, a worldwide bestseller, made a fortune for Speer and earned widespread praise for its disavowal of Hitler. According to David Irving, Speer had a secret agreement with his German publisher, Ullstein Verlag, to pay 25% of all royalties and proceeds to the State of Israel.

About Fest’s Hitler Irving wrote, “Stylistically, Fest’s German was good; but the old legends were trotted out afresh, polished to an impressive gleam of authority.”

As noted above, Fest fought on the conservative side of Germany’s Historian’s Dispute in the 1980s, denying the “singularity” of the Holocaust (which, however, he believed in). His Wikipedia entry provides lengthy quotations that strike a contemporary reader as heretical.

Finally, a friend kindly gave me his copy of Timothy W. Ryback’s Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life (2008), which is both interesting and informative.


Recommendations of a dissident: William Pierce’s National Vanguard Books Catalog (December 1988)

I’ve often used this valuable reference over the years. It is essentially an elaborate college syllabus. Subdivisions include “European Prehistory, Archaeology, & Folkways,” “European Legend, Myth, and Religion,” “History of Western Civilization,” “Western Art,” and so on. Its 125 carefully-selected titles provide in-depth knowledge and a comprehensive overview of the white race and Western civilization.

With the exception of Mein Kampf, only three Hitler biographies are included in Pierce’s catalog, none of them standard ones. Two are: Heinz A. Heinz, Germany’s Hitler (London: 1934), and Hans Baur (Hitler’s personal pilot), Hitler at My Side (1986).

The third, Otto Wagener’s Hitler–Memoirs of a Confidant (1985), was written in 1946 when Wagener was a British prisoner. It was not published until many years after his death by the late Yale historian Henry Ashby Turner, Jr. Pierce described the book as “By far the most informative and positive memoir by a confidant of Hitler since August Kubizek’s The Young Hitler I Knew” ([German 1953, English 1955], another memoir NV had previously sold).

A notable feature of Wagener’s memoir is that, according to historian Gordon Craig’s New York Times review, it strongly emphasizes Hitler’s pro-British views and depicts the Führer as “an ‘unwitting prisoner’ of Göring, Goebbels and Himmler, powerless to prevent his true intentions from being distorted by evil associates for their own criminal purposes”—claims by an eyewitness that parallel David Irving’s controversial views.


Mein Kampf (My Struggle) and Zweites Buch (Second Book)

Though not biographies, strictly speaking, I own 1950s-era drugstore paperback copies of Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 1941–1944 (1953) and Felix Gilbert, ed. and trans., Hitler Directs His War (1950).

According to David Irving, the transcripts published as Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 1941–1944 are genuine. (Though Irving doesn’t say it, the book he discusses, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944, is the same as mine, but with a different title—I warned you it’s complicated!)

I recommend clicking on the preceding link to get a feel for how important it is to understand the provenance and reliability—the evidentiary basis—of even “mainstream” books and texts you might otherwise assume are problem-free. To his credit, Irving is keenly aware of the difficulties posed by mainstream books and official documents housed in archives. They cannot simply be accepted at face value.

I should nevertheless quote the following from Irving’s web page:

The Table Talks’ content is more important in my view than Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and possibly even more than his Zweites Buch (1928). It is unadulterated Hitler. He expatiates on virtually every subject under the sun, while his generals and private staff sit patiently and listen, or pretend to listen, to the monologues.

Along with Sir Nevile Henderson’s gripping 1940 book Failure of a Mission: Berlin, 1937-1939, this was one of the first books that I read, as a twelve year old: Table Talk makes for excellent bedtime reading, as each “meal” occupies only two or three pages of print. My original copy, purloined from my twin brother Nicholas, was seized along with the rest of my research library in May 2002.

He adds: “Ignore the 1945 ‘transcripts’ published by Hugh Trevor-Roper in the 1950s as Hitler’s Last Testament [The Testament of Adolf Hitler—Ed.]—they are fake.” That book purports to be Martin Bormann’s notes on Hitler’s final bunker conversations.

Mein Kampf was originally published in German in two volumes, the first in 1925 and the second in 1927. English translations combine both volumes into one.

I read Mein Kampf thoroughly in 1988, as my well-marked copy indicates. (The fact that it was ’88 is coincidental!) However, the book did not have an impact on me intellectually or emotionally. I wasn’t a national socialist then (much less a National Socialist) and am not one now. Nor do I view Hitler as a quasi-sacred figure.

Part of the reason for the book’s lack of effect may be due to the particular translation I purchased. In the original German the book was a runaway bestseller and the source of much of Hitler’s private fortune. Even acknowledging the political factors involved, one cannot dismiss the possibility that it reads better in German than in its English translations. The quality of a translation determines how well a book “travels” from one language to another. Both fidelity to the original (accuracy) and transmission of the spirit or feel are necessary. I have experienced translations that capture the originals marvelously, and others where even classic works appear dead on the page.

I bought my copy of Mein Kampf without prior research and ended up purchasing the 1939 Hurst and Blackett translation by James Murphy.

Murphy, a former Irish Catholic priest, was hired by the German government to make the official English translation, but the project was scuttled after a dispute. Murphy continued the translation nevertheless, and it appeared independently in Britain in 1939.

I later learned that many English-speaking National Socialists prefer Ralph Manheim’s 1943 Houghton Mifflin translation (which I have not read). It is possible that Manheim better catches the spirit of Hitler’s original, because he was also the translator of Konrad Heiden’s Der Fuehrer which so enthralled me as a boy.

In his catalog, William Pierce categorized Mein Kampf as “semi-autobiographical,” calling it “a beacon and a guide to every healthy soul in this dark age, to everyone who seeks understanding and light.” He described the differences between the English translations this way:

Manheim translation: Accurate, but marred by anti-Hitler introductions and derogatory footnotes.

Murphy translation: No hostile comments, but the translation is not as faithful to the original text.

After Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote what has become known as the Zweites Buch (Second Book) (1928), an extension and elaboration of his foreign policy aims. It also sets forth his views of the Soviet Union, France, Great Britain, and the United States. The book was written to clarify his foreign policy objectives for the German public after the 1928 elections. However, his publisher advised him that, from a sales point of view, the time was not propitious for bringing it out. By 1930 Hitler had decided that it revealed too much about his intentions, so it was never published.

In 1935 it was locked away at his order in a safe inside an air raid shelter. There it remained until the fall of Germany in 1945, when it was discovered by the American invaders. Its authenticity was reportedly vouched for by Josef Berg and Telford Taylor.

In 1958 the manuscript of the Zweites Buch, having again fallen into obscurity, was rediscovered in American archives by Jewish historian Gerhard Weinberg. Weinberg, whose family left Germany for the United States in 1938, is the author of numerous anti-German academic books and articles and a vigorous Holocaust promoter. He is Shapiro Senior Scholar in Residence at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Weinberg strongly supported the ethnic cleansing of Germans from Eastern Europe after WWII, which resulted in an enormous number of white deaths.

Unable to find a US publisher for the book, Weinberg turned to a fellow Jew in Germany, Hans Rothfels; a German edition of the Second Book was issued in 1961. (A pirated copy translated into English appeared in New York the following year.) An authoritative English edition did not appear until 40 years later: Gerhard L. Weinberg, ed., Hitler’s Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf (New York: Enigma Books, 2003).

Because I had never heard of this book until 2003, I thought the whole story a bit strange. It is unclear how many scholars apart from Weinberg have examined the original manuscript, or what methods of authentication were used. However, David Irving sold the 2003 edition at one of his lectures, and has indicated at least implicitly on several occasions (some quoted here) that he accepts the book as genuine.


David Irving

David Irving’s Hitler’s War is interesting on several levels.

An independent, non-academic historian, Irving has been victimized to an unimaginable degree over many decades by the Jewish power structure, including a global panoply of government agencies, apparatchiks, courts, police, and academic and media shills eternally at its beck and call. His suffering is mind-numbing proof of the bizarre, Orwellian world we live in. Blacklisted and bankrupted, his personal prosperity and former high reputation are in ruins.

His book, as usual, is long: 985 pages (2002 ed.), and again there is the thorny problem of multiple volumes and editions of a single biography floating around. Hitler’s War was first published in 1977, and its prequel, The War Path, in 1978. In 1991 a revised 1-volume edition incorporating both books was issued as Hitler’s War. In 2002, a revised “Millennium Edition” was published under the title Hitler’s War and the War Path, incorporating the latest documents from American, British, and former Soviet archives. This is the one I own.

In an introductory Note Irving states that in the Millennium Edition he has not revised his earlier views, but merely refined the narrative and reinforced the documentary basis of his former assertions.

Famed for working almost exclusively from official archival documents, diaries, private letters, and other original source material, his method has the downside of somewhat impeding smooth narrative flow. However, this is compensated for by the rich source material. Almost incredibly, Irving admits:

I have dipped into Mein Kampf but never read it: it was written only partly by Hitler, and that is the problem. More important are Hitlers Zweites Buch, (1928) which he wrote in his own hand; and Hitler’s Table Talk, daily memoranda which first Heinrich Heim (Martin Bormann’s adjutant, whom I interviewed) and then Henry Picker wrote down at his table side, and the similar table talks recorded by Werner Koeppen (which I was the first to exploit, in Hitler’s War).

In his introduction, notes, and on his website, Irving reveals the care necessary in dealing with even supposedly reliable documentary materials, never mind historians’ work (which he typically ignores). German memoirs, for example, have been extensively tampered with by publishers, Allied authorities, and others. When using them Irving attempts to work from the original typescripts rather than published texts. Even documents contained in government archives have been altered, removed, or otherwise manipulated. His many discussions about such issues are highly instructive.

Irving is not a “Holocaust denier” as Jews claim, though he does not believe in every jot and tittle of their religious narrative as everyone else does.

One of Irving’s most controversial claims is that “antisemitism” in Germany was “a powerful vote catching force,” “an evil steed” that Hitler had no compunction in riding to the chancellorship in 1933. But once in power, “he dismounted and paid only lip service to that part of his Party’s creed.” The “evil gangsters” under him, however—Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Joseph Goebbels—continued to ride it even when Hitler dictated differently.

Although Irving maintains that a Jewish Holocaust of sorts did occur (unfortunately, he is exceedingly vague, evasive, and even contradictory about its details, and denies any interest in it), he says that Hitler’s evil henchmen dreamed it up and carried it out entirely without Hitler’s knowledge or approval. Thus, while Irving is a Hitlerphile, he is extremely harsh toward “bad guys” like Himmler (in particular), Heydrich, and Goebbels. The reader may perhaps see how Irving’s central thesis is hard to… accept.

Irving has published a critical biography of Goebbels and is currently working on one about Himmler. Himmler’s elderly daughter Gudrun has publicly expressed her fear that Irving will perform a hatchet job on her father in an attempt to salvage his (Irving’s) reputation.

In fairness to Irving, Jewish historian Felix Gilbert, editor of Hitler Directs His War (above), wrote that “during the war, Hitler cut himself off from all his former associates and interests and closed himself in at his headquarters with his military advisers. The center of Hitler’s activities became then the daily conferences on the military situation.” This suggests possible great autonomy on the part of Himmler and others, at least after the inception of the war. Irving, however, tends to emphasize disloyalty, deceit, and manipulation by Himmler and others rather than Hitler’s isolation or distraction. Still, as previously noted, Otto Wagener’s Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant also presents a picture of Hitler’s relationship to his top lieutenants even in the early days of the regime that is similar to Irving’s.

The most important thing to note is that Hitler’s War is not a biography per se, but a military history of WWII from Hitler’s perspective. My primary interest, however, apart from biography, is the racial, political, philosophical, and social aspects of Hitler’s Germany rather than the conduct of the war.


John Toland’s Hitler

La Crosse, Wisconsin-born John W. Toland is another independent scholar who wrote a major biography of Hitler: Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography. Something of an intellectual renegade in his later years, he managed to stay beneath the radar screen of controversy. His books remain popular and highly regarded. His best-known book, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945 (1970), won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Based upon extensive original interviews with high Japanese officials who survived the war, it was the first book in English to tell the history of the war in the Pacific from the Japanese rather than the American point of view. (Toland married a Japanese woman.)

Toland’s mildly controversial Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath (1982) offered a quasi-revisionist view of the Roosevelt Administration’s scapegoating of the Pearl Harbor commanders and subsequent cover-up. The Pearl Harbor book led to Toland’s association with the Holocaust revisionist Institute for Historical Review (IHR), at whose meeting he spoke.

After Jewish terrorists firebombed the Institute on the Fourth of July, 1984, destroying its warehouse and inventory of books (American authorities “never found”—or punished—the perpetrators), Toland wrote to the IHR:

When I learned of the torching of the office-warehouse of the Institute for Historical Review I was shocked. And when I heard no condemnation of this act of terrorism on television and read no protests in the editorial pages of our leading newspapers or from the halls of academia, I was dismayed and incensed. Where are those defenders of democracy who over the years have so vigorously protested the burning of books by Hitler? Are they only summer soldiers of democracy, selective in their outrage? I call on all true believers in democracy to join me in public denunciation of the recent burning of books in Torrance, California.

Toland’s Adolf Hitler was based upon a great deal of original research, including previously unpublished documents, diaries, notes, photographs, and interviews with Hitler’s colleagues and associates. I have had difficulty identifying a good copy of the biography for sale on Amazon due to the headache of multiple editions and reprints I mentioned earlier.

As near as I can determine, the initial publication was Adolf Hitler, 2 vols. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1976). However, sellers often list it for sale on Amazon while really having only one volume (which one is usually undeterminable) in stock. On the other hand, one seller informed me that he checked his 1976 edition in the warehouse, and it appeared to be a complete book in one volume. My impression is that the reprint (I assume it is unrevised), Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography (Doubleday, 1992), is the same book in a single volume.

Toland’s biography was well-received by both reviewers and the public. In his autobiography Toland wrote that he earned little money from his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Rising Sun, but was set for life thanks to the earnings from Adolf Hitler.

Patrick Buchanan penned a column about the book in 1977, after which he was widely condemned for “praising Hitler.” Daniel Weiss of the Virginia Quarterly Review wrote that “In some respects the Hitler who emerges is almost too human, too normal.”

Mark Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review and a longtime WWII revisionist who reads German, writes:

I’m sometimes asked which biography of Hitler I think is best, or which I recommend. In my view, the best single biography of Hitler, and the one I most often recommend, is the one by John Toland, Adolf Hitler. It’s especially good in helping the reader to understand Hitler’s personality and outlook. Kershaw’s biography is detailed, but it’s also very slanted and leaves out a lot.

It would be a mistake to assume that Weber’s recommendation is the result of Toland’s brief connection with the IHR. Adolf Hitler was written several years before that relationship developed. Moreover, in 1977, when David Irving offered a thousand pound reward to anyone who could produce a single wartime document showing that Hitler knew anything about the Holocaust, Toland published an emotional appeal in Der Spiegel urging his fellow historians to refute Irving.

It is unlikely that Toland’s book is “pro-Hitler.” Certainly, reviewers have not attacked it as such.


Conclusion

I guess I’ll go with Toland’s biography, evidently the most objective, despite owning several others instead. Although I’ve only scratched the surface, it is apparent that enormous effort is required to merely survey the field before diving in to actually get a handle on The Most Evil Man Who Ever Lived.

And what is the likely outcome of such an effort? Well, David Irving, who has spent the better part of a lifetime studying the Führer, concluded:

What is the result of twenty years’ toiling in the archives? Hitler will remain an enigma, however hard we burrow. Even his intimates realised that they hardly knew him. General Alfred Jodl, his closest strategic adviser, wrote in his Nuremberg cell on March 10, 1946: “I ask myself, did you ever really know this man at whose side you led such a thorny and ascetic existence? To this very day I do not know what he thought or knew or really wanted.”

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