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Category: Sturmabteilung (SA)

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

Hitler, 27

Significantly, the first mission of his new paramilitary formation, undertaken even before it was christened the SA, was an attack not on the Jews, communists or Social Democrats, but on a meeting of [particularist —Ed.] Ballerstedt’s Bayernbund in the Löwenbräukeller in the summer of 1921 under the banner ‘we will not betray Bavaria’. Hitler led an assault in which Ballerstedt was manhandled and the police were eventually called to break up the fight. His violent behaviour earned him a short jail sentence. By contrast, it is not documented that Hitler ever personally laid hands on an individual Jew, either then or subsequently. Hitler’s campaign against Bavarian federalism in general and his vendetta against Ballerstedt in particular continued throughout the 1920s and remained a preoccupation until he had him killed during the ‘Night of the Long Knives’.

Hitler’s view of foreign policy was, as we have seen, strongly ideological. That said, he was also beginning to develop a keen sense of geopolitics. In part, this followed the prevailing discourse of Germany’s central location in Europe and her consequent vulnerability to ‘encirclement’. He spoke of ‘the position of our fatherland, which was geographically one of the most unfortunate in Europe’. Hitler inveighed repeatedly against the ‘encirclement attempts of the Entente against Germany’. Where Hitler went much further than the nationalist mainstream was over the growing question of space, the Raumfrage, references to which increased exponentially during the early 1920s. In mid April 1920, Hitler lamented that ‘the world was so unjustly distributed’. Four months later, he noted that Germany suffered from a crippling lack of space by comparison with Britain, which controlled about one-quarter of the entire globe. By March 1921, Hitler decried the injustice that Britain, with a smaller population, controlled ‘three-quarters of the entire world’, while more populous Germany had to make do with considerably less space. This sense of connection between Germany’s ‘disadvantageous military location’ and the ‘impossibility of securing the food supply in Europe’ stayed with Hitler to the end.

The cause of this unequal distribution, he believed, was global capitalism and its associated system of world governance. ‘The international exploitation of capitalism must be combated’, Hitler demanded, as well as that of ‘international loan capital’. ‘We want to turn world slaves into world citizens,’ he announced. This required ‘the liberation of our German people from the fetters of its international world enslavement’. This in turn meant that Germany would have to regain its military freedom of action. ‘The German is either a free soldier,’ Hitler argued, ‘or a white slave.’ He therefore called upon the German people to relearn the old adage that ‘whoever does not want to be a hammer must be an anvil’, adding that ‘we are an anvil today, and were being beaten until the anvil became a hammer’, that is a ‘German sword’. The idea that Germany must become a ‘hammer’ to avoid remaining an ‘anvil’ was a common trope at the time and one to which Hitler returned on a number of occasions.

In short, Hitler saw the root of Germany’s evils in her external subjection… Any prospect of a vigorous German foreign policy, Hitler claimed, ‘is predicated on a radical domestic political change’. In this context, the defeat of 1918 could be put to good use. Just as the catastrophe of 1806 had led to the Wars of Liberation in 1813, Hitler hoped that defeat in 1918 and the humiliation of Versailles would be followed by a national revival; ‘fall’, ‘purification’ and ‘rebirth’ were common tropes in Weimar Germany. Hitler’s rhetoric consciously mimicked that of the great patriotic martyr Palm, a Nuremberg bookseller who was executed by Napoleon in Hitler’s hometown of Braunau for penning the rousing tract ‘Germany in its deepest humiliation’…

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

Hitler, 19

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hitler and Gregor Strasser.

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Democracy Monarchy Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Sturmabteilung (SA) Third Reich

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 50

There is no shortage of opponents of Marxism. They range from those who condemn all violence and are frightened by the known episodes of ‘class struggle’ in Russia and China, to those who reproach the Communists for their atheism and materialism, to those who own some property and are afraid of losing it if they have to live under the sign of the Sickle and Hammer.

Many oppose it in the name of some political doctrine, usually embodied in a ‘party’, which, if it attacks the ‘subversive’ character of Marxism, is itself no less subversive, and for the same deep reasons. This is the case with the adherents of all democratic parties, whose common denominator is to be found in the belief in the ‘equality in law’ of all men, and hence the principle of universal suffrage, of power emanating from the majority. These people don’t realise that Communism is in its infancy in this very principle, as it was already in Christian anthropocentrism (even if it is a question of the value of human souls in the eyes of a personal God who infinitely loves all men). They don’t realise that it is and can only be so, for the reason that the majority will always be the mass—and increasingly so, in an overpopulated world.

Only those who are faithful to any adequate expression of immemorial Tradition, and in particular to any true religion or to any Weltanschauung capable of serving as a basis for a true religion—any worldview which is ultimately based on the knowledge of the eternal and on the will to make it the principle of the socio-political order—, are fundamentally opposed to Marxism.

Now, disregarding the apparent paradox of such an assertion, twenty-five years after the collapse of the Third German Reich I dare to repeat that the only properly Western doctrine which (after the very old Nordic religions which Christianity persecuted and gradually killed between the 6th and 12th centuries) fulfils this condition is Hitlerism.

______ 卐 ______

 
Note of the Editor: Once more, Savitri didn’t know about the apocalypse of whites that also represented, in the 4th and 5th centuries, the violent destruction of the classical world by fanatic Christians. We cannot blame her. Books like this one had not been published! More recently than Savitri’s time, even Mauricio didn’t know about the blackest page of ancient history, as he commented yesterday.

______ 卐 ______

 
This is the only Weltanschauung infinitely more than ‘political’ that is clearly ‘against Time’ in accordance with the eternal. It is the only worldview which, in the long run, will triumph both over Marxism and the general chaos to which it will have led the world—and this, no matter how great the material defeat of its followers may have been yesterday, and no matter how hostile millions of men may be about it today. Only a total recovery can succeed a total subversion: a glorious beginning of the cycle at a lamentable end of it.

But our opponents won’t fail to draw everyone’s attention to the eminently ‘anti-traditional’ character of more than one aspect of National Socialism, both during the Kampfzeit, before 1933, and after the seizure of power. If it is ‘subversive’ from the viewpoint of eternal values to preach the ‘class struggle’ with a view to the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. But wasn’t it equally subversive to rise to power democratically thanks to universal suffrage, by relying on a succession of electoral campaigns (on the protection of young fighters, for the most part as ‘proletarian’ in their behaviour, as the Communists whose attacks they repelled during meetings and whom they overcame in street battles)? Wasn’t it to be so, to keep this power, which came from the people—the masses—and to omit the reestablishment of the old monarchy despite the last and fervent recommendation of Marshal von Hindenburg, President of the Reich?

On the other hand, didn’t several German banks[1] as well as industrial magnates[2] subsidised the NSDAP, thus making the success of the National Socialist Revolution depend, in part, on the power of money and running the risk of making it considered, despite its popular appearance, the supreme defence of the ‘capitalist’ order as it already existed—that is to say, a society extremely distant from the traditional ideal?

Finally, it may be said, how can it be denied that, even after the seizure of power the Third German Reich was far from presenting the appearance of an organism inspired from top to bottom by the vision of the cosmic hierarchy? The famous author Hans Günther himself, apparently disillusioned, wrote to me in 1970 that he had, unfortunately, seen in it ‘an ochlocracy’ rather than the aristocratic regime he had dreamed of. And one cannot categorically reject without discussion this judgement of one of the most prominent theorists of Hitler’s racism before the disaster of 1945. The judgement, while undoubtedly excessive, must, in more than one particular case, certainly express some regrettable reality.

Let’s never forget that we are approaching the end of a cycle, and that the best institutions can therefore only exceptionally have a semblance of the perfection of the past. For everywhere, and the post-war period has amply proved this, there are more and more two-legged mammals and fewer and fewer men in the strongest sense of the word. No doctrine should therefore be judged by what has been accomplished in the visible world in its name.

The doctrine is true or false depending on whether or not it is in unison with that direct knowledge of the universal and eternal which only a steadily diminishing minority of sages possesses. It is true—it cannot be repeated often enough—regardless of the victory or defeat of its followers, or so-called followers on the material plane, and regardless of their weaknesses, foolishness, or even crimes. Neither the atrocities of the Holy Inquisition, nor the scandals attached to the name of Pope Alexander VI Borgia, take anything away from the truth of the vision of the ‘intelligible world’ that a Master Eckhart, for example, or some initiated Templar, may have had through Christian symbolism. And the same is true of all doctrines.

We must therefore be careful not to impute to Hitlerism the faults, weaknesses or excesses of people with power, to any degree whatsoever, under the Third Reich or during the period of struggle (Kampfzeit) from 1920 to 1933, and especially the faults or excesses committed against the spirit of the Weltanschauung and the Führer’s dream, as there seemed to be so many. In German society, as it was under the growing influence and effective rule of the Führer during the Kampfzeit and afterwards, we must see only the Führer’s efforts to mould it according to his dream, or to prevent it from evolving against that same dream. We must try to understand what he wanted to do.

Already in the official National Socialist texts addressed to the general public—in the Twenty-five Points, which form the basis of the Party programme; and above all in Mein Kampf where the great philosophical directives of the latter are traced out even more clearly—it is visible that the Movement was directed against the most cherished ideals and the most characteristic customs of the eminently decadent society, which had grown out of the Liberalism of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Lending at interest, financial speculation, and any form of gain alien to a creative endeavour, as well as the exploitation of vice or silliness in a press, literature, cinema or theatre envisaged above all as a means of making a profit, are condemned with the utmost rigour. Moreover, the very principles of modern Western civilisation—the equality of all men and all races in law, the idea that ‘law’ is the expression of the will of the majority, and ‘nation’ the community of those who, whatever their origin, ‘want to live together’; the idea that perpetual peace in abundance, the fruit of man’s ‘victory over nature’ represents the supreme good—are attacked, ridiculed and demolished in a masterly manner.

Natural law, the law of the struggle for life, is recognised and exalted on the human level as on all other levels. And the primordial importance of race and personality—the two pillars of the new faith—is proclaimed on every page. Finally, this new faith, or rather this new conception of life (neue Audassung) for the Führer and the few, is not a question of ‘faith’ but true knowledge. It is characterised as ‘corresponding to the original meaning of things’[3] which says a lot, this ‘original meaning of things’ being none other than that which they take on in the light of Tradition.

We can therefore, without going any further, affirm that everything in the history of the National Socialist Party that doesn’t seem to coincide with the spirit of a struggle ‘against Time’ is a matter of the tactics of the struggle, not its nature or purpose. It was under the pressure of hard necessity, and only after he had failed on 9 November 1923 in his attempt to seize power by force that Adolf Hitler, released from his Landsberg prison but now deprived of all means of action, had recourse—reluctantly to be sure—to the slow and long ‘legal way’, that is to say, to the repeated appeal to the voters and the gradual conquest of a majority in the Reichstag. It is well known that his first move after taking power ‘by democratic means’ was to replace the authority of the many with that of one, namely his own at all levels; in other words, to abolish democracy: to bring the political order into line with the natural order as far as possible.

It was under the pressure of a no less compelling material necessity—that of meeting the enormous expenses involved in the struggle for power in a parliamentary system with its inevitable election campaigns—that he had to accept the help of the Hugenbergs, the Kirkdorfs, the Thyssens, Dr Schacht and later Krupp, as well as of a host of industrialists and bankers.

Without it, he couldn’t have risen to power fast enough to block the road to the most dangerous forces of subversion: the Communists. For money is, more than ever, in a world which it increasingly dominates, the ‘sinews of war’ and politics. Does this mean that the Führer was subservient to money or to those who had given him money during the Kampfzeit? Does it mean that he made any concessions to them after taking power?

Far from it! He allowed them to get rich insofar as, in so doing, they served the national economy effectively and gave the working masses what he had promised them: abundance through work insofar as, subject to his authority, they continued to help the Party, i.e. the state, in peace and war. He kept them in their place and their role—like a king and the merchant ‘caste’ in a traditional society—thus showing both his realism and wisdom.

On the other hand, the (at least partial) ‘ochlocracy’ that has so often been attributed to National Socialism was, in fact, only the inevitable corollary of Adolf Hitler’s obligation to come to power by relying, quite democratically, on the majority of the electorate. It wouldn’t have existed if the putsch of 9 November 1923 had succeeded and had given him free rein to remake Germany according to his immense dream. It wouldn’t have existed because he wouldn’t have needed the collaboration of hundreds of thousands of young people ready to do anything: to strike blows as well as to receive them, to maintain in the vicinity of his massive propaganda meetings, and in the halls themselves, an order constantly threatened by the physical attacks of the most violent and implacable elements of the Communist opposition.

To conquer Germany ‘democratically’ he had to show himself, to be heard, hundreds and hundreds of times to convey to the public his message: part of his message, at least that which would induce the masses to vote for his party. The message was irresistible but it had to be communicated. And that would have been impossible without the wolf pack, the SA[4], who ruled the streets and who, at the risk of their own lives, ensured the Führer’s silence and safety amid his audience.

Adolf Hitler loved his young beasts, madly attached to his person, eager for both violence and adoration, many of whom were former Communists who had been won over to the holy cause by the fascination of his words, his looks, his behaviour and his doctrine in which the son of a proletarian saw something more outrageous, more brutal, and therefore more exalting than Marxism.

He loved them. And he loved the latest of their supreme leaders of the Kampfzeit, under whose orders he himself had once fought in the war: Ernst Röhm, who had returned from Bolivia, from the end of the world, at his call in 1930. He willingly turned a blind eye to his deplorable morals and saw in him only the perfect soldier and genius organiser.

And yet… he resigned himself, despite everything, to having this old comrade killed, or to let him be killed—almost the only man in his entourage who was on a first-name basis with him[5]—as soon as he was convinced that the turbulence of this troop, so faithful though it was, its spirit of independence and especially the growing opposition which was emerging between it and the regular German army could only lead precisely to ochlocracy, if not to civil war; in any case, only to the weakening of Germany.

One could compare this tragic but apparently necessary purge of June 30, 1934 with the most Machiavellian settlements of accounts in history; for example, the execution without trial of Don Ramiro di Lorqua on the orders of Caesar Borgia—with this crucial difference, however: that, while the Duke of Valentino had in mind only power for himself, the Führer aimed infinitely higher. He wanted power to try, in a desperate effort, to reverse the march of Time against itself, in the name of eternal values. There was nothing personal in his struggle at any stage.

And if, despite the fervent desire of Field Marshal and Reich President von Hindenburg, he rejected any idea of restoring the monarchy, it was not out of ambition either. It was because he was aware of the vanity of such a step in terms of values and true hierarchies. The monarchy ‘by divine right’, the only normal one from the traditional point of view[6] had, for centuries already, lost all meaning and justification in Europe.

The Führer knew this. It was not a question of trying to restore a shaky order by reinstalling a parliamentary monarchy presided over (there is no other word) by William II or one of his sons. He wanted to build a new order, or rather to resurrect the oldest order: the ‘original’ order in the strongest and most durable form it could take in this century.

And he knew that, by the choice of those forces of life which, throughout any cycle of time, untiringly oppose the ineluctable current of dissolution, he—the eternal Siegfried, both human and more than human—held both the legitimate power in this visible world and the legitimate authority emanating from beyond: the ‘power of the two Keys’. With him at the top, the pyramid of earthly hierarchies was to gradually resume its natural position, once again depicting in miniature, first in Germany, then throughout Europe and the Aryan world: the invisible Order which the Cosmos depicts in large.

It was in the name of this grandiose vision of ideal correspondences that he rejected, with equal vigour, Marxism: a doctrine of total subversion; Parliamentarism in all its forms, always based on the same superstition of quantity; and ochlocracy, a source of disorder, and therefore of constant instability.

But the traditional character of his wisdom is to be sought even more in the few texts that give us his secret, or at least intimate, talks, his open-hearted confidences in front of a few selected people, than in his writings or speeches addressed to the general public.

__________

[1] The Deutsche Bank, the Commerz und Privat Bank, the Dresdener Bank, the Deutsche Credit-Gesellschaft, etc.

[2] E. Kirkdorf, Fritz Thyssen, Voegler, Otto-Wolf von Schröder, then Krupp.

[3] ‘…unsere neue Auffassung, die ganz dem Ursinn der Dinge entspricht…’ (Mein Kampf, 1935 edition, page 440).

[4] Sturmabteilungen or Storm Troops.

[5] With some of his other early collaborators, such as Gregor Strasser.

[6] The elective kingship of the ancient Germans, that of the Frankish warrior raised to the flagstaff by his peers, was also ‘of divine right’ if we admit that the ‘divine’ is none other than the pure blood of a noble race.

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Heinrich Himmler Real men Schutzstaffel (SS) Sturmabteilung (SA) Table talks (commercial translation) Women

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 61

the-real-hitler

 

Night of 3rd-4th January 1942

Recruitment of the SS—Himmler’s value—Origins of the SS and the SA—Women love males.
 
 
The SS shouldn’t extend its recruiting too much. What matters is to keep a very high level. This body must create upon men of the élite the effect of a lover. People must know that troops like the SS have to pay the butcher’s bill more heavily than anyone else—so as to keep away the young fellows who only want to show off. Troops inspired by a fierce will, troops with an unbeatable turn-out—the sense of superiority personified! As soon as peace has returned, the SS will have to be given its independence again—a complete independence. There has always been a rivalry between troops of the line and guards-men.

That’s why it’s a good thing that the SS should constitute, in relation to the others, an absolutely distinct world. In peace-time it’s an élite police, capable of crushing any adversary.

It was necessary that the SS should make war, otherwise its prestige would have been lowered. I am proud when an army commander can tell me that “his force is based essentially on an armoured division and the SS Reich Division”.

Himmler has an extraordinary quality. I don’t believe that anyone else has had like him the obligation to deploy his troops in such constantly difficult conditions. In 1934, “the old gentleman” was still there. Even afterwards, a thousand difficulties arose.

Being convinced that there are always circumstances in which élite troops are called for, in 1922-23 I created the “Adolf Hitler Shock Troops”. They were made up of men who were ready for revolution and knew that one day or another things would come to hard knocks. When I came out of Landsberg, everything was broken up and scattered in sometimes rival bands. I told myself then that I needed a bodyguard, even a very restricted one, but made up of men who would be enlisted without restriction, even to march against their own brothers.

Only twenty men to a city (on condition that one could count on them absolutely) rather than a suspect mass. himmlerIt was Maurice, Schreck and Heyden who formed in Munich the first group of “tough uns”, and were thus the origin of the SS. But it was with Himmler that the SS became that extraordinary body of men, devoted to an idea, loyal unto death. I see in Himmler our Ignatius de Loyola. With intelligence and obstinacy, against wind and tide, he forged this instrument.

The heads of the SA, for their part, didn’t succeed in giving their troops a soul. At the present time we have had it confirmed that every division of the SS is aware of its responsibility. The SS knows that its job is to set an example, to be and not to seem, and that all eyes are upon it.

The men of the Nordic countries have been softened to this point, that their most beautiful women buckle their baggage when they have an opportunity of getting their hooks on a man in our part of the world. That’s what happened to Goring with his Karin. There’s no rebelling against this observation.

It’s a fact that women love real men. It’s their instinct that tells them. In prehistoric times, the women looked for the protection of heroes. When two men fight for the possession of a woman, the latter waits to let her heart speak until she knows which of the two will be victorious. Tarts adore poachers.

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Art Benito Mussolini Schutzstaffel (SS) Sturmabteilung (SA) Table talks (commercial translation)

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 80

the-real-hitler

 

31st January 1942, evening

Possibility of collaboration with France—The era of Italian Fascism— The birth of the SA.

 

The Jew is so stupid that he himself saws through the branch on which he’s sitting. In 1919 a Jewess wrote in the Bayrischer Kurier: “What Eisner’s doing now will recoil upon our heads.” A rare case of foresight.

France remains hostile to us. She contains, in addition to her Nordic blood, a blood that will always be foreign to us. There must be two Frances. Thus, the French who have compromised themselves with us will find it to their own interests that we should remain in Paris as long as possible.

But our best protection against France will be for us to maintain a strong friendship, lasting for centuries, with Italy. Unlike France, Italy is inspired by political notions that are close to ours. I was thinking of the Italian delegation I received yesterday. I met men who have rulers’ qualities such as are very much to my taste. What handsome individuals, and what a resolute air! Those are men who could play a part at the top level.

The Fascists paid with their blood much more than we did. The story of the conquest of power in Italy is a heroic epic. It always warms my heart to think of it. I can understand their emotion when they once more live through the time of the March on Rome.

Why should such men suddenly become worthless as soldiers? It’s quite simply because they lack a command. The Italian people are idealistic, but the cadres of the Italian Army are reactionary.

It was in 1921 that I first heard Fascism mentioned. The SA was born in 1920, without my having the least idea of what was going on in Italy. Italy developed in a manner at which I was the first to be surprised. I could see fairly clearly the orientation that it would be proper to give the Party, but I had no ideas concerning paramilitary organisations. I began by creating a service to keep order, and it was only after the bloody brawls of 1920 that I gave these troops the name of Sturmabteilung (SA), as a reward for their behaviour.

I had taught them the technique of concentrating their efforts on limited objectives, and at meetings to attack the opponent table by table. But it was confined to that. When the brassard proved no longer sufficient, I equipped them with a specially designed cap. That was after Coburg. The skier’s cap didn’t cost much. It was all done in a very empirical manner. Nothing of that sort was thought out in advance.

The SS started with formations of seven or eight men. In these we gathered the tough ‘uns. Things developed spontaneously, and subsequently acquired a speed comparable to that of developments in Italy. The Duce himself has told me that at the moment when he undertook the struggle against Bolshevism, he didn’t know exactly where he was going.

From the cultural point of view, we are more closely linked with the Italians than with any other people. The art of Northern Italy is something we have in common with them: nothing but pure Germans.

The objectionable Italian type is found only in the South, and not everywhere even there. We also have this type in our own country. When I think of them: Vienna-Ottakring, Munich-Giesing, Berlin-Pankow! If I compare the two types, that of these degenerate Italians and our type, I find it very difficult to say which of the two is the more antipathetic.

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1st World War 2nd World War Holocaust Sturmabteilung (SA)

The burden of Hitler

by Greg Johnson



Adolf Hitler was born April 20, 1889. Every April 20th, White Nationalist websites inevitably see an increase in discussion and debate about Hitler and his legacy. Positions usually array themselves between two poles: Hitler is the problem and Hitler is the solution.

The claim that Hitler is the problem is basically a rejection of an intolerable burden of guilt by association. Hitler is the most hated man in our whole Judaized culture. Indeed, hating Hitler is the only moral judgment not stigmatized by modern moral relativists. The only absolute moral standard we are allowed is the evil of Hitler, and all other evils are judged by their proximity to Hitler—which ultimately means that all white people are evil due to our kinship to Hitler.

The “blame Hitler” argument boils down to this: If only Adolf Hitler had not started World War II, killed six million Jews, and tried to conquer the world, White Nationalism would get good press and perhaps make some progress in the political realm. Hitler is the reason why race realism, eugenics, immigration control, and nationalism have been discredited in the eyes of whites the world over. Thus if White Nationalism is to have any chance of changing the world, we need to ritually condemn and repudiate Hitler and everything he stood for, as well as all his present day followers.

I find this argument to be morally contemptible and politically naïve.

It is contemptible, because it is essentially an attempt to curry favor with our enemies and pander to ignoramuses and fools by throwing a loyal white man under the bus. And make no mistake: Adolf Hitler, whatever his faults, was a loyal white man who fought and died not just for Germany, but for our race as a whole.

Blaming Hitler is also morally obscene because it absolves a whole host of villains who are the real architects of our race’s doom: the slave traders and plantation owners who introduced blacks into the Americas, the railroad magnates and other plutocrats who brought Orientals to our shores, the traitorous capitalists who are destroying the white working and middle classes by importing non-white labor (legal or illegal) and shipping American jobs to the Third World—and of course every politician who has done the bidding of these powers.

Blame must also be placed on the organized Jewish community which has used its control over the entertainment and news media, academia, and the professions, as well as its vast wealth, to corrupt all aspects of American politics, business, and culture and to engineer and promote multiculturalism, mass non-white immigration, miscegenation, racial integration, and a poisonous culture of white self-hatred and anti-white truculence.

Blaming Hitler is also politically naïve. Our race was not set on the path to destruction when Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany in 1933. The problem started long before then, but a real turning point began in the 1880s with the immigration of millions of Jews from Eastern Europe to the United States, a country that was simply not culturally or politically capable of understanding and containing the threat they posed. By 1917, the organized Jewish community—operating through a cabal around Woodrow Wilson—had sufficient power to bring the United States into the First World War as a quid pro quo for the British Empire’s Balfour Declaration, which paved the way for the foundation of the state of Israel.

When Jews arrived in America en masse, they found a largely innocent and trusting people and only the weakest barriers to their rise to wealth and power. And what gratitude did the Jewish community feel toward America and its people? As soon as they were able, they traded the lives of 116,000 of the sons of those trusting Americans, plus the suffering of 205,000 more young men who were wounded, some of them unspeakably, plus the mental anguished suffered by ten million soldiers and their loved ones, plus the years robbed from the lives of the ten million soldiers and all those who worked to support them, plus the untold millions of Europeans who suffered and died because America’s entrance prolonged the war—all in order to gain a British promise to allow Jews to displace the Arabs of Palestine to found a Jewish state.

This was a pivotal moment in world history: In the United States, it became clear that whites had lost control of our destiny to Jews, and ever since then, Jews have been able to use their hegemony in the United States to take control of the destinies of white nations around the world and turn more and more of them onto the path of to extinction.

No, their control was not absolute. In 1924, white Americans passed immigration restriction. But by 1941, Jews and their allies had delivered America into another World War; in the 1950s and ’60s they spearheaded, funded, and controlled the civil rights movement; and by 1965, after more than 40 years of lobbying, Jews were pivotal in opening America’s borders to non-white immigration.

If Hitler had never been elected Chancellor of Germany, if the Second World War had never happened, Jews would still have lobbied for open borders; they would still have promoted multiculturalism, feminism, and generalized cultural decadence; they would still have promoted pseudo-scientific race denial, racial egalitarianism, and racial integration; they would still have corrupted our political system to pursue Jewish interests at the expense of American interests. How do I know this? Because they were already doing all these things long before Hitler came to power.

Jews are promoting conditions that are leading to the genocide of the white race. They are not doing this out of “self-defense” against Hitler’s aggression, since they were doing it when Hitler was just a common soldier in the Great War. Indeed, the truth is that Hitler did whatever he did in self-defense against Jewish aggression—the same Jewish aggression that we are suffering today in a much intensified form.

The “blame Hitler” argument also commits what I like to call the “one little thing” fallacy. The way some people talk, Adolf Hitler is the one thing standing in the way of our victory. If only he had remained a painter, we would be living in a White Republic today. But history is not that simple. History is the net result of billions of causal factors interacting with one another. Therefore, chances are “one little thing” is never responsible for any large scale historical phenomenon, good or bad.

A choice example of the “one little thing” fallacy is a spurious quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin that floats around right wing circles. According to this legend, Franklin claimed that America needed to exclude Jews from the very beginning, else that one little thing will undo our otherwise perfect culture and political system. This kind of thinking is appealing because it simplifies matters considerably and a spares us from the necessity of reflecting on broader, deeper, systematic problems that might implicate us as well.

Blaming Hitler is just another form of blaming ourselves for our ongoing racial decline. It deflects attention from the real culprits—white traitors and aliens—and replaces righteous anger at our enemies with demoralizing self-reproach and self-doubt. Anger motivates action. Self-reproach promotes passivity. So our march to oblivion continues uninterrupted.

White Nationalists who feel like Hitler is a burden on our cause need to recognize that ritually condemning him on his birthday does no good. Hitler is dead and cannot be harmed. And they are still goyim slated for extinction. The only thing that has changed is their own moral status. They may have won the esteem of knaves and fools, but better men see them as ignorant and vile. What good is the friendship of the corrupt and cowardly if it costs you the friendship of the honorable and upright?

How, then, can one lessen the burden of “Hitler”—the Hitler of anti-white propaganda? If a person damages your car, cursing him might feel good, but the only way to fix things is to get some sort of compensation.

How can Hitler compensate us for the burden of “Hitler”? All he has to offer us today is knowledge. So if we can learn something from Hitler that actually helps our race, that would at least contribute to lessening or lifting the burden of “Hitler.” If you really believe that “Hitler” is keeping the white race down, then pick Hitler up: read Mein Kampf, Hitler’s Table Talk, etc. and see if you can glean some useful truths.

There is a lot of truth there: about race, history, the Jewish question, political philosophy, economics, culture, religion, and the dead ends of bourgeois liberalism and conservatism. Mein Kampf is filled with practical advice about radical political organizing and propaganda that remains valid to this day.

Hitler was right about another thing as well: “The National Socialist doctrine, as I have always proclaimed, is not for export. It was conceived for the German people” (Hitler-Bormann Documents, Feb. 21, 1945). What he means is that the ideas behind National Socialism may be universally and eternally true, but the National Socialist movement—its political platforms, symbolism, and other external trappings—are the products of a particular time and place. Thus people who dress up like Storm Troopers in 21st century America have only a superficial understanding of Hitler’s teachings. A real follower of the Leader would look as American as apple pie.

You might also pick up a few good books about Hitler and the Second World War, just so you do not fall into the trap of discussing them in terms of preposterous war propaganda like “Hitler started the Second World War” and “Hitler was out to conquer the world.” Begin with Patrick Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. I would also look at A. J. P. Taylor’s The Origins of The Second World War. And be sure to read David Irving’s enthralling and fact-packed books The War Path and Hitler’s War, available in a single volume: Hitler’s War and the War Path. Lesser researchers routinely plunder them, so you might as well go back to the source.

I do not think that the progress of White Nationalism in the 21st century requires the rehabilitation of Hitler and the Third Reich, which in any case would be an infinite task for scholars and a distraction for political activists. But when historical clichés are regularly lobbed at us like grenades, every responsible adult needs the basic knowledge necessary to defuse them. We don’t need to be doctors of revisionism, but we should be able to apply some battlefield first aid.

Perhaps the most subversive thing one can do regarding Adolf Hitler is simply to ignore those who hate or love him blindly and instead discuss him rationally and objectively, like any other historical figure. If you follow this advice, I guarantee that the burden of “Hitler” will begin slowly to fade.

But you also may discover that the burden of thinking “Hitler” was wrong is nothing compared to the burden of believing that Hitler was right.

Categories
2nd World War Communism David Irving Holocaust Joseph Stalin Julius Caesar Metaphysics of race / sex Real men Red terror Richard Wagner Savitri Devi Sturmabteilung (SA) Third Reich

Beyond evil and tyranny

The 2011 biography authored by R. H. S. Stolfi on Adolf Hitler mentions that Caesar perpetrated a genocide of whites in Gaul, something that I discussed in my previous post. Greg Johnson’s recent review of Stolfi’s biography merits reproduction below:

Stolfi


Russell Stolfi (1932–2012)


Adolf Hitler was clearly the man of the 20th century, whose shadow grows taller as the sun of the West sinks ever lower. Sadly, though, there is no biography worthy of Hitler.

If great men are those who leave their stamp on history, then Hitler was a great man. But great men present great problems for biographers. Great men are not necessarily good men, and even good men, when they hold political power, often find it necessary to kill innocent people. Evil men do not find this difficult, but good men do. Thus a good man, if he is to be a great man, must also be a hard man. But it is difficult for biographers, who are ordinary men, to sympathize with great men, especially men who are unusually bad or hard.

But biographers must at least try to enter imaginatively into the minds of their subjects. They must feel their feelings and think their thoughts. They must feel sympathy or empathy for their subjects. Such sympathy is not a violation of objectivity but a tool of it. It is a necessary counter-weight to the antipathy and ressentiment that hardness, cruelty, and greatness often inspire. Sympathy is necessary so a biographer can discover and articulate the virtues of intellect and character necessary to achieve anything great in this world, for good or ill.

Of course, one’s ability to sympathize with great men depends in large part on one’s moral principles. A Nietzschean or Social Darwinist would, for instance, find it easier to sympathize with a human beast of prey than would a Christian or a liberal democrat. Even so, it has been possible for Christians and liberals to write biographies of such great conquerors as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Mohammed, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon without whipping themselves into thousand-page paroxysms of self-righteous moralistic denigration.

Hitler, of course, provides even greater problems for biographers, because his demonization is a prop of contemporary Jewish hegemony, and there are consequences for any writer who challenges that consensus.

R. H. S. Stolfi’s Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny is one of my favorite books on Hitler. It is not a biography of Hitler, although it is organized chronologically. It is, rather, a kind of “meta-biography,” an essay on the interpretation of Hitler’s life. Stolfi’s project has both positive and negative aspects: Stolfi critiques the existing interpretations of Hitler’s life as a whole and of specific episodes in Hitler’s life, and Stolfi sets forth his own interpretations.

Stolfi’s criticism of Hitler biographies focuses on the work of those he calls the four “great biographers”: John Toland (Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography, Alan Bullock (Hitler: A Study in Tyranny), Joachim Fest (Hitler), and Ian Kershaw (Hitler: 1889-1936, Hubris and Hitler: 1936-1945, Nemesis). In Stolfi’s words, “the penchant of [Hitler’s] biographers for gratuitous sarcasm, strained skepticism, and writing from preconceived heights of antipathy has left the world with a dangerously inaccurate portrait of Hitler” (p. 54). (Judging from the reception of David Irving’s Hitler’s War and The War Path, the existing establishment regards an accurate portrait of Hitler more dangerous than an inaccurate one.) Four examples of this bias will suffice:

(1) Ian Kershaw claims that outside of politics, Hitler was an “unperson,” a nullity, which completely ignores Hitler’s voracious reading, serious engagement with and understanding of philosophers like Schopenhauer, love of painting and fine art, remarkable architectural knowledge and skill, and love of classical music, including a connoisseur’s knowledge of the operas of Richard Wagner that impressed the Wagner family and other highly discerning individuals.

(2) Hitler’s biographers invariably denigrate his humble, common origins, coming off like parodies of the worst forms of social snobbery. But of course the same authors would wax sodden and treacly in describing any other man’s rise from poverty and obscurity to fame and fortune. Jesse Owens, for instance.

(3) Stolfi rebuts one of Joachim Fest’s most outrageous liberties as follows: “The great biographers all debunk Nazi theories of racial differences, which they characterize as pseudoscientific and based on unredeemed prejudice, yet one of them [Fest] could claim confidently, without hint of countervailing possibility, that the subject of his biography had ‘criminal features’ set in a ‘psychopathic face’” (p. 268).

(4) The great biographers regularly slight Hitler’s service as a soldier during the First World War, yet as Stolfi points out, Hitler won the Iron Cross First Class, the Iron Cross Second Class, and a regimental commendation for bravery. He was also seriously wounded twice. Hitler never spoke much about what he did to earn these commendations, partly out of his characteristic modesty and reserve, but also probably because he did not wish to relive painful experiences. But even this is twisted by his biographers to cast aspersions on Hitler’s bravery and character. Stolfi notes that with no other historical figure do biographers feel entitled to take such liberties.

Kershaw is the most tendentious of the great biographers, repeatedly characterizing Hitler as an “unperson,” a “nonentity,” a “mediocrity,” and a “failure.” These epithets must surely feel good to Kershaw and like-minded readers, but if they are true, then Hitler’s career is utterly incomprehensible. Stolfi is acerbic, witty, and tireless in skewering the great biographers—although some of his readers might find it tiresome as well.

In addition to offering fascinating interpretations of particular events, Stolfi argues for three overriding theses about Hitler: (1) Hitler cannot be understood as a politician but as a prophet, specifically a prophet forced to take on the role of a messiah; (2) Hitler cannot be understood as an evil man, but as a good man who was forced by circumstances and his own ruthless logic and unemotional “hardness” to do terrible things; and (3) Hitler must be understood as one of the great men of history, indeed as a world-historical figure, who cannot be grasped with conventional moral concepts.

Surely by now you are thinking that our author must be some sort of “discredited,” “marginal,” outsider historian like David Irving, or even a dreaded “revisionist.” So who was Russell Stolfi? Born in 1932, Stolfi is to all appearances an established, mainstream military historian. He was Professor at the US Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California and a Colonel in the US Marine Corps Reserve. He is the author of three other books: German Panzers on the Offensive: Russian Front–North Africa 1941-1942 (Schiffer Publishing, 2003), Hitler’s Panzers East: World War II Reinterpreted (University of Oklahoma, 1993), and NATO Under Attack: Why the Western Alliance Can Fight Outnumbered and Win in Central Europe Without Nuclear Weapons (with F. W. von Mellenthin, Duke University Press, 1983). I first read Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny in May of 2012, and I was so excited that I tried to contact Stolfi for an interview only to learn that he had just died in April.


Politician or Prophet?

Adolf Hitler was a formidable political organizer who took over a minuscule Bavarian debating club and turned it into the largest political party in Germany. After being imprisoned for an abortive Putsch, Hitler decided to attain power legally, through electoral politics. To that end, he virtually created the modern political campaign, traveling tirelessly by automobile and airplane and masterfully employing the mass media of his time. When he became Chancellor, Hitler proved a formidable statesman, transforming Germany with a virtually bloodless revolution and recovering German lands and pride through a series of deft foreign policy triumphs until the British and French started a World War to stop him.

Yet for all that, Stolfi argues that Hitler’s personality, goals, and grand strategy were more like those of a religious prophet, specifically an armed prophet like Mohammed.

Politicians presuppose a common political system and climate of opinion. They generally avoid contesting fundamental principles and instead deal with essentially quantitative differences within the same political and ideological continuum, hence their ability to compromise and their susceptibility to corruption. Stolfi points out again and again that Hitler refused to behave like a politician.

Hitler never compromised on basic principles. He took dangerously unpopular stands (p. 225). He refused to soften the party’s message to appeal to squeamish and lukewarm people. He was no demagogue: “A demagogue tells his audience what it wants to hear. A messiah tells his audience what he wants it to hear” (p. 248). Hitler never worried that his radical views would “discredit” him in the eyes of the public, whose minds were mostly in the grip of his enemies anyway. Instead, Hitler was supremely confident of his ability to lend credit to his ideas through reason and rhetoric. He wanted to elevate public opinion toward truth rather than condescend to pander to ignorance and folly.

Hitler also refused to enter common fronts with enemy parties, especially the Social Democrats, even when they took patriotic stands.

Hitler was, moreover, utterly incorruptible. He refused to make special promises to businessmen and other interest groups. He just handed them the party’s platform. In the end, he was offered the Chancellorship simply because his opponents knew he could not be bought off with anything less.

Revolutionaries deal with fundamental issues of principle, which is why they seek to overthrow existing systems and begin anew. Hitler was, of course, a political revolutionary. But he was something more. He saw himself as the exponent of a whole philosophy of life, not just a political philosophy. He placed politics in a larger biological and historical perspective: the struggle of Aryan man against Jewry and its extended phenotypes Communism and Anglo-Saxon capitalism. He believed the stakes were global: nothing less than the survival of all life on Earth was in peril. And having miraculously survived four years of slaughter and two serious wounds in the trenches of World War I—including an experience that can only be described as supernatural (p. 95)—Hitler believed that he enjoyed the special protection of Providence.

Hitler had a number of heroic role models. As a child, he was transported by Germanic myths and sagas. As a teenager, he identified with the hero of Wagner’s opera Rienzi, based on the story of Cola di Rienzi, the 14th century popular dictator who sought to restore Rome to its Imperial glory but who was undone by the treachery of the aristocracy and church and finally murdered. Hitler prophesied that he would become a tribune of the people who would rise and fall like Rienzi, and he did. Hitler also identified with Wagner’s Lohengrin and Siegfried. Although Hitler himself had little use for the Bible, his later career as armed prophet brings to mind the Hebrew prophets and lawgivers as well. Stolfi’s analogy between Hitler and Mohammed is quite apposite and revealing.

Savior of Germany – and Europe

Hitler, however, apparently did not think of himself as a messiah figure, but more as a John the Baptist, preparing the way for someone greater than him. But, as Stolfi documents, many of Hitler’s closest followers—all of them intelligent men, ranging from mystics like Hess to consummate cynics like Goebbels—as well as some of his more fair-minded enemies, did see him as a messiah figure, and in the end, he was forced to take on that role. Reading Stolfi makes Savitri Devi’s thesis in The Lightning and the Sun that Hitler was an avatar of the god Vishnu seem a little less eccentric. (Savitri did not originate that thesis. It was a view that she encountered widely among educated Hindus in the 1930s.) There was something messianic about Hitler’s aura and actions, and people around the world understood it in terms of their own cultural traditions.

Stolfi does not mention it, but there is a sense in which Hitler was the savior of Germany and all of Western Europe, although his accomplishments fell far short of his ambitions, consumed his life, and devastated his nation. When Hitler launched operation Barbarossa in 1941, the Soviets were poised to launch a massive invasion of all of Central and Western Europe. Hitler pre-empted that invasion, and although he failed to destroy the USSR, the Third Reich was destroyed instead, and Stalin conquered half of Europe, the outcome would have been much worse if Stalin had been able to launch his invasion. Stalin could have conquered all of Europe. At best he would have been repulsed after unimaginable devastation and bloodshed. Thus every Western European who has lived in freedom from want and terror since 1941 owes a debt of thanks to Adolf Hitler, the German people, and their Axis partners.

(See on this site [Counter Currents] Daniel Michaels, “Exposing Stalin’s Plan to Conquer Europe” and the National Vanguard review of Viktor Suvorov’s Icebreaker; for more recent literature on this subject, see Viktor Suvorov’s definitive statement of his research has been published as The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II [Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2008] and Joachim Hoffmann, Stalin’s War of Extermination, 1941-1945: Planning, Realization and Documentation [Capshaw, Al.: Theses and Dissertations Press, 2001].)

The Question of Evil

In today’s climate of moral relativism and rot, Adolf Hitler is probably the only human being that even liberals will denounce as evil. Hitler is the modern world’s paradigm and embodiment of evil. But of course other people can be evil if they are “like Hitler.” Thus the most radical thesis of Stolfi’s book is that Adolf Hitler was not evil.

There are many dimensions to this argument.

(1) Stolfi points out that there is no evidence that Hitler had psychopathic or sociopathic personality traits as a child. He did not torture animals or steal, for instance. He was polite, serious, and reserved.

(2) Stolfi also points out that Hitler was not primarily motivated by hate or ressentiment. He arrived at his two great enmities, namely against Jewry and Bolshevism, based on personal experience, current events, and extensive research. But when he was rationally convinced of their enormity, he naturally hated them with appropriate magnitude and intensity. As Stolfi writes, “It is difficult to imagine Hitler either as messiah or otherwise and not hating the enemy. Did Jesus the Christ or Mohammed the Prophet hate Satan or merely disapprove of him?” (p. 233).

(3) Calling Hitler evil, like calling him “crazy,” is mentally lazy, because it exempts us from trying to understand the reasons for Hitler’s actions: both his thought processes and objective events that prompted him to act. Hitler had his reasons.

(4) Stolfi argues that Hitler’s character, goals, and actions were not evil. Hitler did what he thought was right, and he was hard enough to spill oceans of blood if he thought it was necessary to advance the greater good. A Socratic, of course, would claim that it is an empty claim, as nobody does evil as such but only under the guise of a perceived good. The evil of an act is in its outcome, not its motive. We all “mean well.”

(5) Stolfi hints that Hitler may have, in a sense, been beyond good and evil, because his goal was nothing less than the creation of a new order, including a new moral order, and it begs the question to subject such men to the moral laws they seek to overthrow. This points us back to Stolfi’s thesis that Hitler has to be seen more as a religious than a political figure and forward to his third major thesis, that Hitler was a world-historical individual.

Russell Stolfi deals with a number of episodes in Hitler’s life that are adduced as evidence of evil. Stolfi argues that some of these acts are not evil at all. He others that others were necessary or mitigated evils. And he claims that still others were no more evil than the actions of other great men of history who nevertheless manage to receive respectful treatment from biographers. Finally, Stolfi argues that all of these acts, even the evil ones, do not necessarily make Hitler an evil man, for even good men can commit horrific acts if they believe they are necessary to promote a greater good.

(1) Stolfi argues that Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch and other violations of the laws of the Weimar Republic are somewhat softened by the fact that he believed that the Weimar Republic was an illegitimate and criminal regime. Hitler’s early attempts to defy it and replace it are not, therefore, “evil,” unless all acts of disobedience and revolution against governments as such are evil. In any case, after his release from prison, Hitler adopted a policy of strict legality: he pursued the Chancellorship through electoral politics, and he won.

(2) Stolfi argues that the creation of the Sturm Abteilungen (Storm Troops) was not motivated by a desire to violently intimidate political opponents and seize power. Instead, the SA was formed in self-defense against organized Communist efforts to violently intimidate political opponents and seize power, violence that had effectively suppressed the ability of all Right-wing parties to assemble. The SA did not merely assure the NSDAP’s freedom to assemble and organize, it broke the Red terror and restored political freedom to all parties.

(3) Stolfi argues that the Röhm purge was necessary because there was ample evidence that Röhm himself was plotting a coup, and, true or not, Hindenburg, the leaders of the military, and Hitler’s top lieutenants all believed it to be true. Hindenburg threatened to declare martial law and have the army deal with Röhm if Hitler would not. Hitler had to act, because if he didn’t, he would be effectively deposed: he would be abdicating the sovereign function to decide and act for the good of the people to Hindenburg and the army. Even so, Hitler temporized to the last possible moment.

Stolfi claims that Röhm’s death was a kind of apotheosis for Hitler: “By June 1934, Hitler stood poised to pass beyond friendship with any man into the realm of the lonely, distant Leader. But Hitler could never pass into that realm with Röhm alive and serving as a reminder of Hitler’s own historical mortality. Röhm had to die, and Hitler had to kill him” (p. 306). But this was not, of course, Hitler’s motive for killing him.

Ultimately, Stolfi judges Röhm’s death to be politically necessary and morally excusable. He describes it not as a cool, premeditated murder but as a “crime of passion” of a man faced with the infidelity of a sworn confidant (p. 309). Of course, the Röhm purge was the occasion for settling a number of other old scores, which complicates Stolfi’s moral picture considerably.

(4) Stolfi evidently thinks there was nothing evil at all about Hitler’s assumption of dictatorial powers—through a provision in the Weimar constitution—or his suppression of a political movement as destructive and implacable as Marxism. But he praises the relative bloodlessness of Hitler’s legal revolution.

(5) As for the concentration camps off to which Hitler packed the leaders of the Marxist parties and other subversive groups: in 1935, when the German population stood at 65 million, the concentration camp inmates numbered 3,500, most of them Communists and Social Democrats. The camp system and its mandate were expanded to house people in protective custody for being social nuisances, including beggars, drunks, homosexuals (homosexuality was criminalized under the Second Reich, remained criminalized under Weimar, and was criminalized in the liberal democracies too), gypsies, and habitual criminals—by 1939 there were 10 camps with 25,000 inmates in a country of 80 million people. That doesn’t seem quite as evil as it was cracked up to be. Furthermore, since Himmler and Heydrich certainly did not lack persecuting zeal and organizational skill, we can conclude that the camp system was exactly as big as they thought it should be.

To give some context, according to Wikipedia—where statistics about Soviet atrocities tend to be on the low end due to Marxist policing—in March of 1940, the Soviet Gulag comprised 53 separate camps and 423 labor colonies in which approximately 1.3 million people were interned out of a population of 170 million. Whatever the real size, it was exactly as big as Stalin wanted it to be.

Although I have not been able to find records of similar forms of internment in liberal democracies for political dissidents and social nuisances, these surely did take place. But even in the absence of these numbers, it seems clear that Hitler’s camps were far more similar to the prisons of liberal democracies than the Soviet Gulag to which they are always likened.

Of course, these were peacetime numbers. Under the exigencies of war, Hitler’s camp system expanded dramatically to house hostile populations, prisoners of war, and conscript laborers, which is another topic.

(6) Hitler’s anti-Semitism is often put forward as evidence of evil. Hitler himself thought that certain forms of anti-Semitism were repugnant if not outright evil: religious anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism based on ressentiment, gutter populist scapegoating, etc. His repugnance for such phenomena prejudiced him against anti-Semitism as such. But his personal experiences in Vienna, combined with serious reading eventually led him to a dispassionate, scientifically based, and historically informed anti-Semitism.

When Hitler took power, Germany had a relatively small Jewish population. His basic policy was to prevent any further German-Jewish genetic admixture, remove Jews from positions of power and influence, and encourage Jews to emigrate. By the outbreak of the Polish war, Germany’s Jewish population had been dramatically reduced. But due to Hitler’s war gains, millions of new Jews fell into his remit. More about this anon. Stolfi is somewhat circumspect in passing judgment about Hitler’s peacetime Jewish policy. But we can safely say that it was no more evil than, say, the British treatment of Boer non-combatants or the American treatment of the Plains Indians.

(7) Regarding Hitler’s foreign policy exploits as Chancellor—including rearmament, pulling out of the League of Nations, remilitarizing the Rhineland, the annexation of the Sudetenland and Austria, the annexation of Bohemia, and the war with Poland—Stolfi writes, “every international crisis that involved Hitler in the 1930s stemmed from an iniquity on the part of the Allies in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919” (p. 316). According to Stolfi, in all of these crises, morality was on Hitler’s side, and he lauds Hitler for conducting them with restraint and relative bloodlessness—at least up until the Polish war.

These were hardly the outrageous, unendurable moral provocations of Allied propaganda that justified Britain and France starting a World War because Hitler, having exhausted diplomatic negotiations, started a war with Poland to recover German lands and peoples subjected to horrific Polish oppression. The British and French simply could not grasp that, in Stolfi’s words, “a world-historical personality had marched, outraged, out of the desert of shattered Flanders fields, and the former Allies had not even superior morality to shield themselves from him” (p. 317).

(8) Stolfi interprets Operation Barbarossa against the USSR as a colonial war of conquest as well as a crusade to rid Europe of the scourge of Bolshevism. From an ethnonationalist perspective, of course, Hitler’s aim to reduce Slavs to colonized peoples was evil. Furthermore, it was more evil than British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgian, American, and Russian imperialism directed at non-European peoples, because it is always worse to mistreat one’s own blood than foreigners. But it was certainly not uniquely evil in the annals of human history. If Genghis Khan and Timur the Lame can be the subjects of objective historical assessments, then Barbarossa does not disqualify Hitler.

Stolfi does not treat Barbarossa as a necessary war to preempt Stalin’s planned invasion of Europe. I wanted to ask Stolfi his thoughts about the thesis defended by Viktor Suvorov and Joachim Hoffmann in an interview, but that was not to be. If they are right, of course, then there was no evil at all in launching Barbarossa, although one can justly criticize the excesses of its execution.

(9) According to Stolfi, Hitler’s darkest deeds are the massacre of 3.1 million Soviet POWs captured in the opening months of Barbarossa and the killing of 4.5 million Jews in what is known as the Holocaust. Stolfi is certainly a Hitler revisionist, but I do not know whether he is a Holocaust revisionist or not, since I am unsure if it is legal for him to think that “only” 4.5 million Jews were killed by the Third Reich. I had not even heard of the 3.1 million Soviet POWs, which Stolfi mentions only a couple of times in passing. But of course I have heard of the Holocaust, to which Stolfi dedicates the last two paragraphs of the book (pp. 461-62). Such a brief treatment may itself constitute revisionism, at least in France, where Jean-Marie Le Pen was fined for saying that the Holocaust was only a footnote to the Second World War. Given that some footnotes are longer than the paragraphs in question, Stolfi might have gotten in trouble in the land of liberté. Stolfi’s treatment, however, is a welcome corrective to the Jewish tendency to treat World War II as merely the backdrop of the Holocaust.

Of course, just as Hitler is our age’s paradigm of an evil man, the Holocaust is the paradigm of an evil event. Stolfi does not dispute that the massacre of 7.6 million people is evil. But he does not think it is uniquely evil in World War II or the annals of history in general. Winston Churchill, for example, was responsible for the starvation of millions of Indians whose food was seized for the war effort. He was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of German non-combatants in strategically unnecessary terror bombings of German cities. He was responsible for the expulsion of 14 million Germans from their homes in Eastern and Central Europe, up to two million of whom died. Was Churchill evil? His apologists, of course, would argue that his actions were necessitated by the exigencies of war and the pursuit of the greater good. But Hitler’s apologists, if there were any, could argue the very same thing and be done with it. If Churchill, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Julius Caesar, and other members of the Million Murder club can receive fair treatment in a biography, then why not Hitler?

Stolfi compares the Holocaust to Julius Caesar’s ten year conquest of Gaul, in which he killed more than a million armed men and reduced another million to slavery. One million civilian non-combatants were also killed or reduced to slavery. Some particularly troublesome tribes were entirely exterminated because they were “irreconcilable, menacing, and useless either as allies or slaves” (p. 38). Stolfi points out, however, that Caesar’s acts “revealed harshness of almost incredible proportion,” but his acts were “based on realism and prudence in the face of perceived danger—scarcely sadism and cruelty” (p. 38). Likewise, Stolfi argues that “Hitler took the action of pitiless massacre as a last resort in the face of a perceived irreconcilable enemy” and his actions “showed virtually nothing that can be interpreted as sadism, cruelty, or ingrained hate as opposed to temporary fury in the carrying out of the action” (p. 39).

Hitler’s massacres, terrible though they may be, do not prove that he is an evil man, since even good men might resort to such measures in direst extremity. Moreover, even if they were expressions of evil, they were not unique expressions of unique evil but all too common in the annals of history. But, again, only in Hitler’s case are they treated as insuperable objections to serious historical treatment.

In sum, Stolfi argues that Hitler cannot be seen as evil if that means that he was motivated by sadism, psychopathy, hatred, or a neurotic need for power and attention. Instead, Hitler was motivated, first and foremost, by love of his people, beyond which were wider but less pressing concerns with the larger Aryan race, European civilization, and the welfare of the world as a whole. Because Hitler believed that the things he loved were imperiled by Jewry, Bolshevism, and Anglo-Saxon capitalism, he fought them. And when the fight became a world conflagration, he fought them with a remarkable hardness and severity. But his essentially decent character and positive ends remained unchanged. Thus for Stolfi, Hitler is a good man who did some bad things as well as good things—a good man who made many good decisions and some catastrophic mistakes.

A Dark World Historical Personality

But there is a sense in which Stolfi thinks that Hitler is beyond the very categories of good and evil, at least as far as historians should be concerned. Stolfi argues that Hitler was a great man, like such great conquerors as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Mohammed, and Napoleon. (Stolfi makes scant mention of unarmed prophets like the Buddha or Jesus.) According to Stolfi, if one were to freeze Hitler’s life at the end of 1942, he would have to be considered one of history’s greatest statesmen and conquerors. And even if one plays the film all the way to the end, Stolfi argues that the Allies did not win World War II so much as Hitler lost it, which itself underscores his greatness and the relative nullity of his opponents.

Indeed, Stolfi argues that Hitler was more than just a great man but one of Hegel’s “world-historical individuals,” who inaugurates a new stage in human history and cannot be judged or comprehended by the standards of the previous stage. Stolfi, it seems, detaches this concept from Hegel’s overall view that world-historical individuals advance history toward the Providential goal of universal freedom, a goal that Hitler, of course, rejected in favor of particularisms of race and nation. Sadly, though, Hitler may have advanced the universalist agenda in defeat, through no intention of his own.

But, as another prophetic figure once said of World War II, “the war’s not over as far as I’m concerned,” meaning that history is still unfolding, including the consequences of Hitler’s actions. So it remains to be seen whether Hitler will contribute to the victory or defeat of universalism. If racial nationalism—of which Hitler is an inexpugnable part—defeats the drive toward a homogeneous global society, then Hitler would be a world historical figure of an entirely new order: not an agent of “progress,” but of its termination; the man who ended the “end of history” and started the world anew; the man who took the ascending line of progress and inscribed it within a cyclical view of history, whether interpreted in the widely variant Traditionalist or Spenglerian senses.

♣

Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny is a remarkable book that I recommend to all my readers. Stolfi executes his audacious project with clarity and dry humor. Sometimes Stolfi seems to go a bit too far, perhaps just to test his dialectical skills. For instance, he even defends Hitler as a painter. He does a surprisingly good job, but I will still not budge from my conviction that Winston Churchill was Hitler’s superior in this—and only this—regard.

This book is even more remarkable because it is the work of a mainstream military historian, and it clears the way for other genuinely historical studies of Hitler and the Third Reich. This really is an inevitable development as the generations that lived through the war die off. Furthermore, we are now living in a multipolar world with new rising powers—Russia, China, India—that are free of Jewish cultural and political hegemony and hungry for a genuine understanding of Hitler and the Second World War.

White Nationalists should especially welcome Stolfi’s book because it works to dispel the cloud of moral hysteria and denigration that surrounds Hitler, taking some of the sting out of the inevitable accusation that we are “just like Hitler,” which turns out to be an undeserved compliment.

Original source: here and here