In late February 1924, Hitler was brought to stand trial before the Volksgericht in Munich in the old Infantry School on the Blutenburgstrasse. He was allowed to appear in a suit rather than prison clothes and sporting his Iron Cross. Security was strict, and the press interest, including from abroad, was intense. Hitler would no doubt have been pleased to know that ‘one heard particularly many English voices’. The Reich government had wanted the trial to be held in Leipzig, but the authorities in Munich were determined to keep it local, almost certainly because they feared what might otherwise emerge about their complicity in the various plots. Berlin gave way in the context of a broader rapprochement with Bavaria. In mid February 1924, about a week before the trial began, the Bavarian Reichswehr submitted once again to command from Berlin, thus reversing Kahr and Lossow’s position in November 1923; Kahr resigned.
Hitler famously used the courtroom as a platform from which to expound his world view… The trial lasted just over a month, from 26 February to 27 March 1924… He did not deny the substance of the charges, but argued that he had acted at all times in the greater interest of Germany… Sometimes Kahr appeared so overwhelmed that his voice dropped to a whisper as the courtroom audience strained to hear him. The rampant Hitler, by contrast, was repeatedly told to lower his voice by the trial judge.
Hitler’s final speech was a triumphant reiteration of his beliefs and sense of mission. If he was a traitor, then so were Bismarck, Atatürk and Mussolini, whose treason had been ratified by success. Hitler decried that there was ‘self determination for every Negro tribe’, but that ‘Germany did not belong to the Negro tribes but stood under them’. The root of the German predicament, he continued, lay in Germany’s exposed geopolitical position in Europe. ‘The German people’, Hitler argued, ‘has perhaps the worst location of all nations in military-political terms. It is geographically extraordinarily badly located, surrounded by many rivals’. It was menaced by France’s determination to ‘Balkanize’ Germany and to reduce her population. In this context he referred to ‘Clemenceau’s [alleged] aim to exterminate 20 million Germans in Europe, to break up Germany into individual states and to prevent the emergence of another united large Reich’. It was also threatened by Britain’s supposed much broader policy of Balkanizing Europe as a whole in order to maintain the balance of power. There was no economic solution to this predicament, Hitler stressed, but only a powerful foreign policy based on the highest level of internal mobilization. Germany would need to get rid of ‘international Jewry’, which was coordinating the global forces against her. She would also need to pursue the related struggle against international capitalism. ‘The battle against international stock exchange enslavement’ and against the ‘trustification’ of the ‘entire economy’, Hitler demanded, must be taken up.
These were all familiar themes from Hitler’s previous statements, but this time he had the eyes of the German and even some of the international press upon him. His dosing speech concluded with a resounding statement that though the court might secure a conviction, posterity would surely acquit him. In an obviously choreographed sequence, the other accused said they had nothing to add, with the result that Hitler’s resonant last words were left ringing throughout the courtroom and shaped the story of the trial. He turned the defeat and humiliation of 9 November 1923 into a victorious narrative…
Hitler was now a hero not merely to the Bavarian right, but to many nationalists throughout Germany. What had begun in the public mind as the ‘Ludendorff Trial’ ended as the ‘Hitler Trial’. ‘I am occupying myself with Hitler and the National Socialist movement,’ the Rhenish student Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary in early March 1923…
On his return to Landsberg to serve the rest of his sentence, Hitler was confronted with some serious strategic questions… Ernst Röhm began to revive the SA, under the cover of a front organization, and went to confer with Hitler at the very end of May 1924. Perhaps anxious not to provoke the authorities, and mindful of his inability to seize power by force, the Fuhrer insisted that the SA keep a lower profile…
Gregor Strasser and General Ludendorff strongly supported amalgamation with the DVFP to create a new National Socialist Freedom Party (NSFP). Hitler reluctantly agreed in broad terms but insisted that the main base and focus of the party remain in Munich….
Gottfried Feder remarked after visiting him that Hitler was ‘depressed [and] wants to withdraw completely from the movement’ in order to ‘work’, that is, ‘write’ to earn money. Over the next two months, Hitler repeated his message publicly on a number of occasions. He was acting partly because he was disenchanted with the way in which the various mergers and collaborations were turning the party into a purely bourgeois organization, and partly because he had no real power to turn things around from prison…
One reason why Hitler wanted to lie low was fear of having his release delayed, or of being deported to Austria. The Bavarian authorities had long hoped to do the latter, and in early May 1924, the Polizeidirektion in Munich told the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior that ‘Hitler constitutes a permanent threat to the internal and external security of the state’. In late April 1924, the Austrians agreed to accept him in principle. Hitler managed to avoid deportation, but after being refused probation he failed to get out by 1 October as he originally hoped. On 16 October he made a statement that he should be allowed to stay, ‘because I never felt myself to be an Austrian citizen but only a German’. ‘My affection for my Austrian homeland is great,’ Hitler continued, ‘but so is hostility of the Austrian state’, in which—like the ‘earlier Habsburg state’—he could only see ‘an obstacle for the unification of the German people’.
Adolf Hitler’s leading emotion is obviously his ‘love beyond all measure’[1] for Germany and all that is German. ‘He lived in the German people; nothing counted for him, save they.’[2] These words, describing the future ruler’s feelings al-ready in early youth, are true at all stages of his life. And his main intellectual, or rather, spiritual, feature, is perhaps that inborn, baffling intuition of history in the broadest sense of the word — of history as our planet’s destiny, — which lifts him straight above all politicians, generals and actual kings, to the level of the great Seers, and gives his whole career that extraordinary, ‘dream-like’[3] character of which Hans Grimm so appropriately speaks. The originality of his genius lies in the fact that he lived his German patriotism from a cosmic point of view, giving both Germany and the history of our times their true significance in the light of not merely human but cosmic evolution.
I do not know whether Adolf Hitler would have been, at any period of his career, in a position to give a learned lecture about the cyclic conception of history according to ancient Wisdom. But I am absolutely sure that he felt, thought and acted, from beginning to end, in full consciousness of the eternal truth — both biological and metaphysical, — which this conception expresses. His writings — specially the general statements which he laid down in Chapter XI of the first part of Mein Kampf— his speeches before and after his rise to power, and more eloquently than anything, the great decisions of his life, prove that he did. The basic tenets and entire spirit of the National Socialist doctrine prove that he did. For what is the latter, if not a passionate denial of the wide-spread belief in the ‘dignity’ of ‘man’ as such (of any human creature of any race) and of the no less wide-spread and no less arbitrary idea of man’s ‘mastery’ over Nature, and of his illimited ‘progress’? The denial of these dogmas in favour of an aristocratic conception of the Universe and, in particular, of history, in the light of which the noble races (and, among them, in first rank, the Aryan, the noblest of all) are alone capable of bringing collectively into material fulfilment, the whole wealth of higher human possibilities? Their denial, also, in favour of the bold assertion that history is, — in fact, has always been, — a long process of more or less slow decay from original perfection to a final state of chaos out of which one rises once more not through regular, unbroken evolution, but abruptly, — i.e., through revolutionary methods — to the state of health, virtue and beauty, i.e., of earthly godhead, which marks the springtime (all the successive spring-times) of Creation?
Considered in its essence, it is, indeed, that, before anything else. More so: the fact that it is that governs, as we shall see, its attitude, — determines its position, — with regard to the various ‘questions’ of our times, from the all-important, worldwide Jewish problem (which is anything but ‘modern’) to those affairs which, at first sight, seem to concern Germany alone. (And there lies precisely the hidden but actual source of its unpopularity in this Dark Age.)
Years before he came to power; nay, years before he started his political career, — Adolf Hitler was vividly aware of that incompatibility between this Age, this world as we see it, and the healthy, glorious world of his dreams. And he sought the reality of the latter, when not in the historical Golden Age of our Time-cycle — so far behind us and so different from all we know that it is practically unthinkable, — at least in as remote a past as his imagination could reach: in the legendary Age before the dawn of recorded German history; the Age pictured in the old Germanic sagas. He did not study that age, as a student of archaeology would have. He lived in it through his own visionary’s intuition and through the magic of Richard Wagner’s music, which he loved. And far from being the mere product of an ephemeral youthful enthusiasm, that consciousness of the World of the Sagas was precisely that which, more decisively than anything else, ‘conditioned his historical and political views.’[4] It was the consciousness of the world ‘to which he felt he actually belonged.’ And ‘all through his life, he found nothing for which he could stand with such pious devotion as he did for that world, which the Sagas of the German heroes had opened to him.’[5]
The Rhinemaidens in the first Bayreuther Festspiele production in 1876.
In other words, it is the healthy, strong, beautiful Germans of the heroic Age who, in his eyes, represented real Germany; eternal Germany. Maybe they have, historically, lived only a few millenniums before the beginning of the present Dark Age (in what the Sanskrit authors call the Dwapara Yuga; the third of the four great Ages) maybe, already within this present Age of Gloom itself (I mean, in the very first part of it).
That is not the point. The point is that, faithful in fact to Tradition, Adolf Hitler believed in the existence of earthly perfection as a reality both of the future and of a very, very remote past. The point is that, whatever might have been the epoch in which they — or their historical prototypes — actually lived, the men and women of the hallowed ‘world of the Sagas’ signified, symbolised, for him, that earthly perfection, that humanity without a flaw for which he yearned with all the ardour of his heart and nearer and nearer to which one reaches to the extent one follows Time further and further upstream.
There is more. Strange as this statement may seem to the European, nay to the German reader himself, Adolf Hitler’s ‘immeasurable love’ for his people is something greater than usual patriotism. It is, no doubt, rooted in that natural feeling of blood — solidarity which binds most individuals — and certainly all Germans, — to their countrymen. But it is, at the same time, the immediate outcome of a staggering intuitive knowledge; the expression of actual insight into the nature, meaning and destiny of Germany as the privileged Nation among all those of the same blood: the most gifted; the most conscious; the most fit to rule; in one word, the most objectively valuable section of Aryan mankind. It is, in spite of what many may think, nay, in spite of the judgement passed upon it by such a prominent figure of the National Socialist regime as Konstantin Hierl,[6] anything but the German counterpart of the British chauvinist’s attitude rendered in the well-known motto: ‘My country, right or wrong!’
True, Adolf Hitler himself has written in Mein Kampf that, had he ‘been French,’ and had France’s greatness meant to him all that Germany’s in fact did, he ‘could not and would not have acted any differently from Clemenceau.’[7] But, if one is to consider him, and to try to interpret his historical career in the light of Ancient Wisdom, (and subsequently, in connection with the destiny of the whole world) one is forced to say: he could not have been French — nor English; nor even Scandinavian. He could not have been anything else but German, nay, anything else but a frontier German, doubly aware of the tragic injustice of man-made frontiers and of the natural unity of the Reich beyond and in spite of them-and of the natural unity of the Aryan race beyond and in spite of the boundaries of the Reich. More still: one is bound to admit that, far from exalting Germany merely because he was a German, it is, on the contrary, he who chose to be born a German because of the predestined — God-ordained — part that Germany has played and is more and more called to play on the side of the eternal Forces of Light and Life in their struggle against the Forces of disintegration, now, as the end of this Dark Age is drawing nigh; because, objectively speaking, the earthly salvation of the Aryan race — the regeneration of higher mankind — can only come from and through Germany: the one Aryan Nation in which the race is still sufficiently pure to be, under given circumstances, capable of total regeneration, while, at the same time it has, through the unbroken experience of danger, remained sufficiently awake to be fully awakened, and sufficiently warrior-like to carry on, to its end, the struggle against Dark Age conditions: the perennial Struggle ‘against Time,’ for integral Truth.
In other words, both the quality of her biological substance and the particular stamp which history has left upon her, have made Germany the one Nation capable of taking the lead of Western Aryandom (when not also of Aryandom as a whole) in the last life and death struggle — the struggle for the survival and rule of the best, who are the predestined founders of the next Golden Age; the last phase of the perennial Struggle ‘against Time,’ marking the end of the present Age of Gloom. And the inspired Man ‘against Time’ who was, at the beginning of that phase, to act on behalf of the Forces of Light and Life, was bound to be a German, nay, the very embodiment of eternal Germany. And Adolf Hitler was that Man. And he knew it in the depth of his heart. He was perfectly conscious of the fact that his policy, both at home and abroad, was the only real German policy, and therefore the only conceivable one in the interest of Aryan mankind as a whole and — consequently — of the whole realm of Lift the only conceivable one ‘in the interest of the Universe,’ to quote the words of the Book of books. For alone regenerate Aryan man can and will save what is, in spite of all, worth saving in this doomed world, and build a new earth — open a new Time-cycle — on the basis of principles eternally true. Adolf Hitler has repeatedly said so in his speeches. And repeatedly expressed in Mein Kampf the same fact, namely that he was acting ‘in the spirit of the almighty Creator’ and struggling ‘for the Lord’s own work’[8] i.e. for Truth upon this earth: earthly Perfection; and that his ‘new ideas’ are ‘in harmony with the primeaval meaning of things.’[9]
What August Kubizek relates of his life in Linz and Vienna from 1904 to 1908, shows how early the future ruler had acquired a clear conception of his ultimate aim — the ‘ideal State’ — and become aware of the spirit of the whole programme he was, one day, to set forth and to work out, with the help of enthusiastic millions of people; how early he knew what his policy would be (what, in fact, any policy in accordance with truth, i.e. with Nature, can only be): — at the same time national and socialistic; nay, socialistic because it was to be — is too be — national in the full sense of the word, first in the sense of racial; and national in that sense because that Godhead within us which is real Godhead, is nothing else but the latent glory of our race in its original perfection.
To urge the German and, beyond the pale of the Reich, the Aryan in general — the youngest race of our Time — cycle, destined to the lordship of the divine Beginning of the next cycle — to yearn for and to strive with all his enlightened might towards that perfection on all planes, and to bring it, here and now, collectively as well as individually, into being (to the extent this is exceptionally possible, already during the Dark Age); to urge him to be, now, against the prevailing spirit of general contamination and general decay — against the current of Time, — the witness and the herald of the coming Dawn, and that, on a national, or rather on a racial scale, such is and remains the actual goal of National Socialism, the Hitler faith, however astounding this may yet appear to most people, to-day, in Year 22[10] after ‘the first Seizure of power.[11] Important as they may have been after 1918 — or as they may be now after 1945, — the immediate political aims which could not and cannot be separated from the persecuted Weltanschauung are mere steps towards that one great positive, permanent goal.
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[1]Kubizek, Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund, p. 292.
A pamphlet published immediately after the failed coup, penned by either Hitler himself or someone briefed by him, traced the collapse of relations between Munich and Berlin throughout October 1923. It quoted from a conversation which allegedly took place between Hitler and Lossow, in which the latter ‘repeatedly spoke of an Ankara-government’, on the lines of the Turkish national revival under Atatürk, which would take on Berlin. The pamphlet went on to attack Kahr, who was allegedly ‘completely dependent on the Roman Jesuits’. ‘Because Hitler knew,’ it continued, ‘that the “black [i.e. clerical] danger” in Bavaria was even bigger than the red one’[emphasis by Ed.], Hitler had been compelled to pre-empt the machinations of the Jesuits, the Wittelsbach dynasty, the French, the papacy and the Habsburgs. The main lines of Hitler’s rather contradictory interpretation of the Putsch were thus clear: it had been carried out both with the collusion of the Bavarian conservatives and in order to forestall their plans for a clerical, monarchist and separatist coup at the expense of the Reich as a whole.
On 11 November, Hitler was arrested at the home of Hanfstaengl at Uffing am Staffelsee, south of Munich. Just before his capture, Hitler managed to get off a short message to Alfred Rosenberg, asking him to lead the movement in his absence. He was imprisoned at Landsberg, awaiting trial. Hitler seems at first to have undergone some kind of personal crisis, appearing depressed and even suicidal. Hess, not yet in Landsberg, spoke of him being ’emotionally very down’. Following stormy interrogations, Hitler went on a ten-day hunger strike. According to the recollection of the resident psychologist, Alois Maria Ott, Hitler was distraught at the death of his comrades and announced that ‘I have had enough, I am done, if I had a revolver I would take it.’ Ott succeeded in calming Hitler and persuaded him to call off his protest; the planned forcible feeding proved unnecessary. In early December 1923, Winifred Wagner sent him blankets, books and other items to cheer him up; she also wrote frequently. Hitler’s spirits revived, and within a fortnight he was beginning to prepare his defence.
In mid December 1923, Hitler was questioned at Landsberg by the state prosecutor, Dr Hans Ehard. Still struggling with his injured arm, Hitler vowed ‘to play his best trump-cards in the court room itself ‘, and wondered aloud whether ‘certain gentlemen’ would have the courage to perjure themselves under oath in court. This was clearly directed at Kahr, Lossow and Seisser. Ehard reported that Hitler, having initially steadfastly refused to make any sort of statements on the record, to avoid ‘having words put into his mouth’, soon began to hold ‘interminable political lectures’. He explained that he had struck because the men of the Kampf bund had been impatient for action, and could not be held back any longer. Ehard, probably acting on instructions from superiors who feared dirty linen being washed in public, asked Hitler directly whether he planned ‘to bring the question of the alleged Bavarian separatist plans into [his] defence strategy’. Hitler pointedly declined to answer, but he soon launched into a lengthy attack on ‘well-known, influential, one-sidedly religiously inclined circles, which pursued solely separatist aims and to this end pushed forward Kahr as a straw man’. ‘These circles,’ he added, ‘sought the restoration of the monarchy.’ In the context of what he called ‘French plans to break up’, these tendencies would lead to ‘the separation of Bavaria’ and the ‘disintegration of the Reich’. Itis striking that Hitler again spent far more time on these dangers to the Reich than those from the left.
Hitler soon made himself comfortable in Landsberg. Conditions were remarkably good, as both the warders and the other prisoners treated him as a celebrity, even after his sentencing. The terms of his incarceration did not involve compulsory labour, a regimented diet, prison clothes or restrictions on visitors. His main companions behind bars were his chauffeur and bodyguard Emil Maurice and Rudolf Hess; his authority was unquestioned. The young Nazi Hermann Fobke related that it was not so much a question of ‘presenting to the boss’ as being ‘lectured to by the boss’. Admirers brought him books, food and flowers and news. Helene Bechstein provided cheese. In all, more than 500 people, including Elsa Bruckmann, visited him in the first few months alone. Hanfstaengl later remarked that the cell looked like a ‘delicatessen’. For all that, Hitler found captivity irksome, as he was kept cooped up and powerless to intervene in outside affairs. His surroundings were far from luxurious—Landsberg remained a prison, not a hotel. Music and hatred kept him going. ‘I let out my annoyance in my apologia/ he wrote in January 1924, ‘whose first part, at least, I hope will survive the court case and me. For the rest I am dreaming of Tristan and similar matters.’
The NSDAP, meanwhile, was in disarray. President Ebert announced that Hitler’s followers would be prosecuted for treason. The party itself was declared illegal and went underground; its press was banned, including the Völkischer Beobachter and Streicher’s newspaper Der Stürmer. The party premises were raided, with seven bags of potatoes being carried off by police along with all records and valuables. In Hesse and Wurttemberg the authorities moved quickly to stamp out any threatened copycat attempts. The Nazi leadership was now largely on the run, hiding among sympathizers in and around Munich. Hitler’s choice of Rosenberg to head the party in his absence took everybody by surprise and caused general consternation. Rosenberg was aloof and cerebral and had no personal following in the movement.
By contrast, the three deputies also appointed by Hitler—Julius Streicher, Max Amann and Hermann Esser—were powerful in their own right. Hitler did not explain his decision. It is possible that he saw Rosenberg as a straw man who would simply keep the seat warm for him for his release, but it may also be that he saw the main priority in his absence as the maintenance not of organizational coherence, but of ideological purity, and for that Rosenberg was the perfect fit.
As a YouTube commenter said: ‘An actual worthwhile use of AI to help people better understand history. Similar to reading a dry book and then visiting the actual place in person, this helps make the past more real’.
Indeed. Hearing uncle Adolf in English really hits harder than reading a translation. Alas, I wouldn’t be surprised if this video is removed from YouTube. With luck, these English-Hitler speeches are going to make a difference among TikTok users, where they are proliferating right now.
Update: A short clip including footage of Hitler speaking while being translated (for twenty-something seconds) can be seen here.
The ideal in the name of which Adolf Hitler constantly rebelled against practically all he saw in living life — already as an adolescent, and then more and more as a young man and as a man thirty and over thirty — was nothing less than that which I have described in this book as ‘a Golden Age ideal’; the inner vision of a healthy, beautiful and also peaceful (necessarily peaceful) world; of thereal earthly paradise, faithful image of cosmic perfection, in which righteousness prevails as a matter of course. There can be no doubt about it if one reads not only that interesting story of his youthful years which his friend A. Kubizek has written, but also all that he wrote and said himself in later, active life. And in an epoch such as that in which we are now living — when, all over the world, every possible attempt is made to present him not merely as ‘a war monger’ but as the ‘war criminal’ number one, — it is not superfluous to stress the fact that Adolf Hitler was, not only at the dawn of his awakening as a ‘Man against Time’ but all his life, ‘a bitter enemy of war’[1] as such; the fact that he was by nature ‘gifted with deep sensitiveness, and full of sympathy for others’[2]; that his programme was essentially a constructive one, his struggle, the struggle for an exalted, positive aim, his aim: the regeneration of higher mankind, of the only section of mankind worth saving […]
Editor’s interpolated note: My emphasis! Remember the Parrish painting emblematic of our ideals from the first incarnation of The West’s Darkest Hour, when I was blogging on Blogspot.
[…] and, ultimately, through the survival of regenerated higher mankind, the restoration of the long-destroyed harmony between the cosmic Order and the sociopolitical conditions on earth, i.e., the restoration of Golden Age conditions; the opening not merely of a ‘new era’ for Germany, but of a new Time-cycle for the whole world.
It is not superfluous, in times like ours, to remind the reader of all the Führer’s efforts to avoid the Second World War, even at the price of heavy concessions, and then, (when this had proved impossible) to stop it, while it could yet be stopped. It is not superfluous to recall the words he addressed his old friend Kubizek on the 23rd of July 1940, i.e. when, from a military standpoint, all seemed to be going on splendidly; when the Swastika Flag was fluttering over public buildings in the capitals of seven conquered States, — ‘This war thrusts us years back in our constructive work. It is deplorable. I have not indeed become the Chancellor of the Greater German Reich in order to conduct war!’[3] Not only was he against war for war’s sake (or for the sake of worthless motives) but he was against any form of useless violence, not to speak of ‘useless cruelty,’ which was, under the Third Reich, according to law and (whenever detected) also in fact, a severely punishable offence.[4] The news of even such an understandable outburst of broad-scale revengefulness as that which took place during the ‘Kristall Nacht’ (8th-9th of November 1938) — attacks on Jews and Jewish property, and burning down of synagogues in answer to repeated Jewish provocation, — brought him ‘to the pitch of indignation.’[5]
That inborn reluctance to wanton violence is a trait common to all those whom I have called men ‘above Time’ (such as King Akhnaton, the Buddha, or Jesus Christ) and to the great fighters ‘against Time,’ Founders of new religious and cultural eras, such as Lord Krishna or, nearer to our times, the Prophet Mahomet, the only men with whom Adolf Hitler can be compared if one feels at all the necessity of drawing historical parallels.
Editor’s interpolated note: I will talk about Akhenaten at the end of this series on Savitri’s book. For now, I would just like to say that Savitri lived when historiographical criticism of many of the supposed founders of religions had not yet been done. Nowadays, some scholars have come to question the historicity of Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, and even Mohammed.
It is one of the signs that his ultimate aim remained — like theirs — a state of deep-rooted, lasting, (more-than-human) harmony, not of conflict among men; in other words, I repeat, a restoration of the original Golden Age conditions upon earth, the only conditions under which absolute health — which means: perfection, — ever prevailed. Considered in the light of such an aim, every necessary violence is a ‘deplorable’ necessity (to quote once more Adolf Hitler’s own words about, the Second World War in 1940). Every unnecessary violence is a denial of the spirit of such a struggle ‘against Time’ as that of National Socialism for power; a foolish provocation of the Dark Forces that stand in the way of its success, and. therefore a sin against the Cause of Truth. And that is the real, deep meaning of the Führer’s bitter words, addressed to Dr. Goebbels at the news of the ‘Kristall Nacht’: ‘You people have thrust back National Socialism, and spoilt my work for many years when not for good, through this nonsense!’[6]
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[1]August Kubizek, Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfround [Adolf Hitler, Friend of my Youth] (Leopold Stocker Verlag, 1953), p. 294.
[4]It is a fact, for instance, that Martin Sommer was, in 1943, i.e. under the N.S. regime and by a N.S. tribunal, sentenced to three years imprisonment for ill-treating internees in the Buchenwald concentration Camp.
[5]Konstantin Hierl, In Dienzt für Deutschland, 1918-1945 [In Service of Germany] (Heidelberg: Vowinckel, 1954), p. 138.
[6]Hans Grimm, Warum? Woher? aber Wohin? [Why, Whence? but Whither?] (Lippoldsberg: Klosterhaus, 1954), p. 184.
Right at the end of October 192 3, the Völkisch and paramilitary leaders assembled in Röhm’s Reichswehr office in Munich and began preparations for armed action. Their concern was at least as much to head off any separatist tendencies in the Bavarian leadership as it was to support them in joint action against Berlin. It was expected that Kahr would announce his plans for a coup against the Berlin government at a meeting scheduled for 8 November at the Bürgerbräukeller. If Hitler and his co-conspirators were going to forestall Kahr, and his suspected separatist agenda, or co-opt him for their own plans, this would be an excellent opportunity to catch all the major protagonists in one place.
Hitler struck in an evening of high drama. He burst into the Bürgerbräukeller, fired his pistol into the ceiling and announced to general applause that the Bavarian government of Knilling and the Reich government in Berlin were deposed. Hitler ‘suggested’ Kahr as regent for Bavaria and Pöhner as minister president thereof. He promised that a ‘German national government’ would be announced in Munich that same evening. He ‘recommended’ that he himself should take over the ‘leadership’ until accounts had been settled with the ‘criminals’ in Berlin. Ludendorff was to be commander of a new national army; Lossow Reichswehr minister, and Seisser German minister of police. Attempting to marry Bavarian local pride and the pan-German mission, Hitler said that it was the task of the provisional government to march on the ‘den of iniquity in Berlin’. In a considerable concession to Bavarian sensibilities he vowed ‘to build up a cooperative federal state in which Bavaria gets what it deserves’. Kahr, Lossow and Seisser were held captive and prevailed upon to support the coup.
The putschists now swung into action. Their ‘Proclamation to all Germans’ announced that the nation would no longer be treated like a ‘Negro tribe’. Hanfstaengl was detailed to inform and influence the foreign press; he tipped off Larry Rue of the Chicago Tribune that the coup was about to begin and appeared in the Bürgerbräukeller with a group of journalists from other countries. The offices of the pro-SPD Münchener Post were smashed up by the SA, but there was no ‘white terror’ on the streets of Munich; Hitler’s main anxiety was the Bavarian right, not the left. One of the few detentions was that of Count Soden-Fraunhofen, a staunch Wittelsbach loyalist who was accused of being a ‘hireling of the Vatican’. Winifred and Siegfried Wagner, who were almost certainly aware of the plot in advance, were due at the Odeon Theatre immediately after the coup, where Siegfried was to direct a Wagner concert, intended perhaps as a celebration. Hitler announced melodramatically that ‘the morning will see either a national government in Germany or our own deaths’.
The morning brought the sobering realization that the putschists were on their own. There was no general national rising across the Reich. Kahr, Lossow and Seisser, who had given their ‘word of honour’ under duress to support the coup, slipped away and began to mobilize forces to restore order. Hitler’s worst fears were confirmed: he was now fighting not merely red Berlin, but reactionary separatist forces in Munich. A bitter Nazi pamphlet rushed out that day announced. that ‘today the [November revolution] was to have been extinguished from Munich and the honour of the fatherland restored ‘. ‘This,’ the pamphlet added, invoking Hitler’s rhetoric, ‘would have been the Bavarian mission.’ Kahr, Lossow and Seisser, alas, had betrayed the cause. Behind them, the pamphlet continued, stood ‘the same trust of separatists and Jews’ who had been responsible for the treasonous Armistice in 1918, the ‘slave treaty of Versailles and the despicable stock-exchange speculation’ and all other miseries. It concluded with a call to make one last effort to save the situation. What was striking about this document was the far greater stress laid on the separatist-clerical and capitalist danger than on the threat of Bolshevism[emphasis by Ed.].
Hitler and his co-conspirators set out mid morning 9 November for central Munich in a column numbering about 2,000 men, many of them armed. Strasser, who had turned up from Nuremberg with a contingent of followers, was particularly belligerent. Their plan was unclear, but it seems to have been to wrest the initiative back from Kahr; Hitler may also have intended to go down fighting as he had vowed the night before. Outside the Feldherrenhalle at the Odeonsplatz, they encountered a police cordon. Hitler linked arms with Scheubner-Richter and the column marched straight at the police lines, weapons at the ready.
It is not clear whether he was seeking death as a blood sacrifice to inspire future generations or whether he was trying to imitate Napoleon’s famous confrontation with Marshal Ney, when the emperor marched slowly towards his old comrades, who refused to shoot. Shots were exchanged, leading to fatalities on both sides. Hitler himself escaped death only narrowly, injured his arm and fled the scene. Before the day was out, Kahr issued a proclamation announcing the failure of the ‘Hitler Putsch’. The great drama had ended in complete fiasco.
There are, to my knowledge, — unfortunately, — no records of Adolf Hitler’s childhood. And, enlightening as it surely is, the little one can gather about it from a conversation with his most sympathetic old tutor, Herr Mayrhofer, (who is still living in Leonding, near Linz, and whom I met twice) and the little he mentions himself in Mein Kampf (which is not an autobiography) is not enough to buttress such a definite (and unusual) view of him as the one put forth in the present study. The one apparently authoritative picture of the future ruler’s life and character, years before he ‘decided to become a politician,’ is to be found in the very good book in which August Kubizek — the one friend he had in early youth, — has related the story of his four years’ friendship with him, namely from 1904 to 1908.[1]
In those years — i.e., when he was over fifteen, less than nineteen, — Adolf Hitler’s main traits of character were already fixed, and visible at every step of his: in all he said or did. His scale of values was already that one which was, in later years, to set him apart from every political leader of our times. And the psychological (the real) basis of his philosophy the source of his unshakable faith in it, and the key to his whole career, — was already definite. In other words, the man he was to be — the Man he could but be, under the given circumstances, — had already taken shape and was, with the sureness of instinct, with a mysterious, inner knowledge, a logic of his own that baffled all human calculations, invincibly following the path of his tremendous destiny. And the features of the rapidly awakening personality were unmistakably those, and the unfailing, baffling logic, that, of a Man of the type I have, in this book, characterised as ‘against Time’: of an inspired, ruthless and realistic — extraordinarily far sighted — fighter for a Golden Age ideal, in the depth of our Dark Age.
And, were we able to trace the history of Adolf Hitler’s evolution further into those very early years which he describes as providing (from the standpoint of events) ‘little to remember,’[2] it is not only probable but certain that we would find, in him, up to the very beginning of his life, the self-same, deeply distinctive traits of character, the self-same fundamental aspirations — the same person. Such men as he are not, as so many people seem to think, the ‘product of circumstances,’ but predestined beings who use the given circumstances to the utmost, for a purpose which far exceeds the obvious, immediate aim of their action, or, to speak the language of ancient Wisdom, — and one is, ultimately, compelled to speak that language, — great free Souls,[3] no longer bound by the law of birth and rebirth, who choose to be born in the environment (within the race, the country, the social stratum) in which, and to grow into leading men and to struggle as such under the circumstances under which they are to act the most efficiently, in the highest interest of Creation. They are children and adolescents ‘against Time’ before leaving in history the mark of their passage as Men ‘against Time.’
One of the most noticeable traits of people ‘against Time’ — no less than of those I have described as ‘above Time’ — is that they fit nowhere in the world as it is; that their moral and aesthetic — and practical — standards: their conception of happiness and unhappiness, their idea of ‘success’ and failure, and of usefulness, in one word their values, and its, have nothing in common. And, from all that his friend A. Kubizek relates about Adolf Hitler’s adolescence in Linz, that appears precisely to have been the case of the future master of Germany, at that time a no doubt remarkably gifted but, in the estimation of cool-minded grown-ups, ‘unpractical’ youth, who had recently left the middle-school without completing the course of his studies, and nourished the ambition of becoming a great artist — a painter, or perhaps an architect — with little material prospects of fulfilling it, and who lived on his widowed mother’s meagre pension, and roamed about the streets — or the countryside — and occasionally went to the theatre (taking admittedly the cheapest seats,) and made gigantic plans and spoke — already — with compelling eloquence, — of things that interested nobody but himself, while other boys earned their living and helped their families, or were learning something ‘useful.’ ‘He just fitted into no social frame whatsoever,’ concludes A. Kubizek, after having tried to, analyse the reasons why his friend, despite capacities by far above the average, failed, even in subsequent years, to ‘get on’ professionally. ‘He had not the slightest ambition of securing himself a livelihood’ and of being comfortable. He did not wish to be ‘comfortable.’ He did not — and never was to — think in terms of comfort or of personal ‘happiness.’ What others called ‘enjoying life’ was something absolutely foreign to him. Nor could he ‘take things as they came’ and live lightly, free of worry, entirely within the present. He was, at a very early age, intensely aware that things were wrong in the world round him — wrong in every walk of life, in every domain of thought and action, from A to Z, — and he felt himself duty-bound to change them; not to change this or that in them, leaving the rest untouched, but to change them ruthlessly and radically, for they were radically wrong, and to build everything anew, according to principles different from those that had prevailed up till then.
And this was not a mere wish, a more or less vague desire or day-dream. It was a purpose that he pursued with ‘deadly seriousness’ and unfailing consistency, busying himself long before hand with the most minute details of his plans in every particular case, without for all that ever losing sight of the spirit and general lines of his creation as a whole, so much so that that ‘extraordinary seriousness’ and consistency — and merciless radicality — struck all those who knew him as the main trait of his character. He pursued it — nay, already in those years in which he was not yet politically active; already while he himself still believed that art would remain, throughout life, his first and foremost concern — with that feverish impatience which finds its expression in the words: ‘Now, or never’; with the haste inherent in all earnest action ‘against Time.’ And that impatience — that tragic awareness that ‘tomorrow will be too late’ — was to stamp his whole career as a ruler and as the Founder of the last true civilisation within the Dark Age. In it, in fact, lies the source and the explanation of Adolf Hitler’s most drastic — and most criticized — steps in later life and the sign that National Socialism, that most heroic of all reactions against our Dark Age, historically still belongs to this Age, while transcending its spirit.
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Editor’s two cents:
…he himself still believed that art would remain, throughout life, his first and foremost concern….
It is here that the gulf between us and American white nationalism becomes apparent. As far as I know, the only American racialist who sensed any of this was Michael O’Meara: who wrote that only a new myth could save us. His readers in a racialist webzine didn’t understand a whit of this, believing that only by smearing data to the normies about race realism or the JQ could one modify the Aryan collective unconscious.
That is not possible for those who know how the mind works!
To use Jungian language, it is all about ‘touching the Self.’ And the royal path toward that direction is through art. Remember how Hitler loved Wagner’s art, or how Parrish’s paintings produced, in me, the eureka moment: This is what Creation (the Big Bang) was for!
The Greco-Romans also knew that displaying the Aryan nude on public thoroughfares through majestic sculptures manifested the Self in the form of the majestic Gods.
The Anglo-Saxon racial right, children of Bentham and not of sculptors, painters or poets, has no idea that what we need is a new religion: a new myth accompanied by a new art! Precisely for this reason all anti-art is a curse for producing the new Aryan awakening, which is why I don’t listen to racialist podcasts that start with degenerate music (to her credit, Uncle Adolf’s other admirer, Carolyn Yeager, never used degenerate music at the beginning or end of her podcasts).
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[1] August Kubizek, Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfround [Adolf Hitler, Friend of my Youth] (Leopold Stocker Verlag, 1953.)
Hitler flanked this rhetoric with a carefully calibrated propagandistic effort. He gave a speech at Bayreuth—Wagner’s city—in mid September 1923, and returned about a fortnight later to speak again. On that occasion, taking up the invitation of Winifred Wagner, the Englishborn wife of Wagner’s son Siegfried, he went to the Wagner shrine at Wahnfried. There Hitler spoke to the composer’s son-in-law, the racist political philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain, author of the best-selling Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, upon whom he made a very favourable impression. Hitler paid homage at Wagner’s grave. He also published an autobiographical text and a selection of his speeches under the title of Adolf Hitler: His Life and His Speeches. The name on the front page was that of his associate Victor von Koerber, but the real author was Hitler. He rehearsed his political positions, including his attacks on ‘Bolshevism’ and ‘international Jewish mammonism’, but pointedly deleted all negative references to the United States, most likely in order to encourage US toleration of a successful coup. The principal purpose of the book was to cast Hitler as the saviour of Germany. Koerber-Hitler spoke of him no longer as a ‘drummer’ but as ‘an architect who is building the mighty German cathedral’. No doubt drawing on his overtures to Bavarian Catholics, Hitler had himself styled as a messianic figure, whose political awakening was compared to the resurrection of Christ, and whose writings were a kind of holy writ.
On 26 September, on the same day as the end of passive resistance in the Ruhr, the Bavarian government announced a state of emergency. Kahr was made commissary general. That same day, too, Hitler signed a proclamation in support of a ‘Battle League to Break Interest Slavery’; pointedly, the main enemy was defined as international capitalism and the victor powers rather than the German left…
Despite the local demands on his time, Hitler made serious efforts to square international opinion. He gave an interview to the American United Press at Bayreuth in which he said that the Bavarian ‘masses’ would back him over Kahr and announced that he was ‘no monarchist and would battle against all monarchic adventures, because the Hohenzollern and Wittelsbachers would merely encourage separatist divisions’. Hitler also gave an interview to the distinguished German-American journalist George Sylvester Viereck, in which he claimed to be the only bulwark against ‘Bolshevism’ and revealed his territorial ambitions. ‘We must regain our colonies and we must expand eastward’, he argued. ‘There was a time when we could have shared the world with England. Now, we can stretch our cramped limbs only to the east. The Baltic is merely a German lake.’ At around the same time, he told an American newspaper of his plans for a ‘Monroe Doctrine for Germany’, the first time he articulated a theme which was to run through his entire strategy. In mid October 1923, he made a public statement in Corriere Italiano once again renouncing any German claim to South Tyrol, as a gesture to Mussolini. He was convinced that France would support a separatist coup, but seems to have believed that Britain and the United States would at least tolerate his own Putsch.
Whether alive or dead in the flesh, the predestined Child of Braunau — Adolf Hitler, — lives forever in National Socialism, his creation and integral expression. To understand the latter is to understand him: to see him in the proper light and to place him — whether one be, personally, attracted to him or not, — on the proper level and in the proper class among the galaxy of exceptionally great men. And that is precisely what most National Socialists, even those who remained after 1945, irreproachable in their profession of faith — even ‘fanatical’ ones — (let alone our enemies, and the world at large, which lies for the last ten years under their influence), apparently fail to do, out of lack off, feeling for cosmic realities and, in particular, out of lack of awareness of the rhythm of Time which explains all laws of history, when not also all great happenings.
One should carefully distinguish the ephemeral N.S.D.A.P., — the National Socialist German Workers Party;[1] an organisation in view of precise aims, which have their place in German and European history, — from the everlasting National Socialist Idea.
The Party came (officially) into existence on the 24th of February 1920; in fact, already in 1919. It was a revolutionary body determined to win power for its Leader — and for its members, — to rid Germany of the enslavement and shame resulting from the Versailles Treaty, and — for the first time in the history of the West, — to apply, on a broad scale, solid — eternal — biological principles to social and to political life. It had, however, the characteristics of even the very best organisations of our Dark Age: their inherent clumsiness; their all-too-human short-comings. There were all sorts of people — fearless idealists and time-servers; heroes, nay, demi-gods, and an immense majority of irresponsible, sheep-like creatures, and a few influential traitors — among the thirteen million members it had at the height of its glory. It achieved a lot, and yet it failed. It has, since 1945, ceased to exist as a body, and even if it be, one day, destined to rise again under its old name and everlasting Sign, will never be restored exactly as before. Cannot be; for it belongs to Time, and in Time nothing is ever restored. Should not be; for restoration would mean stagnation, whence incapacity to face new circumstances and overcome new dangers.
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Editor’s interpolated note: We shouldn’t take texts like Mein Kamp or Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century as an infallible New Testament as fundamentalists take the Bible; rather, NS is continually developing and refining its basic and fundamental principles (for example, what we say in ‘The Wall’ about the historical non-existence of Jesus of Nazareth).
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The National Socialist Idea is not the Party. Not only was it in existence — ‘in the air’ — more or less in its present-day garb, before the Party (the Proclamation of Friedrich Lange’s ‘Deutsches Bund,’ in Heidelberg, on the 9th of May 1894 — when Adolf Hitler was five years old — has all the traits of a National Socialist Manifesto; and so have Hans Krebs’ declarations in 1904), but it is, in its essence, as old as the oldest contact and first clash between the Germanic race and the outer world. Fundamentally, it is nothing else but the expression of the collective will of the race to survive and to rule; of its readiness to combat and eradicate all that which, from without or from within, stands in the way of its survival and expansion; of its healthy consciousness of itself — of its strength; of its youth; — and of Godhead within itself: a biological reality stressed in political and in social life, rather than a ‘political’ idea. One could say that Theodoric the Great acted in the true National Socialist spirit when, fourteen hundred years before the famous ‘Nüremberg Laws,’ he did all he possibly could to prevent marriages between his Goths and the racially less pure — less Aryan — people of conquered Italy, let alone people of altogether non-Aryan stock.
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Editor’s interpolated note: Old time Nordicism! Those who haven’t read William Pierce’s book Who We Are should read it now.
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And I have many times and in different writings pointed out that there is no difference in purpose and in standpoint between the National Socialist attitude to life and that of the ancient, warrior-like Aryans, worshippers of Light, who were conquering North-West India, setting the caste-system, conceived on a racial basis, between themselves and the conquered people, and praying the Vedic Gods for ‘many sons,’ prosperous flocks, and ‘victory over the dark-skinned Dasyus’ — for Lebensraum — several thousands of years before 1919, 1933, or 1935.
One could go a step further and state that, in its essence, the National Socialist Idea exceeds not only Germany and our times, but the Aryan race and mankind itself and any epoch; that it ultimately expresses that mysterious and unfailing Wisdom according to which Nature lives and creates: the impersonal Wisdom of the primaeval forest and of the ocean-depth, and of the spheres in the dark fields of Space; and that it is Adolf Hitler’s glory not merely to have gone back to that divine Wisdom, — stigmatising man’s silly infatuation for ‘intellect,’ his childish pride in ‘progress’ and his criminal attempt to enslave Nature, — but to have made it the basis of a practical regeneration-policy of world-wide scope, precisely now, in our over-crowded, over-civilised, and technically over-evolved world, at the very end of the Dark Age.
In other words, it is impossible to understand National Socialism unless one integrates it into the cyclic conception of history as suggested by Tradition, i.e., unless one sees in it not a political system among many others, — not an ephemeral ‘ism,’ product of ephemeral circumstances, — but the last, (or, as we shall see, the one before the last) effort of the permanent and more-than-human Forces of Life within this Time-cycle, against the accelerated current of degeneracy characteristic of any advanced development in Time, or, in one sentence, unless one sees in it the effort ‘against Time’ at the very end of the last Age of our present Cycle.
Seen in this light, the whole well-known struggle to free Germany from the enslavement to which the Versailles Treaty had reduced her, — the National Socialist struggle for ‘freedom and bread’ (and far space); for the German people’s right to thrive in healthy creative activity, — is the last (or, rather, as we shall see, the one before the last) phase of the perennial Struggle for Truth within the present Time-cycle the form which that perennial Struggle was bound to take at our epoch, i.e., at the end of the Dark Age. And Adolf Hitler is the most heroic of the heroes who, in the course of history, stood in the way of the world’s fated downward rush towards its doom; the One Who comes back, in His last desperate attempt to save that which is still worth saving, before it is too late, — the typical Man ‘against Time.’ He embodies that eternal Nature-wisdom to which I have alluded in the former paragraph — the only wisdom that deserves the name of divine, and opposed it, — not human arguments, — to the false science, and false religion and false morality and, of course, also false political conceptions of our decadent Age, and made Germany’s struggle for freedom the occasion of a broader systematic struggle for the liberation of higher mankind from the chains of the Dark Age. And made the Sign of the Sun — the Sign of Health[2] — the Symbol of both German and Aryan regeneration, and Germany, the holy Land of the West — the Stronghold of regenerate Aryandom.
Considered as the twentieth century expression of the age-old yearning of Aryan mankind to free itself, here and at once, from the appalling determinism of decay, National Socialism begins before Adolf Hitler’s political career. Its unrecorded but real evolution as an incarnate Idea, — its true history — starts with the future German Führer’s gradual awakening to the consciousness of his own scale of values, of his fundamental aspirations and repulsions, and of his mission: the awakening of the Man ‘against Time,’ as such.
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[1]Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei.
In late February 1924, Hitler was brought to stand trial before the Volksgericht in Munich in the old Infantry School on the Blutenburgstrasse. He was allowed to appear in a suit rather than prison clothes and sporting his Iron Cross. Security was strict, and the press interest, including from abroad, was intense. Hitler would no doubt have been pleased to know that ‘one heard particularly many English voices’. The Reich government had wanted the trial to be held in Leipzig, but the authorities in Munich were determined to keep it local, almost certainly because they feared what might otherwise emerge about their complicity in the various plots. Berlin gave way in the context of a broader rapprochement with Bavaria. In mid February 1924, about a week before the trial began, the Bavarian Reichswehr submitted once again to command from Berlin, thus reversing Kahr and Lossow’s position in November 1923; Kahr resigned.
