‘Words build bridges into unexplored regions’.
—Hitler
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Tag: Adolf Hitler
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Adolf quote
‘Strength lies not in defence but in attack’.
—Hitler
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Hitler, 50
Despite the bravado, Hitler trod very carefully. Shortly after his release, Hitler had two meetings with the Bavarian minister president, Heinrich Held, at which he assured him that he would not attempt another putsch. He toned down some of the rhetoric in Mein Kampf, the second volume of which he was writing in the calm of his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden, the use of which had been given to him by a well-wisher.
Hitler also moved to sort out his national status, which acquired renewed importance after the speaking ban. In early April 1925, he wrote to the authorities in Linz requesting his ‘release from Austrian citizenship’. Hitler also had a long discussion with the Austrian consul in Munich and expressed his desire to surrender his nationality. On 30 April 19 25, the Austrian authorities finally stripped him of the citizenship he had never accepted. This did not mean that Hitler had established his right to stay in Germany beyond all doubt—he was now formally ‘stateless’—but he had at least ensured that it would be more difficult to deport him somewhere else. The threat of removal, however, remained, and the Bavarian authorities reminded him of it from time to time…
Hitler avoided confrontation, partly in order to concentrate on the completion of Mein Kampf. ‘Not a word from Hitler,’ Goebbels noted right at the end of 1924, ‘Oh this sly fox with the political instinct.’ A fortnight later, he asked anxiously, ‘What will Hitler do? That is the anxious question every day. Hopefully he will not go over to the camp of reaction.’ Hitler’s reticence annoyed some of the rank and file, who complained that it would be better for him to sort out the ‘problems’ in the movement than to work on a ‘high political work’. The Bavarian police, which kept a close eye on Hitler after his release, also reported that he seemed to be absorbed by Mein Kampf, which was concerned ‘exclusively with Marxism and Jewry’. This was, as we shall see, by no means a completely accurate summary…
Hitler gave thirty-eight speeches in 1925, and fifty-two in the following year. This gave him limited traction, however, partly because the numbers attending were substantially lower than during his heyday in 1923, and partly because he was still banned from appearing in public in much of Germany. Hitler was thus forced to speak to closed party meetings, in salons, or at private events. Nor could he put too much reliance on his personal magnetism…
Hitler would have to work with the people he had rather than the people he would like to have had. He knew that the party needed to transcend his own person. Personal loyalty was not enough; he needed party cadres to obey not just him but their immediate superiors. The Führer principle was thus extended beyond the Fuhrer himself. More talented and trained speakers were needed, so that the entire strain of communicating the message did not fall on him and a few others. ‘We need speaker schools,’ he announced in March 1925, ‘because to this day this mass movement has only 10-12 good speakers.’ In other words, Hitler was learning not to hog his charisma, but to spread it around. His speeches and instructions increasingly referred not just to the Führer in the singular, but to the plural Führers upon whom the leadership of the movement depended.
Central to this was the establishment of a proper party bureaucracy. Here the Social Democrats explicitly served as a model. Hitler spoke grudgingly of the SPD as a party ‘organized like the SA’. Despite shortage of funds, the NSDAP moved to new premises in the Schellingstrasse in Munich in the summer of 1925, and Hitler signalled his plan to build a dedicated ‘Party Headquarters’ in Munich paid for by the membership…
Hitler also resurrected the Sturmabteilungen, not as a paramilitary formation, as it had developed in the months preceding the Putsch, but as an organization dedicated to ‘strengthening of the bodies of our youth, bringing them up on discipline and dedication to the common great ideal [and] training in the marshalling and reconnaissance service of the movement’.There should be no weapons, either carried openly or stored in depots. Anybody who violated that rule was to be expelled. Hitler’s concern here was to avoid being dragged into illegality by armed hotheads. The immediate effect of this ruling was to precipitate a breach with Röhm, for whom the paramilitary aspects of the SA remained central. He resigned and eventually emigrated to South America . That same month Hitler created the ‘Protective Squadron’ soon known simply as the SS, a personal protection squad whose first leader, Josef Berchtold, placed particular stress on ideological purity. In a critical assertion of authority, Hitler had established a monopoly of violence within the movement.
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The Lightning
and the Sun, 8
There are, in the records of mankind, few things as beautiful as the early history of the National Socialist Movement.
The tremendous will-power, kindled through despair, out of which the latter had sprung, was, as I just said, nothing less than the divine Will to Perfection in its last (or one before last) effort to lead the best up-stream against the fated current of Time and to save through them whatever is yet worth saving in this doomed Creation. The material and moral condition under which the Movement took shape—the miserable, smoky room[1] in which six unknown German workmen sat and discussed with the superman who was soon to guide them, and millions of others, to the reconquest of national greatness these men’s utter poverty, their utter insignificance in the eye of the wide world and specially of those well-spoken of, comfortable politicians and party-leaders whom they were, within few years, to thrust into oblivion; their burning faith and which is more, the fact that their Leader—Adolf Hitler—was in possession of cosmic truth—are highly symbolical. All life begins in darkness. All everlasting things are born in silence and away from the lime-light of publicity; in faith and in truth. And whatever is not born in such a manner, does not last. However noisy and wide-spread be its success, it will not stand the test of time and that of persecution, let alone the terrible impact of the storm in which a Time-cycle comes to its end.
The very early growth of National Socialism as an active, incarnate Idea, was like the growth of a corn-seed within the snow-bound earth; it was like the slow rise of molten rock within the depth of a slumbering volcano: unnoticed and irresistible. It was the outcome of a natural Force, in fact, of the oldest and mightiest of all natural Forces: of Life’s inherent instinct of self-preservation in presence of the Powers of death—the Force that links every Time-cycle to the following one, over almost total destruction. Started in 1919, officially founded in early 1920, it owes that divine Force its impulse which nothing,—not even the disaster of 1945—was able to break.
Throughout the wide world, governments representing sheer finance interests looked with satisfaction upon their latest handiwork: the Versailles peace-treaty, up till then the most infamous official document in history, intended to enslave Germany for all times. And the sheep followed their shepherds. And the parrots repeated the nonsense—and lies—which they had been taught: ‘This Treaty seals the victory of those who fought this war in order to put an end to all wars!’—while frenzied crowds demonstrated in the streets of the French towns howling ‘Germany must pay!’ Never had there been so many speeches, so many sermons, so many articles and books—such a ‘hullabaloo’—about ‘peace.’ And never had victors yet behaved with such calculated barbarity.
In the inconspicuous little room at the back of a café in Munich, however, Adolf Hitler—the Man ‘against Time,’—spoke to the tiny group of German workmen; to the rough men of pure blood and solid virtues, sons of the people among which he—He, the One Who comes back,—had chosen (this time) to be born. And his words were—and his whole life was—the answer to the lies of this advanced Dark Age. They cannot have been much different from those one reads in Mein Kampf although these were written five years later. He said:
For me, as for every true National Socialist, there is only one doctrine: people and fatherland.
We have to fight to secure the existence and expansion of our race and of our people; to enable them to nourish their children and to preserve the purity of their blood; to secure the freedom of our Fatherland, so that our people may be in the position to fulfil the mission appointed to them by the Creator of the Universe.[2]
He said:
Whoever speaks of a mission of the German people on this earth must know that such a mission can only lie in the formation of a State which holds it to be its highest task to preserve and to promote the noblest of all elements which have, in our people, nay, in the whole of mankind, remained unspoilt.[3]
He said:
The German Reich should, as a State, comprise all Germans, and set itself the task not merely to gather and preserve the most valuable original racial elements in that people, but to raise them slowly and surely to a ruling position.[4]
He said:
Men do not go to ruin through lost wars, but through the loss of that power of resistance that lies in pure blood alone.[5]
He was aware of the downfall of the whole of mankind—including Germany—in the present Age. ‘Unfortunately,’ said he, ‘our German people are no longer racially homogeneous.’[6] And aware of the primary cause of downfall: racial mixture, the result of forgetfulness of Nature’s truth. And aware of that truth, expressed in the oldest Book of Aryan Wisdom, the Bhagavad-Gita: ‘Out of the corruption of women proceeds the confusion of races; out of the confusion of races, the loss of memory; out of the loss of memory, the loss of understanding; and out of this, all evil.’[7] He was aware of it, not because he had read the Book, (it is doubtful whether he had, at least as early as 1919) but because the impersonal Wisdom of the most ancient Aryans lived in him; because he was He Who has spoken in the Book—the One Who comes back. And he knew that the Wisdom which he preached as the key to earthly salvation ‘corresponds entirely to the original meaning of things’;[8] and that the way he preached—return to that primaeval, cosmic Wisdom in individual and in collective life, in thought and in deed,—was—is—the only way through which the chosen few can survive the last impact of the forces of disintegration and become the founders of the new Age of Truth. And that those chosen few are the best elements of the youngest great Race of our Time-cycle: the Aryan. He knew that too. And while he stressed in his speeches the necessity of freeing Germany, at once, from the immediate consequences of the Versailles Treaty—inflation; unemployment; growing misery,—his ultimate aim remained to raise her to that organised power which, in the light of traditional Wisdom, can only be termed as a ‘State against Time’—nay, the ‘State against Time,’ enabling the best to carry both their privileged biological substance and their unmarred Golden Age ideal through and beyond the last storms of this Dark Age.
He spoke with the compelling eloquence of faith, knowing that he was right—that the endless future of the Universe (not merely of Germany and Europe) would glaringly prove how right he was. He spoke with the wild eloquence of emergency, knowing also that the struggle he was about to start had to take place then or never; that there was not an hour to waste.
And the sombre faces of the hungry, embittered men, who had fought and suffered, and yet lost, gazed at him with that unconditional admiration and confidence that is the essence of worship—the faces of the six, and, soon, of many more; of; hundreds, in ever broader meeting-halls, always too small to contain them; of hundreds of thousands under the open sky.
‘Men do not go to ruin through lost wars…’ The magic words—these, and others, meaning the same,—rang throughout defeated Germany. And the hundreds of thousands no longer felt defeated. They now knew they had been betrayed. And they roared against the traitors and against the dark powers at the back of them—the dark powers that they (the German people) would one day crush. They felt strong; they felt young;—invincible and immortal. They felt what the best among them really were—had been, from the beginning of Aryan history, appointed to become—the masters of an unheard-of future; the proud founders of a new world (Only they did not—yet—know through what a terrible Via dolorosa they actually were to fulfil that staggering destiny). They gathered, more and more numerous, round the Man whose inspired speech quickened in them the highest possibilities of joyous heroism—and made them see old forgotten truths in a glaring new light; whose magic radiance filled them with self-assurance: whose love for them was limitless and gratuitous, like the love of a God. They beheld in him the Leader, the Avenger, the Saviour—the living embodiment of their unvanquished collective Self, which indeed he was. And they followed him blindly. Their love carried him to power; their love, and their hatred for those whom he rightly pointed out to them as the promoters of the humiliation of 1918 and of all the subsequent misery: the Jews, and the servants of Jewry, agents of the Dark Forces by nature or by choice, Germany’s—and the world’s—real enemies.
__________
[1] Mein Kampf, p. 240 and following.
[2] Ibid., p. 234.
[3] Ibid., p. 439.
[4] Ibid., p. 439.
[5] Ibid., p. 324.
[6] Ibid., pp. 436-437.
[7] The Bhagavad-Gita, I, verse 41 and following.
[8] Mein Kampf, p. 440.
______ 卐 ______
The Lightning & the Sun by Savitri Devi (Counter-Currents Publishing, 2014, unabridged edition) can be ordered here.
Categories
Hitler, 49
While Hitler tried to reduce his exposure to petty party disputes in prison, it is striking that he tried to maintain engagement with the wider world, especially potential ideological sympathizers and funders in Italy and the United States. Despite the fact that he allowed Göring to find sanctuary in Italy after the Putsch, Mussolini was careful to keep the Nazis at arm’s length.
That left America. In early January 1924, not long after the start of his incarceration at Landsberg, Hitler penned a letter of accreditation for his envoy Kurt Lüdecke. He asked Lüdecke ‘to promote the interests of the German freedom movement in the United States and especially to collect money for them’.
At the end of January, Lüdecke set off with Winifred and Siegfried Wagner to Detroit. Despite Lüdecke’s invocation of the ‘solidarity of white men’, and his offer to promote the kind of international anti-Semitism demanded by the Dearborn Independent, he was unable to persuade Ford at their meetings to provide any funding for the movement. Lüdecke repeatedly visited Hitler in Landsberg in May and June 1924. In 1924, a National Socialist Ortsgruppe was founded in the German quarter of Chicago, and there also appears to have been some sort of presence in New York City; a year later, Hitler personally thanked one of his activists in America for sending back money for the movement. In general, however, the attempt to reach out to the United States was a failure.
Hitler was under no illusions about the timescale for the national and racial regeneration of Germany. The failure of the coup had cured him of any vanguardism. He was now thinking in terms not of years, or even decades, but of centuries. In late June 1924, he made a public announcement that ‘the re-establishment of the German people is by no means a matter of the acquisition of technical weapons, but rather a question of the regeneration of our character’.
‘Spiritual renewals,’ Hitler continued, ‘require, if they are to be more than just a passing phenomenon, many centuries [emphasis in the original]’ to be ‘successful’. Five months later, Hess recorded that Hitler ‘is under no illusions about the extent to which the “idea” can be implemented by him’. ‘The ripening of ideas, the adapting of reality to the idea and the idea to reality,’ he continued, ‘will probably require many generations.’
Hitler, Hess went on, saw his own role as merely ‘setting up a new marker in the distance’, ‘loosening the soil’ around the existing pole, which ‘represented a major era in the development of mankind’. The task of ‘ripping out’ the pole and advancing it some way towards the goal, by contrast, would be the task ‘of another, a greater man yet to come’. In other words, after the certainty of 1923, Hitler was once again unsure whether he was the messiah himself rather than just John the Baptist, the ‘drummer’ of 19 19-20.
______ 卐 ______
Editor’s 2 ¢
This is most interesting. Post-1945 European National Socialism is best represented by the philosophy of Savitri Devi, who by the end of her books used to invoke the Hindu archetype of Kalki in the sense—translated into Christian metaphors—that Hitler had been a sort of John the Baptist and that the Aryan leader who would really vindicate his people in the darkest hour would use many more ‘lightnings’ than Uncle Adolf had used; that is, he would be an exterminationist (something we could visualise with William Pierce’s novel The Turner Diaries).
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Hitler on democracy
‘This is the expression of an authoritarian state –not of a weak, babbling democracy [like the American one]–, of an authoritarian state where everyone is proud to obey, because he knows: I will likewise be obeyed when I must take command’.
—Speech at Nuremberg, September 14, 1935 (see Savitri’s Memoirs pages 172-177 to fully grasp this point).
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AH & Animals
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‘Emergency’
I was going to post another Might is Right instalment today but I got to thinking about my recent exchanges with Benjamin in various threads, and I feel I should say a few things.
I sometimes check the number of comments on old threads, back when WDH was hosted for free by WordPress, and I’m surprised that there were threads with dozens of comments. Since I started criticising American white nationalism, calling it deficient compared to German National Socialism, and shifting my paradigm from regarding the Christian problem as infinitely more serious than the Jewish problem, the visitor traffic has collapsed.
This is compounded by the fact that, as an immense admirer of Hitler myself, the German Chancellor’s sensitivity to art and animal welfare is something that simply doesn’t exist on the American racial right.
The immense dilemma I find myself in is that this sort of thing cannot be explained by pure reason, say, by solid race realist articles like the ones Jared Taylor has been publishing for decades. It has more to do with what we might call emergent psychogenics, which I have already discussed in Day of Wrath (a book that is nothing more than a translation of some chapters of my trilogy).
Psychogenic emergency is either felt or not. Or rather: either one belongs to a higher psychoclass, or one doesn’t belong to it. As I said, it is not something that can be demonstrated by pure reason. On seeing a work of art, such as the Lorraine canvas I saw on my last trip to London, the museum visitor either feels the emergent aesthetics compared to the architectural Neanderthalism of the largest city in Europe, or he feels nothing at all. Those 18th-century Englishmen like Henry Hoare who were aesthetically emergent even designed their gardens in imitation of the Italian painter’s architecture. Either you feel art or you don’t.
Incidentally, the bridge in Stourhead’s garden whose image I posted in June in this article was also used by Kubrick in one of the scenes in Barry Lyndon: a film whose images were inspired by canvases of the period like very few films I have seen. (Perhaps the sole exception is 1956’s Lust for Life in which the director used the actual sites in Holland, Belgium and the French countryside where Vincent van Gogh lived.)
The fourteen words have to do with aesthetics, in that the white race is the only truly beautiful race from the point of view of the Gods of Olympus. The other issue is ethics, the four words, Eliminad todo sufrimiento innecesario. Like great art, you either feel the four words or you don’t. Either you are a Neanderthal (Benjamin sent me an email today describing experiments on rabbits that I don’t even want to describe) or you are an overman like Hitler, and Göring who forbade tormenting those animals.
The sad truth is that most American racialists have not reached the psychogenic level of the Führer in terms of ethics and aesthetics, and that those emergent qualities cannot be induced by arguments, criticisms or diatribes like the ones I have used in this blog. Either you start psychogenically emerging as a child or an adolescent (cf. Kubizek’s memoirs of Hitler when they were both teenagers) or you won’t.
and the Sun, 7
Adolf Hitler’s second and even more shattering experience of the horror of the present Age began on the 10th of November 1918, as he stood, half-blind from the effects of poisonous gas, among his wounded comrades in a hospital hall at Pasewalk in Pomerania, and heard from the clergyman the latest news: the ‘November revolution’ and Germany’s capitulation; the tragic end of the first World War.
More than four years before, he had joined the war with enthusiasm, as a volunteer in a Bavarian regiment, not in an Austrian one, clearly showing thereby that he was prepared to die anytime for the German people and ‘for the Reich that embodied them,’[1] though not for ‘the State of the Habsburgs’—that artificial State of many nationalities. For he considered the war in no way as an Austrian concern, but as a struggle of the German people (including, naturally, those of Austria) ‘for their existence’[2]—as a just war. And, he had done his duty thoroughly; faithfully. And although he had, for months already, (especially since the general strike of 1917) been fearing —feeling—that some diabolical traitors’ intrigues were being carried on to rob the German front-soldier of a victory which he well deserved, yet he had not expected such an end, and so suddenly….
The grief, the indignation and temporary despair that took him over as he abruptly acquired ‘the most horrible certitude in his life’[3] are so eloquently described in Mein Kampf that nothing can throw more light upon the future, Führer’s state of mind than an extensive, quotation of his own words:
I could not remain any longer’ (i.e. remain hearing the news). ‘While my eyes once more stared into darkness, I sought my way back to the dormitory, threw myself upon my bed, and buried my burning head under the quilts and pillows.
Since the day I had stood before my mother’s grave, I had not wept. When, in my youth, Destiny had been mercilessly harsh to me, I had faced it with growing defiance. When during the long years of the war, death had taken many a dear comrade and friend of mine from our ranks, it would have seemed to me nearly a sin to complain—for they had died for Germany. And when, in the days of the terrible struggle, the slowly advancing gas had taken me in its grip, and begun to gnaw into my eyes, and when the fear of becoming blind for ever had made me feel, for a second, as though I would weaken, the voice of conscience had thundered to me: ‘Miserable wretch! You feel like weeping, while thousands are faring worse than yourself!’ And I had put up with my lot in silence. But now I could not help weeping. Now I experienced how completely every personal suffering fades away before the misfortune of one’s Fatherland.
So, it had all been in vain! In vain all our sacrifices, and all the hardships we had endured; in vain, hunger and thirst, for months without end; in vain, the hours in which, facing the terror of death, we had yet done our duty; and in vain, the death of two million men! Would not the graves of the hundreds of thousands who had gone forth full of faith in the Fatherland, never to return, break open and release the dumb heroes covered with mud and blood,—release them as revengeful spirits among the people at home, who had treated so disdainfully the highest sacrifice which a man can offer his country? Had they died for that, the soldiers of August and September 1914? Had the regiments of volunteers, in the autumn of the same year, followed for that the elder comrades? Had those boys of seventeen sunk for that into Flanders’ earth? Was that the object of the sacrifice that German mothers had brought the Fatherland when, with a grieving heart, they had sent the boys to their duty, never to see them, again? Had all that happened in order to enable, now, a handful of criminals to set their grip upon the Fatherland?!! … The more I tried, then, to think clearly about the monstrous event, the more my forehead burnt with indignation and shame. What was all the pain I felt in my eyes, compared with this wretchedness?
What followed, were appalling days and still worse nights. I knew that all was lost. Only fools—fools or … liars and criminals—could put their hope in the enemy’s mercy. During those nights, hatred grew in me, hatred against the originators of that deed.
In those days, I also became aware of my destiny. Now, I could only laugh at the thought of my own future, that had caused me such bitter worry only a short time before. Was it not ridiculous to build houses upon such foundations as this? At last it was clear to me that the very thing which I so often already had feared, without ever being able, in my heart, to believe it, had now happened.
Emperor William the Second had been the first German emperor to hold out his hand to the leaders of Marxism, in a gesture of reconciliation, without knowing that rascals have no honour. While they still held the Emperor’s hand in one of theirs, their other one was already seeking for the dagger.
With Jews, no pactising policy is possible, but only that of the hard ‘either—or.’
‘I decided to become a politician.’ [4]
This heart-rending autobiographical account could—historically—be described as: the passage of National Socialism from the stage of an expectant or latent incarnate Idea, to that of an active one.
Surely the incarnate Idea is, when not as old as Adolf Hitler himself, at least as old as his earliest awakening to socio-political, nay, to philosophical consciousness in general. And that took place very early: already in Linz, when not before. Yet, then, and in Vienna, although his interest in social and political problems grew and grew with the daily experience of injustice and misery, and still in Münick, after 1912, the future ruler continued to think of himself primarily as of a future architect. There may have been moments, of course, in which he thought, or at least felt, differently. There were such moments—one such moment at least, and a great one,—already in his life in Linz, if we are to believe Kubizek’s account of it.[5] But the artist’s immediate goal soon reappeared. Horrible as—in Vienna, at any rate—many of them doubtless were, the experiences of daily life were not sufficiently appalling to push it out of sight altogether. Nay, during the war, when more and more aware of the necessity of opposing to the forces of international Socialism a national organisation which would be free from the weaknesses of the Parliamentary system, Hitler had begun to think seriously of becoming politically active, he had merely visualised himself speaking in public ‘while carrying on his profession.’[6] Now, his profession, nay, his art,—for he still was, and could but remain, fundamentally, an artist,—was out of question. Every activity which was not to contribute directly and immediately to free Germany from the consequences and specially from the causes of defeat, was, out of question; and that, not merely because Adolf Hitler loved Germany above all things, but because that more-than-human intuition that classes him among the few great seers of mankind, told him that Germany’s real, deeper interest was—is, absolutely,—the real interest of Creation;—the ‘interest of the Universe,’ again to quote the immortal words of the Bhagavad-Gita. (And it is not an accident,—not a mere coincidence,—that I, a non-German Aryan intimately connected with England, Greece and India, should stress this fact. It is a sign; a symbol; the first expression of the homage of worldwide Aryandom to the latest Man ‘against Time’ and to the truly chosen Nation).
Out of the abyss of powerless despair—from that bed of, suffering upon which the nameless corporal Adolf Hitler lay weeping over Germany’s fate while his blinded eyes burned in their sockets, like red-hot embers; out of his appalling certitude that ‘all was lost,’ that ‘all had been in vain’—rose the defiant Will to freedom and Will to power of an invincible people and, beyond that, and greater than that, the perennial cosmic Will to Perfection in all its majesty; the will of the German soldier who had fought in Flanders and—identical to it; expressing itself through it,—the impesonal and irresistible Will of the eternal Warrior and Seer above Time and ‘against Time’; the Will of Him Who comes back age after age, ‘when all is lost,’ ‘when evil rules supreme,’ to re-establish on earth the reign of Righteousness.
From then onwards, the age-old Struggle for Truth—the Struggle ‘against Time’—was, in the West, to enter a new phase. It was to identify itself with the political struggle to free Germany from the bondage imposed upon her by the victors of 1918, no less than with the more-than-political one against the causes of physical and moral decay that were—and still are—threatening the existence of the natural aristocracy of the Aryan race. And the National Socialist German Labourers’ Party—the famous N.S.D.A.P., which Adolf Hitler soon evolved out of the tiny group of idealists (seven, including himself) originally called Deutsche Arbeiter Partei, which he joined in 1919—was to be the one agent of the everlasting Force of Light and Life amidst the growing darkness of the Dark Age. I say: the one; for, contrarily to all other so-called movements of regeneration, religious and secular, this political and yet infinitely more than political Movement, attacked the very root of historical decay as such: biological decay, consequence of sin against the primary natural Commandant of blood purity; in other words (from the standpoint of original Perfection), sickness; tangible, physical untruth and that moral untruth (that false conception of ‘man’) which stands to the back of it.
________________
[1] Mein Kampf, p. 179.
[2] Ibid., p. 178.
[3] Ibid., p. 222.
[4] Ibid., pp. 223, 224-225.
[5] Kubizek, pp. 140 and following.
[6] Mein Kampf, p. 192.
Chapter 5
Anglo-American power and German impotence
The main reason why Hitler withdrew from party management was his plan to write a ‘large book’, which he stated clearly in the declaration announcing his decision. This project began as a quasi-legal defence of his actions for the court. It soon developed into the idea of producing, as Hitler told Siegfried Wagner in early May 1924, a ‘comprehensive settlement of accounts with those gentlemen who cheered on 9 November’, in other words Kahr, Lossow and Seisser. No doubt hopeful of signing a sensational book with high sales, various publishers offered their services to Hitler, either in person or by letter. In time, however, the emphasis of the work changed again, probably in part thanks to some sort of explicit or implicit bargain with the Bavarian state to let sleeping dogs lie in return for a mild sentence. There were also positive reasons, however, for the new approach. Hitler wanted to use the relative peace of Landsberg to write a much broader manifesto elaborating the principles of National Socialism, charting a path to power for the movement and showing how Germany could regain her independence and great power status. The first volume of Mein Kampf, most of which was written or compiled in Landsberg, seems to have been largely a solo effort, with relatively little input from others. Julius Schaub, another inmate who later became his personal adjutant, recalled that Hitler wrote Mein Kampf ‘alone and without direct input from anyone’, not even Hess, who had joined him in Landsberg. Hitler typed the book himself, reading out or summarizing large sections to his fellow prisoners, who constituted an appreciative or at any rate a captive audience. Sometimes, he was moved to tears by his own words.
Incarceration gave Hitler a chance to read more widely and gather his thoughts. One of his main preoccupations in Landsberg was the United States, which he was corning to regard as the model state and society, perhaps even more so than the British Empire. ‘He ‘devoured’ the memoirs of a returned German emigrant to the United States. ‘One should take America as a model,’ he proclaimed. Hess wrote that Hitler was captivated by Henry Ford’s methods of production which made automobiles available to the ‘broad mass’ of the people. This appears to have been the genesis of the Volkswagen. Hitler envisaged that the automobile would further serve as ‘the small man’s means of transport into nature—as in America’. He also planned to apply methods of mass production to housing, and experimented with designs for a Volkshaus for families with three to five children which would have five rooms and a bathroom with a garage in large terraced settlements. He was equally determined not be outdone in the construction of ‘skyscrapers’, and looked forward to the consternation of the ‘Deutsch-Völkisch’ elements by putting the party headquarters into such an edifice. Quite apart from showing that Hitler had an interest in vernacular architecture, and not just in monumental public buildings, these plans prove that he was thinking of elevating the condition of the German working class through American style suburban and metropolitan modernity. This was the model of an ideal society against which he wrote Mein Kampf.
Modernity was not an end in itself, but a means by which the German people, especially the German working class and German women, could be mobilized in support of the project of national revival. Hitler exalted technological development—aeroplanes, typewriters, telephones and suspension bridges, and even domestic appliances. These would free German women from drudgery and enable them to be better wives producing more children. ‘How little our poor women benefit from progress,’ he lamented, ‘there is so much one can do to make [a woman’s life] easier with the help of technology! But most people still think today that a woman is only a good housewife if she is constantly dirty and working from early until late.’ ‘And then,’ Hitler continued, ‘one is surprised when the woman is not intellectual enough for the man, when he cannot find stimulation and recuperation.’ Worse still, he went on, this was ‘bad for the race’ because it was ‘obvious that his overtired wife will not have as healthy children as one who is well rested, can read good books and so on’. The link between what Hitler would later call the racial ‘elevation’ of Germany, technological progress and maintaining the standard of living is already evident here.
Part and parcel of this programme of racial improvement was Hitler’s support for what we would today call ‘alternative’ technology. ‘Every farm,’ he demanded, ‘which does not possess any alternative source of energy’ should set up a ‘wind motor with dynamo and rechargeable batteries’. This might not be possible in the current economic climate, Hitler continued., but it would be a viable long-term investment. He rejected the idea that technological change took the romance out of farming. ‘I couldn’t care less about a romanticism,’ he exclaimed, ‘which puts people behind frosted windows in the twilight, [and] which lets women age prematurely through hard work’. Hitler therefore sneered at the city folk who went into the country for a day, enthused about the scenery and then returned to their modem and efficient homes in the city. Hitler claimed to support ‘the preservation of nature’, but in his view it should take the form of national parks in the mountains. ‘Here too,’ Hitler concluded, ‘the Americans have made the right choice with their Yellowstone Park.’
In Landsberg, Hitler did not abate his ferocious hostility to international finance capitalism. He did, however, qualify some of his earlier ideas about ‘national’ economies. Significantly, he rejected the demands of the German automobile manufacturers to be protected against competition from Henry Ford through higher tariff barriers. ‘Our industry needs to exert itself and achieve the same performance,’ Hitler remarked. Once again, the United States was the explicit model.
Hitler was also taking on board the concept of Lebensraum. This was one of the key ideas of Hess’s teacher and patron Karl Haushofer, the doyen of German Geopolitik. He visited Hess in prison, bringing him copies of Clausewitz and Friedrich Ratzel’s ‘Political Geography’, one of the seminal geopolitical texts. While there is no hard evidence that Haushofer met Hitler on those occasions it is highly likely he did so, or at any rate that his ideas found their way to him. In mid July, there was a debate about Lebensraum at Landsberg, which began with some good-natured joshing in the garden and ended with Hitler’s ‘marvelling’ inner circle being provided with a lengthy definition of the term by Hess. Its essence was simple: every people required a certain ‘living space’ to feed and accommodate its growing population. The idea seemed to provide the answer to the main challenge facing the Reich, which was the emigration of its demographic surplus to the United States. This was part of an important shift in Hitler’s thinking, away from a potential Russo German alliance and the prevention of emigration through the restitution of German colonies, towards the capture of Lebensraum in the east, contiguous to an expanded German Reich. It had less to do with hatred of Bolshevism and eastern European Jewry, and more to do with the need to prepare the Reich for a confrontation or equal coexistence with an Anglo-America whose dynamism mesmerized Hitler more than ever.