web analytics

Tag: Adolf Hitler

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 24

Moreover, in Hitler’s view the war was by no means over. Germany was still the victim of international capitalism, whose continuing power he repeatedly attacked. He spoke of ‘international stock exchange and loan capital’ as the main ‘beneficiaries’ of the peace treaty. Ever since the ‘collapse of the Reich’, Hitler claimed, the country had fallen under ‘the rule of international, fatherlandless capital, independent of person, place and Nation’. [emphasis by Ed.]

Left, portrait of Adam Smith by John Kay. Considered by some as ‘The Father of Economics’ or ‘The Father of Capitalism’, Smith, who popularised the idea that capital has no flag, wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776 (look at the year of publication of his magnus opus!).

Except for the European Tom Sunic and the American Michael O’Meara, it strikes me that the bulk of white nationalist pundits have been blinded to see something so obvious: that, without a flag, sooner or later the Anglo-Saxon economic system was going to betray their ethnicity.

This is compounded in the American myth of those who emigrated fantasising about a city on a hill, self-understanding themselves as the new Israelites to the extent of admiring the real Jews and rolling out the red carpet to them in subsequent centuries. Why, unlike O’Meara and Sunic, can the racial right not see that they, along with the rest of the Anglo-Americans, have been empowering the enemy through this fatherlandless, flagless capitalist ideology? Hitler did get it:

International conferences—such as Genoa in April 1922—were simply condemned as ‘stock exchange conferences’. Hitler saw Jewish international capitalism and western democracy as linked. ‘International Jewish stock exchange capital, ‘he believed, ‘was the driving force of these western-democratic states.’ He set up the ‘equation’ of ‘democracy-capitalism-Jew’. For all these reasons, he argued, National Socialism was a ‘new force whose aim could always only be anti-capitalist’.

Hitler was not completely opposed to all forms of capitalism, though he sometimes gave that impression. He contrasted the blanket hostility of Social Democrats and Marxists to capitalism in general with his own distinction between allegedly pernicious and largely Jewish ‘international loan capitalism’ and nationally oriented ‘productive industrial capitalism’.

‘Factories and industrial capital,’ he told an audience of SA, ‘is national’ and ‘the capital of every country remains national’. For clarity, he stressed that National Socialism ‘struggled against every form of big capital, irrespective of whether it is German or Jewish, if it is grounded not in productive work, but in the principle of interest, of income without work or toil’.

Moreover, Hitler added, the NSDAP ‘battled the Jew not only as the sole bearer of this [form of ] capital’, but also because he ‘prevented ‘ the ‘systematic struggle’ against it. In Hitler’s view it was the determination of international capitalism to subjugate independent national economies which had led to the world war and the brutal peace settlement. This was the context in which he interpreted Allied attempts to control the Reichsbahn, the German national railways. Hitler accused the Jews of trying to ‘grab’ them, as part of a policy whose ‘final aim was the destruction of our national economy and the enslavement of our workforce’.

The Allied determination to annihilate Germany, Hitler believed, was demonstrated by their continuation of the blockade after the end of hostilities. ‘One wants to destroy us completely,’ he claimed, ‘one wants to make our children sick and to allow them to waste away’…

‘The Entente,’ he lamented, ‘advises us to emigrate in order to feed ourselves, and to make way for the Eastern Jews.’ Hitler, in other words, feared that Germany would become the victim of what is today called ‘population replacement’.

He frequently urged his audience to think of the ‘thousands of German emigrants’. This was the great trauma underlying Hitler’s whole world view: the continued haemorrhaging of the best elements of the Reich who had left the Fatherland in order to enlarge the population of Germany’s rivals, with the fatal results that had been seen in the Great War. Worse still, he argued, these best elements were being replaced by the Jewish dregs of central and eastern Europe in a kind of negative selection, designed to further undermine the racial coherence of the German people.

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 21

Munich was thus an ambivalent habitat for the young NSDAP. It was stony ground for the Nazis not only politically and culturally, but also physically. The authorities began to take an ever dimmer view of Hitler’s activities, especially when these disturbed public order. He spent two stretches in prison. He lost an important ally with the resignation of Ernst Pohner as president of the Munich Police in September 1921. A month later, Hitler was summoned to police headquarters for a serious caution following a series of street brawls and beer-hall battles.

The Volkischer Beobachter was repeatedly banned for publishing inflammatory articles. In March 1922, after his conviction for a breach of the peace, the Bavarian minister of the interior, Dr Franz Schweyer, seriously considered deporting Hitler to Austria, and the minister president, Count Lerchenfeld, made it clear to Hitler that he was in Bavaria on sufferance. The police watched Hitler closely.

Hitler remained determined to establish himself in Munich, but only as a beacon to inspire the rest of Germany and as a base from which to take over the Reich as a whole. ‘Munich must become a model,’ he wrote in January 1922, ‘the school but also the granite pedestal’ of the movement. ‘We do not have a Bavarian mission today,’ Hitler announced six months later, ‘rather Bavaria has the most important mission of its entire existence.’

Bavaria, on this reading, was not separate but rather ‘the most German state in the German Reich’. Munich was a sanctuary and a bulwark, certainly, but above all it was a sally-port. The special role Hitler envisaged for Bavaria in Germany was thus not as a separate or autonomous entity, as the federalists and particularists wanted, but as the vanguard of national renewal. ‘Not “away from Berlin”,’ Hitler intoned when discussing the relationship between Bavaria and the Reich, ‘but rather “towards Berlin”’ in order to ‘liberate it from the seducers of the German people’.

It would soon become clear that was a very different agenda to that of the generally monarchist and particularist Bavarian military and political elites.

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

Hitler, 19

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hitler and Gregor Strasser.

Categories
Indo-European heritage Music

Bridges

This is a response to the ongoing debate about my Wednesday post ‘Part of the System’.

I can’t weigh in on the issue Thankmar and Vlad Tepes debate because I woke up racially until after half a century of existence, and never had time to read in-depth the authors Thankmar or Vlad mention (e.g. The Edda, compilations of stories related to Norse mythology, and what scholars debate about it). But even from my ignorance of these classics, I can contribute my two cents.

Recall what on pages 149-156 of my book Daybreak I wrote about Johann Sebastian Bach in the context of what Thankmar says: Christian propaganda. I think that in what I wrote there is the key to this matter.

Let’s think about Hitler. He was indeed initiated spiritually with Richard Wagner, as Savitri well saw in her book. But when I saw my first Wagnerian opera I was surprised that, at the end, Tannhäuser repudiated Venus and invoked the Virgin Mary! Wagner acted as a transitional bridge between a purely Christian art (like Bach’s St Matthew Passion) and an art that, although still inspired by Christianity, already has pagan elements, like Tannhäuser or Parsifal.

In other words, we must be tolerant of these ‘bridges’. When the Third Reich was already underway, Richard Strauss, a fanatic Wagnerian, even left behind the Christian tail that Wagner still suffered from, and composed the symphonic poem I like best of his, Thus Spake Zarathustra, his opus 30. Strauss himself acknowledged that that symphonic poem was ‘freely inspired in Nietzsche’ and he also composed some operas. (Many years ago I was lent the visual DVD of Strauss’ Elektra, based on the Greek myth according to Sophocles’ tragedy.)

So, considering that musically Strauss was heavily influenced by Wagner, and that Hitler himself also was a fanatic Wagnerian, why not be tolerant of bridges? Ultimately, that bridge, from the Christian Bach to the half-pagan Wagner, lead to Strauss and eventually to us (as a child and pubescent I listened a lot of times to the LP we see on the left). It could even be argued, as I do in the featured post, that Hitler and Rosenberg themselves could be bridges to an even more refined NS than the one they promoted (an Aryan Jesus, etc.).

Because of the majesty of the music, I can enjoy Wagner’s Parsifal without being much bothered by the Christian inspiration precisely because it already represents a breakthrough, or bridge, to our side of the Wall.

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 17

(Left, NSDAP membership book.)

The NSDAP, he [Hitler] claimed, had been established on ‘the basis of an extreme racial outlook and rejects any form of parliamentarism’, including its present-day incarnation. It was intended to be quite different from all other ‘so-called national movements’, and so constructed that it would best serve to wage ‘the battle for the crushing of the Jewish-international domination of our people’. The NSDAP was also a ‘social or rather a socialist party’, whose statutes laid down ‘that the seat of its leadership was Munich and must remain Munich, now and for ever’.

This programme, Hitler continued, had been agreed as ‘immutable and inviolable in front of an audience of a thousand people, and invoked as a granite foundation in more than a hundred mass meetings’. Now, Hitler claimed, these principles had been violated by plans to merge with another party, by the agreement at Zeitz to move the headquarters to Berlin and by the prospect that they would be abjured in favour of the programme of Otto Dickel, which he condemned as a ‘meaningless, spongy [and] stretchable entity’. Specifically, Hitler objected to Dickel’s belief that Britain was emerging from under the thumb of the Jews and to his admiration for the Jew Walther Rathenau. He was interested in propaganda, not organization, and the power of ideas, not bureaucratic power…

Hitler averred that he made these demands ‘not because I crave power’ but because he was convinced that ‘without an iron leadership’ the party would soon degenerate from a National Socialist Workers Party into a mere ‘Occidental League’. Hitler had originally wanted to control the message rather than the party, but he now realized that he could not do the former without ensuring the latter.

It is not quite clear whether Hitler resigned with the intent of forcing the leadership’s hand, or whether he left in despair and decided to lay down the law only after attempts to win him back showed the underlying strength of his position. Even then, his demands were more modest than they sounded, being subject (as the law required) to membership vote. The ‘dictatorial powers’ were not requested for the running of the party in general but limited to the sphere that Hitler was primarily concerned about, namely the re-establishment and maintenance of ideological coherence. This is what underlay his demand to purge deviators, to oversee the absorption of other groups and the retention of Munich as an ideological ‘Rome’ or ‘Mecca’. The outcome, in any case, was the same. Hitler triumphed all along the line. Drexler caved in…

Hitler’s struggle with Drexler is common to most emerging political movements: the clash between the need for growth and the maintenance of ideological purity, which was the side which he took with such vigour. In July 1921, Hitler won his first political battle. He had become a politician. Whether Hitler had sought leadership or had leadership thrust upon him, it was clear that he now was increasingly not merely the de facto but the formal chief of the NSDAP. If he had once seen himself as a mere ‘drummer’ of the movement for the new Germany, he now aspired to be its leader.

Categories
2nd World War Third Reich

Blunder

My post for next Monday, the first of January, is being written for new visitors to this site. That will be the new featured post and I will use a metaphor analogous to the one I have been using about the psychological Rubicon: a metaphor that for now can be seen in this year’s featured post, ‘The River Nymph’. The next featured post, which, I reiterate, is for new visitors who are unaware of what the transvaluation of values is, says much the same but in an even more incisive way.

There is something I will say in the forthcoming featured post about which I can advance something for the moment.

Hitler and his inner circle of National Socialists, with whom he discussed the esoteric aspect of NS (his anti-Christianity—cf. Weikart’s book), didn’t have the opportunity to read mature mythicist literature as far as the historicity of Jesus is concerned.

Mythicism only matured in the present century, for example, with the work of mythicist Richard Carrier but also with non-mythicists like Richard Miller (see what we have said about Miller’s work in 2023). With this in mind, the forthcoming featured post will show a theological difference of mine with Hitler and Rosenberg in that, only up to our times, we can already begin to conceive, with recent scholarship on early Christian writings, that Jesus is as fictional a figure as the legendary King Arthur. The relevance of this for a 21st century National Socialism is capital, though this will be the subject of another post.

As far as today’s quote from Simms’ book is concerned (‘It was probably from him that Hitler got his determination that the Germans should not become a people like the [holocausted] Armenians’), I must add something.

While this issue of not realising the fictional nature of Jesus is understandable in Hitler’s biography, the military decision to invade the Soviet Union was Hitler’s mistake that led to what we have called here the Hellstorm Holocaust, the holocaust of Germans from 1945 to 1947 (which very few have heard of). Not all the generals of the Third Reich agreed with Operation Barbarossa, precisely because of the vast expanses of Russian territory and ‘General Winter’. In fact, the same thing happened to Hitler as to Napoleon in the previous century, so the artist ought to have listened to his generals.

Hitler was first and foremost an artist aware of the history of his people, as we saw in the previous day’s post, ‘Hitler 14’, with his books on art and history being the most widely read. Savitri Devi was absolutely right in saying that Hitler was first and foremost ‘Sun’, but that he failed in his ‘Lightning’. Had the solar artist been a little more patient, he would have prepared with the atomic bomb and then he would have become Kalki: the enemies of the Reich would have been incinerated with the Lightning of an Austrian avatar of this Indo-European god, and the Third Reich would now reign from the Atlantic to the Urals.

(Left, Vasily Malinin vs. Viktor Savinov—Leningrad). Operation Barbarossa was a serious mistake: a blunder as chess players say, like gambiting the queen and then realising we just cannot checkmate our opponent with a wrong sacrifice! And it bothers me that Hitler’s fans want to rationalise it by claiming that Stalin was about to invade Germany. The truth is that the Diktat the US imposed on Europe after the Hellstorm Holocaust was, as Francis Parker Yockey saw, even worse than if Stalin had invaded Europe. This interview with Srdja Trifkovic, who as a young man suffered under Yugoslav communism, is worth watching (Trifkovic lived on Gran Canaria, the Spanish island next to Africa where I also lived for almost a year).

But what I wanted to get at here is that, while I will continue to admire Hitler for the Sun he represented, it is clear that he didn’t read Sun Tzu when it comes to the point that, if you know your enemy like the back of your hand, you won’t lose any war.

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 16

During this period Hitler collaborated with a range of figures, not all of whom were party members, in an informal and often non-hierarchical way. His closest associate was Rudolf Hess, a First World War veteran who had grown up in Egypt; the date of their first encounter (which was probably in May 1920) is disputed, but we know for a fact that he joined the NSDAP in July 1920.

A key interlocutor was the Reichswehr officer Ernst Rohm, whose meetings are documented from early 1920, though the first contacts may have taken place a lot earlier.

Hitler had frequent dealings with the staff of the Völkischer Beobachter, especially its executive editor, the playwright Dietrich Eckart, and his deputy Alfred Rosenberg, a Baltic German refugee from the Russian Revolution, who would influence Hitler’s view of the Soviet Union; the editor was his old regimental comrade Hermann Esser. In a rare gesture, Hitler explicitly acknowledged his debt to Eckart for his help with the Völkischer Beobachter, and to Rosenberg for his ‘theoretical deepening of the party programme’.

In late 1920, Hitler met Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, who had witnessed and been appalled by the massacre of the Armenians as a German consul in the East Anatolian town of Erzurum during the First World War. It was probably from him that Hitler got his determination that the Germans should not become a ‘people like the Armenians’, that is, the butt of foreign oppressors.

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 15

Hitler giving a speech to supporters in a beer cellar, by Hermann Hoyer.

Over the next fifteen months, Hitler engaged in an intense programme of speeches in the major Munich beer halls; he practised his poses in front of a mirror.

By the end of the year, he had made twenty-seven appearances in Munich, and twelve outside, including Bad Tolz, Rosenheim and even Stuttgart. The audiences ranged in number from 800 to about 2,000. During late September and the beginning of October 1920, Hitler made repeated trips to Austria and to support the National Socialist Party in neighbouring Wurttemberg in their election campaign. In early 1921, a speech on Versailles at the Zirkus Krone was heard by about 5,600 people. One eyewitness, his first biographer Konrad Heiden, recalled that the secret of the success of his speeches was that the audience became ‘participants’ rather than ‘listeners’.

There were some missteps. Hitler’s opportunistic attempt to address a Munich crowd of 20,000 or so uninvited at a general rally outside the Feldherrnhalle in February 1921 was drowned out by the massed bands who struck up as he began to speak. It is also worth remembering that many members had never seen or heard Hitler in person. In general, though, his profile grew steadily, and he began to overtake the best-known orators, such as Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart, as the public face of the party. Despite his somewhat mysterious aura—Hitler refused to allow any photograph of him to be taken—he had become a recognizable ‘name’ in Bavarian politics . His relationship with the Reichswehr in Bavaria, which had effectively incubated him, remained good even after he had left the ranks.

In mid May 1921, Hitler met with the prime minister, Gustav von Kahr, marking his political recognition by ‘official’ Bavaria. He had ‘made it’.

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Racial right

Hitler, 14

By early 1920, Hitler had found two new homes. On leaving the army, he found lodgings as a sub-tenant of Ernst and Maria Reichert in Thierschstrasse no. 41, in the inner Munich suburb of Lehel. It was a very modest berth in a working- and lower-middle-class neighbourhood. Hitler was an easy-going resident, who never locked his doors and allowed the Reicherts to use his gramophone and books during his frequent absences. We do not know what exactly he read, but the best-thumbed surviving volumes from his collection relate to history and art, whereas those on race and the occult gave the impression of being unread. [emphasis added]

As we said recently, it is the poet who creates nations, not the scientist (e.g. the scientific books on race realism published by Jared Taylor). ‘The historical course offered by myth, in contrast to the inherently passive determinism of scientific rationalism’, writes Michael O’Meara, ‘is a choice for heroes, not for bookworms or computer hobbyists’. Also, history is the most important subject in the eyes of the raven, who spends his life fused to the Weirwood looking at the past of his civilisation. Like Bran, the raven’s pupil, Hitler perfectly understood this.

His new professional and political home was the DAP, which was renamed the ‘National Socialist German Workers’ Party’ (NSDAP) in the course of 1920. Hitler was by now a recognized quantity on the local right-wing scene…

Hitler believed political organization without propaganda was pointless. His main concern at this point was to use the party as a platform to disseminate and elaborate his ideas. He was involved in the drafting of the twenty-five point NSDAP (technically DAP) programme in February 1920, though it is unclear whether he can claim sole authorship. The first four related to national integrity, foreign policy and territorial expansion; the next four concerned race, mostly strictures against the Jews. Hitler turned Wilson’s idea of ‘self-determination’ back on the Allies with his call for ‘the unification of all Germans in a Greater Germany on the basis of the right of peoples to self-determination’. More than that, he demanded ‘Land and soil (colonies) to feed our people and to settle our surplus population’, the first unambiguous documented articulation of what subsequently became the Lebensraum concept. The geographic location of these future ‘colonies’ was not specified but at this time Hitler seems to have had overseas territories in mind…

Hitler paid close attention to the iconography underpinning the message. A black swastika of his design on a white circle with red background was first flown as the official party emblem at a meeting in Salzburg in August 1920. In one of his very few excursions into the occult, Hitler praised the swastika—as a ‘symbol of the sun’ which sustained a ‘cult’ of light among a ‘community based on Aryan culture’, not only in Europe, but in India… as well. The use of the old imperial black, white and red colours was a calculated affront to the black, red and gold of the Weimar flag.

‘The red is social,’ he later explained, ‘the white is national, and the swastika is anti-Semitic.’ By mounting the symbol diagonally, Hitler cleverly conveyed a sense of dynamism and movement.

Four months later, he oversaw the purchase of the Volkischer Beobachter newspaper and the Franz Eher Verlag, financed in part by a loan from a Reichswehr slush fund guaranteed by Dietrich Eckart, which gave the party a media platform with a print run of 8,000-17,000 appearing three times a week; after many ups and downs, the Volkischer Beobachter became a daily on 8 February 1923.

Here it is noticeable that the white nationalists haven’t really broken ideologically with the ethnocidal System. If they had broken away with it, they would have had the initiative to, at the very least, come up with a new flag very different from the American flag, as well as having incredibly different heroes. In my previous post, I quoted what Robert Morgan said yesterday. This is what we read on pages 175-176 of my book Daybreak: ‘Stars and Stripes? As Morgan explained to us, the personalities sculpted on Mount Rushmore represent ideals that would eventually lead to white decline’:

The Old America is dead? I don’t think so. Symbolic of the Old America, and chiseled into Mt. Rushmore, are four American ‘heroes’, whose exploits demonstrate the white man’s biggest problem: himself. First we have George Washington, who magnanimously freed his slaves, but only after his death, after which he had no further use for them. How many white Americans have been robbed, murdered, or raped by the descendants of those slaves? Quite a few, no doubt.

Thanks George!

Then comes Lincoln, who authorized the murders of hundreds of thousands of whites on his way to freeing the slaves and then turning them loose on his countrymen. His admirers say that, like Martin Luther King, he had a dream. But Abe’s dream was that all of the negroes would volunteer to leave these shores. How racist! Amazingly, and no doubt a big surprise to Abe, few wanted to do so.

Thanks a lot, ‘honest’ Abe!

Then we have Thomas Jefferson, a randy old fellow who was probably nailing his quadroon slave Sally Hemings, and likely had a child by her. His was the colonial prototype for the long American tradition of race mixing (a.k.a. white racial suicide).

Thanks Tom! You set a fine example.

Last is Teddy Roosevelt, the original progressive. He was an advocate for women’s suffrage, yet another step in the direction of the hallowed American cause of ‘equality’, and it’s painfully obvious how that turned out. Also, he favored a powerful federal government, just as do progressives today. To fund such a government he favored the income tax, a noose into which the American public eagerly thrust its neck.

The current unrest is only more of the same white racial self-destruction. So the Old America isn’t dead. Its spirit is just flying new flags, reorganized under the banners of BLM and antifa. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

An 1849 epigram by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, it means: ‘The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing’. As long as the American racial right doesn’t produce a new flag with colours different from those chosen by Hitler, but that the new flag displays the swastika, their movement will be la même chose: the American way of white ethnocide.

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Emigration / immigration

Hitler, 10

Hitler was well aware of the industrial strength of the British Empire and the United States, but in his view the struggle against the Anglo-Americans during the First World War was not decided solely by material factors. His vision of international politics was essentially human-centred. On Hitler’s reading, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been an epic demographic contest which the German Empire had spectacularly lost. She had failed to provide an outlet for her excess population either through economic or through territorial expansion, with the result that millions of Germans had emigrated. Meanwhile, her enemies built up huge empires which they could parlay into strength on the European battlefield. Hitler lamented ‘that the Entente sent alien auxiliary peoples to bleed to death on European battlefields’. He had personal experience of this, having confronted (British) Indian troops in 1915 and (French) Algerian Zouaves in 1918. Hitler’s anxiety deepened on beholding the Africans and Moroccans who formed part of the French occupation forces in the 1920s. He accused France of ‘only waiting for the warm season to throw an army of 800-900,000 blacks into [our] country to complete the work of the total subjugation and violation of Germany’. Hitler’s concern was thus not only racial, but strategic: that France would use the human reserves of Africa to oppress Germany, a weapon no longer available to Germany as she had lost her much smaller overseas empire as a result of the war.

The main threat posed by the European empires, however, was not the deployment of men from the ‘subject races’, but from the white settler colonies. Some of the most formidable British troops on the western front had come from Canada, Australia and New Zealand. They were numerous, well fed, fit, highly motivated, and often extremely violent. Worse still was the fact that the Germans whom the Reich had exported in the nineteenth century for want of land to feed them had come back to fight against her as American soldiers during the war. In later speeches, as we shall see, Hitler repeatedly came back to the moment he had encountered his first American prisoners. The emigration question was the subject of his second known major speech in September 1919, and it also underlay his next disquisition, which was on the internal colonization of Germany. His thoughts on that subject so impressed his sponsor Captain Mayr that he announced his intention ‘to launch this official report abridged or in full in the press in a suitable manner’. Emigration was part of daily life in post-war Germany, so much so that a whole newspaper in Munich, Der Auswanderer (‘The Emigrant’), was devoted to the topic.

That said, although contemporary concern with the emigration issue went well beyond Hitler, it does not seem to have enjoyed a particular salience in the broader inquest into the war. It thus represents his distinctive contribution to the debate on German revival and one of the most important lessons he drew from the war. Henceforth the emigration question, and the associated American problem, lay at the very heart of Hitler’s thinking.