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Tag: Adolf Hitler

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 37

For the first eighteen months or so after his political emergence in 1919, Hitler seems to have conceived of the revival of Germany as a long-term process, in which he would play a supporting role, and which he might not live to witness himself. Even after his shift from Trommler to Fuhrer in mid 1921, he advocated a steady process of ideological transformation rather than an insurrectionary takeover. During this period Hitler was an attentiste, waiting for his propaganda and the march of events to turn the German population in his direction. ‘People are still far too well off,’ he remarked to Hanfstaengl, ‘only when things are really bad will they flock to us.’

In the second half of 1922, however, in the first of many temporal shifts in Hitler’s career, he began to envisage a much shorter timeline. A new urgency crept into his rhetoric and actions; evolutionary languor gave way to revolutionary fervour. Germany, he argued, needed a ‘dictator’, that is, ‘a man who if necessary can go over blood and corpses’. His regime ‘could then be replaced by a form of government similar to that of the Lord Protector’, which in turn could be followed by a monarchy. This recourse to English history, which gives a sense of Hitler’s range of historical reference, was a clever pitch for conservative backing for a coup which would give him dictatorial power, but held out the prospect of an evolution via a German Cromwell and a General Monk to the restoration of the monarchy. Driving this process was Hitler’s growing conviction not only that he alone could save the country, but that a perfect storm of domestic challenges and external threats made it imperative that he do so soon. Time was speeding up. Germany was out of joint, and Hitler was more and more convinced that only he could put things right.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 36

There was an important shift in Hitler’s spatial thinking around 1922, however. He came to see eastward expansion as the solution. ‘In terms of foreign policy,’ Hitler said in December 1922, ‘Germany should prepare for a purely continental policy’ and ‘avoid violating British interests’. ‘One should try to destroy Russia with the help of Britain,’ he continued. ‘Russia,’ Hitler went on, ‘would provide sufficient soil for German settlers and a wide area of activity for German industry.’ Though he had not yet alighted on the phrase Lebensraum, a further major plank of Hitler’s thinking, the need for territorial enlargement to the east in order to secure the food supply of the German people and staunch the haemorrhage of emigration, was now in place. This was a policy primarily driven by fear and emulation of Anglo-America rather than anxiety about eastern communism or a desire to eliminate the Jews living there…

Hitler had said much less than one might expect about the Soviet Union, and his fear of communism was dwarfed by that of capitalism. Even more remarkably, though there were some routine scatter-gun imprecations against the Poles in specific contexts to do with disputed territories in the east, he had shown no signs of a blanket hostility towards Slavs in general or the Russian people in particular. What later became the Lebensraum conception was visible, but only in outline. His intellectual formation was not yet complete.

His authority in the party, by contrast, was now well established.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Benito Mussolini

Hitler, 34

[Hitler] enthused about Italy, where Mussolini and his fascists seized power in late October 1922 through his iconic ‘March on Rome’. Shortly after, Hitler remarked coyly: ‘one calls us German fascists’, adding that he did not want to go into ‘whether his comparison is true’. He was soon more forthright, demanding ‘the establishment of a national government in Germany on the fascist model’. A year later, he told an interviewer from the Daily Mail that ‘If a German Mussolini is given to Germany, people would fall down on their knees and worship him more than Mussolini has ever been worshipped.’

Hitler now broke with the mainstream nationalist and revisionist consensus, which demanded that Italy surrender German-speaking South Tyrol. He argued that any new ‘national government’ would only be able to establish itself if it secured some major victories. These would be hard to achieve on the economic front, Hitler believed, and so the best bet was the incorporation (Anschluss) of Austria. This would require not only British but Italian approval. Moreover, Germany should align itself more generally with Mussolini’s Italy, ‘which has experienced its national rebirth and has a great future’. For both of these reasons, he condemned the ‘palaver’ about South Tyrol of the other nationalists in the strongest terms, emphasizing that ‘there are no sentiments in politics, only the cool calculation of interest’.

April 20th

To the god-like Individual of our times;
the Man against Time;
the greatest European of all times;
both Sun and Lightning:

ADOLF HITLER,

as a tribute of unfailing love and loyalty, for ever and ever.

—Savitri Devi

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Miscellany

Hitler in English

Yesterday a terrific idea occurred to me: Why not translate all of Hitler’s public speeches with the voice of an English speaker whose native language is English, and upload them to the Internet, adding subtitles so that his message is clear and transparent?

When speaking a couple of days ago about Miguel Serrano we hinted that, in addition to an exoteric Hitlerism, there is an esoteric Hitlerism: the latter, what we try on this site. But normies need exoteric Hitlerism (esoteric Hitlerism was only for the SS, or the few initiates in 21st century NS). And what better than the words of the Führer himself dubbed into English?

If it were possible to do so, I think it would be a great emotional bomb for listeners, who have never heard Uncle Adolf in his own words (only through the filter of malicious Allied propaganda).

But to carry out this idea, a team is required. My native language is neither German nor English. The equipment would require at least one native English speaker with a clear voice, as well as a technician who synchronizes the recording with the image as is done in movies: practically the work of a film studio.

Although it would be laborious and perhaps expensive, the result would be very impressive, and I suppose that a huge number of English speakers would visit that channel to hear Uncle Adolf’s message for the first time in their lives.

Exoteric Hitlerism is for the masses!

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) French Revolution

Hitler, 33

Le Serment du Jeu de paume by Jacques-Louis David (c. 1791), depicting the Tennis Court Oath.

More immediately relevant to Germany’s predicament were the dramatic recent examples of national revival, where peoples had bounced back from decline or catastrophic defeat. Perhaps surprisingly, Hitler was open to inspiration from France. ‘The French Revolution was national and constructive,’ he argued, ‘whereas the German one wanted to be international and to destroy everything.’ Hitler took a similarly positive view of later French radicalism. ‘When France collapsed at Sedan,’ he wrote, ‘one made a revolution to rescue the sinking tricolour!’ ‘The war was waged with new energy,’ he continued, and ‘the will to defend the state created the French Republic in 1870’, thus restoring ‘French national honour’. This shows that Hitler’s fundamental objection was not to the ‘ideas of 1789’, which he hardly ever mentioned. His real trauma—to which we will return later—was the fragmentation of Germany beginning with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.

The way I quote from Brendan Simms’ book may seem strange. I read through it and, when I come across a passage that requires comment, I pause and comment on it here.

The passage above, for example, strikes me as remarkable because it shows us a young Adolf who was unaware that the egalitarian ideas of 1789 were already symptomatic of a cancer in which Christian ethics were secularised to be metastasised in subsequent centuries. Recall that the French had been inspired by the American Revolutionary War of 1775-1783 and that in turn these American ideals were inspired by Protestant ethics (those who haven’t read Tom Holland’s Dominion should at least read our excerpts now). The young Hitler, naturally, didn’t have all this in mind. He was first and foremost a politician, not exactly a philosopher and certainly not, to use my metaphor, a visionary who sees the remote past in a cave north of the Wall (for example, to realise that Protestantism is behind today’s mass psychosis if we psychoanalyse the West from the remote past).

One of the things that distinguishes me compared to the American organisation founded by George Lincoln Rockwell is that, unlike the Commander, I am convinced that National Socialism must be understood as an organism in continuous development. And NS is developing even in the darkest age of the West in which Savitri Devi used the metaphor of ‘gold in a furnace’, in the sense that all the chaff burns in the burning furnace and only the element gold, which being a chemical element cannot burn there, will survive it.

Although Savitri came up with this metaphor at a time when the denazification of Germany was in full swing, in our time it could be said that the fire of that furnace has already burnt up all the chaff, except for people like us who continue to believe in Uncle Adolf’s ideals.

But Uncle Adolf couldn’t have known what we now know! His untimely death in 1945 prevented him from realising the levels of anti-white delirium to which the white man would fall after the decades-long process of trying to demonise NS throughout the West!

A mature NS man has to take into account the darkest hour for the white man and explain it. One oblique way to do this is to realise that American white nationalism has gone astray. It is at a dead end, as I said this morning in this thread.

It is high time to be humble; to retrace our steps from that alley, and return to the main avenue leading us to a National Socialism of the 21st and 22nd centuries. But I don’t see that humility anywhere on the racial right…

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 32

Hitler was also increasingly interested in the United States, which he came to regard as the repository of (in his view) all the best European racial elements, including the supposedly better sort of Germans. He remarked that, unlike Germany, which admitted swarms of eastern Jews, ‘yellow people are not allowed to settle in America’. In August 1922 he was introduced to Kurt Lüdecke, who had spent some time on business in the United States and whom Hitler would later send as an emissary across the Atlantic. In the middle of that month, Rudolf Hess wrote on Hitler’s behalf to the legendary automobile manufacturer, and fervent anti-Semite, Henry Ford for support. Moreover, Anglo-America was also becoming interested in Hitler. He had appeared on the radar of the British Foreign Office as early as 1920, and by later 1922 he was firmly established in their minds as a figure to be reckoned with, but there was no attempt to make contact with him.

By contrast, the United States embassy, probably influenced by Mussolini’s coup in Italy, decided to take a closer look at this rising politician. In November 1922, the US assistant military attaché to Germany, Captain Truman Smith, came down from Berlin and met with Hitler on 20 November. Hitler argued that he was America’s best chance of keeping the Bolsheviks out of Germany, condemned monarchy as ‘an absurdity’, claimed that ‘dictatorship’ was the only answer, denied any plans for a war against France and railed against ‘the present abuse of capital’. To be sure, these were all things that the American wanted to hear—apart from the remarks on capitalism—but they also represented Hitler’s genuine views. One way or the other, the two men—both Wagnerians—seem to have hit it off. A ‘marvelous demagogue’, Smith wrote a few days later. ‘I have rarely listened to such a logical and fanatical man. His powers over the mob must be immense.’

It was Smith who put Hitler in touch with Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl immediately after their meeting. Hanfstaengl epitomized the relationship between Germany and the United States, which was to play such a central role in Hitler’s thinking and policy over the next twenty years or so. Hanfstaengl’s maternal grandfather, Wilhelm Heine, had emigrated to America as a liberal refugee from the failed 1848 revolution. He reached the rank of brigadier-general in the Union Army and served as a pallbearer at Lincoln’s funeral. Hanfstaengl’s father owned a large art business in Munich. Hanfstaengl himself was partly brought up in the United States, where he attended Harvard University and was personally acquainted with the young Franklin Delano Roosevelt. From 1912, he had run the New York branch of his father’s business. Hanfstaengl spent the war—which killed a brother fighting on the German side—in America. The business was ruined by the American entry into the conflict and the associated ‘Trading with the Enemy Act’. Hanfstaengl became an enemy alien: the insider had become an outsider.

Over the next year, Hanfstaengl and Hitler were in almost daily contact. Hanfstaengl impressed upon Hitler not only the immense industrial and demographic power of the United States, but the fact that every German had a close relative there or in some other part of the world, something of which Hitler was already well aware. He argued that the party needed to reach out to the world through a coordinated foreign press policy. Hanfstaengl now became effectively the NSDAP’s external media liaison officer. He also entertained Hitler with his piano, playing from a repertoire which included not only Wagner but Harvard football marches. Captain Mayr later recalled the ‘American methods of salesmanship’ used to push out the Nazi message. The United States thus increasingly became a model as well as a rival.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Racial right

Hitler, 30

Hitler therefore espoused ‘socialism’, but not as the Social Democrats, the Independent Socialists or the communists knew it. ‘National’ and ‘social’, he argued, were ‘two identical terms’. ‘True socialism teaches the most extreme performance of one’s duties,’ Hitler explained, ‘real socialism in the highest form of the Volk.’ ‘Marxism is not socialism,’ he claimed, ‘I shall take socialism away from the socialists.’ This was what the words ‘worker’ and ‘socialist’ in the party’s name meant. There was ‘no room’, Hitler said, for ‘class-conscious proletarians’ in the party, just as there was no place either for a ‘class-conscious bourgeois’. He repeatedly reached out to workers. All this explains Hitler’s ambivalence towards communists, whom he regarded not only as good men led astray, but as temperamentally more congenial than the lukewarm bourgeois who clove to the safe middle path.

This is indeed interesting, for it shows the gulf between German National Socialism and American white nationalism: something George Lincoln Rockwell didn’t understand because biographies like Simms’ didn’t exist in his time. (Although this English scholar is anything but a NS sympathiser, his prose portrays the ideals of the Führer better than the crude and simplistic propaganda that was circulated in the US in Commander Rockwell’s time.)

‘I would rather be strung up in a Bolshevik Germany,’ he averred, ‘than be made blissful in a French southern Germany.’ One observer noted that Hitler ‘was courting the communists’, saying that ‘the two extremes, communists and students, should be brought together’. The centre ground, he claimed, was full of useless ‘lickspittles’ (Schleimsieder), whereas ‘the communists had fought for their ideal with weapons and only been led astray’. They only need to be led towards the ‘national cause’. With German communists, Hitler hated the sin, but loved the sinner.

Alas, any attempt to imitate German NS on the other side of the Atlantic would run into formidable difficulties. Imagine how (almost) impossible it would be to convince the racial right that, for the fourteen words, capitalism is even worse than communism and that the worship of Mammon must be transvalued to these Hitlerian ideals if the sacred words are to be fulfilled (read the last page of The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour).

To boot, a century ago Hitler was referring to a Germany composed basically of Aryans. In today’s polluted America, such a transvaluation couldn’t even be preached without openly stating that the proposed socialism is solely for the benefit of Aryans. In other words, to implement Hitler’s ideals on this side of the Atlantic the dictators of the new state would first have to become Himmlers to achieve an ethnic cleansing similar to the Pierce Diaries.

Can you see why I no longer visit the sites of the American racial right? Almost all white nationalist information sources are cleverly written to pacify whites back into the Christian and neo-Christian fold. And it all has to do with what we on this site have called slaves of our parents’ introjects. I know no one understands me on this point but my autobiographical findings, or what I have written about mental disorders (for example what I said yesterday in my postscript about narcissism), provide the key to understanding how these introjects still hold the Aryan in bondage.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Democracy John Stuart Mill

Hitler, 29

Hitler rejected the ‘purely economic way of looking at things’, which he called the ‘greatest mistake of German policy in the past decades’. ‘The hoped-for peaceful seizure of [world] power through our economy,’ he continued, ‘has been a failure.’ ‘Industrialization [and] the peaceful capture of the world,’ Hitler claimed, were doomed to fail, because one ‘did not consider that there can be no economic policy without the sword [and] no industrialization without power’. ‘The economy,’ he explained, ‘is only of secondary importance.’ ‘The main thing,’ Hitler stressed, ‘is national pride, [and] love of country.’ The primacy of politics in Hitler’s thinking could not have been more clearly expressed.

Calvin Coolidge was born in Massachusetts, a state founded by English Puritans. Compare the above quote with that famous phrase by Coolidge, the 30th president of the US: ‘The business of America is business’ in the sense that his was the nation of pure materialism. I remember, when I lived in California in the 1980s, the words of President Ronald Reagan, who wanted a globalised world where ‘the market reigned supreme’.

The key question, Hitler stated, was not the state form itself, but what arrangement served the German people best in its quest to escape external subjection. Here there was remarkably little shift in his views throughout the early 1920s. The issue was not, he argued in April 1920, whether Germany should be ‘a monarchy or a Republic’, but rather ‘which state form was best for the people’. ‘We need a dictator of pure genius if we want to rise again.’ ‘We do not fetishize forms of government,’ he explained in November 1921, ‘the only thing that is decisive is the spirit which sustains it. The only consideration must be the welfare of the entire German people.

Compare this with the forums of American white nationalism, which endorse democracy and in recent years have suggested that their visitors vote for this or that candidate. And the racialists on the other side of the Atlantic are no better. At the only BNP rally I have attended I spoke to a couple of senior members, who informed me that their aims were strictly democratic, not fascist.

He called for the nationalization of the entire banking and financial system, and thus the ‘breaking of interest slavery’, a term he had borrowed from Gottfried Feder. His aim here was not so much public ownership in the Marxist sense, as national control over the levers of international financial manipulation. Hitler had not yet called for the physical destruction of world Jewry, but the elimination of German Jewry was already implicit, at least in the context of a future war, in case they might once again act as fifth columnists. In the Gemlich letter of September 1919, he had already called for the ‘complete removal of the Jews’, and in a letter of August 1920, one correspondent reports that Hitler believed that ‘the bacillus’ must be ‘exterminated’ in order to ensure the survival of the German people. One way or the other, his domestic policy was essentially foreign policy.

Compare this with the first American president, who stated that it would be bigoted, in the new nation, to discriminate against Jewry. So who caused their empowerment in today’s world?

Unlike the Judeo-reductionism in vogue in white nationalism and even the Gemlich letter of September 1919, the conceptual framework for understanding the West’s dark hour can already be gleaned from texts by Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill.

In On Liberty Mill concludes that in former times, when it was proposed to burn atheists, charitable people used to suggest their confinement in a madhouse. Mill said that he wouldn’t be surprised if they saw that in his day because of the ‘tyranny of the majority’ that Jefferson and Madison so feared: a tyranny that doesn’t tolerate eccentricity.

And this is the central problem, since egalitarian tyranny is based on the feelings of the majority, and that feeling was programmed in the Aryan collective unconscious since the time of Constantine, with those Pauline words that there is no longer a Jew or a Greek, etc.

In On Liberty Mill didn’t so much propose to defend the rights of the eccentric individual—an atheist in Victorian England for example—against the state. He proposed to defend his rights against society itself: a giant Leviathan. That is why the First Amendment has failed utterly, in the US, to defend us. The majority society, even without the arm of the state, can cancel the dissenter (as it cancelled the previous incarnation of The West’s Darkest Hour when it was hosted elsewhere).

For Mill, his great mission was to say what he thought of modern society, especially of the power of public opinion over the outsider. As in Christendom, the collectivist solution proposed by Rousseau and post-French Revolution Europe fears the Other and allows no edges. However, a homogeneous construct determined to establish a norm of equality is a form of despotism. Liberal collectivism is opposed not only to National Socialism but to Pindar’s ideal Become what you are!, realise yourself; and it is also opposed to the Romantic ideal of the individual’s right to unfold his full potential, exemplified in Goethe.

On social pressure (which, if we use the parable of the sower, prevents the National Socialist seed that Rockwell wanted to sow in the US from blossoming) Tocqueville wrote that the kind of oppression by which democratic nations are threatened is very different from what has ever existed. He added that we shall find no prototype of this in historical memory; that he sought in vain for an expression to convey the idea of this new socio-political animal, and that the old words ‘despotism’ and ‘tyranny’ were inappropriate. ‘We are faced with something new’, he wrote.

Tocqueville’s remarks left a deep imprint on the thinking that Mill would express later in On Liberty, who confessed that he had noticed that the aim of democracy wasn’t, as claimed, to protect the interests of everyone but simply the interests of the majority (what Voltaire called canaille, and I call Neanderthals).

Tocqueville and Mill noticed some unintended consequences of modern democracy. In democratic nations the political force of the majority, the canaille, has become a force that surpasses that of the old tyrannies; though the manner of exercising such force is far more subtle, and infinitely more difficult to detect than that of a classical tyranny. The reason for this is that the values of the majority surround us as much as the ocean surrounds the fish. The invisibility of this soft totalitarianism is the corollary of democracy, the rule of the demos: the omnipresent people or mass.

The mass, the ‘Neanderthals’, form their opinion through the school and the Jew-controlled media. Mill believed that the self-educated individual was the antidote to this new form of mass control. For example, no organisation denounced the Inquisition over the centuries of its existence. It was individuals, often isolated individuals, who saw the crimes of the Imperial Church; and from Mill’s century to ours only individuals like Solzhenitsyn have been able to expose, in a big way, other kinds of crimes. That’s why Mill loved the distinct individual so much and feared the blind masses, and he was suspicious of democracy as potentially the most oppressive form of government.

The predominant note in Mill’s writings is not utilitarianism. On Liberty is the clearest exposition of the views of those who desire a tolerant society for the different individual; for example, he who advocates race realism. Mill was the intellectual answer to Rousseau. What he came to value most was the spark of individual genius, the human anomaly; and in On Liberty, which he began writing in 1855, he loved the independent thinker, the solitary worker; the dissident, the eternal questioner of established values, the one who questions the dogmas of the masses and their prejudices; in a word, the outsider who today is personified in he who doesn’t subscribe to the dogma of egalitarianism of race, gender and sexual orientation.

I would like to end this comment with the words I addressed to Gaedhal on Monday: ‘One of the things that white nationalists have never understood is that Europe should already be under one German Reich. Neither the Europeans nor the Americans nor the Australians are capable of governing themselves without a good Führer, as seen with this triumph of democracy and Judeo-liberal values after WW2. Savitri taught me to see an inverted world like the inverted pyramids, which I even illustrated in her book with triangles on pages 172 and 177’.

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

Hitler, 27

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

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

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

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