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Tag: Adolf Hitler

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'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.

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'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’.

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'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.

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'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.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Judeo-reductionism

Hitler, 9

Brendan Simms, professor of history, University of Cambridge.

Note that Simms’ volume—the hard copy in the hardcover edition I own is over 900 pages long—is replete with endnotes, so every biographical claim about Adolf Hitler’s intellectual odyssey that we see in this volume is backed up by primary sources. Although in years past I have browsed through other voluminous biographies of Hitler that have been selling in mainstream bookstores, I didn’t buy them because I wasn’t motivated by the POV of the biographer in question (e.g., Ian Kershaw’s volumes). The revisionism of another normie on the other hand, Simms, really caught my attention. Let’s continue quoting what Simms wrote in chapter 3 of Hitler: Only the World Was Enough.

Hitler put the inquest into the defeat at the heart of his world view. The alleged fractures in German society played an important role here, the ‘inner internationalism’ to which he had referred during the war itself. By this Hitler primarily meant the Social Democrats and Independent Socialists (USPD), who allegedly put loyalty to their class comrades over that to the nation; it was their internationalism, not their socialism, that he objected to. It was the same anxiety as over capitalism, which Hitler rejected in its global, but, as we shall see, not necessarily in its local ‘national’ form. He also took aim at German particularism, especially in Bavaria, which threatened the integrity of the Reich.

The principal internal enemy, however, was the Jews, who had ‘stabbed Germany in the back’, although Hitler rarely used this precise phrase. All this has given the impression that Hitler, like so many other Germans, sought to blame the defeat primarily on internal scapegoats rather than facing up to the strength of the Entente. In fact, Hitler never subscribed to a monocausal [bold & red added by Ed.!] domestic explanation for the disaster and much of his thinking, especially the later quest for Lebensraum, would be inexplicable if he had. Eliminating the Jews and healing the domestic rifts inside Germany were necessary conditions for the revival of the Reich, but not sufficient ones.

I bolded the above because I was unaware that a renowned historian had used the word I have used on this site in my dispute with white nationalists, whom I have branded as ‘monocausalists’ in the sense that they have refused to see other factors, besides Jewish subversion, that have been contributing to Aryan decline. Now it turns out that an academic, Simms, says the same thing I say about Hitler even though his POV is altogether different.

The point is to find out whether Simms is right about Hitler. And if he is, one can use his information simply from the POV of the 14 words.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) 1st World War

Hitler, 4

The third chapter of Simms’ book is entitled ‘The Colonisation of Germany’ and begins with these words:

The immediate post-war years were a period of national disgrace for Germany. Its monarchy banished, shorn of large tracts of territory by the Versailles settlement and saddled with a huge reparations bill, the Reich was plunged into profound economic, political and psychological dislocation. Foreign soldiers, some of them of colour, occupied substantial parts of the country. Germany had fought the world and lost; now many felt she was a colony of the global system.

The very biological substance of the German people seemed to be at stake, as they grappled with the continuing blockade and then the prospect of long-term immiseration. Hitler experienced these travails both personally and politically. His own situation was even more marginal than most. He found his way through the turbulent aftermath of the war with difficulty. Hitler was also even more exercised than most Germans about the state of the Reich. He looked for answers, and he soon found them.

Hitler identified the root cause of Germany’s humiliation as the power of the Anglo-American and Jewish international capitalism, which used various instruments, in particular revolutionary communism, to keep the Reich in subjection. With the help of others, but essentially under his own steam, Hitler began to develop an ideology to make sense of the world around him. By the end of this period, Hitler had undertaken a comprehensive diagnosis of the Reich’s ills, though he had yet to suggest a cure. Given the depths to which Germany had fallen, Hitler expected the national revival would take generations.

Shortly after the war ended, Hitler was discharged from hospital. Then according to Simms came three decisive events. First, Hitler was chosen by his commanders to serve in the propaganda and education section of the army, headed by Captain Karl Mayr. This indicated, according to the author of Hitler, an understanding that he had an aptitude for such work. Secondly, Hitler was elected Vertrauensmann—a person to be trusted—by the High Command, which shows that he had by then won the support of a section of his comrades. The third event was the news of the humiliating conditions of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of June 1919.

German delegate Johannes Bell signing the Treaty of Versailles in the Hall of
Mirrors, with various Allied delegations sitting and standing in front of him.

 
The following month Hitler took part in a debate in his Reichswehr unit; three days later he delivered a speech on the peace terms. Simms informs us that this was Hitler’s first major political statement on record. Although the text hasn’t survived, the content can be deduced from comments on it. The next day Hitler spoke on the subject of ’emigration’. Two days later, a Reichswehr report states that Hitler had given ‘a very good, clear and spirited lecture on capitalism during which he touched, indeed he had to touch, the Jewish question’.

Simms comments that this was Hitler’s first recorded reference to Jews, adding that it was made in the context of capitalism, not Bolshevism.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) 1st World War

Hitler, 3

Adolf Hitler would look considerably different 20 years later.

In March 1917, Hitler returned with his unit to the regimental barracks. Shortly afterwards, List’s men witnessed the heavy Canadian attack on the Vimy Ridge. And then they were directly confronted by fierce British attacks during the Battle of Arras. Then, in the late summer of 1917, the List Regiment returned to Geluveld for the Third Battle of Ypres, during which it was brutally pounded by British artillery for over a week. The combination of high explosives, shrapnel and gas caused terrible casualties. Hitler was directly involved in the fighting, as his regiment’s barracks stood in the way of the British advance towards the Ypres salient.

Meanwhile, the United States entered the war on the side of the Allies in early April 1917. This decision was seen by many on both sides of the Atlantic as an act of Anglo-Saxon solidarity directed against the Teutons. Millions of Americans, many of them foreign-born, prepared to cross the Atlantic.

The List Regiment was deployed to support the major German offensive in the spring of 1918. In late March, while advancing just behind the assault troops, they encountered French soldiers from the colonies, Algerian Zouaves. Then, in mid-1918, the List Regiment encountered Americans for the first time, at the Second Battle of the Marne near Reims. Here they were forced to retreat quickly, but not without taking some prisoners. Two of them were taken by Hitler to the brigade barracks.

Colin Ross, who would later advise Hitler on the United States, and who was then serving on the western front, remembers not only the courage of the American soldiers, but also their frequent calling out to each other in German and the large number of German-speaking prisoners.

By now, the Allied blockade, control of the sky and numerical superiority were beginning irreversibly to wear down Hitler’s regiment.

The German offensive was running out of steam in the face of overwhelming Allied superiority in manpower, material and energy. General Ludendorff famously spoke at the time of ‘the black days of the German army’. Although Hitler was again decorated in August 1918, this time with the Iron Cross First Class, German morale collapsed under the heavy bombardment. One report lamented that ‘enemy aircraft completely controls the skies’.

The growing wave of American soldiers arriving throughout September exacerbated the general feeling of despondency. Since October, more than half a million rested Americans entered the war and Africa, Australia, India and Canada continued to send whole units of soldiers to Europe.

After more than four years of war, the List Regiment had had enough. In mid-October, Hitler was wounded in a gas attack during a British bombing raid. A week later, he was sent to the Prussian Reserve Hospital northeast of Berlin. There he learned of the Armistice and the German surrender on 11 November 1918. Thus ended Hitler’s four-plus years of war.

Above all, Hitler had come away from the war with a keen sense of power of the Entente, especially the British, in his eyes the most formidable of the ‘world of enemies’ against which he had battled in vain those four years…

In short, by the end of the war, Hitler had the ‘world of enemies’ firmly in his sights. The struggle against the Jews, in their capitalist or communist guises, had not yet begun, however, and nor had he explicitly targeted the United States.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) 1st World War

Hitler, 2

The second chapter of Brendan Simms’ book is entitled ‘Against a World of Enemies’. Although I will follow the prose of his abridged paragraphs closely, in order not to violate the copyright of his book I will be rephrasing it (and perhaps I will do the same with the rest of the book Hitler: Only the World Was Enough). Although my paraphrases closely follow Simms’ abbreviated paragraphs, only when I quote him verbatim will I indent the quotations.

This latest Hitler biographer, who as I said in a previous post published his book in 2019, begins his chapter by saying that the young Adolf reacted enthusiastically to the outbreak of the First World War, and although he doesn’t publish the following photograph, he mentions it:

Adolf Hitler attends a rally in the Odeonsplatz
to celebrate the declaration of war in 1914.

The enthusiastic Hitler volunteered to fight with the Bavarian army and was drafted into a regiment known as the List Regiment, the name of its commander, which included not only volunteers but also forced recruits. During weeks of training, Hitler learned to use the regulation rifle and was then sent to reinforce the German advance through Belgium and northern France.

Hitler did not, in other words, react to the outbreak of war by disappearing. Instead, he immediately volunteered for the German (technically, the Bavarian) army, an unusual choice. In August 1914, therefore, Hitler definitively turned his back not just on Austria-Hungary, but opted decisively for Germany. It was his first major documented political statement.

But the curious thing is that, at this point, Hitler’s main enemy was England. The first letter on record after enlistment announces his hope that he ‘would get to England’ apparently as a German invasion force. The target was not the Tsarist Empire, although the Russians were at that time a danger to Prussia.

The List Regiment did indeed encounter the British at Geluveld, Wytschate and Messines in the Belgian region of Flanders. Hitler took part in several frontal attacks. He himself refers to ‘heaviest battles’. Despite an initial triumph, the Bavarians were eventually driven out of Geluveld. Hitler was promoted to Gefreiter, Private First Class. Since then he claimed ‘I can say that I risked my life daily and looked death in the eye’. On 2 December Hitler was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class. ‘It was’, he wrote, ‘the happiest day of my life’.

In a letter of February 1915, Hitler lamented the loss of life in a struggle against a ‘world of international enemies’ and expressed the hope not only that ‘Germany’s external enemy’ would be crushed but that her ‘inner internationalism would disintegrate’. These were times when the word globalisation wasn’t yet in use. In the following letter from mid-1915 Hitler recounted a bomb hit from which he was ‘rescued as by a miracle’, and rejoiced that Germany was ‘at last mobilising opinion against England’, further evidence of his concern about Great Britain.

Hitler’s next major battle, in March 1915, was preceded by even more massive bombardments by the British, followed by the first encounter with Imperial troops from the Indian Army. A month later Hitler had to face more Empire units, especially Canadian ones. In time, the array of exotic helmets in the enemy trenches—including turbans and beaked hats—gave the men of the List Regiment the sad impression that the world was up in arms against them (something that would be repeated in the Second World War). This truthful impression was reinforced the following year. Hitler was back in action in French Flanders in May-June 1916. This time the List Regiment had to face Australians and New Zealanders.

The Bavarians were once again discouraged to find themselves grappling with men who had travelled from the far side of the world to fight them in Flanders. Worse still, as Hitler’s comrade Adolf Meyer recalled, some of the Australians were of German descent. One of his captives ‘not only spoke excellent German, but wore my own name of Meyer into the bargain. Understandably: His father was a German, who had immigrated to Australia as a child with his parents and later married an English woman there’.

Subsequently, the List Regiment suffered the final stages of the Battle of the Somme. Hitler’s bunker was hit by a British artillery barrage, wounding him in the left upper thigh. While the wound wasn’t life-threatening, it was serious enough for him to be evacuated. Hitler was sent to the Beelitz military hospital in Berlin to recover.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 1

Hitler was born on 20 April 1889, i.e. he was a year younger than my paternal grandmother, with whom I lived for a while (that means that if it hadn’t been for the Allied dogs, I might even have met him!). He was born in Braunau am Inn in Austria. Hitler would later call himself a Bavarian on several occasions.

At the beginning of the first part of his book, Brendan Simms informs us that the first three decades of Hitler’s life were characterised by obscurity and various deprivations; his father and mother died, the latter after a traumatic illness, and his artistic talent went unrecognised in Vienna. Those were times, and we are talking before his twenty-fifth birthday, when the young Adolf didn’t yet show any signs of politicisation.

Today I can say that of all the post-1945 writers, I have the closest rapport with Savitri Devi—by far. But before I discovered white nationalism, and I’m talking about how I thought from 2002 to 2009, Alice Miller, the first author in history to take the side of the child abused by his parents was, intellectually, my Beatrice. It’s interesting what Simms says at the beginning of his biography: that there is no evidence that Alois, Hitler’s father, was violent to his children; because Miller, who suffered in the Warsaw ghetto, defamed Hitler by speculating that he had indeed been abused by his father Alois.

Hitler had an older half-brother, Alois Junior, and a half-sister, Angela, born from his father’s first marriage. After the death of his first wife, Alois married his cousin Klara Pölzl, with whom he had six children, only two of whom survived: Adolf himself and his younger sister Paula. Two of Hitler’s four siblings died before they were born, and another when Hitler was ten years old.

At school, the boy Adolf only got good marks in drawing and sport, but he was such a bad student that he failed one year before leaving school for good at the age of sixteen, about the age at which I, too, left school and for the same reasons (it’s all brain-washing bullshit what the System teaches us there). Simms informs us:

Hitler’s main preoccupations after leaving school were his financial security, his emotional life, pursuing a career as an artist and the health of his mother. The first known letter by Hitler was penned in February 1906, together with his sister Paula, asking the Finanzdirektion Linz for payment of his orphan’s pension.

I will be omitting the numbers and endnotes throughout my quotations of Simms’ book.

He visited Vienna on a number of occasions and soon moved to the imperial capital. There he pursued an interest in the operas of Richard Wagner. In the summer of 1906, Hitler saw Tristan and Isolde as well as The Flying Dutchman. He also attended the Stadttheater. He was engrossed by not only the music but especially the architecture of opera. A postcard of the Court Opera House Vienna records that he was impressed by the ‘majesty’ of its exterior, but had reservations about an interior ‘cluttered’ with velvet and gold.

I know that many visitors find it bothersome that, whenever I can, I take the opportunity to denigrate white nationalism. But I must. Savitri hits the nail on the head in her book when she points out that the Hitler phenomenon can only be understood if we see that he was a kind of initiate. And the initiation was art! It seems easy for me to understand this because, coming from parents who were artists, it seems obvious to me that this is what motivated me to seek a different path from the crap that conventional schooling offers us (everything looks like pork to someone who understands Beauty as a child). In other words, if contemporary racialists fail to initiate themselves into art, they won’t be able to save their race. I will not repeat Savitri’s reasons: that is why we abridged her book and translated that abridged version here. Simms continues:

In early 1907, Hitler’s mother was diagnosed with cancer and operated on without success. She had no medical insurance, but bills were kept low by the kindness of her Jewish doctor, Eduard Bloch. Hitler helped to look after his mother during her illness and he seems to have been devastated by her death in late December 1907.

He was eighteen years old.

It is certain, in any case, that Hitler neither blamed Bloch for his mother’s death nor became an anti-Semite in consequence. On the contrary, he remained in friendly contact with Bloch for some time after and even sent him a hand-painted card wishing him happy new year. Much later, Hitler enabled Bloch to escape from Austria on terms far more favourable than those granted for his unfortunate fellow Jews.

The young Hitler’s interests were above all musical and architectural, like the layout and architecture of Linz. He confessed to leading a hermit’s life and was plagued by bedbugs. These were times when he was on good terms with August Kubizek, another teenager. Savitri recounts some very revealing anecdotes of this friendship in her book. Simms ignores them in his biography Hitler, although he writes the following:

He certainly seems to have experienced a period of poverty, telling Kubizek that ‘you don’t have to bring me cheese and butter anymore, but I thank you for the thought’. He was not too poor, however, to miss a performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin.

Shortly, afterwards, Hitler left the Stumpergasse and was swallowed up by the city for more than a year. He lodged with Helene Riedl in the Felberstrasse until August 1909. His only known activity during this period was a second and equally unsuccessful application to the Academy. Hitler then lived for about a month as a tenant of Antonia Oberlerchner in the Sechshausterstrasse, leaving in mid September 1909. Even less is known about what came next. He certainly underwent some sort of economic and perhaps psychological crisis, leading to a descent from respectability.

Der Hauptplatz in Linz

A few years later, well before he was famous, Hitler told the Linz authorities that the autumn of 1909 had been a ‘bitter time’ for him. According to a statement he gave to the Vienna police in early August 1910, he spent a time in a sanctuary for the homeless at Meidling. How Hitler extricated himself is not known, but he was able to pay for a bed at the more respectable men’s hostel in the Meldemannstrasse in Vienna-Briggitenau from February 1910. There he started to paint postcards and pictures which his crony and ‘business’ partner Reinhold Hanisch would sell to dealers; this relationship soured when he reported Hanisch to the authorities for allegedly embezzling some of the money.

Now that I posted a review of The Godfather, I’ve been watching videos about the real-life mafia. One YouTubber said that what these people really loved was the American dollar. Those gangsters were slaves to Mammon, just like Hitler (and I) are slaves to the Goddess of Beauty. Simms ends his first chapter with some of these passages:

All we know for sure is that Hitler had to mark time in the Austro-Hungarian Empire until he was twenty-four so as to keep collecting his orphan’s pension. It did not help that he fell out with his half-sister Angela Raubal over their inheritance, and was forced to give way after a court appearance in Vienna in early March 1911…

In the spring of 1913, Hitler collected the last instalment of his pension. There was nothing to keep him in Vienna. When Hitler went to Munich in May 1913 his worldly possessions filled a small suitcase…

He lived happily for nearly a year under the roof of Czech spinster, Maria Zakreys, and betrayed no irritation at her limited command of German. His documented interests were architecture, town planning and music, particularly the connections between them. There was surely much more going on inside his head, but we cannot be certain what it was.

Hitler’s self-description varied, but the common denominator was creativity. He registered himself as an ‘artist’ in the Stumpergasse in mid February 1908, as a ‘student’ in the Felberstrasse in mid November 1908, as a ‘writer’ in the Sechshausterstrasse in late August 1909, and as a ‘painter’ at the Meldemannstrasse in early 1910 and again in late June 1910…

He was eventually mustered in Salzburg by the Austrian authorities, in early February 1914, and found to be physically unfit to serve. In the meantime, Hitler continued to make his living by selling pictures, just as he had in Vienna.

All this makes our picture of the young Hitler closer to a sketch than a full portrait. To be sure, he was already more than a mere cipher: his artistic interests were already well established; his hostility to the Habsburg Empire, though not the reasons for it, was a matter of record… There is no surviving contemporary evidence that he was much aware of France or the Russian Empire or the Anglo-World of the British Empire and the United States. That was about to change. If the Hitler of 1914 had as yet left almost no mark on the world, the world was about to make his mark on him.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler

In Martin Kerr’s list of books recommended in his introduction to National Socialism, we can see this subheading, ‘Books Hostile to National-Socialism but Still Containing Valuable Information’. In line with this literary advice this year I bought a book, Hitler: Only the World Was Enough by English biographer and historian Brendan Simms. Half a year ago I had already written something about Hitler but now, that I am willing to read it carefully, I could start a new series.

Simms’ book, once purged of its anti-Nazi sentiments, serves me wonderfully for the point of view of The West’s Darkest Hour: the Anglo-American world has been the villain of our film. This viewpoint contrasts dramatically with what George Lincoln Rockwell believed, and is much closer to the position of Francis Parker Yockey.

Hitler: Only the World Was Enough begins with a magnificent epigraph, some words from the Führer himself: ‘In the end man takes his livelihood from the earth, and the earth is the trophy which destiny gives to those peoples who fight for it’. Lebensraum!

Some of the final chapters contain striking titles: ‘England is the motor of the opposition to us’, ‘The struggle against the Anglo-Saxons and plutocracy’, and ‘The Fall of Fortress Europe’.

The prologue contains the key to deciphering Simms’ thesis. Hitler’s biographer informs us that on July 17, 2018, brigade adjutant Fritz Wiedemann wrote that Private First Class Hitler dropped off two American prisoners at the headquarters of 12 Royal Bavarian Infantry Brigade. Simms adds: ‘This, then, is when all it began’ because these doughboys were the descendants of German immigrants, lost to the Fatherland for lack of living space (not enough Lebensraum). In subsequent discourses, Hitler repeatedly came back to the moment, in the mid-summer of 1918, when the first American soldiers appeared on the battlefield of France: ‘Well-grown man, men of our own blood, whom we have deported for centuries, who were now ready to grind the motherland itself into the mud’. In Hitler’s mind, only the Lebensraum east was ultimately to become the remedy because he wanted to imitate the US somehow, an extensive ‘spacial formation’ he said elsewhere.

Already in the Introduction, Simms gives brief reviews of the major works on Hitler and criticises their authors for not having seen this reality, including Alan Bullock, Joachim Fest, Ian Kershaw, Peter Longerich and other standard biographers of the anti-Nazi System under which we live: biographers who deal with other facets of Hitler’s personality. Simms then sets out his thesis.

What he offers us is an intellectual biography of Hitler, from his first conception of Germany’s history and its role in the world in the wake of defeat in World War I, to his conviction that the main enemy was neither communism nor the Soviet Union, nor even international Jewry, as has hitherto been repeated even in racialist forums; but Anglo-Saxon capitalism and, primarily, the United States. While most historians have argued that Hitler underestimated the American threat, Simms shows that Hitler embarked on a pre-emptive war against the United States precisely because he considered it the main adversary and the only one that could destroy Germany. The Third Reich domination of virtually all of Europe, the war against the USSR and the annihilation of European Jewry were chapters in a race against time to turn the Reich into a power capable of confronting Anglo-Saxon leadership and, if not defeating it, at least achieving a bipolar world balanced between the stark Anglo-Saxon finance capitalism and a German Reich rooted in the Germanic racial tradition.

Simms’ thesis is not entirely original. As we also read in the Introduction, Adam Tooze has shown to what extent the US must be considered the main reference for the Third Reich from its very beginning. In the Intro Simms also mentions the sources he used for his massive biography of Hitler. In addition to the official texts, he includes the memoirs and diaries of those close to the Führer. But he is very emphatic in stressing that

While the connection between Hitler’s anti-Semitism and his anti-capitalism is often noted, and has been the subject of some individual subjects, its centrality to his worldview, and the extent to which he was fighting a war against ‘international high finance’ and ‘plutocracy’ from start to finish, has not been understood at all.

To understand it I would advise the visitor of this site to familiarise himself with the realism of theorists such as John Mearsheimer, who teaches us how States think and how they relate to each other.