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David Irving Heinrich Himmler

True Himmler, 7

THERE WAS ONE OVERHANGING PROBLEM, the growing left-wing unrest in Bavaria. The army might soon have him doing night patrols as a reservist. ‘Dear Mother, Dear Father,’ he wrote on November 6, 1919. ‘Today you get your promised letter. Thanks a lot for your dear packages. The one with coat and fur jumpers arrived this morning. Gebhard collected the other at the post office this afternoon. Again, dear Mother, thanks a lot. After all, your boys are a bothersome pair. The possibility exists that they will call us up in a few days’ time…’

After adding a breakdown of their expenses, he asked for more cash. ‘Then Mother, we would like to for the following with our next laundry parcel (but there is absolutely no hurry): 1. smokes for Gebhard, 2. a little green cover for the travelling suitcase, 3. wax paper to wrap sandwiches, 4. Gebhard’s electric flashlight, 5….’ Such letters are hard to paraphrase, but they provide much we need to know about Heinrich Himmler at this time.

After his recovery from illness he went to confession twice: he found himself thinking impure thoughts about women. He had begun cautious friendships – primarily with Ludwig’s girl, Maja Loritz and also with Louisa Hager, the daughter of trusted family friends; her mother evidently approved, as the two females came round and joshed him. ‘Friendship? Love?’ pondered Himmler in his diary. ‘Another step towards maturity. But I will stay indifferent.’

‘Then over to the Hagers for lunch,’ he confided on October 20, 1919, the day he registered at the Polytechnic: ‘Mama Hager was as nice and kind to me as ever. Afterwards we talk about private dancing lessons.’ Louisa resorted to tears, every woman’s last resort. ‘Floods of tears from the poor thing. I felt really sorry for her. She does not realise how pretty she is when she cries. I escorted her to the streetcar, then went to the State Library and read up on the war of 1812. From four to five o’clock I sat in on a lecture at the Veterinary School.’ Louisa went to Communion every day, and she shot up in his esteem. ‘This really was the best thing I have heard this last week.’ Most evenings after lectures, which began on November 3, the four friends went to concerts or an indoor swimming pool. Heini found it difficult to juggle these two females, Maja and Louisa. With Maja he visited the theatre and talked about religion; he wrote rapturously, ‘I think I’ve found a sister.’ Less innocently perhaps, he was thrilled that she hooked her arm in his, as they went for a stroll with Gebhard and his girl. But Heini was plagued with irritation about Louisa – and twice he lamented in his pages, ‘She won’t let her hair down.’

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Irving’s book can be purchased on his website.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 47

In late February 1924, Hitler was brought to stand trial before the Volksgericht in Munich in the old Infantry School on the Blutenburgstrasse. He was allowed to appear in a suit rather than prison clothes and sporting his Iron Cross. Security was strict, and the press interest, including from abroad, was intense. Hitler would no doubt have been pleased to know that ‘one heard particularly many English voices’. The Reich government had wanted the trial to be held in Leipzig, but the authorities in Munich were determined to keep it local, almost certainly because they feared what might otherwise emerge about their complicity in the various plots. Berlin gave way in the context of a broader rapprochement with Bavaria. In mid February 1924, about a week before the trial began, the Bavarian Reichswehr submitted once again to command from Berlin, thus reversing Kahr and Lossow’s position in November 1923; Kahr resigned.

Hitler famously used the courtroom as a platform from which to expound his world view… The trial lasted just over a month, from 26 February to 27 March 1924… He did not deny the substance of the charges, but argued that he had acted at all times in the greater interest of Germany… Sometimes Kahr appeared so overwhelmed that his voice dropped to a whisper as the courtroom audience strained to hear him. The rampant Hitler, by contrast, was repeatedly told to lower his voice by the trial judge.

Hitler’s final speech was a triumphant reiteration of his beliefs and sense of mission. If he was a traitor, then so were Bismarck, Atatürk and Mussolini, whose treason had been ratified by success. Hitler decried that there was ‘self­ determination for every Negro tribe’, but that ‘Germany did not belong to the Negro tribes but stood under them’. The root of the German predicament, he continued, lay in Germany’s exposed geopolitical position in Europe. ‘The German people’, Hitler argued, ‘has perhaps the worst location of all nations in military-political terms. It is geographically extraordinarily badly located, surrounded by many rivals’. It was menaced by France’s determination to ‘Balkanize’ Germany and to reduce her population. In this context he referred to ‘Clemenceau’s [alleged] aim to exterminate 20 million Germans in Europe, to break up Germany into individual states and to prevent the emergence of another united large Reich’. It was also threatened by Britain’s supposed much broader policy of Balkanizing Europe as a whole in order to maintain the balance of power. There was no economic solution to this predicament, Hitler stressed, but only a powerful foreign policy based on the highest level of internal mobilization. Germany would need to get rid of ‘international Jewry’, which was coordinating the global forces against her. She would also need to pursue the related struggle against international capitalism. ‘The battle against international stock exchange enslavement’ and against the ‘trustification’ of the ‘entire economy’, Hitler demanded, must be taken up.

These were all familiar themes from Hitler’s previous statements, but this time he had the eyes of the German and even some of the international press upon him. His dosing speech concluded with a resounding statement that though the court might secure a conviction, posterity would surely acquit him. In an obviously choreographed sequence, the other accused said they had nothing to add, with the result that Hitler’s resonant last words were left ringing throughout the courtroom and shaped the story of the trial. He turned the defeat and humiliation of 9 November 1923 into a victorious narrative…

Hitler was now a hero not merely to the Bavarian right, but to many nationalists throughout Germany. What had begun in the public mind as the ‘Ludendorff Trial’ ended as the ‘Hitler Trial’. ‘I am occupying myself with Hitler and the National Socialist movement,’ the Rhenish student Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary in early March 1923…

On his return to Landsberg to serve the rest of his sentence, Hitler was confronted with some serious strategic questions… Ernst Röhm began to revive the SA, under the cover of a front organization, and went to confer with Hitler at the very end of May 1924. Perhaps anxious not to provoke the authorities, and mindful of his inability to seize power by force, the Fuhrer insisted that the SA keep a lower profile…

Gregor Strasser and General Ludendorff strongly supported amalgamation with the DVFP to create a new National Socialist Freedom Party (NSFP). Hitler reluctantly agreed in broad terms but insisted that the main base and focus of the party remain in Munich….

Gottfried Feder remarked after visiting him that Hitler was ‘depressed [and] wants to withdraw completely from the movement’ in order to ‘work’, that is, ‘write’ to earn money. Over the next two months, Hitler repeated his message publicly on a number of occasions. He was acting partly because he was disenchanted with the way in which the various mergers and collaborations were turning the party into a purely bourgeois organization, and partly because he had no real power to turn things around from prison…

One reason why Hitler wanted to lie low was fear of having his release delayed, or of being deported to Austria. The Bavarian authorities had long hoped to do the latter, and in early May 1924, the Polizeidirektion in Munich told the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior that ‘Hitler constitutes a permanent threat to the internal and external security of the state’. In late April 1924, the Austrians agreed to accept him in principle. Hitler managed to avoid deportation, but after being refused probation he failed to get out by 1 October as he originally hoped. On 16 October he made a statement that he should be allowed to stay, ‘because I never felt myself to be an Austrian citizen but only a German’. ‘My affection for my Austrian homeland is great,’ Hitler continued, ‘but so is hostility of the Austrian state’, in which—like the ‘earlier Habsburg state’—he could only see ‘an obstacle for the unification of the German people’.

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David Irving Heinrich Himmler

True Himmler, 6

ON JUNE 26, 1919 Himmler’s father had become headmaster of the Gymnasium in Ingolstadt. For a few weeks Heini worked on a farm at Oberhaunstadt nearby. A work diary started on August 1 shows him toiling in stables, fields, and the dairy. On August 15 he entered, ‘Stables as usual. Church in the morning, with Mr Franz after lunch.’

On September 2 he fell ill with salmonella poisoning, and he remained bedridden for the rest of the month. On the twenty-fourth a doctor in Munich diagnosed an enlarged heart, and advised him to quit farm work for a year and concentrate on studies. Himmler transferred from rural Bavaria to Munich. He applied to study at the Polytechnic and paid the requisite fees. At the same time his brother Gebhard engaged to read mechanical engineering. The four storeyed building sat with its square, copper-sheathed clocktower between Gabelsberger Strasse and Theresien Strasse. The Polytechnic’s file records them as living just two blocks away from the college at No. 5, Schelling Strasse, a street much trodden later in history.

The Polytechnic issued a matriculation certificate on October 18, 1919. Heini would study here until 1922. He had chosen to read agriculture, and he might well have prospered as a farmer; farmers seldom go hungry. The two brothers would share digs, and take their weekly bath at the Luisenbad (at home they had only an old-fashioned bath contraption). ‘Our room looks very comfortable right now,’ he wrote to his parents a few days later. ‘I just wish you could see it. Everything excellently in its rightful place. In the mornings we drink tea, which is very good. We get up at six-thirty. Then we tot up our outgoings of the day before and reconcile them’ – this no doubt for their father’s benefit. ‘For the morning break we always buy cheese.’

His mother did the laundry for them both. The parents still required him to practise the piano, and he struggled with the keys until they conceded defeat. He went back to Ingolstadt frequently, and took Thilde their old nanny from Sendling, the Munich suburb where she lived, to the Waldfriedhof to see one grandmother’s grave and then a day later with Gebhard to the southern cemetery to visit their other’s.

Like freshers everywhere, Heini signed up for everything – the Polytechnic union, an old boys’ society, a breeding association, a gun club, the local Alpine society, and the officers’ association of the 11th Infantry Regiment. The return to Munich, his big native city, also brought Heini together with Mariele, the sister of Ludwig Zahler, a former comrade during his military training at Regensburg; Ludwig was Heini’s second cousin, and became his best friend at the Poly.

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David Irving’s book can be purchased on his website.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 46

A pamphlet published immediately after the failed coup, penned by either Hitler himself or someone briefed by him, traced the collapse of relations between Munich and Berlin throughout October 1923. It quoted from a conversation which allegedly took place between Hitler and Lossow, in which the latter ‘repeatedly spoke of an Ankara-government’, on the lines of the Turkish national revival under Atatürk, which would take on Berlin. The pamphlet went on to attack Kahr, who was allegedly ‘completely dependent on the Roman Jesuits’. ‘Because Hitler knew,’ it continued, ‘that the “black [i.e. clerical] danger” in Bavaria was even bigger than the red one’ [emphasis by Ed.], Hitler had been compelled to pre-empt the machinations of the Jesuits, the Wittelsbach dynasty, the French, the papacy and the Habsburgs. The main lines of Hitler’s rather contradictory interpretation of the Putsch were thus clear: it had been carried out both with the collusion of the Bavarian conservatives and in order to forestall their plans for a clerical, monarchist and separatist coup at the expense of the Reich as a whole.

On 11 November, Hitler was arrested at the home of Hanfstaengl at Uffing am Staffelsee, south of Munich. Just before his capture, Hitler managed to get off a short message to Alfred Rosenberg, asking him to lead the movement in his absence. He was imprisoned at Landsberg, awaiting trial. Hitler seems at first to have undergone some kind of personal crisis, appearing depressed and even suicidal. Hess, not yet in Landsberg, spoke of him being ’emotionally very down’. Following stormy interrogations, Hitler went on a ten-day hunger strike. According to the recollection of the resident psychologist, Alois Maria Ott, Hitler was distraught at the death of his comrades and announced that ‘I have had enough, I am done, if I had a revolver I would take it.’ Ott succeeded in calming Hitler and persuaded him to call off his protest; the planned forcible feeding proved unnecessary. In early December 1923, Winifred Wagner sent him blankets, books and other items to cheer him up; she also wrote frequently. Hitler’s spirits revived, and within a fortnight he was beginning to prepare his defence.

In mid December 1923, Hitler was questioned at Landsberg by the state prosecutor, Dr Hans Ehard. Still struggling with his injured arm, Hitler vowed ‘to play his best trump-cards in the court room itself ‘, and wondered aloud whether ‘certain gentlemen’ would have the courage to perjure themselves under oath in court. This was clearly directed at Kahr, Lossow and Seisser. Ehard reported that Hitler, having initially steadfastly refused to make any sort of statements on the record, to avoid ‘having words put into his mouth’, soon began to hold ‘interminable political lectures’. He explained that he had struck because the men of the Kampf bund had been impatient for action, and could not be held back any longer. Ehard, probably acting on instructions from superiors who feared dirty linen being washed in public, asked Hitler directly whether he planned ‘to bring the question of the alleged Bavarian separatist plans into [his] defence strategy’. Hitler pointedly declined to answer, but he soon launched into a lengthy attack on ‘well-known, influential, one-sidedly religiously inclined circles, which pursued solely separatist aims and to this end pushed forward Kahr as a straw man’. ‘These circles,’ he added, ‘sought the restoration of the monarchy.’ In the context of what he called ‘French plans to break up’, these tendencies would lead to ‘the separation of Bavaria’ and the ‘disintegration of the Reich’. Itis striking that Hitler again spent far more time on these dangers to the Reich than those from the left.

Hitler soon made himself comfortable in Landsberg. Conditions were remarkably good, as both the warders and the other prisoners treated him as a celebrity, even after his sentencing. The terms of his incarceration did not involve compulsory labour, a regimented diet, prison clothes or restrictions on visitors. His main companions behind bars were his chauffeur and bodyguard Emil Maurice and Rudolf Hess; his authority was unquestioned. The young Nazi Hermann Fobke related that it was not so much a question of ‘presenting to the boss’ as being ‘lectured to by the boss’. Admirers brought him books, food and flowers and news. Helene Bechstein provided cheese. In all, more than 500 people, including Elsa Bruckmann, visited him in the first few months alone. Hanfstaengl later remarked that the cell looked like a ‘delicatessen’. For all that, Hitler found captivity irksome, as he was kept cooped up and powerless to intervene in outside affairs. His surroundings were far from luxurious—Landsberg remained a prison, not a hotel. Music and hatred kept him going. ‘I let out my annoyance in my apologia/ he wrote in January 1924, ‘whose first part, at least, I hope will survive the court case and me. For the rest I am dreaming of Tristan and similar matters.’

The NSDAP, meanwhile, was in disarray. President Ebert announced that Hitler’s followers would be prosecuted for treason. The party itself was declared illegal and went underground; its press was banned, including the Völkischer Beobachter and Streicher’s newspaper Der Stürmer. The party premises were raided, with seven bags of potatoes being carried off by police along with all records and valuables. In Hesse and Wurttemberg the authorities moved quickly to stamp out any threatened copycat attempts. The Nazi leadership was now largely on the run, hiding among sympathizers in and around Munich. Hitler’s choice of Rosenberg to head the party in his absence took everybody by surprise and caused general consternation. Rosenberg was aloof and cerebral and had no personal following in the movement.

By contrast, the three deputies also appointed by Hitler—Julius Streicher, Max Amann and Hermann Esser—were powerful in their own right. Hitler did not explain his decision. It is possible that he saw Rosenberg as a straw man who would simply keep the seat warm for him for his release, but it may also be that he saw the main priority in his absence as the maintenance not of organizational coherence, but of ideological purity, and for that Rosenberg was the perfect fit.

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Arthur C. Clarke Pederasty

Clarke

Arthur Clarke before moving to Sri Lanka.

One way of probing how much we have matured in life is to take our former idols down from their pedestals.

As I explain in my autobiography, seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey on the big screen at ten was a transformative experience. In later years I would become a huge fan of Arthur C. Clarke, who under Kubrick’s direction wrote the novel of the same title. In my twenties I would read Clarke’s Childhood’s End: a novel that would greatly influence my worldview. I even corresponded with Clarke. His typewriter letters I showed, incidentally, to the commenter who visited me last month. But now, after taking my vows on the sacred words, I see Clarke as a failed creature and would like to explain why.

The first disillusionment with Clarke occurred when I was living in Houston. I never understood why Clarke had spent most of his life in Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon. In a bookstore, I saw that Neil McAleer’s biography of Clarke had just been published. I rushed to buy it. Since I put dates on every chapter I read, I know that it was 8 May 1996 when I underlined these paragraphs on page 291:

Clarke knew this unique travelling educational program had great value for students; he believed in it enough to give a scholarship for one student. Says Lloyd Lewan, ‘I remember sitting with him at breakfast one time saying, “Arthur, we have a terrible time coming up with funds to put minorities on the ship.” Of course he wanted to help. The result was he gave us a full scholarship for a minority student—a black woman student from the University of Pittsburgh. He paid for it completely.’

On the first page of my copy of that book, I noted that Clarke had paid a scholarship to that negress instead of paying it to someone like us (someone who would bring the ideals of the movie 2001 into the real world)!

In the third book of my trilogy I talk about who motivated me to love 2001: my father, an uncle and the work of Kubrick and Clarke. In a very brief chapter I note that all of them had betrayed the ideals of my favourite film. Kubrick showed his true Jewish colours after 2001 when he filmed a monstrosity that was released in 1971 (an ultra-violent movie that, fortunately, was banned for many years in the UK, where Kubrick lived). Of my father and uncle I don’t want to talk because they already appear in my autobiography. But about Clarke, I must say a few things.

Yesterday I saw this video by Rob Ager, a film critic, about Clarke’s personal life. Ager lists newspapers claiming that Clarke emigrated to Sri Lanka to have legal sex with Indian teenagers (pederasty is not a crime there). I had already heard these rumours but the amount of evidence that Ager collects is compelling, and motivates me to see my former idol in a different light.

Greco-Roman pederasty, which I’ve discussed on this site—not the optimal form of sexuality, obviously! (though I don’t condemn it)—is one thing. But having sex with Indians is quite another. Such behaviour from someone I used to consider an inspiration disturbs me deeply. Since the early 1980s, the trips I have made to the UK were intended to meet English women, since to my eyes English roses are the most beautiful girls on earth. How a notable Englishman could be incapable of seeing such beauty and go and fuck on the other side of the world with coloureds is an affront to my religion (2001 for example, filmed in England, boasts a couple of very good-looking English actors, a man and a woman).

I know some people say that human beauty is in the eye that sees it, but something inside tells me it is something fairly objective: something like the teleological goal of our universe. When someone I admire is unable to see what I see it disturbs me very deeply, especially if he is an Englishman. Worse, instead of falling in love with an English rose, Clarke became infatuated with his landlord’s son!, as is evident from pages 277-278 of Neil McAleer’s Arthur C. Clarke: The Authorized Biography. When the young Indian died in a motorbike accident, comments an eyewitness, Clarke ‘cried like a baby at the grave and told me, “This is where I will be buried, next to Leslie.” Clarke later named his big house on Barnes Place ‘Leslie´s House’ in memory of his ‘only perfect friend of a lifetime…’

Of course, when I read the book, the authorised biography of Clarke, McAleer didn’t speak openly of pederasty. My disappointment wasn’t complete. Now it is. To go halfway around the world and end up falling in love with a male Indian instead of staying in England and procreating with a beautiful rose, and to boot paying for the career of a young negress, is the ultimate betrayal.

Clarke’s life (1917-2008) is a perfect example of how someone who was born into a very favourable environment, and wrote good science-fiction in the late 1940s—when English values hadn’t yet been grotesquely inverted—, gradually degenerated into a racial traitor. His life is paradigmatic for understanding the West’s dark hour after 1945.

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David Irving Heinrich Himmler

True Himmler, 5

THE TIDE OF WAR receding across Europe had left behind ugly whirlpools; Bavaria was in permanent unrest. Communists, socialists, regular army, and Free Corps disputed control, always keenly watched by the central government in Berlin.

The example of Hungary had struck terror into Munich’s middle classes: in Budapest Bela Kun, a Transylvanian Communist (born Bela Cohn) seized power. In Munich, the turmoil continued after the killing of Kurt Eisner: a triumvirate of ‘Russian’ Jews under the St Petersburg-born Communist Evgenii Levine, seized power on April 6, 1919, and proclaimed a ‘Soviet Republic.’ Levine had agitated among his fellow soldiers for an Allied victory – using an argument identical to that of Hans Oster and future traitors. ‘It is necessary,’ Levine said, ‘that Germany is humiliated: that the colonial troops of France and England march through the Brandenburg Gate.’

Himmler’s diaries and letters still make no mention of Jews but the backdrop to later events was already forming. The German government in Berlin, under socialist chancellor Friedrich Ebert, ordered the truncated army to crush the ‘Soviet Republic’ of Bavaria. Aided by the Free Corps and a substantial Bavarian army contingent under Colonel Franz Ritter von Epp it was bloodily suppressed, but not before Levine’s men took scores of middle-class burghers hostage, along with members of the right-wing Thule Society, and locked them away in the Luitpold Gymnasium building. These hostages were taken out two at a time, and bludgeoned and shot to death on the last night of April 1919. Levine’s accomplices were shot out of hand (except for Tovia Axelrod, who claimed Russian diplomatic status). Levine was executed by firing squad at Munich’s Stadelheim prison on July 9, of which we shall occasionally hear more.

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Irving’s book can be purchased on his website.

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Lightning and the Sun (book)

The Lightning

and the Sun, 4

The ideal in the name of which Adolf Hitler constantly rebelled against practically all he saw in living life — already as an adolescent, and then more and more as a young man and as a man thirty and over thirty — was nothing less than that which I have described in this book as ‘a Golden Age ideal’; the inner vision of a healthy, beautiful and also peaceful (necessarily peaceful) world; of thereal earthly paradise, faithful image of cosmic perfection, in which righteousness prevails as a matter of course. There can be no doubt about it if one reads not only that interesting story of his youthful years which his friend A. Kubizek has written, but also all that he wrote and said himself in later, active life. And in an epoch such as that in which we are now living — when, all over the world, every possible attempt is made to present him not merely as ‘a war monger’ but as the ‘war criminal’ number one, — it is not superfluous to stress the fact that Adolf Hitler was, not only at the dawn of his awakening as a ‘Man against Time’ but all his life, ‘a bitter enemy of war’[1] as such; the fact that he was by nature ‘gifted with deep sensitiveness, and full of sympathy for others’[2]; that his programme was essentially a constructive one, his struggle, the struggle for an exalted, positive aim, his aim: the regeneration of higher mankind, of the only section of mankind worth saving […]

Editor’s interpolated note: My emphasis! Remember the Parrish painting emblematic of our ideals from the first incarnation of The West’s Darkest Hour, when I was blogging on Blogspot.

[…] and, ultimately, through the survival of regenerated higher mankind, the restoration of the long-destroyed harmony between the cosmic Order and the sociopolitical conditions on earth, i.e., the restoration of Golden Age conditions; the opening not merely of a ‘new era’ for Germany, but of a new Time-cycle for the whole world.

It is not superfluous, in times like ours, to remind the reader of all the Führer’s efforts to avoid the Second World War, even at the price of heavy concessions, and then, (when this had proved impossible) to stop it, while it could yet be stopped. It is not superfluous to recall the words he addressed his old friend Kubizek on the 23rd of July 1940, i.e. when, from a military standpoint, all seemed to be going on splendidly; when the Swastika Flag was fluttering over public buildings in the capitals of seven conquered States, — ‘This war thrusts us years back in our constructive work. It is deplorable. I have not indeed become the Chancellor of the Greater German Reich in order to conduct war!’[3] Not only was he against war for war’s sake (or for the sake of worthless motives) but he was against any form of useless violence, not to speak of ‘useless cruelty,’ which was, under the Third Reich, according to law and (whenever detected) also in fact, a severely punishable offence.[4] The news of even such an understandable outburst of broad-scale revengefulness as that which took place during the ‘Kristall Nacht’ (8th-9th of November 1938) — attacks on Jews and Jewish property, and burning down of synagogues in answer to repeated Jewish provocation, — brought him ‘to the pitch of indignation.’[5]

That inborn reluctance to wanton violence is a trait common to all those whom I have called men ‘above Time’ (such as King Akhnaton, the Buddha, or Jesus Christ) and to the great fighters ‘against Time,’ Founders of new religious and cultural eras, such as Lord Krishna or, nearer to our times, the Prophet Mahomet, the only men with whom Adolf Hitler can be compared if one feels at all the necessity of drawing historical parallels.

Editor’s interpolated note: I will talk about Akhenaten at the end of this series on Savitri’s book. For now, I would just like to say that Savitri lived when historiographical criticism of many of the supposed founders of religions had not yet been done. Nowadays, some scholars have come to question the historicity of Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, and even Mohammed.

It is one of the signs that his ultimate aim remained — like theirs — a state of deep-rooted, lasting, (more-than-human) harmony, not of conflict among men; in other words, I repeat, a restoration of the original Golden Age conditions upon earth, the only conditions under which absolute health — which means: perfection, — ever prevailed. Considered in the light of such an aim, every necessary violence is a ‘deplorable’ necessity (to quote once more Adolf Hitler’s own words about, the Second World War in 1940). Every unnecessary violence is a denial of the spirit of such a struggle ‘against Time’ as that of National Socialism for power; a foolish provocation of the Dark Forces that stand in the way of its success, and. therefore a sin against the Cause of Truth. And that is the real, deep meaning of the Führer’s bitter words, addressed to Dr. Goebbels at the news of the ‘Kristall Nacht’: ‘You people have thrust back National Socialism, and spoilt my work for many years when not for good, through this nonsense!’[6]
 

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[1] August Kubizek, Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfround [Adolf Hitler, Friend of my Youth] (Leopold Stocker Verlag, 1953), p. 294.

[2] Ibid., p. 44.

[3] Ibid., p. 345.

[4] It is a fact, for instance, that Martin Sommer was, in 1943, i.e. under the N.S. regime and by a N.S. tribunal, sentenced to three years imprisonment for ill-treating internees in the Buchenwald concentration Camp.

[5] Konstantin Hierl, In Dienzt für Deutschland, 1918-1945 [In Service of Germany] (Heidelberg: Vowinckel, 1954), p. 138.

[6] Hans Grimm, Warum? Woher? aber Wohin? [Why, Whence? but Whither?] (Lippoldsberg: Klosterhaus, 1954), p. 184.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 45

Right at the end of October 192 3, the Völkisch and paramilitary leaders assembled in Röhm’s Reichswehr office in Munich and began preparations for armed action. Their concern was at least as much to head off any separatist tendencies in the Bavarian leadership as it was to support them in joint action against Berlin. It was expected that Kahr would announce his plans for a coup against the Berlin government at a meeting scheduled for 8 November at the Bürgerbräukeller. If Hitler and his co-conspirators were going to forestall Kahr, and his suspected separatist agenda, or co-opt him for their own plans, this would be an excellent opportunity to catch all the major protagonists in one place.

Hitler struck in an evening of high drama. He burst into the Bürgerbräukeller, fired his pistol into the ceiling and announced to general applause that the Bavarian government of Knilling and the Reich government in Berlin were deposed. Hitler ‘suggested’ Kahr as regent for Bavaria and Pöhner as minister president thereof. He promised that a ‘German national government’ would be announced in Munich that same evening. He ‘recommended’ that he himself should take over the ‘leadership’ until accounts had been settled with the ‘criminals’ in Berlin. Ludendorff was to be commander of a new national army; Lossow Reichswehr minister, and Seisser German minister of police. Attempting to marry Bavarian local pride and the pan-German mission, Hitler said that it was the task of the provisional government to march on the ‘den of iniquity in Berlin’. In a considerable concession to Bavarian sensibilities he vowed ‘to build up a cooperative federal state in which Bavaria gets what it deserves’. Kahr, Lossow and Seisser were held captive and prevailed upon to support the coup.

The putschists now swung into action. Their ‘Proclamation to all Germans’ announced that the nation would no longer be treated like a ‘Negro tribe’. Hanfstaengl was detailed to inform and influence the foreign press; he tipped off Larry Rue of the Chicago Tribune that the coup was about to begin and appeared in the Bürgerbräukeller with a group of journalists from other countries. The offices of the pro-SPD Münchener Post were smashed up by the SA, but there was no ‘white terror’ on the streets of Munich; Hitler’s main anxiety was the Bavarian right, not the left. One of the few detentions was that of Count Soden-Fraunhofen, a staunch Wittelsbach loyalist who was accused of being a ‘hireling of the Vatican’. Winifred and Siegfried Wagner, who were almost certainly aware of the plot in advance, were due at the Odeon Theatre immediately after the coup, where Siegfried was to direct a Wagner concert, intended perhaps as a celebration. Hitler announced melodramatically that ‘the morning will see either a national government in Germany or our own deaths’.

The morning brought the sobering realization that the putschists were on their own. There was no general national rising across the Reich. Kahr, Lossow and Seisser, who had given their ‘word of honour’ under duress to support the coup, slipped away and began to mobilize forces to restore order. Hitler’s worst fears were confirmed: he was now fighting not merely red Berlin, but reactionary separatist forces in Munich. A bitter Nazi pamphlet rushed out that day announced. that ‘today the [November revolution] was to have been extinguished from Munich and the honour of the fatherland restored ‘. ‘This,’ the pamphlet added, invoking Hitler’s rhetoric, ‘would have been the Bavarian mission.’ Kahr, Lossow and Seisser, alas, had betrayed the cause. Behind them, the pamphlet continued, stood ‘the same trust of separatists and Jews’ who had been responsible for the treasonous Armistice in 1918, the ‘slave treaty of Versailles and the despicable stock-exchange speculation’ and all other miseries. It concluded with a call to make one last effort to save the situation. What was striking about this document was the far greater stress laid on the separatist-clerical and capitalist danger than on the threat of Bolshevism [emphasis by Ed.].

Hitler and his co-conspirators set out mid morning 9 November for central Munich in a column numbering about 2,000 men, many of them armed. Strasser, who had turned up from Nuremberg with a contingent of followers, was particularly belligerent. Their plan was unclear, but it seems to have been to wrest the initiative back from Kahr; Hitler may also have intended to go down fighting as he had vowed the night before. Outside the Feldherrenhalle at the Odeonsplatz, they encountered a police cordon. Hitler linked arms with Scheubner-Richter and the column marched straight at the police lines, weapons at the ready.

It is not clear whether he was seeking death as a blood sacrifice to inspire future generations or whether he was trying to imitate Napoleon’s famous confrontation with Marshal Ney, when the emperor marched slowly towards his old comrades, who refused to shoot. Shots were exchanged, leading to fatalities on both sides. Hitler himself escaped death only narrowly, injured his arm and fled the scene. Before the day was out, Kahr issued a proclamation announcing the failure of the ‘Hitler­ Putsch’. The great drama had ended in complete fiasco.

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David Irving Heinrich Himmler

True Himmler, 4

Previous True Himmler entries: 0, 1, 2, 3.

 

Gaudeamus Igitur [‘So Let Us Rejoice’]

HE SITS IN THE TRAIN brooding, a few days after his nineteenth birthday in October 1919. There is a young couple seated opposite. He noticed them earlier, on the railroad platform; they are married, and he envies them. He is visiting Eichstatt, a town popular with pilgrims. It has a castle, built by mediaeval princes and clergy—‘impossible with today’s wages and workforce,’ reflects Heinrich Himmler, the teenager. Twenty or more years from now he will command a slave-labour force of millions building much vaster structures.

He has brought along something to read, Friedrich Schiller’s 1784 pamphlet on ‘The Stage as a Moral Institution’—a call for playwrights to purify the German language; both are disciplines after his father’s heart, and the Classics professor may well have pressed this reading matter into his hands. Lingering on rather lower ground, Heini has brought along a ghost story, The White Hand, to read as well.

He and Gebhard are visiting castles and monasteries and family—rattling along on the narrow-gauge railroad to Rebhard-Hofmühle station, and then on to the majestic church at Eichstatt, where their uncle Karl Patin has been a priest since 1894 in the famous abbey of St Walburg’s, named after an English Benedictine missionary whose bones rest here for over twelve hundred years. Uncle Karl is just back from officiating at a funeral, and he invites them in for tea.

Heinrich Himmler is still getting to know his family in October 1919 as he prepares for his years of higher education: men of the cloth and Classical academics, that is his milieu.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 44

Hitler flanked this rhetoric with a carefully calibrated propagandistic effort. He gave a speech at Bayreuth—Wagner’s city—in mid September 1923, and returned about a fortnight later to speak again. On that occasion, taking up the invitation of Winifred Wagner, the English­born wife of Wagner’s son Siegfried, he went to the Wagner shrine at Wahnfried. There Hitler spoke to the composer’s son-in-law, the racist political philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain, author of the best-selling Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, upon whom he made a very favourable impression. Hitler paid homage at Wagner’s grave. He also published an autobiographical text and a selection of his speeches under the title of Adolf Hitler: His Life and His Speeches. The name on the front page was that of his associate Victor von Koerber, but the real author was Hitler. He rehearsed his political positions, including his attacks on ‘Bolshevism’ and ‘international Jewish mammonism’, but pointedly deleted all negative references to the United States, most likely in order to encourage US toleration of a successful coup. The principal purpose of the book was to cast Hitler as the saviour of Germany. Koerber-Hitler spoke of him no longer as a ‘drummer’ but as ‘an architect who is building the mighty German cathedral’. No doubt drawing on his overtures to Bavarian Catholics, Hitler had himself styled as a messianic figure, whose political awakening was compared to the resurrection of Christ, and whose writings were a kind of holy writ.

On 26 September, on the same day as the end of passive resistance in the Ruhr, the Bavarian government announced a state of emergency. Kahr was made commissary general. That same day, too, Hitler signed a proclamation in support of a ‘Battle League to Break Interest Slavery’; pointedly, the main enemy was defined as international capitalism and the victor powers rather than the German left…

Despite the local demands on his time, Hitler made serious efforts to square international opinion. He gave an interview to the American United Press at Bayreuth in which he said that the Bavarian ‘masses’ would back him over Kahr and announced that he was ‘no monarchist and would battle against all monarchic adventures, because the Hohenzollern and Wittelsbachers would merely encourage separatist divisions’. Hitler also gave an interview to the distinguished German-American journalist George Sylvester Viereck, in which he claimed to be the only bulwark against ‘Bolshevism’ and revealed his territorial ambitions. ‘We must regain our colonies and we must expand eastward’, he argued. ‘There was a time when we could have shared the world with England. Now, we can stretch our cramped limbs only to the east. The Baltic is merely a German lake.’ At around the same time, he told an American newspaper of his plans for a ‘Monroe Doctrine for Germany’, the first time he articulated a theme which was to run through his entire strategy. In mid October 1923, he made a public statement in Corriere Italiano once again renouncing any German claim to South Tyrol, as a gesture to Mussolini. He was convinced that France would support a separatist coup, but seems to have believed that Britain and the United States would at least tolerate his own Putsch.