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Tag: Biography

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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]
 

_______________

[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.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 43

Hitler also worked to expand his international links. These were partly designed to secure funding. One of the figures of whom Hitler had high hopes was the American automobile tycoon and Democratic Party Congressional candidate Henry Ford, who not only symbolized the kind of national productive capitalism he so admired but was an active anti-Semite into the bargain. His book, translated as Der internationale ]ude (1921), had been a great success in Germany. It was well known at the time that Hitler kept a portrait of Ford in his office, and there was talk of inviting the American to speak.

His overtures to Ford were a failure. According to Robert D. Murphy, US vice consul in Munich, who met Hitler in early March 1923, ‘Mr Ford’s organization had so far made no money contributions to the party’ and ‘his funds were principally contributed by patriotic Germans living abroad’. Press reports spoke of Nazi hopes for ‘America’ and a joint struggle against Jews and capitalism. At the end of August 1923, Hitler travelled to Switzerland in search of financial backing. ‘Hitler is very engaging,’ one of the ladies of the house of a wealthy Swiss supporter noted in her diary, ‘his whole body trembles when he speaks,’ which he did ‘wonderfully’. Hitler told the Swiss general Wille: ‘I will strike in the autumn’…

Hitler tried to win over the Americans through a series of interviews. In mid-August 1923 he gave a fire­ breathing interview to the New York World promising a ‘fascist dictatorship’ and demanding that ‘officialdom must be reduced to a minimum’, perhaps a sop to the ‘small government’ preferences of his American readers.

These overtures suggest that Hitler’s overwhelmingly negative image of Anglo-America had given way to a more positive attitude. This was partly tactically motivated, because he realized that his domestic aims could only be achieved with the support or at least the toleration of London and Washington.

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Autobiography Conspiracy theories

Oswald

In the comments section of my article ‘The Failed Oswald’, on Tuesday I said something that I now quote again, slightly modified. I wrote that I recently acquired two books on the subject of conspiracy theories, one by a couple of Americans and another by a European:

Both are flawed precisely because their authors are normies. And normies are incapable of seeing the ultimate truth. However, if I dabble in the subject of conspiracy theories it is because, for a dozen years now, I have been dismayed that many on the racial right subscribe to theories which, in my opinion, are like a Vampire sucking the sap from the dissident: who should devote his efforts to developing National Socialism to an evolved, post-1945 NS (cf. what I wrote about Savitri Devi’s magnum opus yesterday).

This said, there is some value in the books pictured above: It is the proles who have no say in the spheres of power who weave these conspiratorial cobwebs. What strikes me is that intelligent people like Chris Martenson are now spinning these kinds of webs regarding the failed Oswald (Thomas Matthew Crooks) while less intelligent people, like those who listened to the Secret Service at the Capitol Hill hearings on Tuesday, are far more sceptical of conspiracy theories.

The powerless are the ones who weave cobwebs in a representative democracy. If demography collapses significantly in an apocalyptic scenario and Aryan man was to return to direct democracy as in ancient Greece, it would be much easier to circumvent these webs where the proles are presently entangled. The subject is complex, and the normie authors of the American book pictured above at least did their statistical work on those who believe in conspiracy theories.

As regular visitors to this site will know, I discovered white nationalism at a late age: after I had been in this world for half a century. My previous intellectual work was focused on the psychic ravages of parental abuse of children.

One of the psychological fallacies mentioned in the books above is that, to the simplistic mindset of the proles, an act of enormous political and social repercussions cannot have a prosaic explanation (Oswald). There has to be a massive conspiracy of very powerful people who had a grudge against JFK. That, of course, is a ‘psychological fallacy’ and those not versed in how the mind of someone who was severely abused as a child or adolescent by their parents works might read The Gunman and His Mother: Lee Harvey Oswald, Marguerite Oswald, and the Making of an Assassin.

It’s hard to imagine how a mother could torment a child so much that, now grown up, he becomes an Oswald. But now that I am revising my autobiographical books for translation into English, I have to pause for a week because the other day I went through my mother’s entire diary, quoted in toto in the second book of my trilogy: a diary so disturbing that I have to take long breaks, even though decades have passed since she wrote it.

Someone like me can understand Oswald, or Thomas Matthew Crooks who suffered massive bullying at school. But anyone who hasn’t been treated so badly by life can’t even imagine it.

Although reading books is a serious way to delve into the matter, not everyone who has rejected the conspiratorial nonsense believed by the proles will do so. If The Gunman and His Mother won’t be on the shelves of those who delve into the JFK assassination, they might at least check out this audiovisual interview with Paul Gregory by Peter Robinson, the host of Uncommon Knowledge. Gregory dealt directly with Oswald and in his recent book debunks the wide range of conspiracy theories about the assassination by demonstrating that Oswald acted alone.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 40

Rare Hitler pictures.

During this period, Hitler continued to elaborate and develop his strategic thinking. Throughout 1923, he lambasted international capitalism—Jewish and non-Jewish—as the source of Germany’s ills. Hitler provided a brief foreword to Gottfried Feder’s book on the subject describing it as a ‘catechism’ of National Socialism. The salience of anti-capitalism, fears of expropriation and exploitation and enslavement by foreign masters is very clear in the party’s ‘work of the committee for food security of the National Socialist movement’, which Hitler blessed in the summer of 1923. It defined the ‘internal enemy’ as ‘profiteering in the system of the national economy’, the ‘idea of class conflict’ and ‘immoral tendencies in government and law-making’. It lamented the crucifixion of the German middle class by the ‘massive fraud’ of ‘our money economy’, the general ‘spirit of speculation’ and the ‘terror of the capitalist idea’. The document made no direct mention of Bolshevism or the Soviet Union. It recommended—with Hitler’s approval—that the state protect the ‘basic assets of the nation’, namely ‘foodstuffs and manpower’ through ‘an anti-capitalist legislation in the fields of land and settlement, housing, but also in the first instance in the field of the supply of necessities’. This would require the ‘exclusion of foreign capital from German land and soil, businesses and cultural assets’.

Like the Ludendorff circle, Hitler was much less worried about the fate of German minorities and the peripheral lands of the Reich than about the fate of the core area, which he believed to be threatened with subjection and even extinction. Hitler was also beginning to look at long-term solutions to Germany’s predicament. He rejected the common notion of an ‘internal’ colonization of sparsely populated German lands in favour of territorial expansion. ‘The [re-]distribution of land alone,’ he warned in the spring of 1923, ‘cannot bring relief. The living conditions of a nation can at the end of the day only be improved through the political will to expand.’

The concept of Lebensraum is already clearly visible here, though the term itself was not used.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Free speech / association

Hitler, 39

Hitler’s position at this time was complicated. He was still virtually unknown in most of Germany. The main Berlin newspapers ignored him and his party. They didn’t even report on the riotous Deutscher Tag at Coburg, whose resonance was confined to south Germany. Hitler had very few funders outside of Bavaria, with the notable exception of the Ruhr industrial baron Fritz Thyssen, who contributed substantially in the course of 1923. That said, within the non-particularist Bavarian right­ wing nationalist milieu, Hitler now enjoyed a commanding position. He was well known in Munich, which Thomas Mann described in a 1923 letter to the American journal The Dial as ‘the city of Hitler’. His speeches drew large and ecstatic crowds. Karl Alexander von Müller, who heard him speak for the first time at the Löwenbräukeller in late January 1923, describes the ‘burning core of hypnotic mass excitement’ created by the flags, the relentless marching music and the short warm-up speeches by lesser party figures before the man himself appeared amid a flurry of salutes. Hitler would then be interrupted at almost every sentence by tempestuous applause, before departing for his next engagement.

Over the next few months, the tempo of Nazi events and activities increased. There were in excess of 20,000 NSDAP members at the start of 1923, and that figure more than doubled over the next ten months to 55,000; the SA nearly quadrupled from around 1,000 men to almost 4,000 during the same period. Hitler himself was so prominent that the NSDAP was widely known as the ‘Hitler-Movement’, the term under which his activities were now recorded by the Bavarian police. He had become a cult figure. The Völkischer Beobachter became a daily paper in February 1923, giving preferential treatment to the printing of Hitler’s speeches. Two months later, it began marking the Führer’s birthday, an honour not accorded any other Nazi leader. He had long given up the humble role of drummer. Hitler spoke once again of the need for a dictator. The German people, he claimed, ‘are waiting today for the man who calls out to them: Germany, rise up [and] march’. There was no doubt from the context and rhetoric that he planned to play that role himself. His followers styled him not merely the leader of the national movement but Germany’s saviour and future leader. The Oberführer of the SA, Hermann Goring, acclaimed him at his birthday rally on 20 April 1923 as the ‘beloved Fuhrer of the German freedom movement’. Alfred Rosenberg described him simply as ‘Germany’s leader [Führer]’.

Conscious of his tenuous position within the Catholic Bavarian mainstream, Hitler continued to try to build bridges to the Church, or at least to its adherents. ‘We want,’ Hitler pledged, ‘to see a state based on true Christianity. To be a Christian does not mean a cowardly turning of the cheek, but to be a struggler for justice and a fighter against all forms of injustice.’ The NSDAP did succeed in making some inroads among Catholic students at the university and the peasantry and in winning over quite a few clerics, including for a while Cardinal Faulhaber, but for the most part Hitler made little headway.

There are two things we might comment on in this passage.

First, we are living in a world of soft totalitarianism. We can already imagine a National Socialist party in Europe today that could recruit thousands of members! That would not even be possible in the US, despite its hypocrisy in claiming that its amendments allow citizens both free speech and freedom of association (in reality, Uncle Sam allows neither, as we saw a few years ago in Charlottesville).

The other issue is this saying that true Christianity doesn’t turn the other cheek but fights injustice. While a hundred years ago it was possible to use this kind of rhetoric in the more conservative sectors of Bavarian society, today it is impossible. The mainstream Christian churches follow the zeitgeist of our century, without exception. I am not criticising Hitler’s use of this rhetoric. But under the circumstances, post-1945 National Socialism must reinvent itself.