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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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Evil Summer, 1945 (book)

1945 (XII)

Meanwhile, to the west, the Americans were engaged in their own version of sexual conquest. Soon after they stormed ashore on D-Day, June, 1944, the worst elements in the US Army were allowed virtual free reign to rob, rape and kill.

“Reports that disciplinary conditions in the army are becoming bad,” General Eisenhower’s personal driver and mistress, Kay Summersby, candidly recorded. “Many cases of rape, murder, and pillage are causing complaints by the French, Dutch, etc.”

Expecting an army of heroic liberators, the Europeans were naturally surprised and shocked at the lack of discipline among the Allied forces, especially that of the Americans. Drunkenness, theft, wanton destruction of public and private property, casual sex on streets and in parks, but above all, violent sexual assault—many French soon referred to the American occupation as a “regime of terror… imposed by bandits in uniform.”

Historian, Mary Louise Roberts, poignantly recounts one such incident:

The handsome American soldier was Elisabeth’s tenth client that evening. Working her trade on the top floor of a dingy apartment block in Paris, she felt that she had seen them all.

For the past four years, the men had been Germans, and now, since the city had been liberated in August, 1944, they were Americans. It made little difference.

Elisabeth held out three fingers of her hand to indicate the price of her body—three hundred francs.

“Too much,” said the soldier.

Elisabeth sighted. She had seen that before as well. Wearily, she kept the three fingers held up, almost as an insult.

There was no negotiation—three hundred was little enough as it was.

“Two hundred,” the soldier insisted.

“Non,” said Elisabeth. “Three hundred or nothing.”

The soldier approached her, hate in his eyes. Elisabeth glowered back, starting to feel scared.

“In that case,” said the soldier, “it will be nothing.”

The soldier then placed his huge hands around Elisabeth’s neck and started to squeeze. She struggled as hard as she could, lashing out, but it was in vain.

After a minute or so she slumped down, her lifeless body falling on to the stained sheets. The soldier then calmly removed his trousers and had sex with her. For nothing.

Afterwards, he went through Elisabeth’s belongings and stole her cash and jewelry. He then went round the block, found another prostitute and took her to dinner and the movies.

For the GI, it had been a swell evening. Paris was just as they said it was.

“The French now grumble that the Americans are a more drunken and disorderly lot than the Germans and hope to see the day when they are liberated from the Americans,” admitted one US general in disgust. “I am informed the Germans did not loot either residences, stores, or museums. In fact the people claimed that they were meticulously treated by the Army of Occupation.”

After raping and robbing their way across France and Belgium, the US Army reacted much like the Soviets once they crossed into Nazi Germany in early 1945. Imagining the Americans to be much like the disciplined and well-behaved Wehrmacht, many German women, young and old, actually greeted the invaders euphorically as the long­sought symbol that the war was finally over and peace was at hand. Unfortunately, most found out too late, just as the boys at Dachau discovered, that these were not the Americans of their imaginations.

“We were crazy with happiness when the Americans came…,” lamented one woman, “[but] what [they] did here was quite a disappointment that hit our family pretty hard.”

“After the fighting moved on to German soil, there was a good deal of rape by combat troops and those immediately following them,” offered Australian journalist, Osmar White, a war correspondent traveling with the Americans. Soon after entering towns and villages the rapes began. Indoors or out, night or day, on park benches, against walls, on shop floors, the sexual attacks continued as the American conquerors laid claim to the conquered. Often going house to house in search of victims, some rapists initially claimed that they were looking for weapons, or food, or German soldiers in hiding. All too quickly their true purpose was made clear. In one German town, a group of six GIs found an attractive mother and her teenage daughter home alone. In the struggle to drag the victims upstairs, the females escaped out the door and hid in a neighbor’s closet. Finding their hiding place, the soldiers immediately threw the mother and daughter onto beds and one after another took turns raping the females, even as the daughter cried out, “Mama, Mama.”

At the Bavarian village of Ramsau, revealed one priest, “eight girls and women [were] raped, some of them in front of their parents.” In other villages, “heavily drunken” US soldiers helped themselves to the females. After raping one woman, a GI bragged that he had “liberated” her. In an apparent attempt to make the job easier for their men, some US officers required all homes to state the names and ages of their inhabitants and then nail the lists to their doors.

“The results of this decree are not difficult to imagine…,” a priest from one town answered. “Seventeen girls or women… were brought to the hospital, having been sexually abused once or several times.”

Rather than use their authority to punish the criminals and thereby stop most of the sexual attacks, American officers, much like their Soviet counterparts, seemed utterly indifferent to the crime, preferring instead to either ignore it entirely or blame the victims. Instead of arresting black soldiers for a massive number of rapes, the victims themselves were blamed because they “smiled” at the negroes while begging food. US Lieutenant General Edwin Lee Clarke went even further. “German women are creating a feeling of great insecurity among our soldiers by untrue charges of rape…,” announced Clarke. “These tactics might be part of a German plan.”

As with the Soviets, the Americans seemed to have no age limit and an elderly woman of 65, or older, could expect to be raped just as could a child of seven, or younger. There were other similarities. Revealed an Allied official:

German women were more frequently injured, beaten unconscious, abused more frequently in front of husbands or relatives and more frequently penetrated orally or anally by Gls than by the British or French.

“Americans look on the German women as loot, just like cameras and Lugers,” confessed a reporter for a New York newspaper.

“[W]e too are considered an army of rapists,” admitted a US sergeant matter-of-factly.

Added a writer for Time magazine succinctly: “Many a sane American family would recoil in horror if they knew how “Our Boys” conduct themselves… over here.

And the duty of concealing from the American public these crimes their husbands and sons were committing in Europe—and later, in Japan—was the job of the Office of War Information. Issuing its unequivocal marching orders to a small army of journalists following along with American troops, the OWI simply perfected a Soviet style censorship on all news and information destined for the US. “The rules for correspondents [were both]… imposed and self-imposed,” explained the American writer, John Steinbeck, about how he and other reporters hid the truth:

There were no cowards [or rapists or murderers] in the American Army, and of all the brave men the private in the infantry was the bravest and noblest… A second convention held that we had no cruel or ambitious or ignorant commanders… We were all a part of the War Effort. We went along with it, and not only that, we abetted it. Gradually it became a part of all of us that the truth about anything was automatically secret and that to trifle with it was to interfere with the War Effort. By this I don’t mean that the correspondents were liars… [but] it is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies. We felt responsible to what was called the home front. There was a general feeling that unless the home front was carefully protected from the whole account of what war was like, it might panic. Also, we felt we had to protect the armed services from criticism, or they might retire to their tents to sulk like Achilles.

Thus, in effect, each “reporter” was expected to ignore or deny the looting, rape and murder committed by the Americans and exaggerate or invent the war crimes committed by the Germans; to dutifully deify their friends in the one breath and viciously vilify their enemy in the next. In essence, a corp of conscientious, diligent newsmen during times of peace had been transformed into an obedient herd of propagandists during times of war.

While some upright American officers, like their Russian counterparts, tried manfully to control the scourge of rape in their units, most did not. For German women, the baffling contradictions in each army was itself a source of nonstop terror and stress. Near Berlin, when a family encountered their first Soviets at war’s end they were naturally paralyzed with fear, fully expecting a riot of robbery and rape to envelop them. Surprisingly, the Russians were very polite and left without harming anything or anyone, including the family’s females. When the Americans later arrived, however, one of the daughters was raped so brutally that years later she still had not recovered.

Although sexual assaults by French troops in Germany were fewer than other allies, perhaps only because there were fewer French troops to begin with, not so the African colonials under their command—Moroccans, Senegalese and others who raped on a massive scale. Just as with their American and Soviet allies, the French commanders seemed indifferent to the fate of German civilians, especially women. Indeed, many French officers seemed to gloat in their power and allowed their black troops to run wild, robbing, raping, and murdering. “In the next few nights,” boasted one French sergeant, “no woman will go untouched.” When Senegalese troops reached Stuttgart in southwest Germany, they herded thousands of women, and a number of men, into the subway then raped and sodomized them all at their leisure.

While the British were far and away the most disciplined and correct of all Allied forces, that army too had its criminal element. “I didn’t go out and chase my chaps away from the women,” laughed one junior officer. “I didn’t have time. I was doing it myself!”

And thus, in the east, in the west, in their thousands, in their tens of thousands, in their hundreds of thousands, perhaps in their millions, the sexual assaults and spiritual slaughter of German females continued long after the war was declared over.

“I was panic-stricken. I was always afraid that everybody could see it in me. I was insecure in myself. I felt so empty,” confessed one young victim expressing the emotional chaos and confusion of countless others. “I wanted to do away with myself and kept crying. My mother would not let me go anywhere alone, not even to the toilet.”

“Is this the peace we yearned for so long?” cried Elsbeth Losch from a town near Dresden. “When will all this have an end?”

 
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Note of the Editor: Here you can request an item of the ‘Hellstorm Holocaust’ package (the biggest secret in modern history: the Allied genocide of Germans after 1945), and here you can order Tom Goodrich’s other books.

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Lightning and the Sun (book) Savitri Devi

The Lightning

and the Sun, 5

Adolf Hitler’s leading emotion is obviously his ‘love beyond all measure’[1] for Germany and all that is German. ‘He lived in the German people; nothing counted for him, save they.’[2] These words, describing the future ruler’s feelings al-ready in early youth, are true at all stages of his life. And his main intellectual, or rather, spiritual, feature, is perhaps that inborn, baffling intuition of history in the broadest sense of the word — of history as our planet’s destiny, — which lifts him straight above all politicians, generals and actual kings, to the level of the great Seers, and gives his whole career that extraordinary, ‘dream-like’[3] character of which Hans Grimm so appropriately speaks. The originality of his genius lies in the fact that he lived his German patriotism from a cosmic point of view, giving both Germany and the history of our times their true significance in the light of not merely human but cosmic evolution.

I do not know whether Adolf Hitler would have been, at any period of his career, in a position to give a learned lecture about the cyclic conception of history according to ancient Wisdom. But I am absolutely sure that he felt, thought and acted, from beginning to end, in full consciousness of the eternal truth — both biological and metaphysical, — which this conception expresses. His writings — specially the general statements which he laid down in Chapter XI of the first part of Mein Kampf— his speeches before and after his rise to power, and more eloquently than anything, the great decisions of his life, prove that he did. The basic tenets and entire spirit of the National Socialist doctrine prove that he did. For what is the latter, if not a passionate denial of the wide-spread belief in the ‘dignity’ of ‘man’ as such (of any human creature of any race) and of the no less wide-spread and no less arbitrary idea of man’s ‘mastery’ over Nature, and of his illimited ‘progress’? The denial of these dogmas in favour of an aristocratic conception of the Universe and, in particular, of history, in the light of which the noble races (and, among them, in first rank, the Aryan, the noblest of all) are alone capable of bringing collectively into material fulfilment, the whole wealth of higher human possibilities? Their denial, also, in favour of the bold assertion that history is, — in fact, has always been, — a long process of more or less slow decay from original perfection to a final state of chaos out of which one rises once more not through regular, unbroken evolution, but abruptly, — i.e., through revolutionary methods — to the state of health, virtue and beauty, i.e., of earthly godhead, which marks the springtime (all the successive spring-times) of Creation?

Considered in its essence, it is, indeed, that, before anything else. More so: the fact that it is that governs, as we shall see, its attitude, — determines its position, — with regard to the various ‘questions’ of our times, from the all-important, worldwide Jewish problem (which is anything but ‘modern’) to those affairs which, at first sight, seem to concern Germany alone. (And there lies precisely the hidden but actual source of its unpopularity in this Dark Age.)

Years before he came to power; nay, years before he started his political career, — Adolf Hitler was vividly aware of that incompatibility between this Age, this world as we see it, and the healthy, glorious world of his dreams. And he sought the reality of the latter, when not in the historical Golden Age of our Time-cycle — so far behind us and so different from all we know that it is practically unthinkable, — at least in as remote a past as his imagination could reach: in the legendary Age before the dawn of recorded German history; the Age pictured in the old Germanic sagas. He did not study that age, as a student of archaeology would have. He lived in it through his own visionary’s intuition and through the magic of Richard Wagner’s music, which he loved. And far from being the mere product of an ephemeral youthful enthusiasm, that consciousness of the World of the Sagas was precisely that which, more decisively than anything else, ‘conditioned his historical and political views.’[4] It was the consciousness of the world ‘to which he felt he actually belonged.’ And ‘all through his life, he found nothing for which he could stand with such pious devotion as he did for that world, which the Sagas of the German heroes had opened to him.’[5]

The Rhinemaidens in the first Bayreuther Festspiele production in 1876.

In other words, it is the healthy, strong, beautiful Germans of the heroic Age who, in his eyes, represented real Germany; eternal Germany. Maybe they have, historically, lived only a few millenniums before the beginning of the present Dark Age (in what the Sanskrit authors call the Dwapara Yuga; the third of the four great Ages) maybe, already within this present Age of Gloom itself (I mean, in the very first part of it).

That is not the point. The point is that, faithful in fact to Tradition, Adolf Hitler believed in the existence of earthly perfection as a reality both of the future and of a very, very remote past. The point is that, whatever might have been the epoch in which they — or their historical prototypes — actually lived, the men and women of the hallowed ‘world of the Sagas’ signified, symbolised, for him, that earthly perfection, that humanity without a flaw for which he yearned with all the ardour of his heart and nearer and nearer to which one reaches to the extent one follows Time further and further upstream.

There is more. Strange as this statement may seem to the European, nay to the German reader himself, Adolf Hitler’s ‘immeasurable love’ for his people is something greater than usual patriotism. It is, no doubt, rooted in that natural feeling of blood — solidarity which binds most individuals — and certainly all Germans, — to their countrymen. But it is, at the same time, the immediate outcome of a staggering intuitive knowledge; the expression of actual insight into the nature, meaning and destiny of Germany as the privileged Nation among all those of the same blood: the most gifted; the most conscious; the most fit to rule; in one word, the most objectively valuable section of Aryan mankind. It is, in spite of what many may think, nay, in spite of the judgement passed upon it by such a prominent figure of the National Socialist regime as Konstantin Hierl,[6] anything but the German counterpart of the British chauvinist’s attitude rendered in the well-known motto: ‘My country, right or wrong!’

True, Adolf Hitler himself has written in Mein Kampf that, had he ‘been French,’ and had France’s greatness meant to him all that Germany’s in fact did, he ‘could not and would not have acted any differently from Clemenceau.’[7] But, if one is to consider him, and to try to interpret his historical career in the light of Ancient Wisdom, (and subsequently, in connection with the destiny of the whole world) one is forced to say: he could not have been French — nor English; nor even Scandinavian. He could not have been anything else but German, nay, anything else but a frontier German, doubly aware of the tragic injustice of man-made frontiers and of the natural unity of the Reich beyond and in spite of them-and of the natural unity of the Aryan race beyond and in spite of the boundaries of the Reich. More still: one is bound to admit that, far from exalting Germany merely because he was a German, it is, on the contrary, he who chose to be born a German because of the predestined — God-ordained — part that Germany has played and is more and more called to play on the side of the eternal Forces of Light and Life in their struggle against the Forces of disintegration, now, as the end of this Dark Age is drawing nigh; because, objectively speaking, the earthly salvation of the Aryan race — the regeneration of higher mankind — can only come from and through Germany: the one Aryan Nation in which the race is still sufficiently pure to be, under given circumstances, capable of total regeneration, while, at the same time it has, through the unbroken experience of danger, remained sufficiently awake to be fully awakened, and sufficiently warrior-like to carry on, to its end, the struggle against Dark Age conditions: the perennial Struggle ‘against Time,’ for integral Truth.

In other words, both the quality of her biological substance and the particular stamp which history has left upon her, have made Germany the one Nation capable of taking the lead of Western Aryandom (when not also of Aryandom as a whole) in the last life and death struggle — the struggle for the survival and rule of the best, who are the predestined founders of the next Golden Age; the last phase of the perennial Struggle ‘against Time,’ marking the end of the present Age of Gloom. And the inspired Man ‘against Time’ who was, at the beginning of that phase, to act on behalf of the Forces of Light and Life, was bound to be a German, nay, the very embodiment of eternal Germany. And Adolf Hitler was that Man. And he knew it in the depth of his heart. He was perfectly conscious of the fact that his policy, both at home and abroad, was the only real German policy, and therefore the only conceivable one in the interest of Aryan mankind as a whole and — consequently — of the whole realm of Lift the only conceivable one ‘in the interest of the Universe,’ to quote the words of the Book of books. For alone regenerate Aryan man can and will save what is, in spite of all, worth saving in this doomed world, and build a new earth — open a new Time-cycle — on the basis of principles eternally true. Adolf Hitler has repeatedly said so in his speeches. And repeatedly expressed in Mein Kampf the same fact, namely that he was acting ‘in the spirit of the almighty Creator’ and struggling ‘for the Lord’s own work’[8] i.e. for Truth upon this earth: earthly Perfection; and that his ‘new ideas’ are ‘in harmony with the primeaval meaning of things.’[9]

What August Kubizek relates of his life in Linz and Vienna from 1904 to 1908, shows how early the future ruler had acquired a clear conception of his ultimate aim — the ‘ideal State’ — and become aware of the spirit of the whole programme he was, one day, to set forth and to work out, with the help of enthusiastic millions of people; how early he knew what his policy would be (what, in fact, any policy in accordance with truth, i.e. with Nature, can only be): — at the same time national and socialistic; nay, socialistic because it was to be — is too be — national in the full sense of the word, first in the sense of racial; and national in that sense because that Godhead within us which is real Godhead, is nothing else but the latent glory of our race in its original perfection.

To urge the German and, beyond the pale of the Reich, the Aryan in general — the youngest race of our Time — cycle, destined to the lordship of the divine Beginning of the next cycle — to yearn for and to strive with all his enlightened might towards that perfection on all planes, and to bring it, here and now, collectively as well as individually, into being (to the extent this is exceptionally possible, already during the Dark Age); to urge him to be, now, against the prevailing spirit of general contamination and general decay — against the current of Time, — the witness and the herald of the coming Dawn, and that, on a national, or rather on a racial scale, such is and remains the actual goal of National Socialism, the Hitler faith, however astounding this may yet appear to most people, to-day, in Year 22[10] after ‘the first Seizure of power.[11] Important as they may have been after 1918 — or as they may be now after 1945, — the immediate political aims which could not and cannot be separated from the persecuted Weltanschauung are mere steps towards that one great positive, permanent goal.

_______________

[1] Kubizek, Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund, p. 292.

[2] Ibid., p. 115.

[3] Traumhaft is the word Grimm repeatedly uses in Warum? Woher? Aber Wohin?

[4] Kubizek, p. 99.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Hierl, In Dienst für Deutschland.

[7] Mein Kampf, p. 766.

[8] Ibid., p. 76.

[9] Ibid., p. 440.

[10] These words were written in 1955.

[11] Machtübernahme—which took place on the 30th Jan. 1933.

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Evil Summer, 1945 (book)

1945 (XI)

By mid-May, 1945, the Allied conquerors had laid claim to virtually all of what was once the Third Reich—the Americans, British and French in the west, the Soviets in the east. Behind the Red Army lines, the final pockets of resistance also surrendered.

At the Courland enclave on the Baltic, over two hundred thousand German soldiers and Latvian volunteers laid down their arms, then joined the defenders of Berlin on the long, one-way march to Siberia. After seventy days of desperate, heroic struggle, the besieged garrison of Breslau also lowered its flag and these men too began their Siberian death march. And also after surrender, the already haggard females of Breslau began pondering “whether life had not been sweeter during the worst days of the siege.” Remembered one girl:

Rape began almost immediately and there was a viciousness in the acts as if we women were being punished for Breslau having resisted for so long… Let me say that I was young, pretty, plump and fairly inexperienced. A succession of Ivans gave me over the next week or two a lifetime of experience. Luckily very few of their rapes lasted more than a minute. With many it was just a matter of seconds before they collapsed gasping. What kept me sane was that almost from the very first one I felt only a contempt for these bullying and smelly peasants who could not act gently towards a woman, and who had about as much sexual technique as a rabbit.

“For four years [Propaganda Minister, Joseph] Goebbels kept telling us that the Russians were rapists, that they would violate, murder, rob and pillage us,” explained one woman. “Such propaganda did not shock us and we looked forward to being liberated by the Allies… We could not bear it when Goebbels turned out to be right.”

“Red soldiers during the first weeks of their occupation raped every women and girl between the ages of 2 and 60. That sounds exaggerated, but it is the simple truth…,” a stunned American reporter revealed. “Husbands and fathers who attempted to protect their women folk were shot down, and girls offering extreme resistance were murdered.”

Although frantic females tried numerous stratagems to stop the attacks, nothing they did seemed to slow, much less halt, the Soviet sexual assaults-not age, not looks, not illness, nothing.

“A young Russian with a pistol in his hand came to fetch me,” a mother of two small children reminisced. “I have to admit that I was so frightened (and not just of the pistol) that I could not hold my bladder. That didn’t disturb him in the least.” When this same woman later went with her sister to see a Soviet military physician, far from helping the females, the doctor and another officer raped them both. The young mother herself was on her menstrual cycle; her sister was in the late stages of pregnancy.

Far from being sanctuaries, houses of worship were some of the first stops for the Red Army. In addition to the mass rape of females who sought shelter in churches and cathedrals, nuns likewise suffered the same. In one Silesian city alone, Soviet soldiers brutally raped nearly two hundred Catholic sisters leaving sixty-six pregnant nuns in their wake.

Although German women were naturally their favorite targets, virtually any female in the path of the communist army would do. Thousands of women of all nationalities held in German and Polish labor camps were not merely liberated when the Soviets arrived.

“I waited for the Red Army for days and nights,” admitted one Russian female. “I waited for my liberation, but now our soldiers treat us far worse than the Germans did. They do terrible things to us.”

At devastated Dresden, Chemnitz and other cities in eastern Germany that now for the first time experienced Soviet occupation, the situation was the same. Encouraged by the Jewish propagandist, Ilya Ehrenburg, Soviet soldiers were not merely encouraged to rape and kill all Germans they encountered, they were all but ordered to do it; it was the Red soldier’s “patriotic duty,” insisted Stalin’s murderous mouthpiece.

“Kill them all, men, old men, children and the women, after you have amused yourself with them!” demanded Ehrenburg. “Kill. Nothing in Germany is guiltless, neither the living nor the yet unborn… Break the racial pride of the German women. Take her as your legitimate booty. Kill, you brave soldiers of the victorious Soviet Army.”

Although front-line troops-Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians committed their share of savage atrocities, it was the rear echelon—Mongolians, and other Asiatics—that were responsible for perhaps not just the greatest number of crimes but also the greatest degree of crimes. To most Germans, however, all were known simply as “Russians,” or “Ivans.”

“There were no limits to the bestiality and licentiousness of these troops…,” remembered a pastor from Milzig. “Girls and women were routed out of their hiding-places, out of the ditches and thickets where they had sought shelter from the Russian soldiers, and were beaten and raped. Older women who refused to tell the Russians where the younger ones had hidden were likewise beaten and raped.”

When groups of fleeing refugees were overtaken by the Soviets the rapes and murders took on a massive, mechanical quality.

Typically, all captured females—old, young, sick, pregnant, mothers and their children included—were forced to lie by the sides of roads while the laughing Soviet soldiers lined up, then lowered their trousers. One after another, the attacks continued. Generally, as more passing troops arrived, the lines got longer, not shorter. Those females who lost consciousness from blood loss were dragged to the side or rolled into a ditch. Any mother who tried to save her daughter was automatically shot. Even those soldiers who would have otherwise avoided such sadistic crimes were compelled, “without exception,” to join in by “grinning officers” who stood at the head of each line.

Like the case above, whenever possible commissars made certain that German men—fathers, husbands, priests, soldiers—were forced to watch the rape of German women be it inside homes, schools, churches, in parks, on sidewalks, or by the roadsides.

With machine guns trained on them, one large group of surrendering German soldiers, including the famous air ace, Erich Hartmann, were forced to look on as a mob of drunken Soviets threw captured women and girls to the ground, tore off their clothes, then, amid howls and laughter, began their violent sexual attacks.

A young German woman, mother of a twelve-year-old girl, knelt at the feet of one Soviet and begged that he and the others take her, not the child. Ignoring her tearful pleas the man strode away, a mocking grin on his face. “Damned fascist pig!” yelled a soldier nearby as he kicked the mother in the face then shot and killed her. With that the killer dragged the dead woman’s daughter behind a nearby tank. He was joined by others and for half an hour only the screams of the little girl and laughter of the men was heard. Then, their hate and lust sated , the rapists finally withdrew. Completely naked and unable to stand, the bloodied child crawled slowly back to her dead mother. An hour later the sobbing little girl at last stopped crying and joined her mother in death.

At the same time as the above was transpiring, eight- and nine­ year-old children were also being raped and sodomized repeatedly by the Soviets. Mothers who tried to protect their daughters were beaten unconscious and dragged to the side where they themselves were savagely raped and killed.

“Kill! Kill!” urged the blood-thirsty propagandist , Ilya Ehrenburg. “In the German race there is nothing but evil; not one among the living, not one among the yet unborn but is evil!… Stamp out the fascist beast once and for all in its lair! Use force and break the racial pride of these German women… Kill! As you storm onward, kill, you gallant soldiers of the Red Army.”

“Fear is always present,” young Regina Shelton admitted. “It flares into panic at tales of atrocities—mutilated nude bodies tossed by the wayside—a woman nailed spread-eagle to a cart and gang-raped while bleeding to death from her wounds-horrible diseases spread to their victims by sex-drunken Mongolians.” Those frustrated rapists too drunk to physically conclude their act instead used the bottle they were drinking from to symbolically continue the savagery with even more hideous damage done to the victim.

Certainly, not every soldier in the Soviet army was a drunken, sadistic monster. Some officers protected helpless German victims. Other upright soldiers placed their own lives on the line to defend the defenseless. A few, like the poet, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, were haunted for the rest of their lives by the things they had seen… and haunted by the things they had perhaps even done:

Twenty-two Hoeringstrasse. It’s not been burned, just looted, rifled. A moaning by the walls, half muffled: the mother’s wounded, half alive. The little daughter’s on the mattress, dead. How many have been on it? A platoon, a company perhaps? A girl’s been turned into a woman, a woman turned into a corpse… The mother begs, “Soldier, kill me!”

No, not all Soviet soldiers were child-killing rapists… but enough were. Ilya Ehrenburg:

Break the racial pride of the German women. Take her as your legitimate booty. Kill, you brave soldiers of the victorious Soviet Army.

 
______________

Note of the Editor: Here you can request an item of the ‘Hellstorm Holocaust’ package (the biggest secret in modern history: the Allied genocide of Germans after 1945), and here you can order Tom Goodrich’s other books.

Categories
'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.

Categories
Film Final solution Racial right

Heydrich, 6

Today I watched the film from this moment until Otto Hoffman’s speech is interrupted by a phone call from Himmler to Heydrich. The segment made me think and even aroused my emotions.

For example, it came to my mind that Christians of the racial right evoke the figure of Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger, portrayed in the film by Franz Rudnick.

Kritzinger was a German civil servant and Secretary of State in the Reich Chancellery: one of the participants in the Wannsee Conference that established the policies of The Final Solution. After the conference, he attempted to resign from his post in the Chancellery, but his resignation was rejected because ‘it would be worse without him’.

After the war, Kritzinger was arrested, along with most of the other surviving members of the Wannsee Conference, in 1946. During the Nuremberg Trials, he publicly declared himself ashamed of the Reich. He was released in April 1946 but then arrested again in December of the same year. He was later released and shortly afterwards died of natural causes.

With Germans like Kritzinger and Americans like the good Christians of today, we are getting nowhere. On the one hand, they recognise that the Jews want to exterminate the Aryans. On the other hand, they put the interests of the Jew before those of the Aryan when it comes to final solutions, because if it comes to a war to the death between the two races, by feeling compassion for the enemy one is tacitly betraying one’s ethnicity.

I don’t think Christian racialists will see the obvious unless they repudiate the religion of their parents. We saw what happened in Germany after the war. The Anglo-Americans easily denazified the German nation by simply using Judeo-Christian ethics as the default morality, and the ideals of National Socialism were quickly forgotten by these Germans who became, like the rest of Westerners, vile bourgeoisie from the 1950s to the present day.

I think it is even treason to go around saying that the film is making things up and that the SS weren’t exterminationists. That’s why I like David Irving and Mark Weber, because despite being sympathisers of Hitler and the Third Reich they don’t fall into this neochristian temptation of wanting to ‘baptise’, with Christian morality, these SS hierarchs who appear at the round table.

If things continue to go wrong and the Aryans are going to be exterminated, I think only the last generation of whites will discover that from WW2 onwards all Westerners, racialists included, made an astronomical mistake.

Conversely, if the racialists were consistent with their premise of racial protection, they would have to have as martyrs all those at the table who were killed by the Allies when the war ended, except Kritzinger because he never abandoned Judeo-Christian morality. Moreover, if English-speaking racialists were consistent, they would try to learn German to understand National Socialism thoroughly, and even to speak in a language that sounds tougher, more manly, than other European languages.

Otto Hoffman’s little speech, portrayed by Robert Atzorn, which starts here, shows the exact tone as the (still non-existent) priests of the sacred words should be speaking, even if we have zero political power. Remember what Savitri implied: the first step to conquer the world is to have this kind of thinking.

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche

Rosenberg

Editor’s Note: Below I quote excerpts from a speech by Alfred Rosenberg at a commemorative event on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Friedrich Nietzsche on October 15, 1944, in Weimar (the full speech can be read here):

Nietzsche also knew this very well when he wrote: ‘The discipline of suffering, of great suffering, do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far?’ Only such common suffering heightens the tension of the soul, only the sight of a great and general fate strengthens the spirit of invention and bravery in the struggle. Only such suffering can call upon human beings, i.e., an entire community that feels suffering in common, to great achievements. And this prerequisite for the transformation of his prophecy into a people reflecting upon itself had to be denied to Friedrich Nietzsche…

That is in line with what we have recently been saying: that the white man must suffer once again to cleanse himself of all the mental infection he suffers from, even if that means the suffering resulting from a Third World War.

‘But may it [the German spirit] never believe’, Nietzsche added at that time, anticipating almost everything, ‘that it can fight similar battles without its household Gods, without its mythical homeland, without a “return” of all German things!’ ‘Let no one believe that the German spirit has forever lost its mythical homeland, for so clearly it still understands the birdsongs that tell tales of that homeland. One day it will awaken, in all the morning freshness of a monstrous sleep: then it will slay dragons, annihilate treacherous dwarves, and awaken Brünnhilde, and Wotan’s spear itself will not be able to bar its way!’

See what I said in January of last year about The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. With the honourable exception of Carolyn Yeager, who never played degenerate music on her podcasts, this is something that contemporary neo-Nazis will never understand.

Here a hope was expressed that literally went to everything, demanded not only a cleansing from all overgrowing foreign plants and their juices but confidently expected it, a true inner rebirth leading back to the ultimate roots from which it longed for the supply of power for a great future…

‘The time for small politics is past: the next century already brings the struggle for domination of the earth, the compulsion to great politics’.

Given this overall evaluation as well he still hopes once more for a rigorous German heart, for the German form of scepticism, for a ‘spiritualized Fridericianism’, and he expresses it more than once that today, where in Europe only the herd animal comes to honour and bestows honours, an entirely different human type would have to assume rule to reverse this destiny.

Thus a profound criticism of the entire social structure sets in, a criticism of the Marxist, even then already falsely termed socialist movement, as it cannot be thought out more consistently and annihilatingly even today. For him Marxism is the thoroughly thought-out tyranny of the lowliest and dumbest, that is of the superficial, envious and three-quarters actors; it is indeed the conclusion of ‘modern ideas’ and their latent anarchism. Nietzsche turns above all against the attempt to abolish the concept of property because abolishing this concept of property had to breed a destructive struggle for existence; for man has no providence or self-sacrifice towards anything that he possesses only temporarily; he deals with it exploitatively, as robber or as dissolute squanderer. And amidst this criticism already arises the indication of a way out:

Keep all paths to small fortunes open, but prevent effortless, sudden enrichment; withdraw all branches of transport and trade that favour the accumulation of large fortunes, which is to say, especially money trading, from the hands of private individuals and companies, and regard both those who own too much and those who own nothing as dangerous creatures to the community…

With that, the presentiment of the Marxist dictatorship which we see marching against us as a mortal enemy from Moscow is clearly predicted. It has allied itself with that force which Nietzsche presented as particularly dangerous, without our wanting to assert that he was then able to survey the whole structure and psychology of the East in every detail.

But Nietzsche knows that probably, despite all cognition, the development once initiated cannot be reversed in a short time, and therefore he predicts that from this mixture of liberalism, plutocracy and anarchy the great crisis of Germany and the whole European continent would have to emerge. He is profoundly convinced that from this hodgepodge initiated by the entire liberal movement, meanwhile expressing an untiring hatred against Rousseau as the intellectual originator of these currents, Europe would someday have to arrive at the most terrible all-encompassing confrontations, but then perhaps also at severe tyrannical phenomena. He writes: ‘The democratization of Europe is at the same time an involuntary event for breeding tyrants, understanding the word in every sense, including the most spiritual’…

He was looking for this voice of wanting to understand and friendship. He also made some friends, but gradually, with an ever-sharper realization of an impending spiritual and political fate, his former companions also stepped back. The companions of his scholarly years sink into the bourgeois world. Richard Wagner also does not seem to want to go the way forward, and in this painful yet to the end still distant reverence, the greatest inner crisis in Nietzsche’s life comes to light, when he declares that Wagner, as an artist, to whom he now believes he must spiritually oppose, also alienates those people in Germany who are worth working on…

While this or that of those prophets of our time may be particularly close to us in some areas, Friedrich Nietzsche was probably the greatest figure in the German and European intellectual world of his day as an overall personality and as an unswerving recognizer of an entire epoch that was about to perish! One thing must be considered with all his later confessions and criticisms: if in his remarks he only suffered wounds and therefore took a fighting stance against the immediate causes of these wounds, the same would have happened if he had lived in France or England or another state for a long time. Because everywhere the same phenomena of decline were at work to decompose old grown traditions without thereby creating new ties and setting up new ideals. The whole world paid homage to base values.

This evokes what I recently said about internal jihad: that one must repudiate one’s nation project to save the Aryan, referring to a ‘nation’ that has been founded on the worship of Mammon (and this even refers to post-WWII Germany).

The revaluation of the values of passing liberal humanity into an ideal of the noble, hard personality, making greatness possible, is essentially Nietzsche’s doctrine that runs through all his works. If in recent times his ‘will to power’ has been particularly emphasized, this core has been rightly highlighted as that character resistance centre from which both the well-founded treatises and the ecstatic proclamations of ‘Zarathustra’ and the harsh attacks of his last writings can be explained…

In truth, there have been no power institutions that have had as hyenas of life an effect like the heartless capitalists of the international stock exchanges, never such a chloroformization of entire peoples as has happened through the all-Jewish press, and never has a power attack on the great culture of a continent been prepared more insidiously than after these influences through the Marxist dictatorship movement. What Nietzsche prophesied, European anarchism, was on the way…

So the forces that are now struggling with each other have not newly emerged; they are prefigured by the liberal movements of the 19th century, by the over-technicization of a new era, by the unbridled rule of money and gold, by the monopolization of the entire news system in Europe by racially alien hands. The European cultural citizens, tired of the sedation of their resistance forces, are now overwhelmed by a long-dammed destructive passion from the East, which, in a strange alliance with Jewish-West-leaning Marxism, has shaken not only Germany but the whole European continent to its foundations. When we proudly declare that National Socialist Germany alone still defends this old Europe today, when we can perhaps say in a slightly different sense than Nietzsche in the 19th century, but still from an even greater depth, that we are the ‘good Europeans’ today, that is a historically honestly won right…

But despite this realization, we still feel in our experience the great train of a new era and know that what has carried us and gives the German nation the inner will to inflexible resistance today is also based on that deep shock of the lonely Nietzsche, which carried him through a painful life, which often led to despair and accusations in solitude, but was always at the same time driven forward by the unconditional necessity of such an avowal to the future…

This is how we, National Socialists, see the workings of those powers today which, coming from the past, began to become a dangerous force of disintegration in the 19th century and today lead to the most terrible disease of the European essence in a large, suppurating process, and at the same time we see some prophets demandingly raise their voices amidst this fateful currents to break these creation-hostile values to help realize a new order of life.

Among them, we honour the lonely Friedrich Nietzsche today. After stripping away all that is tied to the times and all too human, this figure stands spiritually beside us today, and we greet him across the times as a close relative, as a spiritual brother in the struggle for the rebirth of great German spirituality, for the shaping of generous and spacious thinking and as a proclaimer of European unity as a necessity for the creative life of our old continent, rejuvenating itself today in a great revolution.

If a new visitor is not familiar with our recent psychobiography on Nietzsche, he could do so now.

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche Twilight of the idols (book)

Crusade

against the Cross, 19

Yesterday I said a few harsh words about the founding cucks in the neighbouring country to the north, but here things were even worse: Hernán Cortés himself married an Indian woman and had a mestizo child with her! At least the northern Protestants would take a little longer to repudiate their anti-miscegenation laws but Catholic Cortés did it from the start!

On the other side of the Atlantic, things were never much better, as the Europeans had already betrayed themselves with Christianity for many centuries. In Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche told some home truths to his compatriots. In §4 of ‘The Improvers of Mankind’ Nietzsche wrote:

These regulations [the Laws of Manu] are instructive enough: we encounter Aryan humanity at its purest and most primordial; we learn that the concept of ‘pure blood’ is very far from being a harmless concept. On the other hand, it becomes obvious in which people the chandala hatred against this Aryan ‘humaneness’ has has become a religion, eternalized itself, and become genius — primarily in the Gospels, even more so in the Book of Enoch.

Christianity, sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as a growth on this soil, represents the counter-movement to any morality of breeding, of race, privilege: it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence. Christianity — the revaluation of all Aryan values, the victory of chandala values, the gospel preached to the poor and base, the general revolt of all the downtrodden, the wretched, the failures, the less favored, against ‘race’: the undying chandala hatred is disguised as a religion of love.

In §5 he adds a sentence: ‘all the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through immoral’.

Nietzsche starts the next chapter, ‘What the Germans lack’ with these words: ‘Perhaps I know the Germans, perhaps I may even tell them some truths’. They have ‘more virile virtues than any other country in Europe can show, much cheerfulness and self-respect…’

But this people has deliberately made itself stupid, for nearly a millennium: nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been abused more dissolutely…

How much disgruntled heaviness, lameness, dampness, dressing gown — how much beer there is in the German intelligence! How is it at all possible that young men who dedicate their lives to the most spiritual goals do not feel the first instinct of spirituality, the spirit’s instinct of self-preservation — and drink beer?… the gentle degeneration which beer produces in the spirit!

And in §5 of that chapter Nietzsche adds: ‘In present-day Germany no one is any longer free to give his children a noble education: our “higher schools” are all set up for the most ambiguous mediocrity, with their teachers, curricula, and teaching aims’. In §7 he adds: ‘Learning to think: in our schools one no longer has any idea of this… That the Germans have been able to stand their philosophers at all, especially that most deformed concept-cripple of all time, the great Kant, provides not a bad notion of German grace’.

Countless times I have cited my favourite Nietzsche quote, which I put as an epigraph in the seminal text of this site, ‘The Red Giant’ (German translation here) which we published in 2009 on Blogspot, even before the incarnation of The West’ Darkest Hour on WordPress (I was deplatformed from both!).

Now I will put that quote in context, by citing the preceding pages of ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’ of Twilight of the Idols. It is here that can be seen that it’s very difficult to follow Nietzsche without considerable European culture, which is why I read Andrés Sánchez Pascual’s heavily annotated German-Spanish translation of Twilight of the Idols. Without Sánchez Pascual’s explanatory endnotes I couldn’t have followed the philosopher in his finesses.[1]

The German-English translation by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale of Twilight of the Idols can be read here, but the translators removed a good amount of italics from the original German (italics that I add back below). Reddish colour added on my favourite Nietzsche quote:

§ 1 My impossible ones. — Seneca: or the toreador of virtue. Rousseau: or the return to nature in impuris naturalibus [in natural filth]. Schiller: or the Moral-Trumpeter of Säckingen. Dante: or the hyena who writes poetry in tombs. Kant: or cant as an intelligible character. Victor Hugo: or the pharos at the sea of nonsense. Liszt: or the school of smoothness — with women. George Sand: or lactea ubertas — in translation, the milk cow with ‘a beautiful style.’ Michelet: or the enthusiasm which takes off its coat. Carlyle: or pessimism as a poorly digested dinner. John Stuart Mill: or insulting clarity. Les frères de Goncourt: or the two Ajaxes in battle with Homer — music by Offenbach. Zola: or ‘the delight in stinking.’

§ 2 Renan. — Theology: or the corruption of reason by ‘original sin’ (Christianity). Witness Renan who, whenever he risks a Yes or No of a more general nature scores a miss with painful regularity. He wants for example, to weld together la science and la noblesse: but la science belongs with democracy; what could be plainer? With no little ambition, he wishes to represent an aristocracy of the spirit: yet at the same time he is on his knees before its very counter-doctrine, the evangile des humbles — and not only on his knees. To what avail is all free-spiritedness, modernity, mockery, and wry-neck suppleness, if in one’s guts one is still a Christian, a Catholic — in fact, a priest! Renan is most inventive, just like a Jesuit and father confessor, when it comes to seduction; his spirituality does not even lack the broad fat popish smile — like all priests, he becomes dangerous only when he loves. Nobody can equal him when it comes to adoring in a manner endangering life itself. This spirit of Renan’s, a spirit which is enervated, is one more calamity for poor, sick, will-sick France.

§ 3 Sainte Beuve. — Nothing of virility, full of petty wrath against all virile spirits. Wanders around, cowardly, curious, bored, eavesdropping — a female at bottom, with a female’s lust for revenge and a female’s sensuality. As a psychologist, a genius of médisance [slander], inexhaustibly rich in means to that end; no one knows better how to mix praise with poison. Plebeian in the lowest instincts and related to the ressentiment of Rousseau: consequently, a romantic — for underneath all romantisme lie the grunting and greed of Rousseau’s instinct for revenge. A revolutionary, but still pretty well harnessed by fear. Without freedom when confronted with anything strong (public opinion, the Academy, the court, even Port Royal). Embittered against everything great in men and things, against whatever believes in itself. Poet and half-female enough to sense the great as a power; always writhing like the famous worm because he always feels stepped upon. As a critic, without any standard, steadiness, and backbone, with the cosmopolitan libertine’s tongue for a medley of things, but without the courage even to confess his libertinage. As a historian, without philosophy, without the power of the philosophical eye — hence declining the task of judging in all significant matters, hiding behind the mask of ‘objectivity.’ It is different with his attitude to all things in which a fine, well-worn taste is the highest tribunal: there he really has the courage to stand by himself and delight in himself — there he is a master. In some respects, a preliminary version of Baudelaire.

§ 4 De imitatione Christi is one of those books which I cannot hold in my hand without a physiological reaction: it exudes a perfume of the Eternal-Feminine which is strictly for Frenchmen — or Wagnerians. This saint has a way of talking about love which arouses even Parisian women to curiosity. I am told that that cleverest of Jesuits, Auguste Comte, who wanted to lead his Frenchmen to Rome via the detour of science, found his inspiration in this book. I believe it: ‘the religion of the heart.’

§ 5 G. Eliot. — They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an English consistency; we do not wish to hold it against little moralistic females à la Eliot. In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there. — We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands.

If there is something I really love about Nietzsche it is that, once you realise that Christianity and its bastard son neochristianity are the cause of all Western evil, everyone in today’s West seems incredibly idiotic to you: something similar to the child with zero superego—the vindication of the Id!—who sees the king naked.

_______________

[1] Friedrich Nietzsche: Crepúsculo de los ídolos. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, fourteenth edition: 1996 (I originally read the 1973 or 1976 edition, a copy now lost).

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche Philosophy

Crusade

against the Cross, 9

David Friedrich Strauss

Between 1873 and 1876 Nietzsche published separately four major essays, David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Schopenhauer as Educator, and Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (these four were later collected and entitled, together, Untimely Meditations). All four essays shared the orientation of a general critique of German culture in an attempt to change its course, which Nietzsche foresaw as wrong.

Since in this series on Nietzsche I am not trying to deal in depth with his complex legacy, but only to show how the anti-Christianity of Hitler’s private conversations in the 20th century had been brewing in his homeland since the previous century, I will only say a few words about the first of the Untimely Meditations: the attack on David Friedrich Strauss.

If we remember that Nietzsche had read Strauss’ magnum opus, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, published in Tübingen in 1835-1836); that the book helped his apostasy; and that he even wanted to communicate this reading to his sister, it seems a mystery that in this first great essay after The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche should fiercely attack Strauss. But it must be understood that Nietzsche was attacking another book by Strauss that was selling like a bestseller, published decades after Das Leben Jesu. I refer to The Old and the New Faith: A Confession (1871).

So far I have based much of the biographical information in this series on Werner Ross’ book on Nietzsche, originally published in German under the title Der ängstliche Adler. But I am afraid to say that, as far as the acerbic satire of the ‘Straussiade’ is concerned, Ross is wrong in saying that Nietzsche’s essay was simply a commission from Wagner, whom Strauss had long before attacked mercilessly.

What prompts me to say a word about this Nietzschean diatribe is that, on this site, I have held Strauss in high esteem, in the sense that since 2012 and 2013 we have presented him as a pioneer of New Testament textual criticism (here, here, here and here). Critical exegesis aside, the normie Ross, who had a poor idea of Hitler, didn’t realise that Nietzsche’s concerns about Strauss’ bestseller were genuine and that they arose naturally from his point of view. (To use a vulgar analogy, it is as if in our century I were to attack Richard Carrier’s Wokism even though I accept the thesis of his book on the non-historicity of Jesus.) We must understand that Nietzsche had erected for himself an ideal of culture based on three pillars: pre-Platonic Greece, Schopenhauer and Wagner. Strauss’ book was in exemplary opposition to them, and its success indicated that the danger for Germany was more serious than could have been supposed.

In David Strauss: der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller (David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer, 1873) Nietzsche presents Strauss as an example of the German thought of the time. He casts the Straussian ‘New Faith’, based on the ‘scientific’ progression of history, as a vulgar reading of history in the service of a degenerate culture. Throughout his essay Nietzsche uses the term ‘Philistine culture’. Philistinism was a pejorative term that, although of German origin, it was used from the 19th century onwards in the English language. By comparison with the ancient Philistines, in the cultural milieu of the Victorian era it was applied to vulgar, uneducated or insensitive people. Today the term is in disuse because vulgarity in the ‘culture’ of the masses, and even of the elites, is no longer seen as vulgar.

It is difficult to present Nietzsche’s critique of culture in a blog post because one must be immersed in the spirit of 19th-century Germany. Such an enterprise could only be of value to a scholar writing retrospectively. But for a taste of Nietzsche’s essay, I will quote a few passages from his heated polemic. After prefacing his critique with the sentence ‘There was once a Strauss who was a brave, rigorous scholar, not at all lightly clad, and we liked him just as much’, Nietzsche tells us:

What kind of people are these who must have attained dominion in Germany and who can forbid such strong and simple feelings and prevent their expression? That power, that kind of people I will call by their name—they are the cultiphilistine…

Because of this lack of self-knowledge, the Philistine has the firm and convinced feeling that his ‘culture’ is the full expression of true German culture: and since everywhere the Philistine goes he meets cultured people of his kind, and since all public institutions, all educational, cultural and artistic establishments are organised by the Philistine’s cult and needs, he wanders everywhere with the triumphalist feeling that he is the worthy representative of present-day German culture…

He finds everywhere the uniform imprint of himself, and from this uniform imprint of all ‘cultured’ people he derives a unity of style of German culture.

The posthumous fragments from the time of the composition of this first of the Untimely Meditations, such as one fragment from the spring-summer of 1873 (the time when Tolstoy was publishing Anna Karenina) are even more direct in probing Nietzsche’s thinking:

Strauss is not a philosopher. He lacks feeling for style. He is not an artist…

The horrendous dilapidation of Hegelianism! Not even those who have been able to save themselves from it, like Strauss, are ever completely cured.

Two misfortunes befell Strauss: firstly, Hegelianism took possession of him and made him dizzy at a time when he should have been guided by a serious philosopher. Secondly, his opponents made him fall into the mania that his cause was popular and that he was a popular author. As a result, it has never been possible for him to cease to be a theologian, and it has never been permissible for him to begin again to be a rigorous disciple of his science. Now he has done his utmost to eliminate Hegel and the theological ingredient as much as possible: but in vain. The former is evident in Strauss’ chatteringly optimistic way of looking at the world, in which the Prussian state is the ultimate goal of world history; the latter in the irritated invective he hurls against Christianity. Strauss lacks something to lean on and throws himself into the arms of the State and of success; his thinking is not at any point a thinking sub specie aeternitatis [in the perspective of eternity], but a thinking sub specie decennii vel biennii [from the standpoint of the decade or the biennium]. This is how he becomes a ‘classic populist’, just like Büchner…

The cultiphilistine ignores what culture-unity of style is. He agrees that there are classics (Schiller, Goethe, Lessing) and forgets that they wanted a culture, but that they are not a foundation on which to rest.

What to say about Nietzsche’s political ideas, would the philosopher have approved of the Third Reich had he lived lucidly and for as many years as his sister? What is certain is that more than one pundit answered his diatribe against Strauss. For example, ‘Herr Friedrich Nietzsche and German Culture’ from the pen of B.F., published in the Leipzig journal Die Grenzboten in October 1873 by the mysterious ‘B.F.’[1] rebuked Nietzsche for his lack of patriotism.

Politics aside one thing is certain: the philologist was left behind and a philosopher was born: a critic of culture, the Kulturkampf.

The context of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations must be understood within the legacy of Wagner and the work of ‘total art’, which detested the scientific fever, the faith in so-called progress and the mercantile spirit of the present. (He who advocates the transvaluation of these Judaizing values would say: Let’s go back to the Germanic myths!) These were the times when Nietzsche had made his first solo trip abroad, and in his diary, he wrote things like ‘This Alpine valley is absolutely my pleasure: here there are strong, pure airs, mountains’ and ‘roads I walk along for hours’.

This is already the new Nietzsche, the philosopher-poet of little or no company. Even to his mother he cites pen, ink and paper as his best companions: ‘All together we greet you from the bottom of our hearts’. This was also the year in which the opening of the Bayreuth theater was planned. Wagner was already sixty years old, and Nietzsche was brimming with euphoria.

Strauss was to die the following year.

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[1] It hasn’t been possible to find out who was behind the initials B.F. The official documents of the journal list Hans Blum, who was then its editor, as the author. Many years later, in 1909, Blum denied that he was the author of the article, but he couldn’t remember exactly who had given it to him; he hinted that it might have been a professor at the University of Leipzig or a publicist inspired by university media. It has also been claimed that the author may have been Bernhard Forster (the initials match), then and always an ardent supporter of the Reich, who later married Nietzsche’s sister. If this is so, Nietzsche’s critic would thus have become Nietzsche’s brother-in-law. Elisabeth, of course, denied it.