Tag: Germany

Good war… better peace

To help celebrate the upcoming 70th anniversary of the end of the “Good War” and the beginning of the “Good Peace,” Tom Goodrich offers the following from his books, Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947, and Rape Hate: Sex & Violence in War & Peace.

And so, with the once mighty German Army now disarmed and enslaved in May, 1945, and with their leaders either dead or awaiting trial for so-called “war crimes,” the old men, women and children who remained in the dismembered Reich found themselves utterly at the mercy of the victors. Unfortunately for these survivors, never in the history of the world was mercy in shorter supply.

Soon after the Allied victory in Europe, the purge of Nazi Party members from government, business, industry, science, education, and all other walks of German life commenced. While a surprising number of Nazis were allowed—even compelled—to man their posts temporarily to enable a smooth transition, all party members, high and low, were sooner or later excised from German daily life. In theory, “de-Nazification” was a simple transplanting of Nazi officials with those of democratic, socialist or communist underpinnings. In practice, the purge became little more than a cloak for an orgy of rape, torture and death.

De-Nazification

Because their knowledge of the language and culture was superb, most of the intelligence officers accompanying US and British forces into the Reich were Jewish refugees who had fled Germany in the late 1930s. Although their American and English “aides” were hardly better, the fact that many of these “39ers” became interrogators, examiners and screeners, with old scores to settle, insured that Nazis—or any German, for that matter—would be shown no mercy.

One man opposed to the vengeance-minded program was George Patton. “Evidently the virus started by Morgenthau and [Bernard] Baruch of a Semitic revenge against all Germans is still working… ,” wrote the general in private. “I am frankly opposed to this war-criminal stuff. It is not cricket and it is Semitic… I can’t see how Americans can sink so low.”

Soon after occupation, all adult Germans were compelled to register at the nearest Allied headquarters and complete a lengthy questionnaire on their past activities. While many nervous citizens were detained then and there, most returned home, convinced that at long last the terrible ordeal was over. For millions, however, the trial had but begun.

“Then it started,” remembered Anna Fest, a woman who had registered with the Americans six weeks earlier.

Such a feeling of helplessness, when three or four heavily armed military police stand in front of you. You just panic. I cried terribly. My mother was completely beside herself and said, “You can’t do this. She registered just as she was supposed to.” Then she said, “If only you’d gone somewhere else and had hidden.” But I consider that senseless, because I did not feel guilty… That was the way it went with everyone, with no reason given.

Few German adults, Nazi or not, escaped the dreaded knock on the door. Far from being dangerous fascists, Freddy and Lali Horstmann were actually well-known anti-Nazis. Records Lali from the Russian Zone:

“I am sorry to bother you,” he began, “but I am simply carrying out my orders. Until when did you work for the Foreign Office?”

“Till 1933,” my husband answered.

“Then you need fear nothing,” Androff said… “We accuse you of nothing, but we want you to accompany us to the headquarters of the NKVD, the secret police, so that we can take down what you said in a protocol, and ask you a few questions about the working of the Foreign Office…”

We were stunned for a moment; then I started forward, asking if I could come along with them. “Impossible,” the interpreter smiled. My heart raced. Would Freddy answer satisfactorily? Could he stand the excitement? What sort of accommodation would they give him?

“Don’t worry, your husband has nothing to fear,” Androff continued. “He will have a heated room. Give him a blanket for the night, but quickly, we must leave…”

There was a feeling of sharp tension, putting the soldier on his guard, as though he were expecting an attack from one of us. I took first the soldier, then the interpreter, by their hands and begged them to be kind to Freddy, repeating myself in the bustle and scraping of feet that drowned my words. There was a banging of doors. A cold wind blew in. I felt Freddy kiss me. I never saw him again.

“[W]e were wakened by the sound of tires screeching, engines stopping abruptly, orders yelled, general din, and a hammering on the window shutters. Then the intruders broke through the door, and we saw Americans with rifles who stood in front of our bed and shone lights at us. None of them spoke German, but their gestures said: ‘Get dressed, come with us immediately.’ This was my fourth arrest.”

So wrote Leni Riefenstahl, a talented young woman who was perhaps the world’s greatest film-maker. Because her epic documentaries—Triumph of the Will and Olympia—seemed paeans to not only Germany, but National Socialism, and because of her close relationship with an admiring Adolf Hitler, Leni was of more than passing interest to the Allies. Though false, rumors also hinted that the attractive, sometimes-actress was also a “mistress of the devil”—that she and Hitler were lovers.

“Neither my husband nor my mother nor any of my three assistants had ever joined the Nazi Party, nor had any of us been politically active,” said the confused young woman. “No charges had ever been filed against us, yet we were at the mercy of the [Allies] and had no legal protection of any kind.”

Leni Riefenstahl

Soon after Leni’s fourth arrest, came a fifth.

The jeep raced along the autobahns until, a few hours later… I was brought to the Salzburg Prison; there an elderly prison matron rudely pushed me into the cell, kicking me so hard that I fell to the ground; then the door was locked. There were two other women in the dark, barren room, and one of them, on her knees, slid about the floor, jabbering confusedly; then she began to scream, her limbs writhing hysterically. She seemed to have lost her mind. The other woman crouched on her bunk, weeping to herself.

As Leni and others quickly discovered, the “softening up” process began soon after arrival at an Allied prison. When Ernst von Salomon, his Jewish girl friend and fellow prisoners reached an American holding pen near Munich, the men were promptly led into a room and brutally beaten by military police. With his teeth knocked out and blood spurting from his mouth, von Salomon moaned to a gum-chewing officer, “You are no gentlemen.” The remark brought only a roar of laughter from the attackers. “No, no, no!” the GIs grinned. “We are Mississippi boys!” In another room, military policemen raped the women at will while leering soldiers watched from windows.

After such savage treatment, the feelings of despair only intensified once the captives were crammed into cells.

“The people had been standing there for three days, waiting to be interrogated,” remembered a German physician ordered to treat prisoners in the Soviet Zone. “At the sight of us a pandemonium broke out which left me helpless… As far as I could gather, the usual senseless questions were being reiterated: Why were they there, and for how long? They had no water and hardly anything to eat. They wanted to be let out more often than once a day… A great many of them have dysentery so badly that they can no longer get up.”

“Young Poles made fun of us,” said a woman from her cell in the same zone. “[They] threw bricks through the windows, paperbags with sand, and skins of hares filled with excrement. We did not dare to move or offer resistance, but huddled together in the farthest corner, in order not to be hit, which could not always be avoided… [W]e were never free from torments.”

“For hours on end I rolled about on my bed, trying to forget my surroundings,” recalled Leni Riefenstahl, “but it was impossible.”

The mentally disturbed woman kept screaming—all through the night; but even worse were the yells and shrieks of men from the courtyard, men who were being beaten, screaming like animals. I subsequently found out that a company of SS men was being interrogated.

They came for me the next morning, and I was taken to a padded cell where I had to strip naked, and a woman examined every square inch of my body. Then I had to get dressed and go down to the courtyard, where many men were standing, apparently prisoners, and I was the only woman. We had to line up before an American guard who spoke German. The prisoners stood to attention, so I tried to do the same, and then an American came who spoke fluent German. He pushed a few people together, then halted at the first in our line.

“Were you in the Party?”

The prisoner hesitated for a moment, then said: Yes.” He was slugged in the face and spat blood.

The American went on to the next in line.

“Were you in the Party?”

The man hesitated.

“Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

And he too got punched so hard in the face that the blood ran out of his mouth. However, like the first man, he didn’t dare resist. They didn’t even instinctively raise their hands to protect themselves. They did nothing. They put up with the blows like dogs.

The next man was asked: “Were you in the Party?”

Silence.

“Well?”

“No,” he yelled, so no punch. From then on nobody admitted that he had been in the Party and I was not even asked.

As the above case illustrated, there often was no rhyme or reason to the examinations; all seemed designed to force from the victim what the inquisitor wanted to hear, whether true or false. Additionally, most such “interrogations” were structured to inflict as much pain and suffering as possible. Explained one prisoner:

The purpose of these interrogations is not to worm out of the people what they knew—which would be uninteresting anyway—but to extort from them special statements. The methods resorted to are extremely primitive; people are beaten up until they confess to having been members of the Nazi Party… The authorities simply assume that, basically, everybody has belonged to the Party. Many people die during and after these interrogations, while others, who admit at once their party membership, are treated more leniently.

“A young commissar, who was a great hater of the Germans, cross-examined me…,” said Gertrude Schulz. “When he put the question: ‘Frauenwerk [Women’s Labor Service]?’ I answered in the negative. Thereupon he became so enraged, that he beat me with a stick, until I was black and blue. I received about 15 blows… on my left upper arm, on my back and on my thigh. I collapsed and, as in the case of the first cross-examination, I had to sign the questionnaire.”

American torture pen

“Both officers who took our testimony were former German Jews,” reminisced a member of the women’s SS, Anna Fest. While vicious dogs snarled nearby, one of the officers screamed questions and accusations at Anna. If the answers were not those desired, “he kicked me in the back and the other hit me.”

They kept saying we must have been armed, have had pistols or so. But we had no weapons, none of us… I had no pistol. I couldn’t say, just so they’d leave me in peace, yes, we had pistols. The same thing would happen to the next person to testify… [T]he terrible thing was, the German men had to watch. That was a horrible, horrible experience… That must have been terrible for them. When I went outside, several of them stood there with tears running down their cheeks. What could they have done? They could do nothing.

Not surprisingly, with beatings, rape, torture, and death facing them, few victims failed to “confess” and most gladly inked their name to any scrap of paper shown them. Some, like Anna, tried to resist. Such recalcitrance was almost always of short duration, however. Generally, after enduring blackened eyes, broken bones, electric shock to breasts—or, in the case of men, smashed testicles—only those who died during torture failed to sign confessions.

Alone, surrounded by sadistic hate, utterly bereft of law, many victims understandably escaped by taking their own lives. Like tiny islands in a vast sea of evil, however, miracles did occur. As he limped painfully back to his prison cell, one Wehrmacht officer reflected on the insults, beatings, and tortures he had endured and contemplated suicide.

I could not see properly in the semi-darkness and missed my open cell door. A kick in the back and I was sprawling on the floor. As I raised myself I said to myself I could not, should not accept this humiliation. I sat on my bunk. I had hidden a razor blade that would serve to open my veins. Then I looked at the New Testament and found these words in the Gospel of St. John: “Without me ye can do nothing.”

Yes. You can mangle this poor body—I looked down at the running sores on my legs—but myself, my honor, God’s image that is in me, you cannot touch. This body is only a shell, not my real self. Without Him, without the Lord, my Lord, ye can do nothing. New strength seemed to rise in me.

I was pondering over what seemed to me a miracle when the heavy lock turned in the cell door. A very young American soldier came in, put his finger to his lips to warn me not to speak. “I saw it,” he said. “Here are baked potatoes.” He pulled the potatoes out of his pocket and gave them to me, and then went out, locking the door behind him.

* * *

Horrific as de-Nazification was in the British, French and, especially the American Zone, it was nothing compared to what took place in Poland, behind Soviet lines. In hundreds of concentration camps sponsored by an apparatus called the “Office of State Security,” thousands of Germans—male and female, old and young, high and low, Nazi and non–Nazi, SS, Wehrmacht, Volkssturm, Hitler Youth, all—were rounded up and imprisoned. Staffed and run by Jews, with help from Poles, Czechs, Russians, and other concentration camp survivors, the prisons were little better than torture chambers where dying was a thing to be prolonged, not hastened. While those with blond hair, blue eyes and handsome features were first to go, anyone who spoke German would do.

Moments after arrival, prisoners were made horrifyingly aware of their fate. John Sack, himself a Jew, reports on one camp run by twenty-six-year-old Shlomo Morel:

“I was at Auschwitz,” Shlomo proclaimed, lying to the Germans but, even more, to himself, psyching himself like a fighter the night of the championship, filling himself with hate for the Germans around him. “I was at Auschwitz for six long years, and I swore that if I got out, I’d pay all you Nazis back.” His eyes sent spears, but the “Nazis” sent him a look of simple bewilderment… “Now sing the Horst Wessel Song!” No one did, and Shlomo, who carried a hard rubber club, hit it against a bed like some judge’s gavel. “Sing it, I say!”

“The flags held high…,” some Germans began.

“Everyone!” Shlomo said.

“The ranks closed tight…”

“I said everyone!”

“Blond!”

Shlomo cried to the blondest, bluest-eyed person there. “I said sing!” He swung his rubber club at the man’s golden head and hit it. The man staggered back.

“Our comrades, killed by the Reds and Reactionaries…”

“Sonofabitch!” Shlomo cried, enraged that the man was defying him by not singing but staggering back. He hit him again, saying, “Sing!”

“Are marching in spirit with us…”

“Louder!”

“Clear the street for the Brown Battalions…”

“Still louder!” cried Shlomo, hitting another shouting man… “Millions of hopeful people…”

“Nazi pigs!”

“Are looking to the swastika…”

“Schweine!” Shlomo cried. He threw down his rubber club, grabbed a wooden stool, and, a leg in his fist, started beating a German’s head. Without thinking, the man raised his arms, and Shlomo, enraged that the man would try to evade his just punishment, cried, “Sonofawhore!” and slammed the stool against the man’s chest. The man dropped his arms, and Shlomo started hitting his now undefended head when snap! the leg of the stool split off, and, cursing the German birchwood, he grabbed another stool and hit the German with that. No one was singing now, but Shlomo, shouting, didn’t notice. The other guards called out, “Blond!” “Black!” “Short!” “Tall!” and as each of these terrified people came up, they wielded their clubs upon him. The brawl went on till eleven o’clock, when the sweat-drenched invaders cried, “Pigs! We will fix you up!” and left the Germans alone.

Some were quite fixed… Shlomo and his subordinates had killed them.

The next night it was more of the same… and the next night and the next and the next. Those who survived the “welcoming committees” at this and other camps were flung back into their pens.

“I was put with 30 women into a cell, which was intended to accommodate one person,” Gerlinde Winkler recalled. “The narrow space, into which we were rammed, was unbearable and our legs were all entangled together… The women, ill with dysentery, were only allowed to go out once a day, in order to relieve themselves. A bucket without a cover was pushed into the cell with the remark: ‘Here you have one, you German sows.’ The stink was insupportable, and we were not allowed to open the little window.”

“The air in the cells became dense, the smell of the excrement filled it, the heat was like in Calcutta, and the flies made the ceiling black,” wrote John Sack. “I’m choking, the Germans thought, and one even took the community razor blade and, in despair, cut his throat open with it.”

When the wretched inmates were at last pried from their hellish tombs, it was only for interrogation. Sack continues:

As many as eight interrogators, almost all Jews, stood around any one German saying, “Were you in the Nazi Party?” Sometimes a German said, “Yes,” and the boys shouted, “Du schwein! You pig!” and beat him and broke his arm, perhaps, before sending him to his cell… But usually a German said, “No,” and the boys… told him, “You’re lying. You were a Nazi.”

“No, I never was.”

“You’re lying! We know about you!”

“No, I really wasn’t—”

“Du lugst! You’re lying!” they cried, hitting the obstinate man. “You better admit it! Or you’ll get a longer sentence! Now! Were you in the Nazi Party?”

“No!” the German often said, and the boys had to beat him and beat him until he was really crying, “I was a Nazi! Yes!”

But sometimes a German wouldn’t confess. One such hard case was a fifty-year-old…

“Were you in the Party?”

“No, I wasn’t in it.”

“How many people work for you?”

“In the high season, thirty-five.”

“You must have been in the Party,” the boy deduced.

He asked for the German’s wallet, where he found a fishing license with the stamp of the German Anglers Association. Studying it, he told the German, “It’s stamped by the Party.”

“It’s not,” said the German.

He’d lost his left arm in World War I and was using his right arm to gesture with, and, to the boy, he may have seemed to be Heiling Hitler. The boy became violent. He grabbed the man’s collar, hit the man’s head against the wall, hit it against it ten times more, threw the man’s body onto the floor, and, in his boots, jumped on the man’s cringing chest as though jumping rope. A half dozen other interrogators, almost all Jews, pushed the man onto a couch, pulled off his trousers, and hit him with hard rubber clubs and hard rubber hoses full of stones. The sweat started running down the Jews’ arms, and the blood down the man’s naked legs.

“Warst du in der Partei?”

“Nein!”

“Warst du in der Partei?”

“Nein!” the German screamed—screamed, till the boys had to go to Shlomo’s kitchen for a wooden spoon and to use it to cram some rags in the German’s mouth. Then they resumed beating him… The more the man contradicted them, the more they hated him for it.

Shlomo Morel

After undergoing similar sessions on a regular basis, the victim was brought back for the eighth time.

By now, the man was half unconscious due to his many concussions, and he wasn’t thinking clearly. The boys worked on him with rubber and oak-wood clubs and said, “Do you still say you weren’t in the Party?”

“No! I didn’t say I wasn’t in the Party!”

“You didn’t?”

“No!” said the punch drunk man. “I never said it!”

“You were in the Party?”

“Yes!”

The boys stopped beating him. They practically sighed, as if their ordeal were over now. They lit up cigarettes…

“Scram,” one said to the German. The man stood up, and he had his hand on the doorknob when one of the boys impulsively hit the back of his head, and he fell to the floor, unconscious.

“Aufstehen, du Deutsches schwein. Stand up, you German pig,” the boys said, kicking him till he stood up and collapsed again. Two boys carried him to his cell and dropped him in a corner…

Of course, the boys would beat up the Germans for “Yes”es as well as “No”s. In Glatz, the Jewish commandant asked a German policeman, “Were you in the Party?”

“Of course! I was obliged to be!”

“Lie down,” the commandant said, and six weeks later the boys were still whipping the German’s feet.

Some torture sessions lacked even the pretense of an examination. Remembered Eva Reimann:

My cell door opened. The guard, who, because of the foul smell, held a handkerchief to his nose, cried, “Reimann Eva! Come!” I was led to a first-floor room.

He shouted at me, “Take off your shoes!” I took them off. “Lie down!” I lay down. He took a thick bamboo stick, and he beat the soles of my feet. I screamed, since the pain was very great… The stick whistled down on me. A blow on my mouth tore my lower lip, and my teeth started bleeding violently. He beat my feet again. The pain was unbearable…

The door opened suddenly, and, smiling obligingly, a cigarette in his mouth, in came the chief of the Office, named Sternnagel. In faultless German he asked me, “What’s wrong here? Why do you let yourself be beaten? You just have to sign this document. Or should we jam your fingers in the door, until the bones are broad…?

A man picked me up by the ankles, raised me eight inches above the floor, and let me fall. My hands were tied, and my head hit hard… I lay in a bloody puddle. Someone cried, “Stand up!” I tried to, and, with unspeakable pain, I succeeded. A man with a pistol came, held it to my left temple, and said, “Will you now confess?” I told him, “Please shoot me.” Yes, I hoped to be freed from all his tortures. I begged him, “Please pull the trigger.”

After barely surviving his “interrogation,” one fourteen-year-old was taken to the camp infirmary. “My body was green, but my legs were fire red,” the boy said. “My wounds were bound with toilet paper, and I had to change the toilet paper every day. I was in the perfect place to watch what went on… All the patients were beaten people, and they died everywhere: at their beds, in the washroom, on the toilet. At night, I had to step over the dead as if that were normal to do.”

When the supply of victims ran low, it was a simple matter to find more. John Sack:

One day, a German in pitch-black pants, the SS’s color, showed up in Lola’s prison. He’d been spotted near the city square by a Pole who’d said, “Fascist! You’re wearing black!” At that, the German had bolted off, but the Pole chased him a mile to the Church of Saints Peter and Paul, tackled him by a gold mosaic, hit him, kicked him, and took him to Lola’s prison. Some guards, all girls, then seized the incriminating evidence: the man’s black pants, pulling them off so aggressively that one of the tendons tore. The man screamed, but the girls said, “Shut up!” and they didn’t recognize that the pants were part of a boy scout uniform. The “man” was fourteen years old.

The girls decided to torture him [with]… fire. They held down the German boy, put out their cigarettes on him, and, using gasoline, set his curly black hair afire.

At the larger prison camps, Germans died by the hundreds daily.

“You pigs!” the commandant then cried, and he beat the Germans with their stools, often killing them. At dawn many days, a Jewish guard cried, “Eins! Zwei! Drei! Vier!” and marched the Germans into the woods outside their camp. “Halt! Get your shovels! Dig!” the guard cried, and, when the Germans had dug a big grave, he put a picture of Hitler in. “Now cry!” the guard said. “And sing All the Dogs Are Barking!” and all the Germans moaned,

All the dogs are barking,
All the dogs are barking,
Just the little hot-dogs,
Aren’t barking at all.

The guard then cried, “Get undressed!” and, when the Germans were naked, he beat them, poured liquid manure on them, or, catching a toad, shoved the fat thing down a German’s throat, the German soon dying.

Utterly unhinged by years of persecution, by the loss of homes and loved ones, for the camp operators, no torture, no sadism, no bestiality, seemed too monstrous to inflict on those now in their power. Some Germans were forced to crawl on all fours and eat their own excrement as well as that of others. Many were drowned in open latrines. Hundreds were herded into buildings and burned to death or sealed in caskets and buried alive.

Near Lamsdorf, German women were forced to disinter bodies from a Polish burial site. According to John Sack:

The women did, and they started to suffer nausea as the bodies, black as the stuff in a gutter, appeared. The faces were rotten, the flesh was glue, but the guards—who had often seemed psychopathic, making a German woman drink urine, drink blood, and eat a man’s excrement, inserting an oily five-mark bill in a woman’s vagina, putting a match to it—shouted at the women… “Lie down with them!” The women did, and the guards shouted, “Hug them!” “Kiss them!” “Make love with them!” and, with their rifles, pushed on the backs of the women’s heads until their eyes, noses and mouths were deep in the Polish faces’ slime. The women who clamped their lips couldn’t scream, and the women who screamed had to taste something vile. Spitting, retching, the women at last stood up, the wet tendrils still on their chins, fingers, clothes, the wet seeping into the fibers, the stink like a mist around them as they marched back to Lamsdorf. There were no showers there, and the corpses had all had typhus, apparently, and sixty-four women… died.

Not surprisingly, the mortality rate at the concentration camps was staggering and relatively few survived. At one prison of eight thousand, a mere 1,500 lived to reach home. And of those “lucky” individuals who did leave with their lives, few could any longer be called human.

When a smattering of accounts began to leak from Poland of the unspeakable crimes being committed, many in the West were stunned. “One would expect that after the horrors in Nazi concentration camps, nothing like that could ever happen again,” muttered one US senator, who then reported on beatings, torture and “brains splashed on the ceiling.”

“Is this what our soldiers died for?” echoed a Briton in the House of Commons.

Added Winston Churchill: “Enormous numbers [of Germans] are utterly unaccounted for. It is not impossible that tragedy on a prodigious scale is unfolding itself behind the Iron Curtain.”

While Churchill and others in the West were expressing shock and surprise over the sadistic slaughter taking place in the Soviet Zone, precious little was said about the “tragedy on a prodigious scale” that was transpiring in their own backyard.

* * *

Among the millions imprisoned by the Allies were thousands of Germans accused of having a direct or indirect hand in war crimes. Because the victorious powers demanded swift and severe punishment, Allied prosecutors were urged to get the most damning indictments in as little time as possible. Unfortunately for the accused, their captors seemed determined to inflict as much pain as possible in the process.

“[W]e were thrown into small cells stark naked,” Hans Schmidt later wrote. “The cells in which three or four persons were incarcerated were six and a half by ten feet in size and had no windows or ventilation.”

When we went to the lavatory we had to run through a lane of Americans who struck us with straps, brooms, cudgels, buckets, belts, and pistol holders to make us fall down. Our head, eyes, body, belly, and genitals were violently injured. A man stood inside the lavatory to beat us and spit on us. We returned to our cells through the same ordeal. The temperature in the cells was 140 Fahrenheit or more. During the first three days we were given only one cup of water and a small slice of bread. During the first days we perspired all the time, then perspiration stopped. We were kept standing chained back to back for hours. We suffered terribly from thirst, blood stagnation and mortification of the hands. From time to time water was poured on the almost red-hot radiators, filling the cells with steam, so that we could hardly breathe. During all this time the cells were in darkness, except when the American soldiers entered and switched on electric bulbs… which forced us to close our eyes.

Our thirst became more and more cruel, so that our lips cracked, our tongues were stiff, and we eventually became apathetic, or raved, or collapsed.

After enduring this torture for several days, we were given a small blanket to cover our nakedness, and driven to the courtyard outside. The uneven soil was covered with pebbles and slag and we were again beaten and finally driven back on our smashed and bleeding feet. While out of breath, burning cigarettes were pushed into our mouths, and each of us was forced to eat three or four of them. Meanwhile the American soldiers continued to hit us on eyes, head, and ears. Back in our cells we were pushed against burning radiators, so that our skin was blistered.

For thirteen days and nights we received the same treatment, tortured by heat and thirst. When we begged for water, our guards mocked us. When we fainted we were revived by being drenched with cold water. There was dirt everywhere and we were never allowed to wash, our inflamed eyes gave us terrible pain, we fainted continuously.

Every twenty minutes or so our cell doors were opened and the soldiers insulted and hit us. Whenever the doors were opened we had to stand still with our backs to the door. Two plates of food, spiced with salt, pepper, and mustard to make us thirstier, were given us daily. We ate in the dark on the floor. The thirst was the most terrible of all our tortures and we could not sleep.

In this condition I was brought to trial.

During the Nazi war crimes trials and hearings, almost any method that would obtain a “confession” was employed. Eager to implicate high-ranking German officers in the Malmedy Massacre, American investigator Harry Thon ordered Wehrmacht sergeant Willi Schafer to write out an incriminating affidavit:

Next morning Mr. Thon appeared in my cell, read my report, tore it up, swore at me and hit me. After threatening to have me killed unless I wrote what he wanted, he left. A few minutes later the door of my cell opened, a black hood encrusted with blood, was put over my head and face and I was led to another room. In view of Mr. Thon’s threat the black cap had a crushing effect on my spirits… Four men of my company… accused me, although later they admitted to having borne false testimony. Nevertheless I still refused to incriminate myself. Thereupon Mr. Thon said that if I continued to refuse this would be taken as proof of my Nazi opinions, and… my death was certain. He said I would have no chance against four witnesses, and advised me for my own good to make a statement after which I would be set free… I still refused. I told Mr. Thon that although my memory was good, I was unable to recall any of the occurrences he wished me to write about and which to the best of my knowledge had never occurred.

Mr. Thon left but returned in a little while with Lieutenant [William] Perl who abused me, and told Mr. Thon that, should I not write what was required within half an hour, I should be left to my fate. Lieutenant Perl made it clear to me that I had the alternative of writing and going free or not writing and dying. I decided for life.

Another Landser unable to resist the pressure was Joachim Hoffman:

[W]hen taken for a hearing a black hood was placed over my head. The guards who took me to my hearing often struck or kicked me. I was twice thrown down the stairs and was hurt so much that blood ran out of my mouth and nose. At the hearing, when I told the officers about the ill treatment I had suffered, they only laughed. I was beaten and the black cap pulled over my face whenever I could not answer the questions put to me, or gave answers not pleasing to the officers… I was beaten and several times kicked in the genitals.

Understandably, after several such sessions, even the strongest submitted and signed papers incriminating themselves and others.

“If you confess you will go free,” nineteen-year-old Siegfried Jaenckel was told. “[Y]ou need only to say you had an order from your superiors. But if you won’t speak you will be hung.”

Despite the mental and physical abuse, young Jaenckel held out as long as he could: “I was beaten and I heard the cries of the men being tortured in adjoining cells, and whenever I was taken for a hearing I trembled with fear… Subjected to such duress I eventually gave in, and signed the long statement dictated to me.”

Far from being isolated or extreme cases, such methods of extorting confessions were the rule rather than the exception. Wrote author Freda Utley, who learned of the horror after speaking with American jurist Edward van Roden:

Beatings and brutal kickings; knocking-out of teeth and breaking of jaws; mock trials; solitary confinement; torture with burning splinters; the use of investigators pretending to be priests; starvation; and promises of acquittal… Judge van Roden said: “All but two of the Germans in the 139 cases we investigated had been kicked in the testicles beyond repair. This was standard operating procedure with our American investigators.” He told of one German who had had lighted matchsticks forced under his fingernails by the American investigators to extort a confession, and had appeared at his trial with his fingers still bandaged from the atrocity.

In addition to testimony given under torture, those who might have spoken in defense of the accused were prevented. Moreover, hired “witnesses” were paid by the Americans to parrot the prosecution’s charges.

When criticism such as Utley’s and van Roden’s surfaced, and even as victims were being hung by the hundreds, those responsible defended their methods.

“We couldn’t have made those birds talk otherwise…,” laughed one Jewish “interrogator,” Colonel A. H. Rosenfeld. “It was a trick, and it worked like a charm.”

Tags 2nd World War, Germany, Hellstorm Holocaust, Jewish Question (JQ), United States

Table talks

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 169

Post author By C .T.
Post date April 1, 2015

16th August 1942, evening

The German nation has survived the period of the great migrations, the wars with the Romans, the onslaughts of the Huns, the Magyars and the Mongols, the Thirty Years’ War, the campaigns of Frederick the Great and Napoleon—and it will no doubt survive even my rule!

Tags Adolf Hitler, Germany

Art Table talks

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 177

Post author By C .T.
Post date March 24, 2015

28th August 1942, evening

Some German towns must be protected at all costs—Weimar, Nuremberg, Stuttgart. Factories can always be rebuilt, but works of art are irreplaceable.

Tags Adolf Hitler, Germany

Autobiography Hitler Youth Pedagogy Table talks

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 178

Post author By C .T.
Post date March 23, 2015

29th August 1942, evening

Do we keep Belgium, France and Norway?—We must adopt the arrogance of Britain—Education and stuffed heads—The safety valve of military service—Once we were a people of energy.

Fundamentally speaking, Belgium, France and Norway are not our natural enemies. I have no desire to incorporate all Frenchmen in the Reich; those who dwell on our borders and with whom we have contact were all Germans four hundred years ago.

With our eighty-five million Germans, we have in the Reich itself a major part of the population of the Germanic races.

No other nation possesses so strong a proportion of these elements. It would then be a sorry business if, with such strength at our disposal, we failed to bring law and order to ancient Europe. We may have a hundred years of struggle before us; if so, all the better—it will prevent us from going to sleep! People sometimes say to me: “Be careful! You will have twenty years of guerrilla warfare on your hands!” I am delighted at the prospect! With a number of small armies we can continue to dominate a large number of peoples. In the future our divisions will not be in dull garrison towns like Lechfeld and Hommerburg, but will be sent to the Caucasus! Our lads have always shouted with joy at the prospect of service abroad, and I shall see to it that in the future they range the four corners of the world. Germany will remain in a state of perpetual alertness.

We will adopt the British attitude of arrogance. In the time of the old German Emperors, let it not be forgotten, the Kings of England were of little more account than the King of Denmark today. In the first war, we found, on going through the paybooks of prisoners of war, that many of them had served in the South African War, They had been all over the world, and for them the fatherland was their Regiment! With men like that, nothing is impossible!

For the future it will, I think, be essential to introduce a three-year period of military service; only by so doing can we ensure efficiency in the handling of new technical weapons. A three-year period will be a great advantage to those who later propose to adopt a learned profession, for it will give them ample time to forget all the muck that was jammed into their heads at school; they will have time to discard everything which will not be of future use to them, and that, in itself, is most valuable.

Everybody, for example, learns two or three foreign languages, which is a complete waste of time. The little one learns is not of the slightest use when one goes abroad. Everybody, I agree, should receive a basic education. But the whole method of instruction in secondary and higher schools is just so much nonsense. Instead of receiving a sound basic education, the student finds his head crammed with a mass of useless learning, and in the end is still ill-equipped to face life.

Lucky are those who have the happy knack of being able to forget most of what they have been taught. Those who cannot forget are ripe to become professors—a race apart. And that is not intended as a compliment! In 1933 things were still being taught in the higher educational establishments which had been proven by science to be false as long ago as 1899.

When I was a schoolboy, I did all I could to get out into the open air as much as possible—my school reports bear witness to that! In spite of this, I grew up into a reasonably intelligent young man, I developed along very normal lines, and I learnt a lot of things of which my schoolfellows learnt nothing. In short, our system of education is the exact opposite of that practised in the gymnasia of ancient days. The Greek of the golden age sought a harmonious education; we succeed only in producing intellectual monsters.

The primary task of education is to train the brain of the young. It is quite impossible to recognise the potential aspirations of a child of ten. In old days teachers strove always to seek out each pupil’s weak point, and by exposing and dwelling on it, they successfully killed the child’s self-confidence. Had they, on the contrary, striven to find the direction in which each pupil’s talents lay, and then concentrated on the development of those talents, they would have furthered education in its true sense. Instead, they sought mass-production by means of endless generalisations.

A child who could not solve a mathematical equation, they said, would do no good in life. It is a wonder that they did not prophesy that he would come to a bad and shameful end! Have things changed much today, I wonder? I am not sure, and many of the things I see around me incline me to the opinion that they have not. I was shown a questionnaire drawn up by the Ministry of the Interior, which it was proposed to put to people whom it was deemed desirable to sterilise. At least three-quarters of the questions asked would have defeated my own good mother. One I recall was: “Why does a ship made of steel float in the water?”

If this system had been introduced before my birth, I am pretty sure I should never have been born at all! Let us, for God’s sake, throw upon the windows and let the fresh air blow away nonsense of this nature! Put the young men into the Army, whence they will return refreshed and cleansed of eight years of scholastic slime!

In the olden days we were an energetic people; but gradually we developed into a people of poets and thinkers. Poets do not matter, for no one takes them seriously; but the world is greatly overburdened with “thinkers.” I keep a bust of Scharnhorst on my table; it is he who started our people back on the road to sanity. The world at large welcomed this Germany of poets and thinkers, because it knew how they sapped our virility.

Still, we have made progress in the field of education, in spite of having a pedant at the head of the Educational Department. With another in control, progress would have been more rapid.

Just think how in the old days a bit of paper could alter the course of one’s whole life! Look at my school reports—I got bad marks in German! My disgusting teacher had succeeded in giving me an intense dislike for my mother tongue! He asserted that I would never be capable of writing a decent letter! If this blundering little fool had given me a grade five, I should have been precluded from becoming a technician! Now, thank God, we have the Hitler Youth, where the child is judged on all his qualities, and not solely on his scholastic attainments; character is taken into consideration, the talent of leadership is encouraged, and every child has the legal right to show what he can do.

_____________________________

Consider obtaining a copy of the complete notes
published by Ostara Publications.

Tags Adolf Hitler, France, Germany, Norway

Art Degenerate art Table talks

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 187

Post author By C .T.
Post date March 14, 2015

15th June 1943, midday

Intellectual and artistic poverty—Only decadent art is harmful—Teutonic nostalgia—The need of open spaces.

The industrialisation of a country invariably provokes an opposite reaction and gives rise to a recrudescence of a certain measure of romanticism, which not infrequently finds expression in a mania for the collection of bibelots and somewhat trashy objets d’art. It is a phenomenon which recurs with each fresh migration from the land to the town. It is not the museums and the picture-galleries which attract these newcomers, but the vaults which foster the liking for the mysterious, like the blue grotto of the nymphs. The process of readjustment takes fifty or a hundred years.

Unfortunately, the period of economic and industrial progress in Germany coincided with a period of artistic hesitancy and poverty. One cannot, in justice, blame the masses, when one remembers the artistic junk with which the big industrialists filled their houses. But the latter were people of intelligence, and them I blame greatly.

The masses are still attracted by somewhat trashy art, but that has nothing in common with artistic degeneracy. If I am asked whether I am prepared to condone this, my reply is that I will condone anything which does not lead to artistic depravity.

The admiration for what we sometimes call chocolate-box beauty is not of itself vicious; it gives evidence, at least, of artistic feeling, which may well become later the basis for real taste. Permanent injury is done only by real depravity in art. It is perfectly true that we are a people of romantics, quite different from the Americans, for example, who see nothing beyond their sky-scrapers. Our romanticism has its origins in the intense appreciation of nature that is inherent in us Germans.

Properly to appreciate such artists as Weber, Ludwig Richter and the other romanticists, one must know Franconian mountains, for that is the background which gives birth to romanticism in both music and painting; and, of course, the stories and legends of our folklore also make a potent contribution.

The only romance which stirs the heart of the North American is that of the Redskin; but it is curious to note that the writer who has produced the most vivid Redskin romances is a German.

One thing the Americans have, and which we lack, is the sense of the vast open spaces. Hence the particular characteristics of our own form of nostalgia. There comes a time when this desire for expansion can no longer be contained and must burst into action.

It is an irrefutable fact that the Dutch, for example, who occupied the most densely populated portions of the German lands, were driven, centuries ago, by this irresistible desire for expansion to seek ever wider conquest abroad.

What, I wonder, would happen to us, if we had not at least the illusion of vast spaces at our disposal? For me, one of the charms of the Spessart is that one can drive there for hours on end, and never meet a soul. Our autobahns give me the same feeling; even in the more thickly populated areas they reproduce the atmosphere of the open spaces.

_____________________________

Consider obtaining a copy of the complete notes
published by Ostara Publications.

Tags Adolf Hitler, Germany, United States

Arcadia Beauty Table talks

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 190

Post author By C .T.
Post date March 11, 2015

23rd March 1944, midday

Charm of the Rhineland—And of other parts of Germany—The marvellous countryside of Bohemia and Moravia.

I saw the Rhine for the first time in 1914, when I was on my way to the Western Front. The feelings which the sight of this historic stream inspired in me remain forever graven on my heart. The kindness and spontaneity of the Rhinelanders also made a profound impression on me; everywhere they received us and feted us in a most touching manner. The evening we reached Aachen, I remember thinking that I should never forget that day for the rest of my life; and indeed the memory of it remains today as vivid as ever, and every time I find myself on the banks of the Rhine I re-live again the wondrous experience of my first sight of it. This is no doubt one of the main reasons—quite apart from the unrivalled beauty of the countryside—that impels me each year to revisit the Rhineland.

There are other parts of Germany, apart from the Rhineland, which give me intense pleasure to visit—the Kyffhaeuser, the forests of Thuringia, the Harz and the Black Forest. It is most exhilarating to drive for miles through the woods and forests, far away from the throng.

One of my greatest delights has always been to picnic quietly somewhere on the roadside; it was not always easy, for our column of cars would often be pursued by a crowd of motorists, eager to see their Fuehrer off duty, and we had to employ all sorts of ruses to shake off these friendly and well-meaning pursuers; sometimes, for instance, I would drive up a side-turning, leaving the column to continue along the main road. Our pursuers would then overtake the cars of the column one by one, and, failing to find me, would go ever faster in the hope of overtaking me farther on. In this way we managed occasionally to snatch a few hours of peace and tranquillity.

On one occasion, I remember, a family out gathering mushrooms came suddenly on our picnic party. In a few moments these kindly folk had alerted the neighbouring village and the whole population was surging towards us, filling the air with their shouts of “Heil.”

It is a great pity that Germans know so little of their own country. Since 1938 the number of beauty spots within the boundaries of the Reich has increased considerably. In addition to Austria, we have the wonderful countryside of Bohemia and Moravia, which is a closed book to all but a few Germans.

Some of them may have heard of the virgin forests of Bohemia, but how many have ever seen them? I have a collection of photographs taken in Bohemia, and they remind one of the vast forests of the tropics. To visit all the beauties of his country, a German today would require taking a holiday in a different district each year for the rest of his life.

Tags Adolf Hitler, Genuine spirituality, Germany

Americanism Michael O'Meara Philosophy of history

On Yockey’s America

by Michael O’Meara

O’Meara’s essay shows beautifully why we believe that the relations between Americans and Germans lie at the deepest level of the rabbit hole to understand the West’s darkest hour.

______ 卐 ______

The “Judeo-African cacophony” mesmerizing the jitterbugs on the dance floors of the Thirties was part of a larger program to debauch the conservative Christian rhythms of American life. Such at least was the argument Francis Parker Yockey made in his first published work, “The Tragedy of Youth” (1939).

In this early piece, full of promise and prefiguring aspects of his later critique of American life, the 22-year-old Yockey depicted an America whose youth had begun to keep step with the intonations and inflections of its Jewish bandmasters. Besides the folly of their un-European cavorting, Americans, he thought, were acting out the worldview of an alien-minded minority in control of the country’s media and entertainment. Drinking, smoking, and other bad habits glamorized by Hollywood became, in this spirit, marks of sophistication; sports were fetishized; public opinion was shaped and reshaped to legitimate machinations of every sort.

More seriously, God was “replaced by lust, the priest by the psychoanalyst, and the hero and heroine by the promiscuous lounge-lizard and the glittering harlot.” For the more educated, there were books and magazines promoting class war, racial equality, and anti-European (especially anti-German) hatred—aimed at destroying “whatever exclusiveness, national feeling, or racial instinct” still part of the American people.

Institutionalizing these subversions, Roosevelt’s New Deal, the granddaddy of the present anti-white system, took on debts and obligations favoring the Left forces—themselves puppets of the international financiers and bankers responsible for the deception and dissimulation entrancing the jitterbugs.

Against this backdrop of cultural distortion, usurious state policy, and agitations favoring causes alien to American affairs, the country’s youth, Yockey claimed, was being conditioned to fight as conscripts in liberal, Jewish, and Communist causes inimical to their national interest.

The True America

Basic to Yockey’s understanding of America was his belief that it was, at root, an integral and organic part of Europe. Whenever he spoke of “the true America,” as opposed to the America that had been taken over by the “culture distorters” and become “the enemy of Europe,” it was the America that had originated as a European colony—the America whose “culture” was a branch of Europe’s High Culture—the America whose people still bore traces of the noble, heroic, and Gothic character of their ancestors.

“All colonials,” Yockey felt, “have a certain plane of their being which is susceptible to the centripetal attraction of the mother-soil.” For they share a common history with “the parent-organism”—no matter how much the distorters might insist otherwise. The true American—i.e., the American whose highest loyalty was to his “mother soil and father culture”—thus instinctively isolated himself from all efforts to betray Europe: like French Canadians and South African Boers who refused to be conscripted by Washington in the Jews’ war against the Third Reich.

A child of European, especially German, culture, Yockey alone among American anti-liberals saw that America’s origin had tied its destiny to that of Europe, and that no matter how many cities the colony built, no matter how many millions of automobiles it turned out every season—no matter, even, how successful it was in reducing Europe to rubble and occupying it—no matter, it (the colony) would never, not in a thousand years, surpass the achievement and destiny of its mother soil and father culture.

To even think it was philosophically absurd.

The Culture of Distortion

Given their shallow culture and the dismissal of the tradition to which they were heirs, Americans were particularly vulnerable to the corrosions of 19th-century rationalism and materialism. Relatedly, they were an easy mark for “culture aliens”—for a world governed by money was a world indifferent to a man’s qualities. Foremost among the culture-aliens were the Jews: product of Spengler’s “Magian” culture, instinctually hostile to the European spirit, and bent on revenge.

In their counting houses, Americans would invariably overlook the Jews’ otherness, though they were of a different “Culture-Nation-Race.” Even before the War of Independence, they treated Jews as Europeans—Jews who had been shunned, ghettoized, and seen by most Europeans as an evil to be avoided.

Beginning in the 1880s, the Jews (these inassimilable aliens rejected by Europe’s High Culture) began their invasion of America. By 1905, they were already a power, evident in fact that the United States, for the first time in its history, severed diplomatic relations with Russia on account of the “anti-Jewish pogroms” that had followed the Russo-Japanese War.

Through its financial acumen and early control of media (the press, movies, radio), and in alliance with the native forces of decadence and degeneration, Jewish power in the New World grew at an unprecedented rate.

In a country where “mass-thinking, mass-ideals, and mass-living prevails,” Jewish propaganda (in the form of advertising, fashion, and a hundred other things) effortlessly reshaped the American consciousness, propelling the jitterbugs onto the dance floor of their world-conquering schemes. Stories of German sadism or Orson Wells’ Mars invasion were peddled with similar success, just as “the ethical syphilis of Hollywood and the spiritual leprosy of New York” infiltrated the larger cultural body.

In 1933, the year of the European Revolution, the Jews acquired outright political control of the United States—something that a thousand years of effort had failed to achieve in Europe.

From this point forward, “the formation of the Jewish-American Symbiosis begins.” Swarming into Washington, Jews and their “sub-American” contractors started dissimulating the Jewish world view and “bringing under control every factor of public expression.”

All who resisted were to be purged or ostracized.

Then, as the country’s racial instincts were worn down by the distorters, America (in accord with the policies of its liberal state and in the programming of its Culture Industry) assumed “a Jewish countenance” in its relations both with the rest of the world and with itself.

For Yockey, Franklin Roosevelt, “the monster who made of his life a study in infamy,” was a creature of the Jews, just as his New Deal was bent on Judaifying American government and society, promoting, as it did, principles of tolerance and universal brotherhood, which were further developed by Rockefeller-funded social-engineers intent on morally disarming the American people.

In this, the prescient Yockey might be criticized for confusing Jewish supremacy with the increasing Judaification of American society (which Matthew Arnold had warned of in the 1860s), for Jewish power in America was arguably not consolidated until the late 1960s (even if its secular low-church market, in making money the ultimate standard, had already Judaicized American life and sentiments).

That Roosevelt, in October 1937, began to maneuver the United States into the coming world war and that this war would be a war of annihilation—i.e., the sort of war fought between racially and culturally alien, rather then related peoples sharing the same civilization—was further evidence, in Yockey’s eyes, of Jewish hegemony and the Jews’ genocidal hatred of Europe.

Despite a certain exaggeration of Jewish power in this period, Yockey was nearly alone in seeing that the United States had become an anti-European power bound to the Jews’ vengeful compulsion to suppress Europe’s destiny.

Unlike other American anti-liberals, anti-Semitism for him evolved, rapidly and logically, into an anti-Americanism.

The Enemy of Europe

As long as America had been ruled by men of European Christian stock, it remained “a European colony.” But the America “distorted by the Revolution of 1933” (a revolution carried out by the allegedly Jewish-dominated New Deal), was now lost to Europe.

America’s Jewified anti-Europeanism was especially evident in the Second World War and in its subsequent occupation of the Continent. For if the United States had possessed a proper ruling class, a tradition, and a regalian state, it would have stayed out of the Second World War, which became a defeat not just for Germany, but for all Europe—and thus, ultimately, a defeat for the true America.

Under its new Jewish-American regime, Washington after 1933 was instrumental in preparing the way for another European civil war—a war it would wage as if the enemy (their European kinsmen) weren’t human. Instead of being the great moral crusade against the absolute evil of fascism, the war in actuality represented a giant step toward the Judeo-plutocratic inauguration of a New World Order, based on American open markets and American economic practices.

To this end, American bombers (supported by their British vassals) reduced every German city to a heap of rubble, intentionally targeting heavily populated working-class residences—that is, “homes and families”; cities in France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, and Eastern Europe were also bombed, adding further hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties to US “kills”; American fighter-pilots similarly sought out civilians to machine-gun and terrorize; vast stores of equipment and armaments, often denied to American troops, were supplied to Soviet Russia to defend the Communist state and encourage its penetration into the heart of Europe; and throughout this most barbaric and punitive war in the white man’s history, the Washington regime talked incessantly of the enemy’s “war crimes” and its “inhumanity.”

Yockey blamed America’s dishonorable conduct in the war on the culture-distorters, whose “motivation derived from the deep and total organic irreconcilability between a High Culture and a parasitic organism” (though I suspect that the country’s latter-day Puritans, given their tendency to dehumanize the enemy, ought also to share a large part of the responsibility).

Even after the guns were silenced, America’s “ghastly dishonor” continued. With the Red Army occupying Eastern Europe and the US Army Western Europe, the looting, raping, pillaging—and ethnic cleansing—began.

The Soviets plundered everything not bolted down; the greatest mass rape in Western history occurred in what became “East Germany”; and 16 million East-European Germans were forced to abandon lands and homes they had inhabited for centuries, two million of whom (mainly the very old and the very young) perished in the process.

With greater discrimination, the Americans raided German patent offices, steeling their superior technology; they rounded up their rocket scientists, confiscated the libraries they hadn’t burned, and made off with priceless art works. German women, most on the verge of starvation, were not subject to mass rape (except by black American and French African troops), but their favors could be had for a half-dozen eggs, some cigarettes, or a few chocolate bars.

If this weren’t enough, the culture-distorters (whose “fury had been heightened by the European Revolution of 1933”), along with their American accomplices (especially the budding military-industrial complex), introduced large-scale starvation, abused POWs (several million of whom died as a consequence), hunted down anyone who failed to bow to the new conquerors, and imposed laws with ex post facto application.

Adding insult to injury, the “American world-clown and the sadistic Jew” then endeavored to “re-educate” Europeans in the arts of anti-fascism, mammon-worship, and democracy (i.e., “the corruptibility of the government by private wealth”).

The war for Yockey represented a categorical defeat for the “true America”—and a total victory for the Jews over Western Civilization.

Since 1945, the two sides of the Atlantic have ceased to share the same inner experience of feeling, for it was essentially a war against Europe. European Americans who supported it, Yockey contended, were traitors—inner enemies of their own culture.

Then, after being reduced to “a beggar colony of America,” Europe’s pre-1945 elites were replaced by “Michel elements” (liberal philistines embodying “the sum of European weaknesses”), who could be trusted to do the Jews’ bidding.

In the name of democracy, press rights and free speech were henceforth abrogated; political parties were required to obtain licenses; any expression of nationalism was criminalized, just as all anti-liberal formations critical of the occupiers’ regime were driven to the political fringe.

America-Jewry in this way sought to sever Europe’s roots, suppress her will to power, and deprive her of a sense of destiny.

In no meaningful political sense did Europe, in fact, continue to exist after 1945, thanks almost entirely to this monstrous entity with the Jewish head and the American body.

America-Jewry’s anti-European vengeance was especially evident in comparison to its generous treatment of defeated Japan.

Indeed, the entire nonwhite world was soon made to know that the United States had conquered Europe and that the colored outer-revolt, encouraged by the distorters, was ready, at last, to triumph over its former white masters. More than Soviet Communism, Yockey argued that Jewish-controlled America was the “enemy of Europe.”

And this made America an enemy of “true America,” for the Jewish idea of America—as a land of immigrants, creedal propositions, and universal brotherhood—stripped it of any “national-spiritual significance” it may have once had, doing so, ultimately, for “the enslavement of the world by big business.”

Every European-American loyal to his ancestral homeland—loyal to his own inmost being—was, Yockey concluded, duty bound to be disloyal to what America had become (even as he struggled to return it to Europe).

The American Vabanquespieler

Yockey believed the 19th-century Age of Materialism and Rationalism, which had shaped America’s cultureless civilization and opened the way to the culture-distorters, came to an end with the First World War (1918), as a new age struggled to succeed it—a new age that would be animated by the same primordial sources that had brought about the European Revolution of 1933.

If not for America-Jewry’s Old Testament war on Europe, German-Prussian Ethical Socialism (in rejection of liberalism’s individualistic Reign of Quantity) would have inaugurated a New Age of Authority, Discipline, and Faith, bringing the whole world under Europe’s influence. Instead, the very opposite occurred.

But even though the America of the culture-distorters had emerged victorious from the war, it changed not in the least the fact that America (this apotheosis of the 19th-century rationalism and materialism born of liberalism) still represented the past—and the past, Yockey held, could never defeat the future latent in Europe’s High Culture.

The barbarian victory of America’s 19th-century capitalism over the Germans’ Ethical Socialism had, indeed, already spread chaos and disorder throughout Western Civilization, heightening the imperative for a revolutionary transformation.

* * *

For the Vabanquespieler, the creation of a new European order (in the form of a continental imperium stretching “from Galway to the Urals”) would entail a great, heroic undertaking, as the White men of the West—in allegiance to a new transcendent idea—rallied to overthrow an exhausted, putrefied, but nearly insurmountable Jewish-American system.

The Last Men of America’s consumer paradise may think that the barbarians and the distorters had tamed the forces of history and quieted the demands of destiny, but the American apostate knew better. He also knew that Americans could do better.

Thus inspired, the Vabanquespieler stood against the Jewish- dominated, liberal-capitalist, anti-European Mammon System that had become America.

In anticipating the next cycle of Western Destiny, Yockey’s life work has bequeathed to European Americans a legacy affirming that “the old Gothic religious idea” is still latent in them and that the 21st century will be an age of European peace and order, if they are willing to fight for it.

The “American ideology” may therefore have no future, but “the soul of the American people,” born of Europe, has.

______ 卐 ______

Editor’s note:

The above piece has been excerpted from Michael O’Meara’s “The Jitterbugs & the Vabanquespieler: On Yockey’s America” (The Occidental Quarterly, Winter, 2010-2011).

Tags 2nd World War, Europe, Germany, Jewish Question (JQ), United States

Dwight D. Eisenhower Ethnic cleansing Evil Holodomor Joseph Stalin Red terror Thomas Goodrich Winston Churchill

Horrific war, calamitous peace

Post author By C .T.
Post date October 21, 2014

by Nelson Rosit

“WWII represented the triumph of Evil. Seventy years afterward the fruits are evident and undeniable. We are all paying for it now.”

—A commenter of The Occidental Observer

Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany,
1944—1947 by Thomas Goodrich
Sheridan, CO: Aberdeen Books, 2010
Reviewed by Rosit in 2014 on TOO

Introduction

I was flattered when asked to review Thomas Goodrich’s book Hellstorm. Though first published in 2010 it has recently come out in paperback and Kindle editions and deserves wider notice. That said, I knew this would not be an easy book to read and review.

Hellstorm chronicles the atrocities and deprivations visited upon Germany from 1944 to 1947. Though much of the story will be familiar to serious students of World War II, the author appears to have also included some new primary-source material. The bibliography shows that Goodrich has accessed most of the older major works in this field, making Hellstorm a well-researched compendium. So, if you have not read Bacque, Sajar, Keeling, et al. you will find them quoted and footnoted here.

In addition to hundreds of footnotes the book contains two maps, always a plus, sixteen pages of photographs, and a useful bibliography and index. If fault can be found, it would be that Goodrich seems to have completed his research by 2000 so none of the more recent historiography has been included. Also, there are places in the narrative where the events described are not assigned a date and location making the chronology a bit unclear.

These are minor criticisms, however, because it is not simply as a piece of historiography that Hellstorm finds its power, but as a gut wrenching, heart rending story of human suffering and the malice that produced that misery.

Synopsis

Prologue: Right from the start Goodrich grabs the reader by the lapels and shakes him. He starts by describing the fate of the East Prussian village of Nemmerdorf. In October 1944 it became the first town in Germany proper to be overrun by the Red Army. Soviet troops went into a blood frenzy of rape, torture, and murder.

The author makes it clear that by 1944 the war aims of the Allies was not just the defeat of the German armed forces, nor even the destruction of the National Socialist regime, but rather, “nothing less than the utter extinction of the German nation” (p. 6). Why the genocidal intent?

Goodrich suggests that, in large part, this genocide was the culmination of an eleven-year propaganda campaign against Germany lead mainly by American Jews. International Jewry had declared war on Germany in 1933 by instituting economic sanctions as well as the above-mentioned propaganda offensive. The author quotes from Theodore N. Kaufman’s book Germany Must Perish! “Germany must perish forever! In fact—not in fancy… by preventing the people of Germany from ever reproducing their kind” (p. 7). He also cites Ben Hecht’s A Guide for the Bedeviled in which Germany and Germans are compared to a cancer which must be destroyed.

On September 15, 1944 President Franklin Roosevelt converted such hate-filled rants into official policy by endorsing the Morgenthau Plan. Named for Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau and developed by his chief lieutenant Harry Dexter White (both Jews), this plan envisioned reducing the postwar population of Germany by two-thirds mainly through the starvation of 50 million men, women, and children. Winston Churchill also signed on to the Morgenthau Plan.

To the east, Ilya Ehrenburg, “perhaps the most influential Jewish writer anywhere in the world,” was advocating German genocide via articles in Pravda, Isvestja, and Red Star as well as in millions of leaflets distributed at the front. “The Germans are not human beings… Kill, Red Army men, kill! No fascist is innocent, be he alive, be he as yet unborn” (p. 10).

Chapter 1 covers the terror bombings conducted by American and especially British air forces. This campaign begun in July 1943 with attacks on the port city of Hamburg that left, “750,000 homeless [and] an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 dead, mostly women and children” (p. 14). Called by various names—area bombing, carpet bombing, saturation bombing, and unrestricted bombing—the indiscriminate destruction of urban areas could more accurately be described as terror bombing.

The leading architect of terror bombing was Chief of British Bomber Command Arthur “Bomber” Harris. Postwar assessments by military and political leaders as well as historians have led most to agree that, in contrast to strategic bombing of military targets and production and transportation facilities, bombing of residential areas and cultural monuments was ineffective. While causing massive devastation, it failed to break civilian morale.

Chapter 2 deals with the issue of POWs on the Eastern Front. Much has been written about the poor treatment received by captured Soviet (but not Western) soldiers. But Goodrich makes the point that Stalin, “refused to sign the Geneva Convention on prisons of war or the Hague Treaty on land warfare” (p. 49). With no assurance of humane treatment for their own troops Germans gave little quarter. Unfortunately, massacres of prisoners on both sides began early. For instance, on July 1, 1941 160 captured Germans were shot or bayonetted in Broniki, Ukraine.

Chapter 3 continues to chronicle events on the Eastern Front as the Soviets advance into Germany. Rape, murder, looting, and destruction accompany the Red Army. “Kill them all, men, old men, children, and the women, after you have amused yourself with them!” urged Ilya Ehrenberg (p. 81). One German boy recalled that in his town, “everyone wearing anything military—a military coat, for example… [was] shoved against a wall and shot” (p. 86). Also in this chapter Goodrich recounts the disaster that befell the refugees trying to flee west by sea. On the night of January 30, 1945 the Wilhelm Gustloff was steaming west on the Baltic Sea, grossly overloaded with 8,000 women, children, and wound soldiers. Goodrich skillful describes the scene.

That black stormy night, as she struggled through high winds and heavy, ice-filled waves, the Gustloff’s ventilation and plumbing systems failed utterly. Strained beyond its limits, the tightly-sealed ship filled with a hot, nauseating stench of urine, excrement, and vomit. The groans and screams of severely wounded soldiers and the wails of separated families added to the ghastly horror. But the worst was yet to come. At approximately 9 P.M., three heavy jolts rocked the passengers on the Gustloff. (p. 89)

The ship had been torpedoed by a Soviet sub. Goodrich gives a figure of roughly 7,000 men women and children lost.

Chapter 4 gives an account of the Yalta Conference of February 1945. For seven days the leaders of the Big Three—Britain, the US, and the USSR—met in Crimean Black Sea resort. This conference confirmed the decision made by Roosevelt and Churchill at Casablanca in 1943 to accept nothing less than unconditional surrender from Germany thus insuring that the Germans would fight to the bitter end. Goodrich notes that the US President “was a staunch supporter and admirer of [Stalin] and defended him at every turn” (p. 98). It was FDR who gave the Soviet dictator the moniker “Uncle Joe.”

Most of this chapter is devoted to describing the holocaust of Dresden. The city, which had been spared up to this time, was obliterated in mid February 1945 by Allied air attacks. The author gives six compelling reasons why Dresden should have been spared the destruction visited upon Hamburg and other German cities. But spared it was not.

On February 13 and 14 the magnificent Baroque city was bombed to rubble. Then thousands of incendiary bombs were dropped igniting the debris to create huge fire storms. “[T]he International Red Cross estimated that 275,000 had died… other estimates that place the death toll at 300,000 to 400,000 may well be closer to the mark” (p. 123). After the horror of Dresden a few Allied political and military leaders raised protests, but “the air terror continued unabated” (p. 125).

Chapter 5 returns to the plight of those fleeing the Soviet advance. After 150 pages of death and destruction the reader may think he has become inured to descriptions of violence. Then Goodrich recounts the shocking story of Neustettin. After the Red Army overran the city in February 1945 2,500 girls of the Reich Labor Service were killed, many after the most gruesome torture imaginable.

Chapter 6 deals with the conduct of Allied soldiers in the West. Their behavior was not nearly as bad as the Soviets, but the GIs did “‘their share of looting and raping’ a US sergeant admitted” (p. 169). Even more serious than looting and rape were the “large number of captured or surrendered Germans [who] were simply slaughtered on the spot” (p. 170). Fortunately, these were the exceptions rather than the rule and Goodrich concedes that “the average GI and Tommy comported himself amazingly well” (p. 170).

Chapter 7 describes the Battle of Berlin, the desperate, heroic, ugly, and hopeless defense of the German capital.

Chapter 8 covers a number of topics: the concentrations camps in the West, the fate of German POWs and civilians in the East, and the treatment of foreigners who supported or collaborated with the Germans.

When the concentration camps in western Germany were captured Allied soldiers were greeted by the sight of thousands of emaciated bodies, living and dead. With the breakdown in production and distribution of food, fuel, clothing, and medicine, “thousands of camp inmates swiftly succumbed in the final weeks of the war to typhus, dysentery, tuberculosis, starvation, and neglect” (p. 230). The Allied forces blamed the camp guards for these conditions and shot most of them on the spot. At this point of the war, however, many of the guards were ordinary German soldiers assigned to the camps to keep some semblance of order until Allied troops arrived.

The surrender of German forces in the spring of 1945 did not bring peace nor stop the killing. In Czechoslovakia German civilians and POWs were subjected to savage reprisals. Almost all Germans, many from families who had been there for centuries, were expelled from their homes. Over 200,000 were killed, many tortured to death. Similar scenes, on a lesser scale, were played out in Rumania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. In France, 100,000 French citizens who had collaborated with the Germans were murdered.

At the end of the war over five million Soviet citizens—POWs, Cossacks, foreign workers, veterans of Vlasov’s German/Russian army—fell into the hands of the western Allies. To appease Stalin, Operation Keelhaul was implemented to forcibly return these millions to the USSR to face execution or years of slave labor. Operation Keelhaul became Operation Prevarication as the War Department solemnly proclaimed, “The United States Government has taken a firm stand against any forced repatriation and will continue to maintain this position… There is no intention that any refugee be returned home against his will” (p. 251).

Meanwhile General Eisenhower was circumventing the Geneva Convention by designating captured German soldiers as DEFs, Disarmed Enemy Forces rather than POWs who would be accorded certain protections under international law. As a result, the surrendering Germans were imprisoned in huge open-air enclosures without shelter, and with little food, water, or medical care. Hundreds of thousands died of exposure, starvation, dehydration, and disease. Probably close to one million German prisoners died in American and French camps. “And thus, in ‘peace,’ did ten times the number Landsers die than were killed on the whole Western Front during the whole of the war” (p. 260).

“These Nazis are getting a dose of their own medicine’ a prison commandant reported proudly” (p. 255). At the same time the International Red Cross reported that ninety-nine percent of American POWs held by Germany survived the war and returned home safely.

Chapter 9 begins with the German unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945. One phase of the war was over. Incredibly, “the worst yet lay ahead… The war against Germany continued unabated” (p. 279). Goodrich points out that the Morgenthau Plan was never officially repudiated and what might be called the Modified Morgenthau was implemented. “‘Most children under ten and people over sixty cannot survive the coming winter,’ one American admitted in October 1945” (p. 289). A few US elected officials protested the treatment of Germans, but the great humanitarian Eleanor Roosevelt declared after a fact-finding tour that conditions in Germany were “tolerable” (p. 292).

Chapter 10 surveys the de-Nazification process instituted after the war. This process involved imprisonment, interrogation, and punishment. Interrogation was often accompanied by beatings, rapes, and even more extreme torture. Few failed to confess to whatever they had been accused of while often implicating others as well. “One man opposed to the vengeance-minded program was George Patton. ‘Evidently the virus started by Morgenthau and [Bernard] Baruch of Semitic revenge against all Germans is still working,’ wrote the general in private” (p. 299).

Twice in the book Goodrich mentions that in immediate postwar Germany the Salvation Army was, “one of the few relief organizations that dared face and fight the incredible suffering, regardless of the Allied political pressure.” (p. 318). Although the Salvation Army was hardy able to “make a dent” in the desperate conditions these efforts might be something to keep in mind when you hear the bell ringers around Christmas time.

Chapter 11 covers the expulsions of over twelve million Germans from Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia. After the war the USSR would claim a bit of East Prussia, the rest of the territory was awarded to Poland. The Germans, whose ancestors had lived in these lands for many centuries, were forced to flee west. Without adequate food, clothing, or shelter, exhausted and hungry, these hapless refugees were robbed, beaten, raped, and murdered by Russian soldiers, Polish militia men, and gangs of Gypsies and Jews. It was, “the greatest death march in history, [and] it was preordained that millions would never survive the trek” (p. 334).

About two million eastern German expellees, mostly women and children, died. Another one million ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia also died. Four million more Germans were sent east and disappeared into the gulags. Unbelievably, it appears that, “far more Germans died during the first two years of ‘peace’ than died during the previous six years of war” (p. 344).

Epilogue: The author suggests that the one thing that saved Germany from total postwar destruction was the beginning of the Cold War. By the late 1940s “Great Britain and the United States were more intent on erecting a bulwark against Soviet expansion than in flailing a fallen enemy even further” (p. 354).

Goodrich ends the book by saluting the German people’s will to live manifest in their postwar economic miracle. Yet he also notes that the propaganda campaign against Germany has continued—a psychological and political necessity for the victors to justify their wartime and postwar policies.

Conclusions

Hellstorm is revisionist history in the most basic definition of the term “revision”—to look at again. Seven decades after the end of World War II the standard narrative still reads like a morality play—the forces of good fought and triumphed over the forces of evil. Whenever history is written in such simplistic terms the reader should know that much of the story is missing. Building on earlier efforts, Hellstorm provides some of the missing pieces of the story.

This reviewer can remember when James Bacque’s Other Losses came out in 1989. It caused a minor stir. It contained evidence that perhaps one million Germans died in captivity in the West. It was released by a major Canadian publisher. It was reviewed by several mainstream publications. And, in that pre-internet age, it was available on the shelves of chain bookstores.

Yet Other Losses shows how difficult it is for any single book, no matter how significant, to change public perceptions of World War II formed by decades of incessant propaganda. Jews were the real victims of the war, and whatever losses the Germans may have suffered were their own fault.

The need for a more balanced view of the war and the need to interpret National Socialist Germany within a historical perspective is why Hellstorm is an important book. More such books need to be written. The suffering of the German people needs to be acknowledged. People of European extraction everywhere should see that the children burned alive or crushed under rubble were our children. The women beaten and raped were our women. The young soldiers summarily executed were our boys.

After seventy years, the denials and hypocrisy of the war and postwar years need to be recognized. For example, today America is fighting a War on Terror, yet terror—the killing of the innocent for military and political ends—was a major tactic of the Allies during World War II.

In 1984 Jewish author and media personality Studs Terkel published a best-selling oral history entitled The Good War. There was absolutely nothing good about World War II. It was a tragedy for our peoples and civilization.

William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Thus it is with World War II. The war is still being fought. It is a psychological war that heaps shame and guilt on Germany, and ironically, on her opponents as well to the extent they shared Germany’s race and culture. The war ought to be seen as an internecine conflict, the result of a failure of statesmanship by both Anglo-American and German leaders. As Patrick Buchanan wrote, it was The Unnecessary War.

An optimist might see the tide beginning to turn. In the past several years a number of mainstream books have been published seeking to present a more impartial view of the wartime and postwar suffering.

This is much more than just an issue of nuanced historiography. The narrative of World War II continues to be used as a propaganda weapon to demoralize the West. The effort to historicize World War II should continue. Hellstorm is part of that effort.

___________________

For the footnotes see the original article on The Occidental Observer, linked at the hatnote.

Tags 2nd World War, Germany, Hellstorm Holocaust, History, Jewish Question (JQ), United Kingdom, United States

Eduardo Velasco Hans F. K. Günther Miscegenation Nordicism Racial studies Science

Gens alba conservanda est

Post author By C .T.
Post date July 10, 2014

“The white race must be preserved”

The new racial classification (first part)

First and foremost, if the white race must be preserved, a scientific definition of “white race” must be provided.

Editor’s Abstract: The European race is divided into three primordial races: the European Nordid White (“White Nordid” or WN), the Nordid Central Asian Redhead (“Red Nordid” or RN), and the Near Eastern Armenid. The white race is actually a mixture of two or more races. We cannot say, “This person is a pure white” but “This person has a mixture of A, B and C races in such proportions.” With terms like Aryan or White we designate a mixture between White Nordid and Red Nordid and its mild crossing with non-white “Armenids” or “Mongolids”—usually people of Germanic and Slavic origin.

Therefore, while the ideal white is a White Nordid with a Red Nordid, we cannot say that those whites who have some Armenid or Mongolid genes are non-whites. However, we could say they are non-whites if they have substantial Armenid and/or Mongolid and especially Congid genes.

In the new racial classification the phenotype is more important than genetic studies.

The rest of this long essay can be read at the end of The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour (see the featured post).

Tags Asia, China, Europe, Feminized western males, France, Geography, Germany, India, Italy, Jewish Question (JQ), Prehistory, Priesthood of the sacred words, Russia, Spain, United Kingdom

Alexis de Tocqueville Arthur de Gobineau Democracy French Revolution Miscegenation Nordicism Paris Philosophy of history Racial studies Richard Wagner

Arthur de Gobineau’s

Post author By C .T.
Post date June 16, 2014

Essai Sur L’Inégalité des Races Humaines

“We (Wagner and Cosima) have done nothing but talk about you and your Essay since noon, when my husband came to tell me of the pleasure and interest he has found in reading chapter thirteen, which has absorbed him since he began it. Parsifal has been cornered into reading your books!! I am not able to express how much we love and admire this masterpiece…”

Letter of Cosima to Gobineau of March 27, 1881

The Essai Sur L’Inégalité des Races Humaines (Essay on the Inequality of Human Races), of which only the first volume is available in English, is a book published in 1853 and 1855 by the French philosopher Joseph Arthur de Gobineau. It is considered the initial work of racialist philosophy. Below I reproduce an abridged translation of the introduction by Adriano Romualdi.

There are books that act on the reality of many of the political events and, out of the narrow circle of the discussion, become a powerful idea, myth and blood supplying historical processes. The most typical is undoubtedly Marx’s Capital, a historical-economic study that has become religious dogma, battle gun and gospel. To these books belongs the Essay on the Inequality of Human Races of Count Gobineau, ignored during the time the author lived but released in Germany after his death.

Arthur de Gobineau was born in Ville d’Avray in 1816 to a family of ancient Norman origin. Shortly before his death, in his Histoire d’Ottar Jara he would relive the events of the Viking conqueror that reached the coast of France, giving rise to his family. Gobineau’s father was a captain in the Royal Guard of Charles X. After the revolution of 1830 he departed to live in Britain while the son went to study in Switzerland. There Gobineau learned German and peered into the vast prospects opened by Germanic philology in those years. Since Friedrich Schlegel in his Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Inder taught affinity between European languages and Sanskrit he assumed an Aryan migration from Asia to Europe. In 1816, Bopp, with his Greek grammar, compared Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin and founded Indo-European philology. Meanwhile, the Brothers Grimm rediscovered Edda and Germanic poetry, reviving the old heroism and primordial mythology while Kart O. Müller found in the Dorians (Die Dorier, 1824) the Nordic soul of ancient Greece. Thus Gobineau was familiar from his adolescence with a world that European culture was slowly assimilating.

In 1834 Gobineau went to Paris. He was not rich and tried to steer through as a writer and journalist. Of his literary works, many pages of Le Prisionnier Chancheux, Ternote, Mademoiselle Irnois, Les Aventures de Nicolas Belavoir and E’Abbaye of Thyphanes have withstood the erosion of time.

An article in the Revue de deux Mondes put him in touch with Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous author of Democracy in America, also of old Norman lineage. This friendship joined them through a lifetime despite their strong differences: Tocqueville, the aristocrat, resigned with melancholy by accepting democracy as a reality of the modern world while Gobineau, another aristocrat, rebelled and identified civilization with the work of a master race.

Tocqueville was appointed Foreign Minister and called his friend as his chief of staff. On the eve of the Napoleonic coup Tocqueville resigned but Gobineau put on a brave face to the Caesarism. He entered diplomacy and was the first secretary to take the delegation of Bern. It was in Berne where he wrote the Essai Sur L’Inégalité des Races Humaines. The first two volumes appeared in 1853, and more in 1855.

The book incorporates the movements of the great discovery of the Indo-European unity, i.e., a large extended Aryan family from Iceland to India. The Latin word pater, the Gothic fadar, the Greek patér and the Sanskrit derivations are revealed as originating from a single word. But if there has been a primary language of which several languages have branched, there must be a major lineage that existed, moving from its original home, and spread this language in the vast space between Scandinavia and the Ganges. It was the people that named themselves Aryans, a term with which the rulers are referred to themselves as opposed to the natives of the conquered lands (compare the Persian and the Sanskrit for arya = noble, pure; the Greek àristos = best , the Latin herus = owner, the soldierly Germanic Ehre = honor).

This is where Gobineau’s reasoning is channeled, mobilizing for his thesis ancient Indian texts revealing these prehistoric Aryans—tall, blond, with blue eyes—piercing into India, Persia, Greece, and Italy to make the great ancient civilizations flourish. Every civilization comes from an Aryan conquest, from the organization imposed by an elite of Nordic lords over a mass population.

Comparing each of the three great racial families the superiority of the Aryan appears to us evident. “If his [the black man’s] mental faculties are dull or even non-existent”—writes Gobineau—“he often has an intensity of desire, and so of will, which may be called terrible. Consequently, the black race is an intensely sensual, emotional radically race, but lacks of will and clarity of the organizer.” The yellow race stands before the black but it differs from the true creative will. Here we also have a race of second order, a kind infinitely less vulgar than the black but that lacks audacity, toughness and that sharp, heroic intelligence expressed in the gracile Aryan face. Civilization is thus a legacy of blood and is lost with the melting pot of blood. This is the explanation that Gobineau offers us about the tragedy of world history.

Gobineau’s key concept is degeneration, in the proper sense of the word, which is expressed in the growing apart from one’s own original type (the Germans would speak of Entnordung or denordization). Ancient peoples have disappeared because they have lost their Nordic integrity, and this can occur to modern man as well. “If the empire of Darius had, at the battle of Arbela, been able to fill its ranks with Persians, that is to say with real Aryans; if the Romans of the later Empire had had a Senate and an army of the same stock as that which existed at the time of the Fabii, their dominion would never have come to an end.”

The fate that overwhelmed ancient cultures also threatens us. The democratization of Europe, which began with the French Revolution, represents the revolt of the servile masses with their hedonistic and pacifist values against the heroic ideals of Nordic aristocracies of Germanic origin. Equality, that for a time was just a myth, threatens to become reality in the infernal cauldron where the superior mixes with the inferior and what is noble is bogged down into the ignoble.

If today the Essai Sur L’Inégalité des Races Humaines appears aged in many features, it retains a substantial validity. Gobineau has the great merit of having first addressed the problem of the crisis of civilization in general and the West in particular. In a century stunned by the commoner myth of progress, he dared to proclaim the fatal decline of every culture and the senile and crepuscular nature of the citizens of a rationalist civilization. Without Gobineau’s work, without the serious, solemn chiming bumps in the prelude of his Essai, all of modern literature about crises by Spengler, Huizinga and Evola is unimaginable.

Gobineau’s great work on the inequality of the races was completed, but the French culture did not take notice. Tocqueville tried to comfort Gobineau prophesying that his book would be introduced into France from Germany.

Gobineau died suddenly in Turin in October 1882. Nobody seemed to notice his disappearance. It was the Germans who valorized him. Wagner opened its columns of the Bayreuther Blätter; Hans von Wolzogen, Ludwig Schemann and Houston Stewart Chamberlain announced his work. It was Ludwig Schemann who founded the cult of Gobineau by instituting an archive near the University of Strasbourg, then in Germany. In 1896 Schemann founded the Gobineau-Vereinigung, which would spread Gobineauism throughout Germany. In 1914 Schemann had an influential network of friends and protectors and the Kaiser himself subsidized it.

On the trail of the work of Gobineau, racialism was born: Vacher de Lapouge, Penka, Pösche, Wilser, Woltmann, H. S. Chamberlain and after the war Rosenberg, Hans Günther and Clauss retook Gobineaunian intuitions and amplified them with a vast doctrinal body. In 1933 National Socialism, assuming power in Germany, officially recognized the ideology of race. Thus what Wittgenstein had prophesied about Gobineau was fulfilled: “You say you are a man of the past, but in reality you are a man of the future.”

Tags France, Germany, Indo-European heritage, National Socialism