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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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).
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.
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For the footnotes see the original article on The Occidental Observer, linked at the hatnote.
“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).
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.”
This piece has been moved
to a single entry: here.