Tag: Jewish Question (JQ)

Hitler sometimes liked to say that the hard part was reviving Germany domestically; thereafter, dealing with her foreign enemies would be easy. In reality, he was under no illusions.

A nationalist revival would make Germany ‘capable of making an alliance’ again, but this was only a necessary, not a sufficient condition to secure her position in the world. That would require actual allies. Temperamentally, Hitler was not averse to a Russian alliance, preferably without the communists, but if necessary with them. ‘We must try to connect to the national [and] anti-Semitic Russia,’ he demanded, ‘not to the Soviets.’

That said, in August 1920, nineteen years before the Hitler-­Stalin Pact, he remarked that he would ‘ally not only with Bolshevism but even with the devil in order to move against France and Britain’. He feared, however, that this attempt to break free through a Russo-German pact would simply be crushed by the British and French. A British alliance was far more desirable, if that country could be kept out of the hands of the Jews.

Instead, Hitler looked further afield, at least conceptually. He hoped that he could confront the forces of international financial capitalism with the united front of the ‘International of the productive’, to mobilize ‘voices for the defence of the rights of the productive peoples’. Germany would spearhead this effort, by purifying itself first. Hitler demanded no less than a pan-Aryan international anti-Semitic front. Inverting the Communist Manifesto’s famous slogan, he announced: ‘not proletarians of all countries unite, but anti-Semites of all countries unite!” Aryans and anti-Semites of all peoples,’ he elaborated, ‘unite to fight against the Jewish race of exploiters and oppressors of all peoples.’ He repeated these injunctions in various forms on many occasions throughout the early 1920s, and indeed beyond. Though Hitler never suggested that Nazism was ‘for export’, he was clear from the beginning that his programme required a high degree of international cooperation among international anti-Semites to compensate for Germany’s weakness.

In the long run he believed that none of this would make any difference unless Germany solved the question of ‘space’.

Hitler rejected the standard solutions to Germany’s predicament. He wondered whether Zionism might be a solution to the ‘Jewish Question’, but quickly came down against the idea. Hitler saw in Jewish aspirations for statehood proof of their sense of national identity, despite all their international rhetoric. ‘The Jews,’ he wrote, were ‘one people’, who ‘identified themselves as a people (Zionists)’. The ‘proof’ of this, Hitler continued, was ‘Palestine’.

Hitler was deeply sceptical, though, that the Zionist project could succeed, because it was completely inimical to the nature of Jewry. The ‘Aryan’ concept of the state, he claimed, was ‘territorial’, while the parasitic Jews could only feed off existing states, not establish one of their own. The Jew ‘cannot build a state’, he argued, because he was ‘incapable of building a state’. Moreover, even if such a state could be erected, Hitler believed that it would merely increase the Jewish threat. ‘The planned Zionist state “Jerusalem”,’ he argued, should not be regarded as an area of Jewish national settlement, but rather as ‘the headquarters for Jewish world power plans for exploitation and nefarious activity’.

For the rest of his life, in fact, Hitler stuck to the view that the establishment of a Jewish state, in Palestine or anywhere else, would simply create another focal point for world Jewry.

Worse still than the old European imperialism of western powers, according to Hitler, was the Jewish aspiration to world domination, of which the Germans were the principal victims. Drawing on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, he claimed to see a grand plan to control the world. The ultimate aim of policy towards Germany and other independent states, Hitler stated at the beginning 1921, was the creation of a ‘Jewish world state’. He came back to this theme repeatedly over the next two years, when he spoke of the ‘Jewish-imperialist plans for world domination’, the ‘Jewish world dictatorship’ and the ‘final aim [of the Jews]: world domination [and] the destruction of the national states’. In his notes for one speech, Hitler made the connections absolutely clear in point form: ‘World domination with a Jewish capital—Zion—that means world enslavement: world stock exchange—world press—world culture. World language. All for slaves under one master.’ In this way, Hitler closed the circle of western imperialist, Jewish and capitalist enemies of the Reich…

Left, Zion (1903), Ephraim Moses Lilien. ‘Zion’ (Hebrew: צִיּוֹן Ṣīyyōn, Septuagint, Σιών, is a placename in the Hebrew Bible, often used as a synonym for Jerusalem as well as for the Land of Israel as a whole. —Ed.

It is in this context that Hitler’s evolving attitude to communism and the Soviet Union should be seen. At times, he suggested that Bolshevism and international capitalism were working together. He spoke of the way in which Jewish capitalism allegedly used Chinese ‘cultural guardians’ in Moscow, and black ‘hangmen’s assistants’ on the Rhine, while the Soviets in Genoa ‘walked arm in arm with big bankers’. The Jews, Hitler claimed, ‘had their apostles in both camps’ and thus agents on both the ‘right’ and the ‘left’. From time to time, Hitler claimed that communism was the main threat. It is also true that after the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War, the threat of international communism loomed larger in his mind than it had in 1919. Hitler now called for ‘the overcoming and extermination of the Marxist worldview’. ‘Developments in Russia must be watched closely,’ he warned, because once the communists had ‘consolidated their power’ they would ‘probably turn it against us’…

Despite all this, Hitler still did not regard capitalism and communism simply as two equal sides of the same Jewish coin… More generally, his rhetoric and attention were still overwhelmingly directed towards the threat posed by the western powers and international finance capitalism.

For this reason, Hitler was bitterly opposed to any form of internationalism, not just because he despised it in principle, but because he considered it humbug. In part, this hostility was directed towards the German left, whose blind faith in universal principles, Hitler argued, had left Germany defenceless during the world war and its aftermath. For this reason, he argued, ‘[we should] free ourselves of the illusion of the [Socialist] International and [the idea of ] the Fraternity of Peoples’. Hitler’s main objection to internationalism, however, was that it simply served the interests of the western imperial powers.

Where was international law, he asked, when Louis XIV had plundered Germany in the late seventeenth century, when the British had bombarded neutral Copenhagen in 1807 and starved and oppressed the Irish, or when the Americans had displaced the native Indians. It had not escaped Hitler’s attention that ‘in the home of the inventor of the League of Nations [Wilson’s America] one rejects the League as a utopia, a madness’. There was not even a racial solidarity among whites, Hitler lamented, because France had sent ‘comrades from Africa in solidarity to enserf and muzzle the population on the Rhine’. For this reason, Hitler rejected the whole notion of international governance, claiming that ‘The League of Nations is only a holding company of the Entente which wants to secure its ill-gotten gains.’

What linked all these explanations in Hitler’s mind was the power and the malevolence of the Jews, the main controllers of an ‘international capitalism’ that needed ‘ever more objects of exploitation’. It was they who under their Jewish ringleader Lord Northcliffe (who was in fact not only not Jewish but a fervent anti­-Semite) had whipped up the British press into a frenzy against Germany before 1914. It was the ‘international Jewish newspaper corporations’, Hitler claimed, who had prevented a Russo-German rapprochement. It was they who owned the large American companies supplying the Allied war effort and who tricked the ‘peaceful’ American people into war with Germany against their better natures and best interests. It was the Jews who tried to manipulate Germany’s food supply and who ‘precipitated the revolution through hunger’. All this happened because the ‘New York Stock Exchange’—the ‘Headquarters of World Jewry’—was determined to crush Germany, the last remaining Nationalstaat which was ‘not yet completely ruled by stock exchanges’. In short, Hitler remained firmly wedded to the idea of a deadly synthesis between world Jewry, international capitalism and Anglo-America as Germany’s nemesis.

In the last sentence, you can see three enemies of Germany from Hitler’s POV, which contrasts with what we sometimes see in the discussion threads of white nationalist forums, where they basically talk about a single enemy: Jewry. And we are still talking about exoteric Hitlerism, aimed at the masses.

In the case of the esoteric Hitlerism led especially by Himmler, a mere ten-page pamphlet aimed at the SS, which by the way can be read on pages 501-510 of The Fair Race, already puts the Christian churches, too, in the dock.

What I like about Simms’ book is that the profile he portrays of the German chancellor is more complex than the simplistic view we see in some racialist forums in vogue today.