Chapter 12

National Socialism and Socialist Racism

At heart Mussolini was always a Socialist. Hitler, on the other hand, had never formally belonged to the Socialist party, although he had drunk from almost the same ideological sources. His Weltanschauung too had been largely fathered by the image of the national socialist Taborites.

Let us go back to the revived interest for the Taborites in Bohemia during the second half of the Nineteenth century. Bohemia then had a Social Democratic Czech party fully cooperating with the Austrian Social Democrats. Both belonged to the Second International. Yet the nationalistic fervor of that period was such that it strongly affected the Czech party and led to a split in 1896. A faction under the leadership of Klofáč, Stříbrný, and Franke seceded and formed the Národně Socialistická Strana Ceská, the “Czech National Socialist party” thus introducing for the first time in European history a party sporting the national socialist label. The popular notion of the Taborite movement became immediately the guiding image of this party.1 We can look up practically any Czech handbook or encyclopedia2 and find that the main characteristic of this important party was its emphasis on the Hussite-Taborite tradition which, in fact, became the “official myth” of Czechoslovakia after its formation in 1918. After 1919 the N.S.S.C, adopted Dr. Edvard Beneš as its leader and changed its name to Czechoslovak National Socialist party. Karel Hoch in his essay The Political Parties of Czechoslovakia gives us the following characteristic of the N.S.S.C.: “Collectivizing by means of development, surmounting of class struggle by national discipline, moral rebirth and democracy as the conditions of socialism, a powerful popular army, etc.”3

A study of its programs reveals other important points: anticlerical-ism, an intimate synthesis between nationalism and socialism, trust in the working class, the peasantry, and the lower middle class, opposition to the nobility—all reminiscent of German National Socialism except that no anti-Jewish stand was mentioned. But, contrary to a widespread notion, anti-Jewish feelings had been quite strong among the Czechs and had led to outbreaks of popular violence against the Jews in Prague and other places. As a matter of fact, anti-German riots had led to demonstrations against Jewish shopkeepers (they spoke German too!) and to the killing of three persons on December 1, 1897. Thomas G. Masaryk’s criticism of the Hapsburgs for their support of the Jews was seconded by Wickham Steed, the great British apostle of the Czech case.4 Still, Czech National Socialism was strongly identitarian, far more so than Italian fascism which, after all, put the accent on the State rather than the people. As a political party the N.S.S.C, disappeared under German occupation and reemerged in 1945, when it eagerly collaborated with the Communists.

We should not consider it accidental that the big “Masaryk Encyclopedia” (Masarykův Ottův Naučný) features under the heading “National Socialism” both the Czech and the German National Socialist parties. The first foundations of the latter were laid among the Germans of Bohemia in 1897 when a small periodical, Der Hammer was transferred from Vienna to Eger. Its editor was Franko Stein, a member of an organization that called itself “German National Workers’ League.” Backed by his paper this man was able to organize a German National Workers’ Congress in Eger (northwest Bohemia) in 1898, where a program of twenty-five points was adopted, a program rather similar to the Linz program of Georg von Schönerer, Austria’s most prominent nationalist leader. (This nationalist program had been partly drawn up by Victor Adler, who later left the nationalist camp and became Austria’s leading Social Democrat.) These nationalist workers, however, soon headed by a bookbinder called Ferdinand Burschofsky, distrusted Schönerer and considered him too “bourgeois” to lead or to rally class-conscious workers. They wanted socialism, they wanted a nationalism of a distinctly leftist pattern.

They were not unsuccessful. In April 1902 a meeting of the Organization of Nationalistic Labor took place in Saaz, and in December of the same year a mass demonstration was held in Reichenberg. The group was then renamed “German Political Labor League for Austria” and boasted 26,000 members. Schönerer’s national-liberal attitude was flatly rejected. On November 15, 1903, a further step was taken in Aussig: A political party was formed which called itself the “German Worker’s Party in Austria” (D.A.P.). Its program was formulated a year later in Trautenau, where the following declaration was made: “We are a liberty-loving nationalistic party which fights energetically against reactionary tendencies as well as feudal, clerical, or capitalistic privileges and all alien influences.”5

There were other demands: for instance, separation of Church and State, adherence to democratic principles in army appointments, nationalization of mines and railroads—the usual postulates of “progressive” leftist parties in Europe. In the same year (1904) however, we hear about a plan to change the name of the rising new party. Hans Knirsch, who hailed from Moravia, proposed to call it the “German Social Workers’ party” or the “National Socialist German Workers’ party.” After a long debate this proposition was rejected by the Bohemian delegates for a very obvious reason: They were afraid of the charge that they were copying the Czech National Socialists. And yet their programs were almost identical and not at variance from that of the Social Democrats, members of the Second International. Karel Engliš, professor at the Masaryk University in Brünn (Brno), speaking about the program of the successors of the German Workers’ party said that “German Socialism does not differ from Marxism in its critique of capitalism and in its concept of the class struggle.”6

At a local election in Reichenberg the German Workers’ party was able to marshal 14,000 votes in 1905. In 1906 it sent three deputies to the Reichsrat, the Parliament in Vienna, thus appearing for the first time in the center of Austrian life. An “All-Austrian” congress of the German Workers’ party took place in Prague in 1909 and again the Moravian effort to change its name was defeated. Now new men were coming up. There was a Rudolf Jung, a man with an engineering degree who had been transferred from Vienna to Bohemia by the state railway since he engaged too much in nationalistic propaganda. There was also a lawyer, Dr. Walter Riehl. There were “bourgeois” elements, to be sure, but we find them in all Socialist parties.

In the beginning World War I had a paralyzing effect on all political activities, but in 1916 Die Freien Stimmen, the paper of the D.A.P., started to propagate anew the adoption of the term “National Socialist.” In April 1918 a motion to rename the party along these lines was again defeated by a vote of 29-14 in Aussig, but a month later the change was effected at a large congress in Vienna. Thus a “German National Socialist Workers’ party” (D.N.S.A.P., not yet N.S.D.A.P) was born months before the end of the war, while Hitler was still a Gefreiter, a private first class, on the Western Front.

The program formulated in Vienna had a purely Leftist character. It said: “The German National Socialist Workers’ party is not a workers’ party in the narrow sense of the term: It represents the interests of all honestly creative labor. It is a liberty-loving and strictly nationalist party and therefore fights against all reactionary trends, against ecclesiastical, aristocratic, and capitalist privileges and every alien influence, but above all against the overpowering influence of the Jewish-commercial mentality in all domains of public life. . . .

“. . . it demands the amalgamation of all regions of Europe inhabited by Germans into a democratic, social-minded German Reich. . . .

“. . . it demands plebiscites for all key laws in the Reich, the states and provinces. . . .

“. . . it demands the elimination of the rule of Jewish banks over business life and the creation of national people’s banks with a democratic administration. . . .”7

This program, as the perceptive reader can see, oozes the spirit of identitarian leftism: It was democratic, it was anti-Hapsburg (since it demanded the destruction of the Danube monarchy in favor of the Pan-German program); it was against all unpopular minorities, an attitude which constitutes the magnetism of all leftist ideologies. The Jews of Austria, we have to bear in mind, were slowly evolving (as they had done further west) into a new upper crust.8 A Jewish proletariat, such as in Poland, Russia, or the Ukraine, no longer existed. Jews were nobilitated. Hence the mobilization of envy against them. Hence also the declaration of war against all nonnational, cosmopolitan elements like the Jews, the clergy, the bankers, the aristocracy and royalty.

Six months later the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was no more. But Germany survived. Lloyd George, Wilson, and Clemenceau actually helped to realize the noble program of the D.N.S.A.P. by eliminating the biggest stumbling block in the path of Pan-Germanism, the Hapsburg monarchy. Though the birth of Czechoslovakia did not quite fit into the plans of the National Socialists, Hans Knirsch congratulated Masaryk and Tusar, the Czech leaders, for having helped to destroy the old monarchy,9 but he wept for the unfulfilled “old nostalgic dream of all German democrats,” the Pan-German state.10 Still, in the first elections held in Czechoslovakia, the D.N.S.A.P. received 42,000 votes. It suffered some losses too: Men who lacked the legal grounds for Czechoslovak citizenship were expelled. Rudolf Jung went to Munich and Dr. Walter Riehl to Vienna. The party now had three branches: one in newly-founded Czechoslovakia, a smaller one in what remained of Austria (headed by Dr. Riehl), and a tiny one in Poland whose members were German-speaking. It was Rudolf Jung who contacted a small nationalist group in Munich and instilled in them the spirit of early National Socialism. Referring to this, Josef Pfitzner, a Sudeten German Nazi author, could write with pride that “the synthesis of the two great dynamic powers of the century, of the Socialist and national idea, had been perfected in the German borderlands which thus were far ahead of their motherland.”11

What happened in the meantime inside Germany? Konrad Heiden, Hitler’s earliest biographer, mentions the creation of a Free Committee for a German Workers’ Peace early in 1918. Anton Drexler organized a branch of this league on March 7, 1918 in Munich.12 In January 1919 this local group was renamed “German Workers’ party” with Drexler the proud possessor of membership card number 1. A certain Adolf Hitler became the seventh member, but he did not like the name of this budding organization and proposed to call it “Social Revolutionary party.” Rudolf Jung, who joined these men and brought much material and literature13 from the D.N.S.A.P., persuaded them to adopt the slightly reshuffled name “National Socialist German Workers’ party” (N.S.D.A.P.). Hitler’s contribution to the party program consisted of several ideas on foreign policy: A teacher and organizer of the Democratic party from Franconia by the name of Julius Streicher provided some additional, anti-Jewish arguments.14

Who was this amazing person, Adolf Hitler? As with every human being, one has to study his development in the light of environment, personal experiences, and the ideas to which he was exposed. He was a tragic and not attractive figure. To understand him fully one has to know the Austrian and especially the Viennese atmosphere.

There cannot be much doubt that Adolf Hitler’s father was of part Jewish origin which explains the son’s twin hatred for his father and the Jews. His father’s mother, a Fräulein Schicklgruber, had been a servant in the home of the Jewish family Frankenberger in Graz. She had a child, Hitler’s father, and it is an established fact that she received alimony from her employers—and alimony in such circumstances is rarely paid without good reason.15 She later married a man called Hiedler or Hitler. This marriage automatically legitimatized the child. Hitler’s father married twice and was a custom official in the city of Braunau on the Austro-German (Austro-Bavarian) border.

One really should see Braunau and the house where Hitler was born.16 The city’s main square is completely open toward the Inn River separating Braunau from (Bavarian) Simbach. The town, a county seat, seems to be cut in half as with a knife. Hitler’s father spent much of his time on the bridge, stopping the passersby to inspect their suitcases, bundles, and sacks, thus symbolizing to his son the separation of Austria from Germany. There were, of course, several reasons why Hitler, who knew of his father’s origin, did not get along with him. Given the importance attached by the Nazis to “racial purity,” Hitler’s ancestry was a state secret. It was known, however, to a number of people.17

Since his father, wearing a uniform with the imperial insignia, personified to young Hitler the Hapsburg monarchy, it is not so surprising that he soon developed a real loathing for the country of his birth. His teachers in the secondary school were mostly Pan-Germans and thus also anticlericals. There is no evidence that he ever harbored religious feelings. As an adolescent and as a young man he seemed to have been possessed by endless animosities. Before concentrating on the Jews his morbid hatred had turned against the higher social layers: the officers and the aristocracy.18 He entered a high school-college of the scientific type19 but was intellectually not able to make the grade. He painted and became interested in architecture. He wanted to study at the Art Academy (Akademie der bildenden Künste) of Vienna but was not admitted because he had neither a B.A. nor a B.S., nor did he show extraordinary talent which would have served in lieu of a degree. The examining professor advised him to study architecture, but this too proved impossible because he lacked a degree which the Polytechnic required.

His hatred for the imperial regime was so strong that he did everything within his power to avoid military service in Austria. (For those without a degree it was three years while the others served one year and almost automatically received a commission.) So he emigrated to Bavaria and at the outbreak of World War I joined the Bavarian army.20 After the war when Hitler, already the recognized leader of the National Socialist movement, wanted to extend his oratory to Austria, the Austrian Federal Chancellor, Monsignor Seipel, warned him that he would have him arrested and tried for desertion. This gave further nourishment to Hitler’s hatred for the Catholic Church.

Hitler was never a paperhanger. He sold hand-colored postcards in coffee houses, a far more humiliating way to earn a livelihood than any honest craft. (Theoretically it is quite possible that he offered his art to Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, or de Gasperi who used to frequent the Café Central in Vienna’s Herengasse.) Easily hurt, quickly offended, tortured by inferiority complexes, he was also highly superstitious. The fact that he was born in Braunau created in him a fixation for the color brown. The Nazi storm troopers wore brown shirts, the headquarters of the National Socialists in Munich was the Brown House: Hitler became a German by acquiring the citizenship of Braunschweig (Brunswick) where the local Nazi government gave him an administrative post.21 Finally he married his mistress called Eva Braun.22

His social inferiority complex weighed heavily on him. Carl Burckhardt, grand nephew of the famous Jacob Burckhardt and last League of Nations Commissioner in Danzig, explained to what extent this factor contributed to the outbreak of World War II. In Meine Danziger Mission 1937-1939 Burckhardt reports his conversation with Hitler in August 1939 about the prospects of war and peace. Hitler shouted, “I have read idiotic reports in the French press to the effect that I have lost my nerve, whereas the Poles have kept theirs.” (Hitler was so furious that for a few moments he was unable to continue.)

Burckhardt: “You do these journalists too much honor if you take their views so seriously. A Chancellor of the Reich ought not to get upset about such trifles. . . .”

Hitler: “This I cannot do. As a proletarian and due to my origin, my rise, and my character, I am incapable of seeing things in this light. This the statesmen have to understand if they want to avoid a catastrophe.”23

Here was definitely a man with a genuinely leftist turn of mind, an identitarian, a leader, not a ruler, a personifier of the masses.24 Big Brother, but not a father, a loveless man who wanted to see Germany in complete monotony, with local traditions eliminated, regional self-government destroyed, the flags of the Länder strictly outlawed, the differences between the Christian faiths eradicated, the Churches desiccated and forcibly amalgamated. He wanted to make the Germans more uniform, even physically, by planned breeding25 and the extermination, sterilization, or deportation of those who deviated from the norm. The tribes (Stämme) should cease to exist. Still, Hitler’s lack of education and preparation for the enormous power he held endeared him to the masses (who usually adore the successful amateur), and so did the amazing mediocrity of his tastes (especially in art), and of his views on almost all subjects. There was a “regular guy,” a “fellow like you and me”!

His Table Talks, noted down by a physician, Dr. Henry Picker, are a most frightening human document because they show the banality and, at the same time, the diabolism of the final logical consequences in the thinking of the man in the street.26 And, as so often happens with basically mediocre neurotics, certain romantic notions established a firm hold on Hitler. Before his emigration to Bavaria he read the curious pamphlets of a defrocked Cistercian monk from Heiligenkreuz Abbey, Georg Lanz, who called himself Lanz von Liebenfels.27 This somewhat mentally disturbed man even published a periodical propagating a Nordic racism. These ideas, combined with his increasing hatred for the Jews and his violent rejection of the multinational Austrian Empire, impressed Hitler deeply. A close community can only be established among near-identical people, and all this ties in well with the haunting vision of a perverted, secularized monastery.

Connections between the newly emerging N.S.D.A.P. and the D.N.S.A.P. of Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Poland were quickly established. In 1920 and 1922 so-called Interstate Meetings of Deputies of the three (or four) Nazi parties were held in Salzburg (Austria).28 In 1920 a violent clash occurred there between Hitler and two Austrian representatives, Dr. Riehl and Herr Schulz, during which Hitler, in the best proletarian fashion, declared that he would “prefer to be hanged in a bolshevik Germany rather than be happy in a Gallicized Reich.”29 At the 1920 meeting the Vienna program of 1918 was repeated almost verbatim, which just shows how strongly even German National Socialism was determined by the Bohemian pattern. The new declarations were signed collectively by the National Socialist party of the German people. Even at the meeting in 1922 the German Nazi group seems to have been the smallest—if we discount the tiny German-Polish splinter.

In November 1923 Hitler tried a Putsch in Munich which ended fatally. The revolutionary demonstrators were met by the Reichswehr under General von Lossow and were mowed down by bullets. Hitler and General Ludendorff30 got away with their lives by throwing themselves on the ground. The conservative Prime Minister of Bavaria, August von Kahr, also helped to quell the rebellion and for this “betrayal of the national revolution” the German conservatives not only earned Hitler’s undying hatred, but Kahr had to pay with his life in the Reichsmordwoche (the mass executions on and after June 30, 1934). After the Munich Putsch Hitler was apprehended and jailed in Landsberg fortress, where he had a splendid opportunity and the leisure to write Mein Kampf.31

Released from jail, he was accepted by all three National Socialist parties as the undisputed leader, though Schulz established a dissident group in Austria. In Czechoslovakia the National Socialists were dissolved in October 1933 and replaced by the Sudetendeutsche Partei which was certainly National Socialist in character. It was led by Konrad Henlein, a gymnastics teacher. The most militant element in the Czech national movement was always the Sokol, a calisthenics association founded by Miroslav Tyrš, a fervent admirer of Jahn and Darwin. The majority of the German and Austrian calisthenic leagues, the Turnvereine, were also nationalistic—the identitarian nostalgia of identically dressed men and women making identical movements in mass performances!

In 1923 Hitler failed to take over Germany by force. The Weimar Republic, however, with its democratic constitution offered an ideal frame for a peaceful and legal takeover by just winning elections. Any party could either achieve supreme power by attaining a majority and thus provide the government or, as a strategically placed minority in the parliament, make a mockery of democratic principles. Of course the Weimar Constitution was extremely democratic in its intentions: It prescribed proportional representation and provided one deputy for every 60,000 voters. The number of deputies was thus flexible and depended upon the size of the electorate.

A study of the numerical development of the different parties in the four elections preceding Hitler’s advent to power is most interesting. We can learn a great deal from their geographic-regional distribution as well as from changes in the support they got. Maps which I have published elsewhere show distinctly that religion was a main factor in the territorial growth of National Socialism.32 In Germany the denominations used to live in specific circumscribed areas—the result of the historic cujus regio ejus religio principle—and even today, after the tragic migrations following the collapse of the Third Reich, the old pattern survives with surprisingly few differences. There is no doubt that the Nazi victories were gained primarily with the aid of the Protestant or, to be more precise, the “progressive” post-Protestant areas: A mere glance at the statistical maps proves it. On the other hand, one of these maps also proves that the Communist votes show no denominational implications.33 In a way, we should expect this when we remember that Luther was a firm political authoritarian, that he thought utter severity in government essential in view of the totally corrupt nature of man, and that he had become (after vainly striving for the conversion of the Jews to his faith) one of the world’s most rabid Jew-haters and racists.34 The idea of a concentration camp for Jews was his,35 and at the Nuremberg trial Julius Streicher invoked Luther, insisting that, if the Reformer were still alive, he would be sitting among the defendants.36 Streicher (but not only Streicher) had carefully studied Luther’s anti-Jewish pamphlets. It shows the ignorance and confusion in which we live that America’s late leading professional anti-racist carried the Reformer’s name, and so did a well-known Jewish movie actor who vied with Charlie Chaplin in impersonating Hitler.

These facts unfortunately must be mentioned because they are essential to an understanding of the German tragedy which has aspects of a global calamity. I refer to them with a heavy heart not only because the ecumenical spirit always had a strong hold on me, but also because, having engaged for years in studies of Luther,37 I have developed a sincere affection for this true “wrestler with Christ,” a compassion for this irascible and melancholy theological genius who is, moreover, the creator of the German language.38. Hitler, to be sure, never showed any specific enthusiasm for Luther and despised the Evangelicals even more than the Catholics. However, he had left the Catholic Church to all practical purposes and declared National Socialism to be not a “cultic religion” but a “popular movement based on the exact sciences.”39

Perhaps even more interesting than the denominational aspects of the spread of National Socialism were its ideological conquests. Looking at the three or four elections before the brown wave finally buried everything, we get a curious picture. Let us put the many parties into three separate categories: the National Socialists; the parties with fixed ideologies (Communists, Social Democrats, Catholic Centrists, German Nationalists, Bavarian People’s party); and the parties belonging to the liberal-democratic dispensation (German People’s party, Democratic party, Economic party). The German People’s party was the successor of the National Liberals of Bismarck’s day and was led by Dr. Gustav Stresemann until his death. The Democratic party had been renamed the State party. The Bavarian People’s party was monarchist and conservative. In our tabulation we include the March 1933 elections, though their genuineness is most questionable. They were held under Nazi control and we know of specific cases where the results were falsified.

First of all, we also have to bear in mind that only 481 deputies had been elected in 1928 as against 647 in 1933, an increase explained by the fact that more and more habitual nonvoters came to the polls: the wishy-washy and the withdrawn, indifferent and skeptical people. Their imagination, obviously, had been caught by the Nazis and thus they strongly contributed to their victory. (Of course, this cannot be proved “scientifically”; theoretically it is possible that they now voted for the Socialists, Centrists, or Nationalists, while former voters became Nazis, but nobody knowing the German scene would dare to argue like this.) Yet just as important as the mobilization of the old nonvoters was the switch of the “Demo-Liberals,” the uncommitted left, the “progressivists” and the middle-roaders to the Nazis. The Democratic party, which in 1919 still had 80 deputies, had only two in November 1933. The Economic party of the middle class went down from 23 in 1928 to zero, the German People’s party, the former National Liberals, decreased from 45 in 1928 to a mere 2 in March 1933, but the Catholic Centrists increased during the same time from 61 to 73, the Bavarian royalists from 17 to 19, even the questionably conservative German Nationalists rose in the years 1930 to 1933 from 44 to 53 seats. This shows quite clearly what resisted and tried to stem the Nazi tide: certainly not the forces of agnosticism, polite doubt, left-of-centrism, progressivism, and enlightenment.

DEPUTIES

ELECTION DATE National Socialists Non-Nazi Ideologists Demo-Liberals
May 20, 1928 12 363 116
September 14, 1930 107 351 119
July 31, 1932 230 358 20
November 6, 1932 196 364 24
March 5, 1933 288 346 13

The Social Democrats decreased, but only slightly. From May 1928 to November 1932 their seats in the Reichstag numbered 153, 143, 133, and 121. To whom did they lose?

We find a hint in the totals of their fellow Marxists, the Communists: 44, 77, 89, and 100. This shows that by July 1932 the two big totalitarian parties, the Nazis and Communists, held 319 seats out of 608—an absolute majority which proves that more than half of all Germans emphatically rejected parliamentary democracy and that another large sector regarded it with the greatest skepticism. This again means, in other words, that the democratic republic uncompromisingly demanded by Wilson, was the basis of future slavery in Germany, the door through which tyranny entered. Plato’s and Aristotle’s dictum that tyranny always arises out of democracy was well confirmed.

German democratic parliamentarism had reached a complete impasse by 1932. Chancellor Brüning knew that there was only one way to preserve basic liberties, the restoration of the monarchy through a referendum. But the President, Paul von Hindenburg, rejected this solution because he considered a plebiscite for a monarchy incompatible with the principle of legitimacy and also because he had actually given an oath of allegiance to the Republic (in which he basically did not believe).40 A cabinet enjoying the confidence of the majority could not be formed. Franz von Papen, a dissenter from the Centrist party and one of the stupidest men ever to emerge in German political life,41 tried to rule without the Parliament, merely with the aid of the old War Emergency laws. He was supplanted by General Kurt von Schleicher, an intellectual military man who desperately tried to find a formula resembling that of Primo de Rivera’s regime, a combined dictatorship of the army and trade unions. Yet the conservative forces, already too deeply imbued with democratic notions and not believing that in the long run a government could subsist without popular support, had a genuine failure of nerve. On January 30, 1933 a government was formed with the National Socialists who, unfortunately, had the relative plurality in the Reichstag. Hindenburg, too old and too tired to resist and ill-advised by his nephew, also gave in to what was actually a victory of the democratic though not the liberal principle.42

It had been Papen’s idea to form a coalition government in which for every Nazi in an important ministerial post, a non-Nazi would be appointed to counterbalance him. Hitler was to be Chancellor of the Reich, Papen Vice-Chancellor, and so on along the whole line. Papen and his friends expected—as did the outside world—that Hitler would never be able to master either the gigantic economic difficulties or those in the domain of foreign policy. Internally, however, Hitler solved the unemployment problem by armament and public works, and the West was so frightened of him that they made every concession they had denied to Dr. Brüning. Still, an earlier offer by Papen to enter such a coalition government had been rejected by Hitler in a haughty letter whose salient passages highlight the leftist character of the Nazi movement. In his analysis of Papen’s predicament Hitler puts the following words into his mouth:

“In this emergency only one thing could help. We wanted to invite them, i.e., the Nazis, into our cabinet which enjoys not only the support of all Jews, but also of many aristocrats, conservatives, and members of the Stahlhelm. We were certain that they would accept our invitation without guile, freely and gladly. Then we would slowly have started to draw their poison fangs. Once they had shared our company, they could hardly withdraw. Caught together, hanged together!”

The “open letter,” printed by the thousands and distributed, was terminated in the best leftist “common-man” tradition:

“As to the rest, Herr von Papen, stay in the world in which you are, I will go on fighting in mine. I am happy to know that my world is the community of millions of German workers of the forehead and the fist, and of German peasants who, although mostly of humble origin and living in dire poverty, want to be the most faithful sons of our people—for they fight not only with their lips, but also with a suffering borne thousandfold and with innumerable sacrifices for a new and better German Reich.”43

But in January 1933 Papen gave in on far less advantageous terms, and was duly cheated and outsmarted. The tragedy ran its full course. The outcome is only too well known.

In the meantime, misinterpretations of the real character of National Socialism continued almost unchallenged. Against these it must be emphasized that, not only in the judgment of the historian and the political scientist, but of its own leaders and ideologues, National Socialism had a distinctly leftist pattern which generally can clearly be traced back to the French Revolution.

The Danzinger Hermann Rauschning was the first man to analyze from a conservative viewpoint Hitler’s utterances made to him in private. In his highly revealing Gespräche mit Hitler he tells of Hitler’s utter contempt for Italian fascism,44 his special hatred for the Hapsburgs,45 his complete legal nihilism46 so reminiscent of the legal positivism in the United States. Hitler naturally knew very well that the Nazi Revolution was “the exact counterpart of the French Revolution” and he imagined himself not only as “the conqueror but also the executor of Marxism—of that part that is essential and justified, stripped of its Jewish-Talmudic dogma.”47 He was particularly proud of having learned so much from the political methods of the Social Democrats. He went on record to say that, “Workers calisthenic associations, cells from the factory workers, mass demonstrations, propaganda pamphlets written especially for the multitudes, all these new means of the political struggle used by us, are Marxist in origin.”48 No wonder, since Socialism brought the principle of totalitarian organization to Germany, a fact duly noted by the late Wilhelm Röpke.49 “National Socialism is socialism in evolution,” Hitler insisted, “a socialism in everlasting change.”50 And he also admitted, “There is more that unites us with than divides us from bolshevism . . . above all the genuine revolutionary mentality. I was always aware of this and I have given the order that one should admit former Communists to the party immediately.”51

Talking about the coming war, Hitler said, “I am not afraid of destruction. We will have to part with much that seems to us dear and irreplaceable. Cities are going to be transformed into ruins, noble edifices will disappear forever. This time our sacred soil will not be spared, but I am not afraid of it. We are going to set our teeth and fight to the bitter end. From these ruins Germany will rise bigger and more beautiful than any country of the world.”52 This idea the mobmaster repeated ecstatically in the last weeks of his rule. Demolition delights all leftists, fills them with diabolic glee. Mr. Herbert Read (quite some time before he was knighted, to be true) praised destruction in a book appropriately called To Hell with Culture (No. 4. of the series, “The Democratic Order”) in which he spoke about the necessity to destroy all “nondemocratic, aristocratic or capitalist” culture: “To hell with such culture! To the rubbish-heap and furnace with it all! Let us celebrate the democratic revolution with the biggest holocaust in the history of the world. When Hitler has finished bombing our cities, let the demolition squads complete the good work. Then let us go out into the wide open spaces and build anew.”53 This was written in 1941 when the barbarians dominated everywhere. Still, Sir Herbert had the courage to write in 1943, “Communism is an extreme form of democracy, and it is totalitarian: but equally the totalitarian state in the form of fascism is an extreme form of democracy. All forms of socialism, whether state socialism of the Russian kind, or national socialism of the German kind, or democratic socialism of the British kind, are professedly democratic, that is to say, they all obtain popular assent by the manipulation of mass psychology.” And then he went on to explain why Nazi Germany was much more thoroughly democratic than either Britain or the United States.54

Official utterances to the effect that Nazism stood firmly on the left, that it represented a democratic and republican, socialistic and antiaristocratic ideology, always abounded. Just like a fanatical Laborite Hitler attacked Eton and Harrow.55 He called himself an “arch-democrat,”56 National Socialism the “most genuine democracy,”57 the Nazi constitution “truly democratic.”58 In Mein Kampf he wrote about the “Germanic democracy of the free election of a leader.”59

Goebbels called National Socialism an “authoritarian democracy” or a “Germanic democracy,” if not the “noblest form of European democracy”:60 He maintained that National Socialists did not talk about much democracy, but nevertheless were the executors of the “general will.”61 Rudolf Hess termed National Socialism “the most modern democracy in the world” which rested on the “confidence of the majority.”62 Michael Oakeshott of the London School of Economics said, very much to the point, in confirming Goebbels’ stand, “An authoritarian regime, no doubt, can ‘liquidate’ the liberal supporters which, for one reason or another, helped to bring it into being, but no modern authoritarian doctrine can liquidate its debt to the doctrine of Democracy. . . . It is impossible to understand either communism, fascism or National Socialism without first understanding the doctrine of representative democracy. . . . It is the parent of these ungracious children.”63

No wonder, therefore, Goebbels had stated unequivocally that he “paid homage to the French Revolution for all the possibilities of life and development which it had brought to the people. In this sense, if you like, I am a democrat.”64 There was, to be true, a more radically Socialist wing among the Nazis, led by the brothers Strasser and by Röhm, a group which had suffered as much in the Reichsmordwoche as the conservative opposition, but men like Goebbels were even more frank about their hatred for the traditional forces of Germany. Dr. Goebbels asked in 1932: “Where would we take the moral right from to fight the idea of the proletarian struggle between the classes, if the bourgeois class-state were not first destroyed and replaced by a new Socialist structure of the German community?”65 And when Mussolini was arrested by the King of Italy, Goebbels’ indignation knew no limits. He declared on October 31, 1943 in the Sports Palace in Berlin, that something of this sort would never happen in the Third Reich because: “. . . first of all, the Reich is headed by the Führer and not by a traitor like Badoglio. And secondly, because we have kings only in fairy tales and musical comedies. Germany is a republic Führer-state.” Hitler, as a matter of fact, always loathed the King of Italy, and after his last official visit to Rome before the war he said openly, “Now I would have become most certainly an antimonarchist, if I had not always been one.”66

The leftist character of Nazism was also apparent in its attitude towards Christianity. For a variety of reasons National Socialism was bound to take an anti-Christian attitude. Not only did it reject the Jewish background of Christianity and of the Old Testament, but Christian ethics—compassion, charity, mercy—militated against the Nazi creed no less than against Marxism. Nazism was moreover a materialism deeply pledged to Darwinistic and Spencerian ideas.67 It preached biological determination but entered a (not truly realized) conflict between the belief in an automatic survival of the fittest and the urge to intervene with legislation, to eradicate, to sterilize, eliminate, castrate, exile, and exterminate “undesirables.” The bellicose attitude of the Nazis made them blind to the fact that in a war the best, not the cowards, are killed off. Ares ouk agathôn feidetai aliá kakôn, “Mars does not spare the good but the bad.”68 And one of the most criminal aspects of Nazi racism was the handling of the Russian and Ukrainian people by its party minions. The German troops were first greeted as liberators and Russia could be had on a platter. But then the party moved in and the Russians were treated as slaves, the Ukrainians never were given self-government,69 and the disappointed and disgusted masses started to resist. Evil prejudices and a false doctrine destroyed a unique opportunity.

Yet the Nazis were slow in showing their cards, which explains why, at the beginning of their rule, many wellmeaning, naive people willingly collaborated with them. Even the plans to amalgamate the Churches forcibly emerged only slowly and foundered when it became evident that a sizable majority of upright Lutherans and Calvinists resisted “Nazification.” “Mercy killings” of the incurably insane got under way only at the beginning of the war, and immediately aroused protests from the Catholic bishops. As time went on and the population was occupied more and more by the war in its critical stage, by the food problem, by the losses at the front and the increasing air attacks, the Nazis became bolder. A circular letter, violently anti-Christian like the one issued by Martin Bormann, the deputy leader, early in 1942, would have been unthinkable a few years earlier—and this in spite of a rather frank forerunner, Alfred Rosenberg’s Mythus des Zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts.70 Bormann’s massive attack was entirely in keeping with scientism and materialism and could have emanated from a Soviet propagandist or from certain American professors. Plans were made for a total crushing of Christianity to be carried out after a victory which, fortunately, never came—the crushing was left to the Communist competitors in the Eastern two-thirds of Europe.

The fundamentally leftist and identitarian character of National Socialism can certainly not be questioned. The Marxists tried to prove that Nazism was “financed by the rich” merely to browbeat organized labor, an interesting theory which implies that political persuasions (and therefore elections) are a mere matter of cash: the bigger the propaganda, the more posters and newspaper ads, the more certain the victory at the polls. This, however, would be the most powerful argument against parliamentary democracy because in the light of this theory the man in the street is either a venal little swine or a mere echo. Yet, as Gustav Stolper has demonstrated,71 the Nazis were quite capable of financing themselves with the millions coming from their membership dues. The contributions of industrialists and bankers (some of them “non-Aryan”) had the same character as the sums shamefacedly paid to gangsters by shopkeepers who want to play safe because they cannot trust the police.

The economic order under the Nazis, indeed, was Socialistic, also from an economic point of view, because in a totalitarian state the factory owner or banker no longer automatically holds genuine property. He is merely a steward, the tolerated representative of an almighty government which can expropriate him at the drop of a hat. Not by accident was the Nazi flag the red banner. In early 1933 many Nazi flags were only adapted Communist and Socialist flags, the center having been cut out and replaced by white cloth or a so-called “mirror” sewn on. (When it rained the red naturally shone through.) In the concentration camps the Communists, who were very well organized, murdered their rightist opponents under the very noses of their jailers, who did not much care.72 As a matter of fact, Nazi-Soviet collaboration was planned at an early date. The Reventlow-Radek negotiations are well documented, and this joint Red-Brown hatred Poland, the bête noire of leftists all over the world.73 In this respect Stalin, Hitler, Lloyd George, and the American left formed an unholy alliance.

Who were the real Nazis? Professor Theodor Abel found among the leading Nazis (i.e., those known to the broad public, the historians, etc.) 7 percent who belonged to the upper layer, 7 percent peasants, 35 percent workers and 51 percent who could be described as middle class. In the party the largest single occupational group were the elementary school teachers, a group well known in Europe for its inclination toward authoritarianism and its intellectual curiosity sadly combined with a lack of scholarly preparation. (European elementary schools usually last only four or five years and in the past the teachers almost never had the equivalent of a college education.) Yet what about the army? Since army officers (or even soldiers) were not permitted to belong to the National Socialist party, the Nazi fanatics with military ambitions were almost all in the Waffen-SS which paralleled the Wehrmacht, the regular army, where there were very few high-ranking officers with Nazi convictions. (Men such as Keitel—“la Keitel”—and Jodl were exceptions.) This situation changed radically following the last attempted assassination of Hitler (there had been several), and after the end of July 1944 members of the Nazi Party and Gottgläubige (non-Christian theists) could be members of the officers’ corps; the “German Greeting” (Heil Hitler!) was also made obligatory. Thus the army was Nazified at that late date. Before these events even the draftees had to return their membership cards to the party and show a deposit slip that they had done so. Membership could be resumed only after military service. Until July 1944 the higher officer’s corps, including the General Staff, consisted about half noblemen and half commoners, and most of the latter were also anti-Nazi. (Names such as Beck, Halder, Rommel, Speidel immediately come to mind.) Yet besides the Jews, the groups most hated by the Nazi leaders were royalty and the nobility, and it was primarily the nobility within the armed forces which, as a group, really struck—in July 1944. The retribution was terrible. Hitler had the hanging of the conspirators filmed—including the suspension of their naked corpses on butchers’ hooks. Here again we encounter the sadistic drives of a genuine, Sade-inspired leftism.

Still we must bear in mind that the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis during the war in occupied areas and inside their country were perfectly “logical.” Leftists all over the world have tried to portray these horrors as typical deeds of reactionaries, of “right extremists,” of “counterrevolutionaries,” if not of “conservatives.” Another school tried to nail these chilling crimes to the German character. But here must be borne in mind that nobody in Europe tried to explain the delirious crimes perpetrated by the French Revolutionaries with the darker and seamier sides of the French character. Few people ascribed the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War to the “Spanish soul,” or the frightfulness of the Russian Revolution to “Eternal Russia.” The shock which the Nazi horrors produced was so great, because they came after two hundred years of Roussellian propaganda about the goodness of human nature and also because the Germans were literate, clean, technologically progressive, hard working, “modern,” sober, “orderly,” and so forth. Yet about human nature we get more concrete and more pertinent information from the Bible than from statistics dealing with secondary education, the frequency of bathtubs or the mileage of superhighways. Nevertheless, it is true that there is something in the German mind which prompts it to make final logical deductions from specific premises. Baron Hügel has written about this German propensity in a memorable article74 and Ernst Jünger said rightly that Germany, due to its central location (central in a metaphysical rather than geographical sense) is the place where one expects the appearance of a symptomatic figure such as Hitler,75—the man, as another author said, who put the Prussian sword in the service of Austrian folly. Ernst Jünger described this situation in other words when he wrote in his diary (Strahlungen II, October 6, 1941): “After that long period of fasting the German was led by Kniébolo [Hitler] up a mountain and the might of the world was shown to him. Not much prompting was needed that he worshiped his tempter.”

We have dealt with the horrors of Nazism or communism in Russia because these are, as we perhaps rashly assume, sufficiently well known. The world, however, is indebted to Germany in a terrifying way, because she demonstrated to everyone what the ultimate conclusions of negative and destructive ideas really are. Ideas which in London or New York are repeated as seemingly harmless abstractions have been shown up by the Germans in all their blood-chilling finality. In this sense Nazi Germany has become the Gorgonian Mirror in which a decadent West could study its own features. This is a characteristic shared by the whole spine of Europe which stretches from the Straits of Gibraltar via Spain, France, Germany, and Poland into Russia, where people tend to be pèlerins de l’absolu, “pilgrims of the absolute,” to use the phrase of Leon Bloy. While the rest of the world has only too often been engaged in small talk, the “absolutists” have transformed abstraction and theories into concrete realities. Have not American and British so-called Liberals repeatedly voiced ideas and notions leading directly in ice-cold logic to the gas chambers and cremation stoves of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Majdanek, to the icy graves of Siberia, the gloomy forest of Katyn, the orgiastic cemeteries of Red Spain? The case of Germany, however, should be a memento to the English-speaking world because there was a nation to be admired in so many ways, the heart of the Holy Roman Empire, the cradle of the Reformation, a land of Dichter und Denker, (poets and thinkers), degenerating into a land of Richter und Henker, (judges and hangmen).

By divorcing themselves from religion and wilfully turning their backs on great traditions, the Germans made of their katabasis an inferno which, historically speaking, they will never be able to forget . . . a fall worse than that of France, the “Oldest Daughter of the Church,” and equaling that of “Holy Russia.” All the visions of Sade, all the nightmarish dreams of the French Revolution Surrealists76 had become true, all the consequences of American pragmatism and universal positivism were drawn, all the “eugenic” blueprints of biological visionaries were carried out and illimited materialism found its fulfillment. Man was conceived as a mere beast that could be crushed like an ant or a bedbug, and all the laws on the Tables of Sinai, all the words of Christ were eradicated.

Just before the outbreak of World War II in Europe a leftist author under the pen name Nicolas Calas wrote a book of essays entitled Foyers d’ incendie,77 making a passionate appeal for “more sadism among leftists.” He claimed that, like the early Christians, they succumb too often to a masochist urge for suffering. “Fascism, therefore, must be fought with Freudian as well as Marxist weapons. And, like fascism, communism will have to call on sadistic and masochistic love. Masochist tendencies must be excited in the Fascist masses, and sadistic tendencies among the Communists. . . . But we must never forget that the dominant of the revolutionary complex is to be the sadistic. This means that hatred of the father should always be stronger than love of the brother.”78

“A real reeducation of the younger generation should take place for this purpose. Let the child learn to do more than admire the beauty of flowers and the intelligence of bees: let us show him the pleasure of killing animals. Let him go hunting, let him visit the butcher’s, let him enjoy suffering.”79

But that is not enough. “The bourgeoisie know what they’re about when they give their children soldiers and cannons for toys. Let us do the same, let us give our own children armies of leaden workers, barricades, buses, factories, and an enemy army as horrible as the heart desires, made up of capitalists, preachers, and cops. For the child, play should be a game of massacres. Our holidays need no longer be those of the bourgeois calendar, for the chocolate Easter eggs let us substitute chocolate guillotines.

“Excite desires! Monogamy does not exist yet. After the butcher, the prostitute! It is up to her to give the child a taste, and not a disgust for love. . . .”

And here a final word about the ideally educated child. “When he wants to read, put in his hands the works best calculated to excite his desire. Show him succulent dreams, the syrups of passions, the wines of blood, the burning kisses, the moist looks, all that bread of life, that whole body of love.”80

Only a poor French degenerate hiding under an obvious pseudonym? Who is the man who said, “I do not think that man at present is a predatory animal. It seems to me that every society rests on the death of men”? It was a Justice of the United States.81

Nicolas Calas exhorted leftists with the words, “Comrades, be cruel!” Hitler followed this call. Not in vain have we been told by Charles Fourier, grandfather of socialism, in his Théorie de l’unité universelle:

“The office of the butcher is held in high esteem in Harmony.”