Hitler and his God

A New Man

Hitler was convinced that humanity had the potential of transformation into a higher species. According to him “man was subject to an enormous change. In the course of the millennia a transformative process, literally speaking, took place in him.” Thus reports Rauschning, who asserts: “For Hitler was much more than a politician: he was the prophet of a new humanity.”

And Rauschning reports the following amazing words of Hitler: “Creation is not finished, at least not where the human being is concerned. The human being stands, from the biological point of view, clearly at a turning point. A new kind of human being becomes discernible … This causes the old human species, as we have known it until now, to become inexorably decadent … All the creative power will be concentrated in the new human species. Both species will quickly separate and develop into opposite directions. The one will sink below humanity, the other will rise above the present humanity. I might call the former ‘god-man’ and the latter ‘mass animal’ … Yes, man is something that has to be overcome. Nietzsche knew already something about this in his own way … Man becomes God, this is what it all means in simple words. Man is the becoming God …” And it was here that he spoke the oft-quoted words: “He who understands National Socialism only as a political movement knows practically nothing about it. It is more than a religion: it is the will to create a new humanity.” 808

We remember that in the decennia around 1900 the idea of “a new man” was put forward by thinkers of the most diverse tendencies. The longing for a more satisfactory human existence arose not only because of dissatisfaction with the present state of the human condition and a nostalgia for the past; man was now also seen by many as a transitory being which was carried forward by the tide of general change, and which would transform itself or be transformed by Nature or Providence into a higher being. Marxism had its theory of economic processes which would produce such a new being; Nietzsche’s “superman” became a cliché; Freud had his ideal of a being conscious of the hidden depths within itself and socially adapted or adjusted; Jung proposed techniques to identify with the archetypal godhead within; List and May foresaw the re-appearance of the Edelmensch; George taught the development of the more refined human capacities into a kind of amalgam of a super-poet and a Greek god. It is therefore no wonder that we find the expectation of “the new man” in the diary of young Goebbels. “Heil and Sieg to the new man! … We must descend into the deepest depths if we want to create the new man … I am in search of the new Reich and the new man …” 809

Ernst Jünger too had perceived a new man, for in one of his books about the First World War he wrote: “The spirit of the battle with modern war materiel and in the trenches, fought more ruthlessly, mercilessly and savagely than any other battle in the past, produced men whom the world had never seen before … These were new conquerors, natures of steel, adapted to battle in its most abhorrent form … When I observe them, the insight lights up in me: this is the new man.” 810 Jünger was personally admired and his writings were widely read. Especially his war reminiscences In Stahlgewittern (in storms of steel), the bible of the Free Corps, was a very popular book, read by those who had been battered in such storms and by those who regretted having been too young to be there.

When Hitler exclaims that the new man exists, he describes him with the characteristics of Jünger’s Frontschweine (literally “front pigs”, a popular German designation of the trench soldiers). “The new man lives among us. He is here!” Hitler shouted triumphantly. “Are you satisfied now? I tell you a secret: I have seen the new man, fearless and terrible. He startled me!” It is puzzling who this superman, “living among us”, may have been. Most probably it was Hitler’s image in the mirror, for “among us” there was no place for somebody superior to the Führer. John Toland writes that he “came to regard himself as a man of destiny, superior to any other human being whose genius and will power would conquer any enemy. Mesmerized by his political and military victories, he explained to one Nazi commander that he was the first and only mortal who had emerged into ‘a superhuman state’. His nature was ‘more godlike than human’, and therefore as the first of the new race of supermen he was ‘bound by none of the conventions of human morality ‘and stood above the law’.” 811

Freedom of all moral restrictions was an integral element of the gospel Hitler had come to preach among the Aryans. “We will free ourselves from all humane and scientific prejudices. Therefore I will have propagated, in the schools for Junkers which I will found and where all future members of our master state will be educated, the gospel of the free man – of the man who is master of life and death, of fear and superstition, and who has learned to control his body, muscles and nerves … yet who also stands above the temptations of the mind and of a so-called free science.” 812

Hitler’s new man would live according to and in harmony with his instincts; he would be a natural, “spontaneous” being. “One must feel diffident about one’s mind and conscience, and confident about one’s instincts. We must regain a new naivety … Providence has predestined me to be the greatest liberator of humanity.” 813 What he wanted humanity to be liberated from, as we have seen, was the predominance of the mind, the torture of its conscience and moral sense, and the need of individual freedom and personal independence. All indications are that the Hitlerian superman was a fully conditioned barbarian, integrated into a barbarian Volk which considered itself the lord and master of all other peoples.

“It is with the youth that I commence my great educational project”, said Hitler. “We, the older people, are used up. Yes, we are already old. We are tainted to the core. We don’t have any unflawed instincts anymore. We are cowardly, we are sentimental. We carry in our blood the burden of a humiliating past and the dull memory of servitude and a cringing existence. But my glorious young ones – is there a more beautiful youth in the whole world? Have a look at these young men and boys! What a material! With them I can build a new world!” 814

“My pedagogic principles are tough”, continued Hitler. “The weak parts must be hammered away. In my Ordensburgen a youth will grow up that will startle the world. I want a violent, authoritarian, fearless, pitiless youth … They must be able to stand pain. They may not have anything weak or soft. The free, magnificent beast of prey must again flash from their eyes. I want my youth strong and beautiful. I will have it built up through all kinds of physical exercises. I want an athletic youth – this first and foremost. In this way I eradicate the millennia of human domestication, and I obtain the pure, noble stuff of Nature. Thus will I be able to create the new.

“I want no intellectual education. With knowledge I spoil the youth. I would prefer to let them learn only what they spontaneously pick up in their games. But they have to learn self-mastery. They must learn to overcome the fear of death by means of the most severe tests. This is the stage of the heroic youth. From it will develop the stage of the free man, of the man who is the centre and norm of the world, of creative man, of the god-man. In my Ordensburgen there will be present the cultic example of the harmonious, self-mastering god-man, and he will prepare the youth for the next stage of virile maturity.” “But here Hitler cut himself short”, writes Rauschning, “as he could not elaborate on this. There were further stages of which he was not allowed to speak, not even he. Moreover, he thought he would communicate this as his secret when he was no more alive. Something very important was then to happen, a staggering revelation. To complete his mission, he was to have died a sacrificial death.” 815

“What Hitler had in mind”, writes Christian Zentner, “was the inner unity of the nation, welded together into a marching column, organized with an iron hand, prepared for any joyful sacrifice, and ready at any time to execute any order of the National Socialist leadership”. 816 “Hitler’s education of the youth was all-embracing”, remarks Henry Picker in his comments on the “table talk”, and he quotes Hitler’s words which should be included in any anthology of totalitarianism: “These boys join our organization at the age of ten and get a breath of fresh air for the first time, then, four years later, they move from the Jungvolk to the Hitler Youth and there we keep them for another four years. And then we are even less prepared to give them back into the hands of those who create class and status barriers, rather we take them immediately into the SA or into the SS … and so on. And if they are there for eighteen months or two years and have still not become real National Socialists, then they go into the Labour Service and are polished there for six or seven months, and all of this under a single symbol, the German spade. And if, after six or seven months, there are still remnants of class consciousness or pride in status, then the Wehrmacht will take over the further treatment for two years, and when they return after two or four years then, to prevent them from slipping back into old habits once again, we take them immediately into the SA, SS etc. and they will not be free again for the rest of their lives.” 817

“Hitler was prepared to write off the older generation, remarking in November 1933 that ‘when an opponent says “I will not come over to your side”, I calmly say “Your child belongs to us already … You will pass on, but your descendants stand already in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community”’ … A pluralistic youth culture was replaced by the monolithic Hitler Youth and League of German Maidens for fourteen- to eighteen-year-olds, and the German Young People and the League of Young Girls for the ten to fourteens.” 818 By the end of 1938 the Hitler Youth numbered more than seven and a half million; in March of the next year it became the only authorized youth organization in the Reich.

When a member had served his years in the Hitler Youth, he was in fact a fully trained military man. “While training in shooting and manoeuvre exercises was extended to all young men, the defence training of the Hitler Youth was expanded into special units. In 1938 the Naval Hitler Youth numbered 50 000, the Motorized Hitler Youth 90 000, the Air Force units 74 000, the model-airplane clubs of the German Youth 73 000, the Communications Hitler Youth 29 000.” 819 Their idols would be the fighter pilots Galland, Mölders and Marseille, and “the Desert Fox” Erwin Rommel, the most popular soldier of the regime. This completely nazified and fanaticized “second generation” – “I see the enthusiasm in their eyes when they speak of the Führer” – became awesome soldiers at the front, for instance as the tank division Hitler Jugend in Normandy and at Bastogne where, as diarist Goebbels notes, they performed “miracles of heroism”. These very young soldiers, many of them still looking like children, were also the ones who defended the last bridgeheads on the Havel, in the suburbs of Berlin, an episode retold in Bernhard Wicki’s film Die letzte Brücke (the last bridge). And a small unit of them lined up in front of a stooped and limping Hitler, when for the last time he came out of his bunker to decorate them for bravery. By that time the dream of Hitler’s Ordensburgen, the citadels of the Order, were bombarded into rubble and smoke.