Hitler and his God

Back to Nature

Nature was the temple of God where, in ever varying beauty, harmony and grandeur, one could communicate with Him and contact one’s inmost soul. Nature was timeless and allowed one to transcend time. In nature everything was the visible expression of the life-forces; there one could come to rest from the frenzy and artificiality of the oppressive human conglomerates which were the modern towns and cities. Romanticism had been one big hymn to nature, conciliating man with suffering and death, and it was to nature that “the new romanticism”, refusing to yield to modern life, turned back. “Many of our generation sought such contact with nature”, wrote Albert Speer, the son of a stiffly conventional upper middle-class family. “This was not merely a romantic protest against the narrowness of middle-class life. We were also escaping from the demands of a world growing increasingly complicated. We felt that the world around us was out of balance. In nature, in the mountains and the river valleys, the harmony of creation could still be felt. The more virginal the mountains, the lovelier the river valleys, the more they drew us.” 479

Joachim Fest, the biographer of Speer as well as of Hitler, comments: “His love of nature was even more formative, and probably also more typical [than his love for the great romanticist literature]. The mountain tours that he made with his future wife in those years and paddling in a canoe were, he later said, a form of ‘bliss’. This euphoria was inspired by the simple life in mountain huts and boat houses, the hours of silent harmony and being deeply moved by nature. The world was far away. Up on those heights there were unforgettable moments when he experienced pity for the ‘wretched people’ below and cloud banks who were subjected to the narrowness, the noise and the bustle of the city. This was the side of ‘the war youth generation’ that shunned reality … This rejection of reality was not an individual impulse but a widespread mood of the day.” 480

The nineteenth century had been the century of the bourgeoisie. The ideals of the American and French revolutions had never gained the spontaneous adherence of the religious creed they had replaced. The result was a dry, conventional morality, of which the norms were constantly breeched by the vital urges in the human being. (It was on such soil that Freud’s perceptions arose.) The youth, fresh before the future, suffered from the hollowness behind the factitious façade of the bourgeois world, in Germany more than anywhere else, because there the militaristic hierarchization of society lend a touch of the grotesque to bourgeois everyday life.

“The beginning of the youth organizations is still idyllic and partly carried by the real utopian and emancipationist spirit”, writes Sünner. “They profit from the general crisis in which the family, the school and the Church are involved. The family ties form no longer a close unity which would be able to provide a seeking youth with aims and values. The younger ones long for enthusiasm, tests of courage and overwhelming experiences with which neither pastor nor teacher can provide them. It is in this no man’s land that student unions and other groups appear in which the restless and experience-hungry youth come together. The Wandervogel is founded in 1904; its groupings will become the main reception centre of all such expectations and longings, and they will expand fast. ‘Trekking should teach us to see and to envision’ is one of the points in their programme. The intense common experience of the landscape, culture, usages and traditions of the land of one’s fathers is at the centre of their excursions. They build tent camps and fires, prepare their meals together and sleep under the starry sky. Old-German feasts are brought to life again.” 481

Fest sees the youth movement as a specifically German tradition, despairing of modernity. “Filled with terror the youth identified the dictates of the hour with the crisis into which their familiar world had plunged, and combined their reaction with the ‘world role’ they assigned to their country, although it had only just been united and attained power. That role consisted in the specifically German mission to preserve ‘culture’ against the destructive assault of ‘civilization’. The country’s defeat and the disgrace inflicted upon it merely intensified the pain of what was happening, lending it universal significance.” 482 Around the year 1900 this way of experiencing the world had already produced “a vanguard of associations and groupings, the most notable of which were the life-reforming groups which sprang up everywhere”. Vegetarianism became fashionable, as did naturopathy and the propagation of all kinds of “natural” diets. Nudism was practiced with abandon, and so were astrology and the other symbolical arts, stimulated by the teachings of theosophy, ariosophy and anthroposophy. Spiritism will become widely practiced after the Great War, when the countless bereaved ones sought communication across the material confines with their fallen husbands, brothers and sons. This was “New Age” avant la lettre, but as varied as in the nineteen-sixties and taken up with no less conviction.

“They rebelled against the bourgeois world and all that went with it: the neuroses and the high-flown banality, the hypocrisy and the sham, the operatic German myths and the indoor palm. They wanted to replace them with simplicity, love of nature, dedication and the values they engendered. These categories in themselves reveal how far removed from reality those who subscribed to these new beginnings were. None of the rebellious demands they made of their world contained a feasible model of society. It often seemed that they did not so much intend to change the state of affairs they all deplored as just to vent their anger at it … ‘Swayed by youthful passion and mindless’, is how Speer characterized himself, looking back on those years. But the description applied to his generation as a whole, and any ‘bliss’, no matter how deeply felt, merely amounted to empty self-satisfaction.” 483

“There were already many youth organizations of this kind before the First World War”, Bronder too points out, “protesting against the satisfaction and the bourgeois mentality of their world, the end of which was greeted with jubilation in 1914. From the ‘German Youth’ originated the movement of the Wandervogel, many of whose best elements would later join National-Socialism … Their ideology was based on the “blood and soil” motto, hate against all civilization and liberalism, humanism and pacifism, social democracy and Bolshevism, as well as against Judaism.” After 1918 the youth movement became dominated by the “völkisch-anti-Semitic-pan-German” thought, says Bronder; the social-democratic Weimar Republic did no longer seem worthwhile to be defended, and they wanted to replace its humanitarian stance with values like communal life, egalitarianism, authority, obedience, and the “leadership principle”, the notorious Führerprinzip, which will become the backbone of Nazism.

Most members of the völkisch youth associations enlisted as volunteers for the front and created “the Langemarck Myth” of unconditional obedience to any command and the sacrifice of one’s life for the nation. (Langemarck is the name of a small place in Flanders were a bloody First World War battle was fought.) “Individuality was replaced by the collective, the separate group integrated into the ‘tribe’, common maintenance chores were called ‘service’, and all activities went accompanied by shouted orders, drum rolls, fanfares and militant soldiers’ and Landsknechts’ songs. Life in the Hitler Youth, the German Army and the SS presented their recruits with very little they had not already known in one or other of their youth organizations.” 484

Whose soul was linked more closely with “the essence of nature” than that of the son of the soil, the countryman, the farmer, the peasant? To the völkisch eye the peasant was the original and true German, guardian of the knowledge of yore, in permanent contact and exchange with the forces of nature. The praise of the peasant is sung in many pages of Oswald Spengler’s Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), a book that like few others mirrors the aspirations and desperations of the period in Germany which occupies us. The peasant, by living and working the way he does, “becomes a plant himself”, writes Spengler. He has his roots in the soil he tills. “The soul of the human discovers a soul in the landscape; a new tie of existence with the earth, a new way of feeling manifests itself. Inimical nature turns into a friend. The earth becomes Mother Earth. Between sowing and growing, harvest and death a deeply felt relation is revealed. A new devotion addresses itself in a chtonic cult to the fertile soil, which grows together with the human being.” 485

Spengler’s book, written during the war and published in 1918, made a general impact on the masses of young people who wanted to find their bearings after the horrors of Langemarck, Paschendaele, Ypres and Le chemin des dames – together with those who had wanted to join their brothers in sacrifice on the battlefield, but who had been too young and were now without prospects in a time of unemployment and overall turmoil. To go and live as farmers on the land was the dream of many of the toughest members of the Free Corps. They went fighting in Poland and the Baltic lands not only to push the Bolsheviks back but also to find there a plot of land for them to till and spend the rest of their days in peace. This will remain an important factor in the German ambition of conquering the fertile lands of Russia, and Hitler will describe in detail the fortified farms he intended to build there for his warrior-farmers, lords over a population of Slavonic slaves.

Heinrich Himmler was one of those who kept the dream of the völkisch farmer alive, after having tried in vain to join the Army at the end of the war and to march under the flag of one of the Free Corps. Himmler became a member of the Artamanen,² a völkisch league founded in 1924 by young men and women whose ideal it was to live on the land and till it with all their dedication and strength in the manner they supposed their forefathers had done in olden times. “This association was already known to me through their publications at the time I was still in prison, and I have given it the best of myself. It was an association of young, völkisch-conscious people, boys and girls, from the youth movements of all nationalist-minded political parties, who wanted to return to a natural way of living on the land, far from the unhealthy, confusing and superficial life in the towns, especially in the cities. They despised alcohol and nicotine – in fact all that is harmful to a healthy development of the spirit and the body. Guided by these principles, they wanted a complete return to the soil from which their forbears had come, to the fount of life of the German people, to the healthy way of living of the peasant.” 486

The man who wrote these words, shortly before being executed by hanging, was Rudolf Höss, the former commandant of Auschwitz. Many prominent Nazis and SS-chiefs had passed through the völkisch and disciplined life of the Artamanen, for instance Walter Darré, leading SS-ideologist and Hitler’s Minister of Agriculture, and Martin Bormann, after Hess’ flight to Great Britain as Hitler’s private secretary one of the most powerful and dangerous men in the Third Reich. Bormann’s wife Gerda, a fanatical Nazi, wrote: “He [her husband] divided all the people in three groups: peasants, rooted in the soil, nomads roaming through the steppes, and parasites living from trade and commerce. The representatives of the peasants, rooted in the soil, are we [the Germans], the Japanese and the Chinese. Only the people who are rooted in the soil have real culture; they know that they have to protect the heritage of their forefathers, and that their labour will bear fruit for their children and grandchildren. Their whole being turns around the concepts of seed and harvest.” 487 It may be assumed that people talking like this were admiring the countryman from the comfortable position of not being one – of not being duty-bound year-in year-out to labour on the soil and care for the animals on the farm, day after unforgiving day from early morning till late at night.

If the country was good, the city was bad; a harvest was nature’s gift from the land, a city was man’s product from the mind; “culture” was related to the land and healthy, “civilization” was an artefact of man’s brain, rootless, and symptomatic of decline. This dualism is again abundantly expounded by Spengler in his utterly negative book. (For Spengler, as for Gobineau, humanity had no purpose.) “The colossus of stone that is the metropolis stands at the end of the lifetime of every culture”, he wrote. “This mass of stone contains the exalted symbolism of the death of what finally ‘has been’.” Cities are mind, nothing but mind, without contact with the soil, with the life-giving womb of nature. “Man becomes ‘mind’, free and similar to the nomads, but more narrow and cold. ‘Mind’ is the specific urban form of the apprehending awareness. All art, all religion and science become gradually mental, foreign to the land, incomprehensible to the earth-bound peasants. Civilization is the onset of the menopause of a people. The age-old roots of being are withered in the stone masses of their cities. The free mind looks like a flame which rises into the air in splendour and slowly evaporates.” 488

Once more we meet with a thinker who condemns thinking as a symptom of decadence and would like to dispense with it, in order to return to a peasant-like existence free from the burden of reflection. Texts like this one by Spengler bear witness to the neurosis the German people were suffering from. A nation which was technologically the most advanced in the world was expressing doubt as to modernity and progress, and dreaming of going back to embellished values of a past which had never existed. But the powers responsible for and profiting from Germany’s first economic Wirtschaftswunder will not allow its industry and economy to stop in their tracks; on the contrary, they will bundle their strength to make their nation ever more prosperous and domineering over the rest of the world. But they will put their superior position at the service of what was essentially the völkisch vision, taking pride in their difference from a materialistic, hollow modernism, and feeling convinced that they stood above everybody else as a race, a culture and a nation.