Hitler and his God

“Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin”

Where was Dietrich Eckart during the Hitler Putsch? John Toland spots him at the Bürgerbräukeller, just before the marchers left there, and near the Isartor, watching them pass by singing the “Storm Song” which he had written for the SA. 219 He was already gravely ill in those days and must have followed the column of the putschists in a car. He was arrested after the failed coup and imprisoned, first in Stadelheim prison, then with Hitler and the others in fortress at Landsberg.

An important document in the Hitler saga is the unfinished “dialogue” Eckart wrote a few months earlier, in April and May 1923: Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin: A Dialogue between Adolf Hitler and me. This text is not the rendering of a real dialogue but of a fictitious one, no doubt based – and herein lays its special value – on conversations which must have taken place between the two men. If these pages were pure invention, Eckart would never have given them to others to read and they would never have been published after his death, certainly not by the Nazi Hoheneichen-Verlag.

The German historian Ernst Nolte was the first to draw attention to this document, in 1961, and Margarete Plewnia’s Eckart biography, in which the dialogue is comprehensively analysed and commented upon, appeared in 1970, but only recent authors begin to read it in earnest. Hitler’s first steps on the political stage have been insufficiently studied. Not only is this astonishing gap in the Hitler biographies the cause of a lack of understanding, or of a wrong understanding of Hitler’s mind, it allows also full play for the most extravagant imaginations.

Plewnia, from her point of view, shows how Hitler’s anti-Semitism took shape “between the autumn of 1919 and the summer of 1920” under Eckart’s influence, which can be traced in Hitler’s speeches, preserved in the files of the Munich police. The effect of Eckart’s brand of “metaphysical anti-Semitism”, mentioned in a previous chapter, is incontestable, e.g. in the following passages: “We do not want to be emotional anti-Semites who seek to create the atmosphere of the pogrom: we are driven by the relentless resoluteness to expose the evil at its base and to eradicate it root and branch. To attain our goal any means will be justified, even if we have to make a pact with the devil.” (6.4.1920) And: “We have to eliminate the poison [i.e. the Jewish spirit] outside and inside us when we want to become cured again.” (17.4.1920)

Hitler’s anti-Judaic ejaculations had become increasingly violent from the time of his propaganda pep-talks at Lechfeld and the Gemlich letter onwards. They will climax (for the time being) in a speech on 13 August 1920, less than a year after his entry in the Harrer and Drexler circle. The title of this speech was explicit: “Why are we Anti-Semites?” and Hitler gave a recital of his complete anti-Jewish repertoire. In the police protocol of the speech is noted the usual crescendo in the response of the audience: “laughter – applause – bravo and applause – tumultuous applause – long tumultuous applause …” Documents like this show, beyond any doubt, the preparedness of the German soil for the seeds sown by Hitler and his likes.

It is reasonable to assume that Eckart intended the “dialogue” as a lasting testimony to his mentorship of Hitler. One possible reason for putting everything down on paper was that his health was declining rapidly. Another reason may have been that Hitler remained no longer satisfied with Eckart’s “metaphysical anti-Semitism” and turned to more tangible justifications of his mission. True, Eckart was a blazing Jew-baiter, preaching a purification of the German race from the Jewish Evil and the advent of a Führer who would lead the Germans toward their glorious future; but his way of reasoning and his philosophical categories were too abstract for Hitler’s demagoguery. How could Hitler preach the elimination and extermination of the Jews while saying that their evil, the poison of a demonic race, was there in all of humanity, including every German in his audience? Darwinism, as interpreted by Chamberlain and Rosenberg, was much more straightforward and handier. Anti-Semitism, after all, is a matter of gut feelings, and any combination of simplistic arguments will do to justify it, even if very loosely stitched together. The assent of the audience was obtained by the power of speech, not by the reasoning behind it.

Still, so many terms (poison, parasite, bacillus) and concepts Hitler was using, and will keep using in the future, are there in the Eckart text, written in the form of a dialogue among equals not to offend the recently proclaimed Führer if he were to read it. There is the schizoid interpretation of the biblical narration about the Jews in Egypt: the Jews were not kept in bondage by the Egyptians, on the contrary the Jews did their usual subversive work in trying to overthrow the throne of the pharaoh. There is the assertion that it was the Christians, followers of Paul, the Jew of Tarsus, who undermined the Roman Empire and caused its downfall. (To Hitler – as to Wagner, Chamberlain, Rosenberg and most of the Nazis – Christ was not a Jew but an Aryan and an anti-Semite.) There is the fundamental Jewishness of the Catholic Church, for is their holy book not Jewish literature, and are many of their feasts and ceremonies not of Jewish origin? – this in direct contradiction to the anti-Semitism for which Christianity and the Catholic Church was primarily responsible. And there are of course the theories of the Jew Karl Marx, propagated to dominate the world and as such the inspiration of Lenin and his Judeo-Bolshevism.

One finds such convictions, which he had from Eckart, scattered through Hitler’s conversations and nightly musings also in later years. And he will proclaim on several occasions that Nazism has to wage a fight against Bolshevism on the left and against Capitalism on the right because both are strategic instruments of the attempt by the Jews to bring the world under their control. Eckart worded this as follows in his Dialogue: “Against left and right stands our front. This is the cause of the strange fact that we are attacked from two sides which fight against each other. The Reds shout at us that we are reactionaries, and the reactionaries that we are Bolshevists. From both sides it is the Jew who blows the storm clouds toward us.” 220

When one reads such an accumulation of crankiness, one wonders how millions of people, belonging to the most cultured nation in the world (at least in their own eyes) could accept them as plain truth. And there was much more of the same alloy, e.g. the world ice theory, the theory of the hollow earth, and the official proclamation of an Aryan science in opposition to the Jewish science of Einstein and similar scatterbrains – not to forget the “scientific” murderous race theories.

The political, social and cultural fantasies of Hitler and his Nazis were bizarre, but the underlying fact, the base of the völkisch movement to which Nazism belonged, was a very important phenomenon on the European cultural scene: it was the refusal to accept the ideals of the Enlightenment, born of Reason, and the stubborn, instinctive resistance against them. It is in these ideals as a coherent whole that we find the target of the dark and spiteful aggression of all that was supposed to constitute the true, fundamental human values born from “the German soul” in an embellished past. Modernism, equated with enlightenment and progress, was to the fundamentalist völkisch reactionaries synonymous with materialism, capitalism, liberalism, internationalism, democracy, socialism, communism, Bolshevism, etc. Take any of these terms in the writings, speeches and conversations of Hitler and you will find them associated with “the Jew”. The words “Jew” and “Jewish” could be used for anything Hitler and his people found unpleasant, inferior, unjust, inimical or criminal. Philosophically, however, they always related to the changing world in progress, of which the Enlightenment was the cause and justification. Nazism as a völkisch movement was part of the general European reaction, born out of disorientation, insecurity and fear, against the coming into being of a new world.

How does one become an anti-Semite? The concrete reason or occasion in Eckart’s case is unknown, as it is in the case of many others. There was a poison in the air, a germ in the mental nourishment of that time which became virulent when the personal constitution proved receptive because of certain surroundings or a traumatic experience. The German mind – and not only the German – had become poisoned by what John Weiss calls an “ideology of death”. And Eckart had read all the books. In his Dialogue there are references to Otto Hauser, Werner Sombart, Henry Ford, Gougenot des Mousseaux, Theodor Fritsch, Friedrich Delitzsch, etc., plus a number of periodicals, and Eckart had chewed all that for Hitler to digest.

There was also a new factor which played an important role since 1917: the Russian Revolution. Lenin, Trotsky, Bolshevism, a Republic of Councils, Bela Kun, Spartacists, red flags, the hammer and sickle, new leftist terms and slogans: all of that became part of the popular awareness, and all of it was felt as threatening. The presence of these elements in Hitler’s thought structures is the surest indication that they were formed in Munich, directly by Eckart through his writings and his frequent contacts with Hitler, indirectly by the Thule Society and its related circles animated by Sebottendorff. What remains to be explained is the power which “the man from nowhere” commanded to pull off the impossible, and which made that “there was no viable alternative to Hitler”. 221