Hitler and his God

Four-in-One

In the West, the Hindu religion is often mistakenly thought to be a superstitious idolatry of a pantheon of grotesque gods with eight arms, bulging eyes, a protruding tongue or an elephant trunk. Hinduism, however, is probably the oldest monotheism in the world. All Gods are aspects or cosmic powers of the One, which is the reason why above the main temple entrances one finds the glyph for OM, the sound which is the expression of the One and which is said to support the universe. But the human individual chooses his ishta devata, the God suited to his personal devotion, knowing full well that his God, like all the others, is an aspect of the One and represents it. Likewise one could say that each one of the four great Asuras represents the anti-One (which is also the One, as there is nothing else than That). The importance for our story lays in the fact that the Lord of Falsehood, who possessed Hitler, also represents Ignorance, Suffering and Death, and that these four aspects were therefore features of his personality.

Falsehood. One of Eckart and Hitler’s recurrent themes was Schopenhauer’s saying that the Jew was “the great master of the lie”. When browsing through Mein Kampf we have found that Hitler systematically applied the methods of the fictional Elders of Zion, in which he was thoroughly instructed by Alfred Rosenberg, the promulgator of The Protocols. In Mein Kampf Hitler professed openly that the lie was a primary means of political action: “In the big lie there is always a force of credibility, because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily, and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than to the small lie.” The German masses, in their “primitive simplicity”, proved him right.

Konrad Heiden said that Hitler was of “a phenomenal untruthfulness” and called him “a prophet of the Devil”. Günter Scholdt writes about his “shamelessness in his relation with truth”. Hitler defined his own mental processes accurately when he wrote that to the Jew lying was an art. “[The Jew] speaks to hide his thoughts, or at least to disguise them, and what he really means is not to be found in what he says but between the lines”. 1061 His own language and that of Joseph Goebbels, the mouthpiece picked by him with such amazing discernment, soon spun Naziland into a cocoon of total illusion. It was as if Germany, in a very short while, became isolated from democratic Europe under a crystalline dome, a world with its own magic which bewitched its citizens.

Christian Zentner calls Hitler “a downright Machiavellian who considered every means as justified when it was useful to realize his objectives”. 1062 “Hitler became Chancellor by declaring his readiness not only to be a strictly parliamentary Chancellor, but also to tolerate continuous interference on the part of Hindenburg and to submit to every conceivable restriction.” 1063 As to his external politics, he set in 1930 a Frenchmen’s mind at rest with the following words: “I think I can assure you that there is no one in Germany who will not with all his heart approve any honest attempt at an improvement of relations between Germany and France … I regard the maintenance of peace in Europe as especially desirable … The young Germany, that is led by me and that finds its expression in the National Socialist Movement, has only the most heartfelt desire for an understanding with other European nations.” 1064 His appeasing speeches during the 1930s gave him the name Friedenskanzler, Chancellor of Peace. He even omitted verbally attacking the Jews for months on end during the period of successive elections preceding his coming to power, when he felt that the moment and the general mood were not appropriate.

Ignorance. We have seen time and again in our story how vehemently Romanticism and the neo-romantic völkisch movement in Germany revolted against the intellect and its primacy during the Age of Reason, and that the political trends assembled under the common label of “Fascism” were in fact nationalist-romanticist expressions of this spirit. Politics has always functioned by appealing to the lower strata of the human character, which were the only ones the masses had access to. And the intellectuals have always been the target of the brute political force. Hitler, well informed by Eckart of the theories of Le Bon, Sorel, and similar-minded authors of that time, was aware of all this and wrote about it in Mein Kampf. It was his intention to go forward by setting the clock back and making humanity return to a pre-civilized, barbarian age; what in most cases had been a mainly mental exercise of certain hot-blooded reactionaries became with him one of the principal components of a world vision.

In the eyes of his German youth he wanted to see the look of the beast of prey, and upon their mind he wanted to imprint, in Burleigh’s words, “an unfeeling form of neo-barbarism”. As humanity’s master race they had to become heartless, daring and cruel (grausam), trained for battle and the exertion of pitiless authority over the peoples subjected by them. A tough body came first, a cultured mind was of secondary importance. Their example was Sparta.

They found their ideal embodied in a person like Reinhard Heydrich, right-hand man of Himmler and chief of the secret police, called by some “the Blond Bestie” and rumoured to be, before he was killed by Czech partisans, a candidate for Hitler’s succession. “To the world he personified not only the boundless brutality and deliberate inhumanity which formed the foundation of the National Socialist state and the SS-system, but also the terrible characteristics of those who executed the National Socialist regime and Hitler’s politics of annihilation. As long as Heydrich was alive he provided an idea of what Hitler’s regime and the National Socialist new order of Europe would have become if the Third Reich had been victorious.” 1065

The intellectual responsible for the implementation of Hitler’s anti-intellectualism was Dr Joseph Goebbels. “He gave a voice to the madness”, writes Guido Knopp, 1066 and Goebbels saw himself as “the smith of the German soul”. Ambassador François-Poncet found him “one of the most redoubtable Hitlerians” whose mind had “something perverse and diabolical … Nobody equals him in the art of skipping between truth and falsehood”. 1067 Speer too found him “horribly dangerous” and called him “Hitler’s cleverest and totally amoral disciple.” 1068 “The evil genius of the second half of Hitler’s career was Goebbels”, writes Hanfstängl. “I always likened this mocking, jealous, vicious, satanically gifted dwarf to the pilot-fish of the Hitler shark.” 1069 And Sri Aurobindo stated, in a talk with his disciples, that Goebbels, as well as Hitler, was “possessed by forces of the Life plane”. 1070

Hermann Göring, Marshall of the Reich, potentate and drug addict, was the other Nazi leader whom Sri Aurobindo mentioned by name as being possessed. Sri Aurobindo’s opinion is confirmed by an unexpected source, a letter to Göring from his first wife, Carin von Kantzow. “To be a morphinist means the same as committing suicide – every day a small part of your body and your soul is lost. You are possessed by an evil spirit and by an evil power, and your body is gradually destroyed by its illness. Save yourself and by so doing save me too.” 1071

In Nuremberg, Göring said to his counsel these revealing words: “If one really wants to bring about something new, good people won’t be of any use. They are self-satisfied, lethargic, they have their dear Lord God and their own big head – one can’t do anything with them … What one needs is experienced criminals … Those who have a lot on their slate will do what you tell them, they will listen when you give them a warning, for they know how things are done and how one gets at the spoils … Give me experienced thugs, but on condition that I have the power, the unconditional power over life and death … What do you people know about the possibilities of evil! You are always writing books and making up philosophies although all you know is something about virtue and the way it is acquired – while basically the world is moved by something altogether different!” 1072

Suffering. Falsehood and ignorance can be discussed, and death is a fact, but suffering remains intangible. Still, it is one of the elementary experiences of the human condition. The phenomenon of wilful, cruelly inflicted suffering was so typical of the Third Reich that “Auschwitz” is the association it automatically evokes today. The physical and psychological suffering, administered for the most part by “ordinary men” (the title of a much discussed book by Christopher Browning), was phenomenal. At its root we find, always, Adolf Hitler, the medium possessed by an asuric god. Most of the Germans did not know this. They glorified their Leader as the Messiah; he was pure and holy, he floated above all the filth. “If only the Führer knew”, was a common expression in Naziland. But the Führer knew very well, for in practically all cases – certainly the most nasty and deadly – it was he who gave the initial orders.

If one feels the inclination to know about the suffering, one has to read what people who went through it have recounted, although the actual facts, of course, defy communication. Only those who belonged to the death commandos in Auschwitz, or who survived naked under a pile of naked corpses somewhere in a Russian field, or who miraculously lived to tell a medical experiment of the SS doctors at Buchenwald, or who were torn out their fingernails by the Gestapo in Paris – only those did know. Yet, as all this is an aspect of the capabilities of the species to which one belongs, one could read books like Masters of Death by Richard Rhodes, The German Trauma by Gitta Sereny, Soldiers of Evil by Tom Segev, Orte des Grauens (places of horror) by Gerd Überschär, Annus Mundi by Wieslaw Kielar, Léon Poliakov’s Bréviaire de la haine (breviary of hate) or Anthony Beevors books on Stalingrad and the fall of Berlin, and many more.
The human ingenuity of finding ways to torture people is so horrifying. In Annus Mundi, a memoir of his five years in Auschwitz, Wieslaw Kielar tells about the Stehbunker, the “standing-up bunker”. This was a shed which contained four cemented cells, each with hardly enough space for four men to stand up pressed against each other; one had to wriggle oneself into the cells through a small, low door. Some prisoners were locked into these cells for an indeterminate time, which meant until their death, without receiving any food or drink and having to relieve themselves where they stood. As they grew weaker, they gradually sank towards the bottom, making the ordeal still more agonizing for their fellow-victims. Death took days to come.

Not less horrifying is the inhumanity of some citizens of a nation which prided itself on its superior human values. Martin Bormann, the eldest son of Hitler’s sinister factotum, was named after his father. When as a young boy one day he visited the house of Heinrich Himmler in the company of his little brothers and sisters, Hedwig Potthast, Himmler’s secretary and mistress, suddenly had an idea: she would show the children “something very interesting, a secret personal collection of her boss”. She took them up the stairs and opened the door to the attic. “There stood tables and chairs made from parts of human skeletons.” The seat of one chair was crafted from a human pelvis, the legs of another from human legs with the foot still attached. Then Miss Potthast showed the children a copy of Mein Kampf bound in the skin of a human back. Young Martin Bormann, who would become a catholic priest and missionary after the war, “still remembers how medically matter-of-fact she showed and explained everything.” 1073

Death. “All things will pass away, nothing will remain but death and the glory of deeds.” Walter Schellenberg writes in The Labyrinth that Hitler often quoted this sentence from the Hávamál, an old Nordic saga. 1074 To Hermann Rauschning, Hitler said already in the 1930s: “We shall not surrender, never! We may perish, perhaps, but we shall take a world with us. Muspilli. The world on fire!” 1075 A catastrophic end of the world was one of the main themes of the Nordic myths and a subconscious obsession with the Germanic-Nordic people. At the end of history there would inevitably be a Götterdämmerung, a twilight of the gods; or the world would die in the Fimbulwinter, when all would be covered with ice; or there would be the great world fire, Muspilli. “Muspilli” is also the theme of a ninth century poem about the apocalyptic battle between Elijah and the Antichrist. “At the time of the Muspilli no clansman can help another. When the whole world burns and fire and hot air devour everything, what remains then of the land for which one has fought together with one’s clansmen?” 1076

Hitler had “an abstract mania for destruction”, writes Fest, who also mentions his “craving for catastrophe”. Trevor-Roper calls him “the Angel of destruction” and elsewhere in his Last Days of Hitler “the God of destruction”. Kershaw ascribes to him “an Asiatic will for destruction”, and Spotts calls a whole section of his book on the Führer “the Artist of Destruction”. Destruction was not only the result of Hitler’s bid for world-supremacy, it was a primal Titanic inspiration and a conscious intention.

“According to an account by General Halder, [Hitler] opposed the opinions of his generals, insisting on the bombing and bombardment of Warsaw when the city was ready for surrender, and extracted aesthetic thrills from the images of destruction: the apocalyptically darkened sky, the walls pulverized by a million tons of bombs, people panic stricken and wiped out.” 1077 “I remember his reaction to the final scene of a newsreel on the bombing of Warsaw”, writes Speer. “Hitler was fascinated … His enthusiasm was unbounded. ‘That is what will happen to them!’ he cried out, carried away. ‘That is how we will annihilate them!’” 1078 The bombing of Rotterdam was totally unnecessary, but had to serve as an intimidating example of Teutonic terror.

London was bombed on 65 consecutive nights, in which 45 000 people died. “Have you looked at a map of London?” asked Hitler during one of his nightly gatherings with his inner circle. “It is so closely built up that one source of fire alone would suffice to destroy the whole city, as happened once before, two hundred years ago. Göring wants to use innumerable incendiary bombs of an altogether new type to create sources of fire in all parts of London. Fires everywhere. Thousands of them. Then they’ll unite in one gigantic area conflagration. Göring has the right idea. Brisant bombs don’t work, but it can be done with incendiary bombs – total destruction of London.” 1079

Goebbels followed the bombings of England with ecstatic comments in his diary from 18 October onwards. “Horrible reports from London. A metropolis disappears from the surface of the earth … The fires in the City must have been terrible … We attack Plymouth extensively and with considerable results … Reports from Coventry: it is pure hell … Again we attack Plymouth massively …” Hitler expected London to be “a rubble heap” in three months. “I have not the slightest sympathy for the British civilian populace”, he said. 1080

“When Yugoslavia attempted, as the result of an army officers’ coup, to withdraw from the Tripartite Pact into which she had been forced, Hitler was so beside himself with fury that he ordered the defenceless capital of the country to be bombed systematically from low altitude for three full days. That was ‘Operation Punishment’.” 1081 Belgrade “was razed to the ground. For three successive days and nights Göring’s bombers ranged over the little capital at rooftop level … killing 17 000 civilians, wounding many more and reducing the place to a mass of smouldering rubble.” 1082

It was Hitler’s “firm decision” that Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad and Kiew would be “razed to the ground”. As Goebbels wrote about Leningrad: “Once again the plough has to go over this city.” 1083 Henry Picker, one of the note takers of the Tischgespräche, comments: “On 8 September 1940, Leningrad was completely surrounded by German troops. Of the three million citizens only 400 000 could be evacuated. 632 000 starved to death.” 1084 “I can imagine that many are asking themselves in astonishment: how can the Führer destroy a city like Petersburg [i.e. Leningrad]!” Hitler mused. “Surely, I was educated in a very different way. I couldn’t see anybody suffer and I couldn’t harm anybody. But when I see that the species is endangered, then the ice-cold intellect takes over from the feelings. I see only the sacrifices which the future will claim if today no sacrifice is made.” 1085 Leningrad, though, would never be taken, and neither would Moscow or Stalingrad.

But Hitler saw further. “I never saw him so worked up as toward the end of the war, when in a kind of delirium he pictured for himself and for us the destruction of New York in a hurricane of fire”, writes Speer. “He described the skyscrapers being turned into gigantic burning torches, collapsing upon one another, the glow of the exploding city illuminating the sky.” 1086 Speer also writes that he was sure that Hitler would not have hesitated for a moment to employ atom bombs against England, and consequently against other targets later in the war. To Rauschning he had already said: “We will weaken the physical health of our enemy and we will break his power of moral resistance. I can imagine that the bacterial weapon has a future.” 1087

“Fire was Hitler’s proper element, though what he loved about fire was not its Promethean aspect but its destructive force. That he set the world afire and brought fire and sword upon the Continent – such statements may be mere imagery. But fire itself, literally and directly, always stirred a profound excitement in him. I recall”, continues Speer, “his ordering showings in the Chancellery of the films of burning London, of the sea of flames in Warsaw, of exploding convoys, and the rapture with which he watched those films.” 1088 Sri Aurobindo saw Hitler’s fascination with fire as “the real sign of the Asura” and expected from him more “works of devilish ingenuity”.

Henriette von Schirach had known Hitler from nearby for many years, for she was the daughter of Hitler’s photographer and the wife of the chief of the Hitler Youth. It was she who said on a certain occasion: “I believe that there are people who attract death, and Hitler was most certainly one of them.” 1089 It is a fact that several of the women who were closest to him tried to commit suicide. Mimi Reiter, in Berchtesgaden, tried to hang herself but was found by her brother before it was too late. Unity Valkyrie Mitford, the pompous British Nazi who had a crush on Hitler and whom he accepted in his Munich entourage, shot two bullets into her head but survived. Eva Braun tried to kill herself on two occasions, in November 1932 and May 1935; the first time she shot herself in the neck, the second time her sister found her before the sleeping tablets took their effect. Geli Raubal shot herself in the chest in September 1931.

Hitler himself suffered from “a continuous readiness for suicide”, as Sebastian Haffner puts it. His friend Kubizek recalls that he thought seriously of taking his own life during the period of his calf love for Stefanie in Linz. After the failed Beerhall Putsch, Hitler threatened to commit suicide at Hanfstängl’s house in the Bavarian countryside, but was prevented from doing so by Hanfstängl’s wife Helene. In Landsberg prison he went on hunger strike till he was talked out of it. He showed suicidal trends after the suicide of Geli Raubal. During the grave Party crisis in December 1932 when all seemed lost – although the tide would turn suddenly – Hitler is reported to have said: “If the Party falls apart, it won’t take me more than three minutes to shoot myself.” 1090 He said on another occasion: “It is so simple to do it! The pistol – nothing is simpler than that!” 1091 On 30 April 1945, it was for real. “The suicidal impulse that had accompanied him throughout his life and predisposed him to take maximum risks, was at last reaching its goal.” 1092

When reaching his end, however, he had turned Germany into an Empire of Death. The Allied bombings reduced most of the German cities and towns to rubble. The skeletal, ghostlike prisoners of the concentration camps in their worn-out striped uniforms were seen everywhere, for the network of primary and secondary camps, like cancer metastases, now covered the whole country and had eaten itself even into the agglomerations. Allied armies were fighting their way towards the heart of the country against a resistance which, in its efficient desperation, increased the devastation. Columns of inmates of the eastern concentration camps, emaciated and soiled, were herded from one place to another, leaving behind a track of corpses. Waves of fugitives, fleeing before the Russian armies, tried to reach the Americans, British and French in the West.

And there he stood, the dilapidated Führer, in his bunker thirty feet under the ground, with his stomach full of cake and seeking support against the wall: he was going to fight this last battle alone. He ordered the formation of a Fliegendes Standgericht, a fully empowered, flying court martial which would pass sentence on deserters, plunderers and defeatists; they were hung by the roadside with on their chests a board mentioning their crime. He ordered that all German citizens had to flee before the Allied armies, on foot if need be, in the freezing cold through the snow. And then he issued a series of orders, the first of which was, on 19 March, the “Nero Order”, saying that “all military, transportation, communications, industrial and food-supply facilities, as well as all other resources within the Reich which the enemy might use either immediately or in the foreseeable future for continuing the war, are to be destroyed”. 1093

Goebbels, “Hitler’s monkey”, held on 21 April, in the ruined building of the Propaganda Ministry, the last of his daily staff conferences. “In the freezing cold sit two dozen gentlemen before the Minister in an elegant dark suit. He asks them: ‘What can I do with a Volk whose men are no longer fighting, even when their women are being raped?’ The Germans deserve their lot, he snarls, they have chosen it themselves … He crosses his arms before his chest and lets his eyes go over those present: ‘I have forced nobody to be my collaborator, and neither have we forced the German people. It is the German people who have chosen us! Why have you worked together with me? Now your throat is going to be cut.’ In the doorway he turns around a last time and shouts: ‘But when we step down the whole earth will tremble!’” 1094 Muspilli …