Hitler and his God

“Germany, Awake!”

Dietrich Eckart’s pithy exhortation, embroidered on all Party banners, was an important component of Mein Kampf, which was after all the announcement and the programme of the man who intended to lead a resurrected Germany towards its glorious future. Yet the real meaning of this exhortation was not its literal meaning; having fought a war, mourned its dead, being shaken by revolts and obliged to fight for its daily sustenance, Germany had had no time to fall asleep. What the Eckart-Hitler slogan meant was that Germany must regain its place and power as the foremost nation of the world, that it must rebuild all means necessary to occupy its rightful place on the globe after having been humbled so shamefully by other nations. Pre-war slogans were still in use whenever national feelings welled up: Heute Deutschland, morgen die ganze Welt! (today Germany, tomorrow the whole world); Den Deutschen gehört die Welt! (the world belongs to the Germans); Deutschland über alles in der Welt! (Germany above all else in the world); and everybody still knew by heart songs like Die Wacht am Rhein (the guard on the Rhine). There were numerous nationalist and völkisch associations in the country and all published their literature, of which these songs and slogans contained the essential message in a nutshell.

At this phase of our story colonialism was at its zenith, the white race thought of itself as the finest fruit on the tree of evolution and its culture was the acme of the human mind. The Germanic peoples were convinced that they occupied the highest rung on the hierarchical ladder within the white race, and if they were not too sure of what “Germanic” meant they called themselves “Nordics”, and if they were uncertain about that they were “Aryans”. But all three terms were problematic. The word “Germanic” was of Latin origin, germanus, and may originally have meant nothing more than an amalgam of barbarians beyond the Rhine. This amalgam was complex, for even Hans Günther, the leading Nazi racial scientist, had to concede that the Germanic people consisted of Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean elements. To these one should add the considerable part of the German population that was of Slavonic origin; for the original Prussians were a Slavonic tribe, and Germanic people had intermingled with Poles, Balts, Russians and many others during the centuries of their struggles and conquests on their eastern borders.

Some German racists, playing it safe, called themselves “Nordics” and included the Scandinavian and Icelandic peoples among the elect. Otherwise how to explain that the largest part of the “authentic” Germanic customs and traditions, so much admired by völkisch nostalgia and rendered visually famous by the costumes of the Wagnerian heroes and heroines, were in fact those of the Vikings, who were Scandinavians? And how to explain that most artefacts of the earliest “Germanic” times, many inscribed with runes, were found in Sweden?

Most problematical, however, was the term “Aryans”, for “originally the Aryan question was a linguistic question. It appeared in 1776 when William Jones was struck by the resemblance between several languages: Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, German, etc. These languages were then brought together into one family, and their resemblance was accounted for by the fact that all of them derived from the same original language, which in 1813 was baptized ‘Indo-European’ by Thomas Young … This original language was supposed to have been the language of a people which was also called ‘Indo-European’, and which was supposed to have lived in former times somewhere between central Asia and eastern Europe. (There were theories about many different locations, from India to northern Scandinavia.) This means that a language was made [illicitly] into a people, and that this people was made [illicitly] into a race.” 281 The Aryan race existed only in the imagination of some scholarly racists, who released their pure-bred chimera into the fields of the imagination of a presumptuous Germany.
“Every manifestation of human culture, every product of art, science and technical skill which we see before our eyes today, is almost exclusively the product of the Aryan creative power”, wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf. “This very fact justifies the conclusion that it was the Aryan alone who founded a superior type of humanity; therefore he represents the archetype of what we understand by the term MAN. He is the Prometheus of mankind, from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has at all times flashed forth, always kindling anew that fire which, in the form of knowledge, illuminated the dark night by drawing aside the veil of mystery and thus showing man how to rise and become master over all the other beings on the earth. Should he be forced to disappear, a profound darkness will descend on the earth; within a few thousand years human culture will vanish and the world will become a desert.

“If we divide mankind into three categories – founders of culture, bearers of culture and destroyers of culture – the Aryan alone can be considered as representing the first category … It is the Aryan who has furnished the great building-stones and plans for the edifices of all human progress; only the way in which these plans have been executed is to be attributed to the qualities of each individual race.” 282 The Aryan was “the standard-bearer of human progress”. “It will be a greater honour to be a citizen of this Reich, even as a street-sweeper, than to be the king of a foreign state.” 283 For the Aryan is “the highest image of the Lord,” 284 and the Aryans are “a race destined to become master of all the other peoples and which will have at its disposal the means and resources of the whole world.” 285 And Hitler said later in a speech to his youth at Ordensburg Sonthofen: “We want to take our Volk to the very first rang! Whether they like us, is of no interest to us, if only they respect us! Whether they hate us, is of no importance to us, if only they fear us!” 286 “They” were the others, the non-German humans on the levels below the Aryans, but also the Aryan Germans who misunderstood or withstood their Führer.

“Although much may be very questionable, the results of science cannot alter one important fact: that the ‘meaning of world history’, irradiating from the North, has spread over the whole earth, carried by a blue-eyed, blonde race, which in several cultural waves determined the cultural outlook of the world”, averred Alfred Rosenberg, the official theorist of Nazi ideology, in his Myth of the Twentieth Century. The Nordic-racist Atlantis myth of the people with the blue eyes, blonde hair, pinkish skin, dolichocephalic and tall “reached a public of millions through Blavatsky for the Theosophists, Steiner for the Anthroposophists, List and Lanz for the Ariosophists, and Rosenberg and Wirth [founder of the SS-Ahnenerbe] for the National-Socialists”. 287

How was the Germanic-Nordic-Aryan race held together and how did it propagate itself? Through the blood. “What makes a people or, to be more correct, a race is not language but blood.” 288 In the veins of a pure race runs pure blood, or rather if pure blood runs in the veins of a race, this race is pure; the blood is the carrier of its life. For the racists the blood became a mystic concept, surviving from animistic times when humanity had no other idea of the way in which characteristics could be inherited. In matters of race, and therefore of basic existence, all depended on the purity or impurity of the blood. The existence of a people, of a Volk, could be degraded by mixing its pure blood with the putrid blood of degenerated races. This was one of the fundamental ideas of the völkisch movement, propagated in the literature of the Germanenorden and the Thule Society. “Keep your blood pure!” was one of their slogans, and Arthur Dinter’s novel The Sin against the Blood was a best-seller in Germany during the inter-war period. As sexual contact was the only way of mixing blood with blood, one finds here the nexus with the widespread sexual and even pornographic character assassination of those intentional spoilers of the Aryan blood: the Jews.

“If nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger”, one reads in Mein Kampf, “she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in such a case all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile. History furnishes us with innumerable instances that prove this law. It shows, with a startling clarity, that whenever Aryans have mingled their blood with that of an inferior race the result has been a downfall of the people who were the standard-bearers of a higher culture … In short, the results of miscegenation are always the following: (a) the level of the superior race becomes lowered; (b) physical and mental degeneration sets in, thus leading slowly but steadily towards a progressive drying up of the vital sap. The act which brings about such a development is a sin against the Eternal Creator. And as a sin this act will be avenged.” 289

“Racism and Darwinism are entering into a symbiosis in Hitler’s Mein Kampf”, writes Zentner. 290 The link is obvious: pure blood means a healthy, strong, superior race; mixing of the blood results in degeneration. The fittest, the purest of blood survive. But here racism drew an un-Darwinian conclusion: the fittest-purest also have the right, conferred by Nature or “the Lord”, to dominate the others. Of course, their whole line of reasoning accorded with the inclusion of the human race into the animal kingdom, something which Linnaeus was the first to do and a theory which, if consequently applied, swept away in one go all humanistic, religious and spiritual values.

“The ideology which bases the state on the racial idea must finally succeed in bringing about a nobler era, in which men will no longer pay exclusive attention to breeding and rearing pedigree dogs and horses and cats, but will endeavour to improve the breed of the human race itself,” teaches Hitler in Mein Kampf. According to this “veterinarian ideology”, as one commentator calls it, “what is stronger must dominate and not mate with what is weaker, which would mean the sacrifice of its own higher nature”. This is “a fundamental law – one may call it an iron law of nature”. “The movement ought to educate its adherents to the principle that struggle must not be considered a necessary evil but something to be desired in itself.” 291 “War is what is most natural, most common”, said Hitler to Hermann Rauschning. “War is always. There is no beginning, there is no peace at the end. War is life.” 292 “Nature knows no political borders. She puts the living beings on this planet and looks on at the free play of forces. Who has the strongest courage and industry obtains then, as her dearest child, the right of the lordship over all beings.” 293 One Nazi leader summed it up: “National Socialism is applied biology.” 294