Hitler and his God

“Great Master of the Lie”

If the Aryan was “the Prometheus of mankind, from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has at all times flashed forth”, his antagonist was the Jew. “The Jew offers the most striking contrast to the Aryan”, wrote Hitler. “There is probably no other people in the world who have so developed the instinct of self-preservation as the so-called ‘chosen’ people. The best proof of this statement is found in the simple fact that this race still exists. Where can another people be found that in the course of the last two thousand years has undergone so few changes in mental outlook and character as the Jewish people? … What an infinitely tenacious will-to-live, to preserve one’s kind, is demonstrated by that fact!” 320 In these words one may find why Fest writes that “[Hitler] admired the Jews … Basically, he regarded them as something like negative supermen.” 321

However, on the globe there was place for only one chosen people, the Aryans. And if there was a rare touch of admiration for the Jews in Hitler’s writings, it was covered over by the much stronger, all-pervading feeling of hate which Hitler entertained towards them from the very beginning of his political career till the time he dictated his political testament, a few hours before his death. “His expansionist dreams for Germany, his concern with the fate of Europe as well as issues of world domination, and his advocacy of a single leader principle all involved a global messianic touch. What is more, this universalist-missionary touch appeared not only two decades later but also before Mein Kampf was written … It was part and parcel of a persistent ideological stance in which, with great grandiosity, Hitler placed himself in charge of the global battle that carried with it ultimate stakes. This had been the focus of his anti-Semitic worldview.” (Jay Gonen 322)

It did not require a great effort from Hitler to find words for his hate of the Jews. Books like Theodor Fritsch’s Handbook of the Jewish Question provided him with an inexhaustible stockpile of anti-Semitic libel through the centuries, and Eckart, who had used much of it in his magazine In Plain German, was an admired teacher. If the Aryan was the highest being in a human form, the Jew was the lowest; in fact, he was not even subhuman and his human shape was only a deceptive appearance. “The Jew wriggles his way in among the body of the nations and bores them hollow from inside,” teaches Mein Kampf. He is “a parasite among nations”, “a parasite, a sponger who, like a pernicious bacillus, spreads over wider and wider areas”; “he is a real leech who clings to the body of his unfortunate victims and cannot be removed”. 323 The Jew is “a fission fungus of humanity”, “a bacillus spreading tuberculosis of the races”. He is a scavenger and “common prey attracts him”. As he is human only in appearance, “his activities are not hampered by moral considerations of any kind”; typical of him is “the general brutality and rapacity of his nature”. 324 This was the kind of language the Germans under the Nazi regime read daily in their newspapers and their youth imbibed in the schools. These were the notions imprinted on the minds of the Jew-exterminators.

“Jewry has always been a nation of a definite racial character and never differentiated merely by the fact of belonging to a certain religion.” 325 However confidently stated, this was flagrantly untrue, for the heterogeneous composition of the Jewish people was well established. Yet, to conceive of the Jewish people as a race was necessary for the coherence of Hitler’s theories about race and blood. “[The Jew] poisons the blood of others but preserves his own blood unadulterated … The religious instruction of the Jews is principally a collection of instructions for maintaining the Jewish blood pure.” 326 Therefore, what was at stake in the war between the Aryans and the Jews was nothing less than the life of humanity. “The Jew is the enemy of human existence. His ultimate aim is the breaking up of the nations, the intermingling and bastardization of the other peoples, the lowering of the level of the highest races and the lordship over the ensuing racial mixture through elimination of the peoples’ intellectuals and their replacement with members of his own people … If the Jew, with the help of his Marxist creed, is victorious over the peoples of this earth, then his crown will be the death-dance of the world; then this planet will again, just like millions of years ago, drift through the ether empty of human beings.” 327

“Though bubbling over with ‘enlightenment’, ‘progress’, ‘liberty’, ‘humanity’, etc. [the Jew’s] first care was to preserve the racial integrity of his own people. He occasionally bestowed one of his fellow [female] members on an influential Christian, but the racial stock of his male descendants was always preserved fundamentally unmixed. He poisons the blood of others but preserves his own blood unadulterated.” 328 It is typical of reactionaries and fundamentalists that they think they are the “decent”, “healthy” people, whereas “the others” are degenerate and immoral. It is also typical to find behind the decent people’s façade much filth and rottenness, a condition compared by a great Teacher to “whitewashed tombs”. Hitler’s obsession about “the black-haired Jewish youth”, who “lies in wait for hours on end, satanically glaring at and spying on the unsuspicious [Aryan] girl whom he plans to seduce, adulterating her blood”, 329 is one example of the perversion at the bottom of his sick racism. Equally so was his obsession with syphilis, and his support for Julius Streicher’s lewd anti-Semitism in the latter’s magazine Der Stürmer.

In the first quote of the previous paragraph Hitler makes once again a direct attack on the spirit and the ideals of the Enlightenment and on “progress”, the slogan of the 19th century. “To mask his tactics and fool his victims, [the Jew] talks of the equality of all men, no matter what their race or colour may be. And the simpletons begin to believe him … During this phase of his progress the chief goal of the Jew was the victory of democracy, or rather the supreme hegemony of the parliamentary system, which embodies his concept of democracy. This institution agrees best with his purposes; for thus the personal element is eliminated and in its place we have the dunder-headed majority, inefficiency and, last but by no means least, knavery.” 330 If one realizes the measure in which the social-democratic way of life has become the norm by which humanity is organizing its societies at present, and that many are even prepared to give their life for the freedom it provides, one may sense in which direction Hitler was working out his reactionary goals: social hierarchy (the “Führer principle”) instead of equality before the law, and ultimately an order in which the master race of the Germanic-Nordic-Aryans rules over the other races, the subjugated subhuman slaves. It may be noted in passing that “no Jew played a noteworthy role in the [French] Revolution nor in the philosophical revolution by which it was preceded”. 331 On the contrary, leading writers like Voltaire were outspoken anti-Semites.

In his stance against the Enlightenment and progress, Hitler was as völkisch as could be and an exponent of the times in Germany. But he extended this oppositional attitude to everything deemed by him to be anti-German, which in point of fact meant opposed to Hitler and his new ideology. In this he followed his propagandist principle: to focus the whole attention of a movement, a mass or a people on a single opponent – who for Hitler was the Jew. Thus he created a thought-world of total paranoia, which he succeeded in developing into armed paranoia. Hitler’s Germany, isolated in its “parallel world”, became one enormous and enormously destructive instrument of deathly delusion.

Hitler’s apocalyptic view of the final global war between the deceitful and the true “chosen people” was in certain of its aspects still indebted to Dietrich Eckart, who had conceived of a struggle between good (the Aryan side) and evil (the Jewish side) in humanity as a whole and in each of its members in particular. But Hitler had now recast these principles in the Darwinian-racist mould, stimulated, especially after Eckart’s death, by Alfred Rosenberg, who “wielded a tremendous influence on Hitler” (Hanfstängl). From this man, steeped in the virulent Russian anti-Semitism of the turn of the century (which resulted in a massive exodus of East-European Jews), Hitler borrowed the reasonings to turn his “intellectual anti-Semitism” into an “exterminationist” anti-Semitism. Of this Eckart most probably would never have dared to dream despite his hardened prejudices; it may have been the cause of his suspicion that his pupil began to suffer from a serious case of folie de grandeur. The conviction that the Jews did not belong to the body of the German Volk, that they were obnoxious to it and therefore had to be eliminated from it, or at least confined and controlled within it, was current in Germany and propagated in violent slogans. People who drew the extreme conclusions from such propaganda are nonetheless generally supposed to have been few in number. Still the general feeling about the Jews would certainly facilitate the execution of what Hitler had in mind and what the executioners of his armed paranoia would be proud to implement.