Hitler and his God

Hitler’s Racism

Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “It would be futile to attempt to discuss the question as to what race or races were the original standard-bearers of human culture and were thereby the real founders of all that we understand by the word ‘humanity’. It is much simpler to deal with this question in so far as it relates to the present time. Here the answer is simple and clear. 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.” 451 For, as we know, the Aryan was “the Prometheus of mankind”. All the same, this is an intriguing statement by Hitler, the supreme racist: if one could not discuss what race or races were “the original standard-bearers of human culture”, how could he maintain that those standard bearers were the Aryans? Was this then nothing to him but a blunt political assertion, a pseudo-scientific fancy without any foundation?

“I know of course as well as all those pedantic intellectuals that in the scientific sense race does not exist”, said Hitler one day to Hermann Rauschning. “But being a politician, I need a concept which allows me to dissolve the order which until now was resting on historical interconnections, and to enforce a totally new, anti-historical order, providing it with an intellectual support … I have to free the world from its historical past. The nations are the manifest forces of our history. Therefore I have to re-melt the nations into a higher order if I want to remove the chaotic residues of a historical past which has become absurd, and to this end the concept of race is useful for me. It dissolves what is old and creates the possibility of new connections. It was with the concept of the nation that France took its great revolution across its borders. It is with the concept of race that National Socialism will conduct its revolution, which will lead to a new order in the world.” 452 Here again Hitler sees race as an abstraction, a “concept”, without any necessary foundation in reality, but to be used as a tool to build a new world-order out of the remnants of the nations. Who were those “pedantic intellectuals” whom Rauschning did not name? They may have been the linguists who pointed out the wrongful reasoning which extended the discovery of a common Aryan language to the factual existence of an Aryan race.

Hitler was, unbeknownst even to his closest paladins, cherishing a dream of world domination, of which the concrete foundations had to be ensured during the few years of his life. To this end he had been sent among the German people, unconsciously prepared by their history as the Volk which was to serve as his instrument. As he was placed in this situation, he had to accept, to a certain extent, the völkisch myths which the Germans had adopted as their past and the justification of their existence. But Hitler, although he himself was dreaming great dreams, understood perfectly well how unreal and in a way childish such legends and myths were. He could not bluntly reject them, for his own movement considered itself fundamentally a völkisch movement, and if he bared his inmost thoughts, he would have been taken for a madman. Moreover, an individual cannot all by himself create an new myth and turn it into a movement within the short lifetime of a human being.

This explains why Hitler was so ambivalent in his appreciation of völkisch matters, which on the one hand he had to encourage while on the other he often ridiculed them in private and even condemned some of their implications publicly. “It was not without good reason that, when we laid down a clearly defined programme for the new movement, we excluded the word ‘völkisch’ from it. The concept underlying the term ‘völkisch’ cannot serve as the base of the movement, because it is too indefinite in its application”, he wrote politely in Mein Kampf. “The word ‘völkisch’ does not express any clearly specified idea.” Then, less cautiously: “Not less dangerous are those who run about as semi-folklorists formulating fantastic schemes [at that time there were many such men in Germany, and Hitler was one of them], which are mostly based on nothing else than a fixed idea which in itself might be right but which, because it is an isolated notion, is of no use whatsoever for the formation of a great homogeneous fighting association and could by no means serve as the basis of its organization.” 453 For this was what Hitler wanted to forge the German people into: a well-organized, well-equipped and fully brainwashed weapon for the execution of his vision.

The völkisch leader in National-Socialist Germany was Heinrich Himmler. Himmler saw his SS, the exemplars and at the same time guardians of the Volk, as an embodiment of the völkisch ideals of his youth and hoped to found one day an SS state based on these ideals. Hitler knew exactly how to manipulate Himmler, yet he often made him the butt of his sarcasm, for instance in a conversation with Speer. “Why do we call the whole world’s attention to the fact that we have no past? It isn’t enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings when our forefathers were still living in mud huts; now Himmler is starting to dig up these villages of mud huts and enthusing over every potsherd and stone axe he finds. All we prove by that is that we were still throwing stone hatchets and crouching around open fires when Greece and Rome had already reached the highest stage of culture. We really should do our best to keep quiet about this past. Instead Himmler makes a great fuss about it all. The present-day Romans must be having a laugh at these relegations.” 454 Laugh they did, the Romans, Mussolini loudest of them all.

Hitler knew perfectly well that the knowledge of the “pedantic intellectuals” about the German tribes and races of the past did not go back much farther than one or two centuries before what is now called “the common era”, and that incessant contacts and interminglings with other races had taken place before and after that time. The largest territory of such racial blendings was the ever shifting border region with the Slavs, where the Teutonic Knights had spearheaded the Germanic colonization and Christianization.

The Prussians, practically identical with the modern German nation, were originally a Slavonic tribe, the Pruss. “Roaming along the coast of the Baltic Sea amidst furious slaughters, the Teutonic Knights seized Prussian lands and virtually exterminated the indigenous people. Building castles, forts and towns, they converted the remaining natives to Christianity, reduced them to serfdom and made themselves lords of the land.” 455 “Half of the German Reich was established on what originally had been Slavonic territory”, writes Christian von Krockow, “and what finally became the German nation arose from a mixture of Germanic and Slavonic tribes”. 456 In a conversation with Rauschning, Hitler talked about the danger for the German people of containing a too high percentage of Slavonic elements. This would alter the character of the people, he said. “We have already too much Slavonic blood in our veins. Doesn’t it strike you how many people in important positions in the Germany of today are having a Slavonic name?” 457

The appearance of Hitler himself, as of most Germans, hardly agreed with the Aryan norm. Many tribes from the West and the East had traversed the Austrian Waldviertel, the region where he came from, and one of his grandfathers remains unknown. He was acidly mocked in the pre-1933 leftist press for his “emphatically non-Aryan appearance”, especially his fleshy nose. 458 The inanity of the Aryan myth in the Third Reich was glaringly demonstrated by the physical appearance of its top leaders: Göring was fat and a drug addict; Goebbels was stunted, big-headed and club-footed; Himmler had a mongoloid face; Hess had bushy dark eyebrows and buckteeth; Bormann was stocky and round-skulled. In Hitler himself one will look in vain for the blond hair, tall and forceful stature, and the longish skull, although some say he had blue eyes. There were countless jokes abroad about the non-Aryan features of the Nazi leadership, and many jokers ended up in a concentration camp.

In practice Volk was identified with Rasse, and Hitler will direct his propaganda towards a definition of both to fit within the framework of his intentions without bothering the völkisch romantics too much. “A race is what we have to become – at least consciously” is one of his pithiest formulations, reported by Henry Picker in the *Table Talk.* 459 We note again that Hitler omits to take the past of the glorious Aryan-Nordic-Germanic race into account. What, then, were they according to Hitler, the contemporary Germans, pride and fulcrum of humanity? The answer may surprise: they were an “adulterated” people. “Our völkisch stock has been so much adulterated by the mixture of alien elements that, in its fight for power, Jewry can make use of the more or less ‘cosmopolitan’ circles which exist among us, inspired by the pacifist and international ideologies.” Hitler, as we know, had notions of Gobineau: “The adulteration of the blood and racial deterioration conditioned thereby are the only causes that account for the decline of ancient civilizations; for it is never by war that peoples are ruined, but by the loss of their powers of resistance, which are exclusively a characteristic of pure racial blood … The Aryan neglected to maintain his own racial stock unmixed and therewith lost the right to live in the paradise which he himself had created.”

The Germans, just like any other race in the world, had neglected to keep their blood pure. “Unfortunately the German national being is not based on a uniform racial type. The process of welding the original elements together has not gone so far as to warrant us in saying that a new race has emerged. On the contrary, the poison which has invaded the body of the Volk, especially since the Thirty Years’ War, has destroyed the uniform constitution not only of our blood but also of our national soul. The open frontiers of our native country, the association with non-German foreign elements in the territories that lie along our frontiers, and especially the strong influx of the blood into the interior of the Reich itself, have prevented any complete assimilation of those various elements, because the influx has continued steadily. Out of this melting-pot a new race arose. The heterogeneous continue to exist side by side … Beside the Nordic type we find the East-European type, beside the Eastern there is the Dinaric, the Western type intermingling with both, and hybrids among them all.”

In due course this situation would lead, as it would for the peoples all over the world, to a complete mongrelization, and ultimately to the extinction of humanity as pictured by Gobineau. Yet the Germans – who would have expected otherwise? – were an exception, which Hitler explains as follows: “Though on the one hand it may be a drawback that our racial elements were not welded together, so that no homogeneous body of the Volk could develop, on the other hand it was fortunate that, since at least a part of our best blood was thus kept pure, its racial quality was not debased.” He explains nowhere how this miracle happened. “A benefit which results from the fact that there was no all-round assimilation is to be seen in that even now we have large groups of German Nordic people within our national organization, and that their blood has not been mixed with the blood of other races.” 460 These sentences would become the tenets of the Nazi state and are no more than a fictitious justification of a pseudo-historical process, concocted to demonstrate the primacy of the Germans as a race, a Volk, a nation.

But if the possibility to regenerate the German race still existed, how much time would this take? In Mein Kampf Hitler paints a rather grim picture of such an eventual regeneration, which was the main goal of the National-Socialist movement, as all its other targets depended upon it. “Look at the ravages from which our people are suffering daily as a result of being contaminated with Jewish blood. Bear in mind the fact that this poisonous contamination can be eliminated from the national body only after centuries, or perhaps never [!] Think further of how the process of racial decomposition is debasing and in some cases even destroying the fundamental Aryan qualities of our German people, so that our cultural creativeness as a nation is gradually becoming impotent and we are running the danger, at least in our great cities, of falling to the level where Southern Italy is today. This pestilential adulteration of the blood, of which hundreds of thousands of our people take no account, is systematically practised by the Jew today.”

Hitler also wrote the following, which may be taken as a summing up of his basic ideas on the subject of race: “Therewith we may lay down the following principle as valid: every racial mixture leads of necessity sooner or later to the downfall of the mongrel product, provided the higher racial stratum of this cross-breed has not retained within itself some sort of racial homogeneity. The danger to the mongrels [which is what the Germans had become at the time these words were written] ceases only when this higher stratum, which has maintained certain standards of homogeneous breeding, ceases to be true to its pedigree and intermingles with mongrels. This principle is the source of a slow but constant regeneration whereby all the poison which has invaded the racial body is gradually eliminated so long as there still remains a fundamental stock of pure racial elements which resists further cross-breeding … There is only one right that is sacrosanct and this right is at the same time a most sacred duty. This right and obligation are: that the purity of the racial blood should be guarded, so that the best types of human beings may be preserved, and that thus we should render possible a more noble development of humanity itself … The State should consecrate [matrimony] as an institution which is called upon to produce creatures made in the likeness of the Lord and not create monsters that are a mixture of man and ape.” 461

“Even if it were proved that there never has existed an Aryan race in the past, we want that there be one in the future. This is what matters for men of action.” 462 These are not words of Adolf Hitler but of Houston Chamberlain, and they illustrate once more how certain force lines in the thought of the German people converge in Hitler. However abstract, dry or dull the above quotations from Mein Kampf may appear: it is these words which would be elaborated into the racial doctrine of the Nazi state, formulated in the directives of the SS, justify the teachings and experiments of the Nazis’ racial pseudo-science, and in the end result in the piles of corpses bulldozed into mass graves at Buchenwald and so many other places of unprecedented horror. Reasonably speaking Hitler’s convictions were balderdash, but they were made effective by a people’s neurotic pride, and lethal by its submission to a “genius” who proved to be an archangel of Death.