Hitler and his God

Houston Chamberlain and Rosenberg

“It is probably no exaggeration to say, as I have heard more than one follower of Hitler say, that Chamberlain was the spiritual founder of the Third Reich.” 438 With whatever proviso one quotes these words of the experienced journalist who was William Shirer, it is a fact that the influence of the Englishman Houston Chamberlain penetrated profoundly into Hitler Germany, where his Foundations of the Nineteenth Century was “a tremendous success”.

“By 1900 there were several rival racial theories,” writes George Mosse. “Most of them had grown with the refinement of the anthropological criteria and had incorporated elements of the ‘survival of the fittest’ axiom of Social Darwinism. They were correspondingly more optimistic about the direction history was taking. Instead of concentrating on the inevitability of racial contamination and the consequent decline of civilization, these theorists looked toward a developing race that would save Western culture and stamp it with its own uniqueness. Of these, Houston Stewart Chamberlain was the most important. Unlike Gobineau, Chamberlain analyzed the totality of civilization, not because he was concerned with its decline, but, on the contrary, because he yearned for a better, more beautiful racial future.”

As we have seen before, Chamberlain was a qualified biologist “fascinated by plant pathology, and he might well have become a scientist had it not been for his health. Instead, he fused his scientific training with a mystical love of nature and a Social Darwinism which was so typical of much radical thought. This transformation from scientist to radical racist was catalyzed by his encounter with the work of Richard Wagner … He provided the New Romanticism [völkisch and therefore racist] with a scientific base and thus lent the tone and the goals of science to his racial theories.” 439 This is a risky undertaking in which usually either science or mysticism loses out, or both.

According to Chamberlain, “on the one hand there was a German science which determined, with the utmost accuracy, that which existed empirically; on the other hand, there was a German religion which bestowed infinite vistas upon the German soul. In terms of importance the religion took priority, since it alone could fathom the true essence of things. As it also functioned in the realm of ideas, it served to keep science within its proper limits, and at the same time appropriated empirical evidence in support of itself. Through their inner selves, which were enveloped in a mystical Germanism, Chamberlain asserted, men could determine the meaning of the external world.” 440 This will lead straight to the official proclamation by the Nazis, Nobel Prize winners among them, of a true “German science” as opposed to a false “Jewish science” of which the world-famous Albert Einstein was the epitome. That this kind of irrationalities, or plain idiocies, did not prevent German engineers to produce an astonishing range of new inventions shows that the engineer does not need an ideological support of his work. It was “German science”, though, which accepted the “world ice theory” and the “hollow earth theory” – and the theory of the superiority of the Aryan race. Nazism was fanatical irrationalism, armed by technological engineering.

Houston Chamberlain was an admirer of Gobineau although, contrary to the Frenchman’s pessimism, he proposed a gloriously positive outlook. Like many of his contemporaries, including Nietzsche, Chamberlain had a problem with the descent of the human from the primates, which did not prevent him to accept Social Darwinism, “so typical of much radical thought”. Radicals do tend to deem themselves superior to others. Chamberlain found convincing support for his view in animal breeding. A race was in fact a soul seeking to incarnate, to acquire a material form dependent on the blood. Therefore a race could be improved, purified, even created by breeding from “a favourable mixture of blood”. 441 In this way Chamberlain evaded the thorny problem of the origin of the existing races, also of the Aryan or Teutonic ones. A race was to be made by breeding – a view which Hitler will adopt.

Chamberlain was a visionary, no doubt, a kind of rational racial mystic. (Shirer tells us that, when writing the Foundations, “Chamberlain was again possessed by one of his ‘demons’.”) Races are spiritual entities which have to be served by the individuals whose material bodies are the cells of the organism that is the race, and who are all of one blood. From this followed that the racial egoism could not accept the general humanitarian and internationalist ideals of the Enlightenment. What also followed was that the organism of the own race was sacred, a direct expression of the will of God, or the Universal Spirit, or Nature. It should therefore be kept in a state of purity, synonymous with purity of the blood, and must repel or expel anything foreign to it and contaminating it.

“In regard to race, Chamberlain used a scientific base to prove its absolute nature, its totality, which encompassed both internal and external appearances. At the end of the nineteenth century, he wrote, no scholar could ignore the fact that skull measurements and the external appearance of the brain decisively influenced the conceptions of aesthetic form that lay within. After all, went the analogy, a building was characterized by the materials used in its construction; they provided the outward form and expressed the ‘ideas’ inherent in the erection.” And Mosse goes on to tell how one Dr Burger-Villingen constructed an instrument, called a plastometer, with which he measured the “geography of the human face and thus the cast of a person’s soul”. Of course, it was the Germans who were the noblest race existing on earth, the saviours of the world and the creators and carriers of the supreme Western culture.

“The Aryan was distinguished by a physical form that typified the Germanic ideal of beauty; the Jew was his very opposite. Symbolically, only to be too deeply believed later on, the two represented the polarization of God and the devil … God was, so to speak, embodied in the German race, and the devil in the Jewish race. These were held to be the two pure races – and between flourished the ‘chaos of peoples’, bastard mixtures of various races.” 442 And Shirer writes: “Chamberlain claimed that the Teutons and the Jews were the only pure races left in the West.” Was he, then, not an anti-Semite? “The Jews, he says, are not inferior to the Teuton, merely different. They have their own grandeur; they realize the sacred duty of man to guard the purity of the race. And yet as he proceeds to analyze the Jews, he slips into the very vulgar anti-Semitism which he condemns in others and which leads, in the end, to the obscenities of Julius Streicher’s caricatures of the Jews in Hitler’s time. Indeed a good deal of the ‘philosophical’ basis of Nazi anti-Semitism stems from this chapter [on the Jews in the Foundations].” 443 It seems to have been impossible to be a German racist without being an anti-Semite.

But what about Jesus Christ? Although they had been “badly baptized”, the Germans considered themselves a Christian nation, in a way the only real Christians, as proclaimed to the world by Martin Luther. Was Christ, the founder of their faith, not a Jew? Chamberlain contended that he was not. At the time Christ walked upon the earth Galilee was inhabited by non-Jewish tribes. Christ had “a large proportion of non-Semitic blood”, and: “Whoever claimed that Jesus was a Jew was either being stupid or telling a lie.” 444 This irrefutable argument was duly repeated after Chamberlain by countless German Christians, while he himself was only repeating what Richard Wagner had said on the subject, who in his turn may have referred to Schopenhauer and Fichte. The Germans were not only the purest Aryans, they were the foremost in every field, also the religious, and “much more devout Christians than other peoples”.

Hitler too believed that Christ was not a Jew. “Christ was an Aryan”, he said in one of his monologues, “but Paul abused his teaching to mobilize the dark forces and to organize a proto-Bolshevism”. 445 How far speculations of this sort can be spun out is shown by the following quotation from The German Christ, a book by Max Brewer, published in 1907. “It is known that precisely around the time of the birth of Christ large armies from Schleswig-Holstein had appeared in northern Italy, whose blood, despite their defeat, will not have mixed with the Romans completely. Since the time of Caesar, the exchange of blood between Rome and the lands along the lower Rhine had become very intense. It is said that Pilate’s bodyguard consisted of soldiers from Lower Germany. In any case, shortly before the birth of Christ German blood had again been instrumental in Galilee. Everything Christ says about reincarnation seems to be inspired by the bodily reincarnated blood.” 446

Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946), the German Balt who had fled the conflagration of the Russian Revolution and been introduced to Hitler by Dietrich Eckart, was another admirer of Houston Chamberlain. The pale, zealotic intellectual Rosenberg fitted badly in the rude and crude entourage of Adolf Hitler, was loved by none and hated by many, and was in later years ridiculed even by the Führer himself. During the early years in Munich, however, his influence on Hitler was more important than is now generally appreciated. “Hitler was deeply under the spell of Rosenberg”, testifies Ernst Hanfstängl, who calls him “Hitler’s most dangerous mentor”. 447 It was the resentful Rosenberg who sharpened Hitler’s ideas about the lowly character of the Russians, who first drew his attention towards the wide-open Russian spaces available for the taker, and who systematically equated Bolshevism with Judaism.

It was also Rosenberg, a member of the Thule Society, who acted as the most anti-Semitic promoter of The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, as well in his contributions to the Völkische Beobachter, the Nazi newspaper of which he succeeded Eckart as the editor in 1923, as in his other prolific writings, e.g. The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion and Jewish World Politics. Though Hitler spoke sometimes scathingly of him in private, officially he remained regardful of Rosenberg’s intellectual contribution to the formation of National Socialism, and called him “a man of whose integrity of personal intention I am absolutely convinced”. 448 He appointed Rosenberg general supervisor of National-Socialist ideology for the whole Reich and would later nominate him Governor-General of the Eastern Occupied Territories.

Rosenberg’s prestige rested, besides on his supposed closeness to Hitler, mainly upon a thick book he published in 1930, The Myth of the Twentieth Century. The title evokes at once Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, and Rosenberg did indeed intend his book to be a sequel. “Rosenberg sold his seven hundred page Myth in editions of hundreds of thousands”, writes Albert Speer. “The public regarded the book as the standard text for party ideology, but Hitler in those teatime conversations bluntly called it ‘stuff nobody can understand’, written by ‘a narrow-minded Baltic German who thinks in horribly complicated terms’.” Indeed, Rosenberg was still tougher reading fare than Mein Kampf, and Hitler “expressed wonderment that such a book could ever have attained such sales”. 449

Rosenberg’s fundamental theses were not all that difficult to understand and resemble closely many of the ideas we have met with above. He too saw the development of humanity and the history of the world as the history of races in conflict, even on a wider scale than drawn by his predecessors. For him too the Aryan-Nordic-Germanic people were superior to all others and deserving of the others’ homage and submission. Northern Europe was, again, “the cradle of humanity”, “the centre of creation” and the origin of all cultures worth the name, an origin which went back to Atlantis.

The Nordic race had spread over the world in three phases or waves. – One wonders once more at the “Eurocentric” vision of these instructors. – First there had been the Indo-Germans who, fanning out everywhere (no longer from India or the Near East, but from the north of Europe), had started the classical cultures; then there had been the migrations of the Germanic tribes, who laid the foundations of all European nations; thirdly, there was “the colonization of modern times”, intended to encompass the whole globe. 450

Race was sacred, the Nordic race that is, and a direct expression of the Creator; it should be made into a religion. The holy land was not Palestine, but Germany. Rosenberg bolstered the dualism of a world divided into Nordic people and Semites, more particularly Jews. As such, he deepened the “North-South divide”, all the same extending the south eastwards, for his hate of the Russia that had made him an expatriate never abated. The Nordics had been the masters of the world in former times and would become so again in the near future; their opponents were the Jews, the Christians and the Bolsheviks, three faces of the same enemy. For Christianity was the brainchild of the Jew Paul of Tarsus and had propagated a morality of compassion and love for one’s neighbour in order to weaken the nations and make them the Jews’ easy prey. And Bolshevism was preaching internationalism and universal brotherhood of the proletariat, which went straight against the competitive theory of the races. Were not Jews to be found in the vanguard of every socialist or communist revolution?

These racist themes have become increasingly familiar to us, but now they were part of the doctrine of National Socialism. From 1933 onwards they would be the official doctrine of the Nazi state, and it would be Hitler’s intention to implement them as soon and fully as possible. He would try to cement them during his lifetime into the foundations of a Reich that would last a thousand years.