Hitler and his God

Socialists and Communists

Although “socialist” was a component of the name of the National-Socialist Party, the word meant to Hitler something quite different from its ordinary significance; it was included into the Party name mainly to attract the workers, as had been the initial purpose of the Thule Society when it set Anton Drexler and Karl Harrer on their way. A juggler with words and concepts, Hitler’s idea of “true democracy”, which he also called “German democracy”, was a hierarchical society organized according to the Führer principle – which was of course no democracy at all, but rather the opposite. Likewise, “socialism” did not mean to him the rise of the fourth estate in its struggle against the bourgeois society for a just distribution of the common weal, but a functional integration into the body of the Volk or nation, cancelling out any notion of individualism.

Actually Hitler – supreme leader, genius and artist – had a profound disdain for the workers, except when he tried to lure them into the ranks of his Party, or when he needed their effort to prepare Germany for war. After all, the workers were part of the despised “dunder-headed mass”. Authentic socialists, like the young Joseph Goebbels and the Strasser Brothers, will soon be confronted with Hitler’s real feelings about socialism, as will the Socialist and Communist Parties and the trade unions barely weeks after he had become the master in the country.

Socialism as well as communism (and capitalism!) were creations of the Jews to dominate the world, and they were therefore to be opposed by the right-thinking with all their might. “My socialism is something different from Marxism”, Hitler said to Hermann Rauschning. “My socialism is not a class struggle, but order. Who thinks of socialism as revolt and demagoguery of the masses is not a National-Socialist. Revolution is not a spectacle by the masses. Revolution is hard work. The mass sees only the steps after they have been undertaken; but it surpasses their knowledge – and it should surpass it – what an immense amount of labour has to be done before a new step forward can be made … National-Socialism is what Marxism could have been if it had separated itself from the absurd, artificial connection with a democratic order.” 605

Konrad Heiden, a closely involved observer of the events we are describing, writes in his biography of Hitler: “The relatively high percentage of Jews in the leadership of the Socialist Parties on the European continent cannot be denied. The intellectual of the bourgeois era had not yet discovered the workers, and if the workers wanted to have leaders with university education, often only the Jewish intellectual remained – the type which might have liked to become a judge or Government official, but in Germany, Austria or Russia simply could not. Yet, though many Socialist leaders are Jews, only few Jews are Socialist leaders. To call the mass of modern Jewry Socialist, let alone revolutionary, is a bad propaganda joke. The imaginary Jew portrayed in The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion ostensibly wants to bend the nations to his will by revolutionary mass uprisings; the real Jewish Socialist of France, Germany and Italy, however, is an intellectual who had to rebel against his own Jewish family and his own social class before he could come to the workers …

“The Jewish socialist, as a rule, has abandoned the religion of his fathers, and consequently is a strong believer in the religion of human rights; this type, idealistic and impractical even in the choice of his own career, was often unequal to the test of practical politics and was pushed aside by more robust, more worldly, less sentimental leaders arising from the non-Jewish masses. A historic example of this change in the top Socialist leadership occurred in Soviet Russia between 1926 and 1937, when the largely Jewish leaders of the revolutionary period (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev) were bloodily shoved aside by a dominantly non-Jewish class (Stalin, Voroshilov, etc.).” 606

In Germany and Austria “hundreds of thousands” of the higher classes believed in “the threat of Judeo-bolshevism”, especially because their new governments after the First World War “were run by socialists, always assumed to be a Jewish front”, according to John Weiss. 607 First and foremost, however, there was the fear of revolution as a backlash of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, about which the most horrible rumours were circulating, many of them not unfounded. Moreover, the Bolshevik leaders had declared that their revolution was a world revolution, and that Germany was an immediate aim. After all, Germany had for a long time been singled out by the Marxists as the ideal country to unleash the proletarian revolution, while none of them had thought it would happen in backward, agrarian Russia.

“Bolshevik propaganda heralded the imminent conquest of Germany by the united strength of the international proletariat; this would be the decisive step on the road to world revolution. The obscure activities of Soviet agents, the continual unrest, the Soviet revolution in Bavaria, the Ruhr uprising of 1920, the revolts in Central Germany during the following year, the risings in Hamburg and later in Saxony and Thuringia, were all too consistent with the Soviet regime’s threat of permanent revolution.” 608 (What Fest does not mention here is the uprising of the Spartacists led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin, maybe because they were not guided directly by Moscow.) “This threat dominated Hitler’s speeches of the early years”, writes Fest. Given the continuous unrest in Germany, and the direct, painful experience of it in Munich, Hitler had no difficulty in stirring up his audiences, the more so as he dished up his oratory with a spicy anti-Semitic sauce.

What were the facts about the Jews leading the socialist and communist movements and revolutions? “Inflamed by a flood of pamphlets highlighting the Russian Jews among the Bolshevik leadership, the public did not know that only some 7 percent were of Jewish origin, though Jews composed some 12 percent of the populations from which Bolshevik leaders were drawn … From 1900 to 1920 more Russian Jews fled the country than ever chose revolution. In 1920 the highest proportion of minority peoples in the Bolshevik leadership were in fact Russians of German origin; Jews, Georgians and Armenians came next. The information fit no racial stereotype … The vast majority of politically active Jews favoured the Mensheviks [moderate socialists], who rejected Bolshevik dictatorship and worked for a democratic Russia. The German Social Democrats, including the most radical, Rosa Luxemburg, also feared Bolshevik success. Only during the civil war in the Soviet Union, when the choice was either Lenin or the tsarists, did large numbers of young Jews choose the Bolsheviks – and they were atheists, a requirement for joining.” (John Weiss 609) The total number of Jews murdered by the tsarists in the Ukraine between 1918 and 1920 was more than 60 000.

The Socialist Republic and the Workers’ Councils immediately after the war in Munich were very visibly lead by Jews, most of them foreigners in the city and for years to come used as bogeymen in the Nazi propaganda. The messy situation these leftist amateurs created, and the misdeeds they committed, will remain an inexhaustible stock of oratorical ammunition for Hitler, who of course never mentioned that among the mourners of the Jew Kurt Eisner, and wearing a red armband, there had been himself.

Taking all this into consideration, it is rather ironical that the Jew Karl Marx, a favourite target of Hitler’s anti-Judeo-Bolshevik rhetoric, was a life-long anti-Semite – a fact for which he is rarely remembered. “Karl Marx, the prototype of the supposed Jewish labour leader, came from a baptized Christian family, and his own relation with Judaism can only be characterized as anti-Semitism; for under Jews he understood the sharply anti-Socialist, yes, anti-political Jewish masses of Western Europe, whom as a good Socialist he coldly despised.” 610 In 1843 Marx wrote a pamphlet, The Jewish Question, in which his attacks on the Jews were as poisonous as those of Hitler. “What was the basis of the Jewish religion? The practical need, egoism … Money is the jealous god of Israel, before whom no other god must remain … The bill of exchange, that is the true god of the Jews … The Law without foundation or reason of the Jews is no more than a religious caricature of morality … The social emancipation of the Jews means the emancipation of the society of Judaism …” Etc. Léon Poliakov remarks dryly: “It may be noted that he applied the adjective ‘Jewish’ only to others, never to himself.” 611