Hitler and his God

Superior People

There were even before Luther marks of a German road that would eventually lead to Hitler. An anonymous publicist, called “the Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine”, wrote the Book of a Hundred Chapters in 1510, at a time that European thought, stirred up by the revolution of the Renaissance, was in total turmoil. (Luther would pin his ninety-five theses on the door of a church at Wittenberg in 1517.) This elderly fanatic, writes Norman Cohn, “was thoroughly familiar with the enormous mass of medieval apocalyptic literature and drew freely from it” 362. He wrote in German for Germans what was “a communication from the Almighty, conveyed by the Archangel Michael”.

The message of the Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine was that the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, asleep in the Kyffhäuser mountain, would wake up, appear on a white horse and lead “a new chivalry” to establish a reign, or Reich, of a thousand years. This would happen through massacre and terror in a crusade “to smash Babylon in the name of God”. Those to be massacred would be “the rich, well-fed, loose-living clergy”, the chief enemy, who must be annihilated. “‘Go on hitting them’, cries [Frederick] the Messiah to his army, ‘from the Pope right down to the little clerics. Kill every one of them!’ He foresees that 2300 clerics will be killed each day for four and a half years.” Others to be slain are the money-lenders, rich merchants, overcharging shopkeepers, unscrupulous lawyers. Then will start the reign of the common people in “abundance of bread and barley and wine and oil at a low price … All property shall become one common property; then there will indeed be one shepherd and one sheepfold”. These were the common expectations of the Middle Ages, a time of misery unimaginable, when the poor were at the mercy of illness, pest and famine, and of the greedy clerical and secular hierarchy pressing down upon them.

“But”, writes Cohn, “in one respect the Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine was truly original: nobody before him had combined such devotion to the principle of commercial or public ownership with such megalomaniac nationalism. This man was convinced that in the remote past the Germans had in reality ‘lived together like brothers on the earth’, holding all things in common. The destruction of that happy order had been the work first of the Romans and then of the Church of Rome … The Old Testament was dismissed as valueless; for from the time of the creation onwards it was not the Jews but the Germans who were the Chosen People. Adam and all his descendants down to Japheth [one of the three sons of Noah], including all the Patriarchs, were Germans speaking German … It was Japheth and his kin who first came to Europe, bringing their language [i.e. German] with them. They had chosen to settle in Alsace [then a German principality], the heart of Europe, and the capital of the Empire which they founded was at Trier.”

This amazing load of nonsense is not only typical of a feverish late-medieval brain: all its elements, and lots more, can be found in German writings throughout the following centuries. One finds much of it in Mein Kampf and still more in the Nazi publications, especially those of the SS. But the Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine had more to say. He defined for the first time the European “North-South divide” which will play such an important part in the German world vision. “Very different was the history of the Latin peoples. These wretched breeds were not descended from Japheth and were not numbered amongst the original inhabitants of Europe. Their homeland was in Asia Minor, where they had been defeated in battle by the warriors of Trier and whence they had been brought to act as serfs of their conquerors. The French – a peculiarly detestable lot – ought therefore by rights to be a subject people, ruled by the Germans. As for the Italians, they were descended from serfs who had been banished over the Alps … Roman law, the Papacy, the French, the Republic of Venice [in 1510 still flourishing] were so many aspects of an immense, age-old conspiracy against the German way of life … Emperor Frederick would restore Germany to the position of supremacy which God intended for her … The future Empire was indeed to be nothing less than a quasi-religious community of the German spirit. This is what the Revolutionary had in mind when he cried, jubilantly: ‘The Germans once held the whole world in their hands and they will do so again, and with more power than ever’.”

Norman Cohn comments: “In these fantasies the crude nationalism of a half-educated intellectual erupted into the tradition of popular eschatology. The result is almost uncannily similar to the fantasies which were the core of National-Socialist ‘ideology’. One has only to turn back to the tracts of such pundits as Rosenberg and Darré to be immediately struck by the resemblance. There is the same belief in a primitive German culture in which the divine will was once realized and which throughout history has been the source of all good – which was later undermined by a conspiracy of capitalists, inferior, non-Germanic peoples and the Church of Rome – and which must now be restored by a new aristocracy, of humble birth but truly German in soul, under a God-sent saviour who is at once a political leader and a new Christ. It is all there – and so were the offensives in West and East – the terror wielded both as an instrument of policy and for its own sake – the biggest massacres in history – in fact everything except the final consummation of the world-empire which, in Hitler’s words, was to last a thousand years.” 363