Hitler and his God

“The Dwarf Napoleon”

Sri Aurobindo wrote two poems about Hitler and Nazism; both poems are reproduced in extenso below. The first, called “The Dwarf Napoleon – Hitler, October 1939”, is written in a polemical, scathing vein; it is an ad hominem attack on Adolf Hitler shortly after his invasion of Poland. The poetic quality of these lines is of secondary importance. The writing of “The Dwarf Napoleon” was much more a yogic act, an act of yogic magic, to counter the aggression of a dictator who had already annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia and was therefore, now that Poland’s turn had come, frequently compared with Napoleon. Sri Aurobindo has often stressed the importance of standing up against a spreading negative force, and in this case he doubtlessly wanted to inform the Asuric Power behind Hitler that the spiritual opposition had taken note.

Behold, by Maya’s fantasy of will

A violent miracle takes sudden birth,

The real grows one with the incredible.

In the control of her magician wand

The small achieves things great, the base things grand. 1034

“Maya” is often understood to be Illusion. However, Maya is essentially the manifesting power of the Divine, in other words the supreme feminine principle or Universal Mother. She is “Shakti”, the inherent power of the Divine, or “Prakriti”, Nature as opposed to the Spirit. It should always be kept in mind that, in spite of the dualities for the working out of the Divine self-manifestation, the Spirit and its Shakti are inherently one and the same. She is He; He is She; both are the One.

In The Human Cycle and The Ideal of Human Unity, his two books most relevant to our story, Sri Aurobindo often uses the word “Nature” for what in this poem he calls “Maya”. He writes for instance: “There is nothing that can be set down as impossible in the chances of the future, and the urge in Nature always creates its own means.” 1035 Our universe is the work of Nature, and so is its evolution, “moving with difficulty upward from Matter to Spirit”. The primal condition, responsible for the fact that this is an evolutionary universe, is the work of Nature, for so is the manifestation of the great negative beings, called “asuras”, and the great positive beings, called “gods”. And all is the work of the One, for nothing can exist without That.

“When we speak indeed of the errors of Nature, we use a figure illegitimately borrowed from our human psychology and experience, for in Nature there are no errors but only the deliberate measure of her paces traced and retraced in a prefigured rhythm, of which each step has a meaning and its place in the action and reaction of her gradual advance … For Nature tired of the obstinate immobility of an age-long resistance seems to care little how many beautiful and valuable things are destroyed so long as her main end is accomplished; but we may be sure that if destruction is done, it is because for that end the destruction was indispensable.” 1036

This puny creature would bestride the earth

Even as the immense colossus of the past.

Napoleon’s mind was swift and bold and vast,

His heart was calm and stormy like the sea,

His will dynamic in its grip and clasp.

His eye could hold a world within its grasp

And see the great and small things sovereignly.

A movement of enormous depth and scope

He seized and gave coherence to its hope.

It is now usually forgotten how often Adolf Hitler, at the zenith of his glory, was favourably compared with Napoleon Bonaparte. The annexation of Austria, the cutting up of Czechoslovakia, the invasion of Poland and afterwards the surprise attacks on Denmark and Norway, and the invasion of France – all these were occasions of praising Hitler to the skies and calling him the greatest genius, military strategist and conqueror in history. This spontaneous appreciation of their Führer by the people of Naziland will continue till the first serious setbacks in Russia, when Goebbels’ propaganda machine will be needed to carry it on.

Hitler had been the first to compare himself with the French Emperor. “What Napoleon did not accomplish, I will succeed in doing”, he boasted to Rauschning in the 1930s. 1037 “Hitler saw himself in a certain traditional line with the Corsican”, writes Reuth. 1038 Toland and Maser, in their biographies of Hitler, work out parallels between the Führer and the Emperor. John Lukacs writes: “The parallels – or, more precise, the similarities – between Napoleon’s and Hitler’s careers (their careers rather than their lives), should be apparent even to general readers who do not possess detailed historical knowledge … but the differences are still more substantial.” 1039

Thomas Mann saw Napoleon as the man who had to secure the ideals of the Enlightenment as formulated by the French revolutionaries, and who had to divulge these ideals everywhere in Europe. 1040 Sri Aurobindo was very strongly of the same opinion. “If [Napoleon] had not risen at the time, the [reactionary] European powers would have crushed French democracy. What he did was to stabilize the French Revolution so that the world got the idea of democracy. Otherwise it would have been delayed by two or three centuries.” Napoleon gave not only glory to France, “he gave peace and order, stable government and security in France. He was not only one of the greatest conquerors but also one of the greatest administrators and organizers the world has seen … The only trouble was that he was not bold enough. If he had pushed on with the idea of unification of all Europe, which he had at the back of his mind, then the present Spanish struggle [the Spanish Civil War] would not have been necessary, Italy would have been united much earlier and Germany would have been more civilized. If instead of proclaiming himself Emperor he had remained the First Consul, he would have met with better success.” 1041

“Hitler can’t stand any comparison with Napoleon”, said Sri Aurobindo. “Hitler is a man of one idea … while Napoleon had many ideas: he was not only a military general, but also an administrator, organizer, legislator and many other things. It was he who organized France and Europe, [and who] stabilized the French Revolution. Besides being a legislator he established the bases of social laws, administration and finance which are followed even today. He is not only the greatest military genius in history but one of the greatest men, with manifold capacities. Hitler is a man with no intellect and of one idea, which he applies with strong force and violence. He has no control over his emotions. He hesitates in his policies – which some call caution. And all his power comes from the Asura by whom he is possessed and guided while Napoleon was a normal human being acting through the power of his brain, which reached the highest development possible in a human being.” 1042

Far other this creature of a nether clay,

Void of all grandeur, like a gnome at play,

Iron and mud his nature’s mingled stuff,

A little limited visionary brain

Cunning and skilful in its narrow vein,

A sentimental egoist poor and rough,

Whose heart was never sweet and fresh and young,

A headlong spirit driven by hopes and fears,

Intense neurotic with his shouts and tears,

Violent and cruel, devil, child and brute …

Adolf Hitler was a “solipsist”. The dictionaries define “solipsism” as “the theory that the only thing you can be certain about is your own existence and your own thoughts and ideas” or “the extreme form of scepticism which denies the possibility of any knowledge other than of one’s own existence”. In other words: the solipsist is the sole protagonist in his own play of life and the world which he experiences is his stage. In psychology this is also called “narcissism”. Hitler’s biographer Reuth affirms that he was “an egomaniacal loner”, and Kershaw that he was “a narcissistic egomaniac”, suffering of “an egomania of monumental proportions”. “He simply could not bear not to dominate any situation in which he found himself”, Hanfstängl concurs. 1043

Examples of this attitude abound in Hitler’s life. There was, at the age of sixteen-seventeen, his calf love for a girl in Linz, Stefanie, whom his imagination transformed into a Walkyrie but whom he never dared to approach. There was the time in Vienna when he began to write an opera on the theme of an old Germanic legend, “Wieland the Smith”, without as much as knowing how to write a musical score. “Hitler did not accept that the facts of reality should be an obstacle to his dreams and to his will”, is the way his one-time close friend Kubizek puts it. The same Kubizek was also the first sufferer of Hitler’s vehement and endless monologues, “an unquenchable urge to launch into tirades”, which was the only way Adolf could express himself and which was his manner of venting his inner turmoil in surges of verbalization. Hitler would never be capable of normal conversation, in no company, and when he launched into one of his tirades he would address even a single individual as if it were a crowd.

“[Hitler] regarded life as a kind of permanent parade before a gigantic audience”, writes Fest, who also mentions his inability to lead a life without posing. “This desire for theatre touches at the core of his being … He had sought orientation and support against the world in a succession of new roles: from the early role of the son of good family and idling student, promenading in Linz with his cane and kid gloves, through the various roles of leader, genius and saviour, to the imitation Wagnerian end, where his aim was to enact an operatic finale. In every case he practised autosuggestion, presenting himself in disguises and borrowed forms of existence. And when after one of his successful foreign-policy coups he called himself, with naïve boastfulness, ‘the greatest actor in Europe’, he was expressing a need of his nature as well as an ability.” 1044

Towards the end Hitler-the-solipsist was moving for months depleted or non-existing armies across his maps, sending “with swiping gestures” thousands to a meaningless death. His doings became still more absurd during “the imitation Wagnerian end” when there was no longer contact with the exhausted men in the field, and he did not hesitate to hasten the doomsday of a people which he deemed unworthy of him. “If the German nation is now defeated in this struggle, it has been too weak. That will mean it has not withstood the test of history and was destined for nothing but doom.” 1045 Besides, all had betrayed him. But “I’ll fight this fight alone!” shouted theatrically the man who had become a physical wreck, and who for years had ordered to kill without himself ever firing a shot in anger.

The subconscious impulses of “this creature of a nether clay” drove him to an existence of “mud and iron”. Underneath all his actions there was his need to hate. Speer calls Hitler “a pathological hater” and Heinrich Mann saw him as “the high priest of hatred”. “Every conversation, however simple, seemed to prove that this man was possessed by boundless hate … He always seemed to need something to hate”, writes Rauschning. 1046 Kubizek agrees: “In his thundering tirades of hate he, feeling abandoned and alone, shouted his rage against the existing world, against the whole of humanity which did not understand him, which did not give him a chance, by which he felt persecuted and cheated.” 1047 And from his hatred sprang his need to take revenge on anybody who had crossed his path. There is a long list of people who fell victim to his death sentences, and we have met several of them in our story.

“Hitler is terribly cruel”, said Sri Aurobindo, “he has cruelty in his blood”. 1048 Sri Aurobindo found in January 1939 that Hitler was “becoming more and more criminal and going down very fast.” 1049 It was at this time that he decided upon “the final solution” concerning the Jews, indirectly announcing this decision in his notorious Reichstag speech on 30 January. After coming to power he had exclaimed: “We are ruthless! I have no bourgeois scruples! They think I am uncultured, a barbarian. Yes, we are barbarians! We want to be. This is an honourable epithet.” 1050 Heartless, fearsome and cruel is how he wanted his youth to be. “In general the regime, contrary to its ideal of dispassionate sternness, displayed a remarkably cruelty, for which Hitler himself repeatedly gave the clues”, states Fest rather coolly if one recalls the endless privation, torturing, killing and burning for which “the regime” was responsible during the war.

Hitler’s disdain for human life and for a human attitude towards it has been highlighted at the beginning of our story, when narrating the origins of the NSDAP and the SA. True, the times were chaotic and violent, but there is no doubt that the general inhuman character of the National Socialist movement is to be sought in the personality of its founder and sole decision maker, urged on by the Power that possessed him. “Things are not possible without the will to cruelty … Terror is absolutely indispensable for every foundation of a new power”, he said. 1051 And: “Our path is not clean. I know nobody who has not dirtied his feet on the path to greatness. We will leave it to our successors to construct something on clean foundations.” 1052 This may sound statesmanlike, but Hitler was also the man who revelled in the damage done to London and the devastation of Warsaw, Belgrade, Leningrad and Stalingrad, and who found pleasure in imagining the toppling of the Manhattan skyscrapers by his planned long-distance bombers. As he was the man who enjoyed the films shot on his orders of the first executions of conspirators in the Stauffenberg attempt on his life, some of whom, hanged with piano wires, took twenty minutes to die.

This screaming orator with his strident tongue,

The prophet of a scanty fixed idea,

Plays now the leader of our human march;

His might shall build the future’s triumph arch.

These perceptions of Sri Aurobindo – it bears repetition – are dated October 1939, a time when the world held its breath but Hitler’s intentions were as yet far from clear. Germany and Russia were still partners under their non-aggression pact; Mussolini had not yet taken his decisive step into Hitler’s camp, staging many shows of “everlasting” friendship with the Third Reich but also often making denigrating remarks about the Germans and their Führer, who to him was something like an epigone; and Japan seemed fully tied down in East Asia.

Now is the world for his eating a ripe fruit.

His shadow falls from London to Korea.

Cities and nations crumble in his course.

A terror holds the peoples in its grip:

World-destiny waits upon that foaming lip.

Sri Aurobindo never had any doubt about the scope of Hitler’s plans. “Hitlerism is the greatest menace the world has ever met”, he said; and “the destiny of the world depends on one man… His aim is clearly world-empire.” Or rather it was “the Asura who aims at world-domination. It is the descent of the Asuric world upon the human to maintain its own power on the earth.” 1053

A Titan Power supports this pigmy man,

The crude dwarf instrument of a mighty Force.

Hater of the free spirit’s joy and light,

Made only of strength and skill and giant might,

A will to trample humanity into clay

And unify earth beneath one iron sway,

Insists upon its fierce enormous plan.

Trampling man’s mind and will into one mould

Docile and facile in a dreadful hold,

It cries its demon slogans to the crowd.

The outcome of the apocalyptic drama, of which the prologue was being performed with the moustached “strident” puppet in the centre of the spotlights, was nothing less than the destiny of humanity:

But if its tenebrous empire were allowed,

Its mastery would prepare the dismal hour

When the Inconscient shall regain its right,

And man who emerged as Nature’s conscious power,

Shall sink into the deep original night

Sharing like all her forms that went before

The doom of the mammoth and the dinosaur.

Sri Aurobindo knew how the possession had come about and where Hitler’s “inspirations” came to him:

It is the shadow of the Titan’s robe

That looms across the panic stricken globe.

In his high villa on the fatal hill

Alone he listens to that sovereign Voice,

Dictator of his action’s sudden choice,

The tiger leap of a demonic skill.

However, those who feel inflated or aggrandized by being the instrument of a black power, and delight in being taken beyond their limits, often forget that they will have to pay the price. Not only are they selling their soul to the devil, as the saying goes, they usually also suffer in their body.

Too small and human for that dreadful Guest,

An energy his body cannot invest, –

A tortured channel, not a happy vessel,

Drives him to think and act and cry and wrestle.

We know now about the “crises of possession” Hitler was subject to, but he was also going down physically from 1937 onwards, according to Werner Maser. 1054 He started taking big quantities of drugs prescribed by his personal physician, Theo Morell. “He felt pressed by the idea that his career would be short, that it would not last longer than ten years, and by the worry to accomplish his work before the end of the time span provided to him by destiny.” (François-Poncet 1055) He did not eat meat, drink alcohol or smoke, but he ate enormous quantities of cakes, so much so that in his last days somebody called him “a cake-eating robot”.

“He has fears of being poisoned, fears of being assassinated, fears of losing his health, fears of gaining weight, fears of treason, fears of losing his mystical guidance, fears of anaesthetics, fears of premature death, fears that his mission will not be fulfilled”, wrote Walter Langer, who had this information from people once close to the dictator. He also suffered from enormous nervous tension. At the time of the Munich pact Shirer observed: “The man is on the verge of a nervous breakdown”, and again when awaiting the signing of the non-aggression pact with Moscow. 1056 Goebbels noted that during the days leading up to the Russian invasion “the Führer lives in an indescribable state of tension”. A similar tension had taken hold of Hitler in April 1940, during the operations in Norway and a month later during the campaign in the West – “Hitler has got the jitters.” 1057

Things became worse towards the end. “Physically [Hitler] represented a dreadful sight. He dragged himself about painfully and clumsily, throwing his torso forward and dragging his legs after him from his living room to the conference room of the bunker. He had lost his sense of balance; if he were detained on the brief walk (twenty to thirty meters), he had to sit down on one of the benches that had been placed along either wall for this purpose, or else cling to the person he was walking to … He lay there completely torpid, filled with only one thought: chocolate and cake. His ferocious appetite for cake had become actually morbid.” 1058 The last documentary films, e.g. the one taken when he pinned an Iron Cross on the chest of a few child heroes of the Hitler Youth, show how much his left hand was shaking, as was his leg when he sat down.

His fits of madness increased. He pronounced offhand one death sentence after the other, even of Eva Braun’s brother-in-law. And sometimes, as his Chief of Staff tells it: “Cheeks flushed with rage, with raised fists, he stood before me with his whole body shaking, beside himself with fury and altogether out of control. After each eruption of wrath Hitler paced back and forth on the edge of the rug, then paused right in front of me and hurled the next reproach at me. He choked up with shouting; his eyes bulged from their sockets and the veins in his temples swelled.” Yet, as we know, “he still preserved something of his magnetic powers”. 1059 “A nation in which there is even one righteous man will not perish”, he said during those last days, and Speer comments: “There was no doubt that he regarded himself as this one righteous man.” 1060

In October 1939, though, the dream of the Third Reich and German domination of the world was still alive – indeed it had never been more alive than then:

Thus driven he must stride on conquering all,

Threatening and clamouring, brutal, invincible,

Until he meets upon his storm-swept road

A greater devil – or thunderstroke of God.