Hitler and his God

The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion

Alfred Rosenberg was born in Reval (Estonia) in 1893. He studied engineering and architecture till the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Staunchly anti-communist and anti-Semitic, which meant one and the same to him, he fled Russia and landed, towards the end of 1918, in a Munich in upheaval. There he became part of the community of Russian refugees, many of whom had connections with the rightist extremists. It may have been In Plain German which led Rosenberg to Dietrich Eckart, who accepted him as his collaborator, although Rosenberg’s first language was Russian and his German still very poor. And Eckart introduced him to Hitler. Rosenberg was strongly influenced by Houston Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, which had made its author the revered guru of the German nationalists, the favoured thinker of Emperor Wilhelm II and, as the husband of Eva Wagner, resident master at House Wahnfried in Bayreuth. But a still stronger influence on Rosenberg was exerted by The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion.

The Protocols pretended to provide a report of the instructions given by a mysterious Supreme Master to the heads of the twelve tribes of Israel at midnight on the Jewish churchyard in Prague. Their objective was Jewish supremacy over the whole world, their strategy a ruthless but surreptitious campaign against everything held sacred by the despised goyim, their ideology an unconditional materialism which would use the principles of the Enlightenment as its guidelines and ultimately result in the submission of a zombie-like humanity of slaves to the Jewish master race. The Protocols were a fake concocted by members of the Russian secret police in France to convince Tsar Nicholas II of the danger the Jews represented to his throne. It was one fake among many in a tradition of similar anti-Semitic writings, most probably written at the time of the Dreyfus Affair in France, which split that country into two, and of the first Zionist Congress held at Basel in 1897. 332

“The Protocols and the myth of the Jewish world conspiration were exploited by the Nazi propaganda in all its stages”, writes Norman Cohn, “from the birth of the Party in 1919-20 until the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945. They were used successively to help the Party come to power, to justify its regime of terror, to justify the war, to justify the genocide, and finally to postpone the capitulation. The history of this myth, and of its utilization for various ends, reflects accurately the rise and fall of the Third Reich itself.” According to Cohn, “one may not be mistaken when writing that, exception made for the Bible, the Protocols were around 1925 the most widely read book in the whole world”. 333

About the Protocols Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “How much the whole existence of [the Jewish] people is based on a permanent falsehood is proved in a unique way by The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion … What many Jews unconsciously wish to do is here clearly set forth. It is not necessary to ask out of what Jewish brain these revelations sprang; but what is of vital interest is that they disclose, with an almost terrifying precision, the mentality and methods of action characteristic of the Jewish people, and these writings expound in all their various directions the final aims towards which the Jews are striving. The study of real happenings, however, is the best way of judging the authenticity of those documents. If the historical developments which have taken place within the last few centuries be studied in the light of this book, we shall understand why the Jewish Press incessantly repudiates and denounces it. For the Jewish peril will be stamped out the moment the general public come into possession of that book and understand it.” 334

“Hitler, in the depth of his feeling, if not of his intelligence, was surely convinced of the Jewish world conspiracy”, writes Konrad Heiden. 335 One finds this confirmed on several pages of Mein Kampf where Hitler writes about “the aspiration of the Jewish people to become the despots of the world”. 336 A direct and sad refutation of a Jewish world conspiracy were the inner divisions among the Jews during the war, their lack of cooperation to receive their co-religionists who had to flee Germany, and the way so many allowed themselves to be led “like lambs to the slaughter”. Cohn quotes the testimony after the war of SS-general Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, one of the notorious Jew-slayers: “Had the Jews only in the least been organized, millions of them could have been saved, but they were entirely taken by surprise.” 337

In his book on Hitler, one of the earliest biographies ever written and still in print, Konrad Heiden states repeatedly that the Nazi Führer imitated the methods described by the forgers of the Protocols. Heiden’s assertion seems at first overblown and inspired by his hatred for Hitler and everything the Nazis stood for. But when one reads the Protocols again after having studied Mein Kampf, one finds analogies on practically every page. Hitler’s aim was indeed world domination, and to this end he would exploit “ruthlessly” (one of his favourite words) the foibles of the human condition, common to his own people as to all others, using exactly the same means and ploys as those recommended to the imaginary Wise Men of Zion.

A phrase which Hitler in Mein Kampf often applied to the Jews was “great masters of the lie”. This expression had been often used by Eckart, who copied it from their admired philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. The phrase is, in fact, perfectly applicable to Hitler himself. He had an instinct to sense and play on the weaknesses of human nature, of the mass as well as of the individual, and he had learned how to brashly mislead, distort and lie, something so obvious in Mein Kampf that it may be another reason why he regretted having written the book.

“The common people are credulous of everything, whether because of their ignorance or their simple-mindedness”, he wrote. “In the big lie there is always a force of credibility, because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily, and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than to the small lie …” Promises are made not to be kept, Treaties are signed to be betrayed. But Hitler’s greatest lie was to the German people, whom he pretended to be his bride, “Germania”, and therefore the reason for his remaining single. He gave them employment, bread, radios and self-esteem – for some time – and lots of martial and theatrical hoopla, but he did not tell them that they were fattened to be eaten by Death.

“The great master of the lie”, the great sophist, was Adolf Hitler, the persuader who distorted all terms and reasonings, but did so in a passionate and therefore convincing way which bypassed logical thought. If Mein Kampf has the nasty odour Fest writes about, it is because of its mendacious contents. This book is a true warning from history, but by most people who know of its existence it is unfortunately considered to be some sort of a curiosity.

What, in the final analysis, was the reason of Hitler’s anti-Semitism? Ron Rosenbaun asked the question of Alan Bullock, who answered, after all the years he had spent on studying the dictator: “I don’t know. Nobody knows. Nobody’s even began.” 338 “Hitler never suggested, not even with a single word, that he was planning the biggest autodafé [i.e. the Holocaust] in history”, writes Köhler. 339 “In spite of all the details we know, the cause of Hitler’s anti-Semitism is not completely explainable”, opines Maser. 340 And yet, Hitler’s intention to eradicate the Jews is written on every page of Mein Kampf; it was shouted by him from the rooftops and echoed from thousands of throats in classes, meetings and demonstrations, on radios in the homes and from loudspeakers in the streets, and it was printed in newspapers, magazines and a flood of books. But his bride Germania did not really believe it (nor did the rest of the world) – it was too horrendous to be true – or she preferred not to think about such disturbing things, or she kept her distance not wanting to think about her responsibility.

“For [the Jew] language is not an instrument for the expression of his inner thoughts but rather a means of cloaking them”, Hitler wrote. “He will stop at nothing. His utterly low-down conduct is so appalling that one really cannot be surprised if in the imagination of our people the Jew is pictured as the incarnation of Satan and the symbol of evil.” “As has so often happened, Germany is the chief pivot of this formidable struggle. If our people and our state should fall victims to these oppressors of the nations, lusting after blood and money, the whole earth would become the prey of that hydra. Should Germany be freed from its grasp, a great menace for the nations of the world would thereby be eliminated.” 341