Hitler and his God

The White Man’s Pride

We have met the noble Aryan – the “Prometheus of mankind”, “standard-bearer of human progress” and “highest image of the Lord” – when leafing through Hitler’s Mein Kampf. We recall that the discovery of an Aryan root language was made around 1800, in that fecund period of literary Romanticism and philosophical Idealism, and that this discovery went hand in hand with a keen interest in Indian culture and religion. The hypothesis of a language common to great parts of Europe and Asia was erroneously extended to the existence of an Aryan people which spoke that language and of which the best among the surviving human tribes descended.

All these complex intellectual exercises took place against the background of expanding colonialism, when a few West European nations were venturing all over the globe, encountered little resistance from peoples who looked so different, felt themselves to be their rightful conquerors and appropriated their possessions. This they did in the name of their racial superiority, their culture and their one true God. What is now called racism was for those West-Europeans at that time a normal component in their way of perceiving the world, based on the supposedly incontestable fact that some people (with white skins) were stronger, more intelligent and inventive, and more religious than other people (mostly with coloured skins). “What today we find abominably racist in the writings of Gobineau, Darwin, Haeckel, Büchner, Vogt, Gumplowicz, etc. … was then the prevalent opinion, common to the point that hardly anybody thought of criticizing it, either on the left or on the right”, writes André Pichot 412. Dietrich Bronder is therefore right in reminding us that racism as such “did not actually originate in Germany, that it started in France and England”, but that the dimensions racism took in Germany resulted eventually “in such terrible political consequences”. 413

Some sayings from that time will illustrate Bronder’s point. The Scottish philosopher David Hume “inclined to presume”, in 1754, that generally speaking “all other races of human beings were naturally inferior to the white race”. The other races had never developed a civilized nation or prominent individuals in any field. Even among the most barbarous white people, like the ancient Germans, something outstanding could be found. Such a constant and uniform difference between whites and non-whites “could not have existed if nature had not made an original distinction between the human races”. The German professor Christoph Meiners wrote that only the white peoples, especially the Celts, “possessed true courage, the love of freedom, and the other passions and virtues of great souls”. The “black and ugly people” were characterized by a deplorable absence of virtues and the presence of some horrible vices.

“What would the world be without the Europeans?” asked Johan-Christian Fabricius, a disciple of the Swedish botanist Linnaeus (1707-78). The European, called by Destiny to the hegemony over a world which he alone can enlighten with his intelligence and subjugate by his valour, is the human being par excellence and the head of the human race; the others, a vile mixture of barbarians, are by way of speaking no more than its embryo. Charles White, a surgeon in Manchester, was of much the same opinion, for he wrote in 1799: “Climbing up the ladder, we arrive at last at the white European who, being the furthest removed from the animal creation, can therefore be considered the most beautiful product of the human race.” Nobody would dare to cast doubt upon the superiority of his intellectual powers. Where else but in the European could one find such a well-shaped head, such a large brain, where such a straight stature and noble gait? “In which other region of the globe shall one find that exquisite blush spreading on the countenance of the beautiful European women, cynosures of modesty and delicate feelings?” 414

Europe dominated the world, saw the world through its own eyes and felt as dominators do. By its own history it measured the history of all others; its scientific and cultural acquisitions – and they were many – were to be infused gradually and cautiously into other peoples; its economic exploitation was the legitimate rewards of its efforts; its God was the true God, and the idols of the heathen had to be broken. It would take a long time before this “Eurocentrism” would be put into question, before the rest of the world would awake from its temporal sleep, reassert its values and powers, and retake possession of its rightful material and cultural property. This process is still ongoing.

The Aryan myth was one of the consequences of the Eurocentric manner of perceiving the world. To have been the cradle of the Aryans was soon denied the brown-skinned, idolatrous Indians and the uncultured Iranians; the birthplace of the Aryans shifted successively to South, Central and finally North Europe, where the northern part of Germany and the south of Sweden became “the womb of the peoples”. Of course, nobody knew what actually had happened there as recently as two or three hundred years before Christ. This left the gates wide open for all kinds of speculations about Hyperborean, Thulean and Atlantidian origins.

The Nazi mythology was an extreme outcome of the European myths as construed by the feelings of superiority of the white people. Some haughty feelings in those myths were tempered by the Christian faith and morals, and by the ideals of the Enlightenment. Romantic and völkisch Germany, however, sought to renew its vitality through contact with its pre-Christian origins, through re-rooting itself in the powers of its old gods. It would take the fancies about being Herrenmenschen literally, and when it thought it had, under Hitler, built up the necessary military capability, try to turn them into reality.