Hitler and his God

Treitschke, Fritsch, Haeckel

It was to be expected that the self-affirmation of the Germans would reach high peaks at times when the material and racial feelings were singularly stimulated. Two such occasions were the foundation of the German nation in 1871 and the take-off of its industry and economy in the Wilhelmian period before the Great War.

The foremost nationalist representative of the first of these periods was Herr Professor Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-96). “He was active before the unification, but his influence was especially notable during the last decades of the century … Standing before packed audiences, Treitschke eloquently proclaimed his faith in a German morality and his deep feeling for the Volk. A note of militancy pervaded his lectures [at the University of Berlin], as if he were attempting to transcend his deafness and in his lectures accomplish the feats of courage denied him on the battlefield.” 425

“Heinrich von Treitschke’s career mirrors the increasing racism and reaction of the universities”, writes John Weiss. “The favourite of the Prussian establishment, he was appointed royal historiographer by the Kaiser, and no middle-class household was complete without his famous German History of the Nineteenth Century [in five volumes and unfinished] … Idol of the German Student Federation, Treitschke gave scholarly sanction to establishment prejudices. For two decades his public lectures at the University of Berlin were attended by the highest-ranking members of the government and the military, his classes crammed with their sons and future schoolteachers, who, while their opposite numbers in France taught the virtues of republicanism, taught those of autocracy … His strident voice harshened by near deafness, Treitschke ranted like a demagogue, praised imperialism, denounced the Jews, and raged against democracy and socialism. Civilians, he insisted, should have no say over the sacred army budget; thank the God of Battles there had been no universal suffrage when Prussia unified Germany.”

Here were created or consolidated the elements of the German mind: Prussian nationalism and racism, autarchy, militarism, respect for the social hierarchical pyramid, unconditional obedience and a sense of duty; they would buttress the national ambitions and make belligerency part of the air the Germans breathed. This spirit was so pervading that even the Left gave in to it in 1914 and again in 1933. It was this spirit which would render democratic republicanism impossible, quite simply because the democratic principles were foreign and therefore incomprehensible to it. “Why give the vote to readers of a daily press that encouraged every ignoramus to utter opinions on matters best left to a few? Universal elementary education created discontent. If it must be, appoint retired non-commissioned officers as teachers to instil the right values. For Treitschke, socialism was the treason of the Jews, feminism the illegitimate offspring of Jewish socialism and Hebrew females. Violating nature, feminism also threatened the sources of Prussian greatness, the patriarchal family and the warrior ethic. As the Nazis would insist, woman’s role was one of childbearer for the race, nurse to the warrior, symbol of the gentler sentiments.

“Treitschke even criticized Bismarck for not completing the holy task of uniting all Germans in an imperial Weltmacht (world power). A people with the power to conquer and absorb weak states had a divine mandate to do so. ‘Brave peoples expand, cowardly peoples perish.’ Treitschke looked forward to the day when a German fleet would sail up the Thames and a German army occupy London … If Austria and Russia fought, Germany must support Austria [as it would do in 1914 and by so doing unleashed the war], for it was the racial duty of Germans to rule over ‘inferior’ Slavs. In politics, all was force. War united the race and fostered the heroic; peace mutilated the personality and brought the domination of vulgar commerce. Might did not make right: it was right. Treitschke said, as Hitler would say: ‘History is nothing other than the eternal struggle of race against race’.” John Weiss calls the Herr Professor “the crude voice of the barracks writ large”.

“The enormous popularity of Treitschke’s harsh simplicities illustrates how racism enabled so many upper-class Germans to reduce social and moral complexities to racial differences and take seriously those who later, in the midst of social trauma, preached racial revolution and war. Treitschke’s writings were revived by the radical right in the 1920’s, and he was one of the very few nineteenth-century writers to win a place in the official Nazi pantheon of required reading. Quotations from Treitschke were included in the small books of readings carried into battle by German soldiers during World War II.” 426

During the second great spasm of German nationalism and racism in the Wilhelmian period, Theodor Fritsch was another powerful figure. He also acted through politics, yet he preferred the more hidden ways, which is why we met him earlier in our story as the founder of the Germanenorden. In all cases German racism was practically identical with anti-Semitism, for the Jews were the main foreign organism, often compared to a germ or a virus, in the living body of the Volk. (Compared to the numbers and the economical and cultural influence of the Jews, the Gypsies were hardly of any importance – if the murder of half a million of them can be said to be of little importance.)

Fritsch, called by some “probably the most important racist and anti-Semite before Hitler”, was a very capable and prolific organizer. We remember that he launched the periodical Der Hammer, from which resulted the local Hammer Societies, which were unified in 1908 in the Reichshammerbund. To counteract the presumed secret activities of the Jews, who wanted to bring the whole world under their power, Fritsch founded the equally secret Germanenorden as a sister organization of the Reichshammerbund – and the Germanenorden became the parent organization of the Thule Society, which introduced us in our early chapters to the lively but murky political world of post-war Munich.

Treitschke and Fritsch were not the only racists of their time, by far. The response they found proves that they were more symptoms than initiators of a mentality which cannot be called otherwise than “common”. Nor did this mentality belong only to historical and literary brains: one of the most powerful racist dynamo’s in Germany before the First World War was the Alldeutsche Verein, the Pan-Germans. They never numbered more than four thousand, but they were a kind of nationalist freemasonry to which only the most influential and high-ranked personalities had access. The historian Karl Lamprecht, advisor to Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, was a Pan-German, as were the sociologist Max Weber, still studied to today, Gustav Stresemann, the future foreign minister, Ludwig Schemann, publisher of Chamberlain’s works, and many politicians, industrialists and bankers.

Sebottendorff called the Pan-Germans “the most important völkisch association of the pre-war period”. Had he written today, he would probably have used the term “pressure group”. “The development of the Pan-German Association is an example of the coming together of nationalist, völkisch and anti-Semitic circles through the gradual integration of racist thought and anti-Semitism justified by racism in the nationalist and imperialist policies.” (Hermann Gilbhard 427) Besides being squarely racist, the Pan-Germans stood chiefly for the integration of all Germans into one Greater German Empire or Reich, and for the hegemony by this Reich over other nations within its sphere of influence. The German “war aims” were their brainchildren, adopted by the politicians and by the Hindenburg-Ludendorff tandem. We have seen that these war aims were actually realized in the East in February 1917, when Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and that they came very close to being realized in the West before the tide of the war definitively turned.

Another Pan-German was the zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919). Nowadays his name is seldom printed outside Germany, but during his lifetime he was the teacher to the German nation of the life sciences, and translations of his works appeared in many languages. Of Die Welträtsel, the riddles of the world, published in 1889, 400 000 copies were printed up to 1933. Haeckel was one of the first adherents of Darwinism, which he popularized in his writings. He was also an important scientist in his own right, and a many-sided one, for his research touched fields outside zoology and biology. As his basic outlook on life he conceived a kind of mystical pantheism, postulating that the organic and inorganic realms were ruled by the same physical laws. This led him to pioneering research in the border region between matter and life, and he was the first to surmise that the cell played an important role in matters of inheritance, although science had not yet invented the technical means to explore this field.

Of direct importance to our story were Haeckel’s theories about race, more specifically the way in which he thought the human being was related to the primates and the hierarchical order he surmised within the species homo sapiens. In Haeckel and in all his contemporaries, though they spoke with great authority and were believed with respectful amazement because of their astonishing revelations, “science” consisted mainly of cultural, political, and especially racial prejudices. “[Haeckel’s] criteria are among the most vague. They relate to the nature of the hair, the colour of the skin, the form of the skull and a number of biological characteristics [afterwards to be applied by the racial researchers of the SS-Ahnenerbe], but added to these are also all kinds of other considerations, intellectual, linguistic, social, etc. Haeckel’s classification is a taxonomic fantasy.” 428

Haeckel found that humanity consisted of thirty-six races, divided into twelve species. He drew a human ancestral tree in which all of them fitted hierarchically. It will surprise no one that the Indo-Germans came out on top of the tree. What is surprising is that, when drawing the genealogy of the Indo-Germans, Haeckel placed the Anglo-Saxons next to the High-Germans (Hoch-Deutsche), apparently a degree more developed than the Low-Germans and the Dutch. The Negro tribes were hardly different from the “man-apes”. Like most of his contemporaries, Haeckel found a considerably greater “psychic” difference between the higher and the lower humans than between the lower humans and the apes.

“Haeckel and other authors like him would evidently have had a tough time explaining the degree of biological evolution according to which they classified the races, but the problem did not even come to their mind”, writes Pichot. “In fact, they hierarchized civilization and transposed this hierarchy into the biological domain because they gave to the civilizations a hereditary basis: the superiority of the Germans and the Anglo-Saxons in Haeckel is manifestly inspired by the greater progress of the industrial revolution in these peoples. Nevertheless, however fictitious the evolutionary degree may have been as a criterion of the hierarchization of the races, it worked perfectly within the social-Darwinian ideology of the time, and it supported its inherent racism by giving it a semblance of scientific justification.” 429

Another surprise of Haeckel’s tree of humanity is that he, though a prominent Pan-German, put the Semites on a nearly identical level with the Indo-Germans. If the Jews were hated and feared, it was in part because they were secretly admired (also by Hitler) for their surviving qualities and purity as a race, and for their intelligence. The characteristics of the Jews, stereotyped by Christianity in general, were ingrained, “programmed” in the thinking modes of the people; yet it was during Haeckel’s lifetime that such thought attitudes would become virulent and aggressive because German nationalism and racism became virulent and aggressive. Even Treitschke wanted to give the Jews a chance to integrate into the nation, by converting to Christianism, before he became a militant anti-Semite and coined the slogan “The Jews are our misfortune”, which would resound through the coming generations. Ernst Haeckel seems never to have gone that far.