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... , p. 192, 166. 334 Adolf Hitler, op. cit., p. 258. 335 Konrad Heiden, op. cit., p. 456. 336 Adolf Hitler, op. cit., p. 538. 337 Norman Cohn, op. cit., p. 250. 338 Ron Rosenbaum: Explaining Hitler, p. 83. 339 Joachim Köhler, op. cit., p. 410. 340 Werner Maser: Adolf Hitler, p. 267. 341 Adolf Hitler, op. cit., 257, 272, 508. 342 Adolf Hitler, op. cit., p. 541. 343 John... Backing Hitler, p. 7. 633 Ron Rosenbaum: Explaining Hitler , p. 83. 634 Werner Maser: Adolf Hitler – Legende, Mythos, Wirklichkeit, p. 267. 635 Joachim Fest, op. cit., pp. 39, 533. 636 H.R. Trevor-Roper: The Last Days of Hitler, pp. 179-80. 637 John Lukacs: The Hitler of History, pp. 47, 130 footnote. 638 Gitta Sereny: The German Trauma, p. 280. 639 J.P. Stern: Hitler – The... der NSDAP, Munich. 4 J.P Stern: Hitler – The Führer and the People , p. 4. 5 Joachim Fest: Hitler (1974 ed.), p. 754. 6 Id., p. 9. 7 Christian von Krockow: Hitler und seine Deutschen , p. 7. 8 Ron Rosenbaum: Explaining Hitler – The Search for the Origins of His Evil , pp. xv and 68. 9 Id., p. xv. 10 In Joachim Köhler: Wagners Hitler – Der Prophet und sein Vollstrecker , ...

... Kempowski, Walter: Haben Sie Hitler gesehen? Kershaw, Ian: Hitler – 1889-1936 Hubris Kershaw, Ian: Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis Kirchhoff, Jochen: Nietzsche, Hitler und die Deutschen Klemperer, Viktor: Tagebücher 1937-1939 Knopp, Guido: Hitler – Eine Bilanz Knopp, Guido: Hitlers Helfer Knopp, Guido: Hitlers Krieger Köhler, Joachim: Wagners Hitler – Der Prophet und sein... et modernité en Allemagne autour de 1900 Berthold, Will: Die 42 Attentate auf Adolf Hitler Breuer, Stefan: Aesthetischer Fundamentalismus – Stefan George und der deutsche Antimodernismus Brissaud, André: Hitler et l’Ordre noir Bronder, Dietrich: Bevor Hitler kam Bullock, Alan: Hitler and Stalin – Parallel Lives Burgess, Simon: Stafford Cripps – A Political Life Burleigh... Deus lo volt – A Chronicle of the Crusades Daim, Wilfried: Der Mann, der Hitler die Ideen gab Davidson, Eugene: The Making of Adolf Hitler – The Birth and Rise of Nazism Dawidowicz, Lucy: The War against the Jews 1933-45 Delpla, François: Hitler Fest, Joachim: Der Untergang Fest, Joachim: Hitler (1974 ed.) Fest, Joachim: Speer – The Final Verdict Fest, Joachim: ...

... than to call Hitler a fascist”, writes Sebastian Haffner in his Anmerkungen zu Hitler (notes on Hitler), “his nationalism was everything except a fascism”. 746 “National Socialism was fundamentally and from the very start ‘Hitlerism’, and Hitler himself was, seen in this way, the first convinced ‘Hitlerite’”, writes Jochen Kirchhoff. He repeats Gottfried Benn’s question: did Hitler create the movement... of Nations. Rauschning’s written memoirs of a few conversations with Hitler and of thoughts he heard Hitler express have been attacked by such authors as Theodor Schieder in 1972 and Wolfgang Hänel in 1983. Ian Kershaw states peremptorily in his preface to his Hitler biography that Hitler Speaks, i.e. the Gespräche mit Hitler from which we quote, is “a work now regarded to have so little authenticity... 12. The Vision of Adolf Hitler Hitler and his God Hitlerism The NSDAP programme, at the beginning of 1920 hastily concocted by Hitler and Anton Drexler, lost much of its actuality as the movement evolved, especially the more or less cranky articles concerning the state finances and the economy. Still Hitler refused to change one iota of the programme – ...

... Speer’s warning that Hitler adapted his words to his audiences. The fundamental difference between the two ways of seeing and speaking seems to reside in the fact that the visionary Hitler was an inspired man, while the philosophizing Hitler was a rather pedestrian thinker who had gathered his thoughts by the roadside. The rickety thought structure of the pedestrian Hitler rested on some curious... 12. The Vision of Adolf Hitler Hitler and his God The Messiah Hitler reportedly said in one of his monologues: ”Ich bin auf Grund höherer Gewalt da”. 754 “Höhere Gewalt” means an act of God, and Hitler’s words may be translated as “I am here through an act of God”, something he declared directly or indirectly in many ways throughout his career. Instead... decisions to go to war, each time as soon as possible. Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch states straightaway: “The model for Adolf Hitler is Christ”, 765 and John Toland asserts that “National Socialism was a religion and Hitler was its Christ.” 766 This is much more than a simile. Hitler took his role of saviour “with the utmost seriousness”, writes Joachim Fest, and attached a special significance to the fact ...

... victory with the existence of Adolf Hitler, this in blatant contradiction with the empirical reality, for Hitler possessed hardly any power at the time”, writes Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch. “Julius Streicher believed not only that Adolf Hitler was blessed by God, but also that he was the intermediary between God and humanity.” Bärsch also points out that Streicher’s faith in Hitler was not based upon race. “One... common bond with Hitler which allowed them to survive the most dangerous crises in their relationship. Even in the case of Röhm, the main target in the Night of the Long Knives and the one exception in this group, Hitler needed a full day to decide that Röhm should die and gave him the choice of a honourable death by shooting himself. And Hess, who by flying to Scotland had given Hitler “the second worst... But “Streicher spoke and acted aloud what Hitler secretly thought and desired”, remarks Heiden. “Streicher was the embodiment of Hitler’s subconscious.” 1027 Arthur Dinter was the man who openly revolted against Hitler, accused him of betraying the original ideals of the NSDAP and demanded that he be deposed as Leader of the Party – all this when Hitler had already come to power and held the life ...

... from him more “works of devilish ingenuity”. Henriette von Schirach had known Hitler from nearby for many years, for she was the daughter of Hitler’s photographer and the wife of the chief of the Hitler Youth. It was she who said on a certain occasion: “I believe that there are people who attract death, and Hitler was most certainly one of them.” 1089 It is a fact that several of the women who were... that the Lord of Falsehood, who possessed Hitler, also represents Ignorance, Suffering and Death, and that these four aspects were therefore features of his personality. Falsehood. One of Eckart and Hitler’s recurrent themes was Schopenhauer’s saying that the Jew was “the great master of the lie”. When browsing through Mein Kampf we have found that Hitler systematically applied the methods of the... to the small lie.” The German masses, in their “primitive simplicity”, proved him right. Konrad Heiden said that Hitler was of “a phenomenal untruthfulness” and called him “a prophet of the Devil”. Günter Scholdt writes about his “shamelessness in his relation with truth”. Hitler defined his own mental processes accurately when he wrote that to the Jew lying was an art. “[The Jew] speaks to hide ...

... 12. The Vision of Adolf Hitler Hitler and his God The Order of the Death’s Head “I am going to tell you a secret”, said Hitler to Hermann Rauschning somewhere in 1933, “I am founding an Order.” 820 The idea of “a small circle of real initiates” was not unknown among those close to Hitler, remembers Rauschning, for Alfred Rosenberg had already talked to... his heels even when Hitler spoke to him on the telephone. There is every ground to believe him, at least till the time that the final collapse of the Reich seemed imminent. We have therefore to disagree with the authors who would have us understand that Hitler distanced himself from some of Himmler’s projects, for instance the Wewelsburg. For Rüdiger Sünner mentions that Hitler signed, on 2 July 1940... ”, and that he thereby gave the Chief of the SS a free hand for all these plans. Höhne writes that Hitler “never appeared in the Wewelsburg”, but this is contradicted by a photo in Lebenda’s Unholy Alliance, showing Hitler and Himmler together in the hall of an old castle, with the caption: “Hitler and Himmler in the Wewelsburg”. In fact, the Order of the Death’s Head was one of Hitler’s most ...

... 16. Two Poems 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... 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... 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 ...

... between Eckart and Hitler was still there. Plewnia also quotes the words of a friend of Eckart’s, a certain Reid, who would have heard from Eckart’s mouth in the summer of 1923: “If there is a man whom Destiny has chosen to save Germany, then that man is Adolf Hitler, and no other.” And even after the November Putsch Eckart would have confided to Reid that “he continued to believe in Hitler, because he was... departure [he is writing in the third person], Adolf Hitler entered the rooms of the Thule, and he participated in the great propaganda days when under the leadership of Dannehl [Sebottendorff’s successor] the whole of Munich was covered with leaflets and posters.” 230 This was not the kind of memories Hitler liked to be reminded of. “Hitler felt it as a personal offence when somebody, struck by... Thule] and the Thule as a whole looked forward to … We recognize the greatness and the merit of Adolf Hitler. He has created what we longed for; we gathered the elements, he led to the goal! … It was to members of Thule that Hitler first came, and Thule members were the first who allied themselves with Hitler.” 233 Another grave mistake by Sebottendorff was that he called on the anti-Semitic ex-Jesuit Bernhard ...

... purpose, Mayr went on, [Hitler] was provided at first with funds … and, contrary to normal practice about members of the Reichswehr joining political parties, was allowed to stay in the army.” 94 Anton Joachimsthaler also says that Hitler was ordered by Mayr to have a look at the DAP “and even to establish contact with them … One may accept that Captain Mayr has advised Hitler to join the DAP, if he... 3. Mentor Hitler and his God The Corporal Joins a Party In Mein Kampf Hitler tells his first and fateful contact with the DAP, on 12 September 1919, as follows: “One day I received an order from my superiors to investigate the nature of an association which was apparently political. It called itself ‘The German Labour Party’ and was soon to hold a meeting... as companions of Hitler, Sergeant Alois Grillmeier and two propagandists of the Gruko [ Gruppenkommando ], Ewald Bolle and Alois Knodn.” 89 The chief speaker at the meeting in question was Gottfried Feder, author of a Manifest for the Breaking of the Interest Slavery of Money , a cranky theory which at the time made a deep impression on the German anti-Semites, including Hitler, who remarks: “Feder’s ...

... himself to powers who pulled him into the pit.” 901 Another cultured and close observer of Hitler was the French ambassador André François-Poncet. He titles the last chapter of his ambassadorial memoirs “Hitler, le possédé”, (Hitler, a man possessed). François-Poncet too describes the contrast between the Hitler in the “neutral” mode and the same man when “exalted”. “At the beginning of the conversation... 13. Medium Hitler and his God Evil Unexplained In the preface to his Hitler biography, Ian Kershaw writes peremptorily: “To call Hitler evil may well be true and morally satisfying. But it explains nothing.” 899 This statement throws some light on the confusion about the meaning of evil in modern Western civilization. Kershaw, an established historian... inner vocation , which had induced the statesman Adolf Hitler to be his own warlord”, and the intention of Hitler “to reserve for himself all essential military decisions” in which he would “follow his intuitions”. Thomas Mann, in exile in the USA, used the communiqué immediately for one of his radio broadcasts to Germany. He said about Hitler: “The monster, torn apart by his evil doings, went to ...

... unbridled expansion of its power, for there are unmistakable indications that Hitler took himself for the Messiah.” 682 Hitler was considered the intermediary between the Volk and God, writes Scholdt. “Solemnly he strides / in silence through his brown army / as a priest who blesses / the germinating seeds.” However, Hitler was much more than the high priest of Germany: he was the Saviour sent by God... Germany waits only for one man.” (Karl Schworm) To most this man was not Adolf Hitler, and he was to many either the deposed Emperor William II, or one of the princes who had abdicated in November 1918. The Bavarian coup in November 1923 prepared by “the three vons”, representing the constitutional government, and which Hitler tried to hijack, was intended to restore the monarchy and put Crown Prince Rupprecht... von Seeckt, although the most serious candidate, especially in the years 1924-25 when Hitler remained sidelined, was Erich Ludendorff, pushed on by his ambitious wife-to-be, Mathilde von Kemnitz. To all of them an imperial restoration was the chief aim. Even the Berlin “Club of the Barons”, who practically put Hitler in the saddle, hoped to be able to bring William back from Holland in due time, and ...

... was part of the political customs of that period. In this the Nazis were as industrious as their opponents, and Hitler himself received a prison sentence for breaking up, with the assistance of his cronies, a meeting of Bavarian monarchists at the Löwenbräukeller. Many years later Hitler will reminisce in his monologues: “I could use only people who knew how to brawl. It was the same everywhere: people... quoting Ernst Jünger. 183 Konrad Heiden called them “the armed human scum of five destructive years”. 184 The link between the Ehrhardt Brigade and the Hitler movement was Captain Ernst Röhm, one of those, with Mayr and Eckart, who made Hitler possible. Longerich calls him the “foster father” of the SA. “His conceptions of society were dominated by military categories; he shared the contempt of ... Corps. Röhm had become a member of the DAP shortly after Hitler. Again the jovial Eckart played a role in attracting this powerful and capable officer who would organize the fighting troops of the Party and provide them with arms when the situation so required. In fact, officer Ernst Röhm will never unreservedly submit to ex-corporal Hitler, even if for a time they addressed each other with the familiar ...

... arrested after the failed coup and imprisoned, first in Stadelheim prison, then with Hitler and the others in fortress at Landsberg. An important document in the Hitler saga is the unfinished “dialogue” Eckart wrote a few months earlier, in April and May 1923: Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin: A Dialogue between Adolf Hitler and me . This text is not the rendering of a real dialogue but of a fictitious... 5. Settling Accounts Hitler and his God “Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin” Where was Dietrich Eckart during the Hitler Putsch? John Toland spots him at the Bürgerbräukeller, just before the marchers left there, and near the Isartor, watching them pass by singing the “Storm Song” which he had written for the SA. 219 He was already gravely ill in those days... Anti-Semites?” and Hitler gave a recital of his complete anti-Jewish repertoire. In the police protocol of the speech is noted the usual crescendo in the response of the audience: “laughter – applause – bravo and applause – tumultuous applause – long tumultuous applause …” Documents like this show, beyond any doubt, the preparedness of the German soil for the seeds sown by Hitler and his likes. It ...

... friend Hitler had in Linz and Vienna, writes: “Hitler found a natural joy in the theatre and had a passion for it … There is no doubt that my friend Adolf was talented as an orator from his earliest youth. He liked to speak and did so all the time … He surely possessed great theatrical talent which, together with his oratorical talent, he knew how to use admirably.” 889 Kershaw calls Hitler “a consummate... that he was always acting on a stage; and Hitler, only half in jest, proclaimed: “I am the greatest actor in Europe”, verily keeping everybody spellbound by his performance. It was this sense for the theatrical effect which made Hitler one of the foremost stage directors, although he is seldom appreciated as such. (See e.g. Frederic Spotts recent study: Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. ) What lives... 13. Medium Hitler and his God “A Little Guy Yelled Himself into a Fit” “The force which has ever and always set in motion great historical avalanches of religious and political movements is the magic power of the spoken word”, wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf. “The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than any other force ...

... up to Hitler had to put his life on the line, there was no other way since he had been handed the power on 30 January 1933. Even one week before that day Hitler could have been pushed into the dustbin of history; from that day onward the fate of Germany was sealed. How many attempts have there been on Hitler’s life? Will Berthold has published a book about Die 42 Attentate auf Adolf Hitler¸ others... mutilated though it might now be, had been spared for some specific purpose, some ordained design.” 723 Stauffenberg reached the conclusion that Hitler had to die, this in spite of his own moral principles, his code of honour and the oath of allegiance to Hitler he had sworn as an officer. There was no longer an alternative. “I know that he who acts will go down in German history as a traitor; but he who... there have been more than 46. The fact is that Hitler survived all of them, often in the most incredible way as if he was forewarned or protected. The Stauffenberg attempt on 20 July 1944 affected him more badly than officially acknowledged, and from that day onward his health will decline rapidly. After meeting with him, Goebbels noted in his diary that Hitler “was firmly decided to set a bloody example” ...

... Munich Bürgerbräukeller on 8 November 1939, when Hitler left early, and the Stauffenberg attempt on 20 July 1944 at the Rastenburg headquarters, when in the conference room the briefcase with the bomb was displaced behind a support of the oak table, away from Hitler, by an unsuspecting general. During the four years of the First World War, Hitler performed the dangerous job of Meldegänger, a runner... 15. “The Lord of the Nations” Hitler and his God A Charmed Life Hitler regularly visited the widow of his first favourite architect, Paul Troost. She asked him one day why he cared so little about his personal security. His answer was that he was following “his inner voice” which had told him that he was destined to remain alive “as long as he was needed... would suddenly turn the tide in his favour. If there was a fundamental insanity in Hitler, it was this unshakeable belief in his lucky star.” 992 It is a fact that Hitler’s eventful life seemed to be protected on numerous occasions and in amazing ways. In the preface to his book about Die 42 Attentate auf Adolf Hitler Will Berthold writes: “It is difficult to say exactly how many attempts on Hitler’s ...

... permanent struggle of the ‘movement’, to be waged over centuries, were laid down. Hitler saw himself as the founder of a new world epoch in which the German claims at absolute world mastery would be realized … The will to absolute dominion is inextricably bound up with the phenomenon Hitler. At the high tide of his victories, Hitler laid claim to the hegemony over Europe, and further on to Germany’s position... Reich, even as a street-sweeper, than to be the king of a foreign state”. Mein Kampf was written in 1924-25, at a time when Hitler had to make a new start in order to give shape to his dreams and world dominion was an envisaged but still vague aim. How, then, did Hitler speak when he held the reins of power? For instance thus, to an assembly of deputies from the Länder, the federal states: “[What... by step”. 372 In this, Hitler was very much aware that to himself he could accord no more than the founder’s role of one who launched a new Weltanschauung and to whom the concrete foundations of the Greater German Reich, incorporating this new world vision or religion, were to be the monuments he planned in proportions becoming of the world’s masters. From 1937 onwards Hitler had hypochondriac fears ...

... knowledge, but without his orders”, and he repeated Rudolf Hess’ words: “Hitler reserved all his important decisions for himself.” 629 Kershaw quotes Heinrich Himmler as saying: “I do nothing that the Führer doesn’t know about.” 630 Christa Schroeder, one of Hitler’s secretaries, exclaimed during an interview after the war: “Of course Hitler knew! Not only knew, it was all his ideas, his orders!” And she described... conviction (p. 98) … He knew that he could not be attacked as a politician because he kept his objectives hidden in a mystic darkness … Hitler showed himself indefinable and has remained so till today (p. 193) … What were the contents of Hitler’s inner truth, nobody knew … Hitler was not a politician who had to work out a programme and to justify his actions to the people, but the saviour of an esoteric cult... ‘When we eradicate this plague [i.e. the Jews]’, Hitler had prophesied during the march on Moscow, ‘we shall accomplish something for humanity of which our men at the front cannot have an idea as yet’. This also meant that those men killed and died without knowing why. And the people around him cheered without knowing why. They became excited when Hitler told them what was at stake and believed in his ...

... after the First World War, and the emergence of Hitler and the National Socialist movement. Without Hitler, the charismatic political leader who believed he had a mission to annihilate the Jews, the Final Solution would not have occurred. Without that assertive and enduring tradition of anti-Semitism by which the Germans sought self-definition, Hitler would not have had the fecund soil in which to grow... 10. The Jewish Question Hitler and his God War and Extermination “Concerning the Jews, Hitler will never change”, wrote Ambassador François-Poncet in his memoirs. “He told me one day that, to his mind, the Jewish problem should be solved by putting all the Jews in the universe on an island, Madagascar for instance. Actually, the only satisfying solution... sentence of this testament Hitler obliged the leadership of the nation, newly appointed by him, to “a strict implementation of the racial laws and to a merciless resistance against the poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry”. In his letter to Adolf Gemlich on the subject of the Jews, and written at the request of Captain Mayr in 1919, twenty-five years earlier, Hitler had already insisted upon ...

... catch all the British Far East Forces in a giant pincer movement.” 1163 Ralph Giordano describes the same strategic plan in his essay Wenn Hitler den Krieg gewonnen hätte (if Hitler had won the war). “A newspaper report from Moscow under the headline ‘Hitler planned conquest of India, documents reveal’ and dated 21 June 1986, was published the next day in the Indian Express. According to the documents... Turkey’s help, and what can Turkey do alone? So Hitler comes to Asia Minor and that means India. The Asura is up to his tricks again. Now Hitler’s moves are quite clear. He will try to move towards the Mediterranean, taking possession of the Suez [Canal] and then Egypt … “ 1157 Around the same time Sri Aurobindo said: “If England wouldn’t stand in the way Hitler would settle first with Russia, then proceed... “The birthplace of the English self-consciousness is India”, he said in one of his monologues. 1162 We read in Toland’s Hitler biography: “Ribbentrop persistently pressed the Japanese, through Ambassador Oshima, to turn their major attack toward India, but to no avail. Nor was Hitler more successful when he invited Oshima to the Wolfsschanze and repeated the request. The Wehrmacht, he said, was about ...

... Revolution and been introduced to Hitler by Dietrich Eckart, was another admirer of Houston Chamberlain . The pale, zealotic intellectual Rosenberg fitted badly in the rude and crude entourage of Adolf Hitler, was loved by none and hated by many, and was in later years ridiculed even by the Führer himself. During the early years in Munich, however, his influence on Hitler was more important than is now... 8. Long Skulls and Broad Skulls Hitler and his God Houston Chamberlain and Rosenberg “It is probably no exaggeration to say, as I have heard more than one follower of Hitler say, that Chamberlain was the spiritual founder of the Third Reich.” 438 With whatever proviso one quotes these words of the experienced journalist who was William Shirer, it is a... “The public regarded the book as the standard text for party ideology, but Hitler in those teatime conversations bluntly called it ‘stuff nobody can understand’, written by ‘a narrow-minded Baltic German who thinks in horribly complicated terms’.” Indeed, Rosenberg was still tougher reading fare than Mein Kampf , and Hitler “expressed wonderment that such a book could ever have attained such sales” ...

... historian of the holocaust”, Hitler represents “near-ultimate evil”. Sebastian Haffner calls Hitler “a truly evil man” and writes about “the enormous evil in him”. Ambassador François-Poncet is of the opinion that Hitler was “a man driven to the extreme by a demon”. The historian Milton Himmelfarb says: “I don’t think that Hitler was a statesman. I don’t think that Hitler was an accidental agent. I think... persons who have a direct experience to tell. Admiral Karl Dönitz said: “Hitler was a demon.” General Franz Halder stated: “I never found genius in him, only the diabolical.” SS-general Walter Schellenberg wrote in his memoirs: “Hitler was ruled by the demonic forces driving him …” Ulrich de Maizière, general staff officer: “From Hitler emanated a demonic influence which is hard to describe, but against... him. To mention a few: Konrad Heiden writes about “the abysmal force” that was in Hitler, “the demon, disguised as an unknown soldier from the Vienna lodging-house”. Emil Fackenheim, a “theologian of the Holocaust”, calls Hitler’s reign “a radical evil”, “an eruption of demonism in history”. To William Shirer, Hitler was “a person of undoubted, if evil, genius”, “possessed of a demonic personality” ...

... 11. The German Aspiration Hitler and his God The Search for Meaning The analysis in the previous chapters of the German mentality which lead directly to Hitler would not be complete without paying attention to the sincere longing behind even the most delirious extremes of national egoism, the historical and cultural fancies, and the aversion to everything... cadet schools. Hitler profited greatly from the peculiarities of an authoritarian educational system.” 644 The patriotic, rigidly authoritarian German teachers had sent “the Langemarck Youth” into the trenches of the First World War; the same kind of teachers, seconded by martinet fathers, are to be found in practically every biography of Germans in the Second World War, be they Hitler, Bormann, Speer... Jesuits, who, after all, were the Catholic Church’s warriors to fight the Reformation. And Hitler himself confided to Rauschning: “I shall tell you a secret: I am founding an order.” The top elite schools of “his” youth were the three Ordensburgen at Krössinsee, Sonthofen and Vogelsang. Even the ordinary Hitler Youth, obligatorily joined by all young Germans from the age of six, had to live up to the ...

... how a Dr Edmund Forster thus created Hitler has been written by David Lewis and published in 2003 as The Man Who Invented Hitler . This book is based on a novel by Ernst Weiss, and all links with the facts behind the story are very thin and in most cases nothing more than suppositions. Besides, one must have a poor idea of what it took Hitler to become Hitler and to start the fateful realization of... of the Hitler phenomenon call “the gap”. One of its aspects is “the abyss between the small-time film-noir grifter, the mountebank criminal the Munich Post reporters knew, and the magnitude of the horror Hitler created when he came to power in Berlin”. 918 How this came to be is still an enigma even to the most prominent historians. The first important episode in the rise of Adolf Hitler is what... kind of transformative vision or hallucination. It was a life-changing moment of metamorphosis … Hitler conceived the mission and the myth that would bring him to power fifteen years later.” Rosenbaum also mentions that Hitler “heard ‘voices’, or [had] a providential vision from on high”, and that “Hitler himself claimed he received a visionary impetus to redeem Germany from Jews and Bolsheviks.” 922 ...

... have been smashed if Hitler had invaded England at the right time, just after the fall of France.” 1125 It is noteworthy that Sri Aurobindo said on 20 June, i.e. before Hitler’s western campaign was concluded: “I think the next war will be between Russia and Germany.” 1126 (In March, before the Blitzkrieg, he had already opined: “Hitler is the great danger to Russia.”) Hitler had his first meeting... testifies to the fact that the destruction of Paris was a kind of obsession with Hitler. “‘We shall reach the decision in France’, Hitler screamed. ‘We will reduce Paris to rubble. We must break the chains of Versailles.’ Oh! my God, I thought, Paris in ruins, the Louvre, all those art treasures gone. Each time Hitler got into this mood I felt almost physically sick.” 1141 And Fest writes in Der Untergang... attitude of “appeasement”, had worn out. By now Chamberlain understood – and his government colleagues as well as the House of Commons had made him understand – that Hitler had tricked him. Great Britain and France both warned Hitler that this time they would not take any further aggressive action lying down. On 2 September they warned him by ultimatum that he had to withdraw his invasion force by ...

... 14. Sri Aurobindo’s Vision Hitler and his God Parallels and Contrasts There are striking parallels between the conceptions of Adolf Hitler and the vision of Sri Aurobindo. After all, Hitler saw himself as the announcer and initiator of a new era in human history which was succeeding the millennium of the Christian era; it was his intention to create a... could be said that in broad outline Hitler’s vision was the shadow of Sri Aurobindo’s vision. Considerations of this sort have indeed led some to declare Hitler an “avatar”, i.e. a divine incarnation come to initiate a new age (cf. Miguel Serrano: Hitler – El ultimo Avatar ). Yet, where Sri Aurobindo’s vision is intrinsically progressive, Hitler’s view and initiatives were retrograde, intending to lead... remains an enigma. Would racial pride, some resurrected folklore and a religion of the masses suffice? Could the life of a superior racial robot be satisfactory? And who would be their living god after Hitler had left the earthly stage? In contrast with this terrible prospect of a world ruled by racial robots, Sri Aurobindo stressed the crucial importance of the individual, always of a higher consciousness ...

... century and of humanity. In chapter 17 I had written: “Hitler did not invade England [after the surrender of France] and neither did Great Britain collapse, as was generally expected. The reason was one man: Winston Churchill … ‘In Churchill Hitler found something more than an antagonist. To a panic-stricken Europe the German dictator had appeared almost like invincible Fate. Churchill reduced him... Hitler and his God Postscript: Churchill’s Mission It does not happen often that events in the occult history are confirmed by an impartial, objective source. This makes it worthwhile to report the following testimony, published after the first edition of the present book and directly related to a crucially important phase in the history of the 20th century... already said in passing: ‘England is quite unreliable under her present leadership,’ and that he and the Mother were looking for a suitable person. If the Asura had his instrument in one camp [Adolf Hitler], the White Forces needed theirs in the opposite camp once their decision had been made to engage actively in the battle. It is now mostly forgotten what a chancy affair the coming to power of Winston ...

... 17. A World in the Balance Hitler and his God “Where is Hitler Now … ?” By this time the daily conversations Sri Aurobindo held with the small circle of disciples had gradually fizzled out. When three years back the author asked Nirodbaran for the reason, his answer was that he did not know. In his Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo we find that “the original... not speaking of personal things – which did not eventually happen even after delay, defeat or even disaster. There was a time when Hitler was victorious everywhere and it seemed certain that a black yoke of the Asura would be imposed on the whole world; but where is Hitler now and where is his rule? Berlin and Nuremberg have marked the end of that dreadful chapter in human history. Other blacknesses... realms which constitute the total reality, and the human actors in front of the curtain are for the most part unconscious instruments of the Powers which really determine the course of history. Hitler was very much aware of the occult gradations of existence and of the importance of the times in which he lived as one of the great changes in the destiny of humanity. It was his pride to be the chosen ...

... out during the war. One of them was Hitler”, Mayr recollected later. 4 We know that Hitler attended a meeting of the DAP on 12 September 1919 at the Sterneckerbräu on Mayr’s instigation, and that he soon will join this secret Thule circle with the intention to use it as a launching pad for the realization of the mission he had received. Mayr reported about Hitler in a letter to Wolfgang Kapp, saying... prose … As I trace the pencilled notations, I realized that Hitler was seeking a path to the divine that lead to just one place. Fichte asked: ‘Where did Jesus derive the power that has held his followers for all eternity?’ Hitler drew a dense line beneath the answer: ‘Through his absolute identification with God’. At another point Hitler highlighted a brief but revealing paragraph: ‘God and I are... reservations, Josef Greiner, a former companion of Hitler at the men’s hostel in Vienna. “Hitler troubled his head about the fakirs and yogis in India, who can perform incredible wonders of human will power by turning away their senses from the outside world through concentration of the thought inwards and through self-punishment.” According to Greiner, Hitler also attended several talks about occultism and ...

... injustice and a compelling argument which Hitler would not fail to use, for “the three vons” too were guilty of insurrection against the legal government. Hitler managed to use the trial as a prolonged act of theatrical propaganda. “All of this helped Hitler turn the trial to his own purposes. Still, one should not fail to mark the boldness with which Hitler faced the proceedings, even after so recent... assassin of Kurt Eisner. Hitler refused to eat for something like a fortnight. Afterwards several visitors claimed the honour of having talked their Führer into eating again, among them Anton Drexler, Hans Knirsch (a Czechoslovakian Nazi), the ever faithful and present Helene Bechstein, and Helene Hanfstängl, on whom Hitler seems to have had a crush. From a local celebrity Hitler had become a national... after all, not only a Brother of Thule, he was also intensely interested in all kinds of occult phenomena, and so was Hitler. Toland describes how the Hitler court at Landsberg was distinctly divided into two levels corresponding to two classes, the one of the inner circle around Hitler with their cells on the upper floor, the other comprising the “commoners” and lodged on the lower floor. There is ...

... Haben Sie Hitler gesehen? (did you see Hitler?), remembers: “When the nonsensical Führer orders continued to come, our division commander said: ‘I am going to give this man a piece of my mind’. I still see him standing in the ravine in which our staff buses were parked. But when he came back [from his meeting with Hitler] he said: ‘The Führer is right’.” 862 Admiral Dönitz called Hitler “a being... enchantment of Hitler”; the annotator of the “table talk” writes about “ that remarkable magnetic fluid which he emanated with such mastery ” and emphasizes his words; Ernst Hanfstängl is struck by “the extraordinary magnetism of his personality”; and Walter Langer too wonders at “the magnetic quality” of the subject of his inquiry. In his Hitler biography, Fest writes: “[Hitler] possessed ‘the... And yet by invoking it so eloquently, he came to be accused of perpetrating, indeed of falling under, the spell, of giving it, giving the Hitler myth, a posthumous life.” 870 In The Last Days of Hitler, one of the first, most famous and influential post-war Hitler books, Trevor-Roper states outright: “The power of the Führer was a magic power.” 871 Similarly, in The Face of the Third Reich Fest writes: ...

... 4. Wolf Hitler and his God The Corporal Becomes the Führer It was in the Münchener Post that in July 1921 the text of a pamphlet was printed with the title “Adolf Hitler, Traitor”, accusing Hitler of all kinds of misbehaviour within the NSDAP, and of acting in the same fashion as the people he ranted against in his speeches and articles, the Jews. The... The pamphlet was written as an angry reaction against Hitler by a group of NSDAP members. The broader background was that Drexler and others, during a prolonged absence of Hitler in Berlin, had approached other small nationalist parties with the intent of an amalgamation in order to increase their political effectiveness. Hitler had not been consulted and reacted, “prima-donna-like”, with a fit of rage... considered her stepparents. The Bechsteins had provided Eckart with funds for his magazine In Plain German . In June 1921 he introduced Adolf Hitler to them and they became “passionate friends of Hitler”, sticking by him through thick and thin. What Hitler during his climb to power owed to supporters like the Bechsteins, the Bruckmanns and the Wagners is for the greatest part still unwritten history ...

... further on. Soon Mayr’s attention was drawn to Corporal Hitler. Not only had Hitler been elected representative of his battalion under the socialist regime, he had also been elected “deputy battalion representative” under the regime of the communist soldier councils. Then, after the Republic of Councils was crushed, in a new turnabout Hitler surprisingly became a member of a commission of inquiry,... aim of the struggle against the Jews must be, “unshakeably”, their elimination – whatever this word my have meant to Hitler in 1919. 23 Mayr has written that he had daily contact with Hitler for more than fifteen months, i.e. from June 1919 till September of the next year. Hitler, acting on his innate despotic impulse, had already managed to push Beyschlag aside. He was “a frequent visitor to the... 1. Turnabout Hitler and his God Captain Mayr’s Discovery After the obliteration of the Munich Republic of Councils, an officer appeared in the city who was to play an important part in the making of Adolf Hitler: Staff Captain Karl Mayr. It was the intention of the central government in Berlin as well as of the Army High Command to wipe out all leftist ...

... appeared to Hitler wearing a silver cuirass and helmet; it was as if fire irradiated from his head, and there was an aura of dazzling light around him … He told Hitler everything he wanted him to do: he played with him like with a little monkey or a mouse. He had clearly decided to make Hitler commit all possible excesses till the day he would break his neck – which was what happened … Hitler was a very... “The Lord of the Nations” Hitler and his God The Four Asuras “When we say that Hitler is possessed by a vital power, it is a statement of fact, not a moral judgement. His being possessed is clear from what he does and the way he does it”, said Sri Aurobindo in January 1939. He confirmed this repeatedly: “One can say that Hitler is not a devil but that he... (Hermann Rauschning 985) “Hitler is a sort of a mystic”, said Sri Aurobindo. “Hitler is a new type, an infra-rational mystic, representing the dark counterpart of what we are striving to arrive at: a supra-rational mysticism … He is a mystic, only a mystic of the wrong kind! He goes into solitude for his messages and waits till they come.” 986 This was the reason why Hitler asserted time and time again ...

... Bavarians, including the clique around Hitler in Munich. When Hitler held on to his gradual, legal way of coming to power, and the SA in North Germany demanded the instant socialist revolution, a rebellion erupted. The SA attacked the Party headquarters and the offices of the Party organ, Goebbels’ Der Angriff , and Hitler was requested to step down as Party leader. Hitler won the direct confrontation thanks... know about Hitler only from hearsay or from reading about him. Guido Knopp, aware of this difference, reminds us: “Numerous are the contemporary witnesses who report that Hitler effectively must have had a hypnotic power at his command to impose his will on others, also in the private sphere.” 875 Laurence Rees gives the example of one Fridolin von Spaun, remembering an encounter with Hitler at a Party... company of Hitler, freeze as he paused to talk to one or the other of them, hypnotized by his penetrating glare. I thought at first that only Germans reacted in this manner. But one day at a reception for foreign diplomats I noticed one envoy after another apparently succumbing to the famous eyes.” 877 A colonel who accompanied General von Kluge to meet Hitler before the war remembers how Hitler shook ...

... 8. Long Skulls and Broad Skulls Hitler and his God Hitler’s Racism Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “It would be futile to attempt to discuss the question as to what race or races were the original standard-bearers of human culture and were thereby the real founders of all that we understand by the word ‘humanity’. It is much simpler to deal with this question... were many such men in Germany, and Hitler was one of them], which are mostly based on nothing else than a fixed idea which in itself might be right but which, because it is an isolated notion, is of no use whatsoever for the formation of a great homogeneous fighting association and could by no means serve as the basis of its organization.” 453 For this was what Hitler wanted to forge the German people... with Rauschning, Hitler talked about the danger for the German people of containing a too high percentage of Slavonic elements. This would alter the character of the people, he said. “We have already too much Slavonic blood in our veins. Doesn’t it strike you how many people in important positions in the Germany of today are having a Slavonic name?” 457 The appearance of Hitler himself, as of most ...

... Vision of Adolf Hitler Hitler and his God A New Man Hitler was convinced that humanity had the potential of transformation into a higher species. According to him “man was subject to an enormous change. In the course of the millennia a transformative process, literally speaking, took place in him.” Thus reports Rauschning, who asserts: “For Hitler was much more... and manoeuvre exercises was extended to all young men, the defence training of the Hitler Youth was expanded into special units. In 1938 the Naval Hitler Youth numbered 50 000, the Motorized Hitler Youth 90 000, the Air Force units 74 000, the model-airplane clubs of the German Youth 73 000, the Communications Hitler Youth 29 000.” 819 Their idols would be the fighter pilots Galland, Mölders and Marseille... monolithic Hitler Youth and League of German Maidens for fourteen- to eighteen-year-olds, and the German Young People and the League of Young Girls for the ten to fourteens.” 818 By the end of 1938 the Hitler Youth numbered more than seven and a half million; in March of the next year it became the only authorized youth organization in the Reich. When a member had served his years in the Hitler Youth ...

... strings to re-enter the royal palace in Munich which his father had hurriedly left in the middle of that November night in 1918. There was no love lost between “the three vons” and Adolf Hitler. The ultra-rightist Hitler was, as a fanatical Pan-German, an arch-opponent of Bavarian separatism, with a deep resentment against royalty and nobility in general. The triumvirate, for its part, looked down on the... Seeckt’s disciplined Reichswehr could easily halt whatever Bavarian phalanxes might move northwards, to ask oneself how the triumvirate as well as Hitler could possibly dream of marching on Berlin. But troubled times hatch troubled schemes. Besides, Hitler had painted himself into a corner. He had accepted and exploited the comparison with Benito Mussolini and allowed himself now generally to be called... funds had been used up. Hitler’s treasury was also exhausted, and the men were going hungry.” (Joachim Fest 216) The Hitler Putsch on 8 and 9 November 1923 was one of the worst prepared, most amateurish and even comical events (except for the shooting) in German history. Hitler and his cronies tried to hijack, on the evening of 8 November, a meeting in the Bürgerbräukeller organized by Kahr, Lossow ...

... 12. The Vision of Adolf Hitler Hitler and his God A New World The influence of Oswald Spengler and his Decline of the West was widespread, and the Nazi intellectuals did their best to make him openly chose their side. Their attempt was not very logical considering Spengler’s pessimistic view of the destiny of the West and of humanity as a whole, while... race. Hitler was quite aware of this incongruity and did not hesitate to put things straight after having given, as the new Chancellor of the nation, an audience to Spengler in Bayreuth. “I am not a supporter of Oswald Spengler! I don’t believe in the decline of the West. On the contrary, I consider it my task, conferred upon me by Providence, to contribute to its prevention.” For he, Hitler, was convinced... Hitler’s National Socialism were fully spelled out in black and white; from this line Hitler never wavered. He steadfastly refused to compromise with any other organization, however rightist or völkisch, a standpoint he sometimes had to fight out with his closest supporters when the NSDAP was still small in numbers. Hitler was the prophet of a new ideology based on faith which implied, to his mind, the ...

... met with Hitler for the first time.” 152 Taking into account that Wilhelm Gutberlet had to report to Eckart about Hitler’s doings at the DAP meeting on 12 September, when illness prevented Eckart from speaking, it stands to reason that the first Eckart-Hitler encounter took place before that date, probably several weeks before. We recall that Captain Mayr became interested in Corporal Hitler from the... What happened between Eckart and Hitler during their frequent meetings remains unknown. It is nonetheless undeniable that Hitler generated a sudden burst of energy which would make him within a short time the undisputed leader of a dynamic party out of what had been a tame affair when he was introduced to it. This is the more astonishing because Adolf Hitler was an outsider and apparently a rather... did not mean much without Hitler, and Harrer, the “national chairman”, had to give way. “The problem ‘loge’ or active party was decided already on 5 January 1920. On that day Karl Harrer left the German Workers’ Party.” (Gilbhard 157) It did not take Hitler more than four months to push him out of the nest. The twenty-five points of the party programme, formulated by Hitler and Drexler, were presented ...

... Hess will henceforth call Hitler “the Tribune”, which is a reference to Hitler’s Rienzi experience. When Haushofer visited Hess, he necessarily met Hitler also. It has been established that the professor of geopolitics visited Landsberg eight times and met both men for a total duration of 22 hours. This was surely time enough for Haushofer to expound his theories to Hitler, and some results of this... important speech Hitler was, sometimes for days, closeted with Hess who in some unknown way got Hitler into that frenetic state in which he came forth to address the public.” 1021 During Hitler’s speeches Hess may have repeated “with closed lips” and in unison with Hitler some passages which he remembered from the rehearsals. As Mayr’s article was written after his flight from Germany (and published after... “The Lord of the Nations” Hitler and his God A Friend In documentary films of the Nuremberg NSDAP congresses, one can still see the Führer’s deputy standing at attention on the rostrum high above the smartly lined up blocks of uniformed Germans, then suddenly turn to his left, raise his arm stiffly in salute to the arriving Hitler, and announce, as chairman ...

... spiritual leader of the small group [around Hitler] was Eckart, the journalist and poet, twenty-one years older than Hitler … He had a strong influence on the younger man, probably the strongest anyone ever has had on him”. 110 In The Crisis of German Ideology , George Mosse agrees that Dietrich Eckart was “the man who exercised the greatest influence on Adolf Hitler in the immediate postwar years”. In... historical importance was Adolf Hitler himself. Here the abundance of references is really overwhelming, taking into account that Hitler as a rule blotted out all traces leading towards his pre-public past and in many cases eliminated the persons connected with it. (“A Führer can never admit that what he advocates, he got from others.” 113) The greatest honour Hitler did to Eckart was highlighting... 3. Mentor Hitler and his God Dietrich Eckart Brigitte Hamann, in her highly rated Hitlers Wien (1998), calls Dietrich Eckart the “closest friend and mentor” of Hitler. 107 In this she is not alone. Actually, most students of Hitler’s life say the same and use identical words. A “mentor”, according to the dictionaries, is “a wise and trusted adviser and ...

... 4. Wolf Hitler and his God A Mental Make-Up Hitler is still often represented in the popular media as a madman obsessed by a few fixed ideas. There is truth in the obsession, but he was not a madman. “Hitler was not mad”, writes John Lukacs, “he was responsible for what he did and said and thought … He had very considerable intellectual talents”. 124 He... summarizing complex matters. As Fest puts it: “Hitler had the knack of translating into simple images the abstract character of political and functional relationships.” 125 When reading some biographies one might gain the impression that Hitler studied, in his Viennese years, some of the most influential philosophers – an impression furthered by Hitler himself by dropping their names in his writings... Kershaw 128) “Books, always books! I cannot think of Adolf Hitler without books. Books were his world,” 129 writes August Kubizek, Hitler’s close friend in Linz and Vienna until somewhere in 1909, when Hitler failed his entrance examination to the Academy of Fine Arts for the second time and disappeared into the anonymity of the metropolis. Hitler read about the subjects that interested him: Richard Wagner ...

... within the Ashram, where a considerable part of patriotic sadhaks was anti-British and therefore pro-Hitler. On 11 May, Nirodbaran, the Ashram doctor, had already said to Sri Aurobindo: “In the Ashram the feeling is divided. Some are for the British and some for Hitler.” Sri Aurobindo: “For Hitler?” A disciple: “Not exactly, but they are anti-British.” Sri Aurobindo: “Not a rational feeling. How can... that people in the Ashram are pro-Hitler, will be compelled to take steps, at least to expel those who are so. If these people want the Ashram to be dissolved, they can come and tell me and I will dissolve it instead of the police doing it. “They have no idea about the world and talk like children. Hitler is the greatest menace the world has ever met. If Hitler wins, do they think India has any... not expect much from Hitler. In 1933 he had already said: “Today I regret that I have to return to India with the conviction that the new nationalism in Germany is not only narrow and selfish, but arrogant … The new racial philosophy, which has a very weak scientific foundation, stands for the glorification of the white races in general and the German race in particular.” Hitler deigned to receive him ...

... general.” (John Weiss 138) The pages in Mein Kampf written on Georg von Schönerer and Karl Lueger, mayor of Vienna, bear testimony to the influence both men had on Hitler. Karl Lueger (1844-1910), mayor of Vienna, impressed Hitler because of his oratory skill and his power over the masses, capacities which appealed to Hitler’s own, as yet latent, capabilities. Lueger was not only the mayor, he was... Franz Joseph. It was not so much Lueger-the-politician and his party, the Christian-Socialists – by 1895 the most powerful anti-Semitic party in Europe – who attracted Hitler, as his towering personality, an example of what young Hitler dreamed of becoming. More concrete was the influence of Georg von Schönerer (1842-1921), the proclaimed Führer of the Austrian Pan-Germans, who strove for unification... would become Hitler’s ideological model.” 139 A failure Hitler would never make, though, was Schönerer’s open belligerence against the Catholic Church in anti-Semitic but predominantly Catholic Austria. Schönerer’s “Away from Rome” movement cost him the adherence of so many supporters that he fell from power. A young vagabond like Adolf Hitler during his Vienna years could never meet with a rich and ...

... meetings and had many followers. His Munich counterpart, according to the press, was a certain Hitler who, however, differed from his Berlin rival by the exciting coarseness of his speeches, which reached new levels of vulgarity in the extravagance of their threats and their unconcealed sadism. While Hitler wanted to bring about the millennium by a massacre of all the Jews, there was a certain [Friedrich]... 11. The German Aspiration Hitler and his God Things Visible and Invisible It is a symptom of the confusion in the Western “consensus mentality”, supposedly materialistic and scientific, that occultism remains a subject of suspicion while millions accept the occult ceremonies of their Churches without questioning them, and while thousands of the social... simple presentation of the facts, cannot explain the historical events. This is especially true as far as the history of the Third Reich is concerned … There is a wealth of quotations which show that Hitler conceived National Socialism as a religion. Until now no historian has drawn serious conclusions from this fact. The National Socialist religion appeared too abstruse to the analytical, scientific ...

... more puzzling Hitler seems to become”, writes Christian von Krockow. 7 Alan Bullock, author of such essays like Hitler – A Study in Tyranny and Hitler and Stalin – Parallel Lives , admits in a conversation: “The more I learn about Hitler, the harder I find it to explain … I can’t explain Hitler. I don’t believe anybody can.” 8 And to H.R. Trevor-Roper “after fifty years Adolf Hitler remains a frightening... myself chosen my way in spite of totally inimical surroundings”, said Adolf Hitler, “and I, an unknown and nameless man, have kept walking until the final success. Often declared no longer existent and always wished to be non-existent, in the end I was the victor.” 10 There must have been a time “when Hitler became Hitler”, when the nonentity turned into a seer and a politician who, in a very short... worn out stray dog, reached such a pinnacle of power that Joachim Fest could write: “If Hitler had succumbed to an assassination or an accident at the end of 1938, few would hesitate to call him one of the greatest German statesmen, the consummator of Germany’s history”? 6 Libraries have been written about Hitler and Nazi Germany, yet several of the best-known and most widely read historians agree ...

... his handbook Geopolitics of the Pacific Ocean . A close friendship tied him to Rudolf Hess, who adulated Hitler and was one of the most enthusiastic Nazis. Haushofer, acquainted with Hitler since 1921, visited Hess several times in Landsberg prison, where he inevitably also met with Hitler, for Hess had a cell next to Hitler’s on the upper floor and these cells gave out unto a common room. There... the Third Reich which others would have to build up and complete, did not include colonies. Water was an element Hitler disliked, and Ernst Hanfstängl, who maintains he tried to convince Hitler of the capacities of the USA, writes: “He thought only in European terms.” 349 How did Hitler justify his demand for living space in Mein Kampf ? The principle was unequivocal: “Only a sufficiently large space... 6. Mein Kampf Hitler and his God Living Space for the Master Race “See to it that the strength of our nation does not rest on colonial foundations”, wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf , “but on our own native territory in Europe. Never consider the Reich secure unless, for centuries to come, it is in a position to give every descendant of our race a piece of ...

... “Day of the Party” that Hitler, after the debacle of the November Putsch in 1923 and his imprisonment, took the reins of the Party again in his own hand and put an end to the factional squabbles. Dinter, however, was very much his own man, even when boasting about his early convictions and his closeness to Hitler. Deep within himself he could not accept that Adolf Hitler was the one and only God-sent... following year he demanded that the Party should constitute a commission with the power to control Hitler, and was consequently excluded from the Party. A few months later he wrote: “Only the blind, uncritical admirers of Hitler or people who do not want to see the truth can doubt as yet that the Hitler Party is a party of Jesuits who, under the völkisch banner, are doing the business of Rome.” Dinter... the Geistchristliche Religionsgemeinschaft, which may be translated as “Religious Community of Christian Intellectuals”. In 1930 he called Hitler “a sentimental dreamer and babbler”. The future of the nationalist-völkisch movement was not “in the hands of Hitler or of para-military organizations; the future lies with the German youth movement, the young, Spartan groups who are the bearers of destiny ...

... three. But Hitler turned around and started walking back towards the hill. “I want to be alone”, he said – and never mentioned the experience again. Till July 1939, “before the war started”, when Hitler was the world-renowned all-powerful German Führer and Chancellor, Kubizek, though an accomplished musician, had never done better than becoming the secretary of a small municipality. Hitler now had... Hitler saw in Linz for the first time, and in the company of his friend August Kubizek, Wagner’s opera Rienzi. Kubizek has related Hitler’s reaction to this experience in detail. What renders it especially important is that Kubizek’s narration was afterwards confirmed by Hitler himself. Wagner’s Rienzi is based on the life of Cola di Rienzo (1313-54), the tribune who wanted to restore the glory... been felt as no more than a theatrical climax, although Hitler kept the possibility of a Weltenbrand, a world conflagration, in mind even in the 1930s; but Wagner’s opera libretto proved to be prophetical. “It was the most impressive moment which I have known with my friend”, writes Kubizek. “When I think back to my friendship with Adolf Hitler in my youth, what has remained most strongly and clearly ...

... future generations.” 306 Hitler was already building a mausoleum for himself and reserving his place in the Walhalla of the great. “One thing is certain”, he declared, “our world is facing a great revolution”. 307 According to Jäckel, “Hitler considered himself to be the prophet of a new world vision.” 308 This is true but perhaps stated too mildly. In any case, Hitler himself repeatedly wrote that... 6. Mein Kampf Hitler and his God Blind Faith Writing in Mein Kampf about his first contacts with the DAP in September 1919, Hitler says that, after long reflection, he came to the conclusion that “what had to be proclaimed here was a new ideology and not a new political slogan”. 304 That this reflection was not a solitary exercise has become evident... considerable extent. True, the beginnings of Hitler’s work seemed modest and the accomplishment of his ambitions questionable to most observers at the time, but not to Adolf Hitler himself. The effect the Landsberg retreat had on Hitler was that of a complete reassurance about his vocation and a total confidence in the execution of his mission. Discretion still prevented him from proclaiming himself Führer ...

... 12. The Vision of Adolf Hitler Hitler and his God “National Socialism is a Religion” It was the future propaganda-tsar Goebbels who wrote in 1928: “National Socialism is a religion. Only the religious inspiration, which shatters the old, outmoded formulas and creates new ones, is still missing. What we lack is a ritual. The time must come that National... an oath on Adolf Hitler personally, represented by the Blood Banner , the sacred banner magically containing and able to impart the presence and force of the Führer. The crowning festivity of the year was the Party Rally, held in Nuremberg in the month of September. It lasted a whole week and delegations of party organizations everywhere in Germany participated. In 1938 Hitler declared: “Several... that would last more than a single lifetime. But when I saw Hitler virtually canonizing the ritual in this manner, I realized for the first time that the phrase was intended literally. I had long thought that all these formations, processions and dedications were part of a clever propagandistic revue. Now I finally understood that for Hitler they were almost like rites of the founding of a church … It ...

... represented by the brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser, by Goebbels (till Hitler turned his mind), and by a considerable faction of leading SA-men, including Hugo Stennes, who will risk an open revolt against Hitler in Berlin, and also including the chief of the SA, Ernst Röhm, who will stubbornly hold on to his demand that Hitler launches a “second revolution”, more or less socialist. There was an outspoken... atmosphere was inimical towards the Jews. There is no doubt that Hitler did not have to push much to make a National Socialist kick a Jew, and harassing those “other” people was a lot of fun for a member of the Hitler Youth, as retaliation was out of the question. National Socialism wanted to discard the Jews from German society. Hitler wanted to eradicate them physically, sooner or later, from the body... 12. The Vision of Adolf Hitler Hitler and his God Nazism “There was actually no ideology as such, no coherent, compact theory which could be called National Socialism. Even central concepts like ‘race’ or ‘Nordic’ were defined in quite differing and loose ways, or not at all,” writes the former Heidelberg Professor Klaus von See. 736 Heinz Höhne, historian ...

... progress, Hitler was as völkisch as could be and an exponent of the times in Germany. But he extended this oppositional attitude to everything deemed by him to be anti-German, which in point of fact meant opposed to Hitler and his new ideology. In this he followed his propagandist principle: to focus the whole attention of a movement, a mass or a people on a single opponent – who for Hitler was the Jew... members in particular. But Hitler had now recast these principles in the Darwinian-racist mould, stimulated, especially after Eckart’s death, by Alfred Rosenberg, who “wielded a tremendous influence on Hitler” (Hanfstängl). From this man, steeped in the virulent Russian anti-Semitism of the turn of the century (which resulted in a massive exodus of East-European Jews), Hitler borrowed the reasonings to... 6. Mein Kampf Hitler and his God “Great Master of the Lie” If the Aryan was “the Prometheus of mankind, from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has at all times flashed forth”, his antagonist was the Jew. “The Jew offers the most striking contrast to the Aryan”, wrote Hitler. “There is probably no other people in the world who have so developed ...

... 198 The dog can be seen on some photos taken when Hitler was reviewing a parade or making an open air speech. He will be the first of a series of Hitler dogs, till the last one in the Berlin bunker, Blondi, will be used to try out the poison with which Hitler and Eva Braun are supposed to have ended their life. Another constant companion of Hitler in the early years was his dog-whip. At a certain... 4. Wolf Hitler and his God “Fortunate Wolf” “Hitler liked to be called ‘Wolf’ in his intimate circle”, we read in Fest. “The name, he decided, was the primitive Germanic form of Adolf. It accorded, moreover, with his jungle image of the world and suggested the qualities of strength, aggressiveness and solitariness. He also used ‘Wolf’ as a pseudonym o... ran his household.” 196 And Toland writes: “Hitler was living up to his own name, for Adolf was derived from the Teutonic word meaning ‘fortunate wolf’.” 197 (Another source says that “Adolf” means Adelwolf, noble wolf.) Could it be a coincidence that the H in Hitler’s signature, with the nick in the horizontal bar, resembles the rune Wolfsangel ? Hitler used his pseudonym quite frequently. Everybody ...

... 12. The Vision of Adolf Hitler Hitler and his God Faith What held together this fantastic, paranormal world of Hitler, which was more and more becoming the world in which lived the whole German nation, was faith and the will power which faith generates. Hitler squarely stated that “faith was all”. Faith in Aryanhood and in Germany’s greatness was the... faith in Hitler. “Hitler was not a politician who based himself on a programme and who had to justify his actions to the people, but the redemptive figure of an exoteric cult whose aim was to liberate the world from the Jews … Strictly speaking the Germans did not need to know anything. They only had to have faith.” 775 “I have taught you how to have faith: now give me your faith!” Hitler shouted... possible.” 776 The last, emotional occasion on which Speer met Hitler in the Führerbunker, when Hitler knew that the man who once had been his “unrequited love” did everything possible to counteract his “Nero order” to destroy Germany, he asked: “Do you still hope for a successful continuance of the war or is your faith shattered?” “Once again Hitler reduced his demand to a formal profession of faith that ...

... 7. Superior People Hitler and his God Hitler Was No Accident How was all that possible: Hitler, Nazism, the Second World War, the Holocaust…? The major tragedy of the 20th century has remained an unexplained mystery with a thousand explanations, justifications and refutations, especially among the people who started it all, the Germans. Were they not ... terminated in Hitler; he was by no means a ‘German catastrophe’, as the title of a well-known book asserted, but a product of German consistency.” 356 Among the first to use the word “accident” in connection with Hitler seems to have been Thomas Mann, the great novelist, writing or addressing his radio messages from exile to the German people. He wrote in November 1939: “Hitler, wretched as he... also Thomas Mann who in 1934 pointed out the influence of Luther on the Nazi movement in general and Hitler in particular: “No, Hitler is no accident, no inexplicable misfortune, no derailment. From him ‘light’ reflects on Luther, and one has to recognise the latter to a large degree in the former. Hitler is a true German phenomenon.” 359 Another writer in exile, Hans Habe, expressed the same idea in one ...

... was religious, occult, or, as many have maintained, demonic. Hitler “claimed to serve not the emancipation but the redemption of mankind”, writes Fest. If this is true, the question is legitimate: redemption in the name of what or of which god? About the ritualistic events of the Reichstage at Nuremberg, Speer wrote: “When I saw Hitler virtually canonizing the ritual in this manner, I realized for... something similar: an order, the hierarchic ordering of a secular priesthood … I will tell you a secret: I am founding an order …” This, Hitler confided to Hermann Rauschning, lifted a tip of the veil over his inmost thought. What kind of religion was it which Hitler wanted to launch? “The Order of the Death’s Head”, the SS, may suggest an answer. Many of Himmler’s hobbyhorses were not to Hitler’s taste... 9. The Völkisch Movement Hitler and his God The Light of Apollo, the Frenzy of Wotan We had a look at some of the ideas which became ever more articulated in “the new romanticism” that was the völkisch movement. We met with a new German history favouring heroes whose actions and ideals seemed worthy of imitation; there was the Motherland with its natural ...

... 17. A World in the Balance Hitler and his God The Munich Agreement (30 September 1938) On 29 September 1938 Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier met in Munich to decide on the fate of Czechoslovakia, which itself was barred from participation. Hitler wanted Czechoslovakia to be split up so that the Sudetenland with its... Czechoslovakia], the Czechs could have given an effective fight to Hitler … Blum and Daladier made the worst possible blunders, the one by his non-intervention policy [in the recently concluded civil war] in Spain, the other by betraying the Czechs.” 1109 Chamberlain was “a crafty fool, thinking that he was dealing most diplomatically with Hitler while he did not see the reality of what he was doing … So... into a more reasonable stance toward the situation. This attitude of appeasement, fully exploited by the sharp-sighted Führer, resulted on the following day in the signing of an agreement which gave Hitler complete satisfaction. Czechoslovakia was forced to cede to Germany “11 000 square miles of territory in which dwelt 2 800 000 Germans and 800 000 Czechs. Within this area lay all the vast Czech ...

... 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... 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... 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 ...

... 6. Mein Kampf Hitler and his God The Leader and the Masses In Mein Kampf Hitler left no doubt as to who was going to lead the Aryans in their struggle for supremacy. Although the book was written at a time when still several candidate-dictators were around, and Hitler never names himself, one does not have to cogitate much before finding out whom he... the Wise Men of Zion , or from his own intuition and experience. Hitler, the theatre man, was a genius at mass psychology, which made him a genius at propaganda; and when he picked out Joseph Goebbels as his right-hand man in these fields, his intuition was proved correct once more. We are now at the heart of the German tragedy. Hitler sought not only to dominate the masses: his objective from the... Sieg Heil! – all of that was an unmistakable warning which was not heeded. “What Hitler had in mind”, writes Zentner, “was the inner unity of the nation, welded into a strictly organized marching column, prepared for self-sacrifice and ready at any time to execute any order of the National-Socialist leadership”. 299 Hitler compared the unified masses which were the nation to a sword, his weapon to wage ...

... rightist revolt in Bavaria. Mayr borrowed a light airplane from the Reichswehr, and Eckart, with “his collaborator” Hitler, flew to Berlin on 16 March. (Toland writes: “The weather was so turbulent that despite the pilot’s skill Hitler kept vomiting … When they touched down at Berlin the wan Hitler vowed that he would never, never fly again.” 160) But on their arrival at the centre of the capital the coup... the outside of the city. Eckart profited of the occasion to introduce Hitler for the first time to some influential friends in Berlin. Afterwards they will travel there on several occasions. When in December 1923 the financial situation of the Völkische Beobachter became so critical that the newspaper had to be sold, Hitler jumped to the occasion. He alerted Drexler, but the person who directed... In Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler we obtain a glimpse of the political atmosphere in Munich at the time of Hitler’s rising. The written histories of Hitler’s life and of the Nazi party always zoom in so closely on their subject that it seems to occupy the whole stage, or at least centre stage, of life in Germany at the time. But the movement launched by Mayr, Eckart, Hitler and others was one of the ...

... 13. Medium Hitler and his God On the Mountain The place of preference where Hitler went to receive his inspirations was his villa on a mountain in the Bavarian Alps, the Obersalzberg, just above Berchtesgaden and very near to Salzburg. 1 Hitler had discovered Berchtesgaden in 1922 through – whom else? – Dietrich Eckart, who went there in hiding when... Mussolini, for whom Hitler developed a liking. It was on the Obersalzberg, auf dem Berg (on the mountain) as his mountain retreat was referred to in Hitler’s entourage, that he received the French ambassador on his last visit. Yet the meeting did not take place at the Berghof but at the Kehlsteinhaus, within walking distance of the villa. The Kehlsteinhaus was built for Hitler on the initiative and... the knights of the Grail obtains a more concrete significance if one knows that, in one of his monologues, Hitler reminisces about François-Poncet’s perfect German and his last visit “at the Gralsburg ” ¸ the Caste of the Gral, by which he meant the Kehlsteinhaus. From the Berghof, Hitler had a splendid view of the Untersberg where, as legend has it, Charlemagne is sleeping till one day he will ...

... 6. Mein Kampf Hitler and his God A Militant Movement Hitler owed the successes of his NSDAP to his insight that, in the given post-war circumstances, no new party could make headway if it was not able to stand up to the other parties, the Socialists and especially the Communists, with brute force, for they ruled the streets and broke up any meeting or... religious terms, used by Hitler freely and intentionally, for the new ideology of which he was the prophet was not a political programme to be realized by a political party and with political objectives: it was a fundamental and therefore religious creed, intended to use the German nation as an instrument for conquest of the world and the establishment of a new world order. Hitler as a human being may... 317 Because Hitler kept his most intimate thoughts a secret, “Germany subjected itself to a religion it did not know; it followed rites it did not understand; it exulted and died for a mysterium in which it was not initiated. Only ‘the Führer’ had real knowledge, no National-Socialist doubted that. And the Führer kept to himself what he did not want to share with others.” 318 “Hitler has shown his ...

... 10. The Jewish Question Hitler and his God World Conspiration One of the prevalent accusations against “international Jewry” was that the Jews were plotting a conspiracy to dominate and exploit the world, and that they were using the liberal and capitalist rightist movements as well as the socialist and communist leftist movements to achieve their aim... the purpose behind the policies of the Catholic Church to establish itself as the Universal Church which it pretends to be. Moreover, as narrated in a previous chapter, it was the objective of Adolf Hitler himself to conquer the globe for the Aryan master race, and it was this objective which resulted into his opposition to the alleged global aspirations of the Jews, propagated by malicious pamphlets... menace”, in the words of Justice Jackson, president of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal in 1946. There are countless documents telling of the sadistic power trip of the brown storm-troopers and the Hitler Youth, who could humiliate and beat up any Jew, and destroy his property, without as much as a gesture of resistance, and who became hardened by this practice to do worse. It remains a startling fact ...

... life, the redeemer of Germany. “That in the hour of her deepest need Germany gives birth to a Hitler proves her vitality … May God protect you!” 405 Siegfried Wagner was equally impressed by Hitler’s first visit: “Hitler is a wonderful man, the real soul of the German people. He must succeed.” 406 “Hitler appears as the specifically radical representative of a concept of German world hegemony that... explained and preached to the enthused German people by Chamberlain.” 403 Another admirer paying homage to Houston Chamberlain was Adolf Hitler when in 1923, a few weeks before his Beer Hall Putsch, he visited Haus Wahnfried for the first time. “It is clear that Hitler had carefully planned his visit to Wahnfried ”, writes Brigitte Hamann, “which happened at a moment when he was already considered someone... go on a pilgrimage before making an important decision, so Hitler went to obtain the blessings of Chamberlain and of the deceased master, Richard Wagner.” 404 By then Chamberlain was a bedridden man who could only hold Hitler’s hand and mumble some hardly understandable words. But afterwards he still managed to write a letter to Hitler in which he thanked God for having been able to meet, at the ...

... 10. The Jewish Question Hitler and his God “The Jews are our Misfortune” “A Jew remains a Jew, in Germany or any other country. We can never change this race, even by centuries of residence among other people”, says the Handbook of the Hitler Youth, published in 1937. 564 This statement, a point of doctrine for Hitler’s young, rash and ready heroes,... ” 579 This is even more true of the German armies in the Second World War, for they fought under the command of a Wagnerian, Adolf Hitler, who had seen to it that they grew up with Wagner’s music in their ears at every important public or political manifestation. Hitler had made Wagner into the official composer of the Third Reich; living composers, like Richard Strauss, only moved in Wagner’s shadow... him behave as if entranced. “This music affected him physically”, wrote Ernst Hanfstängl, “it had become part of Hitler’s being.” 580 And Hitler himself said one day: “When I hear Wagner, it is as if I hear the rhythms of the world in its beginnings.” 581 Hitler never hid what he owned to Wagner and he thanked him by taking Bayreuth and Wagner’s legacy under his special protection – as told by Brigitte ...

... 1. Turnabout Hitler and his God Like a Worn Out Stray Dog This was the Munich corporal Hitler arrived in on 21 December 1918, discharged from the hospital at Pasewalk. He was assigned to the Reserve Battalion of the 2nd Infantry Regiment, a battalion marked for immediate demobilization. But demobilization was what Hitler tried to prevent by any means for... army garrison in Munich was governed by Eisner’s socialists, which means that Hitler went along with the leftists, something diametrically opposed to his later beliefs. He even became a member of the propaganda section of the Soldiers Council. And when Kurt Eisner had been murdered, on 21 February, Vertrauensmann Hitler was one of the hundred thousand mourners following the remains of the Jewish prime... political propaganda and how little a biography”. 14 In the beginning of 1919 corporal Hitler would have done anything to stay another day in the army, for he had nowhere else to go. “He was after the First World War one of the many thousands of ex-soldiers who roamed the streets looking for work … At that time Hitler was willing to accept a job from anybody who was kind towards him. He would have worked ...

... dagger plunged in his back [by the pacifist Social-Democrats and other ‘Jews’]”, wrote Hitler in *Mein Kampf.* 260 This untruth, a lie called legend, launched by Hindenburg before a commission examining the cause of the German collapse, was reinforced and propagated by Ludendorff, and was still believed in after Hitler had done his damage. “It has poisoned, as nothing else, the internal political atmosphere... 6. Mein Kampf Hitler and his God Mortal Enemy France In the First World War the Germans were fighting on two fronts. This made the divided efforts of their armies indecisive, and the unending war caused ever greater suffering in the Fatherland. Because of this problematic situation the German power elite – the Army, the heavy industry and the banks – as... dictatorship of the duo Hindenburg-Ludendorff, did their utmost to bring about the downfall of the Russian empire. When Lenin came to power, it was thanks to the Germans – a fact conveniently forgotten by Hitler in his diatribes against Lenin and his “Judeo-Bolshevism”. The Peace of Brest-Litovsk, concluded on 9 February 1918 with the Ukraine and on 3 March with Russia, looks like the finishing off and robbing ...

... doing, only obeys an iron law of logic.” This was the lesson Hitler had learned, and which he worded rather civilly in one of his nightly monologues: “One must not take pity on people who are marked by destiny to perish … One must in no way take pity on whoever lacks the necessary hardness in life.” 421 “Life is cruel”, reflected Hitler, deep in the night reclining in a comfortable chair at his eastern... war is everywhere. There is no beginning to it, there is no peace, ever. War is life. War is in every contest, war is the primeval state”, said Hitler to Hermann Rauschning. And also: “Nature is cruel, that’s why we may be so too.” 423 And yet Hitler did not believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution. In the composite arrangement of his mind the most irrational and contradictory ideas existed side... 8. Long Skulls and Broad Skulls Hitler and his God Social Darwinism Racism found itself justified by Darwin’s theory of evolution published in 1859 under the title The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. The racism deduced from Darwin’s revolutionary view of nature was that all life is a continuous struggle for existence in which the fittest ...

... but some descendants still survive in the original location. In 1934 Elisabeth would receive the Chancellor of the German Reich, Adolf Hitler, at the Nietzsche Archives in Weimar with a flashy right arm salute, and create the occasion for a photo session of Hitler with the bust of Friedrich Nietzsche, symbolizing the philosophical tradition of Nazism. Nietzsche’s superman was not the only new human... 698 The well-read Dietrich Eckart was familiar with List’s publications, a fact which we find confirmed in Ralph Reuth’s Hitler biography, and communicated this knowledge, along with much more, to his Austrian pupil. There is also the testimony of a Munich librarian that Hitler borrowed List’s books, and Brigitte Hamann mentions several occasions on which he used Listian language. 699 Intriguing, moreover... Tagore on nationalism with a handwritten dedication on the occasion of his 1921 birthday: ‘To Mr Adolf Hitler, my dear Armanist Brother, B. Steininger’. Babette Steininger has been identified as an early member of the Nazi Party in Munich.” And Hamann cogitates: “This could be an indication that Hitler had contacts with a secret organization connected with List”, adding: “The word ‘Armanist’ could also ...

... 10. The Jewish Question Hitler and his God Socialists and Communists Although “socialist” was a component of the name of the National-Socialist Party, the word meant to Hitler something quite different from its ordinary significance; it was included into the Party name mainly to attract the workers, as had been the initial purpose of the Thule Society... struggle against the bourgeois society for a just distribution of the common weal, but a functional integration into the body of the Volk or nation, cancelling out any notion of individualism. Actually Hitler – supreme leader, genius and artist – had a profound disdain for the workers, except when he tried to lure them into the ranks of his Party, or when he needed their effort to prepare Germany for war... capitalism!) were creations of the Jews to dominate the world, and they were therefore to be opposed by the right-thinking with all their might. “My socialism is something different from Marxism”, Hitler said to Hermann Rauschning. “My socialism is not a class struggle, but order. Who thinks of socialism as revolt and demagoguery of the masses is not a National-Socialist. Revolution is not a spectacle ...

... 6. Mein Kampf Hitler and his God Hitler Bares his Mind William Shirer, the American journalist who has followed “the rise and fall of the Third Reich” from nearby, writes: “It might be argued that had more non-Nazi Germans read [ Mein Kampf ] before 1933 and had the foreign statesmen of the world perused it carefully while there was still time, both Germany... For whatever other accusations can be made against Adolf Hitler, no one can accuse him of not putting down in writing exactly the kind of Germany he intended to make if he ever came to power and the kind of world he meant to create by armed German conquest. The blueprint of the Third Reich and, what is more, of the barbaric New Order which Hitler inflicted on conquered Europe in the triumphant years between... advantage of present hindsight, are agreed – as little as the top Nazis around Hitler were agreed on it among themselves. This is the fundamental paradox of this book, which confers to it a special place in history. “Rarely and probably never in history has a ruler, before he came to power, put down in writing, as Adolf Hitler did, what he subsequently carried out” writes Jäckel, and he quotes Hans Gisevius: ...

... baptized”. Even Hitler will compare the Christian culture in Germany to a veneer covering a world of ancient fears and impulses still very much alive. These were the hidden realities Romanticism fell back on, as did, in its wake, the völkisch movement which built up an imaginary world fed by deep instincts. “National Socialism was a völkisch movement”, states George Mosse. “Yet Hitler would never have... 7. Superior People Hitler and his God The Quest for World Domination “The Germans once held the whole world in their hands and they will do so again, and with more power than ever”, wrote that exalted anonymous German in 1510. Similar feelings were given vent in the following centuries (as we will see below), not in reference to the Book of a Hundred... underlying ideological foundation for the feeling of “Germanness”, of belonging to a German Volk . It was this special sense of belonging which made them sing, long before they raised their right arm to Hitler: “Today Germany belongs to us, tomorrow the whole world”, and shout slogans like “Am deutschen Wesen wird die Welt genesen” , meaning that the rest of the world would regain its health if it shared ...

... redemption.” 559 “A line of anti-Semitic descent from Martin Luther to Adolf Hitler is easy to draw. Both Luther and Hitler were obsessed by a demonologized universe inhabited by Jews. ‘Know, Christian’, wrote Luther, ‘that next to the devil thou hast no enemy more cruel, more venomous and violent than a true Jew.’ Hitler himself, in that early dialogue with Dietrich Eckart, asserted that the later... 10. The Jewish Question Hitler and his God Luther, the anti-Semite Then came the Reformation with the towering personality of Martin Luther, who threw his long shadow ahead in German history. In a previous chapter we have seen him as the precursor of nationalism; here now we will have a look at his influence on the sentiment which is inseparable from ... compensate for all the money fleeced from the Germans, and be expelled from the country … 557 Several authors who mention this programme proposed by Luther remind their readers that it was exactly what Hitler, who called Luther “that powerful enemy of the Jews”, would implement – adding a point of his own which for others had remained unthinkable, at least to such an extent. “The historical connection of ...

... Gutberlet], a Munich physician who belonged to the intimate circle around Hitler. Gutbarlett believed in the ‘sidereal pendulum’, an astrological contraption, and claimed that this had given him the power to sense at once the presence of any Jew or persons of partial Jewish ancestry, and to pick them out in any group of people. Hitler … had many discussions with him on racial questions.” 69 Wilhelm Gutberlet... 2. Masters Hitler and his God The Thule Society The Germanenorden-Walvater was not in good shape when Sebottendorff took charge of the Bavarian province in 1916. This was in the middle of “the Great War” which the Germans at the outset had expected to last only a few weeks or months, but which had turned into unending hell at the front and dire hardship... century by a succession of esteemed publicists, scientists as well as litterateurs, and became gospel truth to all völkisch-oriented, racist Germans in the first decennia of the twentieth century. Hitler, for one, held exactly the same opinion, as did Alfred Rosenberg, the ideological supervisor of the Third Reich, and consequently the official ideology of the Nazis. Thule had also become familiar ...

... 6. Mein Kampf Hitler and his God “Germany, Awake!” Dietrich Eckart’s pithy exhortation, embroidered on all Party banners, was an important component of Mein Kampf, which was after all the announcement and the programme of the man who intended to lead a resurrected Germany towards its glorious future. Yet the real meaning of this exhortation was not its... its literal meaning; having fought a war, mourned its dead, being shaken by revolts and obliged to fight for its daily sustenance, Germany had had no time to fall asleep. What the Eckart-Hitler slogan meant was that Germany must regain its place and power as the foremost nation of the world, that it must rebuild all means necessary to occupy its rightful place on the globe after having been humbled... “Every manifestation of human culture, every product of art, science and technical skill which we see before our eyes today, is almost exclusively the product of the Aryan creative power”, wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf. “This very fact justifies the conclusion that it was the Aryan alone who founded a superior type of humanity; therefore he represents the archetype of what we understand by the term ...

... 2. Masters Hitler and his God The Germanenorden [Order of Germanic People] It was around 1880 – an axis in European cultural history – that the self-consciousness of the Germans, not to say their superiority complex, took on inflated proportions. Thanks to the statesmanship of Bismarck they had finally succeeded, in 1871, to build a German nation, which... On this well-prepared soil the Germanenorden was born, the brainchild of a mechanical engineer, Theodor Fritsch (1852-1933). Some consider him to have been “the most important anti-Semitic before Hitler”. 41 It was Fritsch who compiled, in 1887, the Catechism of the Anti-Semite; its twenty-seventh impression in 1907 was renamed Handbook of the Jewish Question and remained till the end of the Third... by candle light. And so on. This goes to show that the Germanenorden was still deeply stuck in the naïve imaginings of a romantic past. It is not that simple to create a new culture with new myths. Hitler will do much better. Still, if a certain aspect of the Germanenorden may appear jejune, its anti-Semitism was fanatical, aggressive and malignant. The order has been the breeding ground of the horrors ...

... 16. Two Poems Hitler and his God “The Children of Wotan” In the part of the globe which one may roughly call “the West”, the Christian era and its civilization were breaking up, and the West had become, since the Renaissance, a world in transition. “As the Christian view of the world loses its authority, the more menacingly will the ‘blond beast’ be heard... green hat who rides at the head of his wild hunters, and who possesses the berserkers with his force and invulnerability. Nazism took pride in this revival of the ruthless Germanic warrior spirit. The Hitler Youth sang: “If all the world lies in ruins, / What the devil do we care? / We will still go on marching, / For today Germany belongs to us, / And tomorrow the world.” And the SS-magazine Das Schwarze... cities as gigantic bonfires to celebrate the summer solstice; for it was the god Thor whose lightning (the exploding bombs) was taking revenge on Germany’s enemies. 1096 This elementary force line in Hitler and Nazism has been sufficiently dealt with in our story to interpret Sri Aurobindo’s poem: “The Children of Wotan (1940)”. The date, part of the title, is relevant because at that time the further ...

... 6. Mein Kampf Hitler and his God “The System” The language Hitler used when he wrote or talked about the government of the Weimar Republic was even worse than the way he talked about the hated French. “November criminals”, designating all Leftists and Jews allegedly responsible for the armistice and related events, was used by him on uncountable occasions... struggle with the Left and their centrist partners in government was happening in the present; it had to be won before the power could be gained and the revenge against Germany’s mortal enemy prepared. Hitler called the government “the present Jewish-Democratic Reich, which has become a veritable curse for the German people”; they were “those ruffians of Jews who came into power in 1918 and were able to ...

... 9. The Völkisch Movement Hitler and his God Völkisch Romanticism The importance of the völkisch movement can be deduced from its diversity, by which it adapted itself to all aspects of German life, and from the number of its adherents. This was a popular movement in the real sense of the word. It found much of its justification in the enduring appraisal... reasoning showed you that, if all higher culture was originally due to the Aryans, cultured peoples like the Greeks and the Romans must have been of Aryan blood, and Aryan meant the same as Germanic. Hitler, borrowing from the völkisch tradition when it suited him or when he did not know better, was of the same opinion. “By the Greeks he meant the Dorians. Naturally his view was affected by the theory... north had been of Germanic origin and that, therefore, its culture had not belonged to the Mediterranean world.” 475 When one asks who were our forefathers, we must always point back to the Greeks”, Hitler said. 476 Everything belonging to this exalted but fictitious past shared in the völkisch adulation. The runes, used from the second century CE till the end of the Middle Ages, and brought back ...

... 10. The Jewish Question Hitler and his God Intelligence “Intelligence is the mortal sin of the Jews”, said one Friedrich Gentz. The Jews were indeed thought to be an intelligent sort of people, and they were hated and feared for it. Hitler himself wrote in Mein Kampf: “The intellectual faculties of the Jews have been trained through thousands of years... sterile, incapable of creation, and that he was a parasite or a vampire of the life-force and creativity of others. “The Jewish intellect will never be constructive but always destructive”, wrote Hitler. “In the course of a few years [the Jew] endeavours to exterminate all those who represent the national intelligence. And by thus depriving the peoples of their natural intellectual leaders, he fits ...

... 10. The Jewish Question Hitler and his God “Without Christianity no anti-Semitism” The popular anti-Semitic mentality, in the rest of Europe as well as in Germany, was the result of a historic process which went back all the way to the life and death of Jesus Christ, and which was closely connected with Christianity. The attitude of Europe, where Christianity... deceitful traitor, a smiling villain who kissed Jesus on the mouth while stabbing him in the back. Indeed, one can hear incendiary anti-Semitic echoes of the Judas story in the stab-in-the-back accusation Hitler manipulated to convince the German public that the heroic German army had not lost the First World War but had been betrayed, stabbed in the back, by treacherous Jews and Jewish-paid politicians on... same conclusion much more bluntly in a conversation with Ron Rosenbaum: “Christians say the Holocaust is part of the evil of humanity. It isn’t the evil of humanity. It’s the evil of Christendom … Hitler was brought up to hate the Jews, particularly to hate the Jews as the people of the Devil. He lost his Christian faith, but he retained the hatred of the Jews as the people of the Devil … I don’t blame ...