Hitler Vs. The Untermenschen: Myth & Reality

                       By Guillaume Durocher

             

Standard narratives of the Third Reich have long emphasized the concept of “subhumans” (Untermenschen) as central to National Socialist thought and policy on race. Here is a typical example from Wikipedia (as of 23 March 2016):

Untermensch . . . underman, sub-man, subhuman; plural: Untermenschen) is a term that became infamous when the Nazis used it to describe “inferior people” often referred to as “the masses from the East,” that is Jews, Roma, and Slavs (mainly ethnic Poles, Serbs, and later also Russians). The term was also applied to most Blacks, and persons of color, with some particular exceptions.

The concept of the “subhuman” clearly has a central place in the demonology of anti-Nazism, the claim that Adolf Hitler and National Socialism are uniquely evil in human history (unlike, say, communism).

Historians frequently refer to “Untermenschen” to explain the Third Reich’s racial policies, but, strikingly, almost never in the context of a quote from Hitler or some other National Socialist source. The simple reason for is that Hitler, and perhaps most other National Socialists, almost never used the term. In searching through thousands of pages of Hitler’s books, speeches, and private conversations (all now conveniently available in PDF format, typically available on websites maintained by faithful National Socialists), I have found exactly four mentions of Untermensch and its derivatives (especially Untermenschentum or subhumanity). In this article, I would like to put the Untermensch concept and its actual use by Hitler in its historical context, as free as possible from the baggage of the victors’ mythology of the Second World War. For as we know, though history is always written by the victors, that account is never disinterested.

The Underman: A Dysgenic, Not Ethnic, Concept

The very use of the word “subhuman,” with its evil connotations, as a translation for Untermensch is somewhat misleading. It was not Germans, but the American racial thinker and eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard, who perhaps made the most prominent early use of the term “Under-Man” in his 1922 book The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man. Stoddard’s underman does not refer to a particular ethnic group, but rather to the gradual degeneration of populations due to dysgenics as a result of the relaxation of selective pressures enabled by civilization. He used the following definition: “The Under-Man – the man who measures under the standards of capacity and adaptability imposed by the social order in which he lives.”[1]

According to Stoddard, civilization paradoxically creates populations too stupid to have created that civilization and, ultimately, to maintain it. The result is an expansion in the less gifted and more anti-social elements of European nations, who are then rabble-roused into promoting revolutionary chaos and tyranny in great upheavals such as the French and Bolshevik Revolutions. This use of the term “underman,” which can also be contrasted with Nietzsche’s “superman,” is not meant to denigrate or justify domination of other peoples (e.g. Slavs), but rather to describe degenerative processes within a nation, including one’s own. At least three of the four recorded uses by Hitler of the terms underman/subhumanity correspond to this meaning.

Significantly, the German National Socialists were directly influenced by Stoddard. Alfred Rosenberg, a reputed leading National Socialist theorist (though one actually not always approved by Hitler), explicitly quotes Stoddard’s definition of the underman in his best-selling The Myth of the Twentieth Century. And here there is already an awkward fact in the mainstream anti-Nazi account. National Socialist killings are claimed to be motivated by the “underman” concept. It is then asserted or insinuated that all racial and eugenic thinking must logically lead to such atrocities (even a thinker as subtle as Raymond Aron made this claim). However, in point fact there was considerable debate within the Third Reich on racial policies, with the more pro-Slav and assimilationist positions often being espoused by top ideologues and racial thinkers.

Rosenberg himself as Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern territories was a consistent, if rather ineffectual, advocate for improving treatment of the Slavs and for a grand strategy of fostering the Soviet Union’s subject nations’ independence as allies against Moscow. Another conciliatory figure was Hans Günther. He was Germany’s top racial scientist and eugenicist, to the extent that he was known as Rassengünther and Rassenpapst (“race pope”).[2] For instance, Günther believed that four-fifths of Poles in the northern Danzig area were genetically close enough that they could be Germanized and assimilated.[3]

There is clearly possible overlap between Stoddard’s notion of the underman stemming from dysgenic civilization and the older notion of inequality between the races (i.e. if a foreign race becomes inferior through degeneration). Some Third Reich ideology and propaganda espoused this, positing that northwest European (Nordic) and Germanic races were uniquely idealistic and had superior state-building and culture-creating abilities.[4] Such ideas are debatable. The fact is however that despite the general postwar taboo on the examination of racial differences, geneticists have found that human beings cluster genetically along traditional racial (i.e. continental) and ethno-national lines. Furthermore, medical and psychometric studies have found average differences not only in physique and health, but also in temperament and intelligence between such groups.[5]

The notion of a “master race” (Herrenvolk) is also heavily emphasized in mainstream accounts of the Third Reich. In fact, Hitler never used the term “master race” in either his books, speeches, or recorded private Table Talk. The wider idea that more culturally advanced or biologically superior peoples had a right or even duty to dominate less gifted peoples was not a National Socialist innovation. On the contrary, this idea was widely shared across the world at the time, including by British imperialists, French Freemasons, American segregationists, Japanese warlords, and Jewish commissars.[6]

The Underman in Hitler’s Speeches

There is no mention of “subhumans” or “subhumanity” in Mein Kampf or in the unpublished Second Book. In Hitler’s numerous speeches –  most comprehensively gathered for the 1932-1945 period in Max Domarus’ monumental four-volume collection – I can find no more than three mentions in over 3,000 pages. And even here “subhumanity” (Untermenschentum) is used twice and “subhumans” only once. In each case, Hitler used the term more in a Stoddardian sense of the lower elements of a society being rabble-roused and led by communists, rather than in an ethnic sense targeting Slavs and Gypsies, let alone Jews.

Hitler first used is in a January 30, 1934 speech to the Reichstag, where Hitler used the term “subhumanity” (again, perhaps better rendered as “underhumanity”) to refer to a part of Germany which had become sensitive to Marxism:

Furthermore, the fact that a number of communist ideologists believe it necessary to turn back the tide of history and, in doing so, make use of a subhumanity (Untermenschentum) which mistakes the concept of political freedom for the idea of allowing criminal instincts free rein will similarly cause us little concern. We were able to deal with these elements when they were in power and we were in the opposition. In the future we will be even more certain of being able to deal with them because they are now in the opposition and we are in power.[7]

Hitler’s second mention of Untermenschentum is in an April 28, 1939 speech to the Reichstag attacking Franklin Roosevelt – again refers to communists’ ability to foment revolution by appealing to the lower elements of a Western Europeannation, this time Civil War Spain:

Entire populations of villages and cities were literally slaughtered under the silent, gracious patronage of humanitarian world apostles from the democracies of Western Europe and North America. In this victory parade, side by side with their Italian comrades, the volunteers of our German Legion will march in the rows of valiant Spanish soldiers. Shortly afterwards we hope to welcome them here in the homeland. The German Volk will then find out how, in this instance also, its valiant sons fought in the defense of the freedom of a most noble people and how, in the end, they contributed to the rescue of European civilization. For the victory of Bolshevist subhumanity (Untermenschentum) in Spain could only too easily have swept over Europe.[8]

In the third instance, in a November 8, 1941 speech in the Munich Löwenbräukeller on the anniversary of the Putsch, there is Hitler’s only confirmed public utterance of the word “Untermenschen”:

Time meanwhile has proved what we National Socialists maintained for many years: it [the Soviet Union] is truly a state in which the whole national intelligentsia has been slaughtered, and where only spiritless, forcibly proletarianized subhumans remain. Above them, there is the gigantic organization of the Jewish commissars, that is, established slaveowners. Frequently people wondered whether, in the long run, nationalist tendencies would not be victorious there. But they completely forgot that the bearers of a conscious nationalist view no longer existed. That, in the end, the man who temporarily became the ruler of this state, is nothing other than an instrument in the hands of this almighty Jewry. If Stalin is on stage and steps in front of the curtain, then Kaganovich and all those Jews stand behind him, Jews who, in ten-thousandfold ramifications, control this mighty empire.[9]

This use could be considered to be in line with that of the “subhumanity” appealed to by communists in Germany and Spain, the only difference being that the revolution that failed there had triumphed in Russia. Hitler could be seen as implying in a novel sense that the Soviet peoples are “subhuman,” but that is by no means explicit. Also noteworthy is that there is no suggestion that the Jews are “subhumans,” but rather than the Jews are cruelly ruling over the undermen as “slaveowners.”

Hitler on Jews: Deadly Rivals, Not “Subhumans”

Hitler’s third use of the term highlights a misleading if not outright false claim of the anti-Nazi narrative: That Hitler and National Socialists lumped less gifted populations together with Jews under the heading “subhumans.” In fact, Hitler had long been extraordinarily impressed by the tribal prowess of the Jews. As he recounts in a largely-ignored passage of Mein Kampf on his prolonged “profound anxiety” in converting to anti-Semitism:

As I critically reviewed the activities of the Jewish people throughout long periods of history I became anxious and asked myself whether for some inscrutable reasons beyond the comprehension of poor mortals such as ourselves, Destiny may not have irrevocably decreed that the final victory must go to this small nation? May it not be that this people which has lived only for the earth has been promised the earth as a recompense? is our right to struggle for our own self-preservation based on reality, or is it a merely subjective thing? Fate answered the question for me inasmuch as it led me to make a detached and exhaustive inquiry into the Marxist teaching and the activities of the Jewish people in connection with it.[10]

Hitler plainly did not consider Jews “subhumans” in anything like the sense he may have considered Gypsies or the lower elements of European nations, in particular Slavic ones, to be so, and his grounds for persecuting them were entirely different. Hitler did not advocate the elimination of Jewry on eugenic grounds, but on grounds of European self-defense against a corrupting and cruel alien domination.

It is interesting to think about why the mainstream narrative emphasizes the misleading idea that National Socialist anti-Semitism considered Jews “subhumans,” as opposed to being the perfidious and gifted leaders of the undermen. The effect of inaccurately lumping Jews and non-Jews who suffered under National Socialist rule together as “subhumans” is to create solidarity between the two groups, and lessening the international appeal of National Socialist anti-Semitism. It is no secret that the Poles and Russians were also among the most anti-Semitic peoples in the world at the time, having a long list of grievances against the Jews, from centuries of misanthropic business practices to a leading role in communist tyranny and mass murder.

If mainstream historiography were to acknowledge that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was based not on a concern about dysgenic “subhumans,” but about Jewish power and privilege, this could well bring people to think about Jewish privilege in the world today, most garishly visible in the United States[11] and France. Indeed, this would highlight the possibilities of multiracial alliances of those who consider themselves to be victims of Jewish power, especially between Europeans and Muslims.[12]

I cannot resist noting the similarity between Hitler’s assessment of Jews and communism, and that of Winston Churchill, as described in his famous 1920 newspaper article “Bolshevism versus Zionism”:

Some people like Jews and some do not; but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world. [. . .] In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort [by patriotic Russian Jews] rise the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. [. . .] This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.

One has the distinct impression that Hitler and Churchill were in basic agreement about dysgenics, communism, and Jews, but merely differed in the sides they chose to serve. This incidentally has enormous implications for Churchill’s ethics, given that he claimed to be fighting so that “the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years”[13] (that’s right: Churchill fought for a thousand-year Reich) and to “keep England white!”[14] Either Churchill was monumentally insincere or he was incredibly short-sighted in making a Faustian pact with forces in America and Russia which would inevitably work to destroy the empire and race he claimed to hold dear.

Hitler’s Slavophobia

I can find only one mention of Untermenschen by Hitler that fits the mainstream narrative. In a conversation in the night of September 14–15, 1941, Hitler denounces judges for being too soft on violent German criminals, and compares the latter to Russian prisoners of wars:

Nearly two thousand people in Germany disappear every year without trace—victims, for the most part, of maniacs or sadists. It’s known that these latter are generally recidivists—but the lawyers take great care to inflict only very light penalties on them. And yet these subhuman creatures are the ferment that undermines the state! I make no distinction between them and the brutes who populate our Russian P.O.W. camps.[15]

This is a shocking comparison, Hitler not considering his opponents in war to be honorable fellow soldiers conscripted by an evil communist tyranny, but no better than the lowest German criminals. This line of thinking can easily be tied to the German mistreatment of Soviet P.O.W.s, ranging from killing to willful neglect, which led to the deaths of over 3 million.

There is then, as with all effective narratives, a grain of truth to the mainstream view. While it clearly caricatures racial thinking in the Third Reich and radically overemphasizes and misrepresents the concept of the underman, the fact is that in Hitler’s case this did underpin a callous and even murderous attitude in the Eastern territories. This is somewhat similar to the status of anti-Semitism in Third Reich cinema. Whereas films like The Eternal Jewand The Jew Süss are given enormous attention, actually out of the over 1,000 films produced in National Socialist Germany, only a half-dozen were primarily anti-Semitic. As some recent mainstream scholarship has emphasized, the German people’s support for National Socialism was not cultivated primarily by stoking jealousy and viciousness against a “powerless minority,” but by appealing to the highest idealism and sense of sacrifice in service of one’s people.[16]

Insofar as Hitler equated the races of the Soviet Union with communist ideology (by these races’ supposed vulnerability to Jewish-led communism), he contributed to murderous policies and to alienating nations which might have been allies against communism and Jewry, and hence to the defeat of the Third Reich.

             

Given the disputed translations and my insufficient knowledge of German, I cannot comment firmly on a central piece of evidence in the mainstream narrative’s case, namely the notorious 1942 SS pamphlet entitled Der Untermensch. The document seems to dehumanize Soviet peoples, or at least large swathes of them, equating them as part of a wider, almost mystical world-historical process: By definition, if humanity evolves upward, some are left behind, the underman, those who would, out of spite and selfishness, drag those who have risen back into the mud. Here too, incidentally, the Jews however are not considered “subhumans” but are rather their leaders.

The mainstream narrative does not recognize that Der Untermensch certainly does not sum up National Socialist views and public discourse on race. The SS itself could be far more nuanced and ecumenical.[17] Propaganda like Der Untermenschshould also be seen in the wider context of an era of brutal revolutions and total wars. The Third Reich hardly had a monopoly in extreme propaganda meant to motivate the nation to sacrifice and to dehumanize an enemy whose defeat requires the harshest methods.[18]

In the racial theories of Stoddard, Rosenberg, and Günther, the underman concept was not incompatible with conciliatory or assimilationist policies towards the Slavs. Hitler however, along with his influential secretary Martin Bormann, took an extremely hard-line view, including statements explicitly contradicting Rosenberg and Günther.

Hitler’s harsh policies in the eastern territories were justified on the following grounds:

1.Realpolitik: Non-German nation-states are inherently unreliable or threatening, therefore their populations must not grow and their states should be destroyed. This was grounded in Hitler’s incredibly negative reaction to multiculturalism in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the unreliability of non-German units in First World War, combined with an inherently conflictual view of life and international relations, made up of perpetual competition between nation-states.

2. Nordicism: Non-German populations could not be assimilated into Germany without the risk that such miscegenation would be dysgenic, leading to quasi-permanent genetic damage. This was motivated by recent racial theories on the success of the West and the haunting fear that miscegenation with lesser stock had led to the decline of Ancient Greece and Rome.

Hitler’s plans for the East are among the most chilling of his private Table Talk (the veracity of which is rarely disputed): Repeatedly demanding the razing of Moscow and Saint Petersburg so as to permanently destroy any Russian state west of the Urals, that Slavs not be provided healthcare or education (lest they multiply and self-organize), that Germans be systematically segregated from the natives, and that Crimea in particular be ethnically cleansed to make way for German settlers. Hitler absurdly claimed the borders of “Europe” end where Slavdom begins, and argues the natives should be treated like America’s Red Amerindians or the British Empire’s Indians. Hitler conceded the eventuality of assimilating some Slavs, but urged this be extremely limited and discriminating (better safe than sorry, he presumably thought). He would occasionally claim the natives would anyway be better off under German rule, but this seems anything but a superficial reassurance, and in any event his preferred humane outcome seems to have been sterilization.

There is a kind of ruthless logic to Hitler’s approach. The mainstream narrative is correct in noting that racial and eugenic thinking can lead to such conclusions, but it is false in claiming this must inevitably be so (after all, any line of thinking, such as Christianity or Marxism, can be taken to violent conclusions). But there is no getting around the fact that genetic thinking inevitably leads to valuing some life over other life (or, at least, some genes over other genes), if the human race is to improve. (Even the most well-thinking liberal would, when pressed, acknowledge that the spread of disease-causing genes is a bad thing.)

Churchill incidentally made arguments similar to Hitler’s: Concerning the need for eugenics in England, the good that was the replacement of the Australian Aborigines by “the stronger race” that was the Anglo-Saxon Australians, and the refusal to provide food to starving Bengalis that had been “breeding like rabbits.” He once said during the war: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”

It is also a fact that the European peoples have seen a staggering relative decline in numbers and power in the world, precisely due to the policies Hitler criticized: Of providing healthcare and development to Afro-Asiatic populations who were incapable of indigenously producing them, and thus enabling massive demographic explosions in the absence of any population control policy. Ethnic Europeans have declined from making up over a third of the world population 1900 to perhaps 10 percent today.  Africans, especially sub-Saharans, are expected to quadruple in number to over 4 billion this century. Muslims, with which there is some overlap with Africans, are expected to almost double in population by mid-century to over 2.75 billion. Meanwhile the sons of Europe, who in 1900 controlled virtually the entire world, will before 2100 be reduced to minorities in their own former homelands in both North America and Western Europe. These facts both highlight Hitler’s failings – hairsplitting between Germanics and Slavs appears uniquely petty in the wider context of European collapse – but also helps us understand his contempt for do-gooder colonialists (whom he even threatened to have put in concentration camps).

Hitler’s eastern policies were supremely blame-worthy, ultimately criminally irresponsible and mad. Here is a classic story of hubris and nemesis. One can ask: Why not even attempt to make Poland into an anti-communist buffer state? Why this unwillingness, in this war to the death, to maximize chances of victory by granting even the non-Russian peoples their own nation-states, given their obvious interest in the destruction of the Soviet “prison of nations”? At the risk of understating the human and moral catastrophe: C’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute.

But asking such questions can miss the point. Hindsight is always 20/20 and comfortable armchair-generals always know best, don’t they? We must learn from suffering. A world-historical figure like Hitler – who must be ranked in terms of impact with the likes of Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, or Napoleon – does not achieve the successes that he does (astonishing up to 1941) by being “reasonable” and compromising with one’s ideals and goals. Rosenberg blamed Hitler’s tragic mistakes in this regard on his artistic penchant[19] for the passions, caught up in the intoxication of spectacular mass rallies and his stunning early triumphs. Hitler for his part could well have been speaking of himself in the following general statement: “I have long realized that actors and artists often have such fantastic ideas that one is compelled from time to time to shake an admonitory finger at them and bring them back to earth.”[20]

                                    Notes

1. Lothrop Stoddard, The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923, republished by Forgotten Books, 2012), 23. Compare also with the McGruderian concept of “nigger tech”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTzO-_Yl4d0

2. I am following the mainstream view here. This could well also be fabrication or caricature.

3, Martin Bormann, Hitler’s Table Talk (Ostara Publications, 2012), 202.

4. Guillaume Durocher, “Nordicism Today,” North American New Right, March 2, 2016, https://counter-currents.com/2016/03/nordicism-today/

5. Guillaume Durocher, “Some Recent Genetic Studies . . . & Hitler,” North American New Right, November 11, 2015, https://counter-currents.com/2015/11/some-recent-genetic-studies-hitler/

6. Indeed, one could argue that many influential Jewish oligarchs such as George Soros, Sheldon Adelson, and Bernard-Henri Lévy have yet to abandon such claims to ethnic superiority and supremacy.

7. Max Domarus, Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, 1932-1945 (Wauconda, Illinois: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1990), 420

8. Domarus, Hitler, 1580.

9. Domarus, Hitler, 2505.

10. Adolf Hitler (Murphy translation), Mein Kampf, 59.

11. To cite only some of the most visible markers: Complete ownership of Hollywood, ownership of much of television, ownership of elite print media, ownership of the two most culturally influential Internet companies (Google and Facebook), massive over-representation and sometimes even outnumbering of white gentiles in the Ivy League universities both as professors and students, circa 500% over-representation in the Senate, circa 2000% over-representation in Supreme Court, and providing between a one and two thirds of Democratic Party financing (including all seven of Hillary Clinton’s top contributors). Such preponderance is simply astonishing. What is truly insufferable is that not only are white gentiles often under-represented in key institutions but are portrayed by “anti-racist” Jews as the most privileged group in the country, responsible for the ills of blacks and other minorities. What’s more, white gentiles are not allowed to organize to defend their group interests, while the powerful Israel lobby in Washington ensures that U.S. foreign policy systematically supports the existing the Jewish ethno-state Israel, with its racist immigration policies, through murderous wars, billions in subsidies, and systematic vetoes at the United Nations. If one believes in karma, one can understand Jewish organizations’ perpetual and characteristic nervousness.

12. Such a strategy has achieved limited success in some cases (namely with Alain Soral’s organization Égalité et Réconciliation and the popular appeal of Dieudonné M’bala M’bala). This strategy, regardless of its ultimate success or failure, causes extreme alarm and agitation among Jewish groups. The strategy also embodies a rather poetic dialectic: These same Jewish groups have promoted non-European immigration and multiculturalism explicitly citing the idea that a multiethnic society is one in which a united Judeo-critical popular political movement would no longer be possible. What irony if the strategy were to succeed!

13. Churchill’s hope of a thousand-year British Empire was prominently mentioned in his iconic “This was their finest hour” speech of June 18, 1940. Of course, the British Empire would very rapidly unravel in the following years, under the debilitating cost of the Second World War and the postwar pressure and hegemony of the American Empire. While Churchill’s vain millennial imperialist ambitions are rarely mentioned, Hitler’s failure to create a “thousand-year Reich” is endlessly repeated.

14. The immigration policy Churchill advocated to his cabinet as postwar prime minister.

15. Borman, Table Talk, 13.

16. Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience(2005): “Challenging conventional assumptions about Hitler, Koonz locates the source of his charisma not in his summons to hate, but in his appeal to the collective virtue of his people, the Volk.” There could be an element of projection in liberal-leftist propaganda against the Third Reich. Consider a show like Last Week Tonight, a non-stop stream of completely unselfconscious snobbery and intellectual intolerance against all whites who think a little differently or are considered “low-class,” an exercise meant only to flatter the young viewer and comfort him in the liberal-egalitarian world-view which has been ceaselessly pumped into his brain since childbirth. George Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate” comes to mind. And the whole thing executed as a series of interruptions of more-or-less obscene non-sequiturs and mental flatulence.

17. For example, the SS Race Theory and Mate Selection Guidelines, a remarkable document, states:

If one examines the individual countries of Europe according to their racial composition, one initially notices that in almost all states the same races are represented. We find the Nordic race represented outside of Germany, in the Scandinavian lands, England and Holland and even in Russia, Italy, France, Spain and so on. We also find, however, East Baltic man in the various European countries. The overall racial evaluation of a folk does not come down to that. It is a matter of the STRENGTH OF THE PORTIONS OF THE INDIVIDUAL RACES in the respective folk. And there we determine: already just numerically the Reich marches far ahead of all other folks in respect to the Nordic portion. With natural right Germany can claim the leadership of the predominantly Nordic-Germanic folks.

18. Allied propaganda and media not only often spread absurd falsehoods – e.g. Germany’s supposed ambitions to conquer North America or ban Christianity – but frequently equated “Nazism,” “Prussian militarism,” and the German people as one and the same, which no doubt morally legitimized the extremely escalatory demand of unconditional surrender, and mass violence by firebombing, mass rape, and ethnic cleansing. Even a historian as serious as A. J. P. Taylor, for instance, wrote in a book near the end of the war on the Germans: “no other people has pursued extermination as a permanent policy from generation to generation for a thousand years,” really a shocking statement coming from an Anglo-Saxon (in fact, besides the Baltic Prussians, one struggles to know what Taylor is even referring to).  A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History (New York: Capricorn Books, 1962), 16. Taylor’s work more generally claims National Socialism is a natural or even inevitable growth of German history, a thesis worth pondering, but which had the effect of legitimizing the end-of-war mass violence against the German people. One wonders if Taylor’s later work to “normalize” Hitler’s foreign policy was partly motivated by a bad conscience.

19. Recall that the dissident émigré Thomas Mann could write of Hitler in 1939: “Ah, the artist! I spoke of moral self-flagellation. For must I not, however much it hurts, regard the man as an artist-phenomenon?”

20. Conversation on April 26, 1942. Bormann, Table Talk, 189.

R.H.S. Stolfi's Hitler: Beyond Evil & Tyranny, Part 2

                              By Greg Johnson

              

Part 2 of 2

R. H. S. Stolfi

Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny
Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2011

Russell Stolfi deals with a number of episodes in Hitler’s life that are adduced as evidence of evil. Stolfi argues that some of these acts are not evil at all. He others that others were necessary or mitigated evils. And he claims that still others were no more evil than the actions of other great men of history who nevertheless manage to receive respectful treatment from biographers. Finally, Stolfi argues that all of these acts, even the evil ones, do not necessarily make Hitler an evil man, for even good men can commit horrific acts if they believe they are necessary to promote a greater good.

(1) Stolfi argues that Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch and other violations of the laws of the Weimar Republic are somewhat softened by the fact that he believed that the Weimar Republic was an illegitimate and criminal regime. Hitler’s early attempts to defy it and replace it are not, therefore, “evil,” unless all acts of disobedience and revolution against governments as such are evil. In any case, after his release from prison, Hitler adopted a policy of strict legality: he pursued the Chancellorship through electoral politics, and he won.

(2) Stolfi argues that the creation of the Sturm Abteilungen (Storm Troops) was not motivated by a desire to violently intimidate political opponents and seize power. Instead, the SA was formed in self-defense against organized Communist efforts to violently intimidate political opponents and seize power, violence that had effectively suppressed the ability of all Right-wing parties to assemble. The SA did not merely assure the NSDAP’s freedom to assemble and organize, it broke the Red terror and restored political freedom to all parties.

(3) Stolfi argues that the Röhm purge was necessary because there was ample evidence that Röhm himself was plotting a coup, and, true or not, Hindenburg, the leaders of the military, and Hitler’s top lieutenants all believed it to be true. Hindenburg threatened to declare martial law and have the army deal with Röhm if Hitler would not. Hitler had to act, because if he didn’t, he would be effectively deposed: he would be abdicating the sovereign function to decide and act for the good of the people to Hindenburg and the army. Even so, Hitler temporized to the last possible moment.

R. H. S. Stolfi, 1932–2012

Stolfi claims that Röhm’s death was a kind of apotheosis for Hitler: “By June 1934, Hitler stood poised to pass beyond friendship with any man into the realm of the lonely, distant Leader. But Hitler could never pass into that realm with Röhm alive and serving as a reminder of Hitler’s own historical mortality. Röhm had to die, and Hitler had to kill him” (p. 306). But this was not, of course, Hitler’s motive for killing him.

Ultimately, Stolfi judges Röhm’s death to be politically necessary and morally excusable. He describes it not as a cool, premeditated murder but as a “crime of passion” of a man faced with the infidelity of a sworn confidant (p. 309). Of course, the Röhm purge was the occasion for settling a number of other old scores, which complicates Stolfi’s moral picture considerably.

(4) Stolfi evidently thinks there was nothing evil at all about Hitler’s assumption of dictatorial powers — through a provision in the Weimar constitution — or his suppression of a political movement as destructive and implacable as Marxism. But he praises the relative bloodlessness of Hitler’s legal revolution.

(5) As for the concentration camps off to which Hitler packed the leaders of the Marxist parties and other subversive groups: in 1935, when the German population stood at 65 million, the concentration camp inmates numbered 3,500, most of them Communists and Social Democrats. The camp system and its mandate were expanded to house people in protective custody for being social nuisances, including beggars, drunks, homosexuals (homosexuality was criminalized under the Second Reich, remained criminalized under Weimar, and was criminalized in the liberal democracies too), gypsies, and habitual criminals — by 1939 there were 10 camps with 25,000 inmates in a country of 80 million people. That doesn’t seem quite as evil as it was cracked up to be. Furthermore, since Himmler and Heydrich certainly did not lack persecuting zeal and organizational skill, we can conclude that the camp system was exactly as big as they thought it should be.

To give some context, according to Wikipedia — where statistics about Soviet atrocities tend to be on the low end due to Marxist policing — in March of 1940, the Soviet Gulag comprised 53 separate camps and 423 labor colonies in which approximately 1.3 million people were interned out of a population of 170 million. Whatever the real size, it was exactly as big as Stalin wanted it to be.

Although I have not been able to find records of similar forms of internment in liberal democracies for political dissidents and social nuisances, these surely did take place. But even in the absence of these numbers, it it seems clear that Hitler’s camps were far more similar to the prisons of liberal democracies than the Soviet Gulag to which they are always likened.

Of course, these were peacetime numbers. Under the exigencies of war, Hitler’s camp system expanded dramatically to house hostile populations, prisoners of war, and conscript laborers, which is another topic.

(6) Hitler’s anti-Semitism is often put forward as evidence of evil. Hitler himself thought that certain forms of anti-Semitism were repugnant if not outright evil: religious anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism based on ressentiment, gutter populist scapegoating, etc. His repugnance for such phenomena prejudiced him against anti-Semitism as such. But his personal experiences in Vienna, combined with serious reading eventually led him to a dispassionate, scientifically based, and historically informed anti-Semitism.

When Hitler took power, Germany had a relatively small Jewish population. His basic policy was to prevent any further German-Jewish genetic admixture, remove Jews from positions of power and influence, and encourage Jews to emigrate. By the outbreak of the Polish war, Germany’s Jewish population had been dramatically reduced. But due to Hitler’s war gains, millions of new Jews fell into his remit. More about this anon. Stolfi is somewhat circumspect in passing judgment about Hitler’s peacetime Jewish policy. But we can safely say that it was no more evil than, say, the British treatment of Boer non-combatants or the American treatment of the Plains Indians.

(7) Regarding Hitler’s foreign policy exploits as Chancellor — including rearmament, pulling out of the League of Nations, remilitarizing the Rhineland, the annexation of the Sudetenland and Austria, the annexation of Bohemia, and the war with Poland — Stolfi writes, “every international crisis that involved Hitler in the 1930s stemmed from an iniquity on the part of the Allies in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919” (p. 316). According to Stolfi, in all of these crises, morality was on Hitler’s side, and he lauds Hitler for conducting them with restraint and relative bloodlessness — at least up until the Polish war.

These were hardly the outrageous, unendurable moral provocations of Allied propaganda that justified Britain and France starting a World War because Hitler, having exhausted diplomatic negotiations, started a war with Poland to recover German lands and peoples subjected to horrific Polish oppression. The British and French simply could not grasp that, in Stolfi’s words, “a world-historical personality had marched, outraged, out of the desert of shattered Flanders fields, and the former Allies had not even superior morality to shield themselves from him” (p. 317).

(8) Stolfi interprets Operation Barbarossa against the USSR as a colonial war of conquest as well as a crusade to rid Europe of the scourge of Bolshevism. From an ethnonationalist perspective, of course, Hitler’s aim to reduce Slavs to colonized peoples was evil. Furthermore, it was more evil than British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgian, American, and Russian imperialism directed at non-European peoples, because it is always worse to mistreat one’s own blood than foreigners. But it was certainly not uniquely evil in the annals of human history. If Genghis Khan and Timur the Lame can be the subjects of objective historical assessments, then Barbarossa does not disqualify Hitler.

Stolfi does not treat Barbarossa as a necessary war to preempt Stalin’s planned invasion of Europe. I wanted to ask Stolfi his thoughts about the thesis defended by Viktor Suvorov and Joachim Hoffmann in an interview, but that was not to be. If they are right, of course, than there was no evil at all in launching Barbarossa, although one can justly criticize the excesses of its execution.

(9) According to Stolfi, Hitler’s darkest deeds are the massacre of 3.1 million Soviet POWs captured in the opening months of Barbarossa and the killing of 4.5 million Jews in what is known as the Holocaust. Stolfi is certainly a Hitler revisionist, but I do not know whether he is a Holocaust revisionist or not, since I am unsure if it is legal for him to think that “only” 4.5 million Jews were killed by the Third Reich. I had not even heard of the 3.1 million Soviet POWs, which Stolfi mentions only  a couple of times in passing. But of course I have heard of the Holocaust, to which Stolfi dedicates the last two paragraphs of the book (pp. 461–62). Such a brief treatment may itself constitute revisionism, at least in France, where Jean-Marie Le Pen was fined for saying that the Holocaust was only a footnote to the Second World War. Given that some footnotes are longer than the paragraphs in question, Stolfi might have gotten in trouble in the land of liberté. Stolfi’s treatment, however, is a welcome corrective to the Jewish tendency to treat World War II as merely the backdrop of the Holocaust.

Of course, just as Hitler is our age’s paradigm of an evil man, the Holocaust is the paradigm of an evil event. Stolfi does not dispute that the massacre of 7.6 million people is evil. But he does not think it is uniquely evil in World War II or the annals of history in general. Winston Churchill, for example, was responsible for the starvation of millions of Indians whose food was seized for the war effort. He was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of German non-combatants in strategically unnecessary terror bombings of German cities. He was responsible for the expulsion of 14 million Germans from their homes in Eastern and Central Europe, up to two million of whom died. Was Churchill evil? His apologists, of course, would argue that his actions were necessitated by the exigencies of war and the pursuit of the greater good. But Hitler’s apologists, if there were any, could argue the very same thing and be done with it. If Churchill, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Julius Caesar, and other members of the Million Murder club can receive fair treatment in a biography, then why not Hitler?

Stolfi compares the Holocaust to Julius Caesar’s 10 year conquest of Gaul, in which he killed more than a million armed men and reduced another million to slavery. One million civilian non-combatants were also killed or reduced to slavery. Some particularly troublesome tribes were entirely exterminated because they were “irreconcilable, menacing, and useless either as allies or slaves” (p. 38). Stolfi points out, however, that Caesar’s acts “revealed harshness of almost incredible proportion,” but his acts were “based on realism and prudence in the face of perceived danger — scarcely sadism and cruelty” (p. 38). Likewise, Stolfi argues that “Hitler took the action of pitiless massacre as a last resort in the face of a perceived irreconcilable enemy” and his actions “showed virtually nothing that can be interpreted as sadism, cruelty, or ingrained hate as opposed to temporary fury in the carrying out of the action” (p. 39).

Hitler’s massacres, terrible though they may be, do not prove that he is an evil man, since even good men might resort to such measures in direst extremity. Moreover, even if they were expressions of evil, they were not unique expressions of unique evil but all too common in the annals of history. But, again, only in Hitler’s case are they treated as insuperable objections to serious historical treatment.

In sum, Stolfi argues that Hitler cannot be seen as evil if that means that he was motivated by sadism, psychopathy, hatred, or a neurotic need for power and attention. Instead, Hitler was motivated, first and foremost, by love of his people, beyond which were wider but less pressing concerns with the larger Aryan race, European civilization, and the welfare of the world as a whole. Because Hitler believed that the things he loved were imperiled by Jewry, Bolshevism, and Anglo-Saxon capitalism, he fought them. And when the fight became a world conflagration, he fought them with a remarkable hardness and severity. But his essentially decent character and positive ends remained unchanged. Thus for Stolfi, Hitler is a good man who did some bad things as well as good things — a good man who made many good decisions and some catastrophic mistakes.

A Dark World Historical Personality

But there is a sense in which Stolfi thinks that Hitler is beyond the very categories of good and evil, at least as far as historians should be concerned. Stolfi argues that Hitler was a great man, like such great conquerors as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Mohammed, and Napoleon. (Stolfi makes scant mention of unarmed prophets like the Buddha or Jesus.) According to Stolfi, if one were to freeze Hitler’s life at the end of 1942, he would have to be considered one of history’s greatest statesmen and conquerors. And even if one plays the film all the way to the end, Stolfi argues that the Allies did not win World War II so much as Hitler lost it, which itself underscores his greatness and the relative nullity of his opponents.

Indeed, Stolfi argues that Hitler was more than just a great man but one of Hegel’s “world-historical individuals,” who inaugurates a new stage in human history and cannot be judged or comprehended by the standards of the previous stage. Stolfi, it seems, detaches this concept from Hegel’s overall view that world-historical individuals advance history toward the Providential goal of universal freedom, a goal that Hitler, of course, rejected in favor of particularisms of race and nation. Sadly, though, Hitler may have advanced the universalist agenda in defeat, through no intention of his own.

But, as another prophetic figure once said of World War II, “the war’s not over as far as I’m concerned,” meaning that history is still unfolding, including the consequences of Hitler’s actions. So it remains to be seen whether Hitler will contribute to the victory or defeat of universalism. If racial nationalism — of which Hitler is an inexpungeable part — defeats the drive toward a homogeneous global society, then Hitler would be a world historical figure of an entirely new order: not an agent of “progress,” but of its termination; the man who ended the “end of history” and started the world anew; the man who took the ascending line of progress and inscribed it within a cyclical view of history, whether interpreted in the widely variant Traditionalist or Spenglerian senses.

                                       * * *

Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny is a remarkable book that I recommend to all my readers. It is an audacious project executed with clarity and dry humor. Sometimes Stolfi seems to go a bit too far, perhaps just to test his dialectical skills. For instance, he even defends Hitler as a painter. He does a surprisingly good job, but I will still not budge from my conviction that Winston Churchill was Hitler’s superior in this — and only this — regard.

This book is even more remarkable because it is the work of a mainstream military historian. Let us hope that it clears the way for other genuinely historical studies of Hitler and the Third Reich. This really is an inevitable development as the generations that lived through the war die off. Furthermore, we are now living in a multipolar world with new rising powers — Russia, China, India — that are free of Jewish cultural and political hegemony and hungry for a genuine understanding of Hitler and the Second World War.

White Nationalism would, of course, still be true and good even if Hitler were every bit the monster and tyrant that his enemies claim. But White Nationalists should still welcome Stolfi’s book because reducing the cloud of moral hysteria and denigration that surrounds Hitler somewhat lowers the impediment we have to step over. Stolfi takes some of the sting out of the inevitable accusation that we are “just like Hitler” — which, it turns out, is an undeserved compliment.

R.H.S. Stolfi's Hitler: Beyond Evil & Tyranny

                             By Greg Johnson

                

Spanish translation here

Parts 1 and 2

R. H. S. Stolfi

Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny
Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2011

“No man is a hero to his valet, not because the hero is not a hero, but because the valet is a valet.” — G. W. F. Hegel

“When ZOG and all its monkey men come a gunnin’ for me, I will build myself a fortress of my Hitler biographies.” — David E. Williams, “Wotan Rains on a Plutocrat Parade” 

Adolf Hitler was clearly the man of the 20th century, whose shadow grows taller as the sun of the West sinks ever lower. Sadly, though, there is no biography worthy of Hitler.

If great men are those who leave their stamp on history, then Hitler was a great man. But great men present great problems for biographers. Great men are not necessarily good men, and even good men, when they hold political power, often find it necessary to kill innocent people. Evil men do not find this difficult, but good men do. Thus a good man, if he is to be a great man, must also be a hard man. But it is difficult for biographers, who are ordinary men, to sympathize with great men, especially men who are unusually bad or hard.

But biographers must at least try to enter imaginatively into the minds of their subjects. They must feel their feelings and think their thoughts. They must feel sympathy or empathy for their subjects. Such sympathy is not a violation of objectivity but a tool of it. It is a necessary counter-weight to the antipathy and ressentiment that hardness, cruelty, and greatness often inspire. Sympathy is necessary so a biographer can discover and articulate the virtues of intellect and character necessary to achieve anything great in this world, for good or ill.

Of course, one’s ability to sympathize with great men depends in large part on one’s moral principles. A Nietzschean or Social Darwinist would, for instance, find it easier to sympathize with a human beast of prey than would a Christian or a liberal democrat. Even so, it has been possible for Christians and liberals to write biographies of such great conquerors as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Mohammed, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon without whipping themselves into thousand-page paroxysms of self-righteous moralistic denigration.

Hitler, of course, provides even greater problems for biographers, because his demonization is a prop of contemporary Jewish hegemony, and there are consequences for any writer who challenges that consensus.

R. H. S. Stolfi’s Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny is one of my favorite books on Hitler. It is not a biography of Hitler, although it is organized chronologically. It is, rather, a kind of “meta-biography,” an essay on the interpretation of Hitler’s life. Stolfi’s project has both positive and negative aspects: Stolfi critiques the existing interpretations of Hitler’s life as a whole and of specific episodes in Hitler’s life, and Stolfi sets forth his own interpretations.

Stolfi’s criticism of Hitler biographies focuses on the work of those he calls the four “great biographers”: John Toland (Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography), Alan Bullock (Hitler: A Study in Tyranny), Joachim Fest (Hitler), and Ian Kershaw (Hitler: 1889-1936, Hubris and Hitler: 1936-1945, Nemesis). In Stolfi’s words, “the penchant of [Hitler’s] biographers for gratuitous sarcasm, strained skepticism, and writing from preconceived heights of antipathy has left the world with a dangerously inaccurate portrait of Hitler” (p. 54). (Judging from the reception of David Irving’s Hitler’s War and The War Path, the existing establishment regards an accurate portrait of Hitler more dangerous than an inaccurate one.) Four examples of this bias will sufficice:

(1) Ian Kershaw claims that outside of politics, Hitler was an “unperson,” a nullity, which completely ignores Hitler’s voracious reading, serious engagement with and understanding of philosophers like Schopenhauer, love of painting and fine art, remarkable architectural knowledge and skill, and love of classical music, including a connoisseur’s knowledge of the operas of Richard Wagner that impressed the Wagner family and other highly discerning individuals.

(2) Hitler’s biographers invariably denigrate his humble, common origins, coming off like parodies of the worst forms of social snobbery. But of course the same authors would wax sodden and treacly in describing any other man’s rise from poverty and obscurity to fame and fortune. Jesse Owens, for instance.

(3) Stolfi rebuts one of Joachim Fest’s most outrageous liberties as follows: “The great biographers all debunk Nazi theories of racial differences, which they characterise as pseudoscientific and based on unredeemed prejudice, yet one of them [Fest] could claim confidently, without hint of countervailing possibility, that the subject of his biography had ‘criminal features’ set in a ‘psychopathic face'” (p. 268).

(4) The great biographers regularly slight Hitler’s service as a soldier during the First World War, yet as Stolfi points out, Hitler won the Iron Cross First Class, the Iron Cross Second Class, and a regimental commendation for bravery. He was also seriously wounded twice. Hitler never spoke much about what he did to earn these commendations, partly out of his characteristic modesty and reserve, but also probably because he did not wish to relive painful experiences. But even this is twisted by his biographers to cast aspersions on Hitler’s bravery and character. Stolfi notes that with no other historical figure do biographers feel entitled to take such liberties.

Kershaw is the most tendentious of the great biographers, repeatedly characterizing Hitler as an “unperson,” a “nonentity,” a “mediocrity,” and a “failure.” These epithets must surely feel good to Kershaw and like-minded readers, but if they are true, then Hitler’s career is utterly incomprehensible. Stolfi is acerbic, witty, and tireless in skewering the great biographers — although some of his readers might find it tiresome as well.

In addition to offering fascinating interpretations of particular events, Stolfi argues for three overriding theses about Hitler: (1) Hitler cannot be understood as a politician but as a prophet, specifically a prophet forced to take on the role of a messiah; (2) Hitler cannot be understood as an evil man, but as a good man who was forced by circumstances and his own ruthless logic and unemotional “hardness” to do terrible things; and (3) Hitler must be understood as one of the great men of history, indeed as a world-historical figure, who cannot be grasped with conventional moral concepts.

Surely by now you are thinking that our author must be some sort of “discredited,” “marginal,” outsider historian like David Irving, or even a dreaded “revisionist.” So who was Russell Stolfi? Born in 1932, Stolfi is to all appearances an established, mainstream military historian. He was Professor at the US Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California and a Colonel in the US Marine Corps Reserve. He is the author of three other books: German Panzers on the Offensive: Russian Front North Africa 1941-1942 (Schiffer Publishing, 2003), Hitler’s Panzers East: World War II Reinterpreted (University of Oklahoma, 1993), and NATO Under Attack: Why the Western Alliance Can Fight Outnumbered and Win in Central Europe Without Nuclear Weapons (with F. W. von Mellenthin, Duke University Press, 1983). I first read Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny in May of 2012, and I was so excited that I tried to contact Stolfi for an interview only to learn that he had just died in April.

Politician or Prophet?

Adolf Hitler was a formidable political organizer who took over a minuscule Bavarian debating club and turned it into the largest political party in Germany. After being imprisoned for an abortive Putsch, Hitler decided to attain power legally, through electoral politics. To that end, he virtually created the modern political campaign, traveling tirelessly by automobile and airplane and masterfully employing the mass media of his time. When he became Chancellor, Hitler proved a formidable statesman, transforming Germany with a virtually bloodless revolution and recovering German lands and pride through a series of deft foreign policy triumphs until the British and French started a World War to stop him.

Yet for all that, Stolfi argues that Hitler’s personality, goals, and grand strategy were more like those of a religious prophet, specifically an armed prophet like Mohammed.

Politicians presuppose a common political system and climate of opinion. They generally avoid contesting fundamental principles and instead deal with essentially quantitative differences within the same political and ideological continuum, hence their ability to compromise and their susceptibility to corruption. Stolfi points out again and again that Hitler refused to behave like a politician.

Hitler never compromised on basic principles. He took dangerously unpopular stands (p. 225). He refused to soften the party’s message to appeal to squeamish and lukewarm people. He was no demagogue: “A demagogue tells his audience what it wants to hear. A messiah tells his audience what he wants it to hear” (p. 248). Hitler never worried that his radical views would “discredit” him in the eyes of the public, whose minds were mostly in the grip of his enemies anyway. Instead, Hitler was supremely confident of his ability to lend credit to his ideas through reason and rhetoric. He wanted to elevate public opinion toward truth rather than condescend to pander to ignorance and folly.

Hitler also refused to enter common fronts with enemy parties, especially the Social Democrats, even when they took patriotic stands.

Hitler was, moreover, utterly incorruptible. He refused to make special promises to businessmen and other interest groups. He just handed them the party’s platform. In the end, he was offered the Chancellorship simply because his opponents knew he could not be bought off with anything less.

Revolutionaries deal with fundamental issues of principle, which is why they seek to overthrow existing systems and begin anew. Hitler was, of course, a political revolutionary. But he was something more. He saw himself as the exponent of a whole philosophy of life, not just a political philosophy. He placed politics in a larger biological and historical perspective: the struggle of Aryan man against Jewry and its extended phenotypes Communism and Anglo-Saxon capitalism. He believed the stakes were global: nothing less than the survival of all life on Earth was in peril. And having miraculously survived four years of slaughter and two serious wounds in the trenches of World War I — including an experience that can only be described as supernatural (p. 95) — Hitler believed that he enjoyed the special protection of Providence.

Hitler had a number of heroic role models. As a child, he was transported by Germanic myths and sagas. As a teenager, he identified with the hero of Wagner’s opera Rienzi, based on the story of Cola di Rienzi, the 14th century popular dictator who sought to restore Rome to its Imperial glory but who was undone by the treachery of the aristocracy and church and finally murdered. Hitler prophesied that he would become a tribune of the people who would rise and fall like Rienzi, and he did. Hitler also identified with Wagner’s Lohengrin and Siegfried. Although Hitler himself had little use for the Bible, his later career as armed prophet brings to mind the Hebrew prophets and lawgivers as well. Stolfi’s analogy between Hitler and Mohammed is quite apposite and revealing.

Savior of Germany — and Europe

Hitler, however, apparently did not think of himself as a messiah figure, but more as a John the Baptist, preparing the way for someone greater than him. But, as Stolfi documents, many of Hitler’s closest followers — all of them intelligent men, ranging from mystics like Hess to consummate cynics like Goebbels — as well as some of his more fair-minded enemies, did see him as a messiah figure, and in the end, he was forced to take on that role. Reading Stolfi makes Savitri Devi’s thesis in The Lightning and the Sun that Hitler was an avatar of the god Vishnu seem a little less eccentric. (Savitri did not originate that thesis. It was a view that she encountered widely among educated Hindus in the 1930s.) There was something messianic about Hitler’s aura and actions, and people around the world understood it in terms of their own cultural traditions.

Stolfi does not mention it, but there is a sense in which Hitler was the savior of Germany and all of Western Europe, although his accomplishments fell far short of his ambitions, consumed his life, and devastated his nation. When Hitler launched operation Barbarossa in 1941, the Soviets were poised to launch a massive invasion of all of Central and Western Europe. Hitler pre-empted that invasion, and although he failed to destroy the USSR, the Third Reich was destroyed instead, and Stalin conquered half of Europe, the outcome would have been much worse if Stalin had been able to launch his invasion. Stalin could have conquered all of Europe. At best he would have been repulsed after unimaginable devastation and bloodshed. Thus every Western European who has lived in freedom from want and terror since 1941 owes a debt of thanks to Adolf Hitler, the German people, and their Axis partners.

(See on this site Daniel Michaels, “Exposing Stalin’s Plan to Conquer Europe” and the National Vanguard review of Viktor Suvorov’s Icebreaker; for more recent literature on this subject, see Viktor Suvorov’s definitive statement of his research has been published as The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II [Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2008] and Joachim Hoffmann, Stalin’s War of Extermination, 1941-1945: Planning, Realization and Documentation [Capshaw, Al.: Theses and Dissertations Press, 2001].)

The Question of Evil

In today’s climate of moral relativism and rot, Adolf Hitler is probably the only human being that even liberals will denounce as evil. Hitler is the modern world’s paradigm and embodiment of evil. But of course other people can be evil if they are “like Hitler.” Thus the most radical thesis of Stolfi’s book is that Adolf Hitler was not evil.

There are many dimensions to this argument.

(1) Stolfi points out that there is no evidence that Hitler had psychopathic or sociopathic personality traits as a child. He did not torture animals or steal, for instance. He was polite, serious, and reserved.

(2) Stolfi also points out that Hitler was not primarily motivated by hate or ressentiment. He arrived at his two great enmities, namely against Jewry and Bolshevism, based on personal experience, current events, and extensive research. But when he was rationally convinced of their enormity, he naturally hated them with appropriate magnitude and intensity. As Stolfi writes, “It is difficult to imagine Hitler either as messiah or otherwise and not hating the enemy. Did Jesus the Christ or Mohammed the Prophet hate Satan or merely disapprove of him?” (p. 233).

(3) Calling Hitler evil, like calling him “crazy,” is mentally lazy, because it exempts us from trying to understand the reasons for Hitler’s actions: both his thought processes and objective events that prompted him to act. Hitler had his reasons.

(4) Stolfi argues that Hitler’s character, goals, and actions were not evil. Hitler did what he thought was right, and he was hard enough to spill oceans of blood if he thought it was necessary to advance the greater good. A Socratic, of course, would claim that it is an empty claim, as nobody does evil as such but only under the guise of a perceived good. The evil of an act is in its outcome, not its motive. We all “mean well.”

(5) Stolfi hints that Hitler may have, in a sense, been beyond good and evil, because his goal was nothing less than the creation of a new order, including a new moral order, and it begs the question to subject such men to the moral laws they seek to overthrow. This points us back to Stolfi’s thesis that Hitler has to be seen more as a religious than a political figure and forward to his third major thesis, that Hitler was a world-historical individual.

Stolfi deals with a number of episodes in Hitler’s life that are adduced as evidence of evil. Stolfi argues that some of these acts are not evil at all. He others that others were necessary or mitigated evils.

And he claims that still others were no more evil than the actions of other great men of history who nevertheless manage to receive respectful treatment from biographers. Finally, Stolfi argues that all of these acts, even the evil ones, do not necessarily make Hitler an evil man, for even good men can commit horrific acts if they believe they are necessary to promote a greater good.

(1) Stolfi argues that Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch and other violations of the laws of the Weimar Republic are somewhat softened by the fact that he believed that the Weimar Republic was an illegitimate and criminal regime. Hitler’s early attempts to defy it and replace it are not, therefore, “evil,” unless all acts of disobedience and revolution against governments as such are evil. In any case, after his release from prison, Hitler adopted a policy of strict legality: he pursued the Chancellorship through electoral politics, and he won.

(2) Stolfi argues that the creation of the Sturm Abteilungen (Storm Troops) was not motivated by a desire to violently intimidate political opponents and seize power. Instead, the SA was formed in self-defense against organized Communist efforts to violently intimidate political opponents and seize power, violence that had effectively suppressed the ability of all Right-wing parties to assemble. The SA did not merely assure the NSDAP’s freedom to assemble and organize, it broke the Red terror and restored political freedom to all parties.

(3) Stolfi argues that the Röhm purge was necessary because there was ample evidence that Röhm himself was plotting a coup, and, true or not, Hindenburg, the leaders of the military, and Hitler’s top lieutenants all believed it to be true. Hindenburg threatened to declare martial law and have the army deal with Röhm if Hitler would not. Hitler had to act, because if he didn’t, he would be effectively deposed: he would be abdicating the sovereign function to decide and act for the good of the people to Hindenburg and the army. Even so, Hitler temporized to the last possible moment.

R. H. S. Stolfi, 1932–2012

Stolfi claims that Röhm’s death was a kind of apotheosis for Hitler: “By June 1934, Hitler stood poised to pass beyond friendship with any man into the realm of the lonely, distant Leader. But Hitler could never pass into that realm with Röhm alive and serving as a reminder of Hitler’s own historical mortality. Röhm had to die, and Hitler had to kill him” (p. 306). But this was not, of course, Hitler’s motive for killing him.

Ultimately, Stolfi judges Röhm’s death to be politically necessary and morally excusable. He describes it not as a cool, premeditated murder but as a “crime of passion” of a man faced with the infidelity of a sworn confidant (p. 309). Of course, the Röhm purge was the occasion for settling a number of other old scores, which complicates Stolfi’s moral picture considerably.

(4) Stolfi evidently thinks there was nothing evil at all about Hitler’s assumption of dictatorial powers — through a provision in the Weimar constitution — or his suppression of a political movement as destructive and implacable as Marxism. But he praises the relative bloodlessness of Hitler’s legal revolution.

(5) As for the concentration camps off to which Hitler packed the leaders of the Marxist parties and other subversive groups: in 1935, when the German population stood at 65 million, the concentration camp inmates numbered 3,500, most of them Communists and Social Democrats. The camp system and its mandate were expanded to house people in protective custody for being social nuisances, including beggars, drunks, homosexuals (homosexuality was criminalized under the Second Reich, remained criminalized under Weimar, and was criminalized in the liberal democracies too), gypsies, and habitual criminals — by 1939 there were 10 camps with 25,000 inmates in a country of 80 million people. That doesn’t seem quite as evil as it was cracked up to be. Furthermore, since Himmler and Heydrich certainly did not lack persecuting zeal and organizational skill, we can conclude that the camp system was exactly as big as they thought it should be.

To give some context, according to Wikipedia — where statistics about Soviet atrocities tend to be on the low end due to Marxist policing — in March of 1940, the Soviet Gulag comprised 53 separate camps and 423 labor colonies in which approximately 1.3 million people were interned out of a population of 170 million. Whatever the real size, it was exactly as big as Stalin wanted it to be.

Although I have not been able to find records of similar forms of internment in liberal democracies for political dissidents and social nuisances, these surely did take place. But even in the absence of these numbers, it it seems clear that Hitler’s camps were far more similar to the prisons of liberal democracies than the Soviet Gulag to which they are always likened.

Of course, these were peacetime numbers. Under the exigencies of war, Hitler’s camp system expanded dramatically to house hostile populations, prisoners of war, and conscript laborers, which is another topic.

(6) Hitler’s anti-Semitism is often put forward as evidence of evil. Hitler himself thought that certain forms of anti-Semitism were repugnant if not outright evil: religious anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism based on ressentiment, gutter populist scapegoating, etc. His repugnance for such phenomena prejudiced him against anti-Semitism as such. But his personal experiences in Vienna, combined with serious reading eventually led him to a dispassionate, scientifically based, and historically informed anti-Semitism.

When Hitler took power, Germany had a relatively small Jewish population. His basic policy was to prevent any further German-Jewish genetic admixture, remove Jews from positions of power and influence, and encourage Jews to emigrate. By the outbreak of the Polish war, Germany’s Jewish population had been dramatically reduced. But due to Hitler’s war gains, millions of new Jews fell into his remit. More about this anon. Stolfi is somewhat circumspect in passing judgment about Hitler’s peacetime Jewish policy. But we can safely say that it was no more evil than, say, the British treatment of Boer non-combatants or the American treatment of the Plains Indians.

(7) Regarding Hitler’s foreign policy exploits as Chancellor — including rearmament, pulling out of the League of Nations, remilitarizing the Rhineland, the annexation of the Sudetenland and Austria, the annexation of Bohemia, and the war with Poland — Stolfi writes, “every international crisis that involved Hitler in the 1930s stemmed from an iniquity on the part of the Allies in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919” (p. 316). According to Stolfi, in all of these crises, morality was on Hitler’s side, and he lauds Hitler for conducting them with restraint and relative bloodlessness — at least up until the Polish war.

These were hardly the outrageous, unendurable moral provocations of Allied propaganda that justified Britain and France starting a World War because Hitler, having exhausted diplomatic negotiations, started a war with Poland to recover German lands and peoples subjected to horrific Polish oppression. The British and French simply could not grasp that, in Stolfi’s words, “a world-historical personality had marched, outraged, out of the desert of shattered Flanders fields, and the former Allies had not even superior morality to shield themselves from him” (p. 317).

(8) Stolfi interprets Operation Barbarossa against the USSR as a colonial war of conquest as well as a crusade to rid Europe of the scourge of Bolshevism. From an ethnonationalist perspective, of course, Hitler’s aim to reduce Slavs to colonized peoples was evil. Furthermore, it was more evil than British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgian, American, and Russian imperialism directed at non-European peoples, because it is always worse to mistreat one’s own blood than foreigners. But it was certainly not uniquely evil in the annals of human history. If Genghis Khan and Timur the Lame can be the subjects of objective historical assessments, then Barbarossa does not disqualify Hitler.

Stolfi does not treat Barbarossa as a necessary war to preempt Stalin’s planned invasion of Europe. I wanted to ask Stolfi his thoughts about the thesis defended by Viktor Suvorov and Joachim Hoffmann in an interview, but that was not to be. If they are right, of course, than there was no evil at all in launching Barbarossa, although one can justly criticize the excesses of its execution.

(9) According to Stolfi, Hitler’s darkest deeds are the massacre of 3.1 million Soviet POWs captured in the opening months of Barbarossa and the killing of 4.5 million Jews in what is known as the Holocaust. Stolfi is certainly a Hitler revisionist, but I do not know whether he is a Holocaust revisionist or not, since I am unsure if it is legal for him to think that “only” 4.5 million Jews were killed by the Third Reich. I had not even heard of the 3.1 million Soviet POWs, which Stolfi mentions only a couple of times in passing. But of course I have heard of the Holocaust, to which Stolfi dedicates the last two paragraphs of the book (pp. 461–62). Such a brief treatment may itself constitute revisionism, at least in France, where Jean-Marie Le Pen was fined for saying that the Holocaust was only a footnote to the Second World War. Given that some footnotes are longer than the paragraphs in question, Stolfi might have gotten in trouble in the land of liberté. Stolfi’s treatment, however, is a welcome corrective to the Jewish tendency to treat World War II as merely the backdrop of the Holocaust.

Of course, just as Hitler is our age’s paradigm of an evil man, the Holocaust is the paradigm of an evil event. Stolfi does not dispute that the massacre of 7.6 million people is evil. But he does not think it is uniquely evil in World War II or the annals of history in general. Winston Churchill, for example, was responsible for the starvation of millions of Indians whose food was seized for the war effort. He was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of German non-combatants in strategically unnecessary terror bombings of German cities. He was responsible for the expulsion of 14 million Germans from their homes in Eastern and Central Europe, up to two million of whom died. Was Churchill evil? His apologists, of course, would argue that his actions were necessitated by the exigencies of war and the pursuit of the greater good. But Hitler’s apologists, if there were any, could argue the very same thing and be done with it. If Churchill, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Julius Caesar, and other members of the Million Murder club can receive fair treatment in a biography, then why not Hitler?

Stolfi compares the Holocaust to Julius Caesar’s 10 year conquest of Gaul, in which he killed more than a million armed men and reduced another million to slavery. One million civilian non-combatants were also killed or reduced to slavery. Some particularly troublesome tribes were entirely exterminated because they were “irreconcilable, menacing, and useless either as allies or slaves” (p. 38). Stolfi points out, however, that Caesar’s acts “revealed harshness of almost incredible proportion,” but his acts were “based on realism and prudence in the face of perceived danger — scarcely sadism and cruelty” (p. 38). Likewise, Stolfi argues that “Hitler took the action of pitiless massacre as a last resort in the face of a perceived irreconcilable enemy” and his actions “showed virtually nothing that can be interpreted as sadism, cruelty, or ingrained hate as opposed to temporary fury in the carrying out of the action” (p. 39).

Hitler’s massacres, terrible though they may be, do not prove that he is an evil man, since even good men might resort to such measures in direst extremity. Moreover, even if they were expressions of evil, they were not unique expressions of unique evil but all too common in the annals of history. But, again, only in Hitler’s case are they treated as insuperable objections to serious historical treatment.

In sum, Stolfi argues that Hitler cannot be seen as evil if that means that he was motivated by sadism, psychopathy, hatred, or a neurotic need for power and attention. Instead, Hitler was motivated, first and foremost, by love of his people, beyond which were wider but less pressing concerns with the larger Aryan race, European civilization, and the welfare of the world as a whole. Because Hitler believed that the things he loved were imperiled by Jewry, Bolshevism, and Anglo-Saxon capitalism, he fought them. And when the fight became a world conflagration, he fought them with a remarkable hardness and severity. But his essentially decent character and positive ends remained unchanged. Thus for Stolfi, Hitler is a good man who did some bad things as well as good things — a good man who made many good decisions and some catastrophic mistakes.

A Dark World Historical Personality

But there is a sense in which Stolfi thinks that Hitler is beyond the very categories of good and evil, at least as far as historians should be concerned. Stolfi argues that Hitler was a great man, like such great conquerors as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Mohammed, and Napoleon. (Stolfi makes scant mention of unarmed prophets like the Buddha or Jesus.) According to Stolfi, if one were to freeze Hitler’s life at the end of 1942, he would have to be considered one of history’s greatest statesmen and conquerors. And even if one plays the film all the way to the end, Stolfi argues that the Allies did not win World War II so much as Hitler lost it, which itself underscores his greatness and the relative nullity of his opponents.

Indeed, Stolfi argues that Hitler was more than just a great man but one of Hegel’s “world-historical individuals,” who inaugurates a new stage in human history and cannot be judged or comprehended by the standards of the previous stage. Stolfi, it seems, detaches this concept from Hegel’s overall view that world-historical individuals advance history toward the Providential goal of universal freedom, a goal that Hitler, of course, rejected in favor of particularisms of race and nation. Sadly, though, Hitler may have advanced the universalist agenda in defeat, through no intention of his own.

But, as another prophetic figure once said of World War II, “the war’s not over as far as I’m concerned,” meaning that history is still unfolding, including the consequences of Hitler’s actions. So it remains to be seen whether Hitler will contribute to the victory or defeat of universalism. If racial nationalism — of which Hitler is an inexpungeable part — defeats the drive toward a homogeneous global society, then Hitler would be a world historical figure of an entirely new order: not an agent of “progress,” but of its termination; the man who ended the “end of history” and started the world anew; the man who took the ascending line of progress and inscribed it within a cyclical view of history, whether interpreted in the widely variant Traditionalist or Spenglerian senses.

                                     * * *

Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny is a remarkable book that I recommend to all my readers. It is an audacious project executed with clarity and dry humor. Sometimes Stolfi seems to go a bit too far, perhaps just to test his dialectical skills. For instance, he even defends Hitler as a painter. He does a surprisingly good job, but I will still not budge from my conviction that Winston Churchill was Hitler’s superior in this — and only this — regard.

This book is even more remarkable because it is the work of a mainstream military historian. Let us hope that it clears the way for other genuinely historical studies of Hitler and the Third Reich. This really is an inevitable development as the generations that lived through the war die off. Furthermore, we are now living in a multipolar world with new rising powers — China, India — that are free of Jewish cultural and political hegemony and hungry for a genuine understanding of Hitler and the Second World War.

White Nationalism would, of course, still be true and good even if Hitler were every bit the monster and tyrant that his enemies claim. But White Nationalists should still welcome Stolfi’s book because reducing the cloud of moral hysteria and denigration that surrounds Hitler somewhat lowers the impediment we have to step over. Stolfi takes some of the sting out of the inevitable accusation that we are “just like Hitler” — which, it turns out, is an undeserved compliment.

Nationalism & Class Struggle

By Eugene Montsalvat

Father Charles E. Coughlin: Social Justice Warrior

Czech translation here

Today, the Right finds itself in a revolutionary situation. All of the mechanisms of power have been seized by a hostile elite. The economy, government, and academia are solely in the hands of corporate internationalists or full scale multiculturalists.

In its economic dimension, capital is aligned against the interests of nationalists, the traditionally religious, and the workers. Capital is international, the common people are patriotic. The capitalist has no country. He can move to whatever location suits him and take his wealth with him. He has no need to develop any loyalty to a nation. As Alain Soral notes in the essay “Class Struggle Within Socialism,” “internationalism which is, on the contrary, the main characteristic of the traveling elites and the nomadic manipulators, doing their businesses above the people’s head, who, due to their Praxis, are fairly immobile and rooted.”

Thus the war of classes is also a war of cultures. Cultural globalization and economic globalization go hand in hand. The sole beneficiary of both is capital. The battle lines are forming: liberal, capitalist internationalists versus conservative, populist nationalists. Of course, at the moment the latter has yet to organize to the extent that the former has.

Much has been written about the failure of the Right to transcend the capitalists versus communists dialectic of the Cold War. It will suffice to say that this failure has hampered the development of a truly nationalist Right since the fall of the Soviet Union. The Left has adapted well to the global realignment, internationalist Trotskyites simply became neo-conservatives or found fruitful employment in the advertising departments of global fashion corporations.

One ray of hope on the Right has been the recalibration of the Front National’s economic policies from neoliberalism in the late 1970s and 1980s to protectionism. In doing so, they have developed a new appeal to the patriotic workers of France. Today a significant group of major Left-wing union members support the Front National. French Leftist newspaper L’Humanité published a poll showing that one third of Force Ouvrière supported Front National, closely followed by the Union Syndicale Solidaires at 27%, and the Confédération Générale du Travail at 22%.

While this move can be attributed to the reconciliation between labor and the Front National, the Left’s betrayal of the class struggle cannot be downplayed. The French Communist Party under Georges Marchais opposed mass immigration, and Marchais himself had little time for New Leftists like Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Today the French Communist party supports immigration, gay marriage, and other concerns of the chattering classes, it is mostly indistinguishable from the other socially liberal parties in the country. In this rare instance, the French Right has acclimated to the new political realities better than the French Left. They have reached out to abandoned French workers with a nationalist economic theory, one that fights the global plutocracy.

There is still much to be done. The alliance between patriots and labor is still fairly embryonic at this time. Moreover, much of the fault still lies with the Right. The Left has done everything in their power to show that they no longer care about the common man. They spit on his faith, his country, his family, and everything he held sacred. They have become embroiled in concerns about race or sexuality that have zero bearing on the average life of a transit worker.

In a eulogy to the union leader Bob Crow, Spectator columnist Ed West said, “it’s funny that most people who consider themselves vaguely leftie or at least holding the ‘correct’ views have zero sympathy for the Tube strikers . . . That’s the curious thing; judging by the world of commentary, most Left-wing people are basically more interested in debating intersectionality or microaggressions or their own genitals, irrelevant and meaningless twaddle that future generations will laugh at.”

In truth, today’s Leftist elites are just as alienated from the working class as their putative enemies the plutocrats, and just as willing to replace them with more grateful peasants from the Third World.

In the face of this immense betrayal, the Right has thus far failed to seize an opportunity, out of what appears to be little more than mere snobbery. Even in “alternative” Right-wing circles, the intellectuals imagine themselves as aristocrats of the pen who refuse to consort with plebeians.

But history provides many examples of genuine aristocrats fighting alongside workers and peasants. In the French Revolution, workers and peasants were underrepresented among the bloodthirsty Jacobins while bankers and lawyers were overrepresented. The aristocrat Henri de la Rochejaquelein rallied an army of peasants in the Vendée to resist the bourgeois revolutionaries who fattened themselves off the seizure of church property, much of which had been devoted to helping the poor.

The past has seen many movements that fought greed with patriotism. While these ended in defeat, there is much to be learned from their struggles. The National Revolutionaries in Weimar Germany are a fruitful case study. Like the nationalists of today, they found their country dominated by a hostile, foreign elite. The old conservatism of the Kaiserreich was insufficient for their purposes. Seeing that the Communists were stepping into the power vacuum, they sought to offer a new nationalism to the workers, one that would turn the revolution of 1918 towards a higher ideal. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck reached out to the workers in his 1923 book Germany’s Third Empire:

In its need the proletariat is seeking new leaders. It is beginning to realize that these can only be found amongst men who have no mind to be proletarians. We cannot ask that the proletariat accept the leadership of that generation which lost the war and against whom the radicals carried out the revolution; but a new generation is coming on. The men of the new generation will not endorse the revolution, but they will accept the mental revolution that has taken place. They owe no loyalty to the age of William II, whose greatest crime was that it allowed conservative forms to fall into decay. No barrier severs the new generation from the proletariat.

The German working man must recognize that he, who was said to possess no fatherland, today possesses nothing else.[1]

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck sought to seize the opportunity presented by the defeat of Germany and fall of the monarchy to realize a national revolution. He stated, “Even the world revolution can only be realized nationally. Each nation has its own particular mission. We believe that it is the mission of the German nation to translate the world revolution into the salvation of Europe.” Rather than accepting the class politics of the Marxists and the failed monarchy, he realized that the workers were a part of the nation, and therefore part of the national mission. He correctly identified liberalism, synonymous for all practical purposes with capitalism, as the death of nations. Moeller van den Bruck’s basic criticisms of capitalism and conservatism, infused with a nationalist spirit, laid the foundations for a rich body of Conservative Revolutionary thought.

Within this milieu the worker was given a transformed, indeed a transcendent meaning in Ernst Jünger’s treatises, Der Arbeiter [The Worker] and Total Mobilization. While Der Arbeiter has not been translated into English, there is commentary available which allows us to grasp the essence of the piece. The worker is a heroic figure, a new titan. His actions are as much metaphysical as they are material. The worker is essential to the process overcoming the industrial bourgeois society to reach a state of total mobilization. He is the builder of the new civilization with a higher ideal, a warrior of industry. His worker stands in direct contrast with the bürger type, who seeks tranquility and security above all. He stated, “Our belief is that the rise of the worker is synonymous with a new ascent of Germany.”[2]

This fusion of labor and nationalism was developed further by Ernst Jünger’s friend and colleague Ernst Niekisch, founder of the journal Widerstand [Resistance], to which Jünger contributed. Niekisch is considered the founding father of National Bolshevism, merging nationalism with radical anti-capitalism and socialism. He saw the German bourgeoisie and their political mainstream as treasonous, working with the victors of World War I for their own financial gain. He viewed the resistance of German nationalists as a resistance against international capitalism, and favored withdrawal from the international Western economy and turning towards an alliance with the Soviet Union.

The alliance of pro-labor politics and nationalism had an influence on the National Socialists as well, most prominently with Strasserism and Ernst Röhm’s calls for a “Second Revolution” to sweep the pre-war financial elite from power. However, the ossification of National Socialism after Hitler’s centralization of power resulted in the end of the Conservative Revolutionary movement. The Strasser brothers and Röhm were purged from the Nazi party. Niekisch was imprisoned. Germany went on to defeat in World War II, and the literature of the Conservative Revolutionary Movement was viewed with much suspicion in the postwar era.

It is not unreasonable to say that proletarian nationalism was a major faction of the interwar Right. Even in America anti-capitalist nationalism found expression in the mass audience of Father Coughlin’s radio broadcasts and his periodical Social Justice.

With the end of the Cold War, there is really no more reason for nationalists to pay tribute to capitalism. The capitalists have no interest in faith, family, tradition, or anything that speaks to the soul of common man. It is time for the nationalist Right to develop ties with labor unions and syndicates, to join hands with fighters against globalization, privatization, and plundering of the environment. To fight the forces of evil.

As Ezra Pound said, “No! it is not money that is the root of the evil. The root is greed, the lust for monopoly. ‘CAPTANS ANNONAM, MALEDICTUS IN PLEBE SIT!’ thundered St. Ambrose—’Hoggers of harvest, cursed among the people!’” It is time for the people to break the curse of finance.

Notes

1. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Germany’s Third Empire (London: Arktos, 2012), pp. 148–49.

2. From p. 122 of Der Arbeiter, cited in Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 103.