What happened to the writings and theorists of socialism in the Nazi party ? Was all the old 20s literature destroyed after Roehm and Gregor Strasser were shot ? Did the archives of the Nazi Party for the 1920s and early 30s all disappear ? Did the Russians get them ?
Via Albert Speer's "Inside The Third Reich", an unflattering glimpse of some of the old comrades :
Late at night I would return from my rounds (Speer was organising the party rallies at Nuremburg - LT) to the Hotel Deutscher Hof, which had been reserved for Hitler's staff and for the Gauleiters and Reichsleiters. In the hotel restaurant I usually found a group of old Gauleiters waxing boisterous over their beer as they denounced the party's betrayal of the principles of the revolution and betrayal of the workers.
Here was a sign that the ideas of Gregor Strasser, who had once led the anticapitalist wing within the NSDAP, were still alive, although reduced to mere bombast. Only in alcohol could these fellows resurrect their old revolutionary elan.
Hitler's views on Islam and Christianity, as reported by Speer :
Hitler had been much impressed by a scrap of history he had learned from a delegation of distinguished Arabs. When the Mohammedans had attempted to penetrate beyond France into Central Europe during the eighth century, his visitors had told him, they had been driven back at the Battle of Tours. Had the Arabs won this battle, the world would be Mohammedan today. For theirs was a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and subjugating all nations to that faith. The Germanic peoples would have become heirs to that religion. Such a creed was perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament. Hitler said that the conquering Arabs, because of their racial inferiority, would in the long run have been unable to contend with the harsher climate and conditions of the country. They could not have kept down the more vigorous natives, so that ultimately not Arabs but Islamized Germans could have stood at the head of this Mohammedan Empire.
Hitler usually concluded this historical speculation by remarking "You see, it's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japansese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good ? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness ?"
Hmmm.
6 comments:
Hm indeed. Bit of a contradiction here...it was the meek and flabby christians who prevailed against the virile Moslems at the battle of Tours, just as it was a Christian force that prevailed at Lepanto and at Vienna.
I haven't gone into it, but I've sometimes wondered if Speer's revelations about Hitler's table-talk are much more authentic than Rauschning's...years ago the late great Frank Johnson admitted that the Rauschning reports were all a complete fabrication, but they should be allowed to stand as they revealed the sort of Hitler we needed to hate...odd though that those who represent Christianity as a meek-minded slave religion can't really account convincingly for its bloodless but complete victory over Imperial Rome
I find the tendency to read great significance into the musings of a very poorly-educated misfit most amusing.
To give any great depth to the rantings and ravings of a man dosed on Pervitin is frankly bizarre
Pervitin
Well yes, but it wasn't Johnson who broke the news about Rauschning.
The question of how much access to Hitler had been enjoyed by Rauschning is quite an old one. Generally speaking, the more populist books on Hitler quoted freely from Rauschning without any caveat into the mid 80's: gradually a note of caution began to enter.
The German press eventually conceded the fraudulent nature of Rauschning's "revelations"in the mid 80's: Johnson recycled the matter through the Daily Telegraph for the great middlebrow public. I had been put on warning that the text was actually compiled by Emry Reves by about 1981. Please don't think that I place any particular weight on Johnson as a researcher: but he WAS a bloody brilliant journalist. What's wrong with being a misfit? Do you only want to read the safe opinions of the "normal"? Well of course Johnson never went to Uni, a cultural lack that also impeded the writing careers of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Chesterton and others too numerous to mention!
What's wrong with being a misfit? Do you only want to read the safe opinions of the "normal"? Well of course Johnson never went to Uni,
Who cares about Johnson ? I was referring to Adolf Hitler....and he didn't go to university either
Dear Observer - sorry. I had not thought that you were referring to Hitler as the uneducated misfit whose shallow musings had little significance. Whatever his educational and social status, his actions DID have great significance and we are still living with the consequences of them. That said, his musings MUST be taken into account if any coherent account of the man is to be constructed. Shame that Rauschning wasn't able to record any of them.
his actions DID have great significance and we are still living with the consequences of them.
Only in the sense that we are dealing with the Counter-Culture - that all the minorities Hitler cremated are now revered Minority Groups in New Europe.
That if Hitler waved a flag, flags are now considered evil. It is known as Reductio Ad Hitleram but highly superficial.
Hitler did not believe in the nation-state for instance but in a Pan-German language group encompassing all areas where German-speakers were to his mind oppressed minorities
The similarity between Pan-Arabism and Pan-Islamism are embarrassing for the modern-day Left; as it is for the EU.
The simple fact is that Hitler's commentaries are meaningless considering that he was a dope-addict on cocaine, morphine, and Pervitin .....and a congenital liar.
The man was a gambler and so often encountered people afraid to call his bluff he won his hand.
He came to power simply because the alternative was a military coup in 1932 and he merely put a civilian front on a military regime but the generals found themselves prisoners after Britain refused to back General Beck's proposed coup d'etat in 1938.
The curse of Adolf Hitler is the obsessional research into him in isolation from the situation in Europe - of Stalin, the 1920 Polish-Russian War, the situation in Romania and Hungary with hyperinflation, and the invasion of Germanuy in 1923 by France and Belgium which caused German hyperinflation.
The war machine Hitler inherited was rebuilt secretly by General Von Seeckt in 1919 with the active cooperation of Russia and was funded through secret budgets throughout the 1920s
The destruction of Poland was planned back in 1919 in joint agreements with Voroshilov from the Russian side and Von Seeckt in Berlin....the 1940 joint NKVD-SS training facility in Zakopane, Poland was a logical outcome of joint interests
Hitler's rantings did not obviate from the fact he spoke no English and depended upon Von Ribbentrop and his fanatical wife to interpret England for him; but whose complete incompetence led him to have to promise Stalin anything to get an alliance to compensate for the catastrophic mess Ribbentrop had made of relations with England.
Had Chamberlain known more about Colonel Beck's duplicity as Polish Foreign Minister; Hitler spoken English; Chamberlain not been the first PM to travel by plane; and the French had not been so artful as to inveigle Britain into taking responsibility for a failed French foreign policy twice in a generation (though Churchill went further and built France into a leading position postwar to keep Germany in check).....then I doubt much interest would ever have been paid to Adolf Hitler
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