Sauce for the Goose

I recently finished the second volume of Richard J. Evan’s history of The Third Reich. It is entitled The Third Reich in Power. It is excellent but not quite so compelling as The Coming of the Third Reich. Once again the differences between the  Nazis and the German Jews are described in black and white terms. The Nazis are cynical, corrupt, arrogant and violent. The Jews are moral, conservative, traditional and, above all, patriotic. Very telling is the story of how greedy and corrupt Nazis Ayrianized (expropriated) Jewish business during the thirties. The Nazis made out like bandits. No mention was made in The Coming of the Third Reich of German Jews with international connections buying up German businesses during the hyperinflationary years of the Weimar Republic at fire-sale prices. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander!

Rommel: A Media Creation?

  David Irving’s The Trail of the Fox about legendary Field Marshal Erwin Rommel is certainly one of the most gripping books I have ever read. The first chapter and the last chapter portray this man as a modern day Hannibal. The intervening pages provide a devastating critique. They say that the devil is in the details. In the early stages of the war in North Africa, Hitler blitzed the media with praise for Rommel touting his victorious siege of Tobruk. After that, when Rommel kept on retreating, Hitler felt he could not back down from his support without losing face with the public. Furthermore, he liked and believed in the Field Marshal. Shortly before the Nazi loss of North Africa Rommel was sent to a rehabilitation resort (partly to save his reputation) and was subsequently put in charge of the defense of the French coast against an expected Anglo-American invasion. Rommel had some good qualities. He was a capable tactician. In the fluidity of the battlefield, especially with tanks, he showed himself to be the master of the surprise attack. He stayed close to the front lines during battle which earned him respect from his men and a reputation as physically courageous. What he lacked was moral courage. After a beachhead was established in Normandy Rommel wanted to strike a deal with Montgomery with or without Hitler’s approval–this while Hitler had always treated him with utmost respect and had persistently promoted his career. While he was not directly involved in the anti-Hitler conspiracy of Von Stauffenberg he did not share the loyalty that Hitler had shown him. Part of the problem was that only the most fervent Nazis were loyal to Hitler in the last months–and Rommel was not really a Nazi. He would not fight to the death for Hitler or the Nazi cause as soldiers in the Waffen SS did. This biography was a big bestseller in Germany. My guess is that most people bought the book because it was the thing to do and did not bother to read it all the way through. I find this is very common for books about Hitler and other prominent figures in the Third Reich.

Ancient and Medieval History

I consider my area of expertise to be German History. I majored in German in college and studied in Germany briefly. I decided to get into Ancient and Medieval History because Himmler hearkened back to the Medieval Period and Hitler hearkened back to times of the Roman Empire. Since then I have developed an interest in the premodern period for its own sake. Several years ago I tried to read a book by Julius Evola called The Revolt against the Modern World. It was too abstract for me but I got the main point anyway. Nazism is a throwback to the pagan premodern times. I can understand discontent with the modern period. It is filled with “hollow men” as T. S. Eliot would say.  I plan to use a new WordPress blog to post information on my studies in this period of history in response to my listening to lectures from The Teaching Company. Perhaps later I will read books as I do for the History of the Third Reich.

Did Hitler do it for us?

I had a conversation this week with an acquaintence I have run into for seven summers now.  He asked me what I do now that I am retired. I said that I study ancient and medieval history, the history of the Third Reich and the Bible. I told him  that I was currently reading David Irving’s great biography of Field Marshall Irwin Rommel, the “desert fox”. He said that Rommel was a controversial figure as was the author of the book. Then he added that he was a student of WWII also. My thinking was that he is one of us. He is probably also respectful of the leaders of the Third Reich but is capable of expressing it only in code language. About 30 years ago I used to go to a local used bookstore and I would look for works on the Third Reich as well as  works on other topics that I study. I once asked the clerk why there were so few books on Nazi Germany. He replied that the  bookstore gets a lot of books about Hitler, Goebbels and others but that they are sold as soon as they hit the shelves. I think that a lot of white men admire these leaders. They killed a lot of innocent people but then a lot of innocent people were killed on both sides in WWII. Forty thousand elderly men, women and children were killed in the Allied bombing of Hamburg in 1943. Between 30,000  and 130,000 denizens of Dresden, many of them refugees, were killed by Bomber Harris in the final stretch of the war. As a Christian I abhor the killing of innocent people. You will hear in the media today what monsters the Nazis were because they killed a lot of innocent people like the Jews. But I don’t think I am going to let the establishment choose my heroes for me because the people I pick are not perfect. Hitler made it clear that he was going to die in the Bunker rather than flee or surrender to the enemy. His reason was that he wanted to set an example for future generations who might be attracted to the Nazi cause. That is something that white men understand and appreciate whether they acknowledge it or not.

Black and white

I am finished with The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans and I am ready to report on it. It is an account of the early history of the Third Reich in black and white. The Nazis are black–they are ruthless, arrogant and often cynical. On the other hand, the Jews and resisters are white–they are noble, loyal to the German nation and courageous. The section on the activities of the Nazi Party in the few years after Hitler’s becoming chancellor are replete with tales of beatings and torture. Several years ago I read William L. Pierce’s (author of The Turner Diaries) comment on a story of torture during the period of Hitler’s rule. Pierce said that the Nazis did not torture people: “They didn’t do things like that.” These writers are not both right. I would think that the Nazis did torture people because in general they glorified violence. Hitler was known to encourage his troops to be brutal towards the enemies in occupied territory a little later on in his dictatorship during the war. This clearly and powerfully written book is the best book I have ever read on the subject the Third Reich and I have read over 20 books–most of them biographies and some of them excellent like Ian Kershaw’s Hitler and David Irving’s Hitler’s War. Especially impressive is the way the author weaves social history into his narrative account.

Concentration camps as hell

I just finished rereading The Theory and Practice of Hell by Eugen Kogon.  It is supposedly a sociological study of the Nazi death camps by Holocaust survivors. The author was an inmate at Buchenwald for a few years where he worked as an assistant to the SS medical officer.  He reports that the SS planned three times to send him to Auschwitz to be gassed but the trips were postponed each time. He was liberated in 1945 by the Allies. Most of the book is his account of what was going on at Buchenwald. But there are also many short testimonies or should I say anonymous horror stories from survivors of other camps. This is not really a sociological study and there is no attempt to verify what Kogon did not witness himself. It is more a Rumpelstiltskin-like fit as you would expect from a book with an inflamatory title. I read the prefatory material and the introduction and skimmed the rest of the book–which I first read in 1966. Included in the prefatory material is a page by Reinhold Niebuhr comparing life in the death camps as the nearest thing to hell on earth.  I also recently have read Night by Elie Wiesel and From Death Camp to Existentialism by Victor Frank. They both describe the camps they stayed in as having at least some little hope. Hell is a place with no hope. These two books are very much worth reading. The Theory and Practice of Hell is a piece of junk.

Frankl’s From Death Camp to Existentialism

I just reread the first thirty pages of Victor Frankl’s 1960s book in which he discusses his time as a prisoner  in Auschwitz. I skimmed the rest.  In the beginning of  his account the train of inmates approaches a camp and he sees the sign for Auschwitz and comments that it brought with it the fears of gas chambers, crematories and massacres. Frankl mentions gas chambers copiously in the section on Auschwitz but although there is a description of the chimney of a crematory  with flames coming out of the top  there is nowhere  a description of gas chambers- either the inside or the outside – or of a massacre. Elie Wiesel in Night which is an autobiographical novel that admits to being partly fictionalized also mentions a crematory chimney with fire belching out. And there is mention of a massacre in which inmates are shot and killed in a pit. But similarly there is no  description of gas chambers. Wiesel recounts that he was in Auschwitz only a few weeks but Frankl was there presumably much longer because he relates extensive accounts of his experience on a work crew. Frankl says that he spent three years in various concentration camps. I am guessing that he spent at least a year in Auschwitz because his account of that part takes about 30 out of 90 pages. Frankl would have had time to locate and see at least the outside of gas chambers if there had been any because they would have been near the chimney of the crematory which he saw and there presumably would have been  lines outside them because hundreds must have been gassed every day to reach the total of  one million. Frankl also mentions inmates with typhus and relates that he spent some time as a doctor in housing for those who were dying from it. Maybe the use of crematory ovens was for the substantial number of inmates dying daily from typhus. Anyway, both accounts are powerfully written and I recommend them. Their style is very sombre with an atmosphere of resignation although the sense of resignation is much more prolonged and poignant  in Frankl’s book. They both make for good existentialist literature. It was no picnic being an inmate at Auschwitz. But were there gas chambers?

Is Nazism collectivistic?

   Anyone watching Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will with its rows and rows of marching soldiers with their swastikas would realize that Nazi society was highly collectivistic.  One could rightly observe that the German people during the Third Reich were a large cult with Hitler as the charismatic leader at the top. Neo-Nazis are often heard to say that if we do not hang together we will hang separately. I am not sure of the origin of that saying but it is representative of the thinking of many of those today on the radical right. Collectivism  is currently very much in vogue on the left also. But it takes on the form of a politically correct multiracialism. A very nice lady I worked with several years ago who was Bahai in faith would wear a sweatshirt that read : There is only one race–the human race. I am currently listening to a lecture series on DVD entitled: Big History. The lecturer claims that what makes human beings distinctive and a separate species is collective learning.  That would mean that a collectivistic society is an essential manifestation of our humanity. Political correctness is supressing contrarian ideas about important subjects like race, intelligence and the Holocaust with a fierceness that is remniscent of the persecution of heretics in the Middle Ages. Yes, the past has been collectivist and collectivism is still with us.  Although I am sympathetic with many aspects of Nazism I shudder at that thought of  living in collectivist society even if  it is a Fourth Reich.  I believe that individualism is responsible for the great leaps of mankind. It is the freedom to disagree with the conventional wisdom that has made paradigm shifts possible. We are currently celebrating the bicentennial of Charles Darwin and his idea of natural selection as the basis of evolution. He is just one example of a thinker who radically changed science with a contrarian idea. The classic exposition on the importance of individualism in human advance is Ayn Rand’s 20th century work Atlas Shrugged. I am on my third reading of this pathbreaking book. It has influenced me more than any work other than the Bible. It is a story of inventors in our society disappearing into an enclave to form their own society-a society that is favorable toward innovators and other achievers. The basic premise of the book is that: We are not all in this together. In this work specifically the productive people abandon the unproductive people. The reader may go beyond the thesis of the book in taking the extrapolated position  that white gentile people, an inventive people in their own right,  do not need Jews and the people of color–as many on the radical right do.  We are capable of running our own society. If this day of white separatism ever comes I am hoping that our new White society will be free, rewarding of  individual initiative and individualistic.  I wish that those I know on the radical right would take the time to read Atlas Shrugged and rethink the collectivistic position of the Nazis and the Neo-Nazis.

Pat Buchanan: a Profile in Courage?

I have just finished reading Pat Buchanan’s new book Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War. It is very well written unlike his Death of the West. You don’t have to be a history buff to follow his well developed thesis. He presents his arguments step by step with copious quotations–mostly from primary source material. I looked at the bibliographical references at the back of the book before reading it to see whom he relied on.  He cited John Toland 20 times. Toland wrote a bestselling biography of Hitler a little over 20 years ago. It is one of poorest biographies of Hitler in English. The author did not even read German. He relied on research by a professional German researcher and on copious interviews with Hitler’s surviving cronies for the backbone of his account.  I noticed that there was not a single reference in Buchanan’s book to the extensive writings on the subject of the Third Reich by David Irving.  Irving is generally acknowledged as having determined the facts for the 12 year reign of Hitler. Certainly, Buchanan read and relied on Hitlers’ War. He probably also read the fact-filled two volumes that Irving has written of his projected three volume biography of Churchill. How does one account for this omission? After Irving lost his lawsuit in Britain against Deborah Lipstadt the Jewish media has been claiming that Irving is now discredited as a historian. Actually all the defense in the trial established was that in all the books Irving has written a few sections of text were not supported by the documents refered to in the bibliographical notes. Pat Buchanan is one of the talking heads on TV. I watch him on The MacLaughlin Group every week.  There are about one thousand people that are continuously seen on TV and Pat is one of them. These people are selected very carefully because they represent current thought to the millions of Americans who get their view of the world from TV. The media is controlled by the Jews and Pat Buchanan would not want to antagonize the Jewish establishment because he desperately wants to be one of those thousand people–for financial reasons and for the sake of his reputation. A co-panelist with Pat on The MacLaughlin Group is media mogul and one of our Jewish masters Mortimer Zuckerman. Pat would not want to be reprimanded or frozen out by Zuckerman for refering to a “discredited” historian and suspected neo-Nazi regardless of how important his research is. I once heard Pat tell the story of his teenage years concerning fighting back. He said that he learned in high school that if someone hit you you had better hit him back or you were in for more trouble. A lot of time has passed since then. Buchanan is not a profile in courage today.

Nietzsche laid the groundwork for Nazism.

This past week I have listened to Robert Solomon’s lectures from his course The Will to Power: The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The author shows how Nietzsche influenced existentialism and postmodernism. But how much much more he prepared the way for Nazism. I would like to list seven ideas of Nietzsche that helped Nazism to flourish in Germany. First, Nietzsche was an outspoken atheist. He announced in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that God is dead. He replaced God with fate and taught a love of fate. Hitler likewise was an atheist and also a naturalist. He believed in no supernatural beings-either good or bad. Hitler also believed in fate which he called providence (Vorsehung). As the war was winding down and defeat for the Germans seemed inevitable, Hitler told his comrades that one must accept one’s fate. Second, Nietzsche believed in the hegemony of the masters over the slaves. He taught that the masters are beyond good and evil and that the resentful slaves have invented morality in order to drag the masters down. The Nazis believed in the Aryans as the Master Race and in the dictum that might makes right. Hitler said more than once in Table Talk that if the Germans were victorious it would not matter who was right and who was wrong. Third, Nietzsche did not believe in objective truth. He wrote a number of statements that undermined truth and the reality of the objective world. He wrote that the only truth is that there is no truth. He wrote that there are no facts–only interpretations. He wrote that the truth is whatever belief that enables the individual to survive. Hitler was not enough of a philosopher to comment on truth. But Nazi Alfred Rosenberg wrote a book The Myth of the Twentieth Century that promulgated the notion that the Aryan racial soul was responsible for the creation of civilization.  Heinrich Himmler made several efforts to establish a pagan religion for the German people. Nietzsche’s depreciation of truth made this Nazi mythmaking possible. Fourth, Nietzsche promoted the healthy and denigrated the sick. The Nazis acted on this belief by practicing eugenics and putting to death the mentally retarded and mentally ill. Fifth, Nietzsche lifted up the Ubermensch as the superior human being of the future. Similarly, the Thule Society in Germany saw in Adolf Hitler the “man from above”.  Sixth, Nietzsche made the will to power the key concept in his understanding of the motivation of man. The Nazis in general and Hitler in particular placed great emphasis on will power as the prerequiste for victory in war. Yes, it is hard to imagine the rapid emergence of Nazism in Germany without the ideas of Nietzsche that were known to the common man. And indeed the Nazis acknowleged their debt to Nietzsche. Nietzsche was the father of existentialism, postmodernism and Nazism. But the child that resembled him the most closely was Nazism. Perhaps that is why Hitler remarked in Table Talk that the Jews would suppress Nietzsche if they were in power even though it was known that Nietzsche was not a classical anti-semite.