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.

Was Jesus a Jew?

Hitler claimed in his Table Talk that Jesus was not a Jew but a Galilean who rebelled against Jewish oppression in general and Jewish capitalism in particular.  He further claimed that the Apostle Paul converted this Aryan Christianity into a universal religion whose goal as a Jewish plot was to undermine the Roman Empire primarily through the advocacy of egalitarianism. Nazi intellectual Alfred Rosenberg explicitly stated in The Myth of the Twentieth Century that Jesus was an Aryan whose teachings were very dissimilar from those of the Roman Catholic Church which arose after his death. Friedrich Nietzsche who preceded the Nazis, dying in 1900, and who probably influenced the Nazi position on Jesus, saw a dichotomy between the ministry of Jesus and the Christian Church as the Apostle Paul established it. To Nietzsche Jesus was a free spirit who promoted a Buddhistic peace movement. He was the first and only Christian and taught openness and love. Paul turned this all into a hostile repressive institutional religion that denied the natural man. While Nietzsche did not claim that Jesus was anything other than a Jew, he set the stage for the Nazi antagonism to the Church as representing the opposite of what Jesus taught. Hitler, Rosenberg and Nietzsche have been embraced for their interpretations of Jesus as a way to rewrite history. Certainly Jesus was a Jew. Although not trained in a rabbinical school, in many ways he was a traditional Jew as Geza Vermes has pointed out in his book Jesus the Jew. The book of Galatians in the New Testament, written about 20 years after the death of Jesus, discusses a conflict between Paul and Peter over Gentile Christians in Antioch. Peter was sensitive to the party of James, also from the Jerusalem Church, who wanted Gentile Christians to convert to Judaism first. This shows that the Jerusalem Church, which included not only Peter but, at least initially, Mary the mother of Jesus, considered itself to be a Jewish phenomenon. This would not have been possible if Jesus had been an Aryan.  Furthermore, although Paul in particular and the Catholic Church in general did  transform Christianity into a universal religion they did not make it  something radically different from what Jesus taught. Contemporary Nazis and Neo-Nazis who proclaim Jesus as an Aryan are promulgating a myth and should examine themselves before criticising the Holocaust as a myth. People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.

Irving versus Kershaw: Battle of the Titans

There are two widely read biographies of Hitler in English.  One is Hitler’s War by David Irving and the other is Hitler by Ian Kershaw. Which is better? Irving’s strength is that he has established the facts for Hitler’s reign of 12 years. During his research he constructed a file with sections for each day recording where Hitler was, whom he met with and what was discussed. Much of this was based on diaries that he collected from the comrades of Hitler and their families. Kershaw has called Irving a great archivist but not a great historian.  He asserts that Irving assembled the facts but could not interpret them. It is true, as has been remarked, that Hitler’s War is written as if the Fuhrer had written it himself. But it is not a whitewash as for example Leon DeGrelle’s Hitler: Democrat is. It is a well-written, fast-paced 1000 page work that is meticulously docmented. Irving is the master of the primary source material. Kershaw’s book is strong on interpretation. Kershaw throws a few sops to political correctness. For example, he uses the expression “gas chambers” –but only once, parenthetically,  in 1200 pages. It is increasingly doubtful that there were gas chambers. He refers to Eva Braun as a “featherbrain”. We don’t know enough about Eva Braun to estimate her intelligence. Kershaw said in an interview shortly after his work was published that he hated everything Hitler stood for. But he didn’t say he hated Hitler himself.  While critical of Hitler he seems to be fairly objective if not faintly respectful of him. His interpretation is insightful. Irving has criticized him for relying primarily on secondary source material.  I think that this is a devasting criticism.  The most important function that a historian has is to establish the facts and determine what happened.  Without this there can be no useful interpretation. Truth is the bedrock of civilization and it is a very fragile thing. So I conclude that Irving’s Hitler’s War is more important than Kershaw’s Hitler. But by all means read both of these two great biographies. 

Queer Nazis

I have read around 20 books on the Third Reich. Certainly the silliest and most absurd is The Pink Swastika. The purpose of this book, written by an Evangelical Christian and a religious Jew, is to organize Christian evangelicals against Nazism and Neo-Nazism. Their argument is that the Nazis were not as much racists as they were homosexuals at war with the promoters of Biblical morality, the Christians and the Jews.  Even more specifically the authors make the bizarre charge that the Nazis were “butch” homosexuals who persecuted “femme” homosexuals in addition to the Christians and the Jews. The charges against individual Nazis set a new standard for ridiculousness. Any Nazi that had any connection with a homosexual male is deemed a probable homosexual. The book is replete with charcterizations like “a likely homosexual” and “a strongly suspected homosexual”. Leaders of the Third Reich tarred with the brush of homosexuality include Hitler, Hess, Himmler,  and Heydrich. Possible homosexuals include Goering and Goebbels. There is no objective evidence that any of these leaders were gay. In fact, it seems the authors are incapable of weighing evidence as shown by their naive acceptance of rumor as proof. And there was so much infighting among the Nazis that there were a lot of slanderous rumors floating around. The authors see so much homosexuality in the Nazi world you wonder if they are projecting.  I’ve heard the following quip: The world is divided into two groups–those who divide the world into two groups and those who don’t. These authors divide the world into those who are for homosexuality and those who are against it. The Nazi revolution was not about sex. Hitler was reputed to have very little interest in sex even though he had a mistress in Eva Braun. Hitler and his henchmen were interested in power and not sex. 

Nazism: Right or Left?

The term for political parties as being right or left comes from the French parliament where French Action (the fascist party) sat on the right and the French Communist Party sat on the left. But how meaningful is this right-left dichotomy. Hannah Arendt in her work Totalitarianism said that there was about a dimes worth of difference between the far right and the far left in post-WW1 Germany. Hitler saw himself as a national socialist and racist and distinguished himself from the Marxists who were international socialists. But they were both very much socialists. In Mein Kampf he talks about his respect for institutions in German society and the two he names are the civil service and the army. His father was very proud of the fact that he had moved up in the Austrian civil service in spite of the fact that he did not have a university education. I think this respect for the government was passed down to Adolf. Mein Kampf also mentions that Hitler despised the capitalists in German society–whether they were Jewish or not. Ian Kershaw describes the Third Reich as being run by a massive and inefficient government bureaucracy  with departments having overlaping responsibilities. Indeed, Hitler was very much a big goverment advocate. Was this perspective right or left? I think it was left. The right should be conservative with commitment to small government and civil liberties and not totalitarian socialist. Racism does not put Nazism on the right per se.