‘Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.’
Genesis: ch 3, v 5
When, as a young adolescent trying to make sense
of a troubling world, I asked my elders and betters the obvious question about
Hitler, I was given two answers. One, Hitler hated Jews because as a young man
he caught syphilis off a Jewish prostitute.
Two, Hitler hated Jews because he was refused admittance to an art
college he wanted to attend, and the administrators responsible for his rejection
were Jewish.
Even at that stage of my life, Hitler’s response to either or both circumstances
– taking out six million Jews and however-many million Russians, not to mention
Poles, French, British, Germans etc – seemed to me an over reaction. Why not just go back to the girl concerned, and
strangle her to stop her from infecting anybody else? Why not revisit the offending institution and
donate a home-made bomb as something to remember you by? Punish the individuals, if you had to, but
why hit everybody else?
There were other problems as well. If the girl did have syphilis, would that have
been because she was Jewish, or because she was a prostitute with multiple
customers? If the latter, shouldn’t you
be purging the world of prostitutes, rather than Jews? The reason apparently given to Hitler for his
art-college rejection was that they felt he was more suited to
architecture. If true – and in the endemic
blending of fact and fiction within the Nazi record of events who can be sure?
– Hitler, rather than feeling resentment, would have agreed. Later, once he was
in power, he said you could judge a nation’s culture by two things: its music and
its architecture. Architecture, rather than art. Decadent art, after all, was
easily dealt with: you could simply burn the offending paintings in public. When
things had really got going, you could – even better – burn the artist along
with his works. But getting rid of architecture was another matter entirely. For that you needed tanks and Stukas, and a
whole strategy of blitzkrieg.
Dissatisfied with the explanations given,
I sought for others. This essay, the
result of many years of troubled pondering, is the result. I do not pretend, unlike Hitler, to have the final
solution. The definitive explanation for
Hitler is as elusive as the final cure for poverty, or the certain identity of
Jack the Ripper. But I hope that what follows may illumine some dark corners of
this dark topic for some readers, in the way that it has done for me by writing
it.
Hugh Trevor-Roper dismissed Hitler’s cultural
views as ‘trivial, half-baked and disgusting’: a description of his thought
that, in view of the cremation ovens, must be one of the most unfortunate ever
made. From Hitler’s own account of himself, however, he virtually starved his
body in order to feed his mind with the best that European culture could
provide. Maybe, scary thought, he misunderstood
what he read. Maybe, even scarier, he didn’t.
Either way, it seems indisputable that in his formative years Hitler absorbed
the ideas of certain celebrated names with a terrifying intensity, identified
the common ground between them with a dreadful clarity, and followed the
implications through to their logical conclusion. The syllogism was perfect;
the problem was the validity of the major premise: especially when the outcome
was not abstract philosophical satisfaction, but death and suffering on such an
unprecedented scale.
Hitler and the word ‘Aryan’ are irrevocably linked.
But what does it mean? Confusingly, it
seems to have originated in the Indus
River Sindh River
who had arrived in Europe with the Ottoman
armies – he rounded them up with the gypsies as a matter of course, interred
them, and exterminated them. Hardly the
types after whom you’d want to name your master race. Even more confusing, ‘Aryan’ sounds like
‘Arian’: after the third-century Arius, of Alexandria
Aryanism – as the Nazis understood it – emerged in
Europe in the 1830s; the supposed spiritual qualities of the Aryans later blending
with Nordicism to produce the blue-eyed, blonde-haired ideal with which so many
of us are familiar. The establishment of the concept arose from the efforts of
the comte de Gobineau.
Gobineau is not a household name;
although in view of the number of households that were later to be ruined as a
result of his ideas, he ought to be. As
a French aristocrat, Gobineau understandably deplored the French Revolution. Brooding
on how things had gone downhill ever since – they certainly had for the likes
of him – he tried to establish why: finding his eventual answer in history as
the conflict between races. In the
tapestry of civilization, one sub-group of the white race – the Aryans – had
the most important role.
Human history is like an immense tapestry… The
two most inferior varieties of the human species, the black and yellow races,
are the crude foundation, the cotton and the wool, which the secondary
families of the white race make supple by the addition of their silk; while the Aryan
group, circling its finer threads through the noble generations, designs on its
surface a dazzling masterpiece of arabesques in silver and gold.
Hitler may have read Gobineau – some experts
say he did, others say he didn’t: take your pick – with close attention, but there are problems
with the sort of view expressed
above. As a matter of sober observation,
talent seems to be no respecter of race or class. It can crop up in the most unexpected places. When Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize,
Hitler felt that the Aryan Swedes had betrayed the nobility of their race by honouring
a Jew. The Swedish response was that genius should be rewarded wherever it
appeared. Renan, Gobineau's
contemporary, feared that his views could spell the ruin of western
civilisation. ‘Apart from anthropological
characteristics, there are such things as reason, justice, truth, and beauty,
which are the same for all.’
That
statement is itself not without its problems, but it does explain why Gobineau
did not thrive in France Germany Bayreuth
Finding
himself among friends, Gobineau developed his ideas further. History was the struggle between strong and
weak races. However, once the strong
races had conquered the weak, as a result of interbreeding the strong were
themselves defeated by the weak. By the blending
of blood, between strong and weak, the former degenerated while the latter gained
power and control.
My
reading of that is that if the two were blended, they were no longer strong and
weak, but something new that was in between.
Mix blue and red, and you don’t get something that is half blue and half
red. You get a new colour altogether. Is the bottle half empty, or is still half
full?
Wagner’s circle made sense of Gobineau
by focusing on those who had not blended.
Those who had blended had contaminated
themselves, but those who hadn’t still remained strong or weak. Germans, with
their pure Aryan blood, would save European civilisation. This sanguine theory
passed down to Hitler undiluted. The future of European civilisation, the apex
of human development, rested on those who still had pure Nordic blood. And in the heavy duty with which Hitler had
been charged by destiny, the easiest way to ensure the ongoing purity of those
with the requisite blood was to eliminate those without it.
I have always struggled with Wagner. For good
or ill, he is one of my favourite composers, and I can fully understand why
Hitler should have idolised him. Rarely
has it been so necessary to separate musical genius from its owner. The
Ring and Tristan und Isolde –
tapping into the Norse mythology and Arthurian legend that are among my most
cherished subjects – are among my favourite works of art; whereas I despise
Wagner’s betrayals of those who helped him and of those to whom he owed money. My
view of Wagner the man is best summed up in what George Orwell said of Dali: ‘as
anti-social as a flea’.
A
disturbing aspect of the Ring cycle
is the depiction of the gold-obsessed dwarves – reminiscent of the Jews of
caricature – and the contempt with which they are treated by the blonde young
hero, Siegfried: so pure of blood that he is the result of incest. A cynic might say that in Wagner’s essay ‘Judaism
in Music’, with its lament that the Jew had bought the German soul, all he was really trying to do was justify not
paying his debts, and promote his own sort of music by downplaying successful
Jewish composers who were his rivals.
Far more damaging was the belief of Wagner’s follower, Wilhelm Marr,
that the Jew would never be able to become German because he would never be
able to ‘speak’ German. Even if he could, for all purposes of social interaction. German wasn’t in his soul. This idea of a subversive nation within the nation
later sank into Hitler’s consciousness with the results we know.
From Houston Chamberlain, Wagner’s English
son-in-law, came the concept of the German as the ideal ‘Aryan’ or Nordic type:
locked in struggle with the Jew who aimed to gain power over gentiles and dominate
the world. This the Jews did by keeping
their own blood pure while polluting the blood of other races.
A question arises here, as it does
with Gobineau: how could the Jews be interbreeding and keeping themselves pure
at one and the same time? Perhaps this
is the origin of the ‘doublethink’ of 1984,
the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in your head simultaneously. You can see, though, how a no-win situation was
building for the Jews. You could blame
them for not integrating. You could
blame them for integrating. And you
could blame them for doing both.
Mussolini scoffed that the prophets
of the nobility of the German race were none of them Germans. It seems equally
odd that those promulgating – directly, or by association – the blue-eyed, blonde Aryan should have fallen
so far short of that physical ideal themselves.
Hitler had dark hair. When Nietzsche
spoke of the superman, he was not thinking in physical terms, but if he did not
anticipate how the idea might be developed along physical lines then, arguably,
he ought to have done. Nietzsche might
proclaim that one should trust only those thoughts that came to one in the open
air, flexing one’s muscles, but most of his thoughts probably came to him indoors
while flexing his bowels, prostrated with his digestive disorders. Whatever superman
he perceived himself to be, as a physical specimen he would have been a plausible
candidate for extermination under the Nazi eugenics programme. Wagner, in his later years, looked more like one
of his own horrible dwarves than he looked like his Siegfried.
It is a nice irony in the film Escape
from Sobibor that the Russian Jew who masterminds the outbreak looks more
like the Aryan ideal than any of the SS guards who are its supposed embodiment.
If it is unclear as to when the Final Solution in
its final form occurred to Hitler, it is arguable that genocide was not on the
early Nazi agenda: not for some Nazis, anyway.
In the 1930s, Germany – or the Europe that was to become Germany – could
be purified by sending the Jews somewhere else: somewhere where Germans would never
want to be. Palestine was the obvious destination. But what about the logistics of getting them
there? In any case, the British who controlled
Palestine France had been conquered, was Madagascar Madagascar France
Even when systematic destruction of
Jews began, initially it was only men. Their families could have the ashes: for a
fee, to defray postal costs. The killing of unarmed women and children was a final
taboo that it was hard to break. There was even talk of solving the Jewish
problem by sterilizing all Jewish females. What prompted the final decision of genocide
was the Jewish world conspiracy. If the
Jews had started the war as part of their plan of world domination, then shifting
them to another place would not solve the problem since they would simply carry
on their schemes from there. The only
hope for the world was a Jew-free world. Mass extermination. Unassailable
logic: assuming, of course, that the Jewish conspiracy was true in the first
place.
Unquestionably,
some Jews were obsessed with money: but if you took that as the criterion for
Jewishness, the concentration camps could never have held all the potential
ex-Aryan candidates. Unquestionably, Jewish bankers had global connections: don’t
all international financiers, whatever their nationality? It was harder to make the case about the
Jewish race’s over-riding urge for world domination when you considered the impoverished
Jews in the back streets of Warsaw Zion
This document – purportedly the
records of a Jewish conspiracy to seize world power – is such a convolution of
deliberate fiction and deliberate fabrication that it is difficult to trace its
accurate pedigree. Try to pin it down, and you will find different versions of when
and where and from whom it originated.
It has even turned up in The Holy
Blood and the Holy Grail. Broad consensus suggests that it began as a French
version of a German novel, designed to destabilise Napoleon III. Outed as a
forgery, it next turned up in a Russian translation presented to the Tsar by
the Russian secret police in the hope it would stimulate a series of pogroms. When
the Tsar perceived it to be false and banned it, the police printed and
circulated it anyway, and it was used by the Whites to discredit the Jews among
the Bolsheviks. By 1920, it had found its way back to Germany
The
existence of this document was a tragedy for the Jews, especially as it became increasingly
fused within Hitler’s mind with the threat of international Bolshevism. Hitler could sympathise with the poverty of
the German working class, which in his youth he had experienced in person: Viennese
version, anyway. Because the Jews were behind
commerce, they were to be blamed for oppressing the poor. Here, perhaps, we can
see the more malign effects of Wagner’s essay: the Jews, being only interested in
money, had taken hold of the German soul, not just its musical soul. But the Jews were also behind the Marxists, fomenting
rebellion out of discontent to bring about a world revolution. What had Marx been, if not a Jew? Weren’t lots of the Bolshevik leaders
Jews? Jews, Jews, Jews manipulating the
economic system at both ends.
A syllogism. Marxism wanted to take over the world. The Jews were behind Marxism. Therefore, the Jews wanted to take over the
world. War against Russia
Hitler’s invasion of Russia is instructive, compared with his invasion
of Greece Germany were taken from Greece
With
the Russian campaign, it was a different matter, in keeping with the military
version of the war against the Jews. The
German invasion armies were to live off the land, and take no prisoners. Up to
thirty million Russian deaths were anticipated, and hoped for. The Russians who
died would create the space – lebensraum – for later German expansion, and the destabilisation
created by the death toll would help sort out the Bolshevik problem, and the
Jewish world-conspiracy problem, once and for all.
With
this approach, Hitler was like someone thinking himself safe inside an aeroplane
because no one would be mad enough to blow themselves up along with the other passengers. Hello, suicide bomber. It was Hitler’s bad luck to be up against someone
even more ruthless than himself. Stalin’s
scorched-earth policy ensured that no one got access to food. The Russian peasants starved, which was according
to Hitler’s plan; but so did the German
invasion armies, which wasn’t.
Let us return for a moment to the unknown woman
to whom Hitler may or may not have fallen victim victim. If the story is true, most of us would assume
she had syphilis because she was a prostitute.
With Hitler, it seems that the answer – in all seriousness – would have
been because she was Jewish.
In Mein Kampf, there are a dozen pages – possibly informed by the
bitterness of unfortunate personal experience – given to linking the Jews and
syphilis. That is why the problem for
Hitler would not have been solved by killing the woman concerned: for Hitler,
she was duplicated throughout the Jewish race.
If Pasteur had discovered bacteria, Hitler had discovered the human equivalent.
The discovery of the Jewish virus is a one of
the greatest revolutions the world has seen.
The struggle in which we are now engaged is similar to the one waged by Pasteur and Koch in the last century. How many diseases must owe their origins to the Jewish virus! Only when we have eliminated the Jews will we
regain our health.
Another syllogism. Disease is undesirable. Disease is caused by the Jews. Get rid of the Jews, and you will get rid of
disease. A concentration camp guard joked to an enquirer about what happened to
Jewish children that they were turned into soap. Hitler would probably have been as appalled
by that statement as any normally-disposed person; but not for the same
reason. By Hitler’s logic, use of the
product would presumably have been a route to re-infection.
As with so many aspects of Nazism,
theory became practice. When the German
army marched past the Warsaw Ghetto, an extra wall – the Jews, inevitably, were
given the bill – was constructed to protect the soldiers from infection. A sceptic might have argued – at the time, of
course, to do so would have been to buy a one-way ticket to an extermination
camp – that it was a tad unreasonable to uproot the Jews from their homes,
compress them in ghettos in conditions of horrific overcrowding and without
access to proper heating, sanitation, running water, or sufficient food, and then
– when they succumbed to typhus, tuberculosis, cholera and dysentery – to
accuse them of spreading disease. One
hell of a way – literally – to prove a
theory.
The reference to biology that we have begun
with ‘the Jewish disease’ leads us on to the
most controversial influence on
Hitler: namely, Darwin
Defenders of Darwin
Luther, however, became anti-Jewish because
the Jews refused to accept Christ. His sentiments
– although in much coarser language – are an extension of Paul’s longing in Romans that the Jews who had remained outside
might come into the Christian fold. Had
the German Jews converted, Luther would have welcomed them with rejoicing.
With Hitler, conversion was irrelevant. It wasn’t the beliefs that mattered, it was
the blood. Insofar as Hitler was influenced
by Nietzsche, Judaism and Christianity were merely two sides of the same coin;
but more of that later. Certainly, Darwin
The first edition of the Origin of Species had as its sub title ‘Preservation
of favoured races (my italics) in the
struggle for life’. Do we thus also have a sub text: animal species are the equivalent
of human races? If so, Darwin
You could tease out
from this that animals are in competition
with one another, that humans are animals,
and that humans are, therefore, also in competition with each other, but you
would be putting words in Darwin’s mouth.
However, ten years later, in The Descent
of Man, Darwin
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon
eliminated… We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to prevent the
process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the
sick… Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind.
If – or since - the checks applied
to the breeding of domestic animals are not applied to the human race, “the nation
will retrograde.” There, in a nutshell, you
have the justification for a eugenics programme: for anyone with the courage –
or whatever other word you want to use – to make a practical application of Darwin
From The Descent of Man you could derive, also, the grounds for genocide:
with biological inevitability as the scientific justification.
extinction follows chiefly from the competition
of tribe with tribe, race with race… At some future period, not very distant
as measured by centuries, the civilised races of men will almost certainly exterminate
and replace throughout the world the savage races.
What Hitler said to the German
people was not – he was a consummate politician, after all – necessarily what
he believed. It wasn’t the Germans against
the rest. It was the Aryans against the rest.
Arguably, Hitler’s dream was racial socialism, even if it had to come
through the medium of national socialism.
He liked the British and the Swedes and the Danes. The Dutch were ‘the little brothers’.
The French were more
problematic. Hitler wanted to humiliate
them in revenge for the humiliations of the Treaty of Versailles. Beyond that, he never seems to have been
quite sure about where France
Hitler’s
vegetarianism was ideological. He liked animals. Darwin
Actually,
the fates of the different species are tied up with each other. If there is drought, and a shortage of vegetation,
the herbivores die out. If the
herbivores die out, the lions starve.
You can make your religion the worship of Nature, but there are lots of inconsistencies
in Nature. As Darwin
The breaking down of conventional constraints
by the Nazis that culminated in their T4 programme gave open house to the pervert,
the sadist and the bully. I am sure nevertheless – from the debate in the surviving
records – that the ordinary medical staff entrusted with T4 endured real soul searching
with their eugenics and euthanasia policies: especially if they genuinely wanted
what was best in the long term for the human race, and had to follow where
science seemed to lead.
In the struggle of the favoured races for survival – Origin of Species sub title – it was inevitable
that the higher races would eliminate the lower. That much was clear: although suicides among the SS suggest some unease
about the elimination of the women and children even of the lower breeds. But what did you do about the defectives within
the Master Race itself? Get rid of the
old. Get rid of the mentally ill;
although what if their illness had arisen from World War One shell shock and
had been acquired in a good cause? Get rid of homosexuals, if they were
obviously effeminate, or tried to dissuade the master race from breeding. Otherwise,
there were more urgent candidates for the available places in the concentration
camps.
Get rid of the congenitally
disabled. But what did that constitute, in
the evolution to perfection? Did you qualify for extermination if you were an adolescent
with bad acne, or a baby with the wrong-shaped ears?
I
often wonder how many million Germans, in their heart of hearts, who had
perhaps wanted nothing more from Hitler than dignity for Germany
In the area of applied eugenics, Darwin Darwin
What about those who had been fit once
and were not now: the World War One veterans who had lost limbs in defence of
the Fatherland? By the logic of the survival
of the fittest, the formerly fit had become a burden to the currently fit. When
the Bishop of Münster asked what might happen to those who had lost limbs in
the current war, the Nazis, having no
easy answer, wished they could hang him to stop him from asking such difficult questions. Significantly, however, Hitler publicly closed
down the programme; although it still continued in secret.
Of all those who have added to the
sum of human misery through the ideas they have inflicted on the world, Nietzsche,
for me, is right up there among the winners.
Disciples of Nietzsche claim that he has been misinterpreted. Well of
course they would: what would it make
them if they admired him and said he hadn’t
been misrepresented? Their defence, for me, is like blaming the audience
for reacting when someone shouts ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre. If ever there was a man who shouted ‘Fire!’ that
man was Nietzsche; and when one megalomaniac shouts, another megalomaniac may
listen. My guess is that Darwin
‘Man is for war, and woman for the
recreation of the warrior!’ is an aphorism that may induce laughter in the
modern reader, but Nietzsche, when he wrote it, was in deadly earnest.
Nietzsche’s war was a religious war: against the Ten Commandments by which the
weak had managed to ensnare the strong; against the Christianity that was a
religion fit for slaves.
No doubt Nietzsche’s claim that God
had died because of humanity’s indifference was a true and original perception in
its way. Let no one underrate the
torment of this terrible and tragic figure.
No doubt it was his courage in staring unflinchingly into the abyss that
opened with the death of God that drove him to madness before his syphilis
did. In his war against the God that had
died, Nietzsche appropriated the empty throne, seized the crown of life, and
declared himself the Antichrist. Where
Nietzsche had led, Hitler later followed.
Churchill’s claim that the Second World War was
not about territory, but about the struggle between good and evil, is open to
scepticism: especially from those who did not have to experience its
effects. Trust an imperialist to try and
defer attention from the real issue!
What about the bombing of Dresden , and
the failure to bomb Auschwitz ? Quite true, and
can the critics be sure what they themselves would have done if they had had to
make the decisions, in the confusion of those particular circumstances, and
justify them to the British public?
In his apocalyptic tones, it seems
to me, Churchill had keyed into something about the mindset of his opponent: if
not good against evil, then at least a lesser evil against a greater. More strictly, a war of those who had held on
to their humanity, however flawed, against those who had, like Nietzsche,
evolved beyond good and evil and become the new secular gods. After all, when the Allies moved into the
death camps, they didn’t keep the process going; they stopped it. That has to suggest some sort of difference
in priorities.
The liberal Protestantism that
Nietzsche so despised had told the world the danger of belief in hell. Hitler showed the world – actually, the Nazis
tried not to – the result of disbelief.
And when there were male bodies in the ovens so starved of flesh that
they would not burn properly; when it was necessary to add one female corpse to
every two male that the three might be consumed together, then, indeed, we were
back with the worst excesses of the medieval imagination. Only, where there had once been devils
stoking the furnaces, now there were humans.
Man had declared himself divine,
and found himself to be demonic. In
evolving into the new type of god, Man had regressed to something ancient; for
the god He had become was Moloch, and with a hunger that was insatiable.
In his private notes, Hitler wrote that you
could not be a German and a Christian.
He was right: not Hitler’s sort of German, anyway. Between the creed of the Aryan Übermensch, and the creed that said, ‘There
is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female; for you
are all one person…’ there could be no compromise.
Here.
I think, we come to the crux of the matter.
Pre-World-War I German academic racists were not especially
anti-Semitic. When, in the wake of The Descent of Man, they were pondering
the elimination of inferior races, their focus was on African negroes and
Australian aborigines. The elimination
of the Jews probably arose from Hitler’s opposition to communism. Communism was
Jewish in origin. Communism threatened a
global proletarianism. Not only did this
challenge the counter-vision of a global Aryanism, but it glorified the wrong
end of the human race. Behind Marx,
despite his atheism, was the protection of the weak enshrined in the Mosaic law
of Judaism, and in its parasite, Christianity.
A Darwinian solution was needed for the problem that was Marxism, and
for the problem that had preceded Marxism.
Two
more syllogisms, following the logic of Nietzsche. Conscience hinders the emergence of the
Master Race, by preserving the weak.
Conscience is a Jewish invention.
Therefore, destroy the Jews, and you destroy conscience.
Or
do you? What about this? Conscience within the Master Race hinders the
Race’s full emergence. Conscience has
been passed on by the Jews to the Christians.
Therefore, for the Master Race to finally emerge, you need to destroy
the Christians.
If the Christians were a sort of subversive
nation within the nation, then Hitler had been there before. Recent research suggests
that there were far more inmates in the death camps who were there for their
Christian beliefs – disguised by the Nazis as unacceptable political views – than
had, at first, been realised.
Once
he had dealt with the Jewish root, Hitler – by the iron logic that impelled him
– would have turned his attention to the Christian tree. But he lost the war, and ran out of time.
‘Thus
far shalt thou come, and no farther
And here shalt thy proud wave be stayed.’
Job ch 38, v. 11.
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