The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Postby admin » Sun Jun 03, 2018 1:19 am

The Hitler Book
edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
Schiller Institute
© 1984 by New Benjamin Franklin House
Cover: Virginia Baier
Cover photograph: Clockwise, from top left, John J. McCloy. photo NSIPS; Allen Dulles (left) with John Foster Dulles in 1948, photo UPI/Bettman Archive; Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht (left) meets with Bank of England Governor Montagu Norman in 1938, photo UPI/Bettman Archive.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS:

• BACK COVER
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: He Who Does Not Learn From History Is Forced to Repeat It, by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
• CHAPTER 1: The Philosophical Roots of National Socialism
• CHAPTER 2: The National Socialist World-View: Racial Darwinism, Gnosticism; and
Mysticism
• CHAPTER 3: The 1930-45 Collaboration Between Switzerland and the Nazis
• CHAPTER 4: The Grand Mufti and Hitler: National Socialist Networks in the Mideast
• CHAPTER 5: Wilton Park and the Farce of German Re-Education
• CHAPTER 6: Old Wine in New Casks: The German Secret Services
• CHAPTER 7: The Nuremberg Trials, Hjalmar Schacht, and the Cold War
• CHAPTER 8: The Global Danger: Today's Nazi-Communists
• AFTERWORD, by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
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Re: The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Postby admin » Sun Jun 03, 2018 1:29 am

BACK COVER

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Helga Zepp-LaRouche was born in 1948 in Trier, the oldest city in Germany, and was educated in Hanover and Hamburg. In 1971, she became the first Western journalist to go to China after the Cultural Revolution. She went on to study philosophy, history, and political science in West Berlin, Frankfurt, and Mainz. Her major theoretical research and writings cover Avicenna, Nicolaus of Cusa, and the German classics, as well as 20th-century history.

In 1974 Helga Zepp-LaRouche was one of the founders of the European Labor Party, of which she has been the chairwoman ever since. She intervened in 1974 in the U.N. World Population Conference in Bucharest to oppose the participants’ plans for mass depopulation of the underdeveloped sector, and has since been active in the formulation of development programs. Extensive travels have taken her to Southeast Asia, Mexico, Africa, and India. In 1977 she married Lyndon H. LaRouche, who directs the Executive Intelligence Review and is currently a Democratic presidential candidate. In 1982 she founded the Club of Life, which works to counter the ideas of the Club of Rome and establish a New World Economic Order; the Club of Life is now represented in 22 countries. In 1984 she founded the Schiller Institute, a foreign-policy think tank based on republican principles.
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Re: The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Postby admin » Sun Jun 03, 2018 1:32 am

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to all those in the USA and Europe whose research work made this book possible, and especially to the writers Dr. Helmut Battiger, Andreas Buck, Thierry Lalevee, Michael Liebig, Laurent Murawiec, and Angelika Raimondi.

I also extend my thanks to John Sigerson, President of the Schiller Institute in the United States, and to Susan Parmacek Johnson, for supervising reparation of this English edition of Das Hitlerbuch, which is being published by the Institute in West Germany. Thanks also go to John Chambless, Edward Carl, and Caroline Sulzer for their translations from the German.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche
June, 1984
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Re: The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Postby admin » Sun Jun 03, 2018 3:14 am

Introduction: He Who Does Not Learn From History Is Forced to Repeat It

This book is a contribution to understanding the current political situation in the Federal Republic of Germany. Its publication has become necessary because processes now at work within the German population are to a large extent unknown to that population, and to such an astounding degree that we must not only draw upon the history of the twentieth century; we must proceed from the fact that Germany has never come to terms with its past. This has been all the more difficult because there exists no competently written history of Germany in the twentieth century. Between the official histories and actual experience, there exists an all too gaping chasm, and Germans have had little chance of recognizing themselves within this mass of literature, let alone using it to achieve some clarity about their past.

The most distressing aspect of the German tragedy is that the citizens of the Federal Republic are once again on the brink of plunging into disaster. Seemingly without a history of their own, and yet shackled by that history, in the 38 years since the end of the Second World War the Germans have not been able to define a positive national identity. And now they are once again chasing after the chimera of a supposed national interest. Their lack of historical awareness and self-knowledge comes into bold relief in the German's largely unconscious fear reactions to the looming war danger. This danger is hard to ignore; the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact states are currently preparing for war. Reorganization of their military command structure, mobilization of all units into the highest state of preparedness, militarization of the civilian economy, and indoctrination of the population are but some highlights, along with the recently much-publicized preparations for committing acts of sabotage in the West through so-called spetsnaz groups -- specially trained units totalling around 30,000 agents with instructions to paralyze key sectors of energy, transport, and communication shortly before the outbreak of war.

Even though this threat to the Federal Republic comes unmistakably from the East, large parts of the population are nevertheless steeped in anti-Americanism, and are, to various degrees, becoming swayed by the seductive tones of Soviet assurances of the U.S.S.R.'s unbounded love of peace. On the one hand, the Soviets are extending their carrot, tempting West Germans with the chance to have a nuclear-free zone in Central Europe and a possible reunification into a neutral German state. But at the same time they are waving their stick, claiming in the Soviet media that the policies of the U.S.A. and the Federal Republic are identical to those of the Nazis, that there is a revival in the army of old Prussian militarism, and so forth. Coming at the present moment, such characterizations are primarily aimed at mentally preparing the population of the Warsaw Pact countries for a '"Just war" against an alleged resurgence of fascism. The Federal Republic's population, knowing about this mobilization in the East, is to be put into such a state of fear and terror that it will, so to speak, voluntarily run into the Soviets' open arms. And if it does not, everything is already in place for a military intervention.

Is President Reagan a new Hitler? Is the Federal Republic under Chancellor Kohl pursuing a Nazi policy? Is the Bundeswehr a conspiracy of revanchists, dripping with Prussian-Hitlerian militarism? Such claims are quite obviously absurd, and could hardly be taken seriously even in the Soviet Union.

In the recent past, accusations of fascism have often been used as justification for political power-plays, but never were there more dangerous implications than today: the result could be a new world war. Without a doubt, there does exist a new danger of fascism. Fascism will, however, come from a different quarter than the Soviet writers claim. In fact, leading circles of the still-powerful Western oligarchy are attempting to respond to the current world economic crisis with economic proposals identical to those which Hitler's Economics Minister and former Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht carried out during the last Great Depression.

The danger of a new fascism exists in the inhuman brutality with which the International Monetary Fund forces its infamous conditionalities upon the developing countries, knowing full well that this will cause millions of human beings to die by starvation. In Africa alone, the IMF's policy threatens to kill off more people than Adolf Hitler did in the course of the Second World War. The danger of a new fascism, however, is also embedded in the racism of the Club of Rome, an organization which considers the white Anglo-Saxon race to be under siege, and which has de facto written off the black, brown, and yellow peoples of the earth as "useless eaters." This club of technology-haters is promoting each and every irrationalist cult which might serve as a nurturing environment for fascism.
The danger of fascism also results from the coincidence of mass unemployment with a mood of cultural pessimism, as well as the so-called peace movement's constant undermining of governmental authority through its use of violence and terror.

But all these dangers are not what the Soviet Union is referring to. Where is their anti-fascist resistance movement to fight this old evil in its new garb? Or is the anti-fascist resistance perhaps not working very hard after all? The reality is that the Communist phase within the Soviet Union has more or less come to an end. To the extent that the ideology of Marxism-Leninism -- never fully embraced by the East bloc population -- loses its appeal, the much more deeply rooted mentality of czarist Russia rears its head again. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are resuming their former positions as spokesmen for the so-called Russian soul and the idea of the "holy Russian race," the brotherhood of the blood and soil of "Mother Russia," of "Holy Moscow." and finally, the medieval idea of Moscow as the third and final Rome, the capital of a future world empire.

Anyone who has followed the recent proliferation of such ominous ideas in Soviet publications or In speeches from leading Soviet military figures, can be left with little doubt that the Soviet Union is currently in the midst of a decisive molting process. The comparatively rational phase of communism is yielding to an irrational and violent fundamentalism, whose highest aim is no longer even the progress of the socialist state, but rather lies in the protection of the holy soil of Mother Russia, from which the Russian soul is supposed to derive its power. This impulse has now been elevated to the status of a national mythos, feeding into Moscow's dream of a world empire.

This metamorphosis taking place within the Soviet Union is likewise moving in the direction of fascism; at the same time, however, it signifies a return to the murkier side of Russian history and mentality, an aspect closely associated with the name of Dostoevsky. This morbid cultural pessimist's world outlook was one of the most crucial sources of all national socialism. The fact that this is usually covered up in most historical research, makes it no less true. The point of departure for investigation along these lines would have to be the German-language translator of Dostoevsky, Moeller van den Bruck, the man who coined the term "Third Reich" and who introduced Dostoevsky's world outlook into German thinking.

The Soviet Union has long ceased claiming it supports the world's "progressive movements." With increasing unabashedness it has been utilizing old and new Nazi networks, such as the Green movement -- that new vessel for fascist world outlooks -- or the old Nazi structures operating out of Switzerland, or even the Islamic fundamentalist Sufis and Shi'ites. These curious alliances of Moscow all proceed not only from their desire to promote anything which weakens the West, but are also based on their epistemological affinity. This affinity is the cement uniting the left and right wings, whose common denominator consists of rabid anti-Americanism, the idea of a neutralized central Europe and a reunified Germany. From the New Right around Alain de Benoist to the so-called left -- so called by such people as Social Democratic leader Oskar Lafontaine out of historical ignorance -- the unifying link is a new wave of the old National Bolshevism which kept on surfacing during the Weimar Republic.

Behind the current policy of appeasement in the West, there lurks a singular longing to join with the Russians in reversing the defeats suffered by Germany in the last war -- a hope many sought to fulfill following the defeat of World War I. That defeat constituted the fertile soil for the National Bolshevist tendencies of that time. The peace movement, which then as now consists almost exclusively of the ecology and counter-culture movement, is still preoccupied with the watchwords of an "anti-capitalist longing" now surging throughout the German people. This at any rate was the term used by Gregor Strasser, leader of the National Bolshevist wing of the Nazi Party. Such a historical parallel is by no means accidental, as is clearly shown by recent positive evaluations of the Strasser brothers appearing in the peace-movement literature, e.g. in the West Berlin terrorist-connected newspaper taz.

Not openly, but with voices hushed as if in fear of ghosts, circles in the peace movement are muttering about "Weimarization" -- the key notion behind that evil phrase, the "ungovernability" of the Western democracies in general and the Federal Republic of Germany in particular. During the parliamentary vote on the stationing of Pershing missiles in Europe, the Greens clearly demonstrated who their teachers have been on the subject of unhinging the parliament through violence and terror; namely, the Nazis. The worst danger here is that the so-called established parties and institutions themselves are disintegrating under the pressure of events. Probably the most terrifying example of this is the degeneration of the Social Democratic Party since the departure of Helmut Schmidt.

Weimarization -- and then what? Is it possible to conceive of a new phase of fascism in Germany? Unfortunately, just as in 1931, the question must be answered in the affirmative. And today, the danger of war is all too evident. Yet we cannot dismiss the fact that the threat of a new fascism is not confined to the Federal Republic, but this time extends over the entire world. The threat could become reality if oligarchical financial circles succeed in enforcing their Malthusian economic policies, or if the West capitulates to Russian-Orthodox hegemonic claims. The irrationalism of Khomeini and his terrorist commandos also pose a serious threat to Western civilization, if we are unable to put an end to this monstrosity.

Humanity today probably faces the gravest crisis in its entire history. It is all the more urgent to achieve epistemological clarity concerning the roots of fascism. Otherwise, what will happen when it appears in different garb? This book differs substantially from other publications on this theme, in that it documents the continuity of fascist networks through to the present, and shows how they operate today.

There is no other way to give a true account of fascism. In this respect we must agree with Friedrich Schiller's thesis, that the historian must retrieve from the entire sum of events, those circumstances "which have had a crucial, undeniable and easily traceable influence on the shaping of the world today and on the condition of the generation now living. In gathering materials for universal history, therefore, we must look to the relation of an historical datum to the state of the world at present."

None of the published books on this theme have met this criterion, with the result that, in spite of their wealth of detail, they are simply wrong.
Although a few works here and there stand out from the general mass of publications by having unearthed important aspects of the history of National Socialism and fascism, no presentation exists which significantly concentrates on this "relation of an historical datum to the state of the world at present." Such a presentation must not only trace how Nazi networks have survived to the present day, but must also show the fate of all the various ideological strands leading into National Socialism -- the ideological jumble out of which Hitler's particular brand of National Socialism was merely the most successful. All these currents, from Theosophists and Anthroposophists, Eugenicists and Pan-Europeans, National Revolutionaries and National Bolshevists, through various Conservative Revolution tendencies, to the Strasser and Hitler wings of the NSDAP -- a total of perhaps 4,000 to 5,000 different tendencies -- have significant overlapping areas with respect to content and practice.

Among these tendencies, Hitler's National Socialism, with its practice of eliminating competitors through violence and terror, was certainly the most successful. This, however, does not mean that the less successful currents were free from guilt, or that their policies would not have led to equally genocidal results, had they won the upper hand instead.

One of the worst blunders, therefore, in all previous historiography has been the attempt to lend some of these other groupings an aura of antifascist resistance, simply because they succumbed to internal rivalries. Such groups, were they to be overlooked now, could continue to exist undisturbed and could under the right conditions increase in influence.


The new world economic crisis contains within it all the dangers of a resurgence of fascism. But just as the emergence of the Nazis and Hitler's seizure of power were by no means "sociological phenomena," so there is nothing "organic" about developments today; now as then, the formation of such movements has been consciously guided and artificially orchestrated.

Certain oligarchical circles have for some time been whispering about a "new Hitler project," and about how they could find a more appropriate Fuhrer figure, educate him in rhetorical skills and supply him with the necessary "charisma." It is easy to see how, in this television age, such a figure could be created out of the most lowly material -- Jimmy Carter being a case in point. Our pursuit of this discussion was an important motivation to the writing of this book.

The old "Hitler model" is, of course, outmoded in its exact original form. A new version of fascism would probably be more oriented toward Strasser's wing of the NSDAP. This, at any rate, seems to be the direction indicated today: fanatical hatred of technology, mystification of nature mixed with regionalism, and the all-pervasive National Bolshevist groundwork, based on dreams of an independent Central Europe as a "third power" with a reunified, neutral, but armed Germany.

Here lies the crux of the matter. A "new Hitler project," which currently has crucial momentum in German politics, does not simply mean a shift into overtly fascist policies. What is required are deftly formulated and cleverly executed "intelligence-chessboard moves."


In order to better understand such operations, we must consider the fact that, as early as 1977, the Warsaw Pact held a large maneuver in the German Democratic Republic and other states under the code name "Operation Polarka." This operation was kept secret not only by the East, but by NATO as well; it would have caused quite a stir if, during the chancellorship of Helmut Schmidt, it had been revealed that the object of these maneuvers was a surgical strike into the Federal Republic, with the aim of removing Nazis who had supposedly taken state power.

We must also recognize that the Soviet Union was the only one of the four victorious powers which never agreed to the formulation of the United Nations Charter of 1948, and therefore still defines the subsequently founded Federal Republic as merely a successor to the fascist aggressor. The Soviet Union therefore officially regards the Federal Republic as a potential opponent, a nation against which military operations are perfectly legitimate.

Although the Polarka maneuver seemed at first to be solely political in nature, its true content was only first revealed in a series of speeches and articles issued by Moscow following the West German Parliament's November 22,1983 decision to install the Pershing missiles. The Soviet military newspaper Red Star charged that the Bundeswehr was encouraging a revival of the old Hitler-Prussian revanchism. East German party chairman Erich Honecker accused the Kohl government of seeking a reunified Germany and a return to the borders of 1937. Soviet Politburo member Grigorii Romanov told the German Communist Party congress in Nuremberg that the same country which was responsible for starting two world wars (an insupportable argument with respect to World War I), is now engaged in preparations for a third, as evidenced by the stationing of the Pershing II and cruise missiles as first-strike weapons on its territory. Numerous Soviet publications have described Reagan as the "new Hitler," emphasizing that the Federal Republic shares this responsibility. Such accusations, of course, are patently absurd in light of the actual balance of military power in both the strategic and intermediate areas. Their real purpose, however, is to mobilize the population within the East bloc for war, and to legitimize a possible military incursion against the Federal Republic.

Now, one might object that such an argument could not possibly hold water; who could imagine Helmut Kohl as a new Hitler? No one in his right mind could possibly accuse Mr. Kohl of planning to emerge as a new powerful Fuhrer!

So then, where are these Nazis which Moscow succeeds in puffing up into credible bogeymen? Even though the hard core of the "Green" so-called peace movement has been engaged in countless terrorist acts in the best tradition of the SA, we would be quickly disappointed if we expected the Soviet Union to describe those people as Nazis. No, on the contrary, Moscow has been providing these actual Nazis with generous financial support.

Instead, the pretext for Moscow's accusations is the new "Republican Party" in West Germany, formed in Munich five days after the missile stationing, and named in order to induce the public to read "x" whenever they see "y." Before its foundation, this party had already been assured financing from oligarchical circles in southern Germany, and its ranks include members so outspoken about their uninterrupted admiration for Hitler that one has good grounds for suspicion. Indeed, it almost seems as if this party wants to send a loud and ringing message: "See, there is a resurgence of Nazism in the Federal Republic!" With central roles played by such prominent persons as Franz Schonhuber (I Was There), who in turn is said to maintain close friendly relations with the current head of the Nazi International, Swiss banker Francois Genoud, then our suspicions can only increase. Genoud himself is considered to be not only at the hub of Nazi-Communist activities worldwide, but is also well known through the European press for his ties with the internationally sought terrorist Carlos and with East Berlin. Is it conceivable, then, that the East has had some hand in the formation of such a blatantly right-wing party as this "Republican" Party professes to be? We must at any rate ask the question, "cui bono?" and watch its development carefully.

Historical truth can never be discovered from the initial appearances of events. This is doubly true for the history of Nazism; never has there been a field more thoroughly and frequently plowed and cultivated by both East and West as this one, and many events which appear on the surface to be "political," are in fact nothing more than secret service operations.

The loser in this game of power is the German people themselves, because such games deprive them of all sense of cause and effect and lawfulness in the real world. Our only remedy here is to remove these events from the shadows and expose them to the light of day, with the goal of leading the Germans into a true consciousness of their own history.
Their knowledge of their own share of responsibility, as well as the responsibility of others, is the Gordian knot which must be cut if there is ever to exist real sovereignty for the Germans. We must overcome the self-righteous hypocrisy found so often abroad, the prejudice that all Germans were Nazis and that the Nazis were only in Germany. In reality, Germany is one of the most tormented nations in the world, even considering all the poverty and suffering this world harbors.

Anyone with a precise knowledge of Germany cannot doubt that it was Germany itself which suffered most at the hands of the Nazis. The price for the Nazis' crimes must be reckoned not only by the number of dead; the nation also seems to have lost its soul, and it is still uncertain whether it will ever be able to regain it. In order to understand the miserable situation of the Federal Republic today -- its inability, during the 38 years following the war, to either become a nation or to produce a national republican elite which could espouse our country's vital interests -- we must include in our considerations the entire span of the last 200 years.

Why and how could Germany have sunk from the highest cultural level of its classical period with its humanistic conception of mankind, down into the depths of Nazi bestiality? This question still needs to be answered; indeed, it represents the key to locating the German identity. Precisely because classical Germany had attained such a pinnacle of humanistic culture, it had made itself into the target of the international oligarchical forces of the Conservative Revolution. What took place in the Germany of Schiller, the Humboldts, and Beethoven, was indeed a true classical period, rooted in Greek classicism and the Italian Renaissance, elevating the conception of mankind to new, hitherto unattained heights. The concept of the American Revolution, the "ideas of 1789," transmitted by the works of poets and composers of that era, penetrated more deeply and more lastingly into the conscience of the population, and educated a greater portion of the population in republican ideas, than ever before or ever after.

Whoever desires to understand the collapse of the German people must learn to comprehend the reasons for this transformation of Weimar classicism's unlimited cultural optimism into the cultural pessimism of the Weimar Republic -- a pessimism which in turn made National Socialism possible, and which is still running rampant today.

This transformation is symbolized by three dates in Germany's history: 1815, 1918, and 1945.
Each of these years had ramifications for Germany which at the time were scarcely comprehensible to individual citizens; they were the products of extremely complex international constellations. For the individual, the events of those years brought deep disappointed expectations, and produced the fissures in national identity which paved the way for cultural pessimism.

The Congress of Vienna in 1815 had an indisputable and decisive influence on the Germans' decline. Had this assembly never taken place, National Socialism would probably have never come into being. Never had the Germans been closer to conducting a republican revolution on the American model, and never had they reached a higher moral level, than they were during the 1812-15 Wars of Liberation. These wars were not merely a republican uprising against Napoleon's imperialist occupation of the greater part of Germany; above all else, they were spearheaded by a flourishing constitutional movement.

The movement was led, of course, by the Prussian reformers vom Stein, Humboldt, and Scharnhorst, but it drew its vitality from the countless common citizens who were filled with patriotism and inspired by Schiller's dramas and other republican writings. Even at the Vienna Congress itself, vom Stein still cherished hopes that the negotiations would result in a united, sovereign German nation. But that was precisely what the international oligarchy conspired to prevent. With the intrigues and machinations of the English, French, Venetians, the Russian nobility, and especially the wretched Metternich (the man whom, not surprisingly, Henry Kissinger admires the most) arrayed against them, the German republicans did not stand a chance. Cloaked in hypocritical fundamentalism, the Holy Alliance snuffed out each and every shining idea, introducing instead an era of brutal oppression and surveillance. The German population, unable to understand why their heroic and victorious struggle against Napoleon had not led to a nation-state, lapsed to an ever greater degree into an other-worldly Romanticism during the years following the Restoration, drifting later on into outright demoralization. It is only from this standpoint that the influence wielded by Nietzsche and the other demagogues of cultural pessimism becomes comprehensible.


As for 1918, standard historical research has long since rejected the thesis that Germany bears sole responsibility for World War I. If the Congress of Vienna signified the end of a period of hope in Germany's history, then the Treaty of Versailles marked the beginning of the subsequent disaster. Out of the colossal injustice embedded within this treaty, the terms of which the population was never in a position to fulfill, all of the later calamities flowed. Hitler made good use of the justified outrage felt by the population, a large portion of whom had been uprooted through four and a half years of senseless, brutalizing trench warfare.

Hitler, however, was by no means the charismatic loner whose personality might enable us to understand the "National Socialist phenomenon." Hitler's entire personal career was, after all, but one product of the oligarchy's cultish world outlook, and it was this same oligarchy which, on the urging of Hjalmar Schacht, decided to raise Hitler onto its shield in 1932. The same oligarchy, therefore, which had passed judgment over Germany at Versailles and had set reparations payments at such an absurdly high level that any economic recovery was rendered out of the question, now looked for the strong man who could carry out a policy of austerity according to their specifications and with the required ruthlessness. Hitler was their man!

But Hitler alone did not give the Weimar Republic its final death blow. This was done by that curious "action alliance" of Communists and National Socialists, both of whom were intent on destroying the constitutional "system." Later memories of the destruction wrought by the Nazis against the Soviet Union during the Second World War, have largely blotted out these earlier memories of the astonishing affinity which existed between "right" and "left" during the Weimar period.


On the one hand there was the Strasser wing of the NSDAP, openly preaching for an alliance with the East. But even within the Hitler wing, the methods used by the SA and SS to construct a totalitarian one-party state and to deploy a terrorist apparat, were remarkably similar to those of the post-Lenin Bolsheviks, who themselves had never broken with the old traditions of czarist Russia.

From the Soviet side, Stalin and the Comintern forced the German Communist Party (KPD) to support the Nazis -- a move which unleashed considerable turmoil among the German Communists, who were more representative of the direct legacy of Karl Marx than the specifically Russian strain of Bolshevism. Stalin and Georgii Dmitrov, head of the Comintern's Western Secretariat, ordered the KPD to fight against the "social fascist" Social Democratic Party (SPD), and to form an action alliance with the Nazis "in order to hasten the dissolution of the dwindling democratic block governing Germany." Stalin thought Hitler was a useful tool for weakening the West, a pawn who would soon discredit himself, at which point Germany would be ripe for Communist takeover.

At play here were the same considerations which later moved Stalin to conclude the Hitler-Stalin pact. The frequent if sporadic collaboration between Nazis and Communists against the SPD -- which continued well after the start of the emergency government under von Papen! -- was grounded on the Soviet side upon the the same philosophy which today permits them to collaborate with the Green "peace movement." Moscow itself, we can be assured, has no illusions about this movement's National Socialist character, but it sees its anti-Western orientation as an asset in Moscow's own struggle against "capitalism." The Soviets have apparently still not learned the lesson that one can always sponsor a National Socialist movement, but one cannot necessarily prevent such a monster from eventually striking back against its master. Today the Federal Republic is threatened once again by the same Nazi-Communist alliance as it was during the Weimar Republic.

Financial circles in Zurich, London, and New York not only financially supported Hitler before his seizure of power; through the pages of the New York Times they lavished public praise on him well into 1939. And at the 1932 Conference on Eugenics at the Museum of Natural History in New York City, not only were leading Nazi racialists present, but they were flanked by representatives of the so-called Eastern Establishment, headed up by Averell Harriman's mother and the infamous William Draper, who soon thereafter was to participate in the terror bombings of German cities. (Following the war, Draper came to Germany in order to "reeducate the Germans.")

Today it would have a liberating effect on the German population if more knew these facts, and if they could experience rage that the same political circles which helped Hitler to power, later had the arrogance to impose upon the Germans their own queer idea of democracy. Access to such knowledge is generally blocked by a prejudice that National Socialism is a strictly German matter; we therefore recommend that such prejudices be dissolved, and that National Socialism should instead be regarded as only an extreme form of the oligarchical world outlook, which is locked in battle against the opposing philosophy of humanism and progress.


One instrument in the oligarchs' armamentarium has been the thesis of so-called collective guilt. Its inventors, Hugh Trevor-Roper and John Wheeler-Bennett, intended to use this thesis to extinguish any glimmerings of humanist culture which might have lingered on within the German population following the Nazis' campaigns of psychological terror.

Everyone who lived through the years following World War II knew that the thesis of German collective guilt was designed to break the back of the German people once and for all. To be sure, Germans were conscious that they were at fault, and that their resistance against the Nazis obviously could have been stronger, especially on the part of large organizations such as the SPD and the trade unions, who were in a position to put up effective resistance. But few could have accurately predicted what was in store for Germany after the Nazis arrived, since there were no examples to draw upon from recent history. After the seizure of power, the reign of terror set into motion with such brutality and efficiency that the predominantly individual resistance of a very considerable number of courageous people was quickly wiped out. "Shot while escaping," the newspapers would report laconically whenever the SA or the SS had to cover up another cold-blooded murder.

We must see the Germans' behavior following Hitler's seizure of power in its proper proportions. Their reactions differed little in this respect from the way people behaved abroad. Were we not also, just recently, in grave danger of a Third World War set off by the incompetent Jimmy Carter -- a danger already evident before his inauguration, and against which presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche warned in a half-hour television broadcast in November 1976? If we had had a Third World War then, would people be talking afterwards -- assuming there were survivors -- of the Americans' collective guilt? And the "resistance" against Jimmy Carter in 1976 was not very great.

The problem was not that all Germans had become Nazis or even Nazi sympathizers. The problem was rather that, once again, a momentous historic moment had found a "little people," as Schiller once put it concerning the French Revolution. Most people at the time preferred to turn to their private affairs, just as they are doing today. "Yes, sure, the violence of the Nazis is upsetting, but I have to look after my family and my career; and anyway, they'll discredit themselves once they've gained power," was the common reply. And the Nazis certainly did discredit themselves; unfortunately, the Second World War had to be fought before they did.

The victims, then, were these "little people" who thought they could remain aloof from politics; many of these became the men who bled and froze to death on the Eastern Front, or crawled home after the war with shattered limbs and withered hearts. It was these "little people," women and children, who night after night, year after year, ran to hide in their cellars, whose lives were destroyed and who will never, despite all subsequent efforts, be able to blot out the terror of those years.
While the population was still paying for the Nazi leaders' insanity, while the Allied terror bombing was still destroying German cities -- to no military purpose, but solely in order to study the population's reactions -- the post-war world was already being divided up. The Bretton Woods monetary system was essentially based on a draft proposal by Hitler's Economics Minister Walther Funk, though for the sake of politeness the name of a Churchill collaborator was placed on it. From its very inception, Bretton Woods contained all the seeds of destruction which were to lead to the second world economic crisis of the 1980s. And while the soldiers were being ground up in a war which, since Stalingrad, had increasingly lost any prospect of victory, the leading Nazis were busily shipping their collected booty into Switzerland, where they could count on tender support from the Dulles brothers. Here, long before the war's end, it had already been decided who among the Nazi bigwigs would be permitted to re-emerge with a clean record -- as did Messrs. Schacht and Skorzeny, for example -- who would be spirited off abroad, and who would be quietly incorporated into the Anglo-American secret service, as exemplified by SS officer Klaus Barbie, along with many others.

No, the course of German history has never been as black and white as the movies would have us believe, with the good Anglo-Americans lined up against the nasty Germans. There never was any new beginning, never some sort of zero hour; there was only a regroupment of forces. A few were justly condemned, many criminals both in and outside Germany got away scot free, and the entire German population was made into the scapegoat for the unsuccessful Hitler project. Even though two world wars fought and lost went a long way toward breaking the backs of the Germans as a nation, it was the Allied occupation which accomplished the rest. All the pacifism, anti-Americanism, hatred of technology and irrationalism so evident today in the West German population can be directly credited to this misguided occupation policy, and now the bill is being presented. Unless the United States recognizes its past mistakes, and substitutes a new, positive policy, the German-American relationship will never truly heal.

Where the Occupying Powers Failed

Perhaps the best way to gain insight into the mistakes made by America in occupied Germany, is to compare the policies of John J. McCloy and Gen. Lucius Clay in Germany with those of Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Japan. These two completely contrasting approaches are in turn expressions of the fact that McCloy and MacArthur represent two poles within American policymaking.

MacArthur, whose thought and actions were embedded in the spirit of the American Revolution, guided his policy toward conquered Japan with a true concern for its future, and acted to strengthen republican tendencies within the country in order to win Japan as a long-term friend. McCloy represented the opposite outlook. He remained a typical representative of the treasonous Tory clique which became known as the Eastern Establishment, whose entire efforts, over the 200 years since the American Revolution, have been tirelessly directed toward reversing the gains of this revolution. The immeasurable wealth held by this clique derived largely from trafficking in slaves and drugs.


McCloy, true to his tradition, acted toward occupied Germany as would an arrogant colonial lord. The idea of formulating a policy for Germany which would also meet U.S. national interests could not have been further from his mind; he dedicated himself single-mindedly to carrying out the policies of his own faction. Even if the Japanese today are correct in criticizing the American pragmatism embedded within MacArthur's educational reforms, and preferring to change them. MacArthur's policies are the true exemplar of the art of statecraft. Faced with a situation which could have easily fallen into total chaos, he succeeded in creating a certain degree of stability, while at the same time paving the way for a truly new start in Japan.

MacArthur had instructed all of his officers and soldiers that they should not under any circumstances do anything to injure the pride of the Japanese. Soldiers were under strict orders to respect the Imperial Palace and other temples and shrines. As a result, the thousands of American soldiers stationed in Japan behaved like "gentlemen," and quickly gained the population's respect and friendship. MacArthur had recognized that it was necessary to keep the institution of the imperial court, in order to maintain continuity for the Japanese nation. On the other hand, he actively engaged the Japanese in carrying out his own reforms. All this took place in a predominantly friendly atmosphere, producing a cross-pollination of ideas fruitful for occupier and occupied alike.

The reconstruction of Japan would never have been as successful as it was, were it not for the cooperative and attentive manner in which MacArthur proceeded in the best interests of both Japan and his own nation. MacArthur allowed the Japanese to keep their identity within the context of their own culture, while at the same time he fostered freedom-loving, republican "American" elements, as exemplified by MacArthur himself. This explains the difference between Japan today, with its much smaller share of problems, and the Federal Republic of Germany.

McCloy's policies were quite different. Not only did he conspire with the Dulles brothers to leave the Nazis' Swiss headquarters untouched, along with the funds they had squirreled away there. Under McCloy, the old Nazi secret service networks were smoothly transferred into well-paying Allied positions. In this so-called new order, the American occupying powers actively sought opportunistic "reeducated" Nazis whom they could hoist into leading positions as so-called "unknown quantities," so as to better control these people through blackmail material from their dossiers.

McCloy made no secret of his intention to create a political vacuum within the occupied areas. Every autonomous democratic organization was suppressed, and all efforts went instead into building up "American assets." And so it came to pass that every institutional structure, whether of a private or a public nature, was interwoven with these "U.S. assets" which could be brought back into line at any time merely by referring to their past. This was also the case with the parties (especially the Free Democratic Party), as well the communications media, trade unions and, above all else, the legal system.


The fact that the Anglo-American occupiers discouraged existing republican tendencies in favor of their own controllable "assets," has turned out to be a great liability for these same circles today. Not only have these "assets" produced what astonishes us about the "green" movement, but faced with a crisis these ostensibly faithful allies of the United States will once again turn against their masters. Willy Brandt's career is a case in point.

Americans should not be amazed that the old Nazis whom they believed they could use, are now steering a course toward National Bolshevism. Only if this mistake is immediately corrected, can we still prevent the Federal Republic from drifting out of the Western Alliance.

These Anglo-American policies had terrible consequences for all well-meaning people in post-war Germany -- all those who had actually put up resistance, whether Christians, old Social Democrats, members of the Reichsbanner organization, humanists or simply people who, lacking any visible prospects, went into a so-called internal emigration in order to preserve at least some remainder of personal integrity. All these people had waited and hoped for the American liberators.

For the sake of these people, such artists as Wilhelm Furtwangler and Heinrich Schlussnus stayed behind in Germany, doing so with the knowledge that, with all the suffering the German population had been subjected to, no one could deprive them of their humanistic culture. These people made up the enthusiastic audiences for hastily organized concerts immediately following the war, some of which were held in empty factory buildings. It was these so-called simple people who took into their own hands the resumption and organization of production, and proceeded to build new parties. Many brave men and courageous "rubble ladies" (Trummerfrauen) took it as obvious that those who had had nothing to do with the Nazis would now be the ones with a chance to prosper.

But they had to look on with increasing disappointment while the same people who had gotten along so well with the Nazis were now succeeding with the Allies as well. The process of political self-organization was abruptly halted, and new political leaders were hoisted into place, among them many exiles selected according to psychological profile. Efficient officials from the Nazi regime, equipped with their new Persilschein (whitewash certificate), once again sat in their offices as judges and administrative advisors.

And once again, just as in 1815 and in 1918, the world became incomprehensible to the normal citizen. Events had no rational explanation, and justice seemed nowhere to be found.

But most absurd of all was the collective guilt thesis aggressively promulgated by the occupying powers. Under the pretext of re-educating the population, perhaps more damage was done than had been accomplished by everything which had come before. What went on within the British re-education camp, Wilton Park, was nothing short of brainwashing; the idea was bludgeoned into detainees' heads that there was no such thing as absolute and unconditional values and truths to guide one's actions; instead, everything had to be done pluralistically, democratically, and pragmatically. If a relatively widespread pacifism is on the rise in the Federal Republic today, then the cause and the blame lies almost exclusively with the coordinators of Wilton Park and associated "de-Nazification programs."

The re-educators had little interest in eliminating fascist tendencies; at best, they went after some of the more exotic types who could cause public embarrassment. Wilton Park was aimed instead at eliminating what remained of humanistic culture, and attempted to equate German classicism with the philosophy of National Socialism. Everything Germans had ever believed in was denigrated, irrespective of whether these were convictions, illusions, and prejudices stemming from the Nazi period, or ideas and concepts from Germany's earlier, positive history.

The result was a classic shock reaction; following such a confession of collective guilt, the victim was left with no choice but to forget or suppress the past as quickly as possible. And thus we had the birth of the German without a history. It is still not uncommon today to meet representatives of the war generation who can only respond to concrete questions about this period by going into a confused and disoriented state;
one can always be sure that such people have no Nazi skeletons in their closet. Real Nazis, on the other hand, have quite good memories.

Once every institution had been seeded with "Anglo-American assets," there was no way for a national republican elite to develop; consequently, since then there has not existed a single institution which has been in a position to espouse national sovereignty for the Federal Republic. Re-education had put a stigma on the very notion of nationhood, and West German citizens were given no chance to develop into a normal nation within the world community.

The Federal Republic has, at best, played the role of a flourishing business concern during the post-war years. But when the world economic crisis of the late 1970s began to fracture this economic underpinning, even this superficial identity began to totter, and the seemingly stable Federal Republic suddenly began to collapse with breathtaking speed. The initially higher morale of the reconstruction period was soon replaced by massive repression;
in retrospect, the 1950s were indeed the best and most optimistic years since the war's end.

During the 1960s no one wanted to talk about the Nazi period or how it came about. The order of the day was: succeed, don't take risks. Parents were too concerned with material things, or did not trust themselves to transmit to their children humanistic values which, perhaps, they themselves had once believed in. They passively looked on while the subversive rebellion of 1968 prepared the groundwork for today's wave of National Bolshevism. They passively accepted the 1970 school reforms, which robbed the younger generation of any chance to obtain a comprehensive education.

West Germany's population thus seems to be divided into two groups: the war generation, whose sense of history has been extinguished; and the younger generation, which has received far too little scientific education, far too little German-language instruction, and far too little education in history, and which can therefore be easily swept up by the same onrushing wave of National Bolshevism which already brought disaster upon Germany once before. In the Weimar Republic, the lack of any institutions representing national interests in a positive sense, enabled Hitler to use Germans' justified outrage against the injustices of the Versailles Treaty to his own ends. So today, we are faced with the danger that the denial of the right to shape a national identity will be utilized once again.

Faced with a military, economic, and social crisis, some sort of national interest is indeed emerging. It is, however, based not upon the citizen's identification with a national, sovereign republic, but upon mystical yearnings for a homeland and the ideology of blood and soil, as we can easily observe today.

Though the predicates might be different, the dynamic upon which these events are based remains the same. The well-founded suspicion that the Federal Republic may not be defensible under the prevailing military doctrine of "Mutual and Assured Destruction" (MAD), along with the certainty that the Federal Republic would cease to exist in the event of a nuclear war, have contributed much to the spread of today's cultural pessimism. It is this cultural pessimism which spawns the old "anti-capitalist yearnings," along with the hope that Germany's problems could be solved jointly with the East.

Is there any way out of the crisis overtaking us? At present, this is still an open question. One thing is sure: whoever refuses to learn from history is condemned to repeat it.

There are two essential preconditions to be met before the Federal Republic -- and one hopes, sometime in the future, all of Germany -- can develop into a truly sovereign republican nation. A republican movement must emerge within the Federal Republic itself, while the United States must create a new, republican basis for its own policy toward the Federal Republic.

With a sense of urgency, we must now make up for what we failed to do in the post-war period; we must give birth to a republican force, firmly based upon German history's best traditions, upon the philosophy of the first great German humanist and founder of modern scientific inquiry, Nicolaus of Cusa, and upon Kepler, Leibniz, Schiller, Beethoven, Humboldt and the great scientific tradition of the nineteenth century. We must finally achieve the Prussian reformers' aim of educating common citizens into informed citizens of the world, citizens actively involved in the shaping of the affairs of state.

In short, we need a revolution -- a republican revolution which must begin in the minds of our citizens and must lead to the successful establishment of a republic. Owing to its historical and geographical situation, the Federal Republic cannot do this by itself. Only if the United States corrects its political mistakes of the occupation era, is a durable positive change possible. President Reagan has indicated the way out of our military-strategic dilemma, proposing to replace the doctrine of MAD with the doctrine of Mutual and Assured Survival. Under this new doctrine, the Federal Republic would once again become militarily defensible.

But as indispensable as military measures are, they do not in themselves represent the positive solution. The cultural crisis now shaking the Western world has brought about the circumstance, that only a tiny handful has any concrete notion of the so-called values of the free West they are committed to defending. This must be changed.

The United States and Germany must return to their respective traditions of the American Revolution and the cultural optimism of our humanist classicists. In the spirit of Friedrich Schiller we must respond to the present challenge with these words:

Man is greater than his fate. We can learn from history; we can retrieve our own soul. We must only cease, right now, thinking like "little people."

Helga Zepp-LaRouche
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Re: The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

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Part 1 of 3

1. The Philosophical Roots of National Socialism

The voluminous literature on fascism and National Socialism is dominated by two opposing views: are we dealing here with a "sociological phenomenon," or with a specific form of a historical tendency whose spiritual predecessors can be identified in past centuries?

Proponents of the first version attempt to portray fascism and National Socialism as the more or less accidental emergence of an extraordinarily "charismatic" Fuhrer figure, who seduced the masses with his demagogic and rhetorical skills. These masses' susceptibility to the "charismatic figure" is then usually explained psychologically, i.e., by referencing various aberrant forms of behavior within that population. This in turn leads to the assertion that Hitler was made possible by a specific "German national character."

Labeling Nazism a genuine German product is, of course, a mental trick which allows us to maintain a moral distance -- we see a Nazism with no past and no future. We are relieved of the burdensome responsibility to measure our present political currents against those standards which, at least in principle, had already been established at the Nuremberg trials.

Until now we have lacked a historically verifiable explanation of the actual characteristics of Nazism and fascism. This lack has made it possible for political forces vaunting themselves as the anti-fascist resistance to flaunt their own, verifiably fascist, policies, while their opponents' contrary policies are often denounced as fascist.


In this case as well, we can arrive at truth; as Nicolaus of Cusa correctly observed long ago, mere opinion is what blocks us off from recognition of our opinions. The major problem is that many writers are unconscious of the basis upon which they arrive at their own knowledge; hence what they present as judgments are often nothing but opinions.

We place the major blame for this dilemma on the artificially introduced separation between the sciences and the so-called humanities, between Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft. This separation, dating from the period following 1815, has blotted out the necessary criteria for arriving at adequate knowledge. Absurd theories such as Max Weber's "value-free science" or the pluralism of the Jesuits, found their way into scientific thought. It is therefore virtually impossible to provide modern readers with the conceptual geometry which would enable them to adequately explain Nazism and fascism.

Schiller's Contribution to Historiography

Perhaps the best point of departure for investigating recent historical developments is that portentous turning point in modern history; when the American Revolution coincided with the birth of German classicism and the inception of the industrial revolution. This is because, in the final analysis, every political precursor of Nazism happens to have been directed against the after-effects of these three events. But we must extend the scope of our investigation still further, and it is no accident that it is Friedrich Schiller, the finest representative of that era, who points us in the right direction.

Schiller's work as a historian set new absolute standards for historiography. In his essay "The Legislation of Lycurgus and Solon," Schiller described two contrasting models for a state, models which shaped the outlines of every state during the succeeding 3,000 years. The Athens of the wise Solon, formulator of the first written republican constitution, was taken as the exemplary model for all subsequent conceptions of the state, and celebrating its brilliant triumph in the American Revolution. The Sparta of the tyrant Lycurgus, on the other hand, bore all the characteristics of a fascist state, and through the centuries has remained the oft-cited point of reference for everything which might be considered a precursor of Nazism. It was no accident that Hitler's opponents saw the "Third Reich" as the fulfillment of this essay of Schiller, and recognized that the Nazi regime was only a modern version of Lycurgus' Sparta. These people had hoped that, following the long-awaited collapse of the "Third Reich," Solon's Athens would become the guiding model for the reconstruction of the German nation.

Using this conflict between forces representing Sparta and those in the tradition of Athens as our conceptual yardstick, we are now in a position to understand the history of the past 3,000 years -- and probably the history of the previous millennia as well. This conflict epitomizes the bitter warfare between oligarchism and republicanism. The arrival of the Nazis on the political scene therefore in no respect represents a break with the past, as some historians of the first school would have us believe. For an explanation of Nazism, we can turn directly to history.

The Oligarchical System

In the oligarchical system, the idea of the state is identical with that of the empire. This is true not only for Sparta, but for its closely related predecessors such as the Assyrian Empire, Babylon, and Persia, as well as Rome, Byzantium, the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, and the British Empire. A small oligarchical elite rules over a mass of subjects who are deliberately kept in a state of backwardness. The elite claims for itself the right to plunder this population, whether it be through the arbitrary setting of ground rent, control of a usury-based credit system, the mechanism of state power itself, or through the ruthless extraction of the last ounce of labor from their subjects, be they slaves, serfs, or other inferior beings whose death through exhaustion is viewed as a normal event.

Combing the works of most so-called scholars of fascism, one searches in vain for this central economic aspect, which runs like a red thread through every oligarchical empire and system. This economic aspect is in fact the primary and most crucial distinguishing characteristic of Nazism. Such systems are always dominated by extreme forms of monetarism, utilized by an autocratic and scornful oligarchical elite to maintain at all costs their usury-based, economically bankrupt monetary system.

From this perspective we can discern clear parallels with the Egypt of the pharaohs, who had no scruples about wearing out their slaves on the pyramids; Sparta's bloody exploitation of the helots; the practices of the British East India Company; and the Nazis' economic exploitation of forced laborers and concentration camp inmates. For the leading financiers in Switzerland, London, and New York, it was Hjalmar Schacht's argument which clinched the matter: only a drum-beater like Hitler would be capable of imposing the necessary drastic austerity and making it palatable to the masses. This was the principal reason for the massive financial support flowing into Hitler's movement from abroad.

Whenever the maintenance of a currency and credit system is put before the maintenance of human life, we have the clearest evidence that we are looking at a fascist system. Whoever sanctions the policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which today is deliberately condemning millions of human beings to death with its infamous credit conditionalities, is morally no better than the Nazi war criminals who were condemned to hang at Nuremburg.

The oligarchical system views the world as a series of great, eternal cycles of birth and death, of construction and destruction. Death and destruction are considered highly desirable, since they have a purifying effect, killing off the weak and enabling the strong to survive. There is no place in this system for scientific and technological progress; indeed, such progress is viewed as the real enemy threatening the eternal cycle.

This corresponds to a conception of man as a creature incapable of change, whose "nature" is fundamentally inclined toward evil. Hence, the rule of men over men is derived not from an ontological natural law, but merely from the ability of this or that oligarchical elite to force its will upon its underlings. Law has no objective basis in this system; all that counts is the power to avoid responsibility for one's own acts.


Such a system is workable, of course, only if the popular masses accept this state of affairs and the ostensible superiority of the oligarchical elite, and conceive of themselves as objects, not as subjects, of events. It is for this reason that the oligarchical system requires more precise and more ingenious mechanisms of mass control in order to protect itself against unwelcome surprises. The preferred mechanism of control is a web of mythology for the masses to believe in. These myths are carefully cultivated and applied by the elite itself, or by a designated caste of priests. Such mythologies, in harmony with the cyclical world outlook, have been interwoven with every pre-Christian "regional" deity -- Cybele, Isis, Shakti, Mother Siva, Mithra, Thor, Wotan, to name a few. The dominant figure in these prevailing myths was usually a goddess who symbolized "Mother Earth" and which thus provided the basis for an ideology of "blood and soil." In northern ideologies, for example, this role was played by the so-called world ash tree, Yggdrasil.

The Republican System

Solon of Athens' republican concept was quite another matter, and through Plato was passed on to the entire succeeding humanist tradition. In the republican state, all individuals are endowed with equal, inalienable rights founded upon natural law. The state is not an instrument of power, but rather serves the exclusive purpose of permitting the maximum unfolding of the potentials of each of its citizens, who, as citizens, are vitally concerned with development of the state as a whole. In the republic, leadership's primary task is not to act as a parasite on the population, depriving it of its livelihood. Its task is to exert leadership on the basis of its acquired wisdom, on the basis of its fully developed understanding of law, and, above all, because of its readiness to assume political responsibility and to act accordingly.

By its very nature, the republican system is the political expression of the physical universe as a negentropically developing continuum, as has been proven by modern science. Whereas scientific and technological progress represents a grave threat to any return to an eternally unchanging state of affairs -- the characteristic feature of the oligarchical system's cyclical world view -- this progress from a republican standpoint is the absolute precondition for the existence of the universe, as it is for human society.

The lawfulness of the universe, its negentropic evolution, is knowable and accessible to human reason and knowledge. Such knowledge, however, is not passive. Man, by virtue of his ability to think the higher hypothesis and make his knowledge increasingly correspond to universal law, is capable of altering this law itself, and in a lawful manner. Scientific progress is only another expression for this interaction between reason and the physical universe; the hypotheses formed by reason are efficient in the real world, and this allows us to conclude that there exists a correspondence between the macrocosm and the microcosm.

A republican state is therefore vitally concerned with the scientific progress of all its citizens, and with the improvement of their standard of living. This especially includes improvements in education and training, which raise the productivity of labor and thereby enrich the source of all social wealth.

For the oligarchical system, the sole source of wealth is the ownership of land and physical resources, the right to extract ground rent, and the ability to lend at usurious rates of interest. The system ultimately depends on maintaining the areas under its control in a state of permanent backwardness, in order to seize raw materials at the cheapest price.
The scribblings of the "evil Parson Malthus" are but one of the numerous attempts to provide a rational justification for the oligarchical faction's policies, and to give them at least the veneer of legitimacy.

Anyone who thinks of the land as the only source of social wealth is apt to feel threatened by the arrival of every new individual into the world; such a person fears that the newcomer will want to share these resources with him, thereby decreasing what belongs to the ruling elite. This is the origin of the so-called overpopulation theory, which in turn supplies the oligarchical vision of a fixed system with a corresponding zero-growth ideology.

It is virtually impossible to distinguish any qualitative difference between Malthus's silly "law of population" -- his rationalization for the practices of British colonialism -- and the Nazis' classification of so-called "inferior races" as "useless eaters," and the Club of Rome's recommendation that the alleged population problem in the developing countries be solved by "natural means" such as denying them technology transfers or "raising the death rate" through hunger, epidemics, and deliberately incited regional warfare. Human life has no value in this system, and its proponents consider it their own privilege if they wish to practice genocide, whether it be against Sparta's helots, the Jews, the Slavs, political opponents, three million people in Cambodia, or the 150 million people in Africa who have been "written off' by the IMF.

The republican system does not share this utter disregard for human life. The land and the soil, taken by themselves, have no significance. The sole source of wealth is the rise in the productivity of human labor effected through technological progress. Every newborn child, when viewed in this way, represents a potential enrichment of society, provided that that society develops all the potentials residing within that child. This in turn requires not only a high nutritional level, but a basic education which promotes character formation and a potentially-never-ending higher education.

It has been entirely due to the work of republicans over the millennia that the earth's population potential has grown from approximately five million at the introduction of agriculture, to about four and a half billion today. The earth could easily have a population potential of several dozen billions, if currently existing technologies were vigorously applied.

This long chain of qualitative technical innovations has repeatedly enabled mankind to overcome limitations imposed by so-called natural resources. Human reason has conceived of new sciences and new technologies, defining and developing new raw materials, taking a little piece of dirt and turning it first into iron ore, and then into a transmitter of energy.

Republican society therefore puts the highest premium on that side of man which absolutely distinguishes him from the beasts; no beast has ever independently altered his "natural resources." Within this progress-oriented climate geniuses have developed, men and women whose unique contributions have extended the limits of existing knowledge, and through whose individual accomplishments humanity as a whole has attained a bit of immortality.

This emphasis on the creative faculties of the individual, as was embedded in the legislation of Solon, has been a constant source of irritation to the leadership of the oligarchical faction, and they have always perceived it as a grave threat. It goes without saying that any efforts to instruct the so-called masses in reason calls into question the continued dominance of the oligarchical elite in the medium term. This was the reason for the murder of Socrates, whom his opponents hypocritically accused of seducing the youth of Athens, whereas his sole intention was to encourage them to use their own minds, as Plato reports to us in the Apology of Socrates.

Burnet has stressed [44] that it was Socrates who created the conception of the soul, a conception which had such an immense influence upon our civilization. I believe that there is much in this view, although I feel that its formulation may be misleading, especially the use of the term 'soul'; for Socrates seems to have kept away from metaphysical theories as much as he could. His appeal was a moral appeal, and his theory of individuality (or of the 'soul', if this word is preferred) is, I think, a moral and not a metaphysical doctrine. He was fighting, with the help of this doctrine, as always, against self-satisfaction and complacency. He demanded that individualism should not be merely the dissolution of tribalism, but that the individual should prove worthy of his liberation. This is why he insisted that man is not merely a piece of flesh — a body. There is more in man, a divine spark, reason; and a love of truth, of kindness, humaneness, a love of beauty and of goodness. It is these that make a man's life worthwhile. But if I am not merely a 'body', what am I, then? You are, first of all, intelligence, was Socrates' reply. It is your reason that makes you human; that enables you to be more than a mere bundle of desires and wishes; that makes you a self-sufficient individual and entitles you to claim that you are an end in yourself. Socrates' saying 'care for your souls' is largely an appeal for intellectual honesty, just as the saying 'know thyself' is used by him to remind us of our intellectual limitations.

These, Socrates insisted, are the things that matter. And what he criticized in democracy and democratic statesmen was their inadequate realization of these things. He criticized them rightly for their lack of intellectual honesty, and for their obsession with power-politics [45]. With his emphasis upon the human side of the political problem, he could not take much interest in institutional reform. It was the immediate, the personal aspect of the open society in which he was interested. He was mistaken when he considered himself a politician; he was a teacher.

But if Socrates was, fundamentally, the champion of the open society, and a friend of democracy, why, it may be asked, did he mix with anti- democrats? For we know that among his companions were not only Alcibiades, who for a time went over to the side of Sparta, but also two of Plato's uncles, Critias who later became the ruthless leader of the Thirty Tyrants, and Charmides who became his lieutenant.

There is more than one reply to this question. First we are told by Plato that Socrates' attack upon the democratic politicians of his time was carried out partly with the purpose of exposing the selfishness and lust for power of the hypocritical flatterers of the people, more particularly, of the young aristocrats who posed as democrats, but who looked upon the people as mere instruments of their lust for power [46]. This activity made him, on the one hand, attractive to some at least of the enemies of democracy; on the other hand it brought him into contact with ambitious aristocrats of that very type. And here enters a second consideration. Socrates, the moralist and individualist, would never merely attack these men. He would, rather, take a real interest in them, and he would hardly give them up without making a serious attempt to convert them. There are many allusions to such attempts in Plato's dialogues. We have reason, and this is a third consideration, to believe that Socrates, the teacher- politician, even went out of his way to attract young men and to gain influence over them, especially when he considered them open to conversion, and thought that some day they might possibly hold offices of responsibility in their city. The outstanding example is, of course, Alcibiades, singled out from his very childhood as the great future leader of the Athenian empire. And Critias' brilliancy, ambition and courage made him one of the few likely competitors of Alcibiades. (He cooperated with Alcibiades for a time, but later turned against him. It is not at all improbable that the temporary cooperation was due to Socrates' influence.) From all we know about Plato's own early and later political aspirations, it is more than likely that his relations with Socrates were of a similar kind [47]. Socrates, though one of the leading spirits of the open society, was not a party man. He would have worked in any circle where his work might have benefited his city. If he took interest in a promising youth he was not to be deterred by oligarchic family connections. But these connections were to cause his death. When the great war was lost, Socrates was accused of having educated the men who had betrayed democracy and conspired with the enemy to bring about the downfall of Athens.

The history of the Peloponnesian war and the fall of Athens is still often told, under the influence of Thucydides' authority, in such a way that the defeat of Athens appears as the ultimate proof of the moral weaknesses of the democratic system. But this view is merely a tendentious distortion, and the well-known facts tell a very different story. The main responsibility for the lost war rests with the treacherous oligarchs who continuously conspired with Sparta. Prominent among these were three former disciples of Socrates: Alcibiades, Critias, and Charmides. After the fall of Athens in 404 B.C. the two latter became the leaders of the Thirty Tyrants, who were no more than a puppet government under Spartan protection. The fall of Athens, and the destruction of the walls, are often presented as the final results of the great war which had started in 431 B.C. But in this presentation lies a major distortion; for the democrats fought on. At first only seventy strong, they prepared under the leadership of Thrasybulus and Anytus the liberation of Athens, where Critias was meanwhile killing scores of citizens; during the eight months of his reign of terror the death-roll contained 'rather a greater number of Athenians than the Peloponnesians had killed during the last ten years of war' [48]. But after eight months (in 403 B.C.) Critias and the Spartan garrison were attacked and defeated by the democrats, who established themselves in the Piraeus, and both of Plato's uncles lost their lives in the battle. Their oligarchic followers continued for a time the reign of terror in the city of Athens itself, but their forces were in a state of confusion and dissolution. Having proved themselves incapable of ruling, they were ultimately abandoned by their Spartan protectors, who concluded a treaty with the democrats. The peace re-established democracy in Athens. Thus the democratic form of government had proved its superior strength under the most severe trials, and even its enemies began to think it invincible. (Nine years later, after the battle of Cnidus, the Athenians could re-erect their walls. The defeat of democracy had turned into victory.)

As soon as the restored democracy had re-established normal legal conditions [49], a case was brought against Socrates. Its meaning was clear enough; he was accused of having had his hand in the education of the most pernicious enemies of the state: Alcibiades, Critias, and Charmides. Certain difficulties for the prosecution were created by an amnesty for all political crimes committed before the re-establishment of the democracy. The charge could not therefore openly refer to these notorious cases. And the prosecutors probably sought not so much to punish Socrates for the unfortunate political events of the past which, as they knew well, had happened against his intentions; their aim was, rather, to prevent him from continuing his teaching, which, in view of its effects, they could hardly regard otherwise than as dangerous to the state. For all these reasons, the charge was given the vague and rather meaningless form that Socrates was corrupting the youth, that he was impious, and that he had attempted to introduce novel religious practices into the state. (The latter two charges undoubtedly expressed, however clumsily, the correct feeling that in the ethico-religious field he was a revolutionary.) Because of the amnesty, the 'corrupted youth' could not be more precisely named, but everybody knew, of course, who was meant [50]. In his defence, Socrates insisted that he had no sympathy with the policy of the Thirty, and that he had actually risked his life by defying their attempt to implicate him in one of their crimes. And he reminded the jury that among his closest associates and most enthusiastic disciples there was at least one ardent democrat, Chaerephon, who fought against the Thirty (and who was, it appears, killed in battle) [51].

It is now usually recognized that Anytus, the democratic leader who backed the prosecution, did not intend to make a martyr of Socrates. The aim was to exile him. But this plan was defeated by Socrates' refusal to compromise his principles. That he wanted to die, or that he enjoyed the role of martyr, I do not believe [52]. He simply fought for what he believed to be right, and for his life's work. He had never intended to undermine democracy. In fact, he had tried to give it the faith it needed. This had been the work of his life. It was, he felt, seriously threatened. The betrayal of his former companions let his work and himself appear in a light which must have disturbed him deeply. He may even have welcomed the trial as an opportunity to prove that his loyalty to his city was unbounded.

Socrates explained this attitude most carefully when he was given an opportunity to escape. Had he seized it, and become an exile, everybody would have thought him an opponent of democracy. So he stayed, and stated his reasons. This explanation, his last will, can be found in Plato's Crito [53]. It is simple. If I go, said Socrates, I violate the laws of the state. Such an act would put me in opposition to the laws, and prove my disloyalty. It would do harm to the state. Only if I stay can I put beyond doubt my loyalty to the state, with its democratic laws, and prove that I have never been its enemy. There can be no better proof of my loyalty than my willingness to die for it.

Socrates' death is the ultimate proof of his sincerity. His fearlessness, his simplicity, his modesty, his sense of proportion, his humour never deserted him. 'I am the gadfly that God has attached to this city', he said in his Apology, 'and all day long and in all places I am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. You would not readily find another like me, and therefore I should advise you to spare me ... If you strike at me, as Anytus advises you, and rashly put me to death, then you will remain asleep for the rest of your lives, unless God in his care sends you another gadfly' [54]. He showed that a man could die, not only for fate and fame and other grand things of this kind, but also for the freedom of critical thought, and for a self-respect which has nothing to do with self-importance or sentimentality.

-- The Open Society and Its Enemies, by Karl R. Popper


Plato's dialogues contain everything which constitutes the essence of the republican system and European humanist culture: natural law, based on the ordering of existence and permanently guaranteeing the individual's God-given rights to life and personal development, and a cosmology which explains the development of the universe to the present day, along with a corresponding republican constitution which holds the rule of "philosopher kings" to be the prerequisite for social well-being.

But it was Augustine who stated in his famous letter to Marcellinus, that only with the appearance of the person of Jesus Christ was Platonic philosophy able to assume unassailable authority over all other teachings. Christ, by becoming the perfected embodiment of the divine within man, laid the unshakable foundation for the inviolability and dignity of human life. It might seem tautological to state that without the person of Christ, 2,000 years of European Christian civilization would not have been possible; this, however, is of crucial significance for any historical investigation.

Through the idea of Man-become-God, from this time onward every human being participates in God (capax dei), on condition that he, as the Image of the Living God, strives to replicate on earth His most noble quality as God-the-creator. Creation is not understood as a single event -- a "big bang" -- but is rather is a continuous process of creation, in which man's creative capacity can be considered the arm of God.

Man, so understood as the image of God, must by his nature be fundamentally disposed toward the Good. From this flows his obligation to perfect himself. A refusal to develop all the creative faculties residing within him is therefore defined as sin.

Christian philosophy is therefore in perfect harmony with the republican system, and it should therefore come as no surprise that it was bitterly opposed by the oligarchical camp. The most blatant example of this was the Roman Empire itself which, boasting all the characteristics of a fascist state, used the most brutal methods In its attempt to exterminate the Christians.


What followed historically, to oversimplify a bit, were merely variations on either model. It is nonetheless fascinating to observe how conscious the protagonists of each side were of their respective predecessors. To be sure, such information cannot be found in the usual history textbooks; original sources must be drawn upon.

The Italian Renaissance was buoyed by Plato and Greece; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, godfather of the Greens, praised the customs of Sparta. And the dark minions of the British imperialism have always sung exalted paeans to the empire of the Romans.

The American Revolution

The American Revolution was a decisive historical turning point. The emergence of the Nazis and all other current political trends must be understood from the standpoint of this event. Our modern history books usually reduce this ground-breaking event to the trivialities surrounding the Boston Tea Party. In reality, it represented a decisive republican victory over the oligarchic system.

America's Founding Fathers were not the backwoodsmen Hollywood would have us believe. Benjamin Franklin's networks in America and in Europe represented a republican and scientific elite, and it was not without reason that Franklin was called the "Prometheus of the Eighteenth Century." The European republicans set great hope on the New World, where individual freedom and prosperity for the industrious, without regard to status or birth: were written on every flagstone. The revolution was triggered by England's refusal to grant the American colonies the unlimited right to build its own manufacturing industry; this finally brought the American republicans to realize that their own economic development could be secured only by separating themselves from the mother country and fighting for independence.

A perusal of the writings of the America's Founding Fathers makes it quite evident that their aim was nothing less than victory of the republican economic system over the oligarchs' system. Examples of this were Alexander Hamilton's "Report on Manufactures" and the later writings of Mathew and Henry Carey. To this day, the U.S. Constitution remains the best republican constitution ever written, because it was of one metal, containing within it the spirit of the entire European humanist tradition.

But not only in America did the oligarchical camp suffer a painful defeat; their system seemed to be under assault on many fronts. Not only was the initial phase of the French Revolution threatening to follow America's example, but simple citizens were becoming scientifically educated in such institutions as the Ecole Polytechnique. The largely uneducated oligarchs saw this as a brazen challenge, especially since the simultaneous flowering of the industrial revolution was threatening to shatter their old structures.

From a cultural standpoint as well, humanity was soaring to its most exalted heights, reaching a new pinnacle of development. Through its composers and poets, German classicism produced a breathtaking wealth of works of art, whose impact on the public had the effect of ennobling the individual as never before. A better ability to distinguish subtle shadings of emotion, coupled with a Promethean boldness of spirit -- these were by no means contradictory. but were expressions of a perfected human character. Large sections of the population were especially swept up by the influence of music and poetry, as evidenced by the rapid spread of "house music" and the mass enthusiasm for the dramas of Schiller and others. It was understandable if the best minds of the age were convinced that humanity had arrived at the threshold of the Age of Reason.

The Oligarchy Strikes Back: The Conservative Revolution

The oligarchical camp, however, did not leave the field in defeat, but moved on all fronts to reverse these unpleasant developments. In America the British Tories stepped up their campaign of treason against the young republic, a campaign extending from the War of 1812 to the machinations of today's Eastern Establishment, which still spares no effort to unhinge the U.S. Constitution.

In France, agents of the British, Swiss, and French oligarchy took control of events in the French Revolution and crushed the republicans' initiatives during the Jacobin Terror. Robespierre's famous remark on the decapitation of France's humanist elite -- "The Revolution does not need any scientists" -- shows him to be an agent of the oligarchy. The fact that the employers of Danton and Marat sat in England; that Jacques Necker had ruined the French economy for the sake of Swiss financial interests; that the Duke of Orleans had organized the storming of the Bastille; and that Napoleon was manipulated into wanting to rule over a new world empire -- all are testimony to the bitter counterattacks launched by the oligarchy, which under no circumstances was going to allow a repetition of the American Revolution on European soil.

The German republicans' resistance to Napoleon's imperialist ambitions managed to produce the best and most fruitful period in Germany's history. The actual impetus to this development, however, did not come from Napoleon's invasion. Even before Napoleon's troops had dealt the Prussian armies a humiliating defeat at Jena and Auerstadt opening the way to the intervention of the Prussian reformers around vom Stein, Scharnhorst, and von Humboldt -- humanist ideas had already become widespread. Friedrich Schiller, through his direct influence on vom Stein and von Humboldt, left a deep impression on this epoch. During the subsequent liberation struggles, above all others it was this beloved "poet of freedom" who lifted the spirit of the soldiers and the entire population.

Never had Germany been closer to becoming a sovereign, republican national entity. These Wars of Liberation, whose immediate goal was the defeat of Napoleon's tyranny, in fact represented a much deeper and broader constitutional movement within the population. The great ideal of republican freedom, in which a monarch would be "king among millions of kings," was their guiding star, as is attested to by the voluminous, impassioned personal correspondence of the period. Schiller, in his letters on Don Carlos, had described the American Revolution as the "favorite subject of the decade." Conversations inevitably dwelled upon "the, spread of a more pure, more gentle humanity, the greatest possible freedom for the individual within the greatest flowering of the state -- in short, humanity in its highest state of perfection, as this is attainable within its nature and powers." A quarter century later, this ideal was given new life.

Without question, the course of German history would have been immeasurably more positive, and we would have never experienced the horrors of the twentieth century, had the population's hopes for a victory over Napoleon and the creation of a German nation come to fruition. Herein lies the great tragedy. But it is also an historical point of reference to which we must return, if we are to raise the question of a positive German identity today.

The Vienna Congress marked the end of republican turmoil in Germany. The oligarchy of England, Russia, France, Switzerland, Venice, and Austria had regrouped their forces, and were determined to leave no openings for the German negotiator, vom Stein. Following 1815, and with a vengeance in the wake of the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, there began a long phase of gloomy reaction, with devastating effects on the population. Most citizens were unable to reconstruct in their minds precisely why and how they had been robbed of the fruits of their struggle. As the bigoted narrowness of the Holy Alliance increasingly made itself felt, the clear mind of the world citizen and patriot shrank into the limited purview of the Burschenschaften (student dueling societies) and maudlin German chauvinism. Clear conceptions yielded to romantic Schwarmerei, and the disappointed hopes lapsed into latent cultural pessimism.

This paradigm shift from classicism to Romanticism, however, was no more a "sociological phenomenon" than was West Germany's turn from a belief in progress during the "economic miracle" of the 1960s, to the 1970s' zero-growth ideology and hatred of technology. The subversion, sabotage, and final defeat of the hopeful republican freedom movement at the start of the nineteenth century was the result of the same shift; and all the weapons directed against the humanist conception of man can be summed up under one modern concept: the "Conservative Revolution."

Under that title, Armin Mohler wrote the standard work on this theme -- first published in 1949 -- in defense of the Nazi regime. According to Mohler, the Conservative Revolution has been an ongoing process ever since the French Revolution. He explains that:

Every revolution brings along with it a counter-force which attempts to reverse the revolution. And with the French Revolution's victory came a world which the Conservative Revolution regards as its mortal enemy. For the time being we would like to describe their world as one which revolves not around that which is unchangeable in man, but which believes it can alter man's nature. It therefore proclaims the possibility of stepwise progress, considers all things, relations and events to be accessible to comprehension, and attempts to consider every object in isolation and understand it in and of itself alone.


Mohler's book is only worthwhile reading for clinical purposes. He leaves no doubt about his constituency for the Conservative Revolution, frankly admitting -- in 1949! -- that this notion is synonymous with fascism. (His description "conservative" is actually ill-chosen, since with its implied notions of "preserve" and "maintain," it is always associated with the idea of influencing the whole, whereas for the Conservative Revolution the whole always remains the same.) The implicit notion in all ideas of progress, that man is fundamentally good, that he can gradually perfect himself unless hindered by adversive circumstances, is entirely foreign to the thinking of the Conservative Revolution. The idea that man is equally disposed to good and to evil lends it a decidedly gnostic and Manichean character, a feature which later made its way into Nazi ideology.

Mohler describes the paradigm shift in the following terms: "In a broad sense, the term 'Conservative Revolution' includes the common basis of all completed or incipient transformations in all areas of life, in theology as well as in physics and music, or the planning of a city, structuring a family, or the care of the body or the building of a machine." It is therefore an "alternative movement," with all the essential features of that movement today.

The reversals in Germany were only one part of a trend which swept through virtually every European country and permeated all areas of life -- a trend represented by Dostoevsky and the Aksakovs in Russia, Sorel and Barres in France, and Pareto and Evola in Italy, to name a few examples.

In theology, the Bishop of Mainz, von Keneler, developed the counterrevolutionary idea of solidarism as a bludgeon against the Augustinian tradition; in physics, Cauchy and Laplace sabotaged the work of Monge, Carnot, and Legendre at the Ecole Polytechnique, breaking with the Leibnizian tradition in mathematics (especially the calculus) and re-establishing mathematics along Cartesian lines.

In music there was a break between those composers who had been educated in the pre-1815 tradition of Bach, and whose compositions were based on the necessary progressions of well-tempered counterpoint -- the first generation of Mozart and Beethoven, the second generation of Schumann and Schubert, and Brahms in the third generation -- and those trained after 1815, who dwelled on the instability of chaotic progressions, such as Wagner or Hugo Wolff, not to speak of our present so-called modern composers.

Romanticism was consciously promoted by the European oligarchy as a movement which advocated the total rejection of reason and humanism, upon which Weimar classicism was based.
One of the oligarchy's most influential agents, who supported the young Romantics with body and soul, was Madame de Stael, daughter of the Swiss banker Jacques Necker, who as French finance minister had ruined France for the sake of the Swiss banks. Heinrich Heine has pointedly described how Madame de Stael and her circles were angered that the "republican" culture found in the Weimar classics, in musical soirees at home, or in the great theater houses had begun to spread through large portions of the population. In a blue rage, she attempted to regain her own control of culture by luring young artists into her own salon. These recruits threw themselves into action with the same abandon as today's "beautiful people" or the nobility's "Jet set." Not only did this romantic movement produce the organized terrorism of Giuseppe Mazzini's "Young Europe," but it also spawned the tendency stretching from the turn-of-the-century youth movement to today's counterculture "alternative" movement, along with its ideologues Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, Alfred Rosenberg, and so forth. The Nazis too drank out of this "alternative" trough.

Three of the most serious attacks, however, came in the areas of philosophy, history, and law. Schiller's grand conception -- the study of universal history as a method of education to reason -- had to be destroyed. The aim was therefore to deny the unity of the sciences and the humanities -- of Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften -- and to reject the validity of natural law.

Barthold Niehbuhr, who hated Schiller's and Humboldt's humanism, glorified Rome as the "perfect state" and established his so-called modern science of historiography (which is not really all that modern), incorporating within it all the elements of the feudalistic interpretation of history.

Savigny stormed against natural law as it was laid down by the philosophy of German Idealism, and campaigned for the historical relativity of law, claiming that law had "organically" developed in tandem with the the "changing Volksgeist" -- a theory designed to justify the existence of every regime contrary to law and every form of rapacious and arbitrary rule. From there to the volkisch idea was but one short step.
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Re: The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

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Part 2 of 3

The most devastating oligarchical attack on the republican spirit, however, was led by the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel in Berlin, who is proven by "check-stubs" to have been a paid agent of Austria's Metternich against the Prussian state, and was therefore working directly for the sinister reaction of the Holy Alliance. It is a sad commentary on the level of our universities, that the holy aura surrounding Hegel has remained intact down to the present day.

There are some who still believe in Hegel's sincerity, or who still doubt whether his secret might not be profundity, fullness of thought, rather than emptiness. I should like them to read carefully the last sentence — the only intelligible one — of this quotation, because in this sentence, Hegel gives himself away. For clearly it means nothing but: 'The heating up of sounding bodies ... is heat ... together with sound.' The question arises whether Hegel deceived himself, hypnotized by his own inspiring jargon, or whether he boldly set out to deceive and bewitch others. I am satisfied that the latter was the case, especially in view of what Hegel wrote in one of his letters. In this letter, dated a few years before the publication of his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel referred to another Philosophy of Nature, written by his former friend Schelling: 'I have had too much to do ... with mathematics ... differential calculus, chemistry', Hegel boasts in this letter (but this is just bluff), 'to let myself be taken in by the humbug of the Philosophy of Nature, by this philosophizing without knowledge of fact . . . and by the treatment of mere fancies, even imbecile fancies, as ideas.' This is a very fair characterization of Schelling 's method, that is to say, of that audacious way of bluffing which Hegel himself copied, or rather aggravated, as soon as he realized that, if it reached its proper audience, it meant success.

In spite of all this it seems improbable that Hegel would ever have become the most influential figure in German philosophy without the authority of the Prussian state behind him. As it happened, he became the first official philosopher of Prussianism, appointed in the period of feudal 'restoration' after the Napoleonic wars. Later, the state also backed his pupils (Germany had, and still has, only state-controlled Universities), and they in their turn backed one another. And although Hegelianism was officially renounced by most of them, Hegelianizing philosophers have dominated philosophical teaching and thereby indirectly even the secondary schools of Germany ever since....

Hegel's influence, and especially that of his cant, is still very powerful in moral and social philosophy and in the social and political sciences (with the sole exception of economics). Especially the philosophers of history, of politics, and of education are still to a very large extent under its sway. In politics, this is shown most drastically by the fact that the Marxist extreme left wing, as well as the conservative centre, and the fascist extreme right, all base their political philosophies on Hegel; the left wing replaces the war of nations which appears in Hegel's historicist scheme by the war of classes, the extreme right replaces it by the war of races; but both follow him more or less consciously.
(The conservative centre is as a rule less conscious of its indebtedness to Hegel.)

How can this immense influence be explained? My main intention is not so much to explain this phenomenon as to combat it. But I may make a few explanatory suggestions. For some reason, philosophers have kept around themselves, even in our day, something of the atmosphere of the magician. Philosophy is considered as a strange and abstruse kind of thing, dealing with those mysteries with which religion deals, but not in a way which can be 'revealed unto babes' or to common people; it is considered to be too profound for that, and to be the religion and theology of the intellectuals, of the learned and wise. Hegelianism fits these views admirably; it is exactly what this kind of popular superstition supposes philosophy to be. It knows all about everything. It has a ready answer to every question. And indeed, who can be sure that the answer is not true?

But this is not the main reason for Hegel's success. His influence, and the need to combat it, can perhaps be better understood if we briefly consider the general historical situation.

Medieval authoritarianism began to dissolve with the Renaissance. But on the Continent, its political counterpart, medieval feudalism, was not seriously threatened before the French Revolution. (The Reformation had only strengthened it.) The fight for the open society began again only with the ideas of 1789; and the feudal monarchies soon experienced the seriousness of this danger. When in 1815 the reactionary party began to resume its power in Prussia, it found itself in dire need of an ideology. Hegel was appointed to meet this demand, and he did so by reviving the ideas of the first great enemies of the open society, Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle. Just as the French Revolution rediscovered the perennial ideas of the Great Generation and of Christianity, freedom, equality, and the brotherhood of all men, so Hegel rediscovered the Platonic ideas which lie behind the perennial revolt against freedom and reason. Hegelianism is the renaissance of tribalism. The historical significance of Hegel may be seen in the fact that he represents the 'missing link', as it were, between Plato and the modern form of totalitarianism. Most of the modern totalitarians are quite unaware that their ideas can be traced back to Plato. But many know of their indebtedness to Hegel, and all of them have been brought up in the close atmosphere of Hegelianism. They have been taught to worship the state, history, and the nation.

-- The Open Society and Its Enemies, by Karl R. Popper


When Constant moved to Maffliers in September 1803 De Staël went to see him and let Napoleon know she would be wise and careful. Immediately the house became very popular among her friends, but Napoleon, informed by Madame de Genlis suspected a conspiracy. "Her extensive network of connections - which included foreign diplomats and known political opponents, as well as members of the government and of Bonaparte's own family - was in itself a source of suspicion and alarm for the government." Her protection of Jean Gabriel Peltier - who wished the death of Napoleon - influenced his decision on 13 October 1803 to exile her without a trial. For ten years De Staël was not allowed to settle within a distance of 40 leagues (almost 200 km) from Paris. She accused Napoleon of "persecuting a woman and her children". On 23 October she left for Germany "out of pride", in the hope to gain attention and to be able to return as soon as possible. [b][size=120]With her children and Constant she stopped off in Metz, met with Kant's translator Charles de Villers....

Pretending she had emigrated to the US, de Staël was given permission to re-enter France. Looking around in Chaumont-sur-Loire de Staël moved into the Château de Chaumont (1810) which she rented from James Le Ray, and then onto Fossé and Vendôme. She was determined to publish De l'Allemagne in France, a book in which she called French political structures into question, so indirectly criticising Napoleon while promoting French culture and theatre. Constrained by censorship, she wrote the emperor a somewhat provocative and perhaps undignified letter. Anne Jean Marie René Savary had emphatically forbidden the publication of her book as being “un-French" and she again set sail on a boat as she had earlier pretended. In October 1810 de Staël was exiled again and had to leave France within three days. Then August Schlegel was ordered to leave Swiss Confederation as an enemy of the French literature. She found consolation in a wounded officer named Albert de Rocca, twenty-three years her junior, to whom she got engaged privately in 1811 and subsequently married publicly in 1816.

The operations of the French imperial police in regard to Mme de Staël are rather obscure. She was at first left undisturbed, but by degrees the chateau itself became a source of suspicion, and her visitors found themselves heavily punished. François-Emmanuel Guignard, De Montmorency and Mme Récamier were exiled for the crime of visiting her. She remained at home during the winter of 1811, planning to escape to England or Sweden with the manuscript. On 23 May 1812 she left Coppet almost secretly, and journeyed through Bern, Innsbruck and Salzburg on her way to Vienna, where she met with Metternich. There she obtained an Austrian passport up to the frontier, and after some trepidation and trouble, received a Russian passport in Brody.

-- Germaine de Staël, by Wikipedia


When one considers that Hegel finished his Phenomenology of Mind in the year 1806, in the midst of the intellectual climate of the Weimar classics, we can only conclude that his ostensibly dialectical method was nothing but a Jesuitical distortion of the Socratic method so gloriously evident in the dramas of Friedrich Schiller. Hegel's idea of the world-historical individual was indeed drawn from the classics; his "philosopher kings" or "philosophical minds," however, tended to degenerate into mere power-mongers (Napoleon, for Hegel, was the World Spirit on horseback!), and were much closer to the master-race concept of Nietzsche and Hitler. Worst of all, toward the end of his teaching career Hegel not only engaged in the corrupt practice of blocking or spoiling the studies of many young and hopeful students, but also -- in his Philosophy of Right -- he provided the perfect justification for the totalitarian state, which served as source material for Europe's reactionary oligarchical circles, as it did later for the Third Reich.

In order to give the reader an immediate glimpse of Hegel's Platonizing worship of the state, I shall quote a few passages, even before I begin the analysis of his historicist philosophy. These passages show that Hegel's radical collectivism depends as much on Plato as it depends on Frederick William III, king of Prussia in the critical period during and after the French Revolution. Their doctrine is that the state is everything, and the individual nothing; for he owes everything to the state, his physical as well as his spiritual existence. This is the message of Plato, of Frederick William's Prussianism, and of Hegel. 'The Universal is to be found in the State', Hegel writes [8]. 'The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth ... We must therefore worship the State as the manifestation of the Divine on earth, and consider that, if it is difficult to comprehend Nature, it is infinitely harder to grasp the Essence of the State . . . The State is the march of God through the world . . . The State must be comprehended as an organism ... To the complete State belongs, essentially, consciousness and thought. The State knows what it wills . . . The State is real; and ... true reality is necessary. What is real is eternally necessary ... The State ... exists for its own sake ... The State is the actually existing, realized moral life.' This selection of utterances may suffice to show Hegel's Platonism and his insistence upon the absolute moral authority of the state, which overrules all personal morality, all conscience. It is, of course, a bombastic and hysterical Platonism, but this only makes more obvious the fact that it links Platonism with modern totalitarianism.

One could ask whether by these services and by his influence upon history, Hegel has not proved his genius. I do not think this question very important, since it is only part of our romanticism that we think so much in terms of 'genius'; and apart from that, I do not believe that success proves anything, or that history is our judge [9]; these tenets are rather part of Hegelianism. But as far as Hegel is concerned, I do not even think that he was talented. He is an indigestible writer. As even his most ardent apologists must admit [10], his style is 'unquestionably scandalous'. And as far as the content of his writing is concerned, he is supreme only in his outstanding lack of originality. There is nothing in Hegel's writing that has not been said better before him. There is nothing in his apologetic method that is not borrowed from his apologetic forerunners [11]. But he devoted these borrowed thoughts and methods with singleness of purpose, though without a trace of brilliancy, to one aim: to fight against the open society, and thus to serve his employer, Frederick William of Prussia. Hegel's confusion and debasement of reason is partly necessary as a means to this end, partly a more accidental but very natural expression of his state of mind. And the whole story of Hegel would indeed not be worth relating, were it not for its more sinister consequences, which show how easily a clown may be a 'maker of history'. The tragi-comedy of the rise of 'German Idealism', in spite of the hideous crimes to which it has led, resembles a comic opera much more than anything else; and these beginnings may help to explain why it is so hard to decide of its latter-day heroes whether they have escaped from the stage of Wagner's Grand Teutonic Operas or from Offenbach's farces.

My assertion that Hegel's philosophy was inspired by ulterior motives, namely, by his interest in the restoration of the Prussian government of Frederick William III, and that it cannot therefore be taken seriously, is not new. The story was well known to all who knew the political situation, and it was freely told by the few who were independent enough to do so. The best witness is Schopenhauer, himself a Platonic idealist and a conservative if not a reactionary
[12], but a man of supreme integrity who cherished truth beyond anything else. There can be no doubt that he was as competent a judge in philosophical matters as could be found at the time. Schopenhauer, who had the pleasure of knowing Hegel personally and who suggested [13] the use of Shakespeare's words, 'such stuff as madmen tongue and brain not', as the motto of Hegel's philosophy, drew the following excellent picture of the master: 'Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and readily accepted as such by all fools, who thus joined into as perfect a chorus of admiration as had ever been heard before. The extensive field of spiritual influence with which Hegel was furnished by those in power has enabled him to achieve the intellectual corruption of a whole generation.' And in another place, Schopenhauer describes the political game of Hegelianism as follows: 'Philosophy, brought afresh to repute by Kant ... had soon to become a tool of interests; of state interests from above, of personal interests from below ... The driving forces of this movement are, contrary to all these solemn airs and assertions, not ideal; they are very real purposes indeed, namely personal, official, clerical, political, in short, material interests ... Party interests are vehemently agitating the pens of so many pure lovers of wisdom . . . Truth is certainly the last thing they have in mind . . . Philosophy is misused, from the side of the state as a tool, from the other side as a means of gain . . . Who can really believe that truth also will thereby come to light, just as a by-product? ... Governments make of philosophy a means of serving their state interests, and scholars make of it a trade ...' Schopenhauer's view of Hegel's status as the paid agent of the Prussian government is, to mention only one example, corroborated by Schwegler, an admiring disciple [14] of Hegel. Schwegler says of Hegel: 'The fullness of his fame and activity, however, properly dates only from his call to Berlin in 1818. Here there rose up around him a numerous, widely extended, and ... exceedingly active school; here too, he acquired, from his connections with the Prussian bureaucracy, political influence for himself as well as the recognition of his system as the official philosophy; not always to the advantage of the inner freedom of his philosophy, or of its moral worth.' Schwegler's editor, J. H. Stirling [15], the first British apostle of Hegelianism, of course defends Hegel against Schwegler by warning his readers not to take too literally 'the little hint of Schwegler's against ... the philosophy of Hegel as a state-philosophy'. But a few pages later, Stirling quite unintentionally confirms Schwegler's representation of the facts as well as the view that Hegel himself was aware of the party-political and apologetic function of his philosophy. (The evidence quoted [16] by Stirling shows that Hegel expressed himself rather cynically on this function of his philosophy.) And a little later, Stirling unwittingly gives away the 'secret of Hegel' when he proceeds to the following poetic as well as prophetic revelations [17], alluding to the lightning attack made by Prussia on Austria in 1866, the year before he wrote: 'Is it not indeed to Hegel, and especially his philosophy of ethics and politics, that Prussia owes that mighty life and organization she is now rapidly developing? Is it not indeed the grim Hegel that is the centre of that organization which, maturing counsel in an invisible brain, strikes, lightning-like, with a hand that is weighted from the mass? But as regards the value of this organization, it will be more palpable to many, should I say, that, while in constitutional England, Preference-holders and Debenture-holders are ruined by the prevailing commercial immorality, the ordinary owners of Stock in Prussian Railways can depend on a safe average of 8.33 per cent. This, surely, is saying something for Hegel at last!

-- The Open Society and Its Enemies, by Karl R. Popper


We could name many more figures and fields which were involved in the Conservative Revolution's attempt to reshape the population's conscious values. In all these cases it can be proven, often in great detail, that these were not "sociological phenomena" or mysterious transformations in the Zeitgeist, but were developments initiated or financed by the oligarchy.

In spite of passing rivalries, the oligarchy's efforts after 1815 were closely coordinated, and they often succeeded in setting into motion movements which crossed national borders, such as Young Europe and the Anthroposophist movement. The direct successors of these movements today are tied to the activities of such supranational institutions as the Trilateral Commission, the Club of Rome, and the Aspen Institute.

The republicans, who could look back upon the American Revolution as their proudest victory, were seriously weakened following 1815 and were later eliminated as a political force. At best, republicans worked on as dispersed, humanistically inclined individuals, who had lost consciousness of the great historical weight of their task. Such individuals reacted to humanist culture solely on the basis of their own personal moral disposition.

The oligarchy's Conservative Revolution did not succeed equally well in all fields and in all parts of the world. Lazare Carnot, who had to flee from France along with Alexander von Humboldt, organized in Berlin a spirited opposition against Hegel and Savigny; under Carnot's and von Humboldt's protection the spirit of Weimar lived on in the natural sciences and in classical philology. The center of scientific work was later moved to Gottingen, which produced such pioneering scientists as Bernhard Riemann and Georg Cantor. Through the work of Felix Klein, this tradition was kept alive into the beginning of the present century.

While Hegel was providing the totalitarian state with a frightening ideological justification, pointing the way to the Nazis' "everything is permitted" rule, Romanticism was at the same time softening up the general population. The Holy Alliance slowly but surely stifled Germany's soul, and encouraged the emergence of such romantic philosophers as Schopenhauer, who began to deny the power of reason. For Schopenhauer, egoism was the natural disposition of mankind, and life as such was not an adequate affirmation of life. Thus the republicans' cultural optimism yielded to an irrational, immoral pessimism.

The Case of Friedrich Nietzsche

The absolute height of Romanticism, or rather the nadir of general culture, where raving folly and emotional infantilism turned into aggressive mania, the welding point between the Romantic muddleheads and the Nazis -- this was the world of Nietzsche, whose works can only be described as the mind running amok.

This self-hating, joyless psychotic could not tolerate the idea of reason; he hated Socrates, Schiller, Beethoven, and Humboldt. In his confused writings he attempted, if incoherently, to rewrite history, emphasizing not the classical and Renaissance periods as the Weimar classics had done, but the Dark Ages, the dionysian and bacchanalian orgies, the dances of St. Vitus and the flagellants. He regarded the scientific mode of questioning as man's arch-enemy, just as the Greens do today. Everything the Nazis later made into reality was already lurking within Nietzsche's tormented brain, darting about with increasing frenzy: the volkisch idea, a deep hatred of industrial progress, the "biological world outlook" of "blood and soil," the idea of a master race, the mystically inspired hatred of Christianity, and its final and ultimate form, the Ecce Homo, where Nietzsche cries out: "Have I made myself clear? -- Dionysus against the Crucified .... "

Nietzsche, celebrated along with Dostoevsky as the prophet of the Conservative Revolution, was the spiritual pathfinder for the nihilism of the National Socialists and the existentialist philosophers.


The most extreme form of nihilism is the recognition that every belief, every notion of truth is necessarily false, since a true world does not exist. It is thus an illusion of perspective .... Let us think this thought in its most frightening form: Existence, such as it is, without purpose and without aim, but ineluctably returning, without end, into nothing -- this is the only return. This is the extreme form of nihilism: nothingness ("purposelessness"), eternally!


Nietzsche's sick cultural pessimism has had many variants, from Lagarde, Langbehn, and Oswald Spengler through to Jean-Paul Sartre, but he has never been outdone. The Nazis, Pol Pot, and Khomeini have seen to the practical application of his world outlook. An equally devastating effect was inflicted on German intellectual life by the works of Wagner and Dostoevsky. The latter was translated by Moeller van den Bruck, who in a fit of inspiration coined the name for the "Third Reich." By this expression he meant a third historical empire to follow the Holy Roman Empire of German Nations and Bismarck's Empire; but his primary aim was a final empire, where "right" and "left" would be transcended in a single synthesis.

From the first to the last page of Nietzsche’s writings the careful reader seems to hear a madman, with flashing eyes, wild gestures, and foaming mouth, spouting forth deafening bombast; and through it all, now breaking out into frenzied laughter, now sputtering expressions of filthy abuse and invective, now skipping about in a giddily agile dance, and now bursting upon the auditors with threatening mien and clenched fists. So far as any meaning at all can be extracted from the endless stream of phrases, it shows, as its fundamental elements, a series of constantly reiterated delirious ideas, having their source in illusions of sense and diseased organic processes, which will be pointed out in the course of this chapter. Here and there emerges a distinct idea, which, as is always the case with the insane, assumes the form of an imperious assertion, a sort of despotic command. Nietzsche never tries to argue. If the thought of the possibility of an objection arises in his mind, he treats it lightly, or sneers at it, or curtly and rudely decrees, ‘That is false!’

-- Degeneration, by Max Nordau


Applying Cesare Lombroso's term "degeneracy" to the works of such men as Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Wagner, Zola, Ibsen, and such phenomena as symbolism, spiritualism, egomania, mysticism, Parnassianism, and diabolism, Nordau predicted the coming of a human catastrophe of unprecedented proportions. An entire literature developed over Degeneration, including a rebuttal in book form by George Bernard Shaw.

-- Max Nordau, by Encyclopaedia Judaica


The Republic Is Carried to its Grave

In order to counter the widespread mythos surrounding the meaning of "right" and "left," let us cite a representative of the "Black Front":

The Black Front can be clearly situated if we dispense with the bourgeois-democratic schema of "left" and "right." Let us imagine the German parties and political currents to be shaped like a horseshoe, whose bend represents the Center and at whose end-points are the KPD and NSDAP respectively; the space occupied by the Black Front lies inbetween those two poles of Communism and National Socialism. The opposites of "left" and "right" are dissolved by their entering into a kind of synthesis, while strictly excluding the "bourgeois." This position between the two poles is the best characterization of the tensile nature of the Black Front. ...


The idea here is no different from the West German Green-peace leader Petra Kelly's "fundamental opposition": the Conservative Revolution's deeply rooted enmity against the ideas of European civilization.

If individual predicates might have changed in the meantime, the substance nevertheless remains the same, whether it be the Romantic movement, the Burschenschaften, the youth movement, or our modern Greens and "alternative movement" activists.

In Germany, one of the first phenomena to develop out of the European Conservative Revolution was the so-called German Movement. In contrast with their promising name, this movement strove not to realize a republican nation imbued with the spirit of Weimar classicism, but rather embraced the ideas of Germanness preached by the likes of Father Friedrich Jahn, picking up later on Friedrich Naumann's idea of a "social Kaiserdom" or the Great Empire fantasies of the old German Bund.

Armin Mohler, in his above-cited book, distinguishes between two wings of the German Movement: the reformed wing, under which he classifies the various political tendencies, e.g., the Christian-Social and anti-Semitic movement of Adolf Stoecker, Friedrich Naumann's National Social Movement, the old German League, the solidarist movement initiated by von Ketteler, and the German nationalists within the Austro-Hungarian monarchy; and a broader, more "theoretical" grouping which Mohler considers to have a much more lasting influence. This second group includes Nietzsche, Lagarde, Langbehn, Moeller van den Bruck, Ernst Niekisch, the two Jungers, K. O. Paetel, and Otto Strasser.

Both groupings shared a fundamental hostility toward the industrialization of Germany. Even though the cultural life of the Wilhelmine era had already lapsed into decadence, it was the cultural pessimism of such writers as Lagarde and Langbehn, with their not inconsiderable effect upon the youth movement, which dealt the final death blow to morality.

But not until the terrible experiences of World War I was the population made ready for the events that followed. The still-barren soil at Verdun speaks volumes about these four and one-half years of bloody carnage, which uprooted large portions of the population, especially the youth, depriving them of any hope for a normal life. The "rain of steel," the senselessness of the trench warfare, extinguished any nobler motivations dwelling within the common soldier, who in many cases had already been under the influence of the youth movement before the war. In this climate of meaninglessness, a dangerous anarchistic ferment began spreading throughout the population. Many who never found their way back into normal lives after spending their formative years in the trenches began to organize themselves into paramilitary groups, seeing these as their only prospect for survival. It was from these strata that the Freikorps, the "alliances" of the postwar youth movement, the Communist armed units, and the National Socialists' Sturmabteilungen (SA) recruited their cadre.

The young Weimar Republic was, from the very start, bitterly opposed by all those sides of the political spectrum grouped around the Communists, the numerous tendencies within the Conservative Revolution, and the oligarchical camp, as represented by the Thule Society, for example, and, later on, by National Socialism. During the five years immediately following the war, conditions in Germany bordered on a state of civil war, with over 20 attempted coups from both right and left. Various armed units -- from the Rotfrontkampferbund, the SA, and the Stahlhelm, to the "Vikings" of Capt. Hermann Erhard and the "Oberland Alliance," the Wehrwolf, or the Reichsflagge -- began to unleash violent political confrontations. The specific ideology of each of these organizations played only a subsidiary role in these conflicts. "Rightists" and "leftists" rubbed shoulders as a matter of course, and members often migrated from one side to the other. It was not uncommon for people to switch from the Communist Party (KPD) to the NSDAP; the most famous example of this was Hitler's criminal judge Roland Friesler, who originally came from the KPD. Organized political murder as an instrument of policy -- just as we know it with today's international terrorism -- was a common practice in this period.

The bitter opposition between KPD and NSDAP in the Weimar Republic is well known; meeting-hall battles and terrorist attacks were a daily occurrence. But from the very beginning there existed within each camp a National Bolshevist tendency, whose influence fluctuated from year to year. Here we must also distinguish between the surges within the general population and the "theoreticians" of the Conservative Revolution, who considered themselves an intellectual elite. In spite of a certain following of their own, this elite remained aloof from events, disdainfully voicing the opinion that the National Socialists had watered down the pure theory of the Conservative Revolution, as had all the other 500 groupings and tendencies within the Weimar Republic.

The totally unrealistic reparations payments demanded by the Versailles Treaty contained the seeds of the Weimar Republic's destruction. Its fate was sealed by the same imperialistic circles within the victorious nations, which had been no less guilty of starting World War I than were the Germans. Just as the brutal credit conditionalities of the IMF today are choking off all development within the so-called Third World, the Versailles conditions rendered any German economic recovery an impossibility, and led directly to the Great Depression.

The victorious powers' financial and economic strangulation of Germany first made possible the "success" of the KPD and NSDAP, both of whom benefited from the ferment against the Versailles Treaty. From the outset, both parties sought to destroy the "system," the young Weimar Republic. The de facto collaboration between Nazis and Communists in this endeavor, repeatedly took on a very practical form, and was the ultimate cause of the Weimar Republic's collapse.

National Bolshevist Dreams

Whenever the National Bolshevist tendency was on the rise within the Nazi movement, discussion quickly moved to the necessity for an alliance between Germany and Russia as the key to defeating the "West," perhaps even leading to eventual world domination by both states. Many German military people, still laboring under the shock of the outcome of the war, cherished hopes that with the aid of the Russians, their humiliating defeat might be reversed. This hope was nourished by the Russian Army's advances in connection with the 1920 Russo-Polish war. Even though the advance was soon halted at Warsaw, an even greater resurgence of National Bolshevist ideas came with the hammer-blows of the Great Inflation of 1923 and the occupation of the Ruhr, both of which seemed to threaten the very existence of the Weimar Republic. This provided such National Bolshevist tendencies as Karl Radek, the most powerful functionary on the executive committee of the Communist International and a close confidante of Stalin, with the opportunity to push through the Nazi-Communist tactical alliance known as the so-called "Schlageter course" and the tactic of National Bolshevism itself.

Ruth Fischer, who since May 1923 had been a "leftist" on the Central Committee, told a meeting of volkisch students:

The German Reich .. , can only be saved if you, gentlemen of the German-volkisch side, realize that you must fight together with the Russians who are organized with the KPD. Whoever raises the cry against Jewish capital ... is already a fighter in the class struggle, whether he knows it or not. ... Stamp out the Jew capitalists, hang them from the lamp posts, trample them to death!


The broadest-based upsurge of National Bolshevism, however, took place in 1930. The world economic crisis was reaching a climax, the soup lines were growing in length, and, in the form of the Young and Dawes plans, the victorious powers were again attempting to unload a large part of the burden onto Germany. The National Bolshevist Strasser wing of the NSDAP, hoping to make the ideas of Moeller van den Bruck, Friedrich Naumann, and Mazaryk into reality, competed with Hitler for leadership of the party. Gregor Strasser coined the catchphrase, "anti-capitalist yearning" (antikapitalistische Sehnsucht), which captured the fancy of the entire German people.

In the tradition of Radek, the KPD attempted to assume leadership of this anti-Western current, and decreed such initiatives as the "Programmatic Declaration of the KPD for the National and Social Liberation of the German People" on Aug. 24, 1930, and the "Farmers Aid Program" in the spring of 1931. Within the KPD itself, the group around Heinz Naumann sought out active contact with National Bolshevist forces on the right. This tendency was later called the "Scheringer Course," referring to the infamous Lieutenant [Richard] Scheringer, who in 1930 had been arrested for his National Bolshevist activities within the Reichswehr and who had gone over to the KPD while still in prison. The German information service DID reported in a special Jan. 30, 1983 issue that:

after his arrest, Scheringer joined up with the KPD and attempted to bring right- and leftwing radical opponents of the Weimar Republic together into a "rebels' circle." Following the outbreak of war in 1939, through the mediation of the later Field Marshal von Reichenau, Scheringer formally requested that Hitler recall him into military service as a volunteer with his old rank. As the "division's most courageous officer," Artillery Captain Scheringer now successfully turned his guns against his Communist comrades. After World War II, Scheringer's silence about his Nazi past enabled him to become a state secretary, and he dedicated himself to the task of gathering together former functionaries from the "Imperial Food Trades" in the Communist-influenced "Association for Forestry and Agriculture." Scheringer was also influential in the "Leadership Ring of Former Soldiers," whose primary task was to follow Moscow's plan to mobilize ex-Nazis and former German officers against the so-called "remilitarization of the Federal Republic." Since the "reconstitution" of the Communist Party of Germany (DKP) in September 1968, Scheringer has been an "agricultural expert" on the DKP's executive committee. The activities of this Nazi-Communist not only undermined the Weimar Republic, as they do now the Federal Republic, but the personnel of this network has remained intact down to the present day.

On Aug. 9, 1931, under Moscow's strict instructions, the KPD supported the Stahlhelm's plebiscite against the Prussian administration, and on election day, in accordance with this order, in front of every voting place there was posted a red flag with hammer and sickle, side by side with a red swastika flag
. (They lost the plebiscite just the same.) One year later the NSDAP and KPD jointly supported the strike of the Berlin Transportation Union. Under the leadership of Walter Ulbricht they followed the motto that anything which weakened the West would help them, putting faith in Stalin's slogan: "Through Hitler we will take power!"


This time the National Bolshevist tendency acquired more influence over the population than before. Strasser's wing in the NSDAP, however, still could not win out over Hitler's Munich clique, and formally subordinated itself on June 30, 1930, with Gregor Strasser knuckling under and his brother Otto leaving the NSDAP entirely. In 1932, it finally came to an open break between Gregor Strasser and Hitler, and on June 30, 1934, the "Night of the Long Knives," Hitler used his own methods to end the faction fighting within the NSDAP, shooting down Gregor Strasser along with all his followers in the SA.

Once again, as in the period before World War I, the so-called theoreticians of the Conservative Revolution had a much greater long-range influence than the pragmatic Gregor Strasser, or those who thought they could accomplish something by forming a new "popular conservative" party. In the wake of the power struggle, the so-called authors of the Conservative Revolution -- the National Revolutionaries and National Bolsheviks of the Weimar Republic -- had been partially wiped out by the Nazis, partially put into concentration camps, and partially driven abroad, where they were able to surround themselves with an absurd aura of resistance. Nevertheless, today they once again represent a serious threat.

Such current "leftist" publications as the right-leaning taz or the journal Wir Selbst are quite frank about their admiration for Libyan madman Qaddafi, and they are building up positive images for Otto Strasser, the Junger brothers, Karl Radek, Walter Stennes, Claus Heirn, August Winnig, Hanno Schultze-Boysen, Ruland Scheringer, Hans Zehrer with his Tat circle, Ernst and Bruno von Salomon, Eberhard Kobel, and so forth. Ernst Niekisch, the most famous National Bolshevist of all, is worshipped as a veritable cult figure.
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Re: The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Postby admin » Tue Jun 05, 2018 1:34 am

Part 3 of 3

In the book Preussische Profile, jointly published by Sebastian Haffner and the Conservative Revolutionary Wolfgang Venohr, Haffner presents a thesis which, despite its strangeness, contains a dangerous quantum of truth:

There are two questions to which 99 out of 100 Germans today would only respond to with an embarrassed wince or a shrug of the shoulders. The first one is: who was actually the last great Prussian? The second: who in Germany was actually Hitler's real opponent? One can search long and hard for an answer. One can tryout various names, only to reject them later. In the end, the final answer to both questions has to be: Ernst Niekisch.


Armin Mohler was unfortunately right when in 1979 he spoke of a Niekisch renaissance among the youth, who had withdrawn in disappointment from the flood of neo-Marxist literature, and were passing around photocopies of Niekisch's writings. Large parts of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) were also not immune to this new-found admiration for Niekisch.

What is the essence of Niekisch's views? Only a revolutionary, socialist Germany, he says, in alliance with revolutionary Russia, would be able to defy the bourgeois (i.e. industrialized) West. So, a Germany allied with Russia against the decadent West! The prophets of the Conservative Revolution gave symbolic meaning to the four points of the compass: against the civilized capitalistic West, against the Roman-Catholic South; and for and with the rustic-Germanic North and the Bolshevist East.

But the Conservative Revolutionaries are by no means talking about a Communist Russia. Schumacher always spoke of "Bolshevik" Russia, and the writers in Tat have described Bolshevism as a "re-Asiatization" of Russia with a thin Western European veneer. For such people as Ernst von Salomon, it was clear that "vague expectations from the East" were the correct perspective for all those who could not reconcile themselves to the defeat of Germany. It also meant the establishment of a new empire without any ties to the West or reliance on its traditional values.

After the experiences of World War I, the twentieth-century authors merely reformulated the vision already outlined by the two most important nineteenth-century theorists of the Conservative Revolution -- one in the West, the other in the East. Nietzsche, in his posthumously published works, sketched out a four-point program containing his call for a "greater German policy":

We need an unconditional partnership with Russia, along with a new common program which will prevent Russia from coming under the influence of any English stereotypes. No American future! ... A purely European policy is intolerable, and any confinement to Christian perspectives is a great malady.


On the other side, Nietzsche's Russian counterpart Dostoevsky, who also promulgated the idea of a holy Russian race and a coming Russian world empire, wrote that "Germany does not need us for a temporary political alliance, but for an alliance lasting into eternity .... Two great peoples, we and they, are destined to change the face of the world!"

But what was to be changed? What was the synonym for the "West," and what was Nietzsche's "American future," which had to be halted at all costs?

The Battle Against the 'American Future'

Because of today's renewed, this time global, offensive of the Conservative Revolution, we must once again review the epistemological basis defining both sides. The aim of Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Niekisch, and the other National Bolshevists was to destroy the republican model we have described earlier, while they themselves were nothing but aggressive spokesmen for the oligarchical model. Their hatred was directed against the dictatorship of reason; they worshipped the power and unlimited domination of the irrational will.

The "West" against which their attack was directed -- the "American future," whose seeds had been planted during the American Revolution -- embodied the noblest ideas produced by the humanism of Christian European culture over the past 2,500 years. This culture is founded upon a conception of man which emphasizes the mental capacities of man, who, according to Nicolaus of Cusa, can make himself into a second God.

Such human beings are capable of thinking three successive levels, as defined by Socrates. On the lowest level, that of sensuous desire, man lives only for the satisfaction of his material needs. On the second level, that of the Understanding, he accepts a certain ordering of things. but is incapable of actual creativity. On the highest level, the stage of Reason, human thought is in agreement with the lawfulness of the physical universe, into whose development he intervenes freely but lawfully.

Such a person, guided by the humanist ideal, has the duty to pursue his own self-development, and to do his utmost to develop all his latent capacities for the benefit of all mankind. That also includes the development of his emotions away from infantile egocentricism and toward a true intercourse with human reason. Such a person must no longer, along with Kant, force himself to do what reason decrees, but his actions must come into harmony with his own sense of joy; indeed, he could not tolerate anything else. The individual who passionately accomplishes that which is necessary has, as Schiller says, a beautiful soul.

It is the specific merit of European humanism that, unlike any other culture or civilization, it emphasizes the significance of the individual human being. In no other cultural milieu, whatever other advantages it might have, does the formation of the individual's character and personality assume such a central role. "Free through Reason, strong through law," is how Schiller's poem "Die Kunstler" ("The Artists") describes this ideal of humanity, to which we owe human history's most momentous qualitative advances. Perfected freedom and beauty in the perfection of form -- this is the principle which applies as much to every individual as it does to science and works of art.

What, on the other hand, is the world of the Conservative Revolution, of National Bolshevism, of National Revolution, and of National Socialism? The individual here is cipher in a mass, playing no role within the collective -- including members of the elite and the master race. Identity is based not individually, but emanates from blood and soil, i.e. from the specific race and "homeland." Human reason is not the crowning flower of creation; man is but a lowly creature in the eternal cycle of nature. The dead must form the humus from which the young can grow -- such was Colorado Governor Richard Lamm's brutal, rage-provoking characterization of this idea.

Eternal Cycle versus Renaissance

The Conservative Revolution consciously counterposes the "rebirths" of the cyclical world-view to the "Renaissance." According to Mohler, "sunken worlds" well up from below, revealing ancient regional mythologies -- the principle of the Great Mother Earth, which transmits the collective's identity with blood and soil. Accordingly, men can come in closest contact with their "souls" when they are in the throes of a dionysian frenzy.

Nietzsche elevated the "dionysian" into a program to defeat Socratic reason. The essence of the dionysian could be most easily captured while in a state of intoxication, e.g., while under the influence of narcotic beverages, or in the ecstatic abandon with which the dionysian masses dance through the streets -- be they the dancers of St. Vitus in the Middle Ages, the marching columns of the SA or SS; or behind the prayer-wheels of the Islamic fundamentalists. "When millions fall trembling in the dust; we are close to the dionysian," wrote Nietzsche. It is all too clear that the individual -- this greatest treasure of European culture -- played a role here as a mere part of a collective mass. Contempt for the individual in favor of the collectivity, is one of the touchstones of the Nazi-Communist alliance.

In contrast with classical art, what passes for art in the camp of the Conservative Revolution was never intended to ennoble the public, "playfully and merrily" bringing them up to the poet's level, as Schiller put it. Esthetic refinement of the emotions; joy in differentiated content within the perfected shape and form which art has as its aim; the ability to address the potentially finer side of popular impulses -- no, the Conservative Revolution will have none of this. Their art is intended to allow the public to "go outside themselves," to drain themselves, to participate in a collective frenzy. Whatever one's inner beast might be, it should be let out in existentialist exhibitionism; the so-called lyrics of Gottfried Benn or the prose of Hermann Hesse invites us to do so. Dostoevsky's "Russian soul" is only completely genuine when the hero, a drunkard and a brute, maniacally smashes everything to bits, including his tubercular wife.

The Conservative Revolution's art is an assault against reason, as is perhaps best demonstrated by the music of Richard Wagner. The public is lulled into entering the cultist world of mythology. The opera is visited not in order to experience joy over human creativity as exemplified by music, but to observe and participate in a cult ritual.

An integral component of this tendency's belief structure is the perverse pleasure it takes in collapse and destruction, in all its various shadings. With Nietzsche it takes the following form:

Is pessimism necessarily a sign of decline? ... of collapse. of aborted efforts, of exhausted and weakened instincts? ... is there such a thing as a pessimism of strength? An intellectual obeisance to what is hard, terrifying, evil, problematic, stemming from well-being, of ebullient health, of fullness of existence? Is there perhaps a suffering from surfeit itself a sharp-eyed, tempting boldness which longs for the dreadful as it would for the enemy, the honorable enemy upon whom it can test its power?


But this is not merely someone's sick fascination with pessimism, or a kind of ideological depression; this addiction to destruction is typical of the cyclical world outlook. Thus Nietzsche writes in Thus Spake Zarathustra:

Everything goes, everything returns again; the wheel of existence rolls on forever. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; the year of existence runs on forever. Everything breaks, everything is put together again; the same house of existence is built forever. Everything parts, everything is reunited; the ring of existence remains true forever. Existence begins at every Now; at every Here the sphere is rolling there. The middle is everywhere. Narrow is th¢ path of eternity.


It follows that the adherents of the Conservative Revolution consider Charles Darwin's theories to be the most important "scientific" idea of the nineteenth century. For if the eternal cycle is to be remain unbroken, then according to Darwin the strong must eliminate the weak and destroy those who "do not deserve to live," just as the race theoreticians [Jahn and Hans Grimm, and finally the Nazis themselves, imagined themselves to be members of a master race, possessing the right to exterminate inferior races.

For the Conservative Revolution, revolution itself (including war) is a kind of blood-letting, a "trimming off of excessive and damaging growth." Its proponents are not amazed that birth must be paid for with destruction. Murder, especially political murder, finds its brutal justification here. It is therefore hardly accidental that all those regimes we group under the term "state terrorism," e.g., Khomeini's Iran or Qaddafi's Libya, not only practice systematic political murder against their opponents, but also exhibit all the other characteristics of the Conservative Revolution.

Its proponents believe that Nietzsche's arrival represents the great turning point, and that the following period has only been an interregnum during which the world of progress must first be entirely destroyed before the new one can take shape. Whoever reads these works of a hundred years ago, cannot help recognizing that their authors knew they were engaged in a conspiracy spanning generations.

In the Preface to his Will to Power, which is celebrated as the "most significant challenge of the interregnum," Nietzsche writes:

What I am going to relate is the history of the next two centuries. I will describe what will occur, and what can occur in no other way: the rise of nihilism. This story can already be told now, for necessity is already at work here. This future is already speaking to us with a thousand signs; this fate is announced everywhere. All ears are straining to hear this music of the future. Our entire European culture has long been moving with agonizing tension, increasing from decade to decade, and is now tumbling loosely, restlessly, violently into catastrophe: like a river which wants to reach its end, which no longer thinks, which is afraid to think.


This "tension" has already been unleashed once in the catastrophe of the Third Reich and World War II -- a direct consequence of the philosophy cited above. But just as the Conservative Revolution disdainfully claimed that the National Socialists had "watered down" their theory, so they regarded Hitler as merely an "episode on Germany's political stage," as a "drum beater': for national revolt, as the "catalyst sent by fate." Lowith sees this as a development whose beginning is the death of God (Nietzsche's God is dead), whose middle is the resulting nihilism, and whose end is nihilism's conquest of itself and the eternal return.

This transition to a new age has cosmic dimensions -- an idea which has weathered well. Under the pseudonym Kurt von Ensen, a certain Dr. Karl Strunkmann wrote in his 1932 book Adolf Hitler und die Kommenden (Adolf Hitler and the Age to Come): Today we are living through the catastrophic transition from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius. We are at a change of aeons, as at the time of the birth of Christ, when humanity left the Age of Aries and entered the new Christian Aeon of Pisces. An old world collapsed, a new one rose up: the Christian Occident. And now, 2,000 years later, a new, powerful "die -- and become again" is beginning: destruction of the Occident and rise of the new atlantic world. The Third Reich's mission is to demolish the dying Occident. The shaping of the new Atlantic cultural empire in the AEon of Aquarius will be the task of the Fourth Reich.

In good National Bolshevist style, Herr von Ensen alias Strunkmann knew precisely what the hub of this Fourth Reich would be: the intimate alliance between Prussia and Russia.

The previous aeon, the Age of Pisces, was under the joint leadership of Roman and Germanic intellectual and cultural forces. The new aeon of Aquarius will be directed not toward the South, but toward the East. The Prussian-Austrian, Deutsch-Germanic will, on the one side, and Russian-Siberian elemental forces on the other side, shall shape a new type of man and a new humankind on earth.


Preparation of all these things was to be the task for a future intellectual general staff.

It is quite surprising and highly fruitful to read the writings of the Conservative Revolutionaries and National Bolshevists of the 1920s and 1930s, and then to compare them with the modern trends toward a so-called neutralized, independent central Europe and a decoupling with the United States. One finds the same hatred against the "West" and against rationality and reason. The negotiating partner is never Communist Russia; it is always the Bolshevist East.

If we regard the transformations cited by Nietzsche, Junger, or von Ense not merely as absurd astrological hokum, but rather as a program for the oligarchical faction, then we must unfortunately conclude that this paradigm shift, the destruction of Western values, has been largely successful.

With the arrogance of someone who has already won the battle, Marilyn Ferguson, a fellow at the futuristic Stanford Research Institute, has given us a popular account of current experimentation in this shift. Without even covering her mouth, in her book The Age of Aquarius she describes the process of mass brainwashing which has led an increasing number of people around the world, especially the youth, into joining up with this Age of Aquarius -- this cosmic touching and feeling which unites everyone in a great dynamic family.

Even if it is perhaps not evident at first glance, the members of the alternative movement, with their dream of a post-industrial Age of Aquarius, share their epistemological groundwork with the so-called peace movement. When this latter group finds not the slightest problem in unilateral disarmament; when Horst Ehmke sees "America's confrontation policies" as a greater problem than the threat of becoming subjugated under "Soviet domination" -- is this not identical to Kurt von Ensen's earlier dictum: "the new AEon of Aquarius will be directed not toward the South, but toward the East"?

The dictatorship of the irrational, a combination of sentimental, romantic wallowing in the boundlessness of emotion, and the corresponding hatred of all lawfulness of reason, is the common denominator where Nazism and Bolshevism coincide. This is the basis of the convergences of the 1920s and 1930s, and it provides an epistemological explanation for the Hitler-Stalin pact.

The Hitler-Stalin Pact

In spite of its weakness, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) of the late Weimar Republic still was the gathering point for most of Germany's republican elements. After the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern, the Communist International declared its main enemy to be the SPD, and not, as one might otherwise expect, the NSDAP. The Communists' decision can only be understood with reference to the affinity between Nazism and Bolshevism described above. If this affinity did not exist, Stalin would never have thought of Hitler as his tool, just as the East would not be supporting the Greens today to suit their own purposes.

The Nazis were not important to Stalin because of their ideology, but because he saw them as the best lever for breaking Germany out of the Western camp. As is usually the case with such Hobbesian alliances, Stalin secretly planned to incorporate Germany into the Soviet sphere of influence at the earliest opportunity; in the meantime, however, he proceeded according to the old principle, "anything which hurts our enemy, helps us," the enemy in this case being the capitalist system in the West.

At the close of 1931 Stalin formulated his thinking as follows: "Don't you also believe, Neumann, that, if the National Socialists were to take power in Germany, they would be so exclusively occupied with the West that we could build socialism here in peace?"

Moreover, at the Dee. 15, 1931 meeting of the executive committee of the Communist International in Moscow, Comintern executive secretary Dmitrii Manuilskii stated:

The main enemy is not Hitler; the main enemy is the system of Severing-Bruning-Hindenburg. We will make no treaties with Hitler or enter into secret negotiations with him. We will let Hitler go his own way, but will make use of everything his victory over the state machine will bring. With his aid we will first smash the Social Democratic police machine and the Bruning state machine .... In the present phase of development of the German revolution, Hitler is our most steadfast ally.... Our future tactics, and the tactics of the German Communist Party, depend upon a correct evaluation of this fact.


The content of these arguments are completely consistent with the peasant wisdom which later formed the basis for the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939 to 1941. In Hitler, Stalin thought he had a useful instrument for realizing his dream of a world socialist empire. Hitler is known to have thought the same of Stalin, namely that Stalin was a stepping-stone to his future seizure of world power. If we consider that Neville Chamberlain, French Premier Edouard Daladier, and powerful Wall Street financiers were also supporting Hitler in hopes that Hitler would go to war against the Soviet Union, then the Second World War begins to look like a classic case of miscalculation on the part of all involved.

The Nazi regime's economic policy had, in the meantime, done precisely what oligarchical forms of extreme domestic austerity always do. As soon as the domestic economy's industrial capacity and labor force is exhausted -- and the Nazis took this to the extreme with their labor and concentration camps -- there remains only one way out for such an economy: wars of conquest, so as to bring new resources within reach. Hitler, speaking to his generals on Aug. 22, 1939, argued for the invasion of Poland in the following terms: "This is an easy decision. We have nothing to lose. Our economic situation is such that we can go on for a couple of years at best. Goring can back this up. We have no choice. We must act."

On Aug. 23 the world was taken by surprise with the announcement of a non-aggression pact between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, signed in the Kremlin by Stalin, Molotov, and Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Poland was to be the booty, divided up between the two empires. At the conclusion of the Polish campaign, on the evening of Sept. 27 von Ribbentrop traveled to Moscow in order to conclude a German-Soviet border and friendship treaty. This was the only friendship treaty Hitler ever made with any state outside the Axis.

If we call to mind the Soviet reaction to France's and Great Britain's declaration of war against Hitler, we are struck with the parallels to Soviet argumentation following their recent shooting down of a Korean commercial jet liner. After Hitler had decided to set into motion a "peace offensive" in October 1939, Stalin ran the following statement in the Nov. 29 issue of Pravda:

It was not Germany which attacked France and England, but France and England have attacked Germany, and thus they bear responsibility for the present war. ... The ruling class of France and England has presumptuously rejected the German peace proposals and the Soviet Union's efforts for a rapid conclusion to the war. These are the facts.


As hard as the Soviets might have subsequently tried to give themselves the aura of anti-fascist struggle, no one can ever erase the these lilies in the Oct. 9, 1939 Izvestia: "To start a war to destroy Hitler, is a criminally stupid policy." And on Oct. 31, Molotov stressed in a public statement:

There is no possible justification for a war of this kind. One can accept the ideology of Hitlerism, or one can reject it... that is a question of political attitude ... but it is not only senseless but also criminal to wage a war to wipe out Hitlerism and disguise this as a fight for democracy.


The Hitler-Stalin Pact, particularly the concomitant expansion in East-West trade, kept the Hitler regime alive for the duration. In accordance with the German-Soviet trade agreement signed just before the pact, the Nazis received from the Soviets one-third of their oil, two-thirds of their phosphate, one-third of their cobalt, tungsten, molybdenum and tin, many other raw materials, and ten percent of their animal fodder. During the period between August 1939 and August 1940, trade between the two states rose by 3,000 percent. If it had not been for Russia, the British naval blockade would have done serious damage to the Nazis; but instead the Russian bought goods from the Far East, and even .from the British, in order to sell it more cheaply to the Nazis.

The myth of the Soviet anti-fascist struggle becomes even less credible when we take into account the fact that when the U.S.S.R. had the best opportunity to stop the Nazis, Moscow let it go by. In 1940 the Nazis deployed 139 divisions on the Western front, and a mere four divisions and six territorial regiments remained on the Eastern front to face Stalin's more than 100 divisions. If Stalin had really intended to move against the Nazis, this would have been the ideal moment.

Only when the Third Reich and the Soviet Union started getting in each other's way, for instance, around raw materials supplies in Romania or Finland, did the tide begin to turn. It is certainly true that, in the course of the bloody warfare which followed, the Soviets lost 20 million of their citizens at the hands of the Nazis. But it helps neither themselves nor the West when they hold up anti-fascist resistance as a holy cow.

It is also undeniably true that the Soviet Union bitterly resisted the Nazis after they opened up the Eastern front. But the fact remains that the rise of the Nazis in Germany had fit perfectly into their concept; this gives them a large degree of co-responsibility for the course of events. The greatest tragedy, however, lies in the fact that no one today -- in East or West -- is willing to learn the lesson of this story. Immediately after the end of the war, the Soviet Union did not hesitate to make use of the old Nazi intelligence networks. Today the Soviet Union continues to provide us with daily proof of its unabashed support for Nazi organizations in the West, be these old formations or newcomers such as the alternative movements of the so-called Age of Aquarius. Has the Soviet Union still failed to learn that it never pays to support Nazi movements in the West?

The oligarchy in the West is equally determined to repeat the same mistakes. The political friends of Lord Carrington, the Kissingers, Genschers and Andreottis, evidently believe that by isolating America and concluding a new Yalta Agreement with the Soviet Union, they can re-divide and plunder the world. An "independent Central Europe accord," no matter how it were formulated, would surely have an even shorter life-span than the Hitler- Stalin Pact. Today there are certain European oligarchs who would like to control their own arsenal of nuclear weapons -- a proposal currently being negotiated under the shameful trademark o( the "two-pillar theory of NATO." If their dreams ever become reality, the result is pre-programmed: whoever refuses to learn from history is condemned to repeat it.

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Malthus, Thomas Robert, An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the future improvement of society, London, 1798. Also published as An Essay on the Principle of Population; or, a view of its past and present effects on human happiness, London, 1826.

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Mosse, George, International Fascism, London/Beverly Hills, 1979.

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---, System des heutigen Romischen Rechts, Darmstadt, 1956. Schiller, Friedrich, Werke, Nationalausgabe, Vols. 1-42, Weimar, 1943-77.

Shirer, William, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, New York, 1960.

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Re: The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Postby admin » Tue Jun 05, 2018 1:36 am

2. The National Socialist World-View: Racial Darwinism, Gnosticism, and Mysticism

The sheer quantity of scholarly -- and non-scholarly -- literature about Hitler and National Socialism has reached massive proportions. But a quick perusal of the bookstores in New York, West Berlin, or Frankfurt reveals that most of these works have little to do with historical truth.

As both the distance from the Nazi phenomenon and the amount written on the subject have increased, two basic myths about Nazism seem to have established themselves. The first myth is the sharp distinction between Hitler's National Socialism on the one hand and fascism on the other, with the result that fascism appears in an increasingly differentiated and even sympathetic light. The second myth reflects a fundamental consensus that has crystalized about Nazism, resting on the axiomatic equation Nazism = Germany +anti-Semitism +industrial capitalism. Both myths contain partial truths, were not "made up out of the clear blue sky," and hence appear plausible and easy to grasp. Nonetheless, both myths are irreconcilable with historical truth, and miss the essence of fascism and Nazism. More importantly, they obstruct insight into new fascist tendencies, in the present and the future.

In the present, second world crisis of the twentieth century, it is absolutely necessary to grasp the essentials of fascism and Nazism. We must avoid being blinded to the essential by a fixation on the form and predicates. For it may very well happen that a new Nazism and fascism will rear its head under the guise of "anti-fascism." There are already very clear tendencies in this direction in both East and West.

The following presentation is closely related to an essay by Helga Zepp-LaRouche which was published in 1982 under the title, "The Historical Roots of Green Fascism," in which the "ideological roots of Green fascism were presented, primarily as they appear in Armin Mohler's work, The Conservative Revolution. Here, we wish to sketch out, on the one hand how the Nazi elite came into being and what ideological factors determined it; and on the other, how this Nazi elite was able to build a Nazi mass movement.

According to Hitler himself, National Socialism was started as follows: "In July 1919 I joined the German Workers Party· (DAP), which then consisted of seven members, in which I finally found an organization in the political arena which reflected my ideals." This statement fits nicely into the conception that the "Fuhrer" built the Nazi mass movement out of nothing. In reality, the German Workers Party (DAP), which shortly afterwards became the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), was in no way a minuscule political splinter group. Founded by Anton Drexler, a railway worker, and run by Karl Harrer, a sports writer, the DAP set itself the task of spreading anti-Semitic racism throughout the working class. The anti-capitalist rhetoric used for this was carried over into the NSDAP, especially in Gottfried Feder's slogan of "breaking from the servitude of [Jewish] interest rates."

Harrer, Drexler, Feder, and Hitler were not only members of the DAP, they were at the same time members or at least sympathizers of the Thule Society. The German Workers Party was actually founded on orders from the Thule Society and functioned as its front organization. Alongside the DAP, the Thule Society created dozens of splinter groups, parliamentary organizations, and terrorist associations. Of all of these organizations the DAP-NSDAP proved to be the most promising, and the Thule Society decided to focus its energies on this project. This, no doubt, had a lot to do with Hitler's quickly emerging talent as a political organizer and demagogic orator:

The Thule SocietY and Haushofer

The Thule Society functioned as a secret mystic-political organization modeled on Freemasonry. The existence of this organization first became known , when members of the Thule Society were "taken hostage and murdered during the final stage of the so-called Munich Soviet Republic. On April 29, 1919, ten Thule members were killed, among them Prince Maria von Thurn und Taxis, Countess Westarp, Baron Teikert, and Baron Seydlitz. About two months earlier, another member of the Thule organization, Count Arco-Valley, had' shot the "revolutionary" Bavarian Prime Minister Kurt Eisner. The Thule organization later continued to exert substantial control over political terrorism, especially through the so-called Consul Organization. In connection with these terrorist activities, it became evident that the Thule Society, unlike the DAP-NSDAP, was no band Of muddleheaded mystics who happened to get together; to a significant extent, its members were recruited from ruling oligarchical families. The Thurn und Taxis were, after all, one of the richest and most influential noble houses in Germany, and remain so to this day.

The official head of the Thule Society was one Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorf, a.k.a. Glauer. Born in 1875 in Thuringia, he had lived in the Middle East at the beginning of the century, where he was adopted by a von Sebottendorf. He became an expert in Islamic Sufism and maintained very close ties to Sufi networks in the Ottoman Empire. Through these ties he was soon able to get his hands on political influence and substantial financial means. Already in the Balkan War of 1912-1913 he served as a leader of the "Turkish Crescent."

His career in Turkey has certain parallels with Alexander Helphand-Parvus, who also, "from nothing," rose from being a revolutionary in 1905 to enormous wealth and influence in Turkey, and worked in the First World War for the German imperial secret police (and probably others as well).

Sebottendorf, a wealthy man by 1917, returned to Germany and settled down in Munich. There he worked on reorganizing the populist-mystic groupings, especially the "Vril Society."

As has already been indicated, Sebottendorf's organizing abilities enabled him to turn the Thule Society into an organization which recruited from noble families, academics, literati, and officialdom. Major-General and Professor Karl Haushofer was a particularly important member of the Society. Along with Halford Mackinder of the London School of Economics, Haushofer is known as the founder of "geopolitics," the theory that the fate of a people and nation depends on their racial characteristics of "blood and soil." The very life and survival of nations, so the theory goes, rests on securing and expanding its Lebensraum (living space). Since the population increases, whereas the size of the earth's surface remains unchanged, a dynamic, ambitious people must continually conquer new areas at the expense of weaker peoples. Not industry, but agriculture must form the primary base of subsistence. Haushofer proclaimed that Germany's Lebensraum lay in continental expansion into the Eurasian land mass. The Anglo-Saxons had taken the sea route and conducted their colonial and imperialist expansion overseas. Since the British Empire and the United States had developed unchallengable naval power, Germany must therefore concentrate on expansion into southern Europe, Russia, the northern Orient and central Asia. As we shall see, these ideas were directly taken over by Hitler. Indeed, it has been established that the key geopolitical section of Hitler's Mein Kampf was dictated by Haushofer through Rudolf Hess during Hitler's imprisonment at the Landsberg fortress, when Mein Kampf was written. Hitler, Hess, and Hermann Goering had all attended Army indoctrination sessions just after World War I at the University of Munich; where Haushofer taught.

But geopolitics was only one side of Haushofer's activities. Haushofer was one of the most important mystic ideologues of the Thule Society. Members of this society bore little resemblance to the typical image of the xenophobic, beer-guzzling, narrow German chauvinist. Many members of the inner circle of the Thule Society lived abroad for many years or had been born there, such as Sebottendorf, Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, and Erwin Scheubner- Richter.

Haushofer spent many years as a military attache in Japan and traveled extensively in Asia; his trips to India and Tibet are important in connection with the origins of his ideology and Nazism. Haushofer made two acquaintances there which were to have important future consequences: the British Viceroy Lord Kitchener and the Russian expert on Tibetan mysticism Georg Ivanovich Gurdjieff, who lived in Tibet. Through Kitchener and Gurdjieff, Haushofer was introduced into the inner circle of racist-gnostic mysticism. This circle also included the Swedish-born Asian scholar Sven Hedin.

Through the beginning of World War II, Haushofer continued to cultivate contacts with his Anglo-Saxon mystic friends, such as the "Order of the Golden Dawn." Houston Stewart Chamberlain, nephew of the British Colonial Minister Joseph Chamberlain and Richard Wagner's son-in-law, was another of the Thule Society's important ties with Anglo-Saxon mystic ideology. Chamberlain's book, "The Foundations of the 19th Century," became one of the most important source documents for National Socialist ideology.

The Thule Myth and Tibet

The special significance of India and Tibet for the ideology of the Thule Society and the Nazis centers around the term Thule. In northern European mythology, Thule signifies a prehistoric "golden age" which ended in a sudden catastrophe. With the mysticism of the Thule Society and the Nazis, but also in circles in Russia, England, Scandinavia, and in other European locations, the Thule mythos became the alpha and omega of all human history. But only in Tibet had this secret knowledge of this ancient Thule been preserved along with the way to a "new Thule," a "thousand-year Reich" of the Aryans.

Without resorting to primary sources, the Thule myth can be approximately reconstructed as follows: In prehistoric times there existed a flourishing culture in the North Sea region. This empire of blond, blue-eyed, racially pure Aryans was led by an aristocracy with "superhuman," cosmic powers and abilities. Without relying on technology, they could exert these "cosmic" powers to determine and change the course of Nature.

But then there came a natural catastrophe of cosmic proportions. The planets' orbits were altered. Continents and oceans shifted, and the flora and fauna in the North Sea region were destroyed. The Aryan Thule empire sank into the sea. Only a few of the Aryans and their supermen managed to escape, finally finding refuge in the Tibetan Himalayas. There the supermen preserved the secrets and powers of the collapsed Thule empire. Still during the prehistoric period, a few supermen wandered back northward. Scandinavia and the area around the Baltic as far as Germany became the new Aryan settlement. In the course of their wanderings they also settled in India and Persia, the Caucasus, and parts of Russia. Along the way, however, the Aryans relinquished some of their racial purity and so lost access to the higher knowledge and supernatural capacities of the old Aryan superman aristocracy. Only a very few, selected Aryans remained capable of gaining access to the inner secrets of the Aryan supermen, and these supreme secrets survived only in the secret cult centers of Tibet.

The Thule Society, and later the leading Nazi circles, thought of themselves as an exclusive secret cult which had re-established its connection to the Aryan supermen's knowledge. This knowledge and concomitant power, however, was reserved for only the select few who submitted to racist-gnostic rituals and cult practices. The mission of these chosen few of the Thule Society and the Nazi leadership, was to lead the Aryan people into a new Thule empire, with themselves as a new superman aristocracy.

This Thule-Nazi mysticism was, of course, not espoused publicly; it remained the knowledge of a select few. The writings of Haushofer, Rosenberg, and Hitler contain only vague hints. But a monologue given by Hitler in 1942 to his closest associates, and later written down by Martin Bormann's assistant Heinrich Heim (in Hitler's Table Talk), contains explicit discussions of the Thule myth. Hitler said that

It is amazing how small a period of time man is capable of grasping .... Where do we get the right to believe that man was not originally what he is today? .. We would do well to assume that what is reported by the mythology of the deities is in fact a memory of a previous reality. At the same time, within every body of legends we always find the story of the collapse of the heavens .... My only explanation for this is that: an immense natural catastrophe destroyed a race of human beings who possessed the highest level of culture. What we find on earth today must be a small remainder which, living for that memory, will gradually find its way back to culture [emphasis added].


Hitler felt that his mission was to resurrect the Thule empire of the Aryans along with its superman aristocracy and their superhuman faculties, and so to create an Aryan "thousand-year Reich." But despite his repeated attempts to portray himself as such, Hitler was not the originator of these ideas. Hitler was initiated into this mystical ideology by the Thule Society.

Haushofer played a crucial role in the Thule Society's inner circles because he was the only member to have been personally initiated into the Tibetan secret cult. A similar role was played by the poet and minor nobleman Dietrich Eckart, who served as the Thule Society's chief ideologue and who was also Hitler's own mentor.

Dietrich Eckart

Eckart was a prominent figure in the "Schwabing Bohemians" circle before World War I. He wrote several dramas, including "Henry IV" and "Lorenzaccio," which were frequently performed at the time. His best-known work is his German version of Ibsen's Peer Gynt. Eckart loved to drink, consumed narcotics, and was a proponent of "racial mysticism." He personified the culture of Nietzsche and Wagner, which was becoming increasingly radicalized into an activist, racist-gnostic mysticism. It is not surprising that Eckart was on the best of terms with influential oligarchical families. Eckart was one of the founders of the Thule Society, and edited its literary-political journal Auf gut Deutsch (In Proper German).

Eckart was probably the first member of the Thule Society to recognize Hitler's talent as a demagogue and an organizer. He saw in Hitler someone who could translate racist-gnostic mysticism into action. It was under Eckart's guidance that Hitler was first made into a political Fuhrer, and Eckart's August, 1921 article was the first to describe Hitler as the Fuhrer of the German People. He put his library at Hitler's disposal, educated him in mysticism, and taught him to express himself more articulately. At the same time, he introduced Hitler to influential families and businessmen. On his deathbed in 1923, Eckart left the following political testament:

Follow Hitler. He will dance, but I am the one who composed the music. Do not regret my death .... My idea will not die with me. The Germans, once they have become a nation of biologically perfected human beings, will lead their people toward those great goals already known by the initiates of Aryan antiquity living in Tibet. Follow Hitler, for through him I will speak to you.


As we have already seen, in his public statements Hitler deliberately attempted to conceal his political origins in the Thule Society. After Eckart's death, Hitler made himself "independent." After years of inculcation by the Thule Society and apprenticeship under Haushofer and Eckart, the "Fuhrer" could now rely on his own dynamism. From the mid-1920s onward, Hitler began to outgrow his fellow conspirators in the Thule circle. Hitler's mystic-ideological sources of inspiration had developed to such an extent that he could henceforth publicly call upon "Providence" to guide his actions. For Hitler, rationality and logical calculation were nothing compared to the mystical "intuition" which determined his thought and actions through "Providence."

It is therefore all the more noteworthy that Dietrich Eckart was the only member of the Thule elite for whom Hitler felt respect and gratitude up to his death in 1945. Hitler not only dedicated the second volume of Mein Kampf to the deceased Eckart; in Heinrich Heim's above-cited transcript of Hitler's monologues, there is no name mentioned more frequently than his. In the warmest tones, Hitler was always ready with new stories and anecdotes about his old mentor.

In addition to promoting Hitler, Eckart was also the mentor of the future official ideologue of National Socialism, Alfred Rosenberg. Rosenberg's career likewise highlights the international connections of the Thule Society and the Nazi inner core. We have already mentioned Haushofer's close relations with the Russian mystic and Tibet expert G. I. Gurdjieff; Rosenberg's connections were even more explicit. He grew up as a "Balkan German" in Reval (Tallinn) and spoke perfect German and Russian. He studied architecture at Moscow University and graduated there in 1917. After the Bolshevik Revolution he left Russia for Germany.

Perhaps one of the least-acknowledged facts is the influence exerted by Russian racist mysticism on the formation of corresponding ideologies in Germany. The political writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky, along with the ideological content of his fictional works, played the crucial role. With the exception of a few British imperalists, before Hitler only Dostoevsky advocated world racial hegemony so radically, so brutally and with such frankness. Dostoevsky proclaims, without restraint, Russia's mission was to become the third and final Rome. In order to free the world from the yoke of Western rationalism, Russia must, in the spirit of gnostic Christianity, achieve world hegemony. Russia was the only nation with an instinctive national "divine" soul.

Dostoevsky vehemently advocated a war of conquest against decadent, rationalist Western Europe. "War refreshes people," he exclaimed. "War is indispensable in our time; without war the world could collapse, or at the very least would change into filthy slime." Dostoevsky took it for granted that this war of conquest would put all of Western Europe under Russian domination, "and perhaps not we, but our children will witness England's demise."

lt is wrong to assume that this is merely an extreme form of Russian chauvinism, having nothing to do with the Nazis. Dostoevsky envisioned Russia as the leader of the entire Aryan race, declaring that Russia "is just as concerned about the fate of the great Aryan race as it is about Russia itself." Dostoevsky was also, of course, a raving anti-Semite: "The Jews and the banks control everything: Europe and the Enlightenment, all civilization and Socialism.... And when nothing remains but anarchy, then the Jew will be sitting on top of it all."

Dostoevsky's political ideology exerted an enormous influence on German intellectual currents. Dostoevsky inspired the ideologue of the "Conservative Revolution," Moeller van den Bruck, to write his book Das Dritte Reich (The Third Reich). His influence is also evident in Alfred Rosenberg's book, The Mythos of the Twentieth Century. By the time Rosenberg had joined up with Dietrich Eckart and the Thule Society, his experience in Russia had already predisposed him to adopting this racist-gnostic mysticism in Germany.

Rosenberg was not transformed into a racist and an anti-Semite by the Thule Society; he brought it with him from Russia. Moreover, in contrast with the German anti-Semites, Rosenberg had already become familiar with the so-called Protocols of Zion during his Moscow days. This forgery, concocted by the czarist secret police, the Okhrana, was first published outside Russia by Eckart and Rosenberg as part of a campaign launched by the Thule Society in 1918.

Hatred of Christianity

In 1930, Alfred Rosenberg proceeded to make a grand attempt at an ideological synthesis of the Thule Society's mysticism, racism, and gnosticism: his book The Mythos of the Twentieth Century. The enemy of Rosenberg (and of the Nazis in general) was the Judeo-Christian tradition. By Judeo-Christian tradition, we do not primarily mean theological- dogmatic statements of belief, but rather the essence of Western European culture and its constantly self-renewing force of progress. Hatred of this conception continues to be a distinguishing characteristic of all neo-fascist tendencies.

Rosenberg and the Nazis dealt with the Jewish intellectual and spiritual tradition, which of course had strongly influenced Christianity, by simply turning it into the expression of an inferior race. The creations of an inferior race must thus axiomatically be inferior and evil, unworthy of serious intellectual discussion.

Their attack on Christianity took a different tack. After all, the overwhelming majority of the" Aryan" populations adhered to the Christian faith or were rooted in Judeo-Christian culture. It was therefore impossible to make an open frontal assault against Christianity. Hence Rosenberg's solution was to promote gnostic distortions of Christianity. Monistic Christian doctrine was transformed into a Manichean ideology of "the blood-soul." Christ became Lucifer, a prophet for the master. race. Christ himself, of course, had to belong to the "Aryan race," and his earthly parents were not Jewish, but rather Roman legionnaires, or else of Persian descent. This northern Christ-hero became the scourge of all racially inferior and rationalist elements. Christ would counter the "poisoning" of the race and "aberrations" in world-outlook-Lucifer-Christ against the Satan of racial inferiority and rationality.

According to Rosenberg, the Nordics must therefore possess a "violent Luciferian power which overcomes space and time," and must produce a harmony of blood and soul. This "blood-soul," manifested through the convergence of the Luciferian and the mystical side of the Aryans, is predetermined among Nordics: "On the level of the unconscious, in cult and in life the individual fulfills the commands of the blood, as in a dream."

Rosenberg's Nazi world-view explicitly draws upon the gnostic tradition. Starting with the Thule mysticism of Tibet, Rosenberg extols the religion and philosophy of Aryan India, which achieved "unparalleled metaphysical depths." He likewise praises the Zarathustra and Mani cults of Aryan Persia -- which are still active today. The allegedly Germanic-influenced religions of Greece and the Roman Empire drew his highest admiration.

Rosenberg, like Hitler, harbored the greatest hatred for the Catholic Church, for quite obvious reasons. According to Rosenberg, the Nordic race never completely and unreservedly embraced the Roman Catholic faith, and indeed engaged in a gigantic struggle with the Church. Rosenberg therefore glorifies all Christian heresies and schisms: Albigensians, Cathars, Waldensians, Calvinists, and Lutherans. Aside from Luther, he has great sympathy for the heroic battle of the Cathars in southwestern France.

The Grail

This attitude toward the gnostic Cathars is related to a further aspect of the Thule Society and the Nazis, namely, the myth of the Holy Grail. The Grail is an ancient heathen-gnostic symbol of wisdom and power. In England, France, and Germany, the poets of the early Middle Ages transformed it into a Christian symbol, principally in the form of a cup holding the blood of Christ. In the nineteenth century, the Grail was de-Christianized and became again a heathen-gnostic myth-object, as expressed most influentially in Richard Wagner's opera Parsifal.

The Thule Society and the Nazis took up this myth of the Grail and interpreted it so that the Grail was understood as an inscribed stone or tablet. This tablet was a crucial document of Aryan gnosticism, preserved and passed on from Aryan prehistory. According to the myth of the Grail, the tablet was finally hidden in a Grail fortress in southern France; according to Nazi lore, it originally came from Aryan Persia, then reached Jerusalem, and was brought to Rome after Jerusalem was destroyed. During the sack of Rome, the tablet fell into the hands of the Goths, and when they were forced out of Spain by the Arabs, it found its way to southern France, where it supposedly constituted the gnostic center for the Cathars. Finally, when the French monarchy bloodily routed the Cathars and ravaged the Aquitaine region, a few surviving Cathars smuggled the Grail from the fortress and hid it somewhere. The Nazis in the inner mystic circle thought they were now able to understand the contents of the tablet, which the Cathars had never deciphered, and to penetrate further secrets of Aryan gnosticism. SS experts in Aryan esoterica actually conducted a search for the Grail, with the support of Heinrich Himmler. And Hitler was not being ironical when he spoke to his intimate friends about his Berchtesgaden Berghof as "my Grail fortress."

Rosenberg's racialist-gnostic distortion of Christianity and the Nazi regime's publicly stated posture vis-a-vis the church in no way coincides with the views of Christianity and the churches actually held by the Nazi elite, let alone that of Hitler personally. Hitler's attitude toward Christianity is characterized by hate-filled, radical rejection.

As previously mentioned, Bormann's assistant Heim had kept notes of the content of Hitler's nocturnal monologues. Between 1941 and 1944, these show an almost daily repetition of tirades of hate against Judaism and Christianity, and there is virtually no difference in the number and frequency of his attacks on Judaism and those on Christianity. Here are some examples:

Christianity is the greatest setback in the history of mankind.

The most severe blow that mankind has ever endured is Christianity; Bolshevism is the bastard son of Christianity.

Christianity was an all-destroying Bolshevism. [Christ was] the son of a whore and a Roman soldier.

Nero didn't set fire to Rome; that was done by the Christian Bolsheviks.

If some little peasant woman or proletarian believes it, fine, then I have nothing to say about it. But for people who are intelligent to embrace such satanic superstition ... !

These priests! Whenever I so much as see such a black-robed inferior being coming my way.... Whoever wants to think, gets burned by one of those black bugs.

The worst cancer is our priests of both confessions. I can't deal with them now, but it's all going into my notebook. The moment will come when I will settle accounts without further ado.


It is interesting to see how, during these tirades, Hitler referred to Dietrich Eckart and to the Thule Society, which had shown him how "priests" and Christianity were to be dealt with. Nietzsche's philosophical slogan "God is dead" was the main trumpet-call of the Thule Society and the inner Nazi circles. They were determined not only to battle Christianity intellectually and spiritually, but to liquidate it physically. They clearly recognized that the destruction of Christianity was the indispensable precondition for the destruction of Western European culture. Hitler deeply regretted that he was still forced for political reasons to compromise with the Christian churches, which contradicted his deepest convictions. He ridiculed the Nazi collaborators in the churches, especially the Protestants, saying that they could not prevent him from settling accounts with Christianity.

Hitler's Gnosticism and Racism

Hitler's "deepest conviction," his conception of God, was based on a racialist gnosticism. For him and his inner leadership circle, God is a cold, Darwinian "law of Nature," of struggle against and elimination' of all "inferiors." The other side of this God of pitiless destruction is the cold "beauty" beyond all good and evil.

We can do nothing more than take joy in what we find beautiful. I strive for a condition in which each individual knows that he lives and dies for the preservation of his species.


Hitler was sharply critical of the metaphysics of the race theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose gnosticism was too "intellectual," a criticism which implicitly extends to Nietzsche. Hitler's gnosticism is strictly biological and Darwinian; therefore "divine" beauty for Hitler is something physical. Hitler characterized Wagner's music in this way, saying that this music with its "divine beauty" transported him into a state of physical and emotional excitement.

But when I imagine that bland Christian heaven! We have had Richard Wagner here on earth, and all you can do up there is listen to hallelujas and look at palm fronds.


In this connection, investigators usually overlook the influence of French nineteenth-century intellectual life on Hitler's racialist gnosticism. The influence of Gobineau on Hitler's racialism is usually mentioned, but not the strong influence of Joseph Ernest Renan, whom Hitler studied carefully. In Renan's Life of Jesus (1863), Renan wrote:

The broad application of the science of physiology and the principle of selection could make possible the creation of a higher race, which would have the right to rule over others, not because of its knowledge but because of the superiority of its blood, intelligence, and determination. We would then have a species of gods or "divas And we can imagine that we could set up something like a factory for cultivating aces [pure Aryans], an "Aceburg.".. .. I repeat, intellectual superiority means religious superiority. We should think of these future beings as the incarnation of the Good and the True, and all must totally subordinate themselves to them.


Hitler had already adopted this racialist gnosticism in his early Vienna days. It is therefore hardly a world-historical accident that Hitler came into contact with the Thule Society in Munich in 1919. The Thule Society became aware of Hitler because of his talent as a political demagogue and organizer; this is the actual surprise or accident, since up to that time Hitler had been a notorious loner, with no demonstrable talents in that direction, whereas his racialism, gnosticism, and mysticism were fully developed before that time. It would have been extraordinary indeed if, given Hitler's views when he arrived in Munich, he had not bumped into the Thule Society.

This is especially true of Hitler's racialism and anti-Semitism. While still in Vienna, i.e. before 1913, Hitler joined an "Anti-Semitic Union." Hitler's turn toward anti-Semitism goes even further back. There are indications that Hitler's father had anti-Semitic ideas, though this has not been definitively established.

Certain conclusions can be drawn from Hitler's school days. Between 1896 and 1898 Hitler attended the Benedictine cloister school in Lambach, which decades before Hitler's school days had been directed by an abbot named Peter Hagen, an expert in oriental mysticism who spent the years 1856-68 in the Middle East and Persia. Abbot Hagen's personal coat of arms was the swastika, a wooden carving of which stands above the abbey door. Furthermore, Hagen left behind an extensive library of mystical works. This library was intensively used by another Benedictine monk in the 1890s named Peter Adolf Josef Lanz, whom we will meet later under a different name. All this, of course, only had a general influence on Hitler's childhood, but such things must be taken into account.

The influences on Hitler during his high school days in Linz from 1900-1905 were probably more direct. Hitler's history teacher, Dr. Leopold Poetsch, played an important role. Poetsch was an active member of the Austrian All-German Party, and served as the party's town council representative. Hitler himself said in Mein Kampf that his historical and political conceptions had been. strongly influenced by Poetsch. The All-German Party of Austria had been founded by Georg Ritter von Schonerer, who rejected the royal poly-racial state of the Danube monarchy, and demanded the separation of non-German areas from Austria and the annexation of German Austria to the German Reich. Schonerer was also the inventor of the slogan "Away from Rome!" and was an active anti-Semite. His party was represented in the Vienna Reichstag. When Hitler left Linz, he became a follower of Schonerer's party and was already anti-Semitically inclined.

In Vienna, Hitler's political sympathies shifted toward Viennese Mayor Karl Lueger and Lueger's Christian Social Party. Like Schonerer, Lueger was anti-Semitic, perhaps more so. In 1895, he and his party had already won a majority on the Viennese City Council on the basis of an anti-Semitic program: and from that time until his death, the anti-Semite Lueger served as the virtually autocratic mayor of Vienna.

Though Hitler did not become a member of Schonerer's or Lueger's party, they were his political models. His viewpoint as a political anti-Semite was firmly fixed. His criticism of Schonerer and Lueger was simply that he rejected their political compromises and thought that their anti-Semitism and their stance against the Hapsburg regime and the Catholic Church was not sufficiently principled.

Hitler himself repeatedly emphasized that, in addition to general political considerations, his own experiences in the "racial Babylon" of Vienna had crystalized his attitude. He relates how emotional encounters with orthodox Eastern Jews and their hairstyle and clothing, finally fixed his anti-Semitism. We can see that in pre-World War I Vienna, anti-Semitism was by no means a fringe phenomenon, but was a broad current which had not only gripped the petite bourgeoisie but was also "fit for polite society" (salonfahig).

Lanz von Liebenfels

Now we must return to the Benedictine father already mentioned above, Peter Lanz. In 1900 Lanz left the Catholic Church, went to Vienna, and founded the "Order of the New Temple." He called himself Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels and published a journal Ostara. This journal, which appeared irregularly but was always available at the kiosks, was characterized by its publisher as follows:

Ostara is the only journal dedicated to the creation and cultivation of the heroic racialism . .and male justice that actually seeks to apply the results of race science, in order to keep the heroic noble race on its path of organized pure breeding and of male justice, and to protect it from socialistic and feminist revolutionaries.


In 1905, Liebenfels published his "major work": Theozoologie oder die Kunde von den sodoms-Afflingen und dem Gotter-Elektron (Theo-zoology or the Knowledge of Sodom's Monkeys and the Electron of the Gods). In it he relates how the Ario-heroes, or aces, lived like gods in prehistoric times. When their Aryan women fell from grace, they mixed with dark, ape-like beings, which resulted in the inferior "Chandala" race. This race reproduced rapidly, while the Ario-heroes steadily lost their racial purity and, with it, their "electro-magnetic-radiological" powers.

The New Temple Order saw itself as a human breeding society whose aim was to bring produce new Ario-heroes. This may seem incredible, until we recall the racial mysticism of the Thule Society and compare it to the Lebensborn Program of the SS, in which selected women were impregnated by SS members to help engender the "master race." Liebenfels claimed that Lord Kitchener was a member of the New Temple Order, a claim which should be taken seriously. It is also documented that the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg was a member of this organization and stayed for some time in Lower Austria at a castle which served as Liebenfels' "Fortress of the Order."

Liebenfels demanded the most extensive extermination of the darker-skinned races, referring to Thomas Malthus and the British colonial regime as examples to follow. The Jews, he maintained, were the most intelligent of the ape-races, and therefore the most dangerous.

Hitler studied the Ostara newspapers during his years in Vienna, and there is no doubt that he was deeply influenced by them. This same insanity, though in a more moderate form, was advocated by the Vienna-based "Guido von List Society," which published a book-series of "research results" which do not differ in content from Ostara.

As Hitler testified later at his trial in 1924, he "left Vienna an absolute anti-Semite, a deadly enemy of the collective Marxist world-view, and as an pan-German in my orientation." In his Vienna student days he had come to understand that "if the power to struggle ... is no longer there, then our right to life in this world of struggle has ended."

Hitler's Racial Genocide

With his deep-seated ideological fixation on a racist-Darwinist struggle for life and death, Hitler's desire to exterminate the Jews and other inferior races had existed implicitly since his Vienna days. The idea that Hitler escalated his endless, hate-filled tirades against the Jews step by step until they ended with the mass exterminations of the Second World War, is misleading. Hitler had already drawn the consequences of his racialist-ideological postulates during the Vienna and Thule Society days, and the early days of the NSDAP. His convictions only became firmer over time.

Hitler could not immediately carry out his racialist-Darwinist world-view because he lacked power; when he had it, he had to maintain restraint because of political considerations. As in the case of Christianity, mass extermination had long before been written down in the "great notebook" of his Weltanschauung. For the Thule Society, Hitler, and the inner leadership of the Nazis, gnosticism, mysticism, and racial Darwinism were not mere external appendages or crazy eccentricities; they were the ultimate driving force.

In the inner circles of the Nazi and SS leadership, Hitler spoke often and matter-of-factly about the mass extermination of the Jews and other "inferiors": "I say only that [the Jew] must go.... I see only one way: mass extermination .... "

Since the Jews had corrupted the Aryan race, extermination was a completely natural process. Animals could not be blamed if they ate other animals. He, Hitler, saw himself as a Pasteur or a Koch in questions of race. The bacillus of the Jews must simply be killed. In the world-view of the Nazi elite, mass murder of the Jews and other "inferior races" followed with virtual necessity from racial Darwinism.

The Role of the SS

Hitler was only being consistent when he commissioned Heinrich Himmler as Reichsfuhrer of the SS, with orders to carry out the mass murder of Jews and other "inferior races." Hitler was reluctant to issue this as a signed order; he gave it verbally to Himmler himself. Hitler designated Himmler as an "Ignatius Loyola, in a good sense," and Hitler told one-time Nazi Hermann Rauschning (who later fled Germany) that he would let him in on a big secret: he had founded an order. And indeed, the SS must be seen as the continuation of the Thule Society as a state institution. In the tradition of the gnostic knightly orders, the SS was not merely a military and police organization, but rather the principal carrier of the world-view of Hitler and his closest associates. The SS was created by a strict selection process, and was conceived as a "blood brotherhood" for breeding. Among the highest echelons of the SS hierarchy, racial Darwinism, gnosticism, and mysticism predominated, increasing with each rung. The SS elite around Heinrich Himmler can be seen as the continuation of the inner circle of the Thule Society and their racialist-gnostic mysticism. In the SS, Hitler saw the ideological and racial incarnation of this world-view; the SS was to be the cell formation of the Aryan Greater Reich toward which he was striving; the SS was to produce the racial and philosophical elite of "Ario-heroes" and supermen.

This is why Hitler ordered Himmler and the SS to carry out the mass extermination of the Jews and other inferior races. The SS, as the incarnation of racial Darwinism, was entrusted with conducting the "racial war" in Europe all the way to its "final solution." Himmler explained:

I urgently request that no regulations be made concerning the "Jew." ... The occupied Eastern areas will be Jew-free. The Fuhrer has shouldered me with the execution of this very difficult order .... It is therefore not discussable.


Hitler was completely unrestrained in his endless, raging public tirades against the Jews and other "inferior" races. At the same time, he knew that he could not put his extermination plans before the German public. His most explicit public statement came a speech on Jan. 30, 1942, in which he said that "the the war can only end when either the Aryans are exterminated or Jewry disappears from Europe." Hitler knew that he must keep the mass exterminations secret from the German people, who would find it unthinkable that Jews and other inferior races could be exterminated in "assembly-line" death camps.

Nazi Ideological Propaganda

Hitler had a finely developed sense of how far he could go, not only on the question of Jewish extermination but generally, with public proclamations of his actual ideas and goals. He knew that it was impossible to confront the population with the full force of his world-view.

Two things played a role here. In accordance with the Nazis' hierarchical mentality, the "need to know" principle was applied. With respect to racial Darwinism, the population was constantly barraged with anti-Semitic propaganda, while they were also subject to the Nuremberg Race Laws, under which marriages were made contingent on certification of Aryan racial purity. The anti-Semitic propaganda was comprehensive and often cleverly done, but it did not have immediate implications for the non-Jewish population. Anti-Semitic activities were carried out by Nazi organizations; the anti-Jewish boycott and the "Kristallnacht" were done by the SA or party members. For the general population, the mysticism of the Nazis was boiled down to symbols such as the swastika, mass marches or "solstice celebrations." Other mystical ceremonies were reserved for the various Nazi organizations. Similarly, the population was only exposed to Nazi anti-religious gnosticism cautiously and in measured doses. This, as we mentioned earlier, was not merely a question of "need to know," but was necessary in order not to shock the population. Even though Germany had been a perfect police state since 1933, the system still depended upon keeping the population calm and passive.

What we have outlined here for the post-1933 period is also true for Hitler in his early period. In 1919 the leaders of the Thule Society had already recognized Hitler's talents as a speaker and political organizer. But Hitler at that point was anything but a lone politician. Hitler utilized the political questions of Germany's chaotic situation immediately after World War I in order to propagandize for racialism and irrationalism. The method he used later remained unchanged.

There exists no speech or written document by Hitler in which he said he acted according to the secret Aryan teachings of Tibet, or that he wanted to destroy Christianity and exterminate the Jews in Europe. Instead he incessantly talked about the "Weimar system," Marxism, the ignominy of Versailles, ending unemployment, the rearmament of Germany, and so forth. But whatever the political theme of his statements was at the time, his racist-mystical world-view would always shine through; this "real" message was always there, sometimes only in vague, dark hints, but other times more explicitly.

Thus, Hitler applied the principle of ideological "need to know" -- the careful dosage and clever packaging of his ideological convictions. His worldview is continually evident in connection with political questions. At the same time, he knew how to give the impression that all his utterances were ultimately and solely based on his world-view, without ever explicitly saying what that world-view was.

Hitler often said that National Socialism was first and foremost a world-view -- and this was not just a passing mood of his. "I have become a politician against my will. For me, politics is merely a means to an end .... If there had been somebody else, I would have never gotten into politics.... "

Economics, technology, natural sciences, or administration did not interest Hitler in the least. His sole interest was his own of racialist mysticism, along with its corresponding "art." In keeping with this, Hitler continued his bohemian style of living and working through the beginning of the war.

Hitler quickly realized that his almost autistic fixation on his own and the Thule Society's worldview could only work to his advantage. His audiences and supporters did not expect well-considered, elaborated ideas from him. As Hitler himself said, the "mass" to which he turned was "inclined to the feminine," and was only capable of "emotional responses." He went so far as to avoid holding rallies in the morning and afternoon, since the "masses" could only be reached while in a certain state of mental exhaustion, at night.

World War I and the Weimar Republic

This state of mental exhaustion has a more comprehensive significance for the period when Hitler and his leadership group were building the Nazi movement. The German masses whom Hitler and the Nazis were addressing were indeed deeply shaken, uncertain and mentally exhausted.

In spite of a cultural crisis 'and social tensions, the German population, including the labor movement, had experienced the period before World War I as a time when "the world was still in order." Patriotism prevailed at the outset of the war. Germans entered a war which they expected to end in swift victory. But instead the war lasted for years and degenerated into unbelievable butchery. The Allied food blockade drew the German civilian population directly into the events of the war, to an extent unseen since the Thirty Years' War of the seventeenth century.

Then, with unprecedented speed, the military collapse came in 1918, so fast that the ill-prepared population could literally "not comprehend" it. Overnight, the state monarchical institutions disappeared. In their place came political chaos which was to last for a decade. Shortly thereafter came the next blow, the dictate of Versailles with its monstrous conditions. Europe's map was crumpled up; the three empires of Germany, Austria, and Russia no longer existed, and dozens of new states suddenly sprang up. Along with hyperinflation came the economic ruin of large sectors of the population, and after a certain amount of minimal stability had been achieved during the second half of the 1920s, this too collapsed into nothing with the world economic depression.

Within a dozen years the German population had been subjected to an unbroken chain of blows and collective shocks. For the majority of the population this was "incomprehensible," and could no longer be grasped rationally.

The fact is, that under the conditions of constant stress, one can observe in both individuals and groups a reduction in rationality. In the group, a kind of "multiplier effect" also comes into play. There is no doubt that during the Weimar period at least, large numbers of Germans were in danger of losing their trust in rationality.

Now it is hardly the case that this worked quickly and directly to the Nazis' advantage. Only under the traumatic conditions of the 1932 world economic crisis were the Nazis able to gain a mass of followers and voters, and even then, at the last free election in November 1932, the Nazis received no more than 34 percent of the vote.

There was, however, a kind of basic intellectual attitude which the Nazis were able to utilize in Weimar Germany. The population's disposition towards a lowering of consciousness was systematically exploited and strengthened by Hitler and the Nazis. Precisely because it was irrational, the Nazi worldview had a chance of striking a responsive chord under the conditions of Weimar Germany. The tendency to doubt rationality enabled the Nazis to win a following not in spite of, but because of, their views. To be sure, the Nazis knew that there was no chance that the full spectrum of racial Darwinism, gnosticism, and esotericism would be accepted, except by a few fringe groups. But in the appropriate dosages and packaging, this world-view could indeed be "sold."

Ultimately, the Nazi world-view is merely a specific form of a pre-cultural mythos. A "leader" who claims to be guided by "providence" fanatically promulgates a world-view of "blood and soil." The "leader" and his "providence" derive from supernatural sources, inaccessible to reason. From out of this supernatural-supersensuous region now comes the message of "blood and soil."

It should be briefly mentioned that "blood and soil" are the predicates of the "Magna Mater" mythos, which has been around since the prehistory of human culture. More precisely, this myth always emerges when a culture undergoes a fundamental crisis. In periods when intellectual and religious values collapse, accompanied by economic slumps and depressions, the "Magna Mater" emerges with great regularity.

To be sure, the Nazis did not propound an explicit "Magna Mater" cult like the cults of Astarte, Cybele, Isis, Madonna Maria, etc. But the Nazis did have a "Magna Mater" world-view: "blood and soil." "Blood" was symbolically associated with death, birth and feminine sexuality, while "soil" symbolized "Mother Earth," the "earth goddess," and so forth.

These references should make it sufficiently clear that the Nazi world-view, as it is summed up in the slogan "blood and soil," was one causal element in the rise of the Nazi movement. In times of crisis, this ideology enabled the Nazis to exploit latent despair in rationality and to massively strengthen this emotion. The Nazi world-view was therefore no add-on, but was rather the Nazi movement's vital attracting and motivating force.

The cult of irrationality will forever remain the primary distinguishing characteristic of every fascist movement, regardless of which predicates it might otherwise employ.

_____________

Bibliography

Angebert, Jean Michel, The Occult and the Third Reich, New York, 1974.

Baignet, Michael; Leigh, Richard; and Lincoln, Henry, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, New York, 1982.

Daim, Wilfried, Der Mann, der Hitler die Ideen gab, Munich, 1958.

Doucet, Friedrich W., Im Banne des Mythos, Esslingen, 1979.

Haushofer, Karl, Der Kontinentalblock, Munich, 1941.

Heiber, Helmut, Reichsfuhrer-Briefe an und van Himmler, Munich, 1970.

Hitler, Adolf, Adolf Hitler-Manologe 1941-1944. Die Aufzeichnungen Heinrich Heims, Munich, 1982.

Kohn, Hans, Prophets and Peoples, Studies in 19th Century Nationalism, New York, 1946.

Maser, Werner, Der Sturm auf die Republik, Frankfurt/Berlin, 1981.

Pool, J. S., Who Financed Hitler?, New York, 1978.

Semyonov, Julian, Die Alternative, Berlin (DDR), 1978.

White, Carol, The New Dark Ages Conspiracy, New York, 1980.

Zepp-LaRouche, Helga, "Die historischen Wurzeln des grunen Faschismus," in Stoppt die grune Gefahr, Wiesbaden, 1982.
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Re: The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

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Part 1 of 2

3. The 1930-45 Collaboration Between Switzerland and the Nazis

When SS Obergruppenfuhrer Walter Schellenberg, who in 1939-44 was the deputy chief and then chief of the foreign department of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) secret security service, betook himself to his superior, SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, to ask him to obstruct "the wish expressed over and over again by Hitler for a preventive occupation of Switzerland," he found a receptive hearing. The SS leadership was determined to leave Switzerland in its status as a financial pivot. Far too much was at stake for the SS and the Allgemeine SS. Switzerland was the channel between leading bankers and aristocrats and the top of the Nazi regime. In his memoirs, Schellenberg recalled his "efforts to enter into negotiations with the chief of the Swiss secret service at. that time, Col. Roger Masson, and the chief of staff of the armed forces, Gen. Henri Guisan." He wrote further: "It was clear to me that this was the only way to protect the country's neutrality .... After I had secured the necessary contacts to Masson and Guisan, I proposed that Himmler use his influence in the Fuhrer's headquarters to block the plans for a military invasion of Switzerland. Himmler assured me, however, in unmistakeable fashion, that my head would roll if the other side failed to maintain its neutrality."

Since Schellenberg died a natural death -- he lived out his last months in Switzerland, for that matter -- one can assume that the Swiss held to Hitler's and Himmler's demands. There exists in fact adequate proof that the Swiss fully and completely fulfilled the Nazis' expectations. According to Schellenberg: "In my efforts to keep Switzerland out of the war, I received the help of the Reich's Economics Minister, Walther Funk, who was able to convincingly set before the senior military command the reasons .why Switzerland should remain our financial lever." With Walter Funk's intervention, a new dimension was achieved in the military and secret-intelligence relations between Switzerland and the Nazi apparatus: the appearance of one of the most powerful men inside the Nazi war machine leads us to the realm of international high finance, for which Switzerland is indeed the recognized channel.

Let us look back to the period of the First World War and examine the founding of the Swiss Gesellschaft fur Metallwerte, a front group for the Deutsche Metallgesellschaft. This company was not only a multinational raw-materials entity, but also served as a lever for a giant international intelligence and espionage network, built up by the Frankfurt financier Richard Merton together with the chief of the Third Reich's general staff, General Groner, and General von Schleicher, who reorganized the Abwehr military intelligence service in 1918. To facilitate this operation, Merton turned to the scion of one of the oldest patrician families of Basel, Felix Iselin, whose family tree in Basel can be traced back to the year 1346 A.D. Iselin & Cie. was (and is) one of the most powerful private banks in Switzerland, which has dominant holdings in the giant Swiss Bankverein, the La Baloise insurance group and the pharmaceuticals multinational Hoffman-LaRoche. It also plays a key role in the Church Council of the Evangelical-Reformed Church and the "charitable" trust, the Gesellschaft fur das Gute and das Gemeinnutzige. In short, the Imperial General Staff and the most senior Swiss patricians were setting up a major joint intelligence venture.

In 1929, shortly before the explosion of the financial crisis, whose origins were in the insane Versailles Treaty's German Reparations clauses, and whose ultimate result was the Second World War, F. Iselin became the deputy head of another, similar venture: the I.G. Farben chemical giant -- formed in 1925 at the behest of Germany's financial dictator, Hjalmar Schacht, head of the Reichsbank and the Allied Reparations Commission Commander-in-Chief in Germany -- was setting up a Swiss front, the I.G. Chemie, a holding corporation for all assets of the immense international empire of the future manufacturer of the Zyklon B gas, of concentration tamp fame.

The co-chairman of I.G. Farben, Hermann Schmitz, the burly fifty-year-old who presided over the company's fate until 1945, had deputized his own nephew, Hamburg's Max Ilgner, a board member of I.G. Farben too, to develop the company's gigantic international espionage and intelligence apparatus, the NW7, which was closely allied, even before Hitler's seizure of power, with the NSDAP/AO, the "Foreign Organization," which performed parallel functions. The Swiss front was designed to centralize international operations from neutral territory, thus acquiring precious immunity from any investigative intruders. By 1939, F. Iselin had become the chairman of I.G. Chemie, which he remained until retirement in 1958, yielding only then to the super-star of Swiss banking, Union Bank of Switzerland chairman Dr. Alfred Schaefer -- a name that will appear again in this tale of Switzerland and Nazism.

I.G. Farben was one of the industrial-financial linchpins of the Swiss-Nazi apparatus. Schmitz himself, for one, was a board member of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the central bank of the central banks, also located in Basel, the powerful institution that had been created in 1930 to oversee the financial collapse of Europe and its reorganization in a "new order."

The Treaty of Versailles had prescribed that the vanquished Germany, made into the war's sole culprit, should pay billions of gold marks in "war reparations" to the victors. The motto of the victors was "squeeze [the Germans] until the pips squeak," which had even the cynical aesthete J. M. Keynes write in disagreement that the agreement would test "the reactions of a people of the White Race under conditions of slavery." Among the artisans of the agreement, on the German side, was Hjalmar Schacht, who was later, in 1923, imposed by the Reparations Commission as head of the Reichsbank, with powers that induced a majority of the Reichstag parties to protest "the dictatorial powers and policy of the Reichsbank under Dr. Schacht." At the Versailles conference itself, lifelong friendships were established between Schacht and two brothers from New England, John Foster Dulles, who acted as a proxy for Bernard Baruch in the Reparations Committee of the Conference, and Allen Dulles, himself on the Boundary Commission that gave the Sudetenland to the newborn "Czechoslovakia."

The Banking Collapse

The 1920s staggered from one financial crisis to the other, with the reparations at the center. The House of Morgan -- dominated Reparations Commission, which virtually dictated Germany's monetary policy, issued in succession the "Dawes Plan" and the "Young Plan," aimed at making an "orderly" process of the looting of the German economy. History relates that the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and' first the Austrian, then the German banking crises of 1931 destroyed the system as a whole. But in 1930, the same group of international financiers had established the BIS, as "the foster child of the Versailles Treaty," wrote Eleanor Dulles, sister of the aforementioned John Foster and Allen, who added that "Dr. Schacht was in a sense the originator of the plan." It was a supranational institution of central bankers who were independent of their respective governments, or of any elected body, to run world finances. Inevitably, the seat of the bank was established in Basel.

The BlS, nominally set up after the breakdown of "normal" international financial relations in order to prevent a downward spiraling of international payments, and ensure the feasibility of German reparations payments, in fact finished off the hapless Weimar Republic by its stern refusal to come to the help of a virtually bankrupt Germany in the crucial summer of 1931, after the Danat-Bank collapse had brought the whole nation to its knees. Schacht, who had been a member of the original BIS team and was to return to its board from 1933 through 1938, had been campaigning. since his 1930 resignation as head of the Reichsbank, for Anglo-American support for a takeover by the NSDAP and its leader, Herr Hitler. He had resigned on March 7, 1930 and the BIS was formally established in June. In September, Schacht was off to London and the United States, to "sell" the Nazi option to the Anglo-American leadership, notably Bank of England Governor and BIS director Montagu Norman, and the already influential Dulles brothers, of the Sullivan & Cromwell law firm, one of America's most influential -- and the attorneys for LG. Farben, and many other large German companies and provincial governments. Schacht's Hamburg friend and colleague, patrician Nazi Gerhardt Westrick, ran the correspondent law firm to the Dulles's in Germany. By December, Schacht -- who by then acted with the full support of the BIS establishment -- was dining with Goering, Goebbels, Fritz Thyssen, and Hitler himself, and urging "Hungerkanzler" Bruning, a friend of the Dulleses, to "let the Nazis in." For them, he and Wilhelm Keppler were organizing the so-called Keppler Circle of top bankers and industry tycoons -- which included Baron Kurt von Schroder of the J. H. Stein Bank of Cologne, a business partner of the Dulleses.

When destiny knocked at the door in the form of the bank crisis, the BIS decided to let Germany remain without external financial help. One of the bank's directors said, "The Germans need Dr. Schacht there," and the crisis should be allowed to wreck Germany first before Schacht could come in as a savior in time of need. The Danat-Bank panic itself was immediately caused by a Swiss newspaper, the Baseler Nationalzeitung, which on July 7, 1931, wrote under the big headline "Troubles of a Major German Bank," that "representatives of major German banks in Switzerland expressly demanded of the newspaper that it publish the name of the Danat-Bank in the next morning's edition." On July 9, Reichsbank president Luther, in desperation, rushed to Basel to get help -- to no avail. On July 13, the BIS board decided to do nothing to help Germany. The way to World War II was open, and the BIS had chosen -- at Schacht's behest -- Hitler and the Nazis as the pathfinders.

The BIS bankers wanted "an [international financial and monetary] scheme of which the controls and the funds are truly international" according to Montagu Norman. A new order was required. Nation-states were a hindrance. Schacht's seed-crystal idea, that of the BIS, had been gradually elaborated in the 1920s debates of the "Central European Economic Union," the Pan-Europa Union of Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, of which Schacht, I.G. Farben's Carl Duisberg, and Carl Bosch were prominent members. Their geopolitical conception of "The Idea of Economic Space" was highly coherent with that of the left radical-revolutionary 'wing of the Nazi party, that of the Strasser brothers. Otto Strasser took shelter in Zurich from 1931 through 1936 after he split from Hitler. The Strasser program called for a decentralized Federalist Europe unified by a customs union of Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Denmark, Holland, and Luxembourg.

The financiers' deliberate death sentence against the Weimar Republic lifted Hitler to power. By November 1932, it was Kurt von Schroder who mediated Franz von Papen's willing surrender to Hitler. On Jan. 4, 1933, the threesome met at Schroder's Cologne villa to seal the pact. On Jan. 30, 1933, Hitler was Reichskanzler. On Mar. 16, 1933, BIS agent Hjalmar Schacht returned in triumph to his Reichsbank. In 1934, Hitler had called upon Schacht to take over the economics ministry. Now, the BIS was going to help the Third Reich -- by 1939, it had no less than several hundred million Swiss gold francs invested in Germany. On the BIS board of directors were Baron Kurt von Schroder, by now a general in the SS Death's Head Brigade; Dr. Hermann Schmitz, of I.G. Farben -- whom Schacht had trained at the imperial economics ministry from 1915 on -- and later, Hitler's two personal appointees, Walter Funk and Emil Puhl, of the Reichsbank. Schmitz also happened to be very close to the fast-rising whiz-kid of Nazi intelligence, Walter Schellenberg. In the words of British historian Charles Higham, "the BIS was to be a money funnel for ... funds to flow into Hitler's coffers and to help Hitler build his war machine. The BIS was completely under Hitler's control by the outbreak of World War II."

Switzerland indeed was, through the Swiss National Bank, which shared directors and staff with BIS, the "financial pivot" Schellenberg was to refer to later. Now, Hermann Schmitz's I.G. Farben intelligence, W7, was coordinated under Walter Schellenberg's Amt VI of the SS Security Service, the SD, and worked very closely with the Foreign Organization of the TSDAP,whose head was SS leader Ernst Bohle. Should a military occupation of Switzerland have been implemented, Bohle was slated to become the Nazi Gauleiter of -- Switzerland! Schmitz's own appreciation of Schellenberg was such that, in plans developed later in the war for a putsch aimed at replacing Hitler by a monarchist rege'ncy, Schmitz intended to include him in the "Council of 12" that would administer the regency.

The German side of the Swiss-Nazi deal was complete. It is time we looked at the other side of the border, into Swiss fascism in its two elements, the fascist movements proper, the Fronts, and the arch-fascist Swiss oligarchy of financiers.

Adolf Hitler was no unknown quantity to Swiss oligarchs and their fascist operatives. In March 1921, A National League for the Independence of Switzerland (VUS) had been established by General Wille, a high-ranking Army official, the war-time Commander-in-Chief Theophil von Sprecher and others. The secretary of the VUS, Dr. Hektor Amman, archivist of the Aargau canton, had met Adolf Hitler in 1920 in Munich and led long discussions, "until late at night" with him. Amman had also made the acquaintance of the hysterical anti-Semite Julius Streicher, editor of Der Sturmer, and, reportedly, through such channels, "had exerted some influence in the shaping of the Nazi Party's program."

In 1923, German Ambassador Muller reported to the Auswartiges Amt (Foreign Office), "the anti-Semitic leader Adolf Hitler went to Zurich at the end of August (and later to Bern too) and took up contact with the leaders of the [right-wing paramilitary] Kreuzwehr as well as pan-Germanist circles. The publisher of the Schweizericher Monatshefte fur Politik und Kultur, journal of the VUS, Dr. Hans. Oehler, paid a visit to Hitler at the Gotthard Hotel, supposedly for mere journalistic reasons." In fact, a dozen-odd persons paid a visit to Hitler, who was later wined and dined at Villa Wiesendonck by Dr. Fritz Rieter, with forty persons in attendance, who listened to Hitler's presentation of the NSDAP program and supplied him with funds. The extreme right-wing "Swiss establishment" league, the Schweizerische VaterHindische Verband (Swiss Patriotic Union) chairman, Dr. Emil Soinderegger, asked to see Hitler in person. Before that, Hitler's fundraising envoy, Dr. Emil Gansser, had also visited SVV founder, Col. Eugen Bircher. In the 1920s, Hitler more than once traveled to Switzerland and back with a false-bottomed trunk. On' the return trip to Munich, the false bottom was filled -- with American dollars, British pounds, and Swiss francs. Freikorps founder and SA leader Ernst Rohm maintained extensive Swiss contact networks for illegal gun-running to Germany in the 1920s.

Native Swiss Fascism

In the spring of 1933, a blossoming of fascist and Nazi organizations swept the streets of Switzerland. The "Springtime of the Fronts" brought thousands into the streets of the big cities. A newly created Nazi party swept elections in the border town of Schaffhausen with 30 percent of the popular vote. Ultimately, there were to be up to 60,000 Swiss Nazis during World War II. Four thousand Swiss citizens joined the Waffen SS, which was part of 'the Germany military. Switzerland, A.G., was merging some of its subsidiaries with the Third Reich. The chief of the NSDAP/AO, Ernst Bohle, and his subordinate, SS officer Dr. Klaus Huegel, who ran operations in Switzerland from his Alemanic Workers Circle in Stuttgart, had a maze of pro-Nazi organizations throughout Switzerland at his beck and call, notably through his German-Swiss Movement. One Dr. Franz Riedweg, a Swiss citizen from Lucerne, became in 1934 an adviser to Hitler personally, and was a member of the Secretariat of the Swiss Action Against Communism of the ex-president of the Swiss Confederation, Jean-Marie Musy, who had turned pro-Nazi outright.

Unlike Austria, no Anschluss was necessary; unlike Poland, no invasion was called for. Switzerland was the Nazi Reich -- with a different regime. The contents, rather than the letter, of "Action Plan Switzerland," were fulfilled: Switzerland was going to be the workshop of the Axis powers, and, in keeping with the Himmler-Schellenberg demands, there would be freedom of action for the local Nazis, and freedom of action to develop, as the head of the SD demanded, contacts with the Special Assistant at the U.S. Legation in Berne, Allen Dulles.

For such a situation to have developed, which made a direct Anschluss counterproductive, the job done by the Swiss Nazis had to have been of consequence. It was.

Nazi organizations in Switzerland, were the baker's dozen: Kreuzwehr, Eidgenossiche Front, Kampfbund Neue und Nationale Front, National-Sozialistische Eidgenossen, Neue Schweiz, Ordre et Tradition, Union Nationale, Schweizerische Heimatwehr, Schweizerische Fascismus, Volksbund, Volksfront, this myriad of organizations being broadly decentralized at the grassroots, in faithful Swiss cantonal-federalist tradition, while being closely unified at the top, also in tradition. Their war-cry, the old Swiss Confederates' "Haaruss" (Get Out!) was not to be aimed equally in all directions.

In French-speaking Switzerland, Swiss fascism was mainly represented by Georges Oltramare's National Political Order (OPN) and its successor organization, the National Union, and the Swiss Fascist Federation of retired Col. Arthur Fonjallaz Oltramare, who rose to prominence in Geneva during the 1920s, was the scion of an old Ligurian family that had come from Genoa to Geneva around 1550, and enjoyed a prominent position on the patrician city's rostrum. The weekly he founded in 1923, Le Pilori, quickly sold 20,000 copies per issue, and became the success story of weekly anti-Semitism. Oltramare was the mouthpiece for a small intellectual elite of French-speaking Swiss who, under the leadership of Gonzague de Reynold, had adopted a Pan-European outlook based on the traditional "Four Antis," anti-Semitism, anti-capitalism, anti-Marxism and anti-liberalism. Their "Federalist Circle" had been created in 1924 "to combat the error of democracy," and, as de Reynold put it in his Doctrinal Theses, to combat "the [democratic] ideas about freedom, the individual, science and mind," which had to be subordinated, in his words, to "knowledge of the natural and supernatural world."

This Pan-European fascism, which worked in organic connection with Coudenhove-Kalergi and the Catholic, South-German and Austrian advocates of Hapsburg restoration and Clerical Black Fascism as implemented by Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss, produced, within the narrower confines of French-speaking Switzerland, a genuine fascist mass movement. In 1924, Theodore Aubert, scion of a major Geneva banking family, founded the Entente Internationale Anti-Communiste (EIA), which worked in close connection with the Nazi Weltdienst (World Service) of Col. Ulrich Fleischauer, a Goebbels-supervised operation also supported by Ribbentrop, and with Mussolini's international intelligence operations. For the more inside-the-border operation, it was Georges Oltramare who rrigned (the two operations were ultimately merged in 1932). When he ran in the cantonal elections in Geneva in 1930, Oltramare scored an upset near-win, which allowed his National Political Order to become a major political factor.

Theodore Aubert wrote a letter to the NSDAP Foreign Policy Office in 1934, proposing to "create an anti-Marxist intelligence service," a very valuable point for the historian which shows that Swiss Nazifascism had at least as much of an intelligence function as a "political" one. The "successes" or failures of the Fronts cannot therefore be gauged from the sole standpoint of electoral gains or mass audiences, but also, and primarily, from this secret intelligence standpoint. Aubert and the EIA worked closelywith the United Alliance of German Anti-Communist Associations of Dr. Adolf Ehrt, known as the "Anticomintern." Ehrt, an Evangelical Church official, was in fact running a covert operation of Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda. In January 1934, Ehrt was in Geneva with Aubert for the conference of the Pro Deo Commission, an outfit created in 1933 to run Nazi intelligence operations through religious networks, with the immediate objective being running relief operations for Russian Christians and organizing the fight against the godless.

In September 1932, Oltramare was in Munich to meet leaders of the NSDAP. In October 1933, Joseph Goebbels, in Geneva for a visit at the Volkerbund, held a secret dinner with Oltramare and the German consul, to set up conditions for funding the National Union, which Theodore Aubert had warmly recommended to his German Nazi friends.

In 1934, Mussolini's Committee of Action for the Universality of Rome, led by Gen. Eugenio Coselchi, and advised by Gonzague de Reynold, held a major international conference in Montreux, on Lake Geneva, which was to ratify the notion of universal fascism, a fascism not bound by any national constraints, but in line with de Rougemont's imperial criteria. Alongside Georges Oltramare, in attendance to represent Swiss fascism, was Colonel Fonjallaz. Oltramare also tied up with Christian-fascist leader Leon Degrelle, of the Rex organization of Belgium. In February 1936, Mussolini invited Oltramare to Rome and received him most cordially, bringing him to a session of the Gran Consilio Fascista. This was to be the first of eleven (recorded) personal meetings from 1936 through 1940. Said Mussolini, in a message to Italian officials at the League of Nations: "Our comrade Oltramare leads a difficult fight in Switzerland. He must be able to reckon with the sympathy and moral support of Fascism. When he has something to communicate [to me], I am adamant that no obstacle be made."

In 1937, Oltramare proposed to Mussolini to establish a "counter-League of Nations," also in Geneva, under the name of "Alliance des Patries" (Alliance of the Fatherlands) with Italy, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Venezuela, and Japan. Who was going to be the secretary general of this organization ... ? Gonzague de Reynold, Mussolini's mentor! By then, Mussolini had bemedaled Oltramare and made him an officer in the Very Venerable Order of Saint Maurice and Saint Lazarus. Returning the compliment, as it were, the University of Lausanne, on the proposal of its School of social and political science -- the old abode of Swiss fascist ideologue and Mussolini inspirer Wilfredo Pareto -- had made Benito Mussolini a Doctor Honoris Causa with the comment: "This school ... has devoted attention to the enterprise of social renovation thanks to which you have ... given back to the Italian people the vital sentiment of its spiritual, economic and social cohesiveness."

The Pan-Europeans

There was, of course, some differentiation between the "Mediterranean Catholic" brand of fascism, and the "Northern Protestant" Nazi movement. Tensions ebbed and flowed between the two, with the Pan-European movement trying to carve its own empire in between. This reflected itself, predictably, in Oltramare's movement, where the "Pan-European" wing and the outright pro-Nazi wing went through several phases of polemics, until all divergences melted away, as early as 1936: "The genuine menace against European peace has not arisen from the fact that German soldiers took the right of keeping the guard on Germany's border," the National Union stated after Hitler's remilitarization of the Rhineland. And Oltramare himself: "We know that Germany has a large appetite and that we must be vigilant, but we also know that ten or twenty years of German hegemony -- Empires collapse quite fast -- would be less fatal to mankind than the hegemony of the bankers from the synagogues has been." And when Austria was subjected to the Anschluss on Oct. 8, 1938: "Either we shall participate in the New Order, or the New Order will trample us underfoot."

Pan-Europa had finally tied up with Mitteleuropa. All were agreed that nation-states would be broken up into small ethnic-religious, perhaps tribal, entities, or satrapies, based on the Hapsburg Empire model. Coudenhove's (and de Rougemont's, arid de Gonzague's) doctrine, which violently opposed industrialization out of devotion to Mother Earth, opposed science for the sake of the primacy of irrational emotions, opposed to "artificial" urban life the love for the "natural" pastoral life. The industrialists so-called and financiers involved in this, such as Schacht, von Schroder, Carl Duisberg of I.G. Farben, etc., fully shared in that conception. De Rougemont himself had spent the late 1920s and the 1930s in Paris as a propagandist and educator for such Pan-European "non-conformist revolution," very close to today's "Conservative Revolution" of former SS volunteer, Swiss citizen Armin Mohler. De Rougemont worked with Third Rome herald Nikolai Berdiaev, and thus defined the historical mission at hand: "The Royal [French] State, the future nation-state, defines itself expressly with respect to the Holy Roman Empire and against it, as one part opposes itself to the whole, and claims self-sufficiency. The state opposes itself to the Empire in its very form. The Empire is spherical and global, and its ruler holds a symbolic globe in his left-hand. State and Empire are no less opposed in' terms of the type of human relations they imply and enhance .... "

Nation-states were evil and ephemeral, de Rougemont argued. An "apocalypse" would come in the form of the universal catastrophe which would cause the fall of Babylon -- the United States especially, the citadel of industrialism and the republican nation-state. What was to be wiped out was "the European virus," as he wrote as recently as 1974 in his book The Future Is in Our Hands, "Europe as a colonizer spread throughout the world the formula of the nation-state, the belief in 2,500 calories a day for all and the morbid desire to have nuclear power plants."

De Rougemont's most explicit comment to the Hitler question was an outrageously frank confession: "I have heard Hitler pronounce one of his great speeches. Where do the superhuman powers he shows on such occasions come from? It is quite obvious that a force of his kind does not belong to the individual, and indeed could not even manifest itself unless the individual were of no importance except as the vehicle for a force for which our psychology has no explanation ... what has been accomplished by this man -- or rather through the forces working through him -- is a reality that is one of the wonders of the century."

Swiss 'Neutrality'

In the wake of the 1938 Kristallnacht which saw new levels of barbaric anti-Semitic pogrom rage in the Reich, the Swiss government signed with the Gestapo and the Foreign Office an agreement whereby passports of German and Austrian Jews would be marked with a "J" letter which allowed Swiss border forces to prevent the latter from escaping! Federal Council member Motta, the former president of Switzerland, told the German Ambassador that "he did by no means wants to criticize the treatment of the Jews in Germany .... " In fact, the Swiss-German "J" ensured that most countries in the world would refuse to let the persecuted emigrants come in at all! Official Swiss-complicity with Nazi anti-Semitism was total. In the words of Swiss historial Daniel Bourgeois, today the Keeper of the National Archives in Berne, "the pitiless attitude of the Swiss government in the question of Jewish refugees" was based on the fact that "the presence of Jews in Switzerland was not liked at all," and "various foreign policy considerations" had "played a role in the attitude of the Federal authorities towards the Jewish refugees."

The SS and SD (Sicherheitsdienst) apparatus working on Swiss affairs, which played no little role in these events, was based in Stuttgart, with a string of interrelated institutions: the SD Leitabschnitt Stuttgart Amt VI, led first by SS Hauptstormfohrer Ernst Peter and later by SS Unterstormfohrer Klaus Huegel, working under NSDAP/AO chief Gauleiter Bohle, Amt VI chiefs SS Brigade Leader Heinz Jost and his successor Walter Schellenberg. In 1939, it spawned a new outfit, the Alemanic Workers Circle, which handled Nazi agitprop in Switzerland, intelligence operations and subversion, in liaison with the Foreign Division of the Propaganda Ministry. The SD's job in foreign countries, in particular, was "the preparation and pursuit bf operations that the Reich's diplomatic representations abroad cannot order nor execute nor assume responsibility for."

The Embassy's staff in Berne was augmented with Councillor of Legation Hans Sigismund Baron van Bibra, who functioned as the SD liaison. At the Zurich General Consulate, there was Hans Georg Ashton, who coordinated with the Nazi Foreign Organization (AD), while an envoy of the Party Division of the Wilhelmstrasse -- he was an old SD agent. Switzerland also had its own NSDAP, with Wilhelm Gustloff as State Group Leader, who kept close contacts with the National Front and the other Swiss Nazi organizations. General coordination was in the hands of the SD Amt VI, and, also. in Stuttgart, the National League for German Identity Abroad, whose chairman was Prof. Dr. General Karl Haushofer, the founder of modern geopolitics and Rudolf Hess's mentor. The Stuttgart-based organization, German Foreign Institute, also. played a role for the "Volksdeutsche" -- ethnic German-Swiss.

From 1934 through 1936, the Reich's Ambassador in Berne had been the influential Ernst von Weizsacker, later to become the head of the Political section of the Wilhelmstrasse foreign ministry under Ribbentrop His links with Swiss Nazis had been if anything strengthened when his son, nuclear physicist Carl-Friedrich von Weizsacker, today a leader of the nuclear freeze movement, after having led Hitler's team to try and build a nuclear bomb, married Gundalona Wille, daughter of the Nazis' chief asset in the Swiss military, Corps Commander Col. Ulrich Wille. His successor Kocher went out of his way to support the native Swiss Nazis.

In 1936, Nazi chieftain Gustloff was assassinated. The Federal Council, as a result of the anti-Nazi outcry that backed an acquittal of the murderer, banned the NSDAP State Group Command and the Local Commands of the Party, but "the toleration of the AO locals in Switzerland, even without their central leadership, still was a privilege," a historian recounts. "It must be said in addition that the ban on the party's official central direction was a lesser evil. It did not significantly hinder the activities of the AO in Switzerland. Kocher said that it hit the party's prestige in Switzerland, but did not hamper its work." In fact, Embassy Councillor von Bibra took over the job, without the external trappings. When the murderer was tried, Federal Council member Motta officially approached the Reich's government to "express the [Swiss] government's regrets to the Reich for the attitude of the defendant's attorney" and explain that he had tried to "intervene to orient the trial in a pro-Reich way"!

Pursuing the track of Swiss appeasement and incipient collaboration with the Third Reich, parliamentarian Edmund Schulthess, a scion of a wealthy and powerful patrician family, got his friend Hjalmar Schacht to facilitate an interview with Chancellor Adolf Hitler, which took place in February 1937. The upshot of the very friendly conversation was a communique authorized by the Fuhrer and issued by Schulthess, where Hitler stated that "at all times and whatever may happen, we shall respect the integrity and neutrality of Switzerland."

Another crucial liaison with the Nazi establishment was Basel patrician Carl J. Burckhardt, chairman of the International Red Cross whom "Hitler received on Aug. 11, 1939 in the Obersalzberg to discuss the Danzig question." At the occasion, narrates historian D. Bourgeois, Hitler "reiterated his pledge to respect Swiss neutrality; "Switzerland runs no risk, since it protects my left flank. I shall respect its neutrality .... " Switzerland, grateful once more, pulled out of the League of Nations system of "collective security."

Quasi-official historian Bourgeois analyzes thus the 1940 situation: "It is in the military area that the German failure is the clearest. ... The pro-German elements in the military only had second-rank positions. Corps Commander Colonel Wille did not manage to be appointed General [in chief] and at the end of 1939, the chief of the General Staff, Corps Commander Colonel Labhart and the chief of the Operations section Rudolf D'Erlach, were pushed out of the general staff by the Commander in Chief, Gen. Henri Guisan." Guisan even took informal and secret contacts with the French General Staff to coordinate a French intervention in case of a Wehrmacht invasion of the Confederation. This "resistant" attitude, however, must be put in perspective: "It so happened that Hitler had no intention to attack Switzerland." The reasons for that "happenstance" are increasingly clear! In fact, Weizsacker had told Ulrich Wille during summer 1940 that "if he learned that Hitler was manifestly committed to invading Switzerland, he would warn him of this. He did not have to do that."

On Sept. 4, 1940, Ambassador Kocher visited Swiss President Pilet-Golaz after the British Royal Air Force had multiplied overflights over Swissair space, to vehement Swiss protest. Neutrality carries obligations. Pilet, reported Kocher, had "extraordinarily harsh words toward the British." Further: "Toward the end of the interview, Pilet stressed Switzerland's spontaneous desire to collaborate with Germany. . . . Switzerland was on the path of Renewal and wanted to align with the New European order. She wanted, for her part, to provide a contribution in the economic field and accepted that Swiss industry receive tasks useful within the framework of European collaboration .... The president of, the Confederation spoke in great praise of ... the social achievements of National Socialism. I drew from the interview the impression that the Swiss government is prepared, to a large extent, to collaborate with us not only in the economic field but also in the political field."

Collaboration with the Third Reich

Swiss leaders lent themselves to much of Berlin's scabrous diplomatic maneuvering during the war. In June 1940, International Red Cross chairman Carl J. Burkhardt, of the prominent Basel patrician family, transmitted to London some "German approaches." In 1941, London was abuzz with "peace feelers" supposedly sent from Germany through Switzerland, with Burkhardt once more in the middle of the game. The president of the Swiss confederation, Marcel Pilet-Golaz, was also deeply involved.
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Switzerland's constitutional system calls for half a dozen Federal Council members (Bundesrat) to rotate the post of President. Pilet-Golaz had been in charge of the Posts and Railways Department from 1930 to 1940, and then became head (Minister) of the Political Department, which he remained until 1944. In the words of the so-called Bonjour-Bericht, the official Swiss government report concerning Switzerland's "neutrality during the war," published in 1970 by Prof. Edgar Bonjour (from which much of the foregoing is excerpted), "these combinations led to place Pilet under the suspicion that he had put himself in the service of the German Peace offensive. On Nov. 5, 1941, he was reported to have told the French Ambassador, who immediately reported to Vichy, that Germany would use the lull in the fighting with Russia to set up an organized European order ... the interpretation given to such imprudent statements of such broad scope, was that Pilet wanted to encourage France to join a European Community, and wanted to initiate a mediation between London and Berlin ... there were indeed Swiss political leaders who remained hopeful that there would be a conciliation between England and Germany ... former Federal Council member Schulthess [from another leading family -- ed.] thought it possible to tackle the peace question in talks with the German envoy.... " Schulthess himself had led the Confederate National Economic Department from 1912 through 1935, and had been president in 1933.

The argument of Pilet-Golaz was very cogent, within the Imperial framework we outlined above: "A complete victory of the Allies would threaten the independence of the small nations no less than a total triumph of the Axis powers, for the Allies would not fail to exert their economic hegemony over Western Europe. France too has an interest that Germany does not dominate the continent, but remains however strong enough to protect her from both the economic imperialism of the Anglo-Saxons and the penetration of Russian Communism. But alone a compromise peace would give Germany the possibility of exerting this beneficial function for Europe .... In England too [continued Pilet] part of the Conservatives, who were worried at the strength of Bolshevism and the economic might of the United States, would be attentive to peace offers." That was "Pilet's pacifist campaign."

The campaign reached an extraordinary level on Sept. 23, 1940, with the "Wulflingen Conference." The Nazi Alemanic Workers Circle convened a conference there with the National League for the Independence of Switzerland, the VUS, "at the initiative of various Swisscircles, from the military, the press and industry," Jost wrote in a report. Contacts had started much earlier, in November 1939, when the SS officer Hegel and a few collaborators had been received in Zurich by Colonel Hasler, an important Swiss military official. A second meeting had taken place in' December in Lausanne, and a third in January 1940 -- which the Swiss government, in internal documents, construed as "mere exchanges of views,"

By 1943, Pilet had become so bold as to openly advocate "to let the Russians finish the war on their own," in other words, to let the Nazis off the hook of the Second Front. "The diplomats of the Allied countries apparently discussed with each other the question of the action reportedly conducted by Pilet in order to drive a wedge in the bloc of the Allies and the Russians ... careless as he often was ... [with] a facile tongue," the Report has to admit. So outrageous, and public, was Pilet's activity on behalf of the Nazis that one Swiss parliamentarian filed a question to the Federal Council asserting that "there are even diplomats who say that Mr. Pilet's efforts aim at having the Allies help the Germans beat the Russians ... ." According to the then-British trade attache in Berne, Sir John Lomax, "Pilet-Golaz was pro-German and pro-Vichy ... that coterie of a half a dozen chaps -- they took advantage and kept the Swiss public in ignorance of what was going on. . . . The Swiss made the most unnatural arrangements [with the Nazis). The Swiss should not have accepted the pressure -- and kept the balance equal. . , . We should have blockaded them. The . officials wanted Hitler to win the war. They thought he would win. By 1942-43, they became easier to deal with."

To say that the Swiss did not keep the balance equal is a vast diplomatic understatement. As the facts released by Bonjour alone testify -- and this is an official Swiss government report, not one to be trusted overly for its impartiality and ability to face unpleasant truths -- Switzerland, throughout the war, worked as the high-technology military factory for the Nazi war machine.

On Sept. 4, 1939, a German trade delegation arrived in Switzerland to negotiate economic exchanges between the two countries. On Sept. 8, Switzerland called off its regulation that banned the export of arms and ammunition. At the beginning of the negotiation, Germany had an 80 million Swiss francs deficit (debt) on the trade account of the clearing system (there was no convertibility as a result of the depression). The Nazi delegation demanded that Switzerland fund the clearing, as an advance to the Reich, in order to settle claims of Swiss exporters. Which is indeed what happened -- Switzerland was opening credits for the Reich to buy weapons from her. The Caisse des Prets of the Confederation funded the German clearing. In the negotiations, "the Swiss delegation untiringly tried to find, in the question of war materials, a solution coming closer to the German thesis." One could hardly be clearer! Further., "to relax the atmosphere, Switzerland temporarily suspended the issuance of permits needed to export to the Western powers." Pilet-Golaz, inescapably, added his two bits: "Germany can now set to us draconian conditions. It will not be a military invasion, but they have the noose around our necks. They can tighten it even more and take what we need for a living. We must seek practical solutions."

On Aug. 9, 1940, an agreement was signed in Berlin which settled for one year, until the end of 1941, the trade relations between the Confederation and the Greater Germany. It is likely that the return to favor of Hjalmar Schacht, who spent much time during the war shuttling between Germany, Basel and Geneva, and the fact that he was "newly persona grata again, and put in charge of elaborating an economic plan for the New Europe, based on a Monetary Union," helped smooth over the rough edges. In return for German raw materials, coal, etc., Berne agreed to open a credit of 124 million Swiss francs to the Reich, plus the right to purchase an additional 133 million worth of goods. The agreement settled on 150 million worth of additional purchases, 100 million in arms and ammunition, 15-20 million in machinery and aluminum for the Nazi war machine.

Cynically, Bonjour comments, "to the advocates of a Renewal who vehemently proclaimed that the Confederation could only continue to live by closely aligning itself with Germany, the outcome of the clearing agreement proved that it was still possible to accomplish in Switzerland what was necessary to keep the economy afloat while safeguarding the independence of the state and the vital interests of the country."

A provisional protocol was signed on Feb. 2, 1941, whereby it extended a supplementary credit to the Reich of 165 million and additionally allowed it to purchase 317 million worth of military goods. Later that month, the German trade negotiator proposed to lift the ceiling of the Swiss credit to 600 million and, later, in April, to 850 million -- without any interest, which must be a unique case of Swiss bankers lending interest-free! The Swiss, after some ritual protest, agreed in. May 1941 to do that. One Swiss official even went so far as to state, "Once more, credit has proved its efficacy as a defensive weapon for the neutral Confederation"!

A member of the Swiss Permanent Council, the upper house, E. Loepfe-Benz, was so outraged by that situation that on Sept. 1, 1941, he stated: "We only supply arms, against raw materials, to Germany. We only supply textiles to Germany alone. We supply Swiss wood, which has become so scarce, to Germany alone. We open an 850 million credit to Germany alone, and another, 150 million, to Italy. We place our productive power, to its very exhaustion, at the service of the military interests of Germany. Financial relations between the Confederation. and the Reich are settled totally to the advantage of Germany .. Switzerland bans [Hermann] Rauschning's book because it is so terribly truthful . .. she renounces banning tendentious German publications. She lets foreigners organize themselves nearly militarily .... Switzerland wants to avoid any unpleasant confrontation with the neighbor state."

'A Very Convenient Arsenal'

By mid-1942, while deliveries from the Reich were unilaterally lowered, new, massive demands came from Berlin: new advances of credit arid the demand that "Switzerland bring to an immediate end the interferences of the Anglo-Americans in the framework of economic warfare. The Swiss delegates replied that their country was fighting as much as possible against the interferences of the Anglo-Americans." In the first half of 1942, Switzerland exported no less than 250 million Swiss francs of war-related goods to the Reich -- and 1.7 million to the Allies! These machine-tools, clockworks, precision tools, and optical instruments were among the most decisive technologies for the conduct of the war. As was officially stated, "given the situation created by the war, Switzerland remains available to work in a preponderant way with the Axis powers, which assuredly represents a very important contribution, given the value of the items supplied." Indeed! In the last nine months of 1942,360 million of war goods were supplied, of which more than 200 million was for weapons. The Allies received 4.7 percent of that in exports! Worse, the Reich had overstepped the clearing ceiling for its purchases by the enormous margin of 300 million -- Switzerland had extended a credit of 1.15 billion Swiss francs to the German war machine. "Should the response to this action that contravened the laws be a denunciation of the clearing agreement? Given the circumstances, it appeared wiser not to do anything of the sort .... "

The July 1943 negotiations saw the Swiss obtain a quota, restricting German purchases to 80 percent of the 1942 shipments. But the Reich's demands continued. At the joint commission meeting in December 1943, a Swiss memo complained that "it is unpleasant to discern in the [German] memo the threat of the damages Germany could inflict upon Switzerland. And it is also unpleasant to see that this country is suspected of taking the side of the powers which are the enemy of Germany." After 15 years of pro-Nazi efforts, it was indeed somewhat impudent to harbor such suspicions. A comparison of shifts in trade balances is instructive: in 1937, Swiss exports to Germany had been, in commodities, 47 million, and 425 million in 1943. To the Allies, 80 million in 1937 and 19 million in 1943. 1944 and 1945 especially saw first a decline and then, of course, a debacle of Swiss-German trade. But not before a wave of committed anti-Nazi fervor led the Swiss government -- on Feb. 16, 1945 -- to freeze German assets in Switzerland -- at least officially, for if the Allied blockade of Switzerland included that demand, the Swiss agreement was systematically violated to the benefit of the Nazis.

Early in the war, on July 19, 1941, the Swiss Minister in London, Thurnneer, had cabled to Pilet-Golaz that "the British are watching closely the Swiss-German negotiations which might seriously affect policy towards Switzerland; we cannot take lightly further Swiss credits to Germany [they say]. It is unfortunate that Switzerland became a very convenient arsenal for the Germans and that factories are working full speed for Germany." The Swiss, with imperturbable aplomb, responded that "the [German] clearing debt is not a loan granted to the Germans. It is advances to the Swiss exporters so that they do not have to wait, to settle their claims, for the German commodity imports to allow payments to be made." Unmoved, the British installed a blockade on the sea for most goods to Switzerland. Of course, the truth of the matter was that "Switzerland is supplying Germany with war goods she pays herself with the money advanced," reported even Hans Sulzer, who added "the Axis powers are exploiting to the hilt the economic potential of Switzerland ... these unfortunate deliveries of goods that are typically military goods ... represent a serious danger to the country's neutrality."

The Briton Sir John Lomax became very angry from his Berne office. Talking to industrialist Buhrle, head of a major arms company on Aug. 27, 1942, he exploded: "Britain cannot tolerate that Switzerland playa double game. He who will not declare himself for the democracies is against them; in the long run, the Confederation will not be able to maintain its so-called neutrality!" Buhrle answered with astounding audacity: "Switzerland is not stupid enough to sacrifice itself for Britain as did Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, Holland, Belgium, Norway, and finally France, and to get, like these countries, the installation of a government-in-exile in London as a reward for such heroic follies."

Most of the detonators used by the Nazi army were manufactured in Switzerland. For the Office of Economic Armament, in Berlin, the Swiss engineering industry was crucial: machine-tools, automatic metal-cutting machines, precision lathes, micro-gauges, miniaturized roll bearings "could not be manufactured in Germany in required quantities nor with equal quality." Precision tools, measurement tools, chronometers as well as machineguns, aircraft engines, anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns and their ammunition, small arms, shells with clockworks, optical instruments were similarly indispensible, to be drawn from the Swiss workshop. The Swiss arms industry delivered 60 percent of its products to the Reich, the foundries 50 percent, the optics industry 50 percent too. Of the high-technology machine-tools, 80 percent went to the Reich, and 30 percent of the clockwork industry.

The Nazi dependency on Swiss military goods became so pronounced that an anxious Weizsacker even allowed himself to ask the Swiss government, in June 1942, to reinforce the Gotthard anti-aircraft defenses and emplace anti-aircraft defenses around those manufacturers that worked for the Reich. One month later, Pilet-Golaz had made sure that the request had been implemented! Pilet, commenting on the Americans, described them to Weizsacker as "totally devoid of scruples, especially brutal and reckless concerning their means" -- how can this tirade delivered to a top Nazi official be further underscored in terms of its implications for the Swiss leadership? Seven percent of the Swiss GNP of 1942 went to the Nazi Reich in the form of military goods!

In July 1942, U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull stated, with his finger pointed in the direction of Berne, that "Any neutrality in the present conflict is absurd and suicidal." Homilectics were not enough to convince the Swiss, who declined the November- December Allied proposals. The pragmatic British understood this well, and, in the spring of 1943, purely and simply bombed the city of Oerlikon, near Zurich, where the Buhrle factories were located. "This was seen in Switzerland as a firm invitation to bring to an end the military production for Germany." Marvels of intelligence! In early 1945, U.S. Secretary of State Stettinius announced a complete. review of U.S.-Swiss economic relations, which took effect promptly. "One of the major victors had inflicted on Switzerland an affront unparalleled in the annals of Swiss diplomacy," Bonjour bitterly commented.

In 1945, negotiations were started between the Allies and Berne. "The activities of the Swiss banks had for long aroused the mistrust and violent criticism of the Anglo-Saxons. They blame the Swiss National Bank for accepting German and Italian gold, even though its origin be suspicious and it came in 'part from occupied countries. They also hit at the brokering and credit activities of Swiss private banks with the Axis powers or strawmen ... in 1942, the United States decreed a 'freeze' on all Swiss assets on U.S. territory." On Feb. 23,1944, His Majesty's Government announced that it would not recognize any transfer of property concerning "stolen goods" put in circulation by the Reichsbank. "On Aug. 23, 1944, an Allied Memo demanded that the Federal Council prohibit any purchase and deposit of gold from an Axis country. Since Switzerland did not respond to this approach, they insisted anew on Feb. 1, 1945. Reasons of principle as well as juridical considerations went counter to the Confederation's agreeing with the Allies' demand," Bonjour writes: Eleven days later, the chief U.S. negotiator told his Swiss counterparts that "the Allies hope that the Swiss Government will show itself ready to stop all help to the Axis powers ... and that, in keeping with the Resolution VI of the Bretton Woods conference, it will take active measures against the enemies of the Allies, to prevent them from disposing of their booty, from funding their war effort, from dissimulating their assets in order for their chiefs to use after the [end of the] hostilities, in short, from having a use of the advantages offered by the Swiss financial organizations."

Helping the Nazis Monetize the Loot

The billion Swiss francs at play in these trade relations in Nazi-overwhelmed Europe did not come out of the Reichsbank itself. Just as in the 1930s, the Bank for International Settlements and "the Swiss National Bank had funneled massive amounts of money into the Nazi Reich, so during the war. As told by British historian Charles Higham, there were "the $378 "million in gold that had been sent to the BIS by the Nazi government after Pearl Harbor for use by its leaders after the war. [That was] gold that had been looted from the National Banks of Austria, Holland, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia, or melted down from the Reichsbank holdings of teeth fillings, spectacle frames, cigarette cases and wedding rings of the murdered Jews." In February 1942, the BIS pushed the criminality to extend a loan of several million Swiss gold francs to the "protectorate" of Poland, the Nazi-administered genocide operation conducted under Dr. Frank.

The war went on, and, in spite of all lying claims to the contrary, board meetings of the BIS went on too -- no matter whether the countries of residence of the central bankers were at war. On March 23, 1943, U.S. Congressman Jerry Voorhis of California entered a resolution in the House calling for an investigation of the BIS, "this bank being used to further the designs and purposes of the Axis powers." Less than one year later, Congressman John M. Coffee also filed a resolution to that effect: "The Nazi government has 85 million Swiss gold francs on deposit in the BIS. The majority of the Board is made lip of Nazi officials.... " The result was that the Bretton-Woods conference resolved for the BIS "to be dissolved at the earliest possible moment," and also resolved to investigate the books and records of the Bank during the war. That this never came to pass is an eloquent testimony to the power of Swiss Nazi finance over the nation-states.

In "defense" of his institution, the BIS chairman stated: "In order to understand [it] one must first understand the strength of the confidence and trust that the central bankers had had in each other and the strength of their determination to play the game squarely. Secondly, one must realize that in the complicated German financial setup, certain men who have their central banker's point of view, are in very strategic positions and can influence the conduct of the German government with respect to these matters." In normal language, that meant that the Nazi Reichsbank was to be entrusted with the future of Germany, with the benediction of the Allies!

As far as the Swiss themselves were concerned, the Nazi-looted gold was sent not directly to the BIS, but from the Reichsbank to the BIS account at the Swiss National Bank. The SNB has demanded that a "trustworthy" Reichsbank official "certify" that the gold sent was not the proceeds of loot. The official in question was Hitkr's own appointee on the BIS board, the Reichsbank's Emil Puhl! "Funk [at the Nuremberg trial in 1946] said that Puhl had informed him in 1942 that the Gestapo had deposited gold coins and other gold, from the concentration camps, in the Reichsbank, Puhl had been in charge of this. Jewels, monocles, spectacle frames, watches, cigarette cases and gold dentures had flowed into the Reichsbank, supplied by Puhl from Himmler's resources. They. were melted down in gold bars .... Funk had made arrangements with Himmler to receive the gold." The gold coming into the Reichsbank came in bags marked "Auschwitz," etc. Under interrogation, Puhl admitted that these gold transfers to the BIS/SNB were "subordinated to the broader question of assisting the SS, all the more -- and this must be emphasized -- because these things were for the account . of the Reich."

In 1942, in one year, the Nazi state had laundered 500 million Swiss francs worth of gold into Switzerland. "At the beginning," writes Bourgeois, "the Germans only passed on small quantities of gold whose origins made no problem. And when the sales became substantial, the Swiss did not dare stop a practice that had always existed for fear of giving offense to the Reich."

By March 1945, the situation became somewhat hot for the Swiss. After the salvo from Bretton Woods, the BIS tried to avert any direct receipt of the looted gold. "Instead," reports Higham, "the SNB, as a shareholder of the BIS, would take it in its vaults. But in order to camouflage the receipt of it, the SNB had disguised it as payments to the American Red Cross and the German Legations in Switzerland." In short, the Swiss National Bank and the BIS were aiding and abetting the flight of Nazi capital in contravention to the formal commitments they had themselves taken under international agreement.

Their behavior was so impudent that on Nov. 15, 1945, the U.S. Senate's Kilgore Committee reported that "the Swiss banks led by the BIS and its member bank the SNB (which shares directors and staff members) had violated agreements made at the end of the war not to permit financial transactions that would help the Nazis dispose of their loot." Sen. Harley Kilgore stated: "Despite the assurances of the Swiss government that German accounts would be blocked, the Germans maneuvered themselves back into a position where they could utilize their assets in Switzerland, could acquire desperately needed foreign exchange by the sale of looted gold, and could conceal economic reserves for another war. These moves were made: possible by the willingness of the Swiss government and banking officials,' in violation of their agreements with the Allied Powers, to make a secret deal with the Nazis."

Ironically, the key to most of that monstrous affair came to Switzerland from the United States, in 1942, in the form of OSS master-spy Allen Dulles, whose family psychoanalyst was Swiss Nazi Carl G. Jung, the ideologue of man's inherent, archetypal submission to irrationality. Dulles was no newcomer to Nazism. In 1930, while visiting his law firm Sullivan & Cromwell's client Fritz Thyssen (one of the early financiers of Hitler, who had just contributed 50 million Reichsmarks to the NSDAP), and also in his capacity of a member of the board of the New York subsidiary of the Schroeder Bank, Dulles met with Adolf Hitler. His brother John Foster Dulles, not to be outdone, had met Hitler in the late 1920s already, having received the invitation, with his wife, while negotiating debt with Schacht.

In the 1930s the Dulles brothers openly propagandized for the Nazi regime. John Foster insisted in a 1936 Princeton University address that "what is happening in Germany and Italy is part of the inevitable struggle between dynamic and static nations. America must adjust to the changes. If [we] all yielded gracefully [to Hitler and Mussolini), Hitler will just be a passing phase." Friend John J. McCloy remarked "I rather gathered that he was not particularly concerned about it." From his powerful position at the Federal Council of Churches (the predecessor organization of the World Council of Churches), Foster was collaborating with the pro-Nazi elements in the Protestant Churches.

Allen Dulles, from his prewar contacts with Sullivan & Cromwell correspondent, Hamburg attorney G. Westrick -- an Abwehr spymaster -- was "in the picture." He was to land right in the middle of the cauldron of intrigue that Switzerland was for the networks of Admiral Canaris and Colonel Schellenberg. "In Switzerland," writes historian Anthony Cave Brown, "a powerful Abwehr force existed as the harbinger of occupation," save that the said occupation was never to occur. In fact, the collaboration between the Abwehr and Swiss military intelligence was so deep that 40 years later, when the author asked a ranking official of Swiss Military Intelligence for an explanation, the latter launched into a spirited tirade in defense of the Abwehr!

The Abwehr network in question was run in particular through aristocrats, bankers and other upper-crust individuals. Swiss citizen, freshly naturalized Baron von der Heydt, of the family running the Delbruck Bank of Cologne where von Schroder, Thyssen and Schacht had opened the business community's "Hitler Fund" in 1932, and a representative of top levels of Dutch high finance, ran the Thyssenbank in Locarno with the help of the Schweizerische Bankgesellschaft. He worked closely with maverick entrepreneur Gottlieb Duttweiler, who was tried by the Swiss after the war as a Nazi collaborator. He also worked with Abwehr Hans Bernd Gisevius, Canaris's special envoy -- who was also on Dulles's payroll! Fritz Thyssen himself, while his Berlin bank' was being renamed Von der Heydt Bank, had emigrated from Germany in 1938, to settle in Switzerland. Von der Heydt managed large family portfolios, including that of the Stinneses, the Haniels -- and that of former Kaiser Wilhelm, who died in exile in Holland in 1941, and that of the Kaiser's sons. One of his missions, from Canaris, was to fund Nazi intelligence activities in Latin America, probably seeding for the postwar future.

Schellenberg, Guisan, and Dulles

Schellenberg's network was of a more simple make: he collaborated directly with Col. Roger Masson, the head of Swiss military intelligence. There also, the business side was not forgotten. Schellenberg was a director of the German branch of International Telegraph & Telephone, ITT, whose chairman was Dulles friend and colleague Gerhardt Westrick. ITT boss Col. Sosthenes Benn was a close friend of Hermann Goering, whose Luftwaffe he continued to supply throughout the war, as well as the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) run by his employee Schellenberg. Benn was also closely working with the Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Wilhelm Keppler, founder in the early 1930s of the Keppler Circle that contributed so much to Hitler's rise to power. And to close the circle, Schellenberg worked hand in glove with I.G. Farben chief Hermann Schmitz of the BIS -- while John Foster Dulles was the attorney for I.G. Chemie (the Swiss front's) U.S. subsidiary, American I.G. -- which Sosthenes Benn bought up during the war in order to avoid expropriation of the Nazi asset by the U.S. government. Directly running I.G. Farben/Chemie's large network of 5,000 spies in the Western hemisphere was Ernst Bohle, the SS officer also in charge of some operations in Switzerland.

The Schellenberg-Masson collaboration led to one of the most extraordinary events of the World War II, the series of conferences between Schellenberg, Masson, and the "pro-Resistance" general Henri Guisan.

On June 25, 1940, Guisan, addressing all the senior Swiss military officers at the historic site of the Rutli Meadows, outlined what, on the face of it, was a "Resistance" strategy. "The Army must remain prepared ... we are still the masters of our destiny .... Believe not only in the right of our cause but also in our strength and, if each of us wants it, in the efficacy of our resistance." Nazi Ambassador Kocher was duly flabbergasted, and visited forthwith President Pilet-Golaz. In his report, "the president of the Confederation concluded [the discussion] with the wish that this incident would be settled with his explanation and added, confidentially, 'I hope now that the General will not talk any more'." A few days later, however, Guisan was requesting from the Nazi authorities a trip of a Swiss military mission to Berlin -- a proposal immediately endorsed by the VUS and the Industrial Association!

Shortly thereafter, the German Abwehr discovered, abandoned in a small French town, La Charite-sur-Loire, a series of documents of the French General Staff documenting the informal deal passed by Guisan with the French for cooperation in case of a German invasion of Switzerland. This golden opportunity to get rid of Guisan by creating a scandal of unheard of magnitude -- Guisan had not consulted the Federal Council, nor even informed it of the deal! -- was not seized. Weizsacker, who was not fully in on the real affair, wrote in his memoirs that this "weakened the standpoint of those who, like me, had always tried to keep Switzerland out of the game under any circumstances." Did that mean that the Schellenberg faction was going to lose their precious financial pivot? Not in the least -- to the contrary! A few days after that, Guisan, still surrounded by echo of his Rutli speech, proposed that Carl J. Burckhardt be sent to Berlin for purposes of appeasement -- an idea that originated from his intelligence chief Masson.

One of Dulles's main informants was Prince Max-Egon von Hohenlohe, who had run German Intelligence in Vienna during World War One -- when Dulles had first met him. The prince's former wife, Princess Stefanie von Hohenlohe, was close to Schellenberg and to Otto Abetz, the Paris ambassador. She was interned in the United States during World War Two as a Nazi spy -- Hermann Schmitz had lavished gifts on her for her services, and Hitler called her "my princess." She was part of the Foreign Organization of the NSDAP. With such collaborators, was Dulles fighting against the Nazis? No more than his earlier profile indicates! He was working with one wing of the Nazi establishment against the other, gaining factional advantage for the future. As A. C. Brown reports, "Schellenberg did not trust the British. His main channels of communication were with Dulles at Berne .... Schellenberg's go-between was Prince Max-Egon von Hohenlohe-Langenburg .... " Yet another Dulles collaborator, his closest, was Gero von Schulze Gavernitz, the son of a prominent Berlin liberal economist whom Dulles had met 20 years before in Berlin. After he had married into the Stinnes family, Canaris had helped him relocate in Switzerland.

One fine morning of February 1945, Major Max Waibel of Swiss Military Intelligence knocked at Dulles's door to say that he could put him in touch with representatives of SS Obergruppenfuhrer Karl Wolff, at present the top SS officer and police chief in Northern Italy, who "wanted to talk about surrender." Wolff had been Himmler's chief of staff, Himmler's personal liaison with Hitler, and with Ribbentrop. In the SS, he was second only to Himmler. And now, according to fairy tales retailed by Dulles in his book Secret Surrender, Wolff kindly wanted to surrender the troops under his command to avoid a bloodbath, and so on and so forth.

Coming to the rescue of Swiss agent Allen Dulles, the Bonjour Bericht naively writes: "Wolff's interlocutors naturally did not know that this man was one of Hitler's associates at Headquarters, and that he had been involved in mass executions of Jews. That became known only long after the war." The negotiation process, code-named "Operation Sunrise," indeed led to a surrender that averted a considerable bloodbath. It also led to the major operation to evacuate Nazi and SS war criminals, with their funds and dossiers, out of Europe, an operation which Dulles supervised, along with his cronies at Swiss intelligence. Dulles admits in his cited book that "it was obvious, and we realized it, that the Swiss intelligence service had contacts with the Allied and German intelligence services. As Swiss, it was possible for them to maintain relations with each group of belligerents, and, in their own interest, they had an absolute right to do so. Misunderstandings were reduced by the fact that one group of intelligence officers was mainly working with the Germans, and another with the Allies. Col. Roger Masson of the Swiss General Staff, was in contact with Walter Schellenberg, and Max Waibel ... with us. What occurred between Masson and Waibel, who both reported to General Guisan, to this day I do not know." Masson, code-named "Senner One" (a Senner is a Swiss cowherd) in Schellenberg's files, whose Swiss contacts were code-named "Senner-People," was no less busy than Dulles reconstructing the Nazi networks for the postwar period. The Dulles part of the operation was codenamed "Land on fire," perhaps as a preview of the Nazi International's postwar terrorism.

One of the major aspects of the operation to save the Nazi infrastructure went through the collaboration of Guisan with the old Geneva Nazi Theodore Aubert. On June 22, 1944, Aubert penned a memo to the general where he proposed to prepare for the post-war and make all "directly available forces" available for that. This included his own league, the EIA: the old SVV; the National Reconstruction (Redressement National) and a maze of other intelligence organizations. In his note of transmittal to one of his subordinates, General Dollfuss, head of the powerful Haus und Heer division of the Swiss General Staff, Guisan noted appreciatively: "For 20 years Monsieur Aubert has dedicated himself to the struggle against subversive movements and, based on past experiences, he is presently seeking to find the means to spare our country from a new period of unrest like that after the last war." The post-war infrastructures were being emplaced.

A front-organization was set up in hospitable Lausanne under the name of Diethelm Brothers, at the initiative of Hitler's personal chief of staff and assistant Martin Bormann, with the help of Hjalmar Schacht and his son-in-law, SS Col. Otto Skorzeny, who worked with the Abwehr's number two man, Count Erwin von Lahousen. The Credit Suisse Bank and the Baseler Handelsbank -- founded by the Iselin family -- were key conduits for the transfer of funds. In the year 1944 alone, Schellenberg succeeded in transferring no less than $600 million to Switzerland! Several hundred Nazi-controlled dummy companies were set up, of which more than 200 were identified in Switzerland. While Hitler may have entertained silly dreams of an "Alpine citadel," the Schellenberg-Schacht group, supported by the BIS and SNB, was investing long term, for the future. In August 1944, a secret meeting took place in Strasbourg, then still occupied, with the leaders of the SS financial and industrial apparatus. The agenda was to prepare for after the war. One principal method was once again to have SS-controlled firms create or consolidate "interfaces" with foreign firms and thus escape de-Nazification scrutiny. Swiss companies massively bought such SS-controlled firms and thus gave them "respectable Swiss" covers. Another method was the laundering through the Swiss of hundreds of millions in faked dollars and pounds.

The individual whose personal role was perhaps the single most significant one in the financial transfers was Dr. Alfred Schaefer, a senior official at the Schweizerische Bankgesellschaft (Union Bank of Switzerland). An open, outright, ostentatious Nazi during the 1930s, and the lover of Adolf Hitler's "mistress" Eva Braun, Schaefer, also an officer in the Swiss military, "was not only part, but an essential part of every single major financial negotiation between the Swiss and the Germans throughout the 1930s and 1940s," according to a Swiss historian. Schaefer was to become the chairman of the bank, the "Great Man" of Swiss banking, and the personal financial advisor to the Shah of Iran. He also was the key partner, in business and other matters, of Madrid-based Otto Skorzeny and the latter's wife, Elsa, a Schacht relative.

Dulles, back in the United States, was receiving loads of SS and other Nazi war criminals, which he was recycling into his State Department-connected intelligence organization, until he managed to acquire a chunk of the CIA to place his darling Nazi legions. As early as 1945, a new Swiss military attache in Washington worked closely with him in order to screen the Nazis-for-hire-Major Max Waibel, who ended with a general's stars.

Denis de Rougemont, a veteran from Swiss Military Intelligence, founded the Ecoropa umbrella-group for Europe's key environmentalist organizations, a control job he shares with the KGB and the Nazi International. The BIS's and the Swiss National Bank's economic and financial strategy is to inflict on the Third World -- and at world scale this time -- what they succeeded in inflicting on Germany first, and the whole European continent next.

______________

Bibliography

Bank for International Settlements, The Bank for International Settlements: 1930-1980, Basel, 1980.

Bonjour, Edgar, Histoire de la Neutralite Suisse, Neuchatel, 1970.

Borkin, Joseph, The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, New York, 1978.

Bourgeois, Daniel, Le Troisieme Rich et la Suisse, Paris, 1974.

Brown, Anthony Cave, Bodyguard of Lies, London, 1975.

Clarke, Stephen V. O., Central Bank Cooperation, 1924-31, New York, 1967.

Dulles, Allen W., The Secret Surrender, New York, 1966.

Freymond, Jean, Le Troisieme Reich et la Reorganisation Economique de l'Europe, Geneva, 1974.

Frischknecht J., et al., Die unheimlichen Patrioten, Zurich, 1979.

Grimm, Bruno, Gau Schweiz?, Berne, 1939.

Higham, Charles, Trading with the Enemy, New York, 1983.

Joseph, Roger, L'Union nationale 1932-39, Lausanne, 1975.

Ledeen, Michael, Universal Fascism, New York, 1973.

Lomax, John, Diplomatic Smuggler, London, 1965.

Lueke, Rolf E., Das Geheimnis der deutschen Bankenkrise, Frankfurt, 1981.

Mosley, Leonard, Dulles-A Biography, New York, 1978.

Muller, Helmut, Die Zentralbank, eine Nebenregierung, Opladen, 1973.

de Reynold, Gonzague, Mes Memoires, Geneva, 1963

---, La Democratie et la Suisse, Berne, 1929. de Rougemont, Denis, The Devil's Share, New York, 1944.

---, The Heart of Europe, New York, 1941.

Schellenberg, Walter, Memoiren 125 de LaGrande Loge Suisse Alpina, Lausanne, 1973.

Simpson, Amos E., Hjalmar Schacht in Perspective, Paris/Den Haag, 1969.

Urner, Klaus, Der Schweizer Hitler-Attentater, Stuttgart.  
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