Hitler's Mentor: Dietrich Eckart, His Life, Times, & Milieu

"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.

Re: Hitler's Mentor: Dietrich Eckart, His Life, Times, & Mil

Postby admin » Mon Dec 10, 2018 3:22 am

Part 1 of 2

9: Karl Marx: The Cinder Klaus of Political Economy

"He who is not a socialist at 19 has no heart. He who is still a socialist at 30 has no brain."

-- Otto von Bismarck


It is not religion but revolution that is the opiate of the people.

-- Simone Weil


Dietrich Eckart constantly railed against "Jewish Communism" in Auf Gut Deutsch. Ironically, his nemesis Karl Marx -- whom he nicknamed "Mordechai" -- resembled him in many respects. Both men were hard-drinking sons of lawyers who ultimately became radical polemicists noted for acerbic writing.

Although Adolf Hitler always fought against Communists, he co-opted their socialist rhetoric to attract working class support. Nevertheless, he repudiated "Mordechai's" Jewish intellectualism on the grounds that it spawned "world historical mistakes" such as helot revolts, women's rights, Negro emancipation, birth control, and German emigration to America. Hitler rejected Karl Marx's naive view that religious, national, and racial differences would disappear when social classes were abolished. He opposed Marxism's leveling cosmopolitanism, which held that Germans, French, and Russian workers could overlook ethnic dissimilarities and unite to make common cause against the bourgeoisie. Nazis believed that collectivism only worked within particular racial groups. Germans might support a welfare state for fellow Germans, but not Jews, Gypsies, Russian immigrants, or guest workers from Turkey. "Internationalism" went against human nature. Social relationships needed to be bonded by "Folk Spirit."

However, the two men concurred on a surprising range of other issues. Neither was capable of self-criticism. Both thought in black-and-white terms, and blamed external forces for their problems -- and the world's ills. They disparaged religion as an "opiate of the masses," and repeatedly used the word "parasite" in their writings. Even though he was ethnically Jewish, Marx had no love of Jews. According to Isaiah Berlin:

"His references to individual Jews, particularly in his letters to Engels, are virulent ... His origin was evidently a personal stigma which he was unable to avoid pointing out in others ... " [1]


Hitler and Marx both deemed themselves practitioners of Realpolitik. Each regarded France and Russia as Germany's traditional enemies. Hollow pronouncements about "individualism" and "the rights of man" struck Marx as bourgeois decadence. Hitler dismissed liberty, equality, and fraternity as maudlin rubbish. Communists and Nazis alike scorned the angst-ridden spiritual crises of artists and intellectuals. Such "morbid attention to private emotional states ... (smacked of) ... bourgeois degeneracy." [2]

According to both Nazism and Communism, meaningful change could only come through violence. Marx preached Revolution, Hitler wars of conquest. Neither man had any use for parliaments. Hitler ridiculed them as debating societies which took forever to pass watered-down measures. Time and again Marx railed against "parliamentary cretinism," and blasted Prussian assemblymen as corrupt windbags who obstructed progress.

Marx and Hitler agreed that working men ought to receive a greater share of national wealth through higher wages, government-subsidized medical insurance, and retirement pensions. In 1933 anti-democratic Communists and Nazis colluded with each other to wreck Germany's Weimar Republic. Many leading National Socialists -- including Josef Goebbels and Robert Ley -- were fervent communists before converting to Nazism. Hans Mend claimed that Hitler tried to join the Communist Party while on leave from the army in 1917.

Karl Marx descended from the Jewish priestly caste. His grandfather (Meier Halevi Marx,) a great-grandfather, and an uncle all served as rabbis. Karl's father Herschel married Dutch Jewess Henrietta Philips. When Prussia reinstated its proscription against Jewish lawyers in the wake of Napoleon's 1812 defeat by Russia, law student Herschel Marx promptly changed his name to Heinrich and converted to Lutheranism. His son Karl renounced all religions by age eighteen.

Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818 at 664 Bruckergasse in Trier, a quaint medieval city on the Rhine. His sister Sophie described him as a domineering boy with a mop of thick black hair who forced her to eat mud and pull his toy cart like a horse. Karl grew into an energetic young man, with voracious appetite for learning, along with a penchant for drinking and bar fights. Heinrich Marx marveled at the way his son combined "senseless and inexpedient erudition" with rowdiness. Never before had he encountered such a learned ruffian. Well before his twenty-first birthday Marx joined the Trier Tavern Club, an organization devoted to pub-crawling and revelry. Bonn University suspended him for disorderly conduct in 1835. He narrowly escaped debtors' prison while attending the University of Berlin in 1841. Police in Cologne arrested him for carrying a concealed weapon. Because of his unruly coal-black hair, swarthy complexion and ungovernable nature Marx's companions dubbed him "the Moor," a nickname that stuck. In Francis Wheen's words,

"he was, like Esau, (a) hairy man (with) lion-like head (and) ... jet-black mane ... a bristling boar. .. " [4]


Two philosophers captivated Marx during his college days: Georg Friedrich Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach. Hegel posited a theory of dialectical evolution toward Spirit, which operated by a process of thesis-anti-thesis-synthesis. For example, hedonism (thesis) versus asceticism (antithesis) might yield the hybrid concept Epicureanism, or rational pleasure-seeking. Epicureanism then would become a new thesis, opposed by stoicism (rational self-denial,) which would lead to a more sophisticated formulation, such as Kant's Categorical Imperative, an abstract (or "ideal") solution to ethics' pleasure-pain issue. Being an utter materialist, Ludwig Feuerbach denied the existence of Spirit, asserting that thought arose from being, rather than being from thought. Human ideas were simply gases emanating from the biological swamp, not revelations vouchsafed by an invisible, "noumenal" world superintended by God. Marx adopted Feuerbach's naturalistic view of existence.

"Man is an object in nature ... swayed by no supernatural influences .... (possessing) no occult properties; (his) entire behavior can be adequately accounted for by means of ordinary verifiable physical hypotheses." [5]


Physical factors such as economic conditions, heredity, education, culture -- even diet -- combined to determine the nature of an individual man. Spirit did not exist.

Marx would eventually take secular humanism to its ultimate conclusion, fusing the ideas of Hegel and Feuerbach into a clumsy synthesis he called Dialectical Materialism. This paradigm held that the proletariat, antithesis of our bourgeois ruling class, would create a communist state through revolution. Marx, though cynical by temperament, believed in the perfectibility of man. With some qualifications, he accepted the romantic optimism of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who imagined that free public education and re-distribution of wealth would eliminate crime, reduce disease, and lift mankind into a better world.

The baptized Marxes enjoyed good social relations with Trier's preeminent citizen, Baron Ludwig von Westphalen. The Baron engaged clever Heinrich Marx as his attorney. Sophie Marx, Heinrich's daughter, became the best friend of the Baron's little girl, Jenny. Karl befriended his schoolmate Edgar von Westphalen, Jenny's younger brother.

At the age of sixteen Karl feel deeply in love with beautiful twenty year old Jenny von Westphalen. To his amazement, she reciprocated, and accepted his proposal of marriage in 1836, though they did not marry until seven years later. During this long period of betrothal Marx studied and caroused at the universities of Bonn, Berlin, and Jena, finally receiving his Doctor of Laws degree from Jena on April 15, 1841.

Karl had vague intentions of teaching at the university, but soon torpedoed any chances of attaining a professorship by writing an anti-clerical broadside, The Last Trump of Judgment Against Hegel. That setback did not daunt him. In the coming years his controversial writings repeatedly got him into trouble.

Radical Journalist

Marx moved on to Cologne, where Moses Hess, a wealthy Jewish liberal hired him as associate editor of Die Rhenische Zeitung (The Rhineland Times,) which was subsidized by a group of anti-monarchist businessmen. Marx vigorously attacked Prussia's repressive government. Under pressure from miserly landowners the Prussian Landtag passed a law rescinding the centuries-old right of peasants to gather fallen tree limbs from private forests for firewood. A mean-spirited Junker deputy defended this stingy measure by insisting that "pilfering ... wood occurs so often because it's not regarded as ... theft." [6] Marx retorted:

"By analogy ... the legislator would have to draw the conclusion "a box on the ear has become so frequent because it is not regarded as murder." [7]


Insolence toward noble officials did not go over well in Prussia. In December, 1842 Oberpresident von Schaeper recommended that Die Rheinische Zeitung be prosecuted for "impudent and disrespectful criticism of ... existing government institutions." [8] Marx's extremism made his bourgeois sponsors uncomfortable. They wanted a well-trained Doberman, not an ungovernable pit bull. No less a personage than Tsar Nicholas I of Russia had complained about the Zeitung's advocacy of anarchism. Intractable Marx then bit the hand that fed him, howling that Hess and his patrons really didn't care about freedom of the press. They fired him in January, 1843.

On November 16, 1842, while passing through Cologne, a well-dressed young man named Friedrich Engels ambled into the Rheinische Zeitung's office and introduced himself to Marx. Though captivated by his writings, Engels first impressions of Marx were unfavorable. He found him personally obnoxious -- a rampant egotist who brooked no dissent. The pair would not become friends for another two years.

Karl Marx married Baroness Johanna Bertha Julia Jenny von Westphalen on June 19, 1843. The couple remained on her mother's estate in Kreuznach for an extended honeymoon. Through marriage Karl acquired a mother-in-law justifiably skeptical of his bread-winning abilities, plus two widely disparate brothers-in-law: Jenny's elder half-brother Ferdinand von Westphalen, a stern reactionary who served as Prussia's Minister of the Interior, and her younger brother Edgar, an amiable buffoon who cleaned out the Marxes' liquor cabinet on every visit.

While in Kreuznach Marx wrote "A World without Jews" In response to his friend Bruno Bauer's article "The Jewish Question," which had argued against granting civil rights to Jews. Marx identified "Jews" with "entrepreneurs," an assumption easy to make in Germany since the word "Judentum" meant "business." According to him, after the Protestant Reformation, "Christians have become Jews." [9] Now all of mankind needed to be emancipated from "Judentum" (capitalism.) Marx felt that the issue could be resolved by establishing an anti-clerical socialist state.

"How is religious opposition made impossible?

By abolishing religion. As soon as Jew and Christian recognize that their respective religions are no more than different stages in the development of the human mind, different snake skins cast off by history, ... the relation of Jew and Christian is no longer religious, but. .. only a critical, scientific, and human relation." [10]


The not-quite-assimilated Jew refused to believe In the hide-bound notion of blood ties.

Twenty-five year old Karl Marx largely based this essay upon a play on the words "Jude" (Jew) and "Judentum" (commerce.) He presumptuously assumed that modern Reason had already judged theology false, thus rendering religious differences meaningless. These suppositions plagued Marxist ideology to the end. Communist states failed everywhere because they underestimated men's pecuniary, spiritual, and national aspirations.

In October, 1843 journalist Arnold Ruge offered Marx a job in Paris as editor for The Franco-German Annals. Jenny declined Ruge's offer to live in a commune with his wife and children. Michael Bakunin, Heinrich Heine, and the poet Georg Herwegh all contributed articles to the paper. Marx and Ruge soon quarreled about politics, domestic matters, and Herwegh's extramarital affair with a French noblewoman. Their potshots at the Prussian government did not go unnoticed. Ruge's series about the wretched working conditions of Silesian weavers sparked a furor. In April, 1844 Marx could not resist publishing a ponderous jest at the expense of Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm. No one remembered much about this leaden joke -- other than that it provoked groans rather than laughter, and had something to do with the queen's breasts. At any rate, gendarmes closed down Franco-German Annals in August for his lame witticism, and expelled him from France. The incident illustrated Marx's dual nature as an intellectual giant and clutz. He mixed trenchant criticisms of existing institutions with silly attacks on individuals. Trashing real and imagined villains in print generally had the effect of damaging his own self-interest, without ameliorating social conditions one iota.

Marx and Friedrich Engels met again on August 28, 1844 at the Cafe DeRegence Place du Palais in Paris, one of Voltaire's favorite hangouts. This time they hit it off. Jenny had taken baby Jennychen for an extended visit to her mother's estate in Germany. This freed up "Moor" and "The General" for ten straight days of tippling and political discussion. From that date on, Engels became an indispensable friend and benefactor.

Now a persona non grata in both Germany and France, Marx moved to Belgium. In Brussels he collaborated with new friend Engels on A Critique of Economics and Politics and The German Ideology. They took a trip to England to meet Chartist radicals George Julian Harney and Ernest Jones, who favored such reforms as higher wages, universal male suffrage, paid M.P.'s, and the abolition of "rotten boroughs." With funds from Wilhelm "Lupus" Wolff and other members of The Communist League, Marx founded The New Rhineland Times just as France's Revolution of 1848 heated up. A succession of incendiary articles got him into trouble. On March 19, 1849 Belgian authorities issued an order banishing him from their soil. Marx appealed this action, but received a formal denial five months later. On August 27, 1849 he sailed for London.

Born to Evangelical Christian parents in Wuppertal, Germany on November 28, 1820, young Friedrich Engels worked two years as a bank clerk in Bremen. While there, he studied the works of Hegel, Lessing, Fourier, St. Simon, and others. In 1841 Engels served as an enlisted artilleryman in the Prussian Army. Wanting to make the best of it, he perused several books on military science and became something of an armchair expert on that subject. Because of his extensive knowledge about weaponry, battlefield tactics, and supply, Marx nicknamed former Private First Class Engels "The General." The duo co-wrote several works, including The Holy Family, German Ideology, and The Communist Manifesto. On his own Engels published The Condition of the Working Class in England and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and State (1884). The two men had different strengths, which complemented one another. Engels wrote rapidly and clearly about actual economic conditions in Europe. Though lacking his colleague's fluency, Marx had a firm grasp of abstract concepts, and managed to weld communist theory into an internally logical system. Engels was an unmarried playboy with good income and cheerful disposition, Marx a scholarly and cantankerous family man.

Friedrich Engels Sr. owned the textile company Engels & Ermen. Engels Jr. supervised this firm's Manchester, England plant from 1844 to 1870, and became a managing partner in 1864. He greatly enjoyed the un-communistic sport of foxhunting, smoked Cuban cigars, and collected expensive wines. Through Marx's recurrent monetary crises, Engels could be relied upon not only for funds, but cases of hock, claret, sherry, and port to fortify his comrade's vitality. After Paris's disastrous Revolution of February, 1848 -- led by poet Georg Herwegh -- Engels treated himself to a vacation in Provence.

"At every step I found the gayest company, the sweetest grapes and prettiest girls .... " [11]


He preferred "the cleanly-washed, smoothly combed, slimly built women of Burgundy" [12] to their hard-working sisters in Loire.

Engels' conviction that marriage oppressed women afforded him an excuse to remain a lifelong bachelor. Between visits to bordellos he carried on affairs with two attractive Irish sisters, Mary and Lydia Burns. Mary, his favorite, worked for awhile in Ermen & Engels' cotton spinning mill. She introduced him not only to downtrodden workers, but Chartist political activists such as George Julian Harney, Feargus O'Connor, and Ernest Jones. Her sudden death in January, 1863 plunged him into all five stages of grief for months.

Chronic Penury

"The bourgeoisie will pay dearly for every one of my carbuncles."

-- Karl Marx


Marx once described himself as "tormented as Job, though not as God-fearing." [13] He and Jenny truly loved one another, but their lives were anything but blissful. The couple endured dire poverty and the deaths of three children: Edgar ("Musch"), Guido ("Fawksey"), and Franziska.

Karl suffered from boils, carbuncles, piles, eye-inflammations, rheumatism, and liver disease. The foul-smelling stogies he chain-smoked gave him bronchitis. Jenny contracted a severe case of smallpox in 1861 which disfigured her beautiful face. A variety of female maladies plagued her -- aggravated, no doubt, by bill collectors who hounded her almost daily from 1849 to 1864. Five year old Edgar "Musch" Marx learned to spot detectives, and yell: "Mr. Marx ain't upstairs." [14]

Karl Marx was a world class economist incapable of balancing his own household budget. It does not require a certified public accountant to see why. He rarely held a steady job, and always lived beyond his means. During their first fifteen years in London creditors banged constantly on his door for past due payments. Bailiffs arrived regularly to repossess the family's household contents. Marx pawned and redeemed Jenny's wedding silverware on several occasions. Because of his scruffy appearance the police once arrested him at a pawnshop on suspicion of fencing stolen goods. In 1851 a compassionate neighbor gave him money to bury infant daughter Franziska. Marx could not afford proper medical care for his dying son Edgar in 1855.

In the early 1850's a German spy described his mode of life in Dean St.

"He lives in one of the worst and cheapest neighborhoods in London. He occupies two rooms. There is not one clean or decent piece of furniture ... Everything is broken, tattered, and torn, with thick dust over (it.) Manuscripts, books and newspapers lie beside the children's toys, ... pieces from his wife's sewing basket, cups with broken rims, dirty spoons, knives, forks, lamps, an inkpot, tumblers, pipes, tobacco ash -- all piled up on the same table. On entering .... Smoke and tobacco fumes make your eyes water to such an extent that ... you seem to be groping about in a cavern ... " [15]


Karl's brainstorm of marketing a "magical varnish" came to nothing in 1854, as did a scheme with son-in-law Paul LaFargue to sell photo-engraving equipment. The railroad turned him down for a clerk's position because of his rumpled appearance, indecipherable handwriting, and notoriety as "The Red Terrorist Doctor." Although conventional employment eluded Marx, he churned out a vast corpus of literature in the British Museum's reading room. But after Das Kapital's publication, he complained that the book's meager royalties did not reimburse him for cigar expenses.

Marx leeched shamelessly off Friedrich Engels -- despite receiving substantial inheritances from his mother, eccentric bachelor Wilhelm Wolff, and Jenny's mother. Shortly after selling his Ermen & Engels shares back to the company in 1870, munificent Engels solved the Marxes' incessant financial problems by granting them an annual pension of 350 pounds.

Image
Karl Marx, 1875

The Bourgeois Bohemian

For all his communist rhetoric, Marx had decidedly bourgeois tastes. He took great satisfaction in Jenny's noble pedigree. At his request, she often enclosed a card bearing her title, "Mrs. Jenny Marx nee Baronesse de Westphalen," along with letters to editors. Marx had no qualms about associating with bigwigs. For instance, he relished having lunch in posh clubs with newspaper magnate Leonard Montefiore and cabinet minister Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff. Although Marx considered Scottish member of Parliament David Urquhart "an utter maniac," [16] he carried on a long friendship with him. An advocate of Islam, Turkish baths, protective tariffs, and Calvinism, Uruquart loathed the Anglican Church, Whig party, and Russia. He and Marx shared Russophobic prejudices and the crackpot theory that British Prime Minister Henry John Temple Palmerston -- who waged the Crimean War against Russia -- was a paid agent of the Tsar.

The spies who tailed Marx in London all described him as an affectionate husband and father -- albeit one with "disorderly habits." He took his daughters on frequent excursions to the park, rode donkeys for their amusement, told bedtime stories, and entertained them with dramatic readings from the works of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Cervantes.

His friend and fellow socialist Wilhelm Liebknecht commented:

"Although in political and economic discussion he was not wont to mince ... words, often making use of quite coarse phrases, his language was so gentle and refined in the presence of children and women that even an English governess could have no cause for complaint." [17]


Though Marx cursed like jack tar himself, obscenities muttered by rogues in polite company made him "fidget and blush like a sixteen year old maiden." [18]

Conservatives who associated socialism with sexual promiscuity exasperated Marx. In The Communist Manifesto he asserted:

"(We) have no need to introduce free love; it has existed almost from time immemorial... Our bourgeoisie, not content with having the wives and daughters of ... proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of ... prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each others' wives." [19]


Marx assumed the tone of a Presbyterian church elder when reproving his daughter Laura's boyfriend Paul LaFargue:

"If you wish to continue your relations with my daughter you will have to give up your present manner of "courting" ... You know full well that no engagement has been entered into ... The practice of excessive intimacy is especially inappropriate ... To my mind, true love expresses itself in reticence, modesty, and even the shyness of the lover toward his object of veneration, and certainly not in giving free rein to one's passion and in premature demonstrations of familiarity. If you should urge your Creole temperament in your defense it is my duty to interpose my sound reason between your temperament and my daughter. If in her presence you are incapable of loving her in keeping with (propriety), you will have to resign yourself to loving her from a distance." [20]


American communist Victoria Woodhull's endorsement of free love made him as uncomfortable as the American clergymen who pilloried her. Associating communism with licentiousness damaged the movement.

Marx consistently resisted anarchists like Bakunin. The indiscriminate violence they championed would only lead to chaos and barbarism. He scoffed at Wilhelm Weitling's daft idea of raising a 40,000 army of criminals to revolt against the capitalist state.

Even during hard times Marx tried to preserve a middle class lifestyle for himself and his family. He could not live without wine, choice viands, cigars, books, or decent health care. Being an aristocrat, Jenny absolutely required the assistance of servants. She always wore fashionable clothes. Though their living quarters may sometimes have been untidy, Jenny furnished them tastefully. Daughters Jennychen, Laura, and Eleanor received private school educations. The family owned a series of lap dogs and went on vacation almost every summer. When temporarily flush after receiving legacies, Marx liked to play the stock market.

After the manner of Heinrich Heine, Marx advocated the proletarian cause without feeling particularly fond of proles. The capitalistic system subjected factory workers to toxic chemicals, bad food, cheap booze, poor dental care, and illiteracy. Thus, not all of them were attractive. One day Wilhelm Liebknecht accompanied Marx on an omnibus ride through London. When a cockney woman in distress shrieked "murder!" outside a bar, Marx chivalrously rushed to her aid, only to find himself in the middle of a domestic argument between an inebriated fishwife and her equally intoxicated hubby. The bedraggled pair immediately turned upon her would-be rescuer. Liebknecht, who reluctantly followed his quixotic friend into this fracas, described the outcome.

"The crowd closed more and more around us and assumed a threatening attitude against the 'damned foreigners' ... Had not two strong constables made their appearance in time we should have had to pay dearly for our philanthropic attempt at intervention." [21]


For the most part Marx chose to help the working class cause by conferring with educated peers such as Engels, Lassalle, and Liebknecht. After moving to London, he deputized "men of the people" like George Julian Harney, Johann Georg Eccarius, and Wilhelm Weitling to deliver speeches before workers.

Marx condemned bohemianism as "inverted philistinism," [22] yet spent most of his life as a bohemian. The Prussian Secret Service recorded his irregular habits while keeping him under surveillance in London.

"Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely ... He likes to get drunk. Though he's often idle for days on end, he'll work ... with endurance when he has a great deal of work to do. He has no fixed times for going to sleep and waking up. He often stays up all night ... then lies down fully clothed on the sofa at midday and sleeps till evening, untroubled by the comings and goings of the world." [23]


Marx flouted respectability by inventing exotic nicknames for his children: "Fly," "Kiki," "Koko," "Tussy," and "Fawksey," and encouraging them to address him as "Moor" or "Old Nick." Observers noticed his striking resemblance to Cinder Klaus, the dirty and drunken anti-Santa Claus who beat naughty children with a switch. Marx solemnly instructed his daughters to disregard the Bible and all forms of religion. His mother and sisters meant nothing to him. When Engels' girlfriend Mary Burns died in 1863, he wrote:

"Instead of Mary it should have been my mother, who's ... prey to physical ailments and has had her fair share of life." [24]


By all accounts his marriage to Jenny was a happy one, yet he copulated off and on with servant Helene Demuth, getting her pregnant in 1850. On June 23, 1851 she gave birth to Henry Frederick Demuth (1851-1929) and put him up for adoption. "Freddy" spent most of his adult life working as a lathe-operator in London's East End.

Doctor of Laws Marx had little compunction about breaking the law. He kept eight rifles and two hundred and fifty rounds of ammunition at The New Rhineland Times' office in Brussels. While on a bender one evening in London with cronies Wilhelm Liebknecht and Edgar Bauer, Marx threw stones at street lights.

"Clash! Clatter! A gas lantern went flying into splinters ... We broke four or five street lamps. It was, perhaps, two o'clock in the morning and the streets were deserted ... but the noise nevertheless attracted the attention of a policeman ... Happily ... we knew the locality (and) raced ahead, three or four policemen some distance behind us. Marx showed ... surprising agility that I should not have attributed to him ... " [25]


For years penniless Marx cheerfully accepted petty cash that Engels purloined from his employer's till. After Ferdinand Freiligrath helped him get a job as correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune, Marx induced Engels to write dozens of articles under his by-line. Of course, all of the Tribune's paychecks went into Marx's account, without a farthing paid to Engels. Marx's columns, with Engels' secret participation, made a hit with Tribune readers, who appreciated their detailed grasp of politics, economics, history, philosophy, and military science.

"The Tribune's London correspondent soon acquired ... considerable popularity ... as an exceptionally versatile and well-informed journalist." [26]


General Orneriness

Karl Marx loved his wife, children, and "heart brothers" Friedrich Engels, Wilhelm "Lupus" Wolff, and Wilhelm Liebknecht. Outside that narrow circle, there was a long trail of broken relationships. He turned on Moses Hess and Arnold Ruge, individuals who gave him his first breaks in journalism. Fellow socialist theoretician Ludwig Borne suffered the same fate. Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer had been his favorite drinking buddy in 1841. Four years later Marx skewered him in a vituperative pamphlet entitled The Holy Family. Poet Ferdinand Freiligrath and Marx were fast friends for over twenty-five years. Freiligrath raised money for him, contributed socialistic poetry to The New Rhineland Times, and introduced him and Engels to New York Daily Tribune editor Charles A. Dana. A rupture occurred in 1870. Marx exploded because Freiligrath wrote a collection of patriotic German poems. They never spoke again.

Like Heinrich Heine and Dietrich Eckart, Marx regularly penned malicious satires against his enemies. The Last Trump of Judgment versus Hegel ruined his prospects of securing a teaching post. While his family nearly starved in 1852, he wasted four months composing The Great Men of Exile, a vitriolic assault on forgotten poet Gottfried Kinkel.

Marx's bigger targets included the Prussian monarchy, Russian autocracy, and bourgeois governments of France and England. His best diatribe, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852) incisively exposed Napoleon III's formation of Europe's first modern police state in reaction against France's 1848 Revolution.

Not long after they overthrew Napoleon III in 1870, French liberals got saddled with President Adolphe Thiers' Third Republic. Marx's "Civil War in France" (1871) exposed the skullduggery of Thiers, his Finance Minister Jules Favre, and Defense Minister Ernest Picard. This trio seized power by collaborating with France's German archenemies. They convinced the Prussians that revolution would break out in Paris, then spread throughout Europe, unless immediate action were taken against radicals.

Misguided members of The Paris Commune executed over a thousand "reactionaries," including the Archbishop of Paris. This rampage seemed to confirm the claims of Thiers and company. With Prussian backing, French soldiers and police commenced a counterrevolutionary purge, killing approximately 19,000 communards and innocent bystanders within a month. France's suppression of the Communards anticipated Germany's own counterinsurgency campaign against Munich's Spartacists in 1919. To make matters worse, a devastating fire destroyed one quarter of Paris. Beleaguered Parisians feared that the end of the world had come.

After Thiers agreed to pay their huge war indemnity, the Prussians installed him as Premier. Germany's "white" overreaction to the Commune's uprising, coupled with its annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, turned English opinion in favor of the French. Prescient Marx immediately divined that England and France would patch up their differences and approach Russia for an alliance, thus guaranteeing a future two-front war for Germany.

Marx assailed Thiers as

"a monstrous gnome ... French Sulla ... , master in small state roguery, ... virtuoso in perjury and treason, ... craftsman in all the petty stratagems, cunning devices, and base perfidies of parliamentary party warfare; never scrupling when out of office to fan a revolution, and to stifle it in blood when at the helm of state; with class prejudices standing him in ... place of ideas, and vanity in the place of a heart; his private life is as infamous as his public life is odious ... " [27]


Thiers' foreign minister Jules Favre lived "in concubinage with the wife of a drunkard resident in Algiers ... " [28] He had made his fortune "by a most daring concoction of forgeries." [29] Political opponent M. Milliere, a National Assembly member, publicized a number of his shady dealings. After Favre came to power he had Milliere shot for treason.

Finance Minister Ernest Picard hung out with sleazy characters, including his brother Arthur,

"an individual expelled from the Paris Bourse as a blackleg ... convicted on his own confession of a theft of 300,000 francs while manager of the Societe General (du Credit Mobilier) branch, Rue Palestro #5 ... The whole financial correspondence of that worthy pair of brothers fell into the hands of the Commune." [30]


Marx did not only excoriate conservatives. Out of peevishness and jealousy, he continually denounced fellow left-wingers. Italian reformer Giuseppe Mazzini was lambasted as a "demagogue," and Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin as "Mahomet without a Koran." [31]

"Bakunin as a theorist, is nothing, Bakunin, the intriguer, has attained to the highest peak of his profession." [32]


He slammed French socialist Pierre Proudhon as a sentimentalist who preached tedious "homilies about home, conjugal love, and suchlike banalities," [33]. .. which mistook "his own petite bourgeois desires ... (for) eternal values." [34] Mocking Proudhon's magnum opus The Philosophy of Poverty as "The Poverty of Philosophy," Marx reviled him for ignorance of history, and a bothersome tendency to moralize.

"Nothing is easier than to invent mystical causes, that is, phrases ... lacking in common sense ... (Man's) material relations form the basis of all his relations... Economic categories are (not) emanations of God's heart ... (Proudhon) thumps his chest and glorifies himself before God and man as being innocent of socialist infamies! ... " [35]


Marx resented Proudhon's disapproval of violent revolution, and his enthusiasm for the "liberty, fraternity, equality balderdash." Pure Communism frowned on individualism as retrograde and fraternity as a utopian illusion. Equality could only be achieved by toppling capitalism and setting up a classless society in its place. Without revolution one had the usual bourgeois double-standard: sanctimonious talk along with de facto segregation.

Marx denigrated American communist Victoria Woodhull as a "whore" who brought discredit upon the International movement. Although Dr. Ludwig Kugelmann functioned as one of his chief German patrons at considerable risk to himself, Marx petulantly broke off all relations with "that hair-splitting philistine" [36] in 1862. Chartist agitator Julian Harney could also have been a valuable ally. However, he and his smitten wife Mary occasionally indulged in public displays of affection which disgusted Marx, who derided Harney as "Our Dear." [37] Mary did not want her husband coming under the spell of unkempt Marx, much preferring French "dandies" such as Louis Blanc and Pierre Francois Landolphe. On February 23, 1851 Marx informed Engels that

"She hates me as a frivolous fellow who might endanger her 'property' ... The extent of Harney's thralldom to this familiar spirit, and of the petty Scottish wiliness with which she conducts her intrigues will be apparent to you ... " [38]


Ferdinand Lassalle incited deep ambivalence in Marx. The son of a wealthy Jewish silk merchant, Lassalle attended the universities of Breslau and Berlin, where he studied philology, law, and philosophy. The theories of Heraclitus and Hegel particularly fascinated him. In 1845 he met Countess Sophie von Hatzenfelt, whose husband had recently abandoned her for Baroness Meyendorff. Lassalle took the countess's case against Count von Hatzenfelt. After thirty-six court hearings over a ten year period Lassalle won a landmark decision, requiring the count to pay alimony and child support.

His litigation on behalf of the countess was interrupted by a year long imprisonment for agitation during the Revolution of 1848. Lassalle took an active interest in Europe's labor movement and criticized German foreign policy. He loathed the Russian autocracy and advocated an alliance of Germany and France against Austria in the Italian campaign of 1859.

A spell-binding orator, Lassalle embarked upon a barnstorming political tour in 1862. Germans had never before seen such American-style political huckstering. He delivered rousing speeches before workers in every major city and industrial town, winning many to the socialist cause. Adolf Hitler's whirlwind political campaigning between 1919 and 1932 followed Lassalle's example.

In 1863 Lassalle founded the General German Workers Association, which later evolved into the Social Democratic Party. Unlike the revolutionary Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle was essentially a reformer who wanted to effect change within the existing system.

Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had no special love for Jews, but he admired their astuteness. He recognized that Ferdinand Lassalle, British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, and banker Gerson Blochroeder all possessed superior intelligence. Bismarck conferred with Lassalle on several occasions. Based on his insights, the Iron Chancellor conceived of an alliance among the monarchy, army, and working class against the bourgeoisie. He accepted Lassalle's argument that blue collar laborers could be won over by humanitarian measures such as government health insurance and universal suffrage.

Always a flashy romantic, Lassalle met an untimely end at the age of 39. He fell in love with Helene von Donniges, daughter of a Bavarian diplomat posted in Switzerland. Helene's father detested Lassalle. He refused permission to marry and mewed her up in the family home. In order to escape from virtual imprisonment, Helene eventually agreed to marry Count von Racowitz. Lassalle wrote a letter to his rival which accused him of coercing Helene to marry him. Von Racowitz challenged Lassalle to a duel. He accepted. On August 28, 1864 the two men walked twelve paces and turned. Lassalle held his pistol down without firing. Von Racowitz shot him in the gut, mortally wounding him. Lassalle died three days later.

Ferdinand Lassalle aided Karl Marx in several ways. He acted as his literary agent in Germany, as well as a conduit for funds. Countess von Hatzenfelt and Lassalle entertained Marx graciously during an extended visit in 1861. Later that year Marx put up Lassalle in London for a few weeks, under much less stylish conditions. The profligate guest offended his host by spending money freely on fashionable clothing, restaurant meals, and wine, while not seeming to notice the Marxes' dire plight. At one point Karl borrowed money from him. Never a prompt debt-payer, Marx felt humiliated and incensed when Lassalle needled him for reimbursement. In letters to Engels Marx applied such anti-Semitic epithets to Lassalle as "the Yid, Wily Ephraim, (Baron) Izzy, and ... the Jewish Nigger." [39] Marx softened a bit after hearing of Lassalle's tragic death.

"He was, after all, ... the enemy of our enemies ... It IS difficult to believe that so noisy, stirring, pushing a man is now dead as a mouse and must hold his tongue altogether ... the devil knows, (our) crowd is getting smaller and no new blood is coming forward." [40]


Marx's enemies did not remain mute about his shortcomings. Bakunin retaliated by depicting him as

" . .. immensely malicious, vain, quarrelsome, as intolerant and autocratic as Jehovah, the God of his fathers, and like Him, insanely vindictive." [41]


Proudhon called Marx "the tapeworm of socialism." [42] Mazzini pegged him as

"a man of domineering disposition; jealous of the influence of others. Governed by no earnest philosophical, or religious belief: having ... more elements of anger than of love in his nature." [43]


Marx harbored prejudices against various racial and national groups. He regarded most Frenchmen -- including his sons-in-law -- as vain coxcombs.

"When presented with the opportunity of making themselves important, the French prepare for it as long in advance and treat it with as much solemnity as the ... lying-in of a pregnant woman." [44]


Their superficial emotionalism made them incapable of true revolution. In Das Kapital Marx attempted to demolish the "shallowness" of French socialists like Charles Fourier, Comte St. Simon, and Pierre Proudhon. His communard sons-in-law Charles Longuet and Paul LaFargue infuriated him by still clinging to Proudhon's "half-baked" altruism.

Marx considered Russians "Tartar brutes" who would never comprehend socialist theory. This negative attitude stemmed in part from antipathy for rival Michael Bakunin and his underworld associate Sergei "Boy" Nechayev, a hooligan who died in a St. Petersburg prison ten years after being convicted of murder.

About Englishmen Marx wrote:

"These thick-headed John Bulls' ... brainpans seem to have been specially manufactured for ... constables' bludgeons ... " [45]


He endorsed Friedrich Engels' characterization of Australia as the

" ... united states of deported murderers, burglars, rapists, and pickpockets ... " [46]


Marx even held a grudge against tolerant Belgium for offering asylum in 1845, then kicking him out after the French disorders of 1848. He lashed out at the "imbecility ... of the ... Belgian press," [47] and slavishness of its police officials, who kowtowed to Europe's worst despots.
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Re: Hitler's Mentor: Dietrich Eckart, His Life, Times, & Mil

Postby admin » Mon Dec 10, 2018 3:23 am

Part 2 of 2

Communist Theoretician

Marx's best writing displays epigrammatic eloquence. The Communist Manifesto (1848) begins ominously:

"A spectre is haunting Europe... the spectre of communism ... " [48]


It refers to the industrial worker as "an appendage of the machine." [49] He disparages Fourier's "phalansteries" and Robert Owen's "home colonies" as "castles in the air." [50] The Manifesto's rousing conclusion rings in one's ears.

"Workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all countries, unite!" [51]


Many of Marx's aphorisms derive from philosophy. He regarded defiant Prometheus as "the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar." [52] A pragmatic Aristotelian, he famously declared that "philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." [53] Adopting the skepticism of Hume, Voltaire, and Feuerbach Marx described religion as

the sigh of the oppressed ... , the heart of a heartless world, and .... soul of soulless conditions ... the opium of the people." [54]


Clergymen pandered to people's superstitions. Marx quoted Epicurus's maxim that

"impiety does not consist in destroying the mob's gods, but rather in ascribing the ideas of the crowd to God." [55]


He shared Immanuel Kant's mistrust of ordinary common sense -- which naively claimed the earth was flat. One had to dig deeper to arrive at truth.

"It is paradox that the earth moves around the sun, and that water consists of two highly inflammable gases. Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive nature of things." [56]


Even conservatives reluctantly admit that Karl Marx occupies the upper echelon of modern thought along with Luther, Newton, and Darwin. Although a materialist, he realized that money-grubbing capitalists caused alienation which destroyed the quality of life on earth.

"The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, .... lawyer, ... priest, ... poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers." [57]


Production should be a cooperative effort for the good of mankind. But sly hustlers had perverted it into a money-making game. Under the capitalist system a small cabal of exploiters dominated multitudes of the exploited.

Capitalism contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Marx admired Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, but disagreed with its argument that an "Invisible Hand's" operations invariably benefited mankind. Marx's insightful critique of the free market economy still holds up. He thoroughly grasped its propensities toward monopoly and panics. According to his analysis, power gradually concentrated into relatively few hands as a result of larger companies adopting improved technology, and underselling smaller ones, thus driving them out of business. Therefore, an unscrupulous oligarchy lorded it over an ever-expanding proletariat.

" ... Small trades people, shopkeepers, ... handicraftsmen, and peasants -- all ... sink ... into the proletariat. .. Their diminutive capital does not suffice ... and is swamped in ... competition with ... large (companies), partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production." [58]


Marx preached that big business, for all its rhetoric about free enterprise, actually devastated laissez-fair economics in the long run. But this very success put plutocrats in jeopardy. Artisans, tradesmen, and white-collar workers "proletarianized" by their machinations soon swelled the ranks of their "paid enemies" in the working class.

Declasse bourgeois intellectuals -- like Marx himself -- formed the vanguard of all revolutions. Their task was to mobilize the proletarian behemoth created by modern capitalism. Hitler knew this also. When witnessing an organized labor parade in pre-war Vienna, he compared the working class to a huge "dragon." The wizard who could tame that beast would acquire unprecedented political power.

In fact, the capitalist economy's cyclical periodicities made it vulnerable to insurrection. Corporations tended to overproduce goods, which the underpaid masses could not afford. Drops in demand accompanied by oversupply caused recessions, leading to unemployment and reduced wages. Civil unrest among the masses happened with greater frequency in such bad times. Marx expected Communist Revolution to manifest in periods of depression, and high inflation following wars. His Jewish ancestors could have told him that the same trend obtained with regard to anti-Semitic outbreaks, which also occurred during times of economic turmoil.

Marx fit the "urban Jew" stereotype by preferring city living. The conservatism of country peasants rankled him. Workers in every European metropolis gravitated toward socialism, but no headway could be made with hicks from outlying areas. In The Communist Manifesto, he credited bourgeois capitalists with eradicating feudalism and thus saving "a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life." [59]

Marx's penetrating insights on the current events of his time impressed Charles Dana, Grant Duff, and other moderates. Right after the Franco- Prussian War he foresaw the inevitability of war between Germany and Russia. Referring to India's Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 against the British, he commented:

"The first blow dealt to the French monarchy proceeded from the nobility, not from the peasants. The Indian revolt does not commence with the Ryots, tortured dishonored and stripped by the British, but with the Sepoys, clad, fed, petted, fatted, and pampered by them." [60]


This tracked with his theory that "the bourgeoisie produces ... its own gravediggers." [61]

"Every class, as soon as it takes up the struggle against the class above it, is involved in a struggle with the class beneath it." [62]


Thus, privileged and educated people were more likely to rebel against despotism than those on the ladder's lowest rung.

Though Marx himself was a "Wandering Jew," he failed to take into account that more of Germany's disgruntled lower middle class emigrated than revolted. He would not admit that the charity of evangelical churches undermined communism. Nor did he sufficiently appreciate the extent to which England's Reform Bill diminished revolutionary ardor.

Capitalist economies needed ever-expanding markets in order to grow. Marx identified the "global economy" as early as 1848.

"The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country ... We find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes." [63]


Marx viewed labor as a commodity which workers sold to capitalists. When wages fell, workers had less money to spend. Therefore, the revenue of big corporations plummeted. Anticipating Keynesian economics, Marx realized that an indigent laboring class increased the likelihood of financial downturns. He illustrated this point by demonstrating how even criminals stimulated the economy.

"Would locks ever had reached their present degree of excellence had there been no thieves? Would the making of banknotes have reached its present perfection had there been no forgers? .. The criminal moreover produces ... the police, ... constables, judges, hangmen, etc." [64]


The Marx Legacy and Family Curse

Marx's money woes subsided after Wilhelm "Lupus" Wolff's legacy in 1864, followed by Engel's 350 pound annual pension in 1870. That year Engels retired to a fashionable address in London's St. John's Wood section. The two friends continued to meet almost daily.

During the last ten years of his life Marx settled into a routine: rising at 7 A.M., drinking five cups of black coffee with breakfast, then walking to the British Museum. There he wrote, and read The London Times, Economist, and government Blue Books until 2 PM, when he returned home for dinner with his family. Following a stroll on Hampstead Heath, he worked at the desk in his study until after midnight. Due to low-level depression, Marx increasingly withdrew into the world of books, learning Turkish and Russian in his sixties. Avid reading curtailed his literary output.

"As his bibliomania grew, Engels' worst fears became confirmed; (Marx) wrote less and less, and more crabbedly and obscurely ... The second and third volumes of Das Kapital (were) greatly inferior in mental power and lucidity to the first volume ... " [65]


After a painful and protracted bout with cancer, Jenny Marx died on December 2, 1881. Seriously ill with bronchitis and pleurisy, the bedridden Marx could not attend her funeral. In January he traveled to the Isle of Wight for a rest cure, but gale-force winds and sleet worsened his condition. In mid-February, on doctor's orders, he embarked on a voyage to Algiers. For three months the Father of Communism limped through the Casbah with tears in his eyes. He then drifted aimlessly to Monte Carlo, Argenteuil, and Vevey, Switzerland, before returning to London in October, 1882. After much suffering, his thirty-eight year old daughter Jennychen died of bladder cancer on January 11, 1883. Marx, who still resided with Helene Demuth, stopped going to the British Museum. He sat around their flat sipping a concoction of milk, rum, and brandy to calm his nerves. In February, 1883 an abscess formed on his lung. Marx's condition deteriorated until his death on March 14, 1883.

The daughters of Karl and Jenny Marx seemed afflicted by a family curse. Jennychen married left-wing professor Charles Longuet, who cruelly abused her. She gave birth to five boys in seven years, one of whom died. An intelligent and highly cultured woman, Jennychen loved theater and good conversation. Unfortunately, household chores, and child care overwhelmed her. Ill-tempered husband Charles provided no emotional support. On April 10, 1882 Jennychen wrote her sister Eleanor: "though I drudge like a (slave) he never does anything but scream at me and grumble every minute he is in the house." [66] Nine months later she died.

Laura Marx married French Creole anarchist, Paul LaFargue on April 2, 1868, and moved to Paris. The couple led a dangerous and romantic existence as leading members of the resistance against Adolphe Thiers' Third Republic between 1871 and 1873. But more benign regimes made them irrelevant. Paul LaFargue had no more aptitude for a nine-to-five job than his father-in-law. Therefore, Laura continued the family tradition of scrounging money from Friedrich Engels. The LaFargues gradually sunk into poverty after Engels' death in 1895. By the early 1900's they were broke political extremists in poor health, with no religious faith to buoy their sagging spirits. Sixty-nine year old Paul and sixty-six year old Laura committed suicide together in November, 1911. Vladimir Lenin preached an atheistic homily at their funeral.

Because of bad impressions created by "Gallic imposters" Longuet and LaFargue, both Karl and Jenny opposed Eleanor's alliance with French political theorist Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, a man of good character. In March, 1874 "Tussy" desperately pleaded her case:

"My dearest Moor,

... I want to know ... when I may see (Prosper) again. It is so very hard never to see him. I have been doing my best to be patient, but it is so difficult and I don't feel as if I (can) much longer. ... Could I not, now and then, go for a little walk with him? ... When I was so very ill at Brighton ... he came to see me, and each time left me stronger and happier; the more able to bear (my) rather heavy load ... It is so long since I saw him and I am beginning to feel so miserable ... If I may not see him now, could you not say when I may. It would be something to look forward to ... Forgive me for being selfish enough to worry you again,

Your Tussy" [67]


Despite tender paternal love for her, Marx would not budge, believing Lissagaray to be cut from the same cloth as Longuet and LaFargue.

Image
Eleanor Marx

In the 1890's beautiful Eleanor, who worked intermittently as an actress, became involved with Dr. Edward Aveling, son of a Congregational minister and leading proponent of Darwin's theory of evolution. Despite an ugly mug and unsavory reputation, Aveling was a ladies' man with seemingly hypnotic powers. While cohabitating with Eleanor Marx in 1898, he secretly married a twenty-two year old actress. When Eleanor tearfully confronted him, he acted contrite and proposed a suicide pact. Emotionally distraught, she consented. After amending Eleanor's will in his favor, and watching her write a suicide note, Aveling furnished a capsule of prussic acid. Eleanor swallowed it, fainted, turned livid, and died. He then pocketed own poison tablet, and strode out the door, "a free man." Due to lack of evidence and witnesses, Scotland Yard never prosecuted Edward Aveling for Eleanor Marx's murder.

We remember Marx as a better critic, than system inventor. Components of his theory, such as fair wages and reasonable welfare benefits, have raised living standards all over the world. However, the cumbersome Marxist "machine" was a shaking, smoking Edsel which lurched forward laboriously, shimmying and sputtering, until finally exploding into a thousand pieces -- an ill-conceived contraption that ultimately caused more injury than benefit to mankind.

The abstractions of Karl Marx fail to take human nature into account. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," sounds good, but does not play out well in the real world. Communism offers few incentives to the "talented 10th" who get things done, while rewarding the "inefficient 8th" for stupidity and laziness.

Marx described the peasantry and proletariat as a random pile, comparing them to potatoes, which needed a sack to give them form. Because most workers could not effectively advocate their interests, they needed representatives -- not deputies in corrupt parliaments, but strong executive leaders -- dictators like Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, and Pol Pot. Hence, Marx's communist remedy turned out to be worse than the bourgeois disease.

Marx borrowed nostrums from both English Chartism and continental socialism. These measures included general suffrage, secret ballots, salaried parliament deputies, old age pensions, public education, graduated income tax, paper money, and a World Bank. But he did not stop there. Among his dubious ideas were the eradication of private property, state confiscation of inheritances, nationalization of corporations, communal farming, "armies" of industrial workers, and compulsory resettlement of metropolitan residents to outlying areas. Karl Marx's distrust of free enterprise ultimately led to Stalin's purges and gulags.

_______________

Endnotes:

1 Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, Time, Inc., New York, 1963, p. 222.

2 Ibid., p. 233.

3 Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2000, p. 28, Heinrich Marx letter to Karl Marx, 3/2/1837.

4 Ibid., pp. 37-38.

5 Berlin, p. 33.

6 Karl Marx, "Debates on the Law on thefts of Wood," Die Rheinische Zeitung, October, 1842, http://www.marxists.org.

7 Ibid.

8 Wheen. p. 45.

9 Karl Marx, "A World Without Jews," 1844, http://www.marxists.org. p. 24.

10 Ibid., p. 3.

11 Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels Collected Works, International Publishers Co., Inc., New York, 1975, Vol. 7, pp. 507-29, passim.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid., p. 245, Karl Marx letter to Friedrich Engels, 1/18/1861.

14 Berlin, p. 159.

15 Ibid.

16 Karl Marx letter to F. Engels, 2/9/1854, http://www.marxists.org.

17 Wilhelm Liebknecht, Karl Marx: Biographical Memoirs, trans. E. Untermann, 1901, Greenwood Press, New York, 1968, p.

18 Ibid.

19 Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848, trans. Samuel Moote, London, 1888, http://www.anu.edu.au, 13.

20 Ibid., p. 290-91, Karl Marx letter to Paul LaFargue, 8/13/1866.

21 Liebknecht.

22 Berlin, p. 66.

23 Wheen, p. 170.

24 Ibid., p. 263, op. cit. Karl Marx letter to Friedrich Engels, 1/18?/1863.

25 Liebknecht, p.

26 Berlin, p. 164.

27 Karl Marx, "The Civil War in France, Edward Truelove, London, 1871, http://www.marxists.org.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

31 Berlin, p. 215.

32 Ibid., p. 216.

33 Karl Marx, Letter to P.V Annenkov, 12/28/1846, http://www.marxists.org.

34 Ibid.

35 Wheen, p. 55.

36 Ibid., p. 259.

37 Ibid., p. 198.

38 Karl Marx, Letter to Friedrich Engels, 2/23/1851, http://www.marxists.org

39 Wheen, p. (J. N.)

40 Berlin, pp. 90-91.

41 Ibid., p. 176.

42 Wheen, p. 109.

43 Giuseppe Mazzini, "The International: Addressed to the Working Class," Contemporary Review, July, 1872, p. 155.

44 Karl Marx, Letter to Friedrich Engels, 2/23/1851, http://www.marxists.org

45 Karl Marx letter to Friedrich Engels, 7/27/1866.

46 Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 10/15/1851.

47 Karl Marx, Neue Reinische Zeitung, 10/29/1848.

48 Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 5.

49 Ibid., p. 1.

59 Ibid., p. 21.

51 Ibid., p. 23.

52 Karl Marx, "The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature," Doctoral Thesis, University of Berlin, March, 1841, Preface, p. 1.

53 Wheen, p. 55, op. cit. Karl Marx letter to Friedrich Engels, 7/30/1862.

54 Karl Marx, "The Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," Joseph O'Malley, editor, trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O'Malley, Cambridge University Press, 1970, Introduction, p. 1.

55 Marx, Doctoral Thesis, University of Berlin, Preface, p. I, op. cit. Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, editor, Diogenes Laertius, X, p. 123.

56 Karl Marx, Economic Manuscripts: Value, Price & Profit, 1865, p. 7, www. marxists.org.

57 Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 3.

58 Ibid., p. 6.

59 Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 4.

60 Karl Marx, "The Indian Revolt," New York Tribune, 9/16/1857.

61 Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 8.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid., p. 3.

64 Karl Marx, Das Kapital, 1867 (Vol. I) and 1885 (Vol. II), "Digression on Productive Labor," editor, E. Unterman, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1960, http://www.marxists.org.

65 Yvonne Kapp, Eleanor Marx, Vol. I, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1972, p. 240, Jenny Marx letter to Eleanor Marx, 4/10/1882.

66 Berlin, p. 231.

67 Ibid., p. 153-4, Eleanor Marx letter to Karl Marx, 3/23/1874.
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Re: Hitler's Mentor: Dietrich Eckart, His Life, Times, & Mil

Postby admin » Tue Dec 18, 2018 4:14 am

Part 1 of 2

10: The Fate of Tsar Nicholas II

"The correspondence of the Russian Revolution to our own leaves nothing to the imagination. It depends only whether or not it will be our end too."

-- Dietrich Eckart


"Historians admit that Nicholas was "a good man" -- the historical evidence of personal charm, gentleness, love of family, deep religious faith and strong Russian patriotism is too overwhelming to be denied -- but they argue that personal factors are irrelevant; what matters is that Nicholas was a bad tsar."

-- Robert K. Massie


Despite Nicholas II's heartfelt desire to help others, his twenty-three year reign was marked by a series of cataclysms, which brought the Russian Empire crashing down. Emperor Alexander III entrusted Crown Prince Nicholas's education to Konstantin Pobedonostsev, a narrow-minded law professor who disdained all liberal measures as works of Satan. Known among intellectuals as "the high priest of social stagnation," he railed against public schools, freedom of the press, women's rights, and all other democratic measures. Like most fundamentalists, he promoted intolerance under the banner of righteousness. As Procurator (chief lay official) of Russian Orthodoxy's Holy Synod, Pobedonostsev excommunicated Leo Tolstoy from the Church for impiety. He taught the Tsarevich that all republican principles were absurd illusions. Under his tutelage Nicholas perpetuated such abuses as press censorship, de facto serfdom, and imprisonment of political dissenters.

Russian Finance Minister Sergei Witte regarded Tsarevich Nicholas as "a kindly and well-bred youth." [1] When he suggested that Alexander III appoint him to a committee studying economic issues, the burly Tsar retorted:

"Have you ever had a ... serious conversation with him? ... Why he is a mere child ... He has only childish notions ..." [2]


Though brutal injustices occurred during his tenure, Tsar Nicholas took his role as Father of the Russian People seriously, holding regular audiences for subjects, and approving all reasonable pleas. Numerous examples of his compassion might be cited, but two will suffice to make the point. Late one evening a weeping girl hurled herself at the feet of St. Petersburg Police Chief Alexander Orlov, begging that her fiance be spared from hanging for political radicalism. Moved by her appeal, Orlov rode to the Imperial Palace and requested permission to see the Tsar, who had retired for the night. Appearing in robe and slippers, Nicholas immediately granted clemency, and thanked Orlov for contacting him expeditiously. "One must never hesitate when one has the chance to save a man's life." [3] In October, 1916 while visiting a military hospital, the Tsar happened upon a wounded soldier about to be shot for cowardice. Nicholas approached, put his hand on the youth's shoulder, and asked why he had fled.

"The young man stammered that, having run out of ammunition, he ... got frightened, turned and ran ... (Tsar Nicholas) told him he was free. The next moment the lad scrambled out of bed, fell on the floor, his arms around (Nicholas's) knees and sobbed like a child." [4]


Though personally kind, Nicholas did not have a decisive temperament. Critics accused him of being an impressionable tabla rasa who typically adopted the views of the last person he consulted. Desiring to please all, he wavered on important issues, often acceding to the wishes of Empress Alexandra, Grigori Rasputin, or inept advisors such as Boris Sturmer. King Edward VII of England, judged him "weak as water." [5] Others described him as "blown by every wind."

The unstable Russian Empire certainly needed a strong ruler between 1894 and 1917. Crown Princess Victoria of Germany, characterized Russia as

"... another world -- there is something so squalid and sad, suggesting poverty and loneliness about the landscape and population, so much in contrast with ... the imperial court's wealth, the money, jewels, and ... almost reckless extravagance with which some things are carried out ... " [6]


Nicholas's twenty-three year reign, though exceedingly troubled, had its positive aspects. Russia made significant economic progress between 1894 and 1914. Railroad lines were built, factories sprung up, wages rose, the ruble's value increased. Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov continued the rich literary tradition of Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky. Choreographers Serge Diaghelev and Vaslav Nijinsky collaborated with composers Nicholai Rimsky-Korsakov and Igor Stravinsky to produce a renaissance in music and ballet.

Tsar Nicholas started out on a progressive note. With encouragement from Jewish railroad president Ivan Bliokh, he endorsed a peace conference at The Hague in August, 1898. This proposal stunned Britain, Germany, France, and Austria, which had long viewed Russia as a perennial troublemaker. Japan, China, Persia, the United States, and twenty European nations attended this meeting. Nicholas put forward a plan for general disarmament, rules of warfare, and a court to mediate conflicts between nations. Participants agreed to establish The Hague World Court for non-violent resolution of international disputes.

Unfortunately, Nicholas's own diplomatic corps did not share his pacific aims. Between 1894 and 1914 the Russian foreign office managed to subvert world order from Vienna to Tokyo. It aggravated Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey by supporting Pan-Slavism in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, and Croatia -- with the ulterior motive of acquiring a Mediterranean or Aegean port. Russia also competed with Japan for sections of Manchuria, Mongolia, China, and Korea. Those machinations led to the disastrous Russo-Japanese War in 1904.

Storybook Romance

"I must say I never saw two people more in love with each other or happier than they are."

-- George, Duke of York


Nicholas first met Princess Alexandra of Hesse-Darmstadt in 1884 at the wedding of her older sister Elizabeth ("Ella") to his uncle, Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich Romanov. Ella and twelve year old Alexandra were daughters of Prince Louis of Hesse and Princess Alice, Queen Victoria's second daughter. Alice died of diphtheria on December 14, 1878. Surviving photographs of young Alexandra show her to be a pretty, but pensive girl. The deaths of her mother, sister May, and brother Frederick cast a pall over her childhood.

Nicholas fell in love with his cousin Alexandra in 1889 when she came to visit Ella on an extended vacation. Although bashful and serious, Alexandra developed into a beautiful young woman, with shining blue-grey eyes, rosy complexion, coppery blonde hair, chiseled features, and a slender but shapely figure. Moreover, there was an ethereal quality about her. Lovesmitten Crown Prince Nicholas requested his father's permission to marry her, but Tsar Alexander refused. After attending the April, 1894 marriage of Alexandra's brother Ernst to the Duke of Edinburgh's daughter Melita in Germany, Nicholas again petitioned the Tsar, who finally relented. With encouragement from Emperor Wilhelm II -- a cousin to both parties -- Nicholas proposed to Alix, and she accepted.

Nicholas and Alexandra loved each other deeply. On their wedding night she wrote these lines in his diary.

"At last united, bound for life, and when this life is ended, we meet again in the other world and remain together for eternity .... Never did I believe there could be such utter happiness in this world, such a feeling of unity between two mortal beings. I love you. Those three words have my life in them." [7]


Nicholas fully reciprocated these feelings. Their mutual devotion grew over the years.

Image
Empress Alexandra in court dress, c. 1906

Broad-shouldered Tsar Alexander III could have been a circus strong man. He bent silver rubles with his bare hands, effortlessly lifted all kinds of heavy objects, and beat all comers in arm-wrestling matches. Shortly before Nicholas and Alexandra's betrothal, his robust health suddenly deteriorated due to a kidney disorder. He died on November 1st, 1894 at age 49. Young, inexperienced, 5 foot 6 inch Nicky now stepped out of his bear-like father's shadow to become Autocrat of All the Russias.

Tsar Alexander III's untimely death proved to be just one of several bad omens. Nicholas was born on May 6, 1868 (Julian Calendar), feast day of Job the Sufferer. A solar eclipse occurred on June 6, 1872, Alexandra's date of birth. Old Russian women beheld her classic profile riding past in the royal carriage, and called her a "bird of ill omen" who arrived behind a coffin. Nicholas and Alexandra married on November 26, 1894, while still in mourning for Tsar Alexander. All guests wore black at their gloomy wedding. During Nicholas's coronation ceremony, the thick chain of St. Andrew's necklace, symbol of Imperial authority, broke, causing it to fall from his neck and clatter down the cathedral steps. That same day Grand Duke Serge's outdoor celebration at Khodynka Park in Moscow degenerated into a melee in which hundreds of people were trampled to death, and thousands injured. While on their honeymoon tour of France Nicholas and Alexandra were assigned to Marie Antoinette's suite at Versailles Palace. Thereafter, Alix always hung a portrait of the unfortunate French queen in her bedroom to commemorate this happy time, unaware that she would suffer a similar fate. Crown Prince Alexis, their only son and heir to the throne, was afflicted with hemophilia, a hereditary blood disease which made him a virtual invalid.

A quiet and self-conscious young woman, Alexandra experienced great difficulty adapting to Russian court life. Profligate Russian aristocrats labeled her a "pill." Alexandra once incurred ridicule for scolding an attractive young countess who wore a low-cut gown to a reception. The Empress's hobbies included collecting religious icons and sewing tapestries. Sophisticated court ladies derided her as "a bourgeois school mistress," who belonged in a nunnery rather than the Imperial Palace.

"Badly dressed, clumsy, an awkward dancer, atrocious French accent, a schoolgirl blush, too shy, too nervous, too arrogant -- these were some of the unkind things said about Alix of Hesse." [8]


Alexandra suffered from sciatica (inflammation of the sciatic nerve, causing hip, lower back, and leg pain) and neurasthenia (psychosomatic hysteria resulting from anxiety.) She attributed her heart palpitations and panic attacks to an "enlarged heart."

Nervous Alexandra used these real and imagined ailments as an excuse to avoid social functions. During her childbearing years (1895 to 1904) she sent regrets across the board, pleading difficult pregnancies, post-partum complications, sick babies, etc. After 1905 she used her "heart condition" as a pretext to duck parties. Such mousy behavior was unheard of for a Russian Tsaritsa. Nicholas's mother, Dowager Empress Marie, berated Alix as a "spoiled and selfish girl" who willfully shirked her royal duties.

Things might have been different if Alexandra's older sister Elizabeth lived nearby. Kindhearted and beautiful Grand Duchess "Ella" had charmed society in Moscow, where her husband ruled as Governor General. But she had to run a large household, entertain often, and raise two adopted children. Therefore, Ella could only help struggling Alix during brief visits to St. Petersburg.

Alexandra's mother, Princess Alice, daughter of Queen Victoria, had thoroughly indoctrinated her children in British culture. Alexandra's governess, Mrs. Orchard, and nanny, Madgie Jackson, were both Englishwomen. They raised her on a strict regimen of morning lessons, afternoon teas, Protestant church services every Sunday, and summer vacations at Balmoral castles with Queen Victoria. Her middle class code of morality contrasted sharply with the devil-may-care attitude of decadent Russian nobles.

Alexandra's mother-in-law, Dowager Empress Marie, was a charming social butterfly who entertained lavishly and often. Her fetes overflowed with champagne, caviar, good cheer, and witty repartee. In the winter, this former Danish princess liked to cap off a night of dancing with a fast sleigh ride through the palace's deer park. Alexandra suffered through balls. She woodenly greeted guests in a receiving line, then bolted back to her mauve boudoir at the first opportunity -- chiding Nicholas if he did not join her promptly. Maturity never eased her loathing of soirees.

Not surprisingly, relations between Marie and Alexandra became strained. The young Empress did not take her mother-in-law's criticisms gracefully. Marie resented being displaced by her gauche daughter-in-law and blamed her for most of Nicholas's problems.

Although the Empress may have been considered maladroit by St. Petersburg's jet set, she was a loving mother, totally devoted to the care of her five children. Empress Alexandra nursed, bathed, dressed, and played with her babies every day. As they grew older she closely supervised their health care, education, and recreation. There were no boarding schools. The children always came along on vacations. Alix was happiest at activities such as summer cruises, family gatherings, and amateur theatrical performances staged by her pretty daughters.

Empress Alexandra dedicated herself to a small circle of friends, which included Lady Anna Vyrubovna and Princess Sonia Orbeliani, who shared her devout religious faith. The haughty set at court disdained Alexandra's confidantes as unfashionable prudes. When Princess Orbeliani, fell ill due to a crippling spinal disease, Alix brought her into the Imperial household, underwrote most of her expenses, and personally attended her until she died in 1915.

Alexandra's mother, Princess Alice, had engaged in many charitable activities, including care of soldiers wounded in the German wars of 1866 and 1870. Following her example, Alexandra worked tirelessly as a nurse in Petrograd Army Hospital during World War I. Her friend Anna Vyrubova wrote:

"I have seen the Empress ... in the operating room holding ether cones, handling sterilized instruments, assisting in the most difficult operations, taking from the hands of busy surgeons, amputated legs and arms ... enduring all the sights and smells and agonies of that most dreadful of all places, a military hospital in the midst of war." [9]


Alexandra and two of her daughters, Olga and Tatiana, earned certificates as war nurses. Excerpts from Alix's letter to Nicholas tell the story of her service.

"November 19, 1914: An officer of the 2nd Rifles, poor boy, whose legs are getting quite dark and one fears, amputation may be necessary. I was with the boy yesterday during his dressing, awful to see, and he clung to me and kept quiet, poor child."

December ?, 1914: A young boy kept begging for me. I find (him) getting worse ... In the evenings he is off his head and so weak."

March ?, 1915: My poor wounded friend Has gone. God has taken him quietly and peacefully to himself. .. Olga and I went to see him. He lay there ... under the flowers I daily brought him." [10]


In spite of her social awkwardness, Empress Alexandra had a compassionate heart.

Crisis Upon Crisis

Tsar Nicholas's defective education from Konstantin Pobedonetsev had ill-prepared him for the Russo-Japanese War and Revolution of 1905, two calamities which foreshadowed the disasters of 1914 and 1917.

When Russia began moving agents and plainclothes military officers into Korea in 1901, Marquis Hirobumi Ito of Japan visited St. Petersburg to negotiate. Russia's foreign office refused to discuss the matter. Ito's requests for an appointment with the Tsar were rebuffed. All during 1903 Japanese ambassador Kurino sent letters protesting Russian incursions into Korea. On February 3, 1904 he officially broke off relations with Russia and left St. Petersburg.

In 1898, to Japan's alarm, Russia obtained a lease from the moribund Qing Dynasty for Port Arthur, a warm water port in Manchuria. The Russians stationed several battleships in its harbor, and constructed a network of forts on high ground overlooking the city. In an action that anticipated their 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan launched a surprise raid against Russian vessels moored in Port Arthur's harbor on February 8, 1904. The Japanese Navy sunk The Pallada, and four smaller ships, in addition to seriously damaging The Rezivan and Tsarevich, until shelling by Russian shore batteries compelled Japan's fleet to withdraw. Naval engagements continued through March, when the Japanese succeeded in blockading Port Arthur.

On August 1, 1904 the Japanese landed ground troops at Port Arthur. In addition to modern amphibious assault tactics, this brutal little war introduced a number of other deadly innovations: barbed wire, Maxim machine guns, hand grenades, portable [11] mortars, bolt action rifles with clips, light howitzers, searchlights, land mines, and telephone communication between separate units.

On August 7th the Japanese Army unleashed a night attack. Russian defenders beat them back with artillery and machine gun fire guided by searchlights. A day later the Japanese captured less than a hundred yards with the loss of I,280 killed, wounded, and missing.

This battle presaged World War I. From August until December, 1904 Japanese soldiers charged Russian fortifications, lost more men than their adversaries, but gained small plots of ground. On August 19th the Japanese took 174 Meter Hill while sustaining 1,800 casualties. They sacrificed 3,734 men in a failed attempt to seize 203 Meter Hill on October 29th. After a nine day battle, costing an estimated 8,000 infantrymen, they secured 203 Meter Hill on December 5th.

Japanese sappers exploded mines under Russia's main redoubt, Fort Shunshu on December 31, and secured Wantai January 1. Major General Anatoly Stoessel surrendered the next day. The Russian Army later court-martialed him, since he had adequate supplies and his men had not yet been defeated by the Japanese. In this five month siege each side sustained more than 30,000 casualties.

Meanwhile, another theater of operations opened up along the railroad line between Liaoyang and Mukden. On August 24, 1904 General Alexei Kuropatkin attacked Japanese troops advancing toward Liaoyang. They repulsed this assault, counterattacked, took Hung-Sha Pass, and forced the Russians to fall back.

After being reinforced with troops transported by the Trans-Siberian Railroad, General Kuropatkin initiated another offensive at Shaho on October 5, which Japanese forces repelled. After failing to take the objective after repeated assaults, Kuropatkin retreated to Mukden on October 17th and ordered his troops to dig trenches.

On January 25, 1905 General Oskar-Ferdinand Kasmirovich Grippenberg launched a surprise attack on the Japanese winter headquarters at Sandepu. He caught them completely off-guard. Instead of bringing up reserves to help Grippenberg rout the Japanese, General Kuropatkin inexplicably ordered him to withdraw.

Field Marshal Oyama Iwao of Japan marched toward Mukden in mid-February, 1905. On February 20th he ordered a three-pronged invasion against the Russians' front line and flanks, while sending his 3rd Army to envelop them from behind. General Kuropatkin's men warded off Japanese charges for eight days. However, on March 1st, when he learned that Japan's yd Army threatened his rear, he pulled men from the front. Field Marshal Iwao took advantage of the Russian Army's slow and disorderly evacuation from its main line of defense, and ordered a full-scale frontal attack on March 7th, which induced Kuropatkin to retreat. In the course of the six month Liaoyang to Mukden campaign Russia incurred approximately 60,000 casualties to Japan's 41,000.

Tsar Nicholas sent eight ships from his Baltic fleet around the world to relieve Port Arthur. Admiral Togo of the Japanese Navy sunk all of them in the Tsushima Straits on May 27, 1905. The Sevastopol, Russia's last remaining battleship, sunk two Japanese destroyers and damaged six cruisers before being scuppered by Captain Nicholai Essen to prevent Japan from salvaging it.

The total casualty toll for this war remains in doubt, with one count estimating 165,000 killed, wounded, and missing for Russia, and 152,000 for Japan.

The Russo-Japanese War and Revolution of 1905 prefigured Tsar Nicholas's downfall in 1917. The casualties, shortages, and inflation arising from this fruitless conflict bred widespread dissatisfaction. Protesters demanded higher wages, civil rights, and representative government. A Russian Orthodox priest named Father George Gapon drafted a petition requesting universal suffrage, parliamentary government, public education, and an eight hour work day. On Sunday, January 22, 1905 Gapon and his supporters marched in a religious procession toward the Winter Palace to present their appeals to Tsar Nicholas. Although Gapon had requested police permission the day before, Nicholas knew nothing of this demonstration, and spent the weekend fifteen miles away in Tsarkoe Selo. At approximately 2 PM soldiers guarding St. Petersburg's Winter Palace ordered Father Gapon's marchers to halt. What happened next remains unclear, except that troops opened fire on unarmed civilians, killing and wounding several hundred people. "Bloody Sunday" precipitated commotions all over Russia for the next ten months. Factory workers went on strike, sailors aboard warships mutinied. Disorders interrupted train schedules, postal service, hospital care, and school classes.

On February 18, 1905 an anarchist named Ivan Kalyayev killed Nicholas's uncle, Grand Duke Serge with a bomb. His wife Ella, sister of Empress Alexandra, heard the explosion, rushed outside, picked up her husband's scattered body parts, and comforted her dying coachman. The grieving widow later visited Kalyayev in prison and urged him to repent, but he refused. Ella nevertheless asked the Tsar to commute his death sentence. Nicholas gently declined, citing the crime's heinous nature. Ella went into a deep depression, and became a vegetarian. In 1909 she gave away her jewelry and sold a substantial amount of property in order to found the Convent of Sts. Martha and Mary, which operated a soup kitchen and infirmary. Her order of nuns dedicated themselves to helping Moscow's poor and sick.

Sporadic violence, including pogroms against Jews in Odessa and Kishenev, persisted throughout 1905. On October 30th, Nicholas reluctantly signed the Imperial Manifesto, a watered-down constitution drawn up by Council Chairman Sergei Witte which accorded basic civil rights to Russian subjects and established the Duma, or legislature, as a "consultative body." Although this quasi-constitution satisfied neither right nor left, rioting finally died down by March, 1906.

The Holy Man

Politics only account for part of the Romanov tragedy. The Imperial family's domestic situation must be examined in order to present a three-dimensional picture.

Alexandra delivered five children: Olga (November, 1895), Tatiana (June, 1897), Marie (May, 1899), Anastasia (June, 1901), and Tsarevich Alexis on August 12, 1904. Due to hemophilia, his blood would not clot after an injury, so even minor cuts and bruises caused life-threatening blood loss. Alexis inherited the hemophilia gene from his maternal grandmother, Queen Victoria. Her son Leopold (1853-1884) had his life cut short by the disease -- so had her daughter Alice's son Frederick (Alexandra's brother,) who died as a child in May, 1873.

Image
The Russian Imperial Family, 1911

Since Tsarevich Alexis was an energetic and playful boy, bleeding episodes occurred often. One of his worst crises took place at the Imperial Hunting Lodge in Spala, Eastern Poland. The eight year old heir bumped his knee during a rough carriage ride in October, 1912. Some blood vessels ruptured, causing hematoma (pathological swelling due to internal bleeding.) In terrible pain and running a high fever, he alternated between delirium and unconsciousness for eleven days.

"Alexandra scarcely left her son's side. Hour after hour, she sat by the bed where the groaning child lay huddled on his side ... Alexandra held his hand, (and) smoothed his forehead ... as she prayed mutely to God to deliver her little boy from torture. During these ... days her golden hair became tinged with gray." [11]


Siberian faith healer Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin (1869-1916), the son of a horse trader, effectively treated Tsarevich Alexis's disease on several occasions. Alexandra asked her friend Anna Vyrubova to telegraph him for help in October, 1912. Rasputin wired back:

"God has seen your tears and heard your prayers. Do not grieve. The Little One will not die. Do not allow the doctors to bother him too much." [12]


One day later Alexis's condition improved dramatically. The hemorrhaging stopped and his fever broke. Within three weeks he fully recovered.

Grigori Rasputin was a lecherous "holy man" from the village of Pokrovskoe near Tobolsk in Western Siberia. In his youth he acquired the reputation of a hard-drinking brawler who compulsively kissed and fondled women he found attractive. Although often slapped by his victims and threatened by their families, he laughed off all snubs.

Rasputin's sister Maria and older brother Dmitri both drowned in Pokrovskoe's Tura River. Grigori's corpse would be fished out of the Neva River in 1916. Ironically, the name Rasputin means "between two rivers." The tragic deaths of his two siblings might have influenced Rasputin's religious conversion.

While working as a coach driver in 1891 young Grigori stumbled upon the Dionysiac monastery at Verkhouryne where he boarded for three months. Cultists there sought direct communication with the supernatural through prayer, fasting, meditation, flagellation, and more unconventional "spiritual exercises." Unsubstantiated rumors had it that these other measures included group sex and the ingestion of psychedelic potions. Rasputin went back to Pokrovskoe, turned to farming, married Praskovia Fedorovna Dubrovina, fathered three children by her, and one by another woman. While plowing his fields one day he beheld a vision of the Blessed Virgin which convinced him of his true vocation as a "starets," or wandering sage. After briefly apprenticing himself to a local shaman named Makariy, Grigori publicly announced his reformation, and began preaching on street corners, quoting scripture, praying aloud, and blessing the sick.

The young evangelist had occult powers. He mesmerized people with his hypnotic gaze. Newly-acquired psychic ability enabled him to identify horse thieves, find misplaced objects, and tell the future. Rasputin cured several chronically ill people by laying hands on them. Local religious authorities grew suspicious of this self-proclaimed magus, and soon banned him as a heretic. Feeling persecuted in his own land, the prophet embarked on a series of pilgrimages throughout Russia, to Greece, and the Holy Land. In 1903 Rasputin moved to St. Petersburg where he impressed society ladies with both his magical abilities and sexual prowess. Tsar Nicholas's Montenegrin cousins, Princess Militsa and Princess Anastasia, first introduced Rasputin to Nicholas and Alexandra on November 1, 1904. Because of "Father Grigori's" efficacious ministrations to Tsarevich Alexis, he soon overshadowed two French soothsayers -- Phillipe Vachot and Gerard Encausse. Alexandra came to believe that he was a Man of God, whose counsel in all matters must be taken seriously.

Grigori Rasputin was an unlikely court favorite. He wore rumpled clothes, smelled like a goat, and had atrocious manners. His glowing eyes, framed by disheveled hair and beard, shone like those of a raccoon. Rasputin ate with his dirty hands and called dignitaries by nicknames, addressing Nicholas and Alexandra as "Papa" and "Mama."

Despite his repellent appearance and conduct, people of all classes frequented Rasputin's atelier in St. Petersburg. His creed of Salvation through the Flesh enabled him to seduce scores of women with impunity. This brand of sophistry valued contrition above all else. Rasputin maintained that sin served an essential purpose, since it elicited saving repentance. After daylight sessions with women clients, the well-endowed mystic would venture out, get drunk, and visit brothels. Neighbors complained that, when inebriated, he regularly banged on neighbors' doors late at night to scare up female bedmates. Detractors circulated the story that he once raped a nun. Police reports confirmed that several angry husbands packing firearms were intercepted by the Tsar's detectives before they could blow the Holy Man to Kingdom Come.

Few more paradoxical characters than Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin have ever existed. He was a charlatan, madman, satyr, and genuine clairvoyant all rolled-up into one. The French diplomat Maurice Paleologue suspected him of being a German agent since he consorted with pro-German banker Manus. However, Rasputin actually hobnobbed with Manus because of his fabulous parties -- replete with courtesans, music, gourmet food, and fine wines.

"Father Grigori" cared little for money and could not be bought. He doled out cash to friend and stranger alike, and casually gave away expensive gifts which noblewomen bestowed upon him. Rasputin dispensed influence with equal generosity. A scrawled, misspelled note from him to almost any government official would usually achieve results. He did his share of favors in exchange for sex and emoluments, but many others without expectation of earthly reward.

The Holy Man used hypnosis to ease pain and instill a positive attitude in patients. When Tsarevich Alexis fell ill, Rasputin confidently assured him that the spell would pass. He befriended the boy, telling stories and playing games with him. Alexis's condition improved due to these distractions and his faith in "Father Grigori's" curative powers. The Tsarevich might have found relief because Rasputin invariably removed him from standard medical care. To alleviate the boy's distress doctors heavily dosed him with aspirin, an anti-coagulant now known to aggravate hemophiliac symptoms.

On June 19, 1914 prostitute Khionia Guseva, a disgruntled former girlfriend, stabbed Rasputin in the abdomen. He collapsed with part of his entrails protruding. Doctors saved him with emergency surgery. Rasputin never fully recovered from that injury. His abundant strength and energy diminished. He took opium for pain. Because of a hyper-acidic condition in his stomach, he had to forego sweets, roast suckling pig, parfait foie gras, as well as other rich foods.

Rasputin accurately prophesied the horrors of World War I and pleaded with Nicholas not to get involved. In August, 1914 he telegraphed Anna Vyrubova: "Let Papa not plan war, for with the war will come the end of Russia and yourselves ... "

In July, 1914 he wrote:

"Dear friend, I will say again a menacing cloud is over Russia, lots of sorrow and grief ... It is dark and there is no lightening ... A sea of tears immeasurable, and as to blood? What can I say? There are no words; ... it is indescribable. I know they want war from you, evidently not knowing this is destruction. Heavy is God's punishment when he takes away reason; this is the beginning of the end. Thou art ... Tsar Father of the Russian People. Don't allow ... madmen to triumph and destroy themselves and the People ... She is all drowned in blood. Terrible (will be) the destruction and without end the grief. Grigori" [14]


Image
Grigori Rasputin (seated) surrounded by followers, 1916

Rasputin foresaw his own death and made prophetic statements to the Tsar in a December, 1916 letter.

"I write and leave behind me this letter at St. Petersburg. ... I shall leave life before January 1, (and) wish to make known to the Russian people, ... Papa, ... the Russian Mother, ... what they must understand if I am killed by common assassins, and especially by my brothers, the Russian peasants, you Tsar of Russia, have nothing to fear, (and will) remain on your throne and govern, ... But if I am murdered by boyars, nobles, ... for twenty-five years their hands will be soiled with my blood. They will leave Russia. Brothers will kill brothers, ... There will be no nobles in the country. Tsar of Russia, if you hear the bell announcing Grigori's death, you must know this: if it was your relations who have killed me, then no one of your family, that is to say, none of your children or relations, will remain alive for more than two years. They will be killed by the Russian people ... I shall be killed. I am no longer among the living. Pray, pray be strong. Think of your blessed family." [15]


Upright and capable ministers such as Stolypin, Polivanov, and Sazonov detested Rasputin and attempted to have him banished from court. Alexandra resented their intrusions and lobbied for the appointment of men friendly toward the Holy Man. As Minister of the Interior, General Polivanov worked hard to keep Russian troops provisioned with food, arms, ammunition, uniforms, and medical supplies. He also efficiently administered the civilian police force. At Rasputin's urging the Tsar fired Polivanov, and appointed Alexander Propopov, a half-mad baronet who spoke to religious icons as if they were real people. Under him the morale of the army and domestic police deteriorated.

Foreign Minister Serge Sazanov maintained good relations with France, England, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. Alexandra realized that Sazanov had no use for Rasputin and badgered Nicholas to replace him with Boris Sturmer, a corrupt intriguer who let relations with Russia's allies become strained during the crucial years of 1916 and 1917. French ambassador Paleologue evaluated Sturmer as

" ... worse than a mediocrity -- third rate intellect, mean spirit, low character, doubtful honesty, no experience, and no idea of state business." [16]


Alexandra adored Nicholas and spoke of herself [as] his "guardian angel." In his diary she wrote:

"Your Guardian Angel is keeping watch over you ... God will help me be your Guardian Angel." [17]


She truly wanted to assist him, but flawed political judgment negated her good intentions. When Alix pressed Nicholas to select one of Rasputin's incompetent candidates for high office, she uttered refrains such as: "he likes our Friend," and "our Friend recommends him." Earning the Mad Monk's approval seemed to be her chief criterion for choosing cabinet officials. That system produced nothing but misfits.

Prince Felix Youssovpov, the Tsar's cousin and one of Russia's wealthiest men, conspired to murder Rasputin in the early morning hours of December 29, 1916. He invited "Father Grigori" to a party at his townhouse, offering to play the lute, and introduce him to his beautiful wife Irina. A less-than-perfect host, Prince Felix plied Rasputin with cyanide-laced cakes and poisoned wine. Showing no signs of illness, the guest of honor loudly sang gypsy songs, and yelled for more wine. Pale with fright, Youssopov put down his lute, fetched a loaded pistol, and shot him. Dr. Lazovert rushed in, felt no pulse, and pronounced Rasputin dead. At that instant one of Rasputin's hands shot up and grabbed Prince Felix by the throat. He fled screaming while the growling mystic chased him on all-fours. Out of breath from sprinting up two flights of steps at top speed, Youssopov collected himself, and dashed downstairs again. Joined by co-conspirators, he threw open a basement door and spied Rasputin hobbling toward the street, shouting: "I will tell all to the Empress!" Youssopov, Grand Duke Dmitri Romanov, British Army Lt. Oswald Rayner, and Duma Deputy Vladimir Purishkevich ran after Rasputin and fired four shots. One round struck him in the head and knocked him down. The Man of God snarled and grimaced on the ground while Youssopov's confederates kicked and clubbed his supine body. Believing Rasputin dead, they wrapped him in a curtain and shoved it down a hole in the ice-covered Neva River. His corpse washed up downstream three days later. A subsequent autopsy report indicated that the slug which entered Rasputin's forehead was an unjacketed .455 caliber Webley revolver bullet, leading investigators to conclude that Lt. Rayner probably fired it. The decedent's bloody finger tips indicated that he had desperately tried to dig out of ice. The coroner ruled drowning as cause of death since Rasputin's lungs contained water, a condition which won't occur when a person has died prior to immersion.

Felix Youssovpov sought to save the Autocracy by assassinating Rasputin. The "Mad Monk's" disreputable character reflected unfavorably on the Imperial family. Soldiers and peasants whispered that he had seduced the "Nemka" (German woman, i.e. Tsaritsa Alexandra.) Youssovpov knew that the Empress, under this crazy man's spell, had persuaded Tsar Nicholas to make many unwise decisions. Lt. Oswald Rayner's presence at the murder scene suggests that British Intelligence wanted to eliminate Rasputin's pacifist influence from the Russian Imperial household.
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Re: Hitler's Mentor: Dietrich Eckart, His Life, Times, & Mil

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Part 2 of 2

Regicide

World War I dealt Tsarist Russia its death blow. Tragically, Tsar Nicholas permitted Russia's fatal mobilization against Austria to go forward on August 1, 1914, even though the Russo-Japanese War's aftermath had nearly brought down his regime nine years earlier. After a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Austria began intimidating Russia's Slavic brothers in Serbia. Under pressure from his foreign office and general staff, Nicholas signed a partial mobilization order on July 31, 1914. This alarmed Germany, which declared war on Russia.

When the fighting commenced Russia's army sustained enormous casualties in East Prussia and Galicia. The Eastern Front stretched roughly 1,600 miles from the Baltic to Black Sea. Because of this vast amount of space, commanders had more scope for offensive operations than on the Western Front. After devastating defeats at Tannenburg and Masurian Lakes, Russian units held their ground in central Poland along the Vistula River. In March, 1915 the Tsar's army captured Austria's Premysyl fortress in the Carpathian mountains, only to lose it two months later to the Germans. This pattern repeated itself in 1916. General Brusilov's offensive sent the Austrians into full flight, until a Germany army corps counterattacked and stopped his advance.

Compared to Germany's Reichswehr, the "cudgeled and apathetic Russian peasant army" was badly led and poorly equipped. In the initial East Prussian battles, officers ordered suicidal bayonet charges simply because their men had no ammunition. Soldiers were more plentiful than bullets.

As had happened during the conflict with Japan, Russia's shaky economy caved in under the war effort's weight. Families suffered the losses of sons, brothers, and fathers, and then had to put up with food, fuel, and commodity shortages, as well as inflation, civil unrest, and breakdowns in rail and electrical service. The 15,500,000 man Russian Army had a 51.6% casualty rate in World War I, higher than any other power. By the end of 1917 1,300,000 men were killed, 4,200,000 wounded, and 2,400,000 taken prisoner. In a misguided effort to save Serbia, Russia suffered a holocaust.

Because "Father Grigori" advised him to command the army personally, Tsar Nicholas spent most of his time near the front between August, 1914 and March, 1917. Meanwhile, the Imperial government teetered on a chasm's edge. Signs of insurrection abounded by December, 1916. A Russian Marine regiment mutinied and murdered their commanding officer in October. Uprisings broke out in Petrograd. When Nicholas ordered army troops in to restore order, they joined their brother workers and fired on local police. Those who censored army mail noticed that most enlisted men believed the Empress to be a German agent and mistress of Rasputin. On February 23, 1917 food riots and strikes raged in Petrograd. Two days later the Tsar dispatched a battalion of soldiers to halt looting. British ambassador Buchanan, Duma whip Michael Rodzianko, and Grand Duke Alexander all begged him to remain in the city to deal with this emergency. Rodzianko warned:

"The capital is in chaos... the government ... unable to function ... Fuel and supplies ... completely disorganized ... wild shooting on the streets. It is urgent that a new government be formed. There must be no delay. Hesitation will be fatal." [18]


Nicholas remained detached from reality, writing Alexandra:

"Again, that fat-bellied Rodzianko has written me a load of nonsense, which I won't even bother to answer." [19]


Shortly after Tsar Nicholas set out for Stavka Camp in his private train on March 1, 1917, the Imperial Government fell. Anarchy rocked Petrograd from March 12th to March 15th, when he signed an instrument of abdication under duress from his general staff. Nicholas first appointed Tsarevich Alexis as his successor, then Grand Duke Michael, who reigned for one day. By March 18th the Imperial family became political prisoners.

On April 9, 1917, with the aid of German agents, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (whose real surname was Ulyanov) boarded a locked railroad car in Zurich and headed for Petrograd. In the words of Winston Churchill:

"The German leaders turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia." [20]


Lenin started agitating immediately. Crowds jeered his initial speeches -- which proposed the abolition of police and encouraged army troops to fraternize with their German enemies. Lenin toned down the Marxist rhetoric when it dawned on him that he was addressing crowds of ordinary folk, not fellow cranks in a Zurich coffee house. On Leon Trotsky's advice he downplayed utopianism and began spouting demagogic slogans such as "bread, land, and peace!," "all power to the people!," "down with Tsarist tyranny!," and "end this senseless war!"

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Mug shot of Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov, alias "Lenin," 1895

On July 16, 1917 Lenin and Trotsky staged a huge peace demonstration in Petrograd. Menshevik leader Alexander Kerensky managed to quell the unrest by persuading loyal army regiments that Lenin and Trotsky were German spies. A company of these troops raided Communist headquarters and arrested Trotsky. Lenin fled the city, hid in a haystack over night, then escaped to Finland disguised as a railroad engineer.

But Kerensky made one major blunder. Under pressure from France and England, he continued the war. After the initially successful "Kerensky Offensive," German forces drove the Russians back, then routed them. By July 16, 1917, same day as Lenin and Trotsky's war protest, the Russian army disintegrated.

Kerensky also gravely erred by requesting Bolshevik aid when General L.G. Kornilov initiated a military coup against his Menshevik government in October, 1917. Kornilov's takeover attempt fizzled when more than half his troops deserted to the Communist side. Then Lenin, a much more formidable enemy, returned to Petrograd on October 27th to engineer Kerensky's ouster. Armed Bolsheviks seized control of the city on November 8th. Lenin and his comrades employed propaganda and violence to consolidate their power. They took over newspapers and shot scores of opponents. Anxious to terminate the Tsarist Empire's ruinous war, Lenin opened up peace negotiations. On March 3, 1918 he signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ceded most of Poland and the Ukraine to Germany.

The Imperial family's plight worsened. They endured one indignity after another from March, 1917 until July, 1918. On March 18, 1917 a delegation of surly Revolutionary Council members showed up at the Tsar's palace to cut his household down to size. Undisciplined rebel guards mocked and assaulted male servants, molested servant girls, helped themselves to the Tsar's cupboard and wine cellar, and shot tame deer in the park. They dragged Rasputin's corpse out of the chapel mausoleum for a round of hideous abuse, then burned it. Hooligans addressed the Tsar as "Nicky," and Tsaritsa as "Nemka." When Nicholas pedaled his bicycle by a group of guards, one stuck his bayonet into a wheel's spokes, causing him to fall amid a chorus of raucous laughter. Appalled by such outrages, Count Alexander von Benckendorff, the Tsar's Privy Counselor, complained to Kerensky, who appointed Colonel Eugen Kobylinsky to handle security for the Romanovs. Under trying conditions, he tried to protect the Imperial family until being dismissed on May 11, 1918.

In August, 1917, due to escalating violence in Petrograd, Kerensky moved the Romanovs to Tobolsk, in western Siberia, right next to Rasputin's home village of Pokrovskoe. There they occupied the local governor's mansion. Tsar Nicholas and Colonel Kobylinsky had to contend with maltreatment from local commissar Alexander Nikolsky. Former political prisoner Nikolsky nursed a grudge against the Autocracy, and relished every opportunity to harass Nicholas and Alexandra. He barged in at all hours without notice, made them pose for mug shots, harangued the Tsar with insipid political lectures, denied the royals wine, coffee, sugar, and other small comforts.

Three different regiments guarded the Imperial family. The 1st and 4th regiments brought flowers to the Empress and her daughters, played games with the Tsarevich, and smuggled in delicacies and presents from townsfolk. The 2nd Regiment mistreated the Imperial family, wrote obscenities on walls, told lewd stories within earshot of the girls, confiscated all "contraband" for their own use, and forbade Nicholas and his son to exercise outdoors.

Shocked by Nikolsky's cruelty, Tobolsk's populace remained loyal to Tsar Nicholas. Local people prayed daily for the Imperial family in church. Men removed their hats when they passed the governor's mansion. Women got down on both knees, bowed toward the house, and crossed themselves.

When Lenin's Bolsheviks wrested power from Kerensky's Mensheviks in November, 1917, their Ural Soviet issued an order that put "Nicholas Romanov" on soldiers' rations. The residents of Tobolsk immediately sent butter, eggs, freshly-killed geese, cakes, wine, and tea to the Tsar's residence. To embarrass the Romanovs, Lenin's government refused to pay local grocers more than 20,000 rubles for supplies already delivered to them. Hearing of this, a local merchant promptly reimbursed all creditors out of his own pocket.

One of the worst days in captivity occurred in late November, 1917 when Nicholas learned that Lenin gained control of the government. A felon whose wanted poster recently graced police station bulletin boards now ruled Russia. The Tsar told Alexis's tutor Pierre Gilliard that this criminal's assumption of power made him bitterly regret his decision to abdicate.

Nicholas's misgivings were warranted. Lenin soon abolished democratic "workers councils" in favor of a "dictatorship of the proletariat," with himself as despot. When Social Revolutionaries cried foul over this broken campaign promise, he formed the Cheka (Secret Police) and authorized the first Red Terror, which liquidated thousands of his former supporters. Lenin wholeheartedly continued the Tsar's Siberian labor camp system. By 1922 his gulags incarcerated over 70,000 political prisoners, more than double the number detained under Nicholas II. He also ordered purges against kulaks (independent farmers), aristocrats, Mensheviks, and clergy. Between 1921 and 1922 Lenin's secret police murdered 2,691 priests, 1,962 monks, and 3,447 nuns. Approximately 200,000 political dissidents died during Bolshevism's first five years of rule. Lenin's August 11, 1918 telegram to Penza's commissars epitomized his administrative style.

"Comrades! The revolt by the ... kulak(s) must be repressed without mercy .... You need to hang ... at least 100 notorious kulaks, the rich, and the bloodsuckers. We need to set an example. Publish their names. Take away all of their grain ... Use your toughest people for this." [21]


The changes of guard at Tolbolsk became more ghastly after Lenin overthrew Kerensky. On April 18, 1918 Nicholas and Alexandra were shipped to Ekaterinburg, four hundred miles to the south. Their children followed on May 25th. Colonel Kobylinski did not accompany them. Communist militiamen evicted a businessman from Ipatiev House, and quartered the Imperial family there. The commissars in charge were Rodionov and Avadeyev. Rodionov bullied the Romanovs and insisted that they get nothing but black bread and cheap tea for breakfast. He ordered the grand duchesses's heads shaved and forbade them to lock their doors. Avadeyev and Ridionov prohibited table cloths, silver flatware, and all other amenities. Soldiers beat townsfolk who tried to bring gifts for the Tsar's family. When Seaman Nagorny, Alexis's faithful navy guardian, tried to prevent soldiers from stealing a pair of the boy's boots, Rodionov had him arrested and shot.

Avadeyev strode around swigging brandy from a flask while he rebuked the Tsar, occasionally pausing to grab food from the family's table with his hands. He allowed his men to steal personal property from the Romanovs. His churlish troops drank while on duty, and leered at the Tsar's daughters.

A servant handed Nicholas a secret message in mid-June, promising an escape attempt on the night of June 27th. Everyone stayed up all night, but no rescuers arrived.

Worried about the approaching White Army, Rodionov and Avadeyev requested permission from party headquarters to kill Tsar Nicholas and his family. Party Secretary Jakov Sverdlov, shared their concern about rescue attempts. On July 4th sinister Jacov Yurovsky arrived with a detachment of "Letts" (foreigners.) On July 13, 1918 the Ural Soviet with official authorization from Sverdlov, ordered him to execute Nicholas, Alexandra, and their children. Around midnight of July 17th "Lett" guards woke up the Romanovs and told them they were being moved to a new location. Yurovsky ordered everyone to wait in the cellar. Outside, trucks ran their engines -- apparently to drown out the noise of gun fire. When all gathered in the basement, Yurovsky announced:

"Your relations have tried to save you. They have failed and we must now shoot you." [22]


Nicholas stepped forward and extended his arm as if to shield his family. Yurovsky shot him in the head. His men then opened fire, murdering everyone else, including Dr. Botkin and the remaining servants. The Tsar's daughters screamed and writhed piteously after the initial burst of fire. They had jewels packed in their corsets, which deflected bullets shot at torso level. Yurovsky's accomplices dispatched them with bayonet thrusts and close-range head shots. They beat the children's spaniel "Jimmy" to death with rifle butts. According to a deposition obtained by White Army investigator Nicholai Sokolov from participant Pavel Medvedev, Tsarevich Alexis still lay moaning on the blood-drenched floor. Yurovsky strode over and pumped three rounds into his head.

Yurovsky's crew drove the corpses to Commissar Voikov at Four Brothers' Mine a few miles outside of town. They stripped the bodies (discovering the jewel-filled corsets), cut them to pieces with saws, and shoveled the gruesome pile of human offal into a bonfire. After pouring sulphuric acid on charred bones, Voikov's men dumped them down a mine shaft along with several grenades.

Although he swore his death squad to secrecy, Yurovsky overheard townsfolk speaking about the murders one day later. He immediately sent a truckload of men to gather up the ashes and bone fragments from Four Brothers' Mine and transport them to a different site. Their vehicle got stuck in mud. With the White Army closing in, they buried all remains in a common grave, covered it with railroad ties, pushed their truck out of the mire, and drove away. Two years later an anonymous Communist bulletin admitted executing the Tsar, but not his wife and children:

"The crowned hangman ... guilty of innumerable bloody crimes has been put to death... The family has been evacuated to a safe place ..." [23]


Image
Jakov Sverdlov (1885-1919), Chairman of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee, who ordered the Romanovs' executions in July, 1918.

Leon Trotsky wanted to try Nicholas II for crimes against Russia's proletariat in a public court, and use the Empress and children as bargaining chips in negotiations with Germany. He claimed that Lenin and Executive Committee Chairman Jakov Sverdlov approved the Imperial family's liquidation without consulting him. According to Trotsky, Sverdlov admitted the executions, explaining that

"Illyich (Lenin) believed that we shouldn't leave the Whites a banner to rally around." [24]


Trotsky realized that the underworld-style slayings of Tsar Nicholas and his family created a public relations catastrophe, which seriously discredited Communism's international movement.

Using written information supplied by Yurovsky's son, investigator Gelli Ryabov exhumed nine bodies in 1991. He gathered DNA samples from Romanov relatives -- including Britain's Prince Philip -- so that scientific tests could be performed. The remains of Nicholas, Alexandra, Olga, Maria, and Tatiana were positively identified.

The Bolshevik government killed several more Romanov family members that summer. Cheka agents hauled good-natured Grand Duke Michael, Tsar Nicholas's younger brother, to Perm in May, 1918, and murdered him there around June 12th. Bolsheviks in Moscow arrested Empress Alexandra's sister Elizabeth, Abess of Marfo-Marinskii Convent, and removed her to Napolnaya School near Alapayevsk, along with her assistant, Sister Barbara Yakovleva, Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, his secretary Fyodor Remez, Prince Ioann Konstaninovich, Prince Igor Konstaninovich, and Prince Vladimir Pavlovich Paley. Cheka hit men employed a method of operation similar to the one followed at Ekaterinberg. At 2 A.M on July 18, 1918 armed guards woke up all captives and formed them that they were to be taken to a new location. Foreign soldiers (or "Letts") commanded by Pyotr Konstantinov Startsev and Him Andreev Solovyov loaded the prisoners onto trucks and drove them to a desolate mining area approximately fifteen miles outside of town. Soldiers then dragged all victims into a cave, threw them down a mine shaft, and tossed several grenades after them. Though severely injured herself Sister Elizabeth bandaged the head of Prince Ioann before dying of her wounds. In 1992 the Russian Orthodox Church canonized her as a saint.

Since the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Tsar's French and British allies had showed little interest in him. Nicholas's cousin, King George V of England, wanted to authorize a commando mission to save the Romanovs. Lloyd George, a Labor Party politician with no affection for absolute monarchs, talked him out of it. Foreign policy advisor Sir Francis Bertie agreed that hosting an autocrat-in-exile would be politically inexpedient. While ambassador to France, Bertie had heard gossip about Alexandra in Parisian salons.

"The Empress is not only a Boche by birth, but in sentiment. She did all she could to bring about an understanding (with) Germany. She is regarded as ... a criminal lunatic and the Emperor as a (dupe) from his weakness and submission to her promptings." [25]


If the four Germany corps needed to fight the Tsar's army at Tannenburg in August, 1914 had been deployed in France, Paris would have fallen. Nevertheless, the French didn't lift a finger to help Nicholas.

Ironically, the Germans evinced more concern for Tsar Nicholas's welfare than his Entente treaty partners. When Denmark's Foreign Minister informed them of his plight in March, 1917, they immediately agreed not to shell or torpedo any cruiser bearing the Imperial standard. After signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk German diplomat Wilhelm Mirbach repeatedly petitioned Lenin's government to transfer the Romanovs safely from Ekaterinburg to Petrograd. Jacov Sverdlov played a double game with Mirbach, claiming that the Ekaterinburg Soviet -- which was actually under his full control -- would not obey his orders to release the royal prisoners.

The barbaric slaughter of Tsar Nicholas and his family tarnished the Soviet Union. Other European nations viewed it as an outlaw regime until after World War II. To this day pious Russians believe that the massacre cursed Mother Russia, bringing on Lenin's terror, Stalin's purges, Hitler's invasion, the Cold War, Afghanistan disaster, secession of Soviet republics, and other misfortunes.

_______________

Endnotes

1 Count Sergius Witte, Memoirs, trans. Abraham Yarmolinsky, Doubleday, New York, 1921, p. 179.

2 Ibid.

3 General Alexandre Spiridovitch, Les Dernieres Annees do la Cour de Tsarkoe-Selo, Payot, Paris, 1928, Vol. I, p. 73.

4 Ian Vorres, Last Grand Duchess: The Memoirs of Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, Scribner, New York, 1965, pp. 150-151.

5 John Van der Kiste, Queen Victoria's Children, Alan Sutton, Gloucester, U.K, 1986, p. 131.

6 Ibid.

7 Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden, The Life & Tragedy of Alexandra Feodorovna, Empress of Russia, Longmans, Green, London, 1928, p. 58.

8 Robert K. Massie, Nicholas & Alexandra, Atheneum, New York, 1967, p. 26.

9 Anna Vyrubovna, Memories of the Russian Court, MacMillan, New York, 1923, pp. 108-09.

10 Ibid., pp. 24-33, passim.

11 Massie, p. 173.

12 Vyrubovna, p. 94.

13 Ibid.

14 Bernard Pares, The Fall of the Russian Monarchy, Vintage Books, New York, 1961, p.188.

15 Ibid., p. 399.

16 Maurice Paleologue, An Ambassador's Memoirs, trans. F. A. Holt, Doran, New York, Vol. II, p. 166.

17 W. Bruce Lincoln, Passages Through Armageddon, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1986, p. 28.

18 http://www.wikipedia.org, February Revolution, p. 3.

19. Ibid.

20 Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, T. Butterworth, London, 1923, p. 73.

21 J. Brooks & G. Gernyavskiy, Lenin and the Making of the Soviet State, Bedford/St. Martins, New York, 2007, op. cit. Nicholai Lenin, Telegram to Penza Gubernia Executive Committee, August 11, 1918.

22 Paul Bulygin & Alexander Kerensky, The Murder of the Romanovs, Hutchinson, London, 1935, p. 237.

23 Fen Montaigne, "The Death of the Last Czar," The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 31, 1994, PP. G-1 & G-4.

24 Marc Ferro, Nicholas II: Last of the Tsars, trans. Brian Pearce, Oxford University Press, Oxford, U.K., 1991, p. 255, op. cit. Leon Trotsky.

25 Massie, p. 439.
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Re: Hitler's Mentor: Dietrich Eckart, His Life, Times, & Mil

Postby admin » Tue Dec 18, 2018 11:35 pm

11: The Russian Connection

"There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for ... the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates ... multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility."

-- Norman Cohn


Image
Alfred Rosenberg with Hitler, 1925

Shortly after arriving in Munich, Russian emigre Alfred Rosenberg visited ballet dancer Edith von Schrenck, an acquaintance of his wife. He told her of his wish to write about the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy. Ms. Von Schrenck advised him to contact Dietrich Eckart, a writer living in Munich, whom she had met a few years earlier while taking the rest cure at Schwarzeck Sanitarium.

On a cold morning in December, 1918 Rosenberg walked up the steps to Tengstrasse 38, second floor, and knocked on Eckart's door. The groggy poet rolled out of bed, opened the door, and raised an eyebrow. The thin, serious-looking Rosenberg nervously introduced himself and asked if Eckart could use another "warrior against Jerusalem." They met for lunch later that day at the Alt Wien restaurant on Bayerstrasse, where they discussed politics, art, Schopenhauer, and the Gothic period. Before long Eckart spoke of Rosenberg as "my tireless friend."

The collaboration of Eckart with Rosenberg led to a cross-pollination between the White Russian community-in-exile and Munich's homegrown Pan-Germans. Rosenberg formed a link between the worst of both worlds. The result would be an unholy amalgamation of Cossack and Nazi anti-Semitism.

During the summer of 1919 Rosenberg obtained a copy of The protocols of the Elders of Zion, recently translated into German by Ludwig Muller von Hausen. Lt. Pyotry Shabelsky-Bork gave it to him -- not a mysterious stranger. Eckart later claimed that it took him a long time to read this riveting narrative. Feelings of shock caused him to drop the book repeatedly. He soon began "leaking" this secret plot to Auf Gut Deutsch readers. For good measure he invented a story about once seeing the very map used in Basel by the Jewish elders as they laid plans to carve up Europe. When scholars and responsible journalists exposed the Protocols as a forgery, Eckart accused them of using the "Hebrew tactic" of mocking what one can't disprove. He and Rosenberg corresponded with Muller von Hausen in hopes of interviews and articles, but he dampened their fervor with curt refusals.

The shy and bookish son of a shoemaker, Rosenberg was born in Reval, Estonia on January 14, 1893. He graduated from Petri Realschule at the top of his class. From there he went to the Advanced Technical Institute of Riga and then to the University of Moscow, where he took a degree in architecture. While at the university Rosenberg boarded with a cadet family and belonged to the ultranationalist Rubonia Society. For his graduation project he designed a gigantic crematorium.

Rosenberg claimed that one day in 1917 a complete stranger marched unannounced into his room, gave him The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, then left abruptly.

"The man, whom I have never seen before, came into my study without knocking, put the book on my desk, and vanished without saying a word." [1]


The addition of The Protocols to Rosenberg's library would have devastating consequences for European Jews.

Although twenty-one years old when the war broke out in 1914, Rosenberg's status as an engineering student exempted him from Russian military service. The November, 1917 Revolution shook his world. This hard-working graduate student, who had undergone so much training in order to advance beyond his petite bourgeois origins, suddenly faced proletarianization at the hands of godless Bolsheviks.

Anxious to escape the chaos of Moscow, Rosenberg went back to Reval where he worked for nine months as a high school drawing teacher. By November, 1918 communist forces threatened the city. Rosenberg and his wife joined the stampede of "Whites" fleeing west under protection of the evacuating German Army. During this exodus to Germany he met various absconding rascals. From former government officials Fyodor Vinberg and Pyotr Shabelsky-Bork he heard accounts of how Jews overthrew the Tsarist Autocracy. Shabelsky-Bork's mother had been active in the Union of the Russian People, a rightwing group which subsidized The Black Hundreds' pogroms against Jews. She denounced both Jews and Freemasons as agents of the Antichrist in her book The Satanists of the 20th Century. Characters like Vinberg, Shabelsky-Bork, and Max von Scheubner-Richter had ties with the Okrhana (Tsarist Secret Police.) Their associates distributed typed copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to delegates at the Versailles Peace Conference.

Black Hundred fortunes only briefly improved beginning in March 1911, when a twelve-year-old boy was butchered in Kiev and the belief spread among the populace that Jews had killed him as part of a ritual. A member of the Union of the Russian People in Kiev wrote an appeal that appeared throughout the city: “Russian People! If you value your children, then kill the Yids! Kill them until there is not even a single Yid in Russia!” In April 1911, Purishkevich and Nikolai Markov II, the influential leader of the Kursk branch of the Union of the Russian People, argued before the Duma that Jews had murdered the boy in Kiev as part of a demonic ritual. [87] An article in a July 1911 edition of the Union newspaper The Russian Banner warned, “Our poor dear children, fear and be afraid of your primordial enemy, tormenter and infanticide, accursed of God and man – the Yid!” The article further admonished Russian children to avoid “the Yid” as if he were a “plague-stricken pest.” [88]

A front-page article in an August 1913 edition of The Russian Banner asserted: “The guilt of the Kiev Jewish Kahal in this matter is established,” no matter what verdict the court would pronounce in the ritual murder case (the accused were found not guilty). Moreover, Jewry deserved to be “expelled from Russia to a country where the use of human blood is not considered a crime.” The article argued that the Russian government had to adopt severe measures against this “accursed people,” the Jews. The piece stressed, “The Yids must be placed artificially in conditions such that they continually die out.” [89] The Union thus served as the first European political group seriously to propose physically exterminating Jews.

While the public uproar over the supposed Jewish ritual murder in Kiev aided the far right’s cause in Imperial Russia, a new split weakened the Black Hundred movement in 1911. At the All-Russian Congress of the Union of the Russian People in Moscow in November 1911, Markov II challenged Union leader Dubrovin’s authority. Other members of the Union’s Head Council backed Markov II, and he received the outside support of Purishkevich, who had already left the Union. Dubrovin reacted by dismissing the offending members from the Union’s Head Council and reconstituting it with reliable supporters. [90] In August 1912, Dubrovin renamed the organization the Vserossiiskogo Dubrinskogo soiuzza russkoga naroda (All-Russian Dubrovin Union of the Russian People) with himself as lifetime leader. Markov II formed another faction of the Union of the Russian People in November 1912. [91]

Dubrovin struggled to maintain his authority in far right Russian circles. Two close colleagues and friends, Aleksandr Bork, who belonged to the Union’s Head Council, and his wife Elsa Shabelskii-Bork, who regularly attended Head Council meetings in an advisory capacity, aided him in his efforts to maintain control of the Union. The couple submitted articles to The Russian Banner in accordance with Dubrovin’s wishes. [92] The pair also began publishing a newspaper, Svoboda I poriadok (Freedom and Order), with police money in December 1913. [93] The Tsar himself avidly read this paper. [94]

In his opening editorial from December 1913, Bork struck an apocalyptic tone. He quoted from Revelation 3:16 in castigating “superficial servants of Christ’s church” who were “neither cold nor hot.” He further warned that “dark forces” were leading humanity to “ruin.” He called for struggle against “Jewish Freemasonry,” which was preparing a “violent … anti-Christian revolution” in Imperial Russia along the lines of those that had “already succeeded in so many countries.” [95] Bork thus viewed Jewry as an apocalyptic force bent on destruction.

In the Russian Empire on the outbreak of World War I, anti-Semitism was relatively widespread, but the Black Hundred movement remained in a disorganized state. As war with Germany loomed, the predominantly pro-German attitude of the Black Hundred movement exacerbated its political weakness. Union of the Russian People leadership tended quite early towards a pro-German stance, largely because of Imperial Russia’s continuing rivalry with Great Britain in Central Asia. [96] In May 1914, the Union faction leader Nikolai Markov II asserted in the Russian Duma that a “small alliance with Germany” was superior to a “great friendship with England.” [97] The majority of rightist monarchists in Imperial Russia favored a German-Russian alliance along the lines that Markov II proposed. [98]

The generally positive attitude towards the German Empire in the Black Hundred movement also applied to the Baltic German population of the Russian Empire. While Union of the Russian People ideology generally disapproved of minority nationalities in Imperial Russia, Baltic Germans proved an exception. In fact, Baltic Germans generally enjoyed a favorable reputation in the Russian radical right. Point 17 of the statutes of Purishkevich’s Michael the Archangel Russian People’s Union expressed “particular trust in the German population of the Empire.” This point had to be removed after the outbreak of World War I, but a generally pro-Baltic German attitude remained among members of the Imperial Russian far right. [99]

The activities and views of right-wing Baltic German subjects of the Russian Empire deserve greater attention that they have received because of the key role that some Baltic Germans subsequently played in the National Socialist movement. The Rubonia Fraternity at the Riga Polytechnic Instituted (named after the Rubon, the Roman term for the Duna River that flows through Riga) spurred Baltic German pride. The majority of the Rubonia Fraternity members came from upper-class Baltic German families in the Russian Baltic provinces. [100] Four members of the Rubonia Fraternity eventually immigrated to Germany and played important roles in Aufbau and the National Socialist Party: Max von Scheubner-Richter, Otto von Kursell, Arno Schickedanz, and Alfred Rosenberg.

Scheubner-Richter was born Richter in Riga in 1884 to an Imperial German father and a Baltic German mother. He received his double name in the course of a love affair with Mathilde von Scheubner, the noble wife of a prominent member of Riga society. He absconded from Riga to Munich with Mathilde, who was almost thirty years his senior, and married her in 1911. A relative of Richter’s wife adopted him and granted him her noble name von Scheubner in 1912, entitling him to the name ovn Scheubner-Richter. [101]

While he was still known as Richter, Scheubner-Richter became friends with Kursell, who had been born into a noble Estonian Baltic Germany family in Saint Petersburg in 1884. [102] Scheubner-Richter and Kursell had first met at the Petri High School in Reval, in what became Estonia. The two Baltic Germans began studying together at the Riga Polytechnic Institute as members of the Rubonia Fraternity in 1905. Scheubern-Richter specialized in chemistry and Kursell studied architecture. Kursell valued Scheubner-Richter as a “popular, cheerful comrade” who held a variety of leadership positions in the Rubonia Fraternity. [103] Kursell was himself a charismatic person and, like Scheubner-Richter, a ladies’ man. [104]

While he was legally considered a subject of Imperial Germany, Scheubner-Richter spoke fluent Russian from his early Russian schooling, and he regarded himself as a Baltic German since he had spent his entire youth in the Imperial Russian Baltic ports Riga and Reval and had risked his life for Baltic German interests in 1905. During the Revolution of 1905, nationalist Latvians and Estonians had joined forces with socialist revolutionaries to overthrow Baltic German landowners who held the leading societal role in the Baltic provines. Scheubner-Richter had been shot in the knee while serving in the Baltic German Selbstschutz (Self-Protection) forces that had combated this anti-Baltic German alliance. [105]

The two other Rubonia Fraternity members who went on to play important roles in Aufbau and the National Socialist movement, Rosenberg and Schickedanz, entered Rubonia in 1910 and studied there together until 1917. Rosenberg had been born in 1893 in Reval to merchant Baltic German parents. His colleague Schickedanz had been born into a Riga merchant family in 1893. Rosenberg majored in architecture and Schickedanz studied chemistry. [106] Rosenberg admired volkisch ideology. As a young man, he read German mythology, Schopenhauer, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. He characterized the last as “the strongest positive influence in my youth.” Russian literature also strongly affected him, most notably the works of Dostoevskii. [107] Rosenberg later helped to shape National Socialist ideology by synthesizing volkisch German ideas with White émigré views.

Unlike the Rubonia Fraternity members Scheubner-Richter, Kursell, Schickedanz, and Rosenberg, a man of noble Baltic German ancestry who went on to influence the National Socialist movement, Fedor Vinberg, regarded himself unequivocally as a Russian. [108] Vinberg grew up in Saint Petersburg as the son of a general who eventually served as a member of the Highest Russian Military Council. He studied at the Classical Gymnasium in Kiev in his youth and subsequently joined the army, reaching the rank of colonel in 1913.

Vinberg attained a high status in Imperial Russia. In 1913, the Tsar named him to serve as his court equerry, meaning that he frequently participated in important ceremonies at the Tsar’s court. With the outbreak of World War I, Colonel Vinberg was assigned command of an infantry regiment. He used his connections to receive an audience with Tsaritsa Aleksandra Romanov, with whom he developed an intense personal relationship if not an outright affair. He pleaded to be allowed to serve in a cavalry regiment. The Tsaritsa saw to it that he received a position in the staff headquarters of the Second Russian Army as he desired. [109]

Vinberg participated in the Black Hundred movement. He belonged to Purishkevich’s Michael of the Archangel Russian People’s Union. Purishkevich “especially impressed” Vinberg early on, though they became somewhat alienated from each other as World War I progressed. [110] After the Tsar’s abdication during the February Revolution of 1917, Vinberg refused to serve the Provisional Government under Aleksandr Kerenskii. Kerenskii’s regime suppressed Black Hundred organizations before any other political groupings. In May 1917, Vinberg launched a counter-revolutionary initiative by founding a secret alliance, Officer’s Duty, which included both members of the officer corps and a few hundred men from outside it. [111] Vinberg remained a staunch supporter of the monarchy in the face of revolutionary upheaval.

Counter-revolutionary activities in which Vinberg participated during the period of Kerenskii’s Provisional Government culminated in the unsuccessful Kornilov Putsch of August 27-30, 1917 under the leadership of General Lavr Kornilov. Vinberg and members of his conspiratorial Officer’s Duty organization took part in this undertaking. [112] Lieutenant Piotr Shabelskii-Bork, the son of the couple who had published the Union of the Russian People newspaper Freedom and Order and a member of both the Union of the Russian People and Purishkevich's Michael the Archangel Russian People's Union, also supported the Kornilov Putsch. Lieutenant Sergei Taboritskii, Shabelskii-Bork's comrade from the Cavalry Regiment of the Caucasian Division, also took part in this counter-revolutionary endeavor. [113] Like Vinberg, both Shabelskii-Bork and Taboritskii went on to serve Aufbau and the National Socialist cause.

In the summer of 1917, Lieutenants Shabelskii-Bork and Taboritskii formed an organization of officers loyal to the Tsar. They traveled to the front at the end of June 1917 to assess which cavalry regiments would best serve for a monarchical coup in the capital Petrograd, as Saint Petersburg was then known. Shabelskii-Bork and Taboritskii planned to assist General Kornilov by using loyal Tsarist cavalry officers to storm the Winter Palace and to arrest Kerenskii's Provisional Government in August 1917, but their preparations were discovered and thwarted beforehand. [114] The Failed Kornilov Putsch increased public fears of repressive right wing counterrevolution. The unsuccessful undertaking undermined remaining public confidence in Russian army officers, and it helped to bring Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks out of the isolation that they had engendered through their own armed protest in July 1917. [115]

After the Kornilov Putsch collapsed, Colonel Vinberg continued to oppose leftist force in Russia. He collaborated with Purishkevich, who formed an underground monarchical organization in September 1917 that included many former members of the now dissolved Michael the Archangel Russian People's Union. [116] Vinberg contributed articles to the "non-socialist" newspaper Narodnyi Tribun (The People's Tribune), which Purishkevich began publishing in September 1917. [117] In an October 1917 essay, "Fighting Value," Vinberg lamented that the 'Revolution" had "torn out" the "lofty religious, public, and civil ideals" from the "souls of the soldiers" in Russia. [118] At this time, he was primarily concerned with the dissolution of the Russian Army as a potent fighting force.

Vinberg wrote an article for The People's Tribune a few days later in which he again lamented the current state of affairs in Russia. In his essay, "Contrasts," he claimed that while the Italian Army was fighting bravely against an overwhelming German force, soldiers of the numerically far superior Russian Army were running "unrestrained" from German troops. Moreover, "Native fields and settlements have been pillaged and destroyed by our own soldiers and peasants." Vinberg used the language of a disappointed lover in expressing his woe: "My poor people! ... I loved and believed in you so! ... What they have done to you!" [119] The spread of revolution and the dissolution of the army devastated Vinberg.

Vinberg's impotent frustration as expressed in Purishkevich's The People's Tribune underscored the inability of the Black Hundred movement to thwart the Bolshevik seizure of power. [120] The Bolsheviks closed The People's Tribune after they had overthrown Kerenskii's Provisional Government in October 1917 (according to the Julian calendar then used in Russia). [121] Vinberg was suddenly faced with the rule of what he termed the "Jewish Bolsheviks." [122] The success of the "October Revolution," as the Bolshevik seizure of power became known, forced Black Hundred activities in Russia to become strictly conspiratorial. [123]

After the Bolsheviks came to power, Vinberg's co-conspirator in the Kornilov Putsch, Shabelskii-Bork, retreated to his estate near Petrograd, where he researched the causes of the February and October Revolutions for Purishkevich's underground monarchical organization. Shabelskii-Bork concluded that the Entente (Britain and France) had fomented revolution in Imperial Russia since it had feared the "Russian peril" as much as the German one. He decided that the restoration of the Russian monarchy could not be achieved with Entente aid, but only through the "reestablishment of the traditional friendship between Russia and Germany." [124]

Bolshevik leaders broke up Purishkevich's underground monarchical organization and imprisoned Purishkevich, Vinberg, and Shabelskii-Bork, among others, in December 1917. Bolshevik authorities charged the three comrades with organizing a monarchical conspiracy against the fledgling Soviet regime. [125] At their trial that began in late December, Shabelskii-Bork impressed Vinberg with his fervent monarchism. [126] Vinberg moved Shabelskii-Bork by assuring the tribunal. “My head can roll off of your execution block, but it will never bow to the Revolution.” [127] The Bolshevik court convicted and imprisoned Purishkevich, Vinberg, and Shabelskii-Bork. [128] Vinberg and Shabelskii-Bork shared the same prison cell, where Vinberg received the thanks of the similarly incarcerated former Tsar for working on his behalf. [129] Vinberg and Shabelskii-Bork began a close friendship in this cell that later led to the transfer of Black Hundred ideology to the early National Socialist movement, most notably in the form of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

CONCLUSION

Far rightests in Imperial Germany and the Russian Empire established detailed anti-Western, anti-socialist, and anti-semitic ideologies in the period leading up to the 1917 Russian Revolution. Largely internally orientated volkisch German thought drew on the idealistic views of Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Volkisch ideology conceived a pernicious materialistic Jewish essence that the spiritually and racially superior Germans needed to transcend by negating the will to live, thereby redeeming the world. More externally fixated Russian radical right beliefs, which were associated with the Slavophiles in general and the authors Fedor Dostoevskii and Vladimir Solovev in particular, expressed apocalyptic visions of Jewish world conspirators who threatened to ruin Imperial Russia and eventually the world. Russians needed to lead all Slavs to combat this menace in a concrete political struggle. Anti-Semitic National Socialist ideology later arose largely as a synthesis of German volkisch-redemptive and Russian conspiratorial-apocalyptic thought.

While the Black Hundred movement in Imperial Russia, of which the Union of the Russian People formed the most important component, managed to disseminate its anti-Semitic ideology to a considerably broader audience than any comparable volkisch German alliance, far right movements in both Imperial Russia and the German Empire nonetheless failed to achieve their political aspirations. Russian conservative revolutionaries fiercely defended the Tsar, but after initial moderate successes, the Black Hundred movement’s influence declined dramatically. Far rightists could not prevent the Tsar’s abdication, nor could they thwart the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. The Russian far right only regained a powerful drive and coherence that had been lacking of late after the Bolshevik Revolution. The Bolshevik “Reds” provided an insidious political foe for “Whites” that fit earlier apocalyptic Black Hundred warnings.

No powerful political volkisch movement developed in Imperial Germany up to the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. Heinrich Class’ Pan-German League, Ludwig Muller von Haussen’s Association against the Presumption of Jewry, and Wolfgang Kapp’s German Fatherland Party all failed to attract mass followings. Numerically slight volkisch elements that grouped around Kapp and Class ultimately concluded that a military dictatorship under the volkisch General Erich von Ludendorff represented a superior option to the rule of the ineffectual Kaiser. Volkisch Germans could not establish such a dictatorship, however.

In any case, although the days of the Kaiser were numbered, German prospects for victory in World War I improved considerably when the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917. German forces advanced deep into former Imperial Russian territory in 1918, most notably into the Ukraine, where right-wing German officers interacted with their monarchical Russian or Ukrainian counterparts on a large scale for the first time. German-White cooperation in the Ukraine set a precedent for further international right-wing alliances after Imperial Germany lost World War I, notably as seen in the Baltic region in 1919. Hitler’s National Socialists subsequently drew upon the tradition of German-White collaboration that had been established in the Ukraine.

-- The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Emigres and the Making of National Socialism, 1917-1945, by Michael Kellogg


Rosenberg's White Russian compatriots had a predilection for draping reactionary prejudices in the mantle of a religious crusade. In pamphlets published by The Confraternity of St. Michael they asseverated that "Christ-killers" such as Sverdlov and Yurovsky had sown seeds of discontent among serfs, then slew God's earthly representative, Tsar Nicholas. God would now bless the Whites' Holy War against these diabolical usurpers.

Rosenberg soon arrived in Berlin with a group of unsavory refugees. Not being able to find work there, he relocated to Munich in December, 1918. Having no money, he ate most of his meals in soup kitchens. A Russian expatriate discussion circle convinced Rosenberg that Germany had to defend European civilization against the spread of Jewish-Marxist nihilism. His first Auf Gut Deutsch article on the "Jewish Revolution" appeared on February, 21, 1919. It rehashed articles from Pravda and put an anti-Semitic spin on them. In December, 1919 Eckart introduced Rosenberg to Hitler, who appreciated his "deep and systematic knowledge of the Jewish problem."

While working odd jobs in Munich, Rosenberg embarked upon an independent study course. After reading Adolf Josef Lanz's TheoZoology, Houston S. Chamberlain's Foundations of the 19th Century, and other racist tomes he began churning out his own brand of humbug. In 1920 Rosenberg wrote a defamatory history of Judaism entitled The Tracks of the Jew through the Ages and edited an off-color anthology of Jewish writings, The Immorality of the Talmud. He followed up with The Crime of Freemasonry (1921), and The Morass, or Plague in Russia (1922), and a translation of Henri- Roger Gougenot des Mousseaux's old French standby, re-titled The Eternal Jew. All of these works were published by Eckart's Hoheneichen ("Big Oak") Press. Although he contended that "earth-bound" Jews lacked souls, this did not prevent the foppish and heavily perfumed Rosenberg from having a scandalous love affair with the daughter of Jewish publishing magnate Georg Bernhard.

Abandoning any pretense of intellectual honesty, Rosenberg translated and published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion -- a work he knew to be spurious. In Warrant for Genocide Professor Norman Cohn uncovered the origins of The Protocols. The Okrhana (Russian Secret Police) hired "Holy Fool" Sergey Nilus to write a tract about the alleged Jewish conspiracy. In 1905 he cobbled together The Great and the Small, which featured The Protocols as a postscript. To associate the "Elders" with anarchy, Nilus set his meeting of International Jewish leaders in Basle, Switzerland, where Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels held their International Congress of Socialists in 1869. Dr. Cohn adduced convincing proof that Nilus plagiarized Maurice Joly's "Dialogue between Montesquieu and Machiavelli" (1864,) a satire aimed at Napoleon III's corrupt government. The Protocols' consisted of an opening speech, followed by twenty-four points that set forth the supposed master plan for world domination. In addition to unscrupulous trade practices, the program called for manipulation of education and the press, so that the legitimate authority of crown and church could be subverted. Elders suggested that the masses might be easily seduced with alcohol, drugs, and trashy entertainment.

X: NAPOLEON AND FREEMASONRY

THE leader who arose out of the first French Revolution, and whose military and diplomatic fame is still fresh in the recollection of many of the present generation — that leader was Napoleon Bonaparte. In the days of his greatest prosperity, nothing was so distasteful to him as to be reminded of his Jacobin past. He then wished to pose as another Charlemagne, or Rudolph of Hapsburg. He wished to be considered the friend of religion, and of the Catholic religion in particular. He did something for the restoration of the Church in France, but it was as little as he could help. It, perhaps, prevented a more wholesome and complete reaction in favour of the true religious aspirations of the population. It was done grudgingly, parsimoniously, and meanly. And when it had been done, Napoleon did all he could to undo its benefits. He soon became the persecutor — the heartless, cruel, ungrateful persecutor of the Pontiff, and an opponent to the best interests of religion in France, and in every country which had the misfortune to fall under his sway. The reason for all this was, that Napoleon had commenced his career as a Freemason, and a Freemason he remained in spirit and in effect to the end of his life. It is known that he owed his first elevation to the Jacobins, and that his earliest patron was Robespierre. His first campaign in Italy was characterized by the utmost brutality which could gratify Masonic hatred for the Church. He suppressed the abodes of the consecrated servants of God, sacked churches, cathedrals, and sanctuaries, and reduced the Pope to the direst extremities. His language was the reflex of his acts and of his heart. His letters breathe everywhere the spirit of advanced Freemasonry, gloating over the wounds it had been able to inflict upon the Spouse of Christ. Yet this adventurer has, with great adroitness, been able to pass with many, and especially in Ireland, as a good Catholic. Because he was the enemy of England, or rather that England led by the counsels of Pitt and Burke, constituted herself the implacable enemy of the Revolution of which he was the incarnation and continuation, many opposed to England for political reasons, regard Bonaparte as a kind of hero. No one can doubt the military genius of the man, nor indeed his great general ability; but he was in all his acts what Freemasonry made him. He was mean, selfish, tyrannical, cruel. He was reckless of blood. He could tolerate or use the Church while that suited his policy. But he had from the beginning to the very end of his career that thorough indifference to her welfare, and want of belief in her doctrines, which an early and life-long connection with the Illuminati inspired.

Father Deschamps writes of him: "Napoleon Bonaparte was in effect an advanced Freemason, and his reign has been the most flourishing epoch of Freemasonry. During the reign of terror the Grand Orient ceased its activity. The moment Napoleon seized power the lodges were opened in every place."

I have said that the revolutionary rulers in France were all Illuminati — that is Freemasons of the most pronounced type — whose ultimate aim was the destruction of every existing religion and form of secular government, in order to found an atheistic, social republic, which would extend throughout the world and embrace all mankind. Freemasonry welcomes, as we have seen, the Mahommedan, the Indian, the Chinese, and the Buddhist, as well as the Christian and the Jew. It designs to conquer all, as a means of bringing all into the one level of Atheism and Communism. When, therefore, its Directory, in their desire to get rid of Napoleon, planned the expedition to Egypt and Asia, they meant the realization of a part of this programme, as well as the removal of a troublesome rival. A universal monarchy is, in their idea, the most efficacious means for arriving at a universal republic. Once obtained, the dagger with which they removed Gustavus III of Sweden, or the guillotine by which they rid France of Louis XVI, can at any moment remove Caesar and call in Brutus. They are not the men to recoil before deeds of blood for the accomplishment of their purposes.

Now Napoleon, who was, as Father Deschamps informs us, a member of the lodge of the Templars, the extreme Illuminated lodge of Lyons, and had given proof of his fidelity to Masonry in Italy, was the very man to extend the rule of Republicanism throughout Asia. He appeared in Egypt with the same professions of hypocritical respect for the Koran, the Prophet, and Mahommedanism, as he afterwards made when it suited his policy for Catholicism.
His address to the people of Egypt will prove this. It ran as follows, with true Masonic hypocrisy: —

"Cadis, Chieks, Imans, tell the people that we are the friends of true Mussulmen; that we respect more than the Mamelukes do, God, His Prophet, and the Alkoran. Is it not we who have destroyed the Pope, who wished that war should be made against the Mussulman? Is it not we who have destroyed the Knights of Malta, because these madmen thought that God willed them to make war upon the Mussulman? Is it not we who have been, in all ages the friends of the Grand Seigneur — may God fulfil his desires — and the enemy of his enemies. God is God, and Mahomet is his Prophet! Fear nothing above all for the religion of the Prophet, which I love."


The cool hypocrisy of this address is manifested by a proclamation he made on that occasion to his own soldiers. The same proclamation also shows the value we may place on his protestations of attachment to, and respect for, the usages of Christianity. The following is a translation of it: —

"Soldiers! the peoples with whom we are about to live are Mahommedan. The first article of their faith is this: 'There is no God but God, and Mahomet is his Prophet.' Do not contradict them. Act with them as you have acted with the Jews and with the Italians. Have the same respect for their Muftis and their Imans, as you have had for Rabbis and Bishops. Have for the ceremonies prescribed by the Alkoran, for the Mosques, the same tolerance you had for Convents, for Synagogues, and for the religion of Moses and of Jesus Christ."


We read in the correspondence of Napoleon I, published by order of Napoleon III (vol. v., pp. 185, 191, 241), what he thought of this proclamation at the very end of his career: —

"After all, it was not impossible that circumstances might have brought me to embrace Islam," he said at St. Helena. "Could it be thought that the Empire of the East, and perhaps the subjection of the whole of Asia, was not worth a turban and pantaloons, for it was reduced to so much solely. We would lose only our breeches and our hats. I say that the army, disposed as it was, would have lent itself to that project undoubtedly, and it saw in it nothing but a subject for laughter and pleasantry. Meanwhile, you see the consequences. I took Europe by a back stroke. The old civilization was beaten down, and who then thought to disturb the destinies of our France and the regeneration of the world? Who had dared to undertake it? Who could have accomplished it?"
...

Thiers (Histoire du Consulat et de I'Empire, iv. p. 14), says that when Napoleon intended to proclaim himself Emperor, he wished to give the Masons a pledge of his principles, and that he did this by killing the Duke d'Enghien. He said, "They wish to destroy the Revolution in attacking it in my person. I will defend it, for I am the Revolution. I, myself — I, myself. They will so consider it from this day forward, for they will know of what we are capable." ...

When Napoleon obtained power, it was we know principally by means of the Illuminated Freemason Talleyrand. [1] By him and his confederates of the Illuminati, he was recalled from Egypt and placed in the way of its attainment. His brothers were — every one of them — deep in the secrets of the Sect. Its supreme hidden directory saw that a reaction had set in, which if not averted, would speedily lead to the return of the exiled Bourbons, and to the disgorgement of ill-gotten goods on the part of the revolutionists. As a lesser evil, therefore, and as a means of forwarding the unification of Europe which they had planned, by his conquests, they placed supreme power in the hands of Bonaparte, and urged him on in his career, watching, at the same time, closely, their own opportunities for the development of the deadly designs of the Sect. Then, they obtained the first places in his Empire for themselves. They put as much mischief into the measures of relief given to conscience as they could. They established a fatal supremacy for secularism in the matter of education. They brought dissension between the Pope and the Emperor. They caused the second confiscation of the States of the Church. They caused and continued to the end, the imprisonment of Pius VII. They were at the bottom of every attack made by Napoleon while Emperor upon the rights of the Church, the freedom and independence of the Supreme Pontiff, and the well-being of religion.

But the chief mistake of Napoleon was the encouragement he gave to Freemasonry. It served his purpose admirably for a while, that is so long as he served the present and ultimate views of the conspiracy; for a conspiracy Masonry ever was and ever will be. Even if Cambaceres, Talleyrand, Fouche, and the old leaders of the Illuminati, whom he had taken into his confidence and richly rewarded, should be satisfied, there was a mass of others whom no reward could conciliate, and who, filled with the spirit of the Sect, were sure to be ever on the look out for the means to advance the designs of Weishaupt and his inner circle. That inner circle never ceased its action. It held the members of the Sect, whom it not only permitted but assisted to attain high worldly honours, completely in its power, and hence in absolute subjection. For them as well as for the humblest member of the secret conclave, the poisoned aqua tophona and the dagger were ready to do the work of certain death should they lack obedience to those depraved fanatics of one diabolical idea, who were found worthy to be selected by their fellow conspirators to occupy the highest place of infamy and secret power. These latter scattered secretly amidst the rank and file of the lodges, hundreds of Argus-eyed, skilled plotters, who kept the real power of inner or high Masonry in the hands of its hidden masters. Masonry from this secret vantage ground ceaselessly conspired during the Empire. It assisted the conquest of the victor of Austerlitz and Jena; and if Deschamps, who quotes from the most reliable sources, is to be trusted, it actually did more for these victories than the great military leader himself. Through its instrumentality the resources of the enemies of Napoleon were never at hand, the designs of the Austrian and other generals opposed to him were thwarted, treason was rife in their camps, and information fatal to their designs was conveyed to the French commander. Masonry was then on his side, and as now the secret resources of the Order, its power of hidden influence and espionage were placed at the disposal of the cause it served. But when Masonry had reason to fear that Napoleon's power might be perpetuated; when his alliance with the Imperial Family of Austria, and above all, when the consequence of that alliance, an heir to his throne, caused danger to the universal republic it could otherwise assure itself of at his death; when, too, he began to show a coldness for the sect, and sought means to prevent it from the propagandism of its diabolical aims, then it became his enemy, and his end was not far off. [2] Distracting councils prevailed in his cabinet. His opponents began to get information regarding his movements, which he had obtained previously of theirs. Members of the sect urged on his mad expedition to Moscow. His resources were paralyzed; and he was, in one word, sold by secret, invisible foes into the hands of his enemies. In Germany, Weishaupt and his party, still living on in dark intrigue, prepared secretly for his downfall. His generals were beaten in detail. He was betrayed, hoodwinked, and finally led to his deposition and ruin. He then received with a measure, pressed down and overflowing, and shaken together, the gratitude of the father of lies, incarnate in Freemasonry, in the Illuminati, and kindred Atheist secret societies. Banished to Elba he was permitted to return to France only in order to meet the fate of an outcast and a prisoner upon the rock of St. Helena, where he died abandoned and persecuted by the dark Sect which had used, abused, and betrayed him. So it has continued, as we shall see, to use, to abuse, and to betray every usurper or despot whom it lures into its toils.

_______________

Notes:

1. Alexander Dumas in his Memoires de Garibaldi, first series, p. 34, tells  us: —

"Illuminism and Freemasonry, these two great enemies of royalty, and the adopted device of both of which was L. P. D., lilia pedibus destrue, had a grand part in the French Revolution.
 
"Napoleon took Masonry under his protection. Joseph Napoleon was Grand Master of the Order, Joachim Murat second Master adjoint. The Empress Josephine being at Strasbourg, in 1805, presided over the  fete for the adoption of the lodge of True Chevaliers of Paris. At the same  time Eugene de Beauharnais was Venerable of the lodge of St. Eugene in Paris. Having come to Italy with the title of Viceroy, the Grand Orient  of Milan named him Master and Sovereign Commander of the Supreme Council of the thirty-second grade, that is to say, accorded him the greatest honour which could be given him according to the Statutes of the Order. Bernadotte was a Mason. His son Oscar was Grand Master of the Swedish lodge. In the different lodges of Paris were successively initiated, Alexander, Duke of Wurtemburg; the Prince Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, even the Persian Ambassador, Askeri Khan. The President of the Senate, Count de Lacipede, presided over the Grand Orient of France, which had for officers of honour the Generals Kellerman, Messina, and Soult. Princes, Ministers, Marshals, Officers, Magistrates, all the men, in fine, remarkable for their glory or considerable by their position, ambitioned to be made  Masons. The women even wished to have their lodges into which entered  Mesdames de Vaudemont, de Carignan, de Gerardin, de Narbonne and many other ladies."
 
Frere Clavel, in his picturesque history of Freemasonry, says that, "Of all these high personages the Prince Cambaceres was the one who most occupied himself with Masonry. He made it his duty to rally to Masonry all the men in France who were influential by their official position, by their talent, or by their fortune. The personal services which he rendered to many of the brethren, the eclat which he caused to be given to the lodges in bringing to their sittings by his example and invitations all those illustrious amongst the military and judicial professions and others, contributed powerfully to the fusion of parties and to the consolidation of the imperial throne. In effect under his brilliant and active administration the lodges multiplied ad infinitum. They were composed of the elect of French society. They became a point of re-union for the partisans of the existing and of passed regimes. They celebrated in them the feasts of the Emperor. They read in them the bulletins of his victories before they were made public by the press, and able men organized the enthusiasm which gradually took hold of all minds."


-- Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked As the Secret Power Behind Communism, by Monsignor George F. Dillon DD. with Preface by The Rev. Denis Fahey, C.S.SP., B.A., D.PH., D.D.


The Protocols reflect the fallacy inherent in all conspiracy theories -- that a secret cabal can "herd cats." Men act independently in their own rational self-interest. No shadowy board of overseers can brainwash the majority, rig stock prices, control the media, and determine the fate of nations. Such sleuths cannot analyze events without introducing secret camarillas and hidden meanings which track with their inmost fears. Nazism's Holocaust proved that the Jews were a vulnerable minority, rather than clandestine world rulers.

Who holds the purse strings to the majority of the world’s wealth? There is a new global elite at the controls of our economic future, and here former Project Censored director and media monitoring sociologist Peter Phillips unveils for the general reader just who these players are. The book includes such power players as Larry Fink, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon, and Warren Buffett.

As the number of men with as much wealth as half the world fell from sixty-two to just eight between January 2016 and January 2017, according to Oxfam International, fewer than 200 super-connected asset managers at only 17 asset management firms—each with well over a trillion dollars in assets under management–now represent the financial core of the world’s transnational capitalist class. Members of the global power elite are the management -- the facilitators -- of world capitalism, the firewall protecting the capital investment, growth, and debt collection that keeps the status quo from changing. Each chapter in Giants identifies by name the members of this international club of multi-millionaires, their 17 global financial companies—and including NGOs such as the Group of Thirty and the Trilateral Commission—and their transnational military protectors, so the reader, for the first time anywhere, can identify who constitutes this network of influence, where the wealth is concentrated, how it suppresses social movements, and how it can be redistributed for maximum systemic change.

-- Giants: The Global Power Elite, by Project Censored: The News That Didn't Make the News


Despite importunities from Prussia's government, British police prefect Lord Aberdare declined to investigate the radical political activities of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1871 on the grounds that they were no more than "harmless malcontents ... (in need of) education (and) religious training." [3] Dissatisfied with this explanation The New York World dispatched a reporter to interview Marx, who asked him if he were the evil genius behind a vast anti-government conspiracy. The communist leader replied:

"There is no mystery to clear up, dear sir, except perhaps the mystery of human stupidity in those who perpetually ignore the fact that our Association is a public one and that the fullest reports of its proceedings are published for all who care to read them. You may buy our rules for a penny, and a shilling laid out in pamphlets will teach you almost as much about us as we know ourselves." [4]


The paranoiacs who hatch conspiracy theories have latched onto Jews, Freemasons, and Jesuits for generations.

Tactician from Cossack-Land

"Everyone (of those who died in the Putsch) is replaceable with the exception of one -- Scheubner-Richter!"

-- Adolf Hitler


Ludwig Maximilian von Scheubner-Richter was born in Riga, Livonia on January 21, 1884. Although of German extraction, he lived most of his life in Russia, and belonged to the Rubonia Fraternity. An engineer and historian by training, he operated as a double agent in Constantinople between 1914 and 1916 -- then as German Vice Consul of Erzerum. There he witnessed Turkey's massacres of Armenians. To no avail Scheubner-Richter advised Kemal Ataturk's agents to stop the bloodshed. In 1917 he acted as a military and political attache while German forces advanced through the Baltic States. He functioned not only as a consultant to German high command, but as liaison officer with Russian civilians and army personnel. During the November Revolution, he recommended that German troops be sent into Petrograd to crush the Bolshevik uprising.

In March, 1920 Alfred Rosenberg introduced Hitler to Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, one of General Ludendorff's advisers. A Baltic German who had intimate connections with Germany's White Russian community, Scheubner-Richter assisted Hitler as a political counselor and channel for Russian emigre contributions. Besides Ludendorff, his wide circle of acquaintances included Grand Duke Cyril (the late Tsar's uncle,) Russian Orthodox prelates, members of the deposed Wittelsbach dynasty, General Skoropadski of The Black Hundreds, Dr. Nemirovich-Dantchenko, a former member of the Tsar's secret police, and Dr. Gregor Schwartz-Bostunitch, a Kiev theater manager turned propagandist.

An engineer by training, Scheubner-Richter's political career began during the Revolution of 1905 when he served in a private landowners' army. After marrying the daughter of an industrialist whose factory he guarded, Scheubner-Richter devoted himself to counterrevolutionary activities. Between 1906 and 1918 he worked as a German agent, with the mission of undermining Russia's alliance with France and England. During World War I he operated as a double agent in Constantinople. The German and Russian governments both paid him to conduct intrigues with Turks, Armenians, and Kurds.

When Tsarist Russia collapsed after the November, 1917 Revolution, Germany's victory suddenly changed into a Bolshevik triumph. Scheubner-Richter harshly criticized the German intelligence operations which abetted Lenin. He temporarily switched back to the White Russian side in a futile effort to stem Bolshevism. These frantic last minute measures came to naught. Though on opposite sides during World War 1, the Russian and German empires both crumbled to dust simultaneously due to a "Jewish-Marxist plot."

After being captured and nearly executed, Scheubner-Richter beat it out of Russia with General Wrangel's army in the spring of 1919 with the Red Army on his heels. Upon arriving in Germany he affiliated himself with the Freikorps movement, and soon met Ludendorff, von Epp, Ernst Rohm, and Alfred Rosenberg. Scheubner-Richter joined the N.S.D.A.P. in April, 1920. Later that year Dietrich Eckart interviewed him for an Auf Gut Deutsch article on the Bolshevik Revolution, "Juden Uber Alles." Scheubner-Richter stated that Baron Wrangel and his staff knew that Jews planned the November, 1917 Revolution. He added that the British and French sent Jewish operatives to Russia who aided Communists in order to scotch Germany's Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

Scheubner-Richter knew artist Otto von Kursell, who had illustrated Eckart's article, Aus Ungarns Schreckstagen (Panic in Hungary.) This "comic book" satirized Bela Kun's communist revolution. Scheubner-Richter sensed the vulnerability of Kun's government to counterrevolution, and predicted that a nationalistic Hungary would make a good ally for Germany.

Like Eckart, Scheubner-Richter wanted to unite anti-Semites of all nations against International Jewry. He admired Mussolini, but faulted him for being insufficiently anti-Jewish. As a German agent in the Mideast, Scheubner-Richter had witnessed Turkish genocide against Armenia. The Turks murdered 1,000,000 Armenians between 1915 and 1919. He pointed out to Hitler that Kemal Ataturk, chief perpetrator of this bloodbath, remained in power. Hence, a large-scale German pogrom against Jews might not necessarily generate much of a backlash. Bleeding hearts in the "civilized world" would send letters of protest, help a few boatloads of refugees, then shrug the whole thing off, since no one liked Jews anyway.

When Hitler emerged as undisputed leader of an anti-Bolshevik party in July, 1921, 5 foot 2 inch Scheubner-Richter replaced the absent Eckart as his right-hand man. Jealous of the "Russian shrimp's" growing influence, Eckart responded in typical fashion -- reasserting his own supremacy by belittling an adversary. Wasn't Russia in worse shape than Germany? So how come Adolf listened with rapt attention to a displaced Baltic midget with shifty eyes behind thick pince-nez? Who could trust a double-crossing spy? Scheubner-Richter's hare-brained plan to kidnap Crown Prince Rupprecht would land them all on the gallows.

Furthermore, Scheubner-Richter's boss, General Erich Ludendorff, had recently turned into a wild-eyed crank. In October, 1923 Gottfried Feder introduced Ludendorff to Dr. Mathilde von Kemnitz (1874-1966), and initially acted as a chaperone. "Matti" soon lured the fifty-eight year old general away from Margarete Schmidt Ludendorff, his wife of thirty years (and mother of six children,) then drew him into the realm of occultism and crackpot theories. Ludendorff married Mathilde in 1926.

The daughter of Protestant theologian Bernhard Spiess, Mathilde studied medicine after her mountain-climbing first husband died in an avalanche. She eventually became a psychologist specializing in spiritual disorders. Though an "integrationist" on the Jewish question, Mathilde frowned upon Jewry's "criminal element," as well as astrologers, Freemasons, and Jesuits. She not only assailed the Red International (Communism), and Gold International (Jewry), but Ultramontane Catholicism, also known as "The Black International." Her magazine, At the Holy Well, recommended the abolition of Christian churches. She founded an Aryan sect, the Tannenberg Bund, which fostered "German God-Knowledge" by worshiping in "forest temples." In her book Redemption from Jesus Christ, Mathilde argued that Jesus was an "alcoholic" who never died on the cross. General Ludendorff nodded vigorously while she uttered such loony beliefs, looking ready to cuff any dissenters with his swagger stick. Under her supervision he undertook studies which exposed the Antichrist's machinations. After the scales fell from his eyes he wrote:


"More and more plainly I became aware of the fission-fungi within ... our society ... in the form of secret supranational forces -- the Jews and Rome, along with their tools, the Freemasons, the Jesuits, occult and satanic structures." [5]


This passage reflects the opinions of cult leader Josef Weissenberg, who revered "Bismarck as ... appointed savior, ... and saw his fall as engineered by Freemasons and Jesuits." [6]

Eckart had mixed feelings about Ludendorff, the hero of Liege, Tannenberg, and Masurian Lakes. He respected the general's prowess as an army commander and understood the prestige he lent to Hitler's movement. On the other hand he considered Ludendorff a "military blockhead" who lacked political sense.

Hitler dismissed Eckart's criticisms of Ludendorff and Scheubner-Richter as sour grapes. Ludendorff, in spite of his descent into irrationalism, still enjoyed the officer corps's trust. Thus, Hitler didn't care about his idiosyncrasies. Scheubner-Richter's fundraising had improved the party's finances. His revolutionary strategies appeared sound. Max preached that seizure of police authority must be the party's primary goal. If the S.A. captured Munich's streets today, they could control all of Germany tomorrow. Lenin had toppled the Tsar's autocracy with less than 50,000 mutinous troops.

The Nazi Party should try to pull off a nationalist revolution similar to Mussolini's coup in Italy -- not a chaotic affair like the Kapp Putsch. If politically ignorant army types grabbed power for a few days and made a mess of things, the whole movement would fall apart. Thank God the Spartacists were imbeciles. Nazis must not repeat their mistakes. The people hate unnecessary discomforts. There can be no looting, power outages, food shortages, or long lines at petrol stations. All hell would break loose if interruptions in water service, electricity, home heating, and trash collection were allowed to occur. Court proceedings, mail delivery, and train service must proceed on time. Every measure must be taken to insure an adequate beer supply. Party leaders must act in concert with reliable officials in government and business, who have the necessary administrative experience to effect an orderly transition of power from the Weimar Republic to an Aryan state. Lenin realized that amateurs in the working class and military could not efficiently govern a village, much less a nation. So did Karl Marx, who wrote that it would be a gross mistake for untrained members of the proletariat to "lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes." [7]

At noon on November 9, 1923 Max von Scheubner-Richter locked arms with Alfred Rosenberg and Hitler for the march on Munich's city hall. He turned to Hitler and said: "this may be our last walk together." A minute later a bullet tore through his heart, killing him instantly. After the Beer Hall Putsch's failure Hitler abandoned Scheubner-Richter's notion of armed revolt and adopted Eckart's idea of a "ballot box revolution."

---------------

Endnotes

1 Trevor Ravenscroft, The Spear of Destiny, Samuel Weiser, Inc., York Beach, ME, 1973, p. 106.

2 Hannah Newman, The Rainbow Swastika, Philogos.org, p. 20 or 21.

3 Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life, Norton & Co., New York, 2000, p. 333.

4 Ibid., p. 336.

5 Leonard Mosley, The Reich Marshal, Doubleday & Co., Garden City, NY, 1974, p. 77.

6 James Webb, The Occult Establishment, Open Court Publishing Co., LaSalle, IL, 1976, p. 33.

7 Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 2000, p. 329.
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Re: Hitler's Mentor: Dietrich Eckart, His Life, Times, & Mil

Postby admin » Fri Dec 21, 2018 10:19 pm

Part 1 of 2

12: The Anthroposophic Heresy

"Some people believe that the Threefold Social Order we are working toward would, ... split a horse into three parts ... We are not trying to divide the horse into three parts (of politics, economy, and culture); we simply want people to stop saying that a horse is real only when standing on one leg."

-- Rudolf Steiner


Occult Politics

Philosophy and religion always fascinated Dietrich Eckart. As a young man he read Arthur Schopenhauer's World As Will and Idea, Buddhist scriptures, and the mystical poetry of Angelus Silesius. He believed in God, and associated the Deity with "that Genius Higher than Human," the "Cosmic Intelligence" which enabled racially superior Aryans to see through Maya's Veil (Worldly Illusion.)

While in Berlin during the early 1900's Eckart associated with Theosophists. In 1906 he witnessed Rudolf Steiner lecturing from a dais that seemed "suspended in mid-air" through the artful use of mirrors. After reading Steiner's "Monism and Theosophy," and hearing him speak about Friedrich Nietszche, Eckart decided that he preferred Guido von List's German-centered Ariosophy to the "internationalism" of Anthroposophy. He and other volkisch militants denigrated anything cosmopolitan as "Jewish," therefore "un-German."

In 1914 Germany had three schools of occult thought: Theosophy, Ariosophy, and Anthroposophy. Members of the Theosophical Society adhered to Madame Helena P. Blavatsky's doctrines, as interpreted by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater. Ariosophists, such as Guido von List, and Adolf Josef Lanz von Liebenfals Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, grafted Pan-German racism and anti-Semitism onto their own ersatz version of Theosophy. Anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner tried to "Christianize" Theosophy and subject it to scientific analysis. Deep divisions within the German Theosophical Society resulted in the secession of Steiner's Anthroposophists in 1913.

Between 1900 and 1906 Eckart moved around in the same Berlin Theosophical scene as Steiner. The two men shared an interest in the thought of Arthur Schopenhauer, Helena Blavatsky, and Friedrich Nietzsche -- though Eckart eventually soured on Nietzsche for being "a despiser of our religious foundations." [1] Their mutual acquaintances included occultists Theodore Reuss, Johannes Muller, Franz Hartmann, and Hugo Vollrath. These commonalities were outweighed by glaring differences. Steiner's universalism clashed with Eckart's racism. Anthroposophy valued Jewish sacred texts. Ariosophy rejected the entire Old Testament, agreeing with Madame Blavatsky's disapproval of its anthropomorphic deity,

" ... old reprobate Jehovah .. a cruel .. and jealous God with his sanguinary laws of eye for eye and tooth for tooth, of the shedding of blood and animal sacrifice ... " [2]


Believing Judaism a form of paganism Eckart contended in his poem "The Riddle" that

"The New Testament broke away from the Old ... As you once released yourself from the world. And as you freed yourself from your past delusions, So did Jesus Christ reject his Jewishness." [3]


In an August, 1921 Volkisch Beobachter article he wrote:

"Tear in pieces that lascivious bible of Satan, the Old Testament! ... Luther's translation of the Bible may have been of use to the German language; it irreparably injured the German people's power of judgment." [4]


Eckart accepted nebulous Eastern Theosophical notions about astral bodies attached to Oversoul, which itself connected to the Divine, via "Hierarchies." Thus, he believed that those who overcame materialism were more attuned to the Spiritual Realm.

"The Jewish conception of God is of no interest to us Germans! We seek God nowhere but within ourselves. For us the soul is Divine, of which the Jew knows nothing. 'The Kingdom of God is within you,' (Luke 17:21) thus God also, who belongs to the Kingdom of Heaven. We feel our soul is immortal, eternal from the beginning, and therefore ... refuse to be told we are created from nothingness." [5]


Ariosophists such as List and Lanz scorned Anthroposophy's notion of universal brotherhood, but it was not until Steiner announced his pacifism during World War I that Eckart turned violently against him.

Benign Mystic

The son of an Austrian railway official, Rudolf Steiner was born in Kraljevic, Croatia on February 25, 1861. At age eighteen he entered Technische Hochschule where he became the star pupil of renowned philologist Dr. Karl Julius Schroer. Upon graduation in 1883, he took philosophy courses from Franz Bretano and Robert Zimmermann at the University of Vienna. Steiner earned his Ph.D from the University of Rostock in 1891, after writing a dissertation on the Epistemology of Fichte's Philosophy of Science.

Through Karl Schroer's influence he received a fellowship to compile Goethe's collected scientific writings in Weimar. Steiner not only edited Goethe's scientific writings, but the complete works of Arthur Schopenhauer in twelve volumes and an eight volume collection of novelist Jean Paul's books. He also wrote scholarly essays, including scientific articles for Pierer's Encyclopedia on geology and mineralogy. Between 1899 and 1900 The Wilhelm Liebknecht Workers' Training School hired him to teach literature, science, and history.

While in Weimar Steiner frequented the Grienstidl Kaffee, a vegetarian restaurant where members of the Progressive Underground congregated.

Authoritarianism.

Fant’s statements about the character of anthroposophy are at odds with Rudolf Steiner’s precepts. In order to continue along the path of spiritual and racial advancement, Steiner taught, individuals must subordinate themselves to “the great leaders of humankind” (die großen Führer der Menschheit). If they fail to obey these leaders, their souls are condemned to spiritual and racial stagnation.[3] Anthroposophy is moreover based on an authoritarian epistemology which explicitly denigrates “criticism” and “judgement” while celebrating “reverent veneration” of ostensible spiritual virtues, and rejects “intellectual effort” in favor of “immediate spiritual perception.”[4] Contemporary anthroposophists’ uncritical attitude toward Steiner’s writings is further testament to this authoritarian framework. Fant is much too optimistic about the possibilities for “adapting Steiner’s texts to our time”; short of schism or apostasy, anthroposophy simply offers no grounds on which its adherents might coherently revise or refute its inherited doctrines. Furthermore, what Fant calls “the great, inspiring wholeness” of Steiner’s teachings depends entirely on anthroposophist credulity toward Steiner’s methods of occult revelation. Whatever the charms of this version of esotericism, such methods are irreconcilable with rational evaluation and independent confirmation.[5] In a judicious assessment of the anti-rational and authoritarian implications of the anthroposophic worldview, Sven Ove Hansson writes: “Steiner’s pronouncements are in practice never questioned in the anthroposophical movement, and very little of substance has been added to the doctrine after his death.”[6] An authoritarian disposition is unavoidable in a movement that considers itself to be preserving a “secret science” (Geheimwissenschaft), one of Steiner’s original terms for anthroposophy.[7]

Elitism.

Anthroposophy’s very nature as an esoteric worldview is predicated on the distinction between initiates and non-initiates, as well as on the notion of a ladder of knowledge which all initiates must climb step by step. These are the characteristic marks of an elitist mindset. Steiner also held that the German cultural elite, as the most spiritually advanced segment of the “Aryan race,” had a special mission to redeem the world from materialism. In his own words, “If one national civilization spreads more readily, and has greater spiritual fertility than another, then it is quite right that it should spread.”[8] His theory of the unique cultural mission of the German people was matched by an elitist social doctrine. In his economic writings, Steiner emphasized that all decisions must be made by “the most capable”; his “threefold society” was to be run not by the “hand-workers” but by “the spiritual workers, who direct production.”[9] And his racial theories, needless to say, were rigidly hierarchical and tied to anthroposophy’s elitist conception of spiritual progress: “Nations and races are merely the various stages of development toward pure humanity. A nation or a race stands higher the more perfectly its members express the pure, ideal human type, the more they have worked their way through from the transitory physical to the immortal supernatural. The development of humankind through reincarnation in ever higher national and racial forms is therefore a process of liberation.”[10] Even sympathetic observers note that Steiner’s anthroposophy aimed to create a “new spiritual elite”.[11]

Racism.

I do not doubt that many anthroposophists today are opposed to racist prejudice. But this admirable orientation does not justify their refusal to confront honestly their doctrine’s thoroughly racist origins. The entire edifice of anthroposophy is built on the comprehensive historical-evolutionary-racial typology Steiner laid out in Cosmic Memory and elsewhere. The key to this typology is the root-race doctrine, which divides the human family into five root races (Wurzelrassen, sometimes also named Hauptrassen or Grundrassen, principal or primary races), with two more root races to appear in the distant future. Each root race is further stratified into sub-races (Unterrassen), a term which eventually gave way, in Steiner’s writings, to the more recognizable unit of the people or nation (Volk). These categories are biological (Steiner calls them “hereditary”) as well as spiritual. The racial classifications are not normatively neutral; they are arranged in ascending order of spiritual development, with the fifth root race, the “Aryan race,” and within that root race the “Germanic-Nordic” peoples, at the top of the hierarchy. This hierarchy, according to Steiner, is an integral component of the cosmic order.

Steiner’s book Cosmic Memory remains to the present day the primary source for anthroposophy’s cosmology, with no distancing whatsoever toward its racist elements. The editor’s foreword to the current edition, published in Dornach, doesn’t so much as mention the book’s racist content, much less try to explain or minimize it; and the Anthroposophical Society continues to officially designate the book one of the “fundamental anthroposophist texts.”[12] Nor did Steiner himself ever renounce it; on the contrary, at the end of his life he called Cosmic Memory the “basis of anthroposophist cosmology.”[13] Today the book is still officially recommended for use by Waldorf teachers. Its racial mythology is elaborated in extravagant detail in many other works by Steiner published by anthroposophical presses.[14]

Thus according to both Steiner and his latter-day followers, humanity’s very existence is structured around the stratified scheme of higher and lower races.[15] Nor is it the case, as Fant would have us believe, that in Steiner’s view these racial divisions “will soon totally disappear.” Steiner taught that the “Aryan race” will reign until the year 7893, six thousand years in the future. Occasionally he indicated that the final transcendence of racial categories would happen sooner, in roughly 1500 years – still an extraordinarily long time to wait for anthroposophy to shed its racial obsessions. The Dutch anthroposophist commission on “anthroposophy and the race question,” on the other hand, reports that “according to Steiner, the word ‘race’ will no longer have meaning in 5,500 years.”[16]

It is also inaccurate and simplistic to say that Steiner gave the Aryan concept “quite another meaning than it later acquired in the Nazi era.” From the moment it was invented by European racial theorists in the nineteenth century, the preposterous notion of an “Aryan race” was inextricably bound up in the repugnant ideology of racial superiority. That Steiner himself shared this ideology is obvious from his contemptuous references to blacks, Asians, aboriginal peoples, Jews, and other non-“Aryans.” Steiner’s version of Aryanism was in fact strikingly similar, even in detail, to that of leading Nazi racial theorists. Steiner divided the Aryan root race into five sub-races: Ancient Indian, Persian, Egyptian-Chaldean, Greco-Roman, and Germanic-Nordic. By comparison, Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg included the Indians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Germans and Scandinavians in the “Aryan race.”[17] Similarly, Arthur de Gobineau’s version of the “Aryan race” comprised Indians, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Chinese, and Germans.[18] Richard Wagner held that the principal “Aryan” peoples were the Indians, Persians, Greeks, and Germans, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s conception of “the Aryans” was substantially similar to Steiner’s as well. Enthusiasts of anthroposophy would do well to familiarize themselves with the history of the Aryan myth.[19] Above all, they would do well to examine more closely the considerable continuities between Steiner’s description of the “Aryan race” and those put forward by the leading racists of the nineteenth century and their Nazi inheritors.[20]

In spite of all this evidence and context, Fant insists that “Steiner’s texts do not express any racism.” The only conclusions the rest of us can draw are that Fant has not read Steiner’s writings, or that he has a remarkably limited understanding of racism. The latter possibility is strongly suggested by Fant’s foolish example of “going out in the streets and slaughtering immigrants” as somehow typical of a racist mindset. He appears to believe that “well-meaning” people cannot be racist.[21] Fant has evidently never examined racism as a belief system or body of ideas. That these ideas continue to exert a powerful and pernicious influence in modern societies, without for the most part yielding directly murderous consequences, seems to have escaped his notice. Today’s naïve anthroposophists are the kinder, gentler counterpart to xenophobic thugs: not violent, not overtly discriminatory or prejudiced, indeed seemingly the opposite. That is why their potential role is so baleful: to make ‘soft’ racism and ‘soft’ nationalism socially acceptable in the heart of a materially comfortable but ideologically insecure middle class.

Anthroposophy’s politics.

Even if Fant’s claim that “anthroposophy is apolitical” were believable, it would hardly be reassuring; it is precisely this sort of naiveté toward the political implications of an all-encompassing quasi-religious worldview that is most worrisome about contemporary anthroposophists. Historically speaking, moreover, many of Steiner’s followers, including prominent and institutionally central anthroposophists, have been actively involved in fascist politics.[22] In any case, my article did not argue that all anthroposophists are enthusiastic activists of the radical right, but that the consistent connections between anthroposophic beliefs and far-right politics have been unmistakable since the doctrine first emerged a century ago. This persistent connection is a mainstay of current research on the European far right. In addition to the many sources cited in my article, interested readers may consult the following discussions of Steiner’s radical right followers: Jonathan Olsen, Nature and Nationalism; Volkmar Wölk, Natur und Mythos; Peter Kratz, Die Götter des New Age; Reinalter, Petri, and Kaufmann, Das Weltbild des Rechtsextremismus; Bernice Rosenthal, The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture; Jahn and Wehling, Ökologie von rechts; Udo Sierck, Normalisierung von Rechts; Gugenberger and Schweidlenka, Die Fäden der Nornen: zur Macht der Mythen in politischen Bewegungen; Franz Wegener, Das atlantidische Weltbild: Nationalsozialismus und Neue Rechte auf der Suche nach der versunkenen Atlantis; Arn Strohmeyer, Von Hyperborea nach Auschwitz; Joscelyn Godwin, Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival; Gugenberger, Petri, and Schweidlenka, Weltverschwörungstheorien: die neue Gefahr von rechts; Eduard Heller and Maegerle, Thule: Vom völkischen Okkultismus bis zur Neuen Rechten; Klaus Bellmund and Kaarel Siniveer, Kulte, Führer, Lichtgestalten: Esoterik als Mittel rechtsradikaler Propaganda; Harald Strohm, Die Gnosis und der Nationalsozialismus; Jutta Ditfurth, Entspannt in die Barbarei: Esoterik, (Öko-)Faschismus und Biozentrismus; Gerhard Kern and Lee Traynor, Die esoterische Verführung; Claudia Barth, Über alles in der Welt – Esoterik und Leitkultur; and Christiansen, Fromm, and Zinser, Brennpunkt Esoterik.[23] It is unacceptable to dismiss the virulent, widespread, and ongoing extreme right variant of anthroposophy as “some Germans from the thirties” and “a handful of ghosts of modern times.”[24]

Fant also tries to turn the recently deceased anthroposophist and right-wing extremist Werner Haverbeck into an enemy of anthroposophy, calling his adulatory biography of Steiner “a severe attack on anthroposophy” and a “total rejection of the anthroposophist movement.” This is a purely terminological argument; Fant presents no evidence for this nonsensical claim, but simply asserts that since Haverbeck’s views on anthroposophy differ from his own, Haverbeck must by definition be anti-anthroposophy. More telling still, Fant claims that Haverbeck’s portrait of Steiner as a committed German nationalist is “an absurd distortion.” Haverbeck’s book Rudolf Steiner – Anwalt für Deutschland is indeed politically and morally appalling, but its depiction of Steiner’s nationalism is entirely accurate, as the briefest familiarity with Steiner’s published writings plainly shows.

During his Vienna years, Steiner was an active member of the deutschnational or pan-German movement in Austria. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century he wrote dozens of articles for the German nationalist press, which are reprinted in volumes 29, 30, 31 and 32 of his Collected Works (above all Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kultur- und Zeitgeschichte and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Literatur).[25] These pan-German publications are politically unambiguous, and they make a mockery of Fant’s naive assertion that nationalism always “bothered Steiner.”[26] Steiner’s German cultural nationalism, based on a chauvinist conviction of superiority and a sense of national mission as well as simple ethnic prejudice, became frantic with the onset of World War One, as his blustery wartime lectures testify (collected in Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen and Die geistigen Hintergründe des Ersten Weltkrieges and elsewhere); and he re-affirmed his German nationalist line in his post-war lectures as well (see, for example, Bewußtseins-Notwendigkeiten für Gegenwart und Zukunft). Steiner remained unapologetic about his nationalist engagement to the end of his life, recalling his pan-German activism in his 1925 autobiography. It may be an uncomfortable fact for progressive anthroposophists to acknowledge, but the far-right Haverbeck had a much more accurate understanding of Steiner on this question than the liberal Fant.


In the period since my original exchange with Fant, anthroposophy’s politics have not, alas, been clarified. The far-right inflection of Steiner’s teachings continues to gain adherents and publicity.[27] The case of Andreas Molau is particularly instructive in this regard. In the 1990s Molau was a prominent publicist on Germany's far-right fringe, and after 2000 became active in the NDP, the major neo-Nazi party in Germany today. Molau also worked as a history teacher at a Waldorf school in the city of Braunschweig for eight years. He was fired (or, by some accounts, resigned) in 2004 when Molau’s official position in the NPD became public.[28] The chief concern for the administration of Molau's Waldorf school was the possible impact of Molau's party work on the school's reputation; as the school's principal told the media at the time: “This is a catastrophe for our image.” Molau’s Waldorf colleagues, meanwhile, claimed to have been unaware of his political involvements.[29] Assuming this claim is true, it raises the obvious question of just how Molau's fellow Waldorf teachers and staff managed not to know about his far-right affiliations for so long. Molau taught history and German (not, for example, math or music) at the same Waldorf school for eight years, and even after the NPD episode erupted into a public scandal, his Waldorf colleagues said they had viewed him as “left-liberal” and “a sympathetic oddball”; they were unanimously surprised to learn of his far-right political activities. But Molau had been a prominent figure on the radical right for a very long time, since the beginning of the 1990s, writing for a range of far-right publications under his real name; for several years he was even culture editor of Junge Freiheit, one of the most notorious of Germany's extreme right wing journals (where among other things he published an article denying the holocaust).[30] Molau’s openly apologetic biography of Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg was published in 1993.[31] Molau was moreover mentioned in readily available sources on the far right, such as the Handbuch deutscher Rechtsextremismus (handbook on German right-wing extremism) published in 1996. Yet none of Molau’s fellow Waldorf faculty, staff, or parents was aware of any of this information whatsoever. The incident speaks volumes about the level of political obliviousness that is apparently endemic at Waldorf schools today.

Even after leaving Waldorf employment, Molau continues to support Waldorf education strongly. In the immediate aftermath of his departure from the Braunschweig Waldorf school, he forcefully re-affirmed his ongoing esteem for Steiner and his own unchanged commitment to Waldorf pedagogy. He has since run in several campaigns as one of the NPD’s better-known politicians, and his election materials consistently highlight his experience as a Waldorf teacher. Within the NPD executive, Molau is responsible for educational policy. In 2005, as an NPD candidate, Molau was invited to speak at a Waldorf school in Berlin, where he quoted from Steiner’s book on the Mission of the Folk Souls, and declared that Waldorf pupils are “the ideal target audience for the NPD, because of Waldorf schools’ natural feeling for living authority and their cultivated inner connection with German culture.” The NPD put out a press release celebrating this Waldorf event as a breakthrough with youth. In 2007, Molau announced his plan to open a Waldorf educational center under NPD auspices. With this new Waldorf project, the neo-Nazi politician hopes to show “the connection between the nationalist NPD ideology and the teachings of the founder of anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner.”

Fant presumably still believes that such incidents – repeated over and over again in the world of Waldorf, biodynamics, and anthroposophy – are merely isolated, marginal, insignificant anomalies that tell us nothing important about the ostensibly “apolitical” nature of anthroposophy. This is nothing but a pretense, and serves quite simply to protect and promote the ongoing infiltration of the far right within the anthroposophical milieu.
The Molau case was not a fluke. In late 2004, in the wake of the controversy over Molau's Waldorf career, the editor of the anthroposophical journal Info3 reported that “a whole array of private voices” within German anthroposophical circles had spoken up in support of Molau. In November 2004, a leading far-right newspaper, the National-Zeitung, published a very sympathetic interview with Molau conducted by an even more famous right-wing extremist, Gerhard Frey.[32] Here Molau emphasized the conceptual affinities between anthroposophy and the contemporary German far right, while citing Steiner’s book The Philosophy of Freedom and touting the wonders of Waldorf education. Molau also noted the support and solidarity he had received from like-minded associates within the Waldorf movement. Molau’s parting of ways with the Braunschweig Waldorf school, in other words, has scarcely solved the problem.[33] Such incidents will continue to recur until anthroposophists finally face their far-right affiliations head-on.

-- The Art of Avoiding History, by Peter Staudenmaier


Karl Schroer introduced him to such leading Viennese Theosophists as Friedrich Eckstein (Franz Hartmann's patron,) Marie Lang, Edmund Lang, and Rosa Mayreder. Steiner also socialized with Nietszche's circle -- including Alfred Schuler, another acquaintance of Eckart. He boarded with Frau Anna Eunicke, the widow of an intellectual recluse, and her daughters. Although Anna was several years older than himself, Steiner married her in 1897. That year he moved the family to Berlin, after receiving an offer to edit The Magazine for Literature.

At the behest of Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, Steiner gave a series of lectures at the Berlin Theosophical Society in 1900. His Anthroposophical ideas took shape in July, 1901 after meeting Social Darwinist Ernst Haeckl at the London Theosophical Society conference. In October, 1902 Steiner addressed the Giordano Bruno Society on "Monism and Philosophy." He called for the unification of science and religion, proclaiming that "de-spiritualization" had gone full circle. Atheism and mechanistic science were both outmoded. Modern science would benefit from an infusion of spirituality, just as dogmatic religion desperately needed to reconcile itself to science. Dietrich Eckart concurred with the mystical Christian currents in Steiner's thought, which held that men must renounce materialism. "De-spiritualization" was one of his favorite jargon terms. Eckart also embraced his concept that every nation had a Folk-Soul -- and Germany's was the most highly-evolved.

Steiner met an attractive Baltic German actress and dancer named Marie von Sievers (1867-1948) in 1902. She recruited a bevy of Russian exiles into his circle, and arranged speaking tours for him. Romance soon blossomed between magus and votary. The overwhelming "karmic connection" between himself and Marie took precedence over his marriage to Anna, from whom he separated in 1903.

Steiner attracted a following with his campaign of unifying science and spirituality. German spiritualists elected him General Secretary of The Theosophical Society in 1902. Steiner accepted on condition that he have freedom to develop his own spiritual ideas, and not be compelled to defend all tenets issuing from the Society's International Branch in Madras, India. His tenure proved controversial. He advocated Rosicrucianism, a Christian form of occultism. The conversions of Theosophists Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott to Buddhism offended him, as did other aspects of their theology. They preferred the impersonal Brahman concept of Atma to the Monotheistic God of Israel. Madame Blavatsky associated the Holy Spirit with Lucifer, the Light Bearer. Steiner deplored this attempt to whitewash the devil as a Promethean hero. He believed that demonic spirits had infected the Theosophical movement with paganism, and resolved to reform spiritualism along Christian lines.

Everything that is connected with propagation and with heredity, everything that is independent of man in the sense that he cannot penetrate it with his thinking, everything that is the gift of the Moon in the celestial firmament—that, in man, is what has proceeded from the principle of Love permeating the process of propagation and heredity. Hence the violent battle which persists through history, the battle waged by Lucifer and Ahriman against everything that comes from this domain. Lucifer and Ahriman want to force on man the exclusive sovereignty of the head, and they launch their attacks by way of the head against everything that is purely natural affinity. For whatever is hereditary substance on the Earth cannot be wrested away by them. What the Moon is in the heavens, heredity is in men on the Earth below. Everything that is grounded in heredity, everything that is not charged with thought, that is connected intrinsically with physical nature — that is the Jahve-principle. The Jahve-principle unfolds its greatest activity where nature is working as nature; it is there that Jahve has outpoured in greatest measure the Love that is his natural attribute, in order to create a counterweight to the lovelessness, the mere wisdom, of Lucifer and Ahriman.

-- The Occult Movement in the Nineteenth Century and Its Relation to Modern Culture, by Rudolf Steiner
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Re: Hitler's Mentor: Dietrich Eckart, His Life, Times, & Mil

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Part 2 of 2

At this time a bejeweled and sari-clad Irishwoman named Annie Besant ruled Theosophy's roost from India. She increasingly identified the movement with eastern religious doctrines. In 1910 Mrs. Besant and her secretary, Charles W. Leadbeater, inaugurated the Eastern Star cult, which billed fifteen year old Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986) as an avatar. This initiative nearly collapsed when Krishnamurti's father brought suit, accusing Leadbeater of pederasty. Amidst the scandal, Steiner wrote to Mrs. Besant, urging her to resign. She expelled him from the Theosophical Society in 1912. Shortly thereafter, Steiner established his Anthroposophical Society in Dornach, Switzerland.

Franz Hartmann and Hugo Vollrath intrigued against Steiner during his term as General Secretary of Germany's Theosophical Society. They regarded him as "an undernourished seminarian" with radical views who diverged from Theosophy's true path. His founding of a heretical sect vindicated Vollrath and Hartmann in the eyes of many German theosophists. Thule Society President Rudolf von Sebottendorf disliked Steiner and conveyed malicious gossip to Eckart, who repeatedly lashed out against him in Auf Gut Deutsch between 1919 and 1921. This obsession with Steiner reflected Eckart's deep concern about metaphysics. As James Webb observed in The Occult Establishment:

"We can learn much from the violence of Eckart's rejection of the Anthroposophists. To react so strongly ... he must have taken them seriously ... The volkisch reaction was an admission that both camps were operating on the same level... The volkisch rage came from the realization that here was another vision of the universe which claimed to be spiritual. Did not the prophets of the Volk have a monopoly on spiritual politics, were not they alone truly geistreich?" [6]


No sketchy treatment can do justice to Steiner's abstruse theories. Anthroposophy (knowledge of man) borrowed from Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Jakob Boehme, Paracelsus, Goethe, evangelical Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Eastern religions, Theosophy, and Naturopathy. Steiner believed that all wisdom derived from higher powers. By practicing certain mental disciplines, avoiding drugs, alcohol, and tobacco, and following "biodynamic" dietary rules people could open up their spiritual centers and attract the divine. Such soul-actualized people became prisms through which Higher Knowledge could shine. Anthroposophen strove not only for sound physical bodies, but healthy astral envelopes as well. Since the Spiritual Hierarchies (helpful spirits working for God) communicated cosmic intelligence through humans' astral bodies, those diaphanous sheaths had to be property maintained with good nutrition, yoga, education, and "Eurythmia" dancing.

Steiner's "scientific spiritualism" outlined techniques by which humanity could overcome the injurious effects of Luciferic (prideful) and Ahrimanic (materialistic) spirits and attract wholesome "rays" from Hierarchies closer to God. Through the intercession of these Hierarchies, Rosicrucian alchemists could transmute their souls from dross into gold.

Steiner celebrated the powerful "white magic" of Jesus. Just as glaciers had transformed the earth's surface, Christ's redemptive death on the cross altered the spiritual landscape forever. Anthroposophists performed spiritual exercises to merge their astral bodies with the etherized blood of Christ. Steiner wrote a handbook explaining how this process might be facilitated by certain breathing techniques and yoga postures.

According to Rudolf Steiner Hierarchies guided early root races, such as the Lemurians, and Atlanteans, by remote control. Later races became independent, logical, and materialistic. As they developed lower rationality and turned away from the Hierarchies, Primal Semites and Aryans gradually lost intuition and the ability to communicate by mental telepathy. Steiner devised Anthroposophy to help mankind regain psychic ability and interconnectedness.

The Lemurian methods of education seem shocking to our more refined sensibilities. In order to spare the reader's feelings, only the least cruel of them will be touched upon. Strenuous in the extreme as they may seem, it must be remembered that the Lemurian body was not nearly so high-strung as are the human bodies of the present day; also that it was only by the very harshest measures that the exceedingly dim consciousness could be touched at all. As time went on and the consciousness became more and more awakened, such extreme measures as those used then became unnecessary and have passed away, but at that time they were indispensable to arouse the slumbering forces of the spirit to a consciousness of the outside world. The education of the boys was designed especially to develop the quality of Will. They were made to fight one another, and these fights were extremely brutal. They were impaled upon spits, with full power to release themselves, but by exercising the will power they were to remain there in spite of the pain. They learned to make their muscles tense, and to carry immense burdens by the exercise of the Will. The education of the girls was intended to promote the development of the imaginative facility. They also were subjected to strenuous and severe treatment. They were put out in the great forests, to let the sound of the wind in the tree tops speak to them and to listen to the furious outbursts of flood and tempest. They thus learned to have no fear of those paroxysms of nature and to perceive only the grandeur of the warring elements. The frequent volcanic outbursts were greatly valued as a means of education, being particularly conducive to the awakening of the faculty of memory. Such educational methods would be entirely out of the question at the present day, but they did not make the Lemurian morbid, because he had no memory. No matter what painful or terrifying experience he endured, everything was forgotten as soon as past. The above mentioned strenuous experiences were for the purpose of developing memory, to imprint these violent and constantly repeated impacts from without upon the brain, because memory is necessary that the experiences of the past may be used as guides to Action.

-- The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception: An Elementary Treatise Upon Man's Past Evolution, Present Constitution and Future Development, by Max Heindel


During his Theosophical Society years Steiner had often seen unqualified people meddle with spiritualism. Ariosophists were among those being drawn down the left-handed path by evil spirits. He enjoined his followers to heed the injunction of 1 John 4: 1-3:

"Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God; because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: and every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is the spirit of Antichrist, whereof ye have heard." [7]


With financial aid from Emil Molt, President of the Waldorf-Astoria Cigarette Co., Steiner set up the first Waldorf School in Stuttgart. Although his teaching methods encouraged creativity and spiritual development in normal children, he also pioneered remedial education for those afflicted by mental retardation, dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, and autism. Waldorf teachers viewed each child as unique. They assumed that God had incarnated every person for a special purpose and asked: "how can we help this child to fulfill his/her spiritual mission?"

Moreover, when Steiner’s economic ideas were put into practice in the early 1920s by the Threefold Commonwealth League (Bund für Dreigliederung des Sozialen Organismus) in southwest Germany, it was very clear that he opposed a democratic organization of the affiliated factories -- the Waldorf tobacco factory being the best known. The anthroposophist Hans Kühn wrote: “Democratization of the factories was something he [Steiner] opposed on principle. The manager had to be able to make his own arrangements without interference.” (Hans Kühn, Dreigliederungszeit. Rudolf Steiners Kampf für die Gesellschaftsordnung der Zukunft, Dornach, 1978 p. 52). Since leading anthroposophists had no trouble grasping this point, it is difficult to understand how Waage could mistake Steiner for an opponent of private ownership and capitalism. Steiner’s scheme was nothing more than an ‘enlightened’ version of private property under the benevolent control of a spiritual aristocracy. As such it forms the perfect economic counterpart to his mixture of radical individualism and elitism. It would be hard to explain the appeal of Steiner’s economic doctrines to aristocrats and industrialists -– and these, after all, are the ones who responded most favorably to his proposals -– if those doctrines had contained anything that threatened the profits of the powerful.[27]

-- Anthroposophy and its Defenders, by Peter Staudenmaier and Peter Zegers


Anthroposophical education methods, as practiced in Waldorf schools, were designed to put Europe's younger generation on the track toward lasting peace by reducing Ahrimanic and Luciferic spirits, the same malignant influences which had brought down Atlantis in 9,000 B.C. Chauvinists like Dietrich Eckart wondered aloud how a nation of artists and ballerinas could repel invasions from Russia and France.

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Rudolf Steiner

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Dietrich Eckart, 1919

The Eckart-Steiner Feud

Friction between Ariosophists and Anthroposophen flared up in 1919. Rudolf Steiner directed his attention to mundane affairs when World War I degenerated into a bloody stalemate after November, 1914. He collaborated with fellow Anthroposophist Count Otto von Lerchenfeld on articles advocating "Totalism" or "Synarchy," a political scheme dreamed up by French occultists Joseph Alexandre St. Yves d'Alveydre and Fabre D'Olivet.

"Synarchism" is a name adopted during the Twentieth Century for an occult freemasonic sect, known as the Martinists, based on worship of the tradition of the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. During the interval from the early 1920s through 1945, it was officially classed by U.S.A. and other nations' intelligence services under the file name of "Synarchism: Nazi/Communist," so defined because of its deploying simultaneously both ostensibly opposing pro-communist and extreme right-wing forces for encirclement of a targeted government. Twentieth-Century and later fascist movements, like most terrorist movements, are all Synarchist creations.

-- A Short Definition of Synarchism, by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.


"Marquis" Sr. Yves d'Alveydre was not a marquis, and certainly no saint. He appropriated the aristocratic moniker d'Alveydre in the same manner that Adolf Josef Lanz acquired "von Liebenfals," [Liebenfels] and Rudolf Adam Glauer cadged "von Sebottendorf." James Webb described St. Yves as "a fraud of highest degree." [7] Contemporary critic Jules Bois judged him a dandy, social climber, plagiarist, and womanizer, who married into money and bought a noble title from the Pope. He not only cheated on his wife, but nearly bankrupt her estate by making poor investments, including one in an "alchemical" firm claiming to have perfected a process for transforming base metals into gold. Some attributed her premature death to stress caused by his high jinks. By way of repentance, he always set a place at table for her after she died. The Marquis invented and marketed the Archeometer, a multi-colored cardboard disk superimposed with complicated diagrams. He assured impressionable disciples that they could predict the future with this device.

Steiner's Threefold Commonwealth trumpeted d'Alveydre's notion that government must be balanced through the equal participation of the political, cultural, and economic spheres. "Totalism" compared society to a human body. All members of a nation should become complementary and cooperative like the interdependent parts of a healthy organism. The cephalic (spiritual) organ of the state must coordinate well with its rhythmic (legislative) and metabolic-limb (economic) systems. Failure to achieve proper equilibrium led to oppression, anarchy, and angst.

Individualism was part of the old intuitive idea of justice. That justice is not, as Plato would have it, the health and harmony of the state, but rather a certain way of treating individuals, is emphasized by Aristotle, it will be remembered, when he says 'justice is something that pertains to persons' [30]. This individualistic element had been emphasized by the generation of Pericles. Pericles himself made it clear that the laws must guarantee equal justice 'to all alike in their private disputes'; but he went further. 'We do not feel called upon', he said, 'to nag at our neighbour if he chooses to go his own way.' (Compare this with Plato's remark [31] that the state does not produce men 'for the purpose of letting them loose, each to go his own way ...'.) Pericles insists that this individualism must be linked with altruism: 'We are taught ... never to forget that we must protect the injured'; and his speech culminates in a description of the young Athenian who grows up 'to a happy versatility, and to self-reliance.'

This individualism, united with altruism, has become the basis of our western civilization. It is the central doctrine of Christianity ('love your neighbour', say the Scriptures, not 'love your tribe'); and it is the core of all ethical doctrines which have grown from our civilization and stimulated it. It is also, for instance, Kant's central practical doctrine ('always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as mere means to your ends'). There is no other thought which has been so powerful in the moral development of man.

Plato was right when he saw in this doctrine the enemy of his caste state; and he hated it more than any other of the 'subversive' doctrines of his time. In order to show this even more clearly, I shall quote two passages from the Laws [32] whose truly astonishing hostility towards the individual is, I think, too little appreciated. The first of them is famous as a reference to the Republic, whose 'community of women and children and property' it discusses. Plato describes here the constitution of the Republic as 'the highest form of the state'. In this highest state, he tells us, 'there is common property of wives, of children, and of all chattels. And everything possible has been done to eradicate from our life everywhere and in every way all that is private and individual. So far as it can be done, even those things which nature herself has made private and individual have somehow become the common property of all. Our very eyes and ears and hands seem to see, to hear, and to act, as if they belonged not to individuals but to the community. All men are moulded to be unanimous in the utmost degree in bestowing praise and blame, and they even rejoice and grieve about the same things, and at the same time. And all the laws are perfected for unifying the city to the utmost.' Plato goes on to say that 'no man can find a better criterion of the highest excellence of a state than the principles just expounded'; and he describes such a state as 'divine', and as the 'model' or 'pattern' or 'original' of the state, i.e. as its Form or Idea. This is Plato's own view of the Republic, expressed at a time when he had given up hope of realizing his political ideal in all its glory.

The second passage, also from the Laws, is, if possible, even more outspoken. It should be emphasized that the passage deals primarily with military expeditions and with military discipline, but Plato leaves no doubt that these same militarist principles should be adhered to not only in war, but also 'in peace, and from the earliest childhood on'. Like other totalitarian militarists and admirers of Sparta, Plato urges that the all-important requirements of military discipline must be paramount, even in peace, and that they must determine the whole life of all citizens; for not only the full citizens (who are all soldiers) and the children, but also the very beasts must spend their whole life in a state of permanent and total mobilization [33]. 'The greatest principle of all', he writes, 'is that nobody, whether male or female, should ever be without a leader. Nor should the mind of anybody be habituated to letting him do anything at all on his own initiative, neither out of zeal, nor even playfully. But in war and in the midst of peace — to his leader he shall direct his eye, and follow him faithfully. And even in the smallest matters he should stand under leadership. For example, he should get up, or move, or wash, or take his meals [34] . . . only if he has been told to do so ... In a word, he should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently, and to become utterly incapable of it. In this way the life of all will be spent in total community. There is no law, nor will there ever be one, which is superior to this, or better and more effective in ensuring salvation and victory in war. And in times of peace, and from the earliest childhood on should it be fostered — this habit of ruling others, and of being ruled by others. And every trace of anarchy should be utterly eradicated from all the life of all the men, and even of the wild beasts which are subject to men.' These are strong words. Never was a man more in earnest in his hostility towards the individual. And this hatred is deeply rooted in the fundamental dualism of Plato's philosophy; he hated the individual and his freedom just as he hated the varying particular experiences, the variety of the changing world of sensible things. In the field of politics, the individual is to Plato the Evil One himself.

This attitude, anti-humanitarian and anti-Christian as it is, has been consistently idealized. It has been interpreted as humane, as unselfish, as altruistic, and as Christian. E. B. England, for instance, calls [35] the first of these two passages from the Laws 'a vigorous denunciation of selfishness'. Similar words are used by Barker, when discussing Plato's theory of justice. He says that Plato's aim was 'to replace selfishness and civil discord by harmony', and that 'the old harmony of the interests of the State and the individual ... is thus restored in the teachings of Plato; but restored on a new and higher level, because it has been elevated into a conscious sense of harmony'. Such statements and countless similar ones can be easily explained if we remember Plato's identification of individualism with egoism; for all these Platonists believe that anti-individualism is the same as selflessness. This illustrates my contention that this identification had the effect of a successful piece of anti-humanitarian propaganda, and that it has confused speculation on ethical matters down to our own time. But we must also realize that those who, deceived by this identification and by high-sounding words, exalt Plato's reputation as a teacher of morals and announce to the world that his ethics is the nearest approach to Christianity before Christ, are preparing the way for totalitarianism and especially for a totalitarian, anti-Christian interpretation of Christianity. And this is a dangerous thing, for there have been times when Christianity was dominated by totalitarian ideas. There was an Inquisition; and, in another form, it may come again.

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


Steiner's body-part analogies struck a resonant chord with Germany's reading public. The Threefold Commonwealth sold 80,000 copies in 1918. In an effort to promote Steiner's hazy concept of "organic government," his disciple Count Otto von Lerchenfeld convinced Count Ludwig Polzen-Hoditz to present the book to Prince Max of Baden, the Kaiser's Privy Counselor. Unfortunately, the Kaiser abdicated and fled to Holland before Prince Max could hand him a copy.

Steiner had a first rate mind. Hence, Totalism, though too abstract for easy application to real world conditions, made sense.

The Guardian of the Threshold is also connected with other matters. The person belongs to a family, a nation, a race; his activity in this world depends upon his belonging to some such community. His individual character is also connected with it. The conscious activity of individual persons by no means exhausts everything to be reckoned with in a family, a nation, or a race. Besides their character, families, nations, and races have also their destiny. For persons restricted to their senses these things remain mere general ideas; and the materialistic thinker, in his prejudice, will look down with contempt on the spiritual scientist when he hears that for him, family and national character, lineal or racial destiny, are vested in beings just as real as the personality in which the character and destiny of the individual man are vested. The spiritual scientist becomes acquainted with higher worlds of which the separate personalities are members, just as arms and legs are members of the human being. Besides the separate individuals, a very real family and national group soul and racial spirit is at work in the life of a family, a people, or a race. Indeed, in a certain sense the separate individuals are merely the executive organs of these family group souls, racial spirits, and so on. It is nothing but the truth to say, for instance, that a national group soul makes use of each individual man belonging to that nation for the execution of some work. The group soul of a people does not descend into physical reality but dwells in the higher worlds and, in order to work in the physical world, makes use of the physical organs of each individual human being. In a higher sense, it is like an architect making use of workmen for executing the details of a building. In the truest sense, everyone receives his allotted task from his family, national, or racial group soul. Now, the ordinary person is by no means initiated into the higher design of his work. He joins unconsciously in the tasks of his people and of his race. From the moment the student meets the Guardian, he must not only know his own tasks, but must knowingly collaborate in those of his folk, his race. Every extension of his horizon necessarily enlarges the scope of his duties. What actually happens is that the student adds a new body to his finer soul-body. He puts on a second garment. Hitherto he found his way through the world with the coverings enveloping his personality; and what he had to accomplish for his community, his nation, his race, was directed by higher spirits who made use of his personality.

-- Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, by Rudolf Steiner


Its emphasis on profit-sharing may be compared to Robert Owens' Cooperative Movement in New Lanark, Scotland and Walter Rathenau's Euplutismus (Benevolent Oligarchy.) According to Steiner the main pillars of society were Politics, Culture, and Economy. This trinity had to attain dynamic equipoise by constant adjustment and rectification. Communism, Laissez Faire Capitalism, and Theocracy all failed because one force dominated the other two. Under a medieval Christian or Islamic theocracy, religion (culture) dominated both politics and economy. In modern capitalistic societies, money power (economy) exercised decisive control over politics and culture. Russia's communist state showed how politics impaired both culture and the economy. To prevent these extremes Steiner favored a Threefold Commonwealth, mutually governed by autonomous political, economic, and cultural bodies. Civilized countries required positive interplay among businessmen, workers, artists, professors, and politicians.To improve communication there must be cultural freedom, political equality, and economic fraternity. However, in 1919 Steiner saw only "Coercion, Inequality, and Subordination." He recommended stakeholder capitalism, which provided workers with dividends based on a company's performance, and encouraged corporations to fund non-profit foundations (such as the Anthroposophical Society) which would subsidize art, science, and charitable endeavors.

Helena P. Blavatsky had identified planet earth as the "4th Sphere" (out of 7,) a reformatory for unevolved souls, which could never become a paradise because of its very nature. Hence, purveyors of utopian panaceas were all mountebanks, whether they be Communists, Anthroposophists, or Ariosophists.

Perhaps unmindful of H.P.B.'s teaching, Steiner continued to press for the adoption of a "holistic" system of government. His representatives, Dr. Carl Unger and Emil Molt, approached Social Democrat politician Wilhelm Bios, who rebuffed them. Steiner then noticed that Dietrich Eckart, a metaphysically-oriented poet of past acquaintance, had founded The German Leading Citizens' Society in May, 1919. He had no way of knowing that Eckart set it up to practice "the pump art" on patriotic businessman, nor that the organization died three months after its birth.

Eckart's name was not exactly a household word in Germany. So Steiner followed his temperamental bent by hoping for the best. He and the Burgers' Society chief seemed to share enthusiasm for spiritualism, guilds, Christian mysticism, and the German Folk Soul. To apolitical Steiner the German Leading Citizens Society appeared to be a wonderful idea, in perfect accord with Synarchy. He naively mailed Eckart an essay on The Threefold Commonwealth, then dispatched an aide to enlist The Burgers' Society's support. After perusing Steiner's letter and a few pages of his article, Eckart concluded that "Totalism" was "total horseshit." In the July 11, 1919 edition of Auf Gut Deutsch he wrote:

". .. I have been asked incessantly what I think of Dr. Rudolf Steiner. My answer confined itself to the facts that many years ago in Berlin when he was enthused by Nietzsche I once heard him speak from a miraculously suspended dais; that recently an 'Appeal' concocted by him came my way signed by a number of 'eminent' names which was nonetheless completely without content, indeed, thoroughly confused." [9]


Eckart refused to see Steiner's emissary in his office. Finally, the persistent young man, who was an artist, rapped on his apartment door early one morning. The bleary-eyed poet reluctantly admitted him. "In ten minutes we had both said all we would ever say to each other." [10] Subsequent articles by Eckart curtly dismissed Steiner's ideas about pacifism, Waldorf schools, the revival of medieval craft guilds, and community Eurythmia (therapeutic dance) theaters as so much buncombe. He compared Steiner to Karl Brandler-Pracht, a tabloid pop-astrologer of questionable integrity, and Renaissance magician Cagliostro.

"If I'm not fooling myself there hides in him the disembodied spirit of Jewish sorcerer Joseph Balsamo, alias Cagliostro." [11]


The volkisch Eckart objected to Steiner's liberalism...

Steiner’s early pan-German articles routinely portray the Germans in Austria as threatened by “the onslaught from all sides” and denounce “Czech agitators” and “the evil Russian influence” while celebrating “the unity and capacity for resistance of the Germans” and insisting on “the cultural mission that is the duty of the German people in Austria” (Steiner, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kultur- und Zeitgeschichte pp. 112, 85, 69). He refers to the non-German peoples of Austria as “the enemy” (115) and asserts that “the non-German peoples of Austria must absorb into themselves that which German spirit and German work have created, if they are to reach the level of education which is a necessary prerequisite of the modern era,” and indeed proclaims: “if the [non-German] peoples of Austria want to compete with the Germans, they will above all have to make up for the developmental process which the Germans have gone through; they will have to learn the German culture in the German language” (112). Because the mainstream nationalist Austro-German Liberals, in Steiner's view, had not insisted strongly enough that the Slavs subordinate their own cultures to German culture, “this forced the German people to form a party in which the national idea is paramount” (113). But even the new, more forthrightly nationalist party was a disappointment to Steiner; it did not do enough “for the national cause” (114). Steiner thus offers German nationalist politicians advice on how to struggle more effectively “against the Slavic enemy” who are marked by an “empty national ego” and “spiritual barrenness,” which is why the Slavs “would like nothing more than to annihilate the achievements of our European culture” (117). According to Steiner, “modern culture” has been “chiefly produced by the Germans.” He condemns not only any accommodation to non-German ethnic groups but indeed any cooperation with ethnically German parties that are not sufficiently nationalist, calling these parties “un-German” (119). Steiner also fulminates against “the culture-hating Russian colossus” and excoriates the abuse of the Austrian state “for un-German purposes” (140). Portraying Czech demands for political participation as a direct threat to German cultural superiority, he exclaims: “The Slavs will have to live a very long time before they understand the tasks which are the duty of the German people, and it is an outrageous offense against civilization to throw down the gauntlet at every opportunity to a people [i.e. the Germans] from whom one receives the spiritual light, a light without which European culture and education must remain a closed book.” (141-142) He demands that the country’s political agenda be set by “the exclusively national elements of the German people in Austria,” namely “the pan-Germans,” and denounces the German Liberals for betraying their people: “If we must be ruled in an un-German fashion, at least our tribal brothers ought not to take care of this business. Our hands should remain clean.” (143) Instead of accepting ever more compromises with the uncultured Slavs, “truly national men” must pull together “to organize the people in a national manner” (144). As late as 1897 Steiner continued to repeat the same hard-line German nationalist stance: “The Slavs and the Magyars are a danger to the mission of the Germans; they are forcing German culture to retreat.” (214) He rails against “non-German elements” in Austria and regrets the ostensible loss of the Austro-Germans’ “privileged position within the monarchy” (215) while looking forward to the day when “the Germans of Austria regain the position of power which corresponds to their cultural level” (216). Such passages make clear how impervious to reason Steiner's nationalism remained even well after his Vienna period. The Germans had hardly lost their privileged position within the Habsburg monarchy, and by the late 1880s, moreover, nearly all German political parties and social organizations, with the exception of the clerical parties Steiner so despised, had gone through a process of intense nationalist radicalization such that figures who a decade earlier had counted as strident nationalists were now seen to be ineffectual moderates. The young Steiner's criticism of the Austro-German nationalist parties for not being nationalist enough thus clearly reveals his own extremist stance.

-- The Art of Avoiding History, by Peter Staudenmaier


... and viewed him as a tool of the "Jewish-Masonic-Marxist conspiracy," which threatened Germany's survival.

"Whether it's Preuss or Hirsch or Steiner, the spirit's the same, even when it goes disguised in a theosophical beard." [12]


Based on information from Karl Rohm's newsletter The Lighthouse, Eckart claimed that many of Anthroposophy's staunchest disciples were Jews. In fact, Steiner belonged to The Society for Repulsing Anti-Semitism and had written that

"Anti-Semitism does not ... have ... many original thoughts at its disposal. .. You must always listen to the same stale platitudes when adherents express (their) musty sentiments." [13]


Steiner identified anti-Semitism as a miasmal emanation from the corporeal bog. Hateful ideas were projections of the sensual ego. As such, they blocked genuine inspiration "from above." ...

Antisemitism

Waage reminds readers of Humanist that Steiner “at the end of the century was involved in ‘the Association Against Anti-Semitism’.” Indeed, Steiner was a friend of Ludwig Jacobowski, an employee of the Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus (Society for Protection Against Antisemitism). The association with Jacobowski, however, does not speak well for Steiner’s confused attitude toward antisemitism. In fact, a look at Jacobowski’s writings on Jewish affairs shows that it was a familiar appeal to German nationalism which drew Steiner’s attention. Jacobowski advocated the “complete assimilation” of Jews to what he called the “German spirit,” and his best-known work, Werther der Jude, could be read as “an antisemitic text” (Ritchie Robertson, The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature 1749-1939, Oxford 1999, p. 279). In a much-discussed pamphlet attacking a prominent antisemitic agitator, Hermann Ahlwardt, Jacobowski called Ahlwardt “un-German” (and also accused him of being a Social Democrat); the same pamphlet spoke of “an honorable anti-Semitism” in contrast to Ahlwardt’s variety, and declared in assimilationist-patriotic style that “a young Jewish generation is being prepared which is German and feels German.” (All quotes from Sanford Ragins, Jewish Responses to Anti-Semitism in Germany, 1870-1914, Cincinnati 1980, pp. 43-44) Jacobowski also referred to some of the anti-Jewish arguments put forth by pan-German antisemites as “important and correct” (Jacobowski quoted in Fred Stern, Ludwig Jacobowski, Darmstadt 1966, p. 159). One of the leading scholars on the topic, Ismar Schorsch, describes Jacobowski’s position thus: “Anti-Semitism is indeed based upon fact and can only be overcome by a drastic ethical reformation of the entire Jewish community.” Schorsch comments: “The response to anti-Semitism of this alienated Jew [Jacobowski] was thus marked by extreme vacillation between criticism of his coreligionists and defiant reaffirmation of Judaism.” (Schorsch, Jewish Reactions to German Anti-Semitism, 1870-1914, New York 1972, pp. 47 and 95). Steiner himself emphasized Jacobowski’s exclusive commitment to German culture and believed that his friend had “long since outgrown Jewishness” (Steiner quoted in Moses and Schöne, editors, Juden in der deutschen Literatur, Frankfurt 1986, p. 200). This is hardly a convincing testament to Steiner’s pro-Jewish sympathies.[11]

What Waage doesn’t mention is that throughout his life Steiner consorted with notoriously bitter antisemites and was by his own account on entirely friendly terms with them. The passages in Mein Lebensgang on his relationship with Heinrich von Treitschke, for example, are straightforwardly admiring of this towering figure on the German right, who was the foremost intellectual ally of militant antisemitism (Treitschke coined the Nazi slogan “The Jews are our misfortune”). Steiner never so much as mentions Treitschke’s infamous stance on the “Jewish question.”[12] The same is true of Steiner’s appraisals of other figures, whether positive or negative, including Haeckel and Karl Lueger, among others. In fact it is abundantly clear from Steiner’s own writings on the subject that he had an extremely rudimentary understanding of antisemitism and that he was himself beholden to a wide variety of antisemitic stereotypes, which he frequently broadcast to his followers.[13] On more than one occasion he expressed the wish “that Jewry as a people would simply cease to exist” (Steiner, Geschichte der Menschheit, Dornach 1968, p. 189 and elsewhere). This wish was consistent with Steiner’s categorical rejection of the Jewish people’s right to existence: "Jewry as such has long since outlived its time; it has no more justification within the modern life of peoples, and the fact that it continues to exist is a mistake of world history whose consequences are unavoidable. We do not mean the forms of the Jewish religion alone, but above all the spirit of Jewry, the Jewish way of thinking." (Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Literatur, GA 32, p. 152) It would seem that Waage’s portrait of Steiner as a consistent opponent of nationalism and antisemitism is at odds with the facts.


-- Anthroposophy and its Defenders, by Peter Staudenmaier and Peter Zegers


Gobineau's [unlike Chamberlain's] was an honest Antisemitism, it was, like Nietzsche's, an historical Antisemitism: it had nothing whatever to do with modern Antisemitism, that movement born from fear, envy, and impotence ... [i]t is an upright, a genuine, a gentlemanly Antisemitism, it is the Antisemitism of the aristocrat, who sees his very blood threatened by revolutionary religions.

-- Oscar Levy, from "Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain", by Dan Stone


Eastern mystics had long meditated on nothingness, or the void to banish the fleshly ego's interference with the Hierarchies' ethereal transmissions. To realize its testimony of equality, the Society of Friends (Quakers) encouraged members to practice inward retirement as a means of immobilizing the sensual ego's tendency to project negative -- and untrue -- attributes onto those of different race, creed, or ethnicity.

Eckart asserted that the Anthroposophical Society "never knew -- and still does not know -- what Theosophy really means." [14] The antagonism did not stop there. An aroused Eckart continued to pummel Steiner in Auf Gut Deutsch. In a December, 1919 broadside he drew upon slanders assembled by disgruntled Theosophists Max Seiling and Hugo Vollrath. Eckart called Steiner "a Galician Jew," and "conjuring illusionist." He repeated a fabricated story that Guru Steiner had prevented victory on the Western Front in 1914 by spooking his disciple General Helmuth von Moltke as the German right wing pushed to encircle Paris. The Schlieffen Plan required an invasion of Belgium, then drive down the channel coast below Paris. General von Moltke did not execute this maneuver decisively because it exposed his left flank and made Germany vulnerable to invasion from across the Rhine. He also "panicked" and sent two army corps to East Prussia, which left him short-handed during the crucial First Battle of Ypres. Critics have second-guessed him ever since. If he had been victorious -- like the German army commanded by his uncle in 1870 -- there would have been no Hitler. Of course, France stood alone during the Franco-Prussian War. In 1914 Moltke the Younger had to contend with combined French and British forces on the Western Front, and Russia in the East.

On November 3, 1914 Kaiser Wilhelm removed Moltke as chief of staff for failing to adhere to the Schlieffen Plan. He retired due to illness a month later. From that time until his death on June 16, 1916, he spurned old army contacts, associating almost exclusively with family and Anthroposophen friends. After death he supposedly remained in touch with the living through his mediumistic wife Eliza. Moltke's purported messages from beyond the grave were collected in The Moltke Mittelungen, which predicted the rise of a German Savior.

Eckart titillated his audience by inventing malicious stories about Steiner. He painted the Anthroposophist leader as a turbaned gigolo who specialized in milking widow's bank accounts. According to Auf Gut Deutsch, Steiner dumped first wife Anna Eunicke, for "failed Russian actress" Marie von Sievers. Eckart claimed that Sievers lived next door to the Steiners, and that Rudolf had a secret passageway built between the two buildings to facilitate their illicit romance. This tale came from Anna's daughter Emmy. She resented her former step-father, and fought to prevent him from receiving any proceeds from Mama's estate. Actually, Steiner maintained an amicable relationship with ex-wife Anna Eunicke after their separation. He did not marry Maria von Sievers until December, 1914, three years after Anna's death.

Although Eckart had rarely darkened the door of a Catholic church since age sixteen, he claimed to be "anti-clerical, not anti-Catholic." Knowing that the Church disapproved of Steiner because he espoused heretical doctrines, he sanctimoniously warned Catholic readers that trafficking with his mumbo jumbo made them liable to excommunication. Another article cited a report in Psychiche Studieren that linked Anthroposophy with nervous breakdowns and suicides. Eckart also quoted from a defamatory pamphlet by List Society member Max Seiling, which accused Steiner of practicing tantric sex magic. Theodor Reuss, initiator of Aleister Crowley, and co-founder of the Order of Templars of the Orient, may have engaged in tantric sex magic. Steiner did not. However, Reuss knew Steiner, and spent a good deal of time at Monte Verita spa in Ascona, a few miles from Dornach. Seiling apparently based his smears on this tenuous connection.

Eckart's libels had an effect. Steiner received death threats. S.A. thugs disrupted Anthroposophical Society meetings, vandalized property, and beat up members. After Steiner spoke at a The Four Seasons Hotel in May, 1922, a gang of brown-shirted hoodlums burst in wielding clubs and brass knuckles. He barely managed to escape unharmed.

Eckart's fixation with Steiner reveals his spiritual pretensions. Above all, he resented Steiner's argument that Ariosophy was no more than a pagan revival which exalted one's lower self at the expense of spirit. According to Anthroposophy only God and his Hierarchies generated soul-growth. Initiates purified their carnal selves only with the aid of Christ and his assignees, which included angels and good spirits. Ariosophists projected their own fallen natures onto the spirit world. False prophets like Guido von List and Tarnhari claimed to tap into the Teutonic Folk Spirit. In reality they communicated with "elementaries" (lower astral entities, or evil spirits.)

Many believed Nazis had a hand in the burning of Steiner's Goetheanum at Dornach, on December 31, 1922. The Anthroposophists constructed this massive twin-domed building from the same fruit woods used to make violins. It had a Norwegian slate roof, stained glass windows, and high-ceilinged theater with superb acoustics. Steiner adorned the interior with sculptures of Christ, the Time Spirit, Ahriman, Lucifer, Seraphim, the Doppelganger, and other figures. Though architecturally splendid, the Goetheanum was a tinderbox by fire safety standards. After Steiner concluded his New Year's Eve sermon at about 9:45 P.M. the audience filed out. Within minutes a guard standing outside noticed smoke issuing from the south wing. Fire spread rapidly through beams and joists. At midnight both domes collapsed. The Goetheanum burned liked a massive bonfire until shortly after dawn.

One man perished in the conflagration -- a watchmaker named Ott, who had been trying to fight the fire. Steiner attended his funeral a few days later, even though local police had put him at the top of their arson suspect list.

The fire marshal's report found no gas leak, electrical fault, or improper storage of combustibles, thus absolving the Anthroposophists of negligence. However, local authorities could not conclusively ascertain the blaze's cause. Distraught Anthroposophists, persuaded that someone had torched their headquarters, mailed postcards to antagonistic Lutheran pastors in the vicinity: "Who did it?" One parson dryly responded: "Your boss is the clairvoyant. Go ask him." Police never made an arrest in the case, but rumors persisted that "Nazis" might be responsible.

Relations between Steiner's adherents and National Socialists remained unfriendly. On January 4, 1929 Nazi sympathizer Wilhelm Krieger murdered Anthroposophical Society President Dr. Carl Unger in Stuttgart. Hitler banned Anthroposophy when he came to power in 1933. The Gestapo arrested many Anthroposophen and shipped them to concentration camps.

One Anthroposophist struck back by circulating untruths about National Socialists. Walter Johannes Stein (1891-1957) was an Austrian Jew who came under Rudolf Steiner's spell in prewar Vienna. He taught at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart for several years and became a specialist in medieval German literature. Stein fled to England in 1933 to escape Nazi terror. During World War II he confided sensational tales about Dietrich Eckart and Adolf Hitler to English Anthroposophists. Ernst Pretzsche, a "toad-like" bookseller and herbalist, supposedly initiated Hitler into the black arts by giving him a dose of peyote, circa 1911. (Coincidentally, an herbalist named Felix Kogutzki had been one of Rudolf Steiner's mentors.)

According to The Spear of Destiny by Trevor Ravenscroft, Stein asserted that "Veteran army officer Eckart was a dedicated Satanist, the supreme adept of the arts and rituals of black magic and the central figure in ... the Thule Group ... founded by Heinrich (sic) von Sebottendorf." [15] Actually, Eckart never served in the army, did not engage in devil worship, and was only a "guest member" of the Thule Society. The first name of Sebottendorf (alias of Adam Alfred Rudolf Glauer) was "Rudolf," not "Heinrich."

Stein tried to turn the tables on Ariosophists by ascribing perverted practices to them. He alleged that Eckart and Hitler wanted to assassinate Steiner because he monitored their Satanic rites from the astral plane, and foresaw the Nazi program for conquest and extermination. According to his account Eckart went to seances with Alfred Rosenberg, during which a naked woman gave birth to "ectoplasmic heads and shrouds" who uttered dark prophecies. In fact, Eckart fraternized very little with the Russian expatriate community, and no reliable source links him with this sort of voodoo. In the final analysis Walter Stein's apocryphal stories about Eckart were as false as Eckart's defamations of Steiner.

_______________

Endnotes

1 Margarete Plewnia, Auf Dem Weg Zu Hitler, Der Volkische Publizist Dietrich Eckart, Schunemann Universitasverlag, Bremen, 1971, p. 45.

2 Helena P. Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy, ed. Joy Mills, Theosophical Publishing House, (abridgement of 1889 edition), p. 48.

3 Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2003, p. 79, op. cit. Alfred Rosenberg, Dietrich Eckart: Ein Vermachtis, p. 112, quoting Dietrich Eckart's poem "The Riddle."

4 Konrad Heiden, The History of National Socialism, Alfred Knopf, New York, 1935, p. 99, op. cit. Der Volkisch Beobachter 8/11/1921.

5 Dierrich Eckart, Auf Gut Deutsch, 1919.

6 James Webb, The Occult Establishment, Open Court Publishing Co., LaSalle, IL, 1976, p. 290.

7 New King James Bible, 1 John, Chapter 4, Verses 1-3.

8 James Webb, The Occult Underground, Open Court Publishing Co., LaSalle, IL, 1974, p. 271.

9 Dietrich Eckart, Auf Gut Deutsch, 7/11/1919.

10 Webb, Occult Establishment, p. 287.

11 Plewnia, p. 59.

12 Ibid.

13 Lorenzo Ravagli, Rudolf Steiner, Opponent of Anti-Semitism, Stuttgart, 2000, p. 31.

14 Plewnia., p. 286.

15 Trevor Ravenscroft, The Spear of Destiny, Samuel Weiser, Inc., York Beach, ME, 1973, pp. 91-92.
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Re: Hitler's Mentor: Dietrich Eckart, His Life, Times, & Mil

Postby admin » Fri Dec 21, 2018 11:33 pm

13: Hitler's Origins and Early Life

"As the man grows estranged from his wife, he becomes more intimate with alcohol. When at length he comes home ... drunk and brutal, ... God have mercy. I have seen this in hundreds of instances."

-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf


Hitler's 56 year life may be neatly divided into 29 years of obscurity (1889-1918) and 27 years of infamy (1919-1945.) This chapter will deal with the years between 1889 and 1903.

Adolf Hitler was born about 6:18 P.M. on Holy Saturday, April 20th, 1889 at the Gasthaus zum Pommer, a hotel in the tiny Austrian border village of Branau am Inn. The building still stands, occupied as a library and private school. Like other towns in Austria's Waldviertel ("Wooded Quarter,") Branau consisted of a small business district, then a collection of white-washed cottages with tile or thatch roofs, surrounded by farms and forests.

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Adolf Hitler as a baby, 1889

The Waldviertel has been called "Austria's Appalachia." Branau's country folks had a reputation of being suspicious of outsiders. The village was also widely known as a hotbed for mediums. Hitler had the same wet-nurse as the psychic brothers Rudolf and Wilhelm Schneider. People came from all over Europe to have their fortunes read by "The Weavers of Branau." During his adult life Hitler himself exhibited the classic mediumistic traits: clairvoyance, ability as a mimic, "duality," charisma, habitual daydreaming, and sleepwalking.

An unmarried maidservant named Maria Anna Schicklgruber gave birth to Adolf's father, Alois Schicklgruber in Strones on June 7, 1837. When she died ten years later, Johann Nepomuk Hitler (or Huttler), a farmer from Spital took Alois into his household. In 1876, at the age of 39, Alois Schicklgruber (meaning "hedge-digger") legally changed his surname to Hitler (meaning "small land-holder.") His son Adolf later hailed this as one of his father's better decisions, acknowledging that the phrase "Heil Schicklgruber" would never have caught on with his followers. According to Werner Maser, the purpose of this belated adoption was not only to legitimize Alois, but to guarantee an inheritance from Johann Nepomuk Hitler, who may have been his natural father. This transaction occurred three years after the death of Johann Nepomuk's wife, Eva Maria, who would certainly have objected to a legacy being diverted from her three daughters to Alois.

Maria Anna Schicklgruber lived with miller's assistant Johann Georg Hitler (or Hiedler), brother of Johann Nepomuk Hitler. Some believe Johann Georg to be Alois's real father. However, after Maria's death the ten year old boy left his home to live with "step-uncle" Johann Nepomuk Hitler's family. After the war Nazi lawyer Hans Frank declared that Maria Anna Schicklgruber got pregnant while working in the household of "a Graz Jew" named Frankenberger or Frankenreither. However, genealogical researchers disproved this account by ascertaining that no Jewish families lived in Graz during the 1830's. Another baseless rumor had it that one of the Rothschilds impregnated Maria Anna while she worked in their Vienna mansion c. 1836. Johann Nepomuk Hitler seems to be the most likely candidate as Alois Hitler's natural father. In any case, Frank confirmed that Adolf Hitler always feared that he might be one quarter Jewish. He knew that an entire clan of Jews named Hitler lived somewhere in Galicia. Author Stephen F. Sage catalogued several of them who died in the holocaust.

In 1850 Johann Nepomuk Hitler apprenticed 13 year old Alois to a local cobbler. A few years later the young man went to Vienna to improve his leather-working skills. While there, Alois applied to the Imperial Finance Ministry for a job, passed the examination, and obtained employment as a clerk. By dint of driving ambition, hard work, and an assertive manner, Alois Hitler eventually overcame his peasant origins and worked his way up to the post of senior customs official.

Alois's love life deviated sharply from the pattern of middle class respectability. Since turning eighteen in 1855 he had sex with a succession of waitresses, chambermaids, and prostitutes. At thirty-six he married forty-six year old Anna Glassl for her money, but soon resumed his philandering. Anna, the daughter of Alois's former boss, flied for divorce in 1880, after seven years of marriage. When she died three years later, 46 year old Alois married his twenty-two year old girlfriend Franziska "Fanni" Maltselberger, by whom he already had an illegitimate son, Alois Jr. (b. January 13, 1882.) Fanni contracted tuberculosis shortly after giving birth to daughter Angela (b. July 28, 1883.) Alois's twenty-three year old niece Klara Polzl (b. August 12, 1860 in Spital) helped with housekeeping and babysitting tasks during her illness. Forty-seven year old Alois took a fancy to Klara, probably seducing her before his young wife's death in August, 1884. When he married Klara on January 7, 1885, she was four months pregnant. Because of their close degree of consanguinity the couple had to obtain a dispensation from the church. Alois was Klara's mother's younger half-brother. Over the next eleven years Klara had six children -- Gustav (b. 1885), Ida (b. 1886), Otto (b. 1887), Adolf (b. 1889), Edmund (b. 1894), and Paula (b. 1896) -- of whom only Adolf and Paula survived childhood.

Image
Alois Hitler (1837-1903)

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Klara Pozl Hitler (1860-1907)

Craving variety, Alois hauled his family from pillar to post during the 1890's. The Hitlers moved from Branau to Passau (Germany) in 1892, from Passau to Hafeld (Austria) in 1895. from Hafeld to Lambach in 1897, from Lambach to Leonding (a suburb of Linz) in 1899. The Austrian Customs Bureau transferred him from Branau to Passau, but the other moves were more or less whimsical. Robert Payne believed that the 1897 relocation occurred so that Adolf could attend Lambach Abbey School, instead of Fischlam's one-room schoolhouse.

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Adolf Hitler, center, at Leonding

Alois lived away from home for long periods, caring more about work, beekeeping, and wine-bibbing than his young family. Klara once confided to a friend:

"What I hoped and dreamed of as a young girl has not been fulfilled in my marriage. It cannot be otherwise ... but does such a thing ever happen?" [1]


During most of 1894 Alois worked in Linz, while Klara and the children resided in Passau. The next year he retired after forty years of civil service and bought a nine acre farm near Hafeld with spacious farmhouse, barn, beehives, garden patches, and small orchard. Hired men helped out with chores. Alois spent more time with bees and drinking buddies than his children. But Klara, Adolf, and Paula preferred neglect to the punishment he sometimes meted out.

" ... he often beat the dog until it ... wet on the floor. He beat the children, and on occasion ... would beat Klara." [2]


Adolf Hitler grew up as an alert, "staring" boy who could not easily be forced to do anything against his will. [bv]Paula Hitler remembered that Alois often punched her stubborn brother, once knocking him unconscious. Adolf never forgot his last thrashing as a thirteen year old boy in 1902, which consisted of 32 strokes with a cane.[/b] During these assaults Klara sometimes stood by, wringing her hands. At other times, Paula recalled that she and her mother would pull on Alois's coattails in an effort to cut the battering short.

The only adult who exercised control over Adolf was his father. Playmates recalled that the elder Hitler used to whistle for his son to come home. The usually insolent boy instantly stopped in his tracks and bolted home when he heard Alois's shrill "dog whistle."

Alois Hitler drank heavily and abused his wife and children while under the influence. His many changes of residence appear to have been what Alcoholics Anonymous has termed "geographic solutions": futile attempts to improve conditions by moving to new places. Alois was jovial in bars, but rough at home. Tavern-mates' testimony that he never appeared drunk only confirmed above-average capacity -- another sign of alcoholism.

Adolf Hitler, who generally abstained from liquor, once told Hans Frank:

"I know what a devil alcohol is! It really was -- via my father -- the worst enemy of my youth." [3]


Dr. Walter C. Langer noticed Hitler's veiled references to his father in Mein Kampf.

"It ends badly if the man goes his own way ... and the woman, for the children's sake, opposes him. Then there is fighting and quarreling, and as the man grows estranged from his wife, he becomes more intimate with alcohol. He is drunk every Saturday ... When at length he comes home on Sunday ... night, drunk and brutal, ... God have mercy ... I have seen this in hundreds of instances." [4]


The historical record contains conflicting accounts of Alois Hitler. Junior members of the Austrian civil service found him "rigid and pedantic." Some neighbors saw him as a stern and violent household tyrant. However, boon companions at the Gasthaus Stiefler esteemed Alois as a witty and down to earth individual. He regularly drank three pints of beer at a sitting, but it never seemed to affect him. A man of regular habits, he invariably stood up after finishing his third stein and walked home to eat supper. Sometimes he returned for a half liter of white wine after dinner. Alois occasionally stopped by for a single glass of wine before lunch. The regulars at the Gasthaus, tipplers themselves, did not consider him a drunkard by any means.

Senior customs official Alois Hitler commanded respect with his peremptory and self-confidant manner. He dispensed level-headed advice to a cousin whose son contemplated a career in the customs office.

"Don't let him think the Finanzwach is... a game because he will quickly be disillusioned. First, he has to show absolute obedience to his superiors at all levels. Second, there is a good deal to learn in this occupation, all the more so if he has had little previous education. Topers, debtors, card players, and others who lead immoral lives cannot last. Finally, one has to go out on duty in all weathers, day or night." [5]


But it seems that Alois was a "toper" himself. His egocentrtclty, brutality, dysfunctional relationships, promiscuity, heavy smoking, religious indifference, overweening ambition, and restlessness all fit the profile of a middle-stage alcoholic. Klara Hitler was a typical co-dependant wife, entirely subject to the self-gratifying caprices of her husband. Intoxicants expand one's carnal ego at the soul's expense. As a middle-aged man Alois tried to fill his "inner void" by getting high. His son Adolf grew up as a "dry drunk." He inherited Alois's spiritual emptiness and drive for ego-expansion, but remained abstemious because his father's drunken misbehavior repelled him. Adolf was addicted to another ego-aggrandizing "drug": power lust.

Incestuous marriages tend to produce children with genetic aberrations. The Polzls, who intermarried for generations, had hunchbanks and imbeciles in the family. Klara Polzl was the daughter of Alois Hitler's half sister, Johanna Hitler Polzl, and granddaughter of Alois's probable father, Johann Nepomuk Hitler. Adolf, Ida, and Paula Hitler were all abnormal. Dr. Walter Langer referred to Paula as a "high grade moron." Dr. Edouard Bloch asserted that Ida may not have died in 1888 at the age of two, as alleged, but lived in Klara Hitler's household. However, the child he saw may have been the handicapped daughter of Theresia Polzl Schmidt, Klara's older sister. Scientific studies have proven that older men generate offspring with higher incidences of mental illnesses than younger fathers. Research has also demonstrated that the children of heavy-drinking males often manifest physical and neurological disorders. Therefore, it should surprise no one that Alois Hitler, a 51 year old alcoholic, involved in a sexual relationship with his niece, engendered an emotionally unstable son.

The elder Hitler's anti-religious views rubbed-off on Adolf. Alois's obituary described him as "frugal... well-informed ... fond of singing ... an authority on beekeeping ... a champion of law and order ... a progressive-minded man through and through." [6] Witnesses recalled that he ridiculed the local Catholic newspaper and only attended mass on Emperor Franz Josef's birthday.

Adolf Hitler contracted Austrian xenophobia from his father. As an Imperial customs official Alois worked as a border province's gatekeeper. With the propensity of alcoholics to blame others for unendurable conditions, he apparently voiced ill-humored complaints about illegal Jewish aliens from Russia, Croatian smugglers, and Serbian anarchists in his son's presence -- perhaps even prophesying that such elements would eventually destroy Austria. In 1931 Adolf told newspaper editor Richard Breiting:

Even as a child I heard my father say that Vienna was ruled by a clique, a mongrel crew which had collected in the capital." [7]


Alois and his barroom comrades, though pro-Habsburg, sympathized with the anti-Slav, anti-Semitic opinions of Georg Ritter von Schoenerer. In Mein Kampf Adolf Hitler alluded to his father's negativity.

"The other things the little fellow hears at home do not tend to further his respect for his surroundings. Not a single institution is left unattacked; starting with the teacher, up to the head of the State, be it religion, or morality as such, be it the State or society, no matter which, everything is pulled down in the nastiest manner into the filth of a depraved mentality."[8]


It is ironic that the writer of Mein Kampf would object to misanthropy and scatology, for in that same book he heaped scorn upon Jews, Slavs, and the French. Moreover, his numerous references to syphilis, germs, cancer, dung, and poison certainly reflect "the filth of a depraved mentality."

Klara Polzl Hitler has been described as a gentle, religious woman who seldom raised her voice. Surviving photographs show an attractive, somewhat melancholy, country girl with neatly combed hair and large, expressive eyes. Adolf inherited her arresting gray-blue eyes. She doted on precocious "Adi," but found it necessary to admonish him often, sometimes threatening to tell Alois of his transgressions. When Adolf misbehaved, she would point to the old man's pipe rack. Young Hitler detested his father, while simultaneously adopting him as a role model. Neglected and mistreated by her disagreeable "uncle-husband," Klara bestowed all her love on Adolf. Dr. Edouard Bloch said he had never seen a closer attachment between mother and son.

Young Hitler excelled in all subjects at Lambach Abbey School, and sang in the choir. At this institution he first saw the swastika. Father Theodor Hagen, Lambach's abbot, ordered workmen to engrave the oriental Hagenkreuz on doorways, windows, gates, and other structures on abbey grounds. This symbol, which formed a logo of his initials, also appeared on his family coat of arms. Father Hagen intended these decorations as a play on his name.

A photo of Hitler's 3rd grade class at Leonding School taken in 1897 shows him as a self-possessed honor student in the center, posing with arms folded. A few years later, Linz Realschule's class portrait shows him as a moon-faced dullard slouched in the background. What wrought this transformation? Part of the answer was that richer city boys from Linz looked down on "rubes" from Leonding. Also, the death of his younger brother Edmund deeply affected Hitler in February, 1900. Only ten at the time, he went to the burial alone during a snowstorm, while Klara lay sick in bed and Alois remained out of town on business.

"It was Hitler's first encounter with death, and the villagers remembered ... that (he) had been seen, at the time following Edmund's death, sitting on the cemetery wall night after night, gazing up at the stars." [9]


Image
Adolf Hitler, left, at Lambach Abbey School, c. 1898

The Hitlers lived across from St. Michael's Church Cemetery. Adolf could see Edmund's headstone from his bedroom window.

Although the death certificate listed "complications arising from measles" as the cause of death, Edmund probably died of encephalitis -- which Adolf caught that same winter. Dr. Hans Berger-Prinz later theorized that Hitler's behavioral disorders and Parkinson's Disease at the end of his life might have stemmed from this childhood bout with encephalitis. Some of the symptoms manifested by post-encephalitic sociopaths correspond to Hitler's behavioral characteristics:

"The post encephalitic moral imbecile is often possessed of cleverness and brilliance ... (He can be) an exceedingly plausible and ready liar ... devoid of all moral and altruistic feelings ... knows neither shame nor gratitude ... (displays) viciousness and maliciousness with a gloating over the misfortunes of others... a coldly egotistical, vengeful, base, vile impertinence... truly explosive outbursts ... criminal actions... wanton destructiveness murder. .. arson ... mythomania ... cruelty as well as fraud malicious denunciations... grandiloquent and ecstatic states ... inclination to lie ... to confabulate past adventures ... to simulate and deceive." [10]


Between 1895 and 1904 Hitler attended five different schools. This constant change created emotional and intellectual disorientation. Perpetually the new kid in class, Hitler felt the need to prove himself continually.

In turn-of-the-century Austria high school boys either attended the Gymnasium to study "Humanities" or Realschule for technical instruction. Cynics quipped that Real Schools taught nothing human and Gymnasiums nothing real. Alois Hitler insisted that his son attend Realschule to prepare for a civil service career.

Dr. Edouard Humer of Linz Realschule found the "gaunt, pale-faced boy ... argumentative, self-opinionated, willful, arrogant, and bad-tempered. He had obvious difficulty fitting in at school... (and) demanded of his fellow pupils their unqualified subservience, fancying himself in the role of leader." [11]

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Adolf Hitler, top right, at Linzer Realschule, c. 1903. Ludwig Wittgenstein is 3rd from left on the lower row.

By his own admission Hitler was a "young scamp." When a neighbor lady's chickens trespassed onto the family farm, Adolf grabbed his father's gun and blasted away at them. He brought knives and hatchets to school, played hooky, smoked cigarettes, scrawled lewd messages on blackboards, released cockroaches in class, blew kisses to nuns, and made impudent comments to teachers. Hitler brought in literature from a pro-divorce society to rankle Catholic clergymen, and once helped classmates lock a science teacher in his lab. One day they threw grass, leaves, and nutshells all over a classroom and told the principal this mess was part of their botany lesson. When school let out, he ran the streets playing soldiers or cowboys and Indians with other boys. Adults considered him unruly. Hitler's own recollections of his schoolboy pranks bear out this assessment.

"One of (Father) Schwarz's female relatives ran a shop in the Steinstrasse. We used to go in and ask for the most impossible things like ladies' underwear. When she said she hadn't got them we'd go out shouting: 'what a miserable hole -- never has anything!'" [12]


Father Franz DeSales Schwarz tried to teach Adolf Hitler religion for three years at Linzer Realschule --- 1902 through 1904. The future Nazi dictator baited him mercilessly. In addition to the usual schoolboy shenanigans, Hitler defied Father Schwarz by declaring his disbelief in the Immaculate Conception, admitting that he never prayed, and flashing black, white, and red pencils indicating his allegiance to Imperial Germany rather than Habsburg Austria. Schwarz punished the young heretic often, and may have been responsible for his transfer to Steyr High School in 1905. Hitler never forgot him. In the mid-1930's he commissioned a genealogist from the SS Ahenerbe to trace the Schwarz family tree to determine if his old adversary had any Jewish blood. Genealogical research proved that Father Schwarz descended from a long line of northern Austrian tradesmen and peasants.

Coincidentally, Ludwig Wittgenstein (4/26/1889-4/29/1951) attended Linzer Realschule with Hitler during the 1903-1904 term. The two boys -- born six days apart -- were not in the same class. Though nascent genius Wittgenstein didn't excel at Linz due to emotional stress, he earned passing grades in honors courses. Hitler wallowed in the "slow" section. Yet they sat less than six feet from each other in one class photograph. Linzer Realschule had an enrollment of 329 students, of whom 15 were Jewish. As a baptized Catholic, Wittgenstein would not have been counted among the Jews, even though he was three-quarters Jewish -- a fact that members of his family tried to conceal.

Hitler would surely have known of Wittgenstein, the richest, smartest, and best-looking boy in class, who hailed from exotic Vienna, where his parents were notable patrons of the arts. His father, Karl Wittgenstein, operated an iron, steel, and rubber cartel with the Rothschilds, which cornered the Austrian markets for those commodities. But tragedy had recently struck the Wittgensteins. Two of Ludwig's older brothers, Hans and Rudolf, committed suicide -- both due to shame about being homosexual. (A third brother, Kurt, shot himself in November, 1918 when the regiment under his command deserted.) The family's strategy in sending their high-strung youngest son to the Realschule was to "toughen him up." His neurotic brothers had been pampered and privately tutored with tragic results. Therefore, Karl Wittgenstein felt that Ludwig needed to be mainstreamed. Nonetheless, like his deceased elder brothers, he became a practicing homosexual by the age of eighteen, and battled depression most of his life.

Homosexually-inclined Hitler could not have failed to notice Wittgenstein who had wavy dark blonde hair, penetrating blue eyes, and chiseled features. Less desirable traits accompanied his physical attractiveness. He looked down on fellow students as "dreck," and would not permit any of them to address him with the informal "du."

Wittgenstein had perfect musical pitch and played clarinet with virtuosity. He could also whistle long passages from Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner. The second best whistler in Linzer Realschule happened to be Adolf Hitler. At this time Wittgenstein idolized the erratic Otto Weininger, an anti-feminist philosopher later revered by Dietrich Eckart and Hitler. The two boys also shared an interest in architecture and Wagnerian opera. Suicide fascinated Hitler, making it likely that he would have been intrigued by the fact that his classmate's two brothers had killed themselves.

Kimberly Cornish, author of the Jew of Linz, called attention to Chapter 2 of Mein Kampf where Hitler discussed an untrustworthy Jewish boy at Linzer Realschule who sometimes "ratted" on classmates. In another passage Hitler referred to "stammering Jews." Wittgenstein spoke with a stutter. Hitler may have regarded the haughty, but glamorous, "half-Jew" from Vienna with simultaneous feelings of attraction, hatred, envy, and fear. Dr. Edouard Bloch heard that Linzer Realschule expelled Hitler for "a sexual indiscretion." Could this have involved Ludwig Wittgenstein? Probably not. There is no evidence one way or the other.

Wittgenstein's lifelong dedication to honesty resulted in sardonic candor and a tendency to "confess" the truth even if it hurt himself and others. Bertrand Russell described him as "pure," Leonard Woolf thought him "cruel."

Wittgenstein earnestly studied Leo Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief while serving as an artillery officer in the Austrian army. Under the influence of that book he made a conscious effort to imitate Christ. After the war he gave away most of his inherited fortune, and taught poor children in rural elementary schools for six years. While a teacher in Trattenbach he donated money to the local parish priest who distributed it anonymously among poor families. Wittgenstein also paid for school supplies and class trips out of his own pocket. Though villagers considered him highly eccentric, they hailed him as a miracle worker when he fixed a broken down steam engine at the local wool factory. Yet most believed that Wittgenstein more closely resembled the "difficult" Jesus who spoke condescendingly to the Samaritan woman, asked "who are my mother and brothers?" (Mark 3:33-34,) and drove moneychangers out of the Temple. At the beginning of his biography on Wittgenstein, William Warren Bartley used Matthew 12:36-37 as an epigraph: " ... every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned." Wittgenstein always disapproved of what he termed "gassing" -- or communicating arbitrary and unverified opinions to others. Language should be used to advance the truth, not distort it. "Gassing" was something his former schoolmate Hitler did incessantly in both speeches and late night monologues inflicted upon his minions. Hitler's blather consisted mainly of what Wittgenstein termed "pseudo-propositions," deficient in truth value.

Although speculation about Hitler's contact with Wittgenstein at Linzer Realschule tantalizes us, and may have a basis in reality, a quotation from Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) will be appropriate here. "Whereof one cannot speak, therof one must be silent ... What can be said at all (must) be said clearly and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence."

Hitler read most of Karl May's dime novels about America's Wild West. May, an ex-convict from Saxony, made a fortune cranking out stories featuring "Old Shatterhand," a leather-skinned cowpoke of German extraction. May, who became a pacifist toward the end of his life, respected Native Americans and portrayed most of them sympathetically in his books. Nonetheless, in self-defense Old Shatterhand shot scores of hostile Indians off their horses with his trusty Winchester rifle.

Hitler attended Karl May's funeral in Vienna on April 3, 1912. During World War II he re-read many of his western stories for relaxation.

"He read them ... while conducting his war with Russian and sometimes referred to the Russians as 'redskins.' As late as February, 1942 he claimed that he was grateful for these stories, which opened his eyes to the nature of the world." [13]


In 1943 the Fuhrer had 300,000 copies of May's Winnetau printed and distributed to troops fighting on the Eastern front.

Hitler had temper tantrums as a boy. Sometimes feelings of extreme wrath caused him to faint. At the age of thirteen strong-willed Adolf began to defy his grouchy father. Alois expected his son to enter the civil service one day, but the boy wanted to develop his artistic ability. Alois Jr. had bitterly disappointed his father by getting arrested for theft, then running away from home. Sixty-four year old Alois Sr. wasn't going to let Adolf turn into another ne' er-do-well. In Mein Kampf Hitler described their disagreement.

"His decision was extremely simple ... 'Artist, no, never as long as I live!' But since his son ... had apparently inherited his father's stubbornness, the same answer came back at him ... My father did not depart from his 'Never!' and I intensified my 'Oh, yes!' The consequences, indeed, were none too pleasant. The old man grew embittered, and ... so did I. My father forbade me to nourish the slightest hope of ever being allowed to study art. I went a step further and declared that if that was the case I would stop studying altogether." [14]


Adolf recalled his 65 year old father dragging him to an Austrian customs office as a thirteen year old boy. The clerks at their desks reminded young Hitler of "monkeys in cages."

Autodidact Hitler once grandly declared to August Kubizek: "You, of course, need teachers. For me they are not necessary!" [15] The only subjects Adolf paid attention to at Linz Realschule were German literature, history, geography, singing, drawing, and gymnastics. He regarded all teachers except Dr. Ludwig Poetsche as "pedantic nobodies." Poetsche fascinated Hitler with his Pan-German lectures and lantern shows, which explained how Austria's Slav majority was slowly but surely dislodging the German elite from power. By 1900 only eight million Germans lived in the Dual Monarchy, as opposed to forty-seven million non-Germans. With democracy in the air, German supremacy could not last.

At the turn of the 20th Century many depicted Austria as "the Balkans of Greater Germany." Prince Klemens Metternich remarked that the Balkans began in Vienna's southeast district. The Dual Monarchy teemed with Serbs, Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Magyars, Hungarians, Croatians, and Jews. Mutually-exclusive "Pan" movements vied for power. Serbian separatists continually plotted revolution. Rival nationalistic groups warred among themselves. All cherished the same chauvinistic ambitions as Pan-Germans.

Every Pan movement deemed itself divinely appointed to rule not only its homeland, but surrounding "buffer zones" as well. Any nationalistic state would have to be militaristic, imperialistic, and exclusionary. Hitler's Pan-German beliefs made him intolerant of all other ethnic groups. His contempt for Austria, predisposed him to sedition. Well aware of similar disloyalty on the part of Pan-Slavs and Zionist Jews, he concluded that any future Pan German state had to be repressive and anti-democratic. From the lectures of Dr. Ludwig Poetsche Hitler learned that Europe resembled one big Austria, over which Germans must gain the upper hand.

In later years Hitler's hatred of Austrian decadence knew no bounds. Dr. Walter Langer theorized that he identified Austria with his unsatisfactory father and Germany with his beloved mother. In Mein Kampf he called his native land "an impossible state," [16] "on the brink of ruin," [17] ... "the Habsburg Cadaver," ... and "an old mosaic (with) cement crumbling." [18] The comic opera Austrian Army had a general staff of "band conductors" who failed to control undisciplined, multi-lingual, and badly-equipped troops. Despite its woeful lack of military preparedness, Austria constantly irritated Russia by stirring up trouble in the Balkans and Ottoman Empire. Hitler criticized Wilhelmine Germany for maintaining an alliance with such "an antique, impotent state." [19] The Kaiser and his ministers should have lured England away from its pact with Russia and France. It would have been better to choose Russia as a treaty partner than to have stood by "the putrid Austrian corpse," since "Slavdom would rather have shattered the monarchy ... than permit aid to Germany." [20] According to his dogmatic view Slavs opposed German rule, but lacked "state-creating ability" themselves. Hitler always maintained that the Baltic German aristocracy held Russia together, not the native Slavic population.

Alois Hitler dropped dead of a pulmonary hemorrhage in a tavern at 10 A.M. on January 23, 1903. He had gone out that morning to buy apples from a local farmer. Feeling ill, he staggered into the Gasthaus Stiefler, ordered a glass of wine, and collapsed. Bystanders carried him to a couch in the next room, where he died.

With the curmudgeonly old man gone, Adolf could pursue his whims unhampered.

_______________

Endnotes

1 August Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew, trans. E.V. Anderson, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1955, p. 61.

2 R.G.L. Waite, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler, Basic Books, New York, 1977, p. 134.

3 Hans Frank, Facing the Gallows, Munich, 1993, p. 332.

4 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1925, trans. Ralph Manheim, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1943, p. 28.

5 Robert Payne, The Life & Death of Adolf Hitler, Barnes & Noble, New York, 1973, p. 10.

6 Ibid., p. 29.

7 Edouard Calic, ed. Richard Breiting, Secret Conversations with Hitler, trans. Richard Barry, John Day & Co., New York, p. 1971, p. 66.

8 Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 43.

9 J. Sydney Jones, Hitler in Vienna 1907-1913, Stein & Day, New York, 1983, p. 226.

10 Ron Rosenbaum (Introduction p. xxxii) op. cit Acta Psychiatrica, "Zur Kriminalitat der Encephalitiker," 1930.

11 Waite, p. 188.

12 H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed. Hitler's Secret Conversations 1941-1944, Farrar, Strauss & Young, New York, 1953, p. 156.

13 Minna C. Klein & H. Anthony Klein, Hitler's Hang-Ups, Dutton, New York, 1976, p. 20.

14 Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 9-10.

15 Kubizek, p. 228.

16 Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 121.

17 Ibid., p. 148.

18 Ibid., p. 124.

19 Ibid., p. 657.

20 Ibid., p. 147.
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Re: Hitler's Mentor: Dietrich Eckart, His Life, Times, & Mil

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14: From The Waldviertel to Vienna

"I really wanted to be an architect. Vienna's Jews knew how to put a stop to that."

-- Adolf Hitler


After Alois Hitler's death the Austrian Customs Service provided a generous pension to his dependents. In June, 1905 Klara Hitler moved from Leonding to Linz. Adolf Hitler's grades and behavior were both unsatisfactory at Linzer Realschule. Dr. Edouard Bloch heard from a local teacher that he nearly got expelled from the Realschule for a "sexual indiscretion" in his 12th year. At any rate, sixteen year old Hitler transferred to Steyr Regional Boys High School, fifty miles from Linz, in the summer of 1905. He and four other students boarded with Herr and Frau Chichini. His formal education ended that December. Hitler's grades had been mediocre:

Moral Conduct 3 (Satisfactory)
Diligence 4 (Erratic)
Religion 4 (Adequate)
Geography & History 4 (Adequate)
Mathematics 5 (Inadequate)
Chemistry 4 (Adequate)
Physics 3 (Satisfactory)
Geometry 4 (Adequate)
Freehand Drawing 2 (Praiseworthy)
Gymnastics 1 (Excellent)
Stenography 5 (Inadequate)
Handwriting 5 (Unpleasing)


While at Steyr Hitler and the other boys sensed tension in the Chichinis' marriage, and delighted in sowing discord between them. Herr Chichini, an impoverished Tyrolean nobleman twice his wife's age, held a patronage job with the town of Steyr. He did little work at the office, and none around the house. Attractive Petronella Chichini had to cook, wash, and clean-up after four boarders, as well as her slothful husband. To provoke an argument the boys would confide some small complaint to Herr Chichini at table -- the food was cold, too bland, or served late. He always rose to the bait and passed these criticisms on to his wife. She would immediately bite her lip and start banging pots, pans, and utensils around. After dinner, Hitler and his housemates snickered while the Chichinis shouted at each other in their suite. Petronella often shoved Comte Chichini out the door after such these arguments. Hitler and his compatriots laughed uproariously whenever they saw "the Count" sleeping in the hallway as they skipped off to school.

Many women found Hitler attractive. Frau Chichini liked him for being neat, superficially polite, and "smoldering." He brought out her maternal instincts by soliciting advice about various matters. After the school's graduation ceremony, Hitler and a few classmates celebrated by getting drunk at a country inn. Somehow he made it back to Chichinis' dormitory. The next day hung-over Adolf realized that his diploma was missing. What should he do? His mother would be disappointed if no "sheepskin" could be shown. He told Petronella his story. She told him to go back and request a duplicate. He immediately ran over to the school. No sooner did Hitler walk through the door than the secretary grabbed his arm and escorted him directly to the principal's office. "Is this what you're looking for?" the principal asked coyly, extending a soiled piece of paper on the end of a stick. Hitler turned several shades of red. "A farmer brought this in yesterday." On his way back from the tavern intoxicated Hitler had evidently defecated in a field, wiped himself with the certificate, and thrown it away. Yet he had no memory of it. The idea of having such a complete black-out stunned him. He solemnly resolved never to get drunk again, and stuck to that pledge for the rest of his life.

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1905 sketch of 16-year old Adolf Hitler by Sturmlechner, a classmate at Steyr Regional Boys' High School

Nearly every summer from childhood through adolescence Hitler and his family vacationed for a few weeks in Spital at the house of his mother's older sister Theresia Schmidt. Hitler's cousin Johann Schmidt recalled that Adolf always came with "lots of books (and) was constantly busy reading ... " [1] Spital may have been the scene of Hitler's encounter with an amorous milkmaid circa 1904. Reinhold Hanisch related that "when she made advances ... he ran away, knocking over a churn of milk in his haste." [2] Hitler continued to visit older sister Angela Raubal in Spital after his mother's death -- at least once during his Vienna years, and twice while on leave during World War I.

The era of the "Linz Dandy" began when Hitler returned home. To affect a university student's look Adolf bought a new suit, derby, and ivory-tipped walking stick. He attended the opera regularly, and became a passionate fan of Richard Wagner. His sister Paula remembered that her brother saw Gotterdamerung at least seven times in 1905, and Lohengrin ten times.

In 1906 Klara Hitler moved across the river from Linz to Urfahr. She bought Adolf a grand piano and paid for lessons from October, 1906 to January, 1907. Her moody teen-aged son frittered away day-time hours with various types of wool-gathering: aimless reading, sketching, daydreaming, writing poetry, and planning Linz's complete reconstruction. Architecture and urban planning would absorb Hitler for the rest of his life. This desire to build utopian "garden cities" for the German master race also preoccupied other Ariosophic thinkers, such as Theodore Fritsch, Guido von List, Willibald Hentschel, and Bernhard Forster.

Young Hitler had a compulsive need for ego-expansion, and wanted to achieve it as an artist. Klara worried that her son had not yet learned a trade.

In the fall of 1905 Hitler met August Kubizek at Linz Opera House. Kubizek, the son of an upholsterer, could play several instruments, and dreamed of studying music at Vienna's Conservatory of Music. Needing a sounding-board for his high-flown ideas, Hitler latched onto this easygoing young musician, whom he called "Gustl." As Kubizek put it: "he had to speak, and needed someone to listen to him." [3] Effusive Hitler lectured his friend on music, art, literature, and architecture. They attended opera performances, went to museums, hiked around Linz together, and discussed their aspirations.

On one of their strolls during spring of 1906 Hitler beheld a pretty blonde girl named Stefanie walking with her mother on Linz's Landstrasse. He fell in love at first sight, and worshipped her from afar for the next several months. Hitler haunted the promenade on Sundays, hoping to see Stefanie. His face reddened when she once stopped to flirt with a young officer, yet he soon spoke again of how he and his beloved would one day preside over Linz's leading artistic salon. Though Hitler never exchanged a word with Stefanie, he wrote an anonymous love letter declaring his admiration for her and intention to propose marriage once his studies were completed. This "platonic affair" blended perfectly into Hitler's adolescent fantasy world.

Adolf Hitler made his first visit to Vienna in May, 1906 to visit his godparents, "swimming pool attendant" Johann Prinz and his wife Johanna. What young Hitler saw of the "Phaecian City" captivated him. He soon convinced his mother to bankroll nebulous plans to study at the Vienna Academy of Art. In September, 1907 he took a train from Linz to Vienna by himself and secured lodgings at 29 Stumpergasse from a Czech woman named Maria Zakreys.

The Vienna Academy only accepted 28 of 113 candidates in October, 1907. Hitler was not one of them. Though a good draftsman, his street scenes focusing on architecture did not impress the judges. Heroic buildings overwhelmed stunted trees and insignificant human figures. Despite the Academy's rejection, Hitler remained in Vienna with the intention of reapplying in 1908.

Almost immediately, he lapsed back into his dream world, wasting time on impractical projects such as his imagined rebuilding of the Ringstrasse. He composed an Icelandic opera scored for primitive instruments, worked on a recipe for a non-alcoholic "people's drink" similar to Coca Cola, painted street scenes, read books on archeology, and auditioned for a singing part with the Vienna chorus. According to one account, Hitler made the choir as a tenor, but had to drop out because he could not afford a tuxedo.

His instability over the next three years was partly due to the sorrow he experienced as a result of Klara Hitler's death from cancer. On October 22, 1907 Dr. Edouard Bloch sadly informed Klara that the painful iodoform treatments he administered had not arrested the growth of malignant tumors on her breast. She had less than three months to live. Klara initially withheld this bad news from her son. As soon as Adolf received word of his mother's impending death in late November, 1907, he returned to Linz.

Dr. Bloch described Adolf as a "sallow, frail boy who lived within himself." [4] The youth's devotion to his mother impressed him.

"He would watch her every movement so that he might anticipate her slightest need. His eyes, which usually gazed mournfully in the distance would light up whenever she was relieved of pain." [5]


Hitler buried his mother on December, 23, 1907. Dr. Bloch observed grief-stricken Adolf at the funeral.

"In all my forty-odd years of practice I had never seen a young man so broken by grief and bowed down by suffering as young Adolf Hitler was that day." [6]


Following his mother's death Hitler inherited between 500 and 1,000 crowns. He also began receiving an orphan's pension of 25 crowns per month. An additional sum would be paid to him when he turned 24 in 1913. In the summer of 1908 he visited his half-sister Angela Raubal. Legal guardian Josef Mayroder and brother-in-law Leo Raubal offended him by suggesting that he apprentice himself to a local baker. He left in a huff and broke off relations with his family for the next eight years.

On February 24, 1908 August Kubizek moved in with him to study music at The Vienna Conservatory. Shortly thereafter, Kubizek invited Hitler to a dinner and concert at the house of Dr. and Mrs. Rudolf Jahoda on Heiligenstadter Strasse. Dr. Jahoda, the scion of a prominent Jewish family, held several patents for chemical products, including luminous paint for alarm clock hands and road signs. Looking back on that evening Kubizek realized that he may have unwittingly abused the Jahodas' hospitality by bringing Adolf Hitler into their home, but added that his friend behaved properly -- hardly speaking at all. Rudolf Jahoda and his Italian Catholic wife Pina were both accomplished musicians. They often invited students from the Conservatory to dinner parties and played quartets and other chamber music pieces with them. At the Jahodas' luxurious home Kubizek experienced "truly sophisticated conviviality possible only in Vienna." [7] Hitler admired Dr. Jahoda's library and enjoyed the music, but felt uncomfortable about his own cultural backwardness and shabby clothes. Kubizek stated that his friend never made any negative remarks about the Jahodas.

In July, 1908 Kubizek went home to work for his father. Hitler no longer lived at Frau Zakreys' lodging house when he returned to Vienna in November. He had probably become disgusted with Kubizek's accomplishments at the Conservatory and his own failure to gain entrance to the Academy of Art. Hitler blamed Jews for his disappointed hopes. Twenty-three years later he complained to Richard Breiting about Leipzig Academy of Art Director Max Seliger, who "was always telling stories to show that only Jews were capable of being gifted artists, businessmen or politicians," [8] and Ilse Dernburg's novels, in which "only Jews were ... successful business leaders." [9]

In subsequent years Hitler tended to be secretive about his Vienna period. When an Austrian Nazi proposed that marble plaques be placed at his addresses between 1908 and 1913, Hitler exploded with rage. "This act of piety was not only unrewarded, (but) ... prohibited." [10]

In November, 1908 Hitler moved to a room at 22 Felberstrasse without leaving a forwarding address. From there he relocated to 56 Sechshausestrasse on August 22, 1909, but only stayed one month due to lack of funds. His whereabouts between September, 1909 and January, 1910 are unknown. Destitute by Christmas, he appealed to his Aunt Johanna ("Hanni") Pozl, a hunchbacked charwoman from Spital, who gave him 50 crowns. Josef Greiner claimed that Hitler sometimes slept in Prater Park during the fall of 1909 -- on grass in dry weather, and under the stone arch when it rained. He more likely stayed at The Refuge for the Roofless in Meidling and one of Vienna's six public "warming rooms." Besides Emperor Franz Josef and Archduchess Valerie, the chief supporters of these heated stations for the poor were Jewish philanthropists Mortiz Singer, Baron Mortiz Konigswater and the Epstein family.

Because of his phobias for foreigners and disease Hitler avoided the jammed dosshouses where criminals, derelicts, and illegal aliens of both sexes slept on floors for 40 hellers a night. Unwashed Czechs, Ruthenians, Magyars, Slovenes, and Galician Jews repelled him, yet the city teemed with them. Vienna's population had jumped from 650,000 to 1,675,000 between 1860 and 1900. The number of Jews increased from 6,200 to 118,500. Only Berlin had grown faster during that time frame. In 1910 nearly half of Vienna's residents were born elsewhere. Housing shortages resulted in severe overcrowding. Journalist Karl Klager visited a tenement in 1901 which packed 276 people into 31 two-bedroom apartments.

The burgeoning Ostjuden population made Adolf Hitler not merely uncomfortable, but manic. He lived in the Leopoldstadt district, known as "Matzohville," because of its high percentage of Jewish residents.

Researchers suspect the Gestapo of destroying most records pertaining to Hitler's Vienna period. Though hostel companion Reinhold Hanisch considered him too weak and lazy for manual labor, Hitler claimed to have worked as a porter, snow-shoveller, postcard painter, and hod-carrier. One construction job allegedly ended because fellow workers threatened to toss him off a scaffold for condemning trade unions. There is no independent corroboration of this story. Most scholars dismiss it as a "Hitlerian myth" designed to assure the masses of his proletarian background.

Around January, 1910 Reinhold Hanisch offered to act as a salesman for Hitler's art works. This arrangement succeeded initially. In addition to postcards and paintings, Hitler drew advertising posters for hair tonic, soap, shoe polish, and Teddy Antiperspirant. With their first sale on February 9, 1910, the duo moved into Mannerheim Model Home for Men, where Hitler would remain until 1913.

The Mannerheim Hostel on Meldemannstrasse had been constructed just five years earlier. Inmates paid three dollars a day for lodging, ten cents per meal, and 6 cents for bath towels. It had central coal heat and could accommodate 544 men. The facility's green-tiled dining hall served up to 352 at a time. Each man got an iron bed with linen and blanket, a clothes rail, and four square meters of space. Like college dormitories, the hostel had bathrooms with showers on every floor. Men were not allowed in rooms from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M., however they could read in the spacious first floor day room, which included a small library of books, newspapers, and magazines. House rules forbade immoral conduct, noise, gambling, smoking outside designated areas, spitting, and drinking alcoholic beverages on premises. Sick individuals were required to stay in the hospital wing. Men had to wear robes or towels when going to and from showers. They were not permitted to stroll around nude.

Like Stalin 31 years later, Hanisch soon regretted entering into a pact with Hitler. The partners had a falling out in August, 1910. The artist wanted his painting of Das Rathaus (City Hall) sold for at least 100 crowns. Hanisch could find no buyers. After days of schlepping around town with it, he unloaded Hitler's masterpiece for 12 crowns to Wenzel Reiner, owner of a frame shop on Porzellangasse. Hanisch gave the dumbstruck painter 6 crowns in accordance with their fifty-fifty commission split. Hitler refused to believe he had only gotten twelve crowns for that painting and accused him of pocketing the difference. On August 10, 1910 he sued Hanisch. The judge ruled in Hitler's favor, indicating that Hanisch apparently sold the painting to Reiner for more than 12 kronen.

Reinhold Hanisch resurfaced as a problem for Hitler in the early 1930's. In exchange for cash he fed source material to unfriendly early biographers Konrad Heiden and Rudolf Olden. Police arrested him twice in attempts to sell fake Hitler watercolors. Fifty-three year old Hanisch mysteriously died of "heart failure" while imprisoned in 1937. The New Republic published his three-part article "I Was Hitler's Buddy," two years after his death.

In Autumn of 1910 Hitler might have worked briefly as a decorative painter in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum. This rumor gave rise to the "Mad Paperhanger" misnomer of later years. The few crowns he earned were barely enough to support himself. At this time a few Mannerheim residents urged Superintendent Johann Hanya to evict Hitler for ragged clothing and cantankerous views. Completely broke by December, he again requested funds from Aunt Johanna Polzl ("Hannitante,") who came through by giving him 2,000 kronen, more than half her life savings.

With this grant Hitler fell back into his routine of drawing, opera-attendance, and sweet-eating. He grew a beard. Old hands warned new arrivals at the Men's Hostel not to sit in Herr Hitler's chair by the reading room window. He observed an iron routine of painting or reading in sulky silence. However, chance remarks against Pan-German solidarity could evoke diatribes. A wit at the hostel dubbed him "Oom Paul Krueger" after the bearded Boer leader, who vociferously preached apartheid and Anglophobia.

Imbued with Habsburg Austria's snobbish class-consciousness, the customs official's son considered himself socially superior to other hostel mates, ten percent of whom were Jewish, the remainder consisting primarily of laborers from Austrian provinces, and "down-and-outers" of every description. He mocked their low level of culture. A trade union parade on the Ring one day reminded him of a "gigantic dragon." Yet he spoke of one day taming that behemoth after the manner of Mayor Karl Lueger. Those who knew him wondered how. August Kubizek and Reinhold Hanisch both saw that he lacked the common touch. Kubizek observed that

"contact with people simply was disgusting to him.... He found the motley crew that was milling though the Prater unbearable. As much as he sympathized with the little people, he couldn't keep them far enough away from himself." [11]


Reinhold Hanisch wrote:

"He repeatedly said of the workers that they were an indolent mass that cared about nothing but eating, drinking and women." [12]


Nevertheless, Hitler thought Marxists had a correct appreciation of the proletariat's power. On Sunday, September 17, 1911 he witnessed a huge labor union protest against meat price increases. Thirty speakers addressed an obstreperous mob which shouted revolutionary slogans on cue. Hitler gazed entranced as masses of workers

" ... swelled to the proportions of a menacing army ... For nearly two hours I stood there watching with bated breath the gigantic human dragon slowly winding by." [13]


Whoever could tame this dreaded monster would one day rule Germany.

In 1911 a constable served Hitler with legal papers. Fearing arrest for failing to register for the draft, Hitler was relieved that the matter only involved an appeal from his half-sister Angela regarding the orphan's pension. Angela Raubal's husband Leo had died in August, 1910, leaving her with three young children to raise alone. She sought to compel Hitler to surrender his 25 kronen per month. He agreed to do so.

In the summer of 1912 Hitler made two sentimental journeys back to his native Waldviertel. He stayed at Branau and Hafeld to do some sightseeing and sketching. Another hiatus followed these excursions. He probably made an exploratory trip to Munich in the fall of 1912, after receiving an inheritance of 819 kronen, 98 hellers from his father's estate. With this windfall as a cushion, Hitler decided to move to Germany. On May 24, 1913, a sunny spring Sunday, he traveled by train to Munich with a nineteen year old friend named Rudolf Hausler.

_______________

Endnotes

1 Timothy W. Ryback, "Hitler's Forgotten Library: The Man, His Books, and His Search for God," Atlantic Monthly, May, 2003, on-line page 5 of 21.

2 Reinhold Hanisch, "I Was Hitler's Buddy," New Republic, April 19 1939, p. 297. Note: This three-part article was published two years after Hanisch's death.

3 August Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew, trans. E. V. Anderson, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1955, p. 22.

4 Dr. Edouard Bloch, "My Patient Hitler," Colliers Magazine, March, 1941.

5 R. G. L. Waite, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler, Basic Books, New York, 1977, p. 114.

6 John Toland, Adolf Hitler, Ballantine Books, New York, 1976, p. 35.

7 Kubizek, p. 285.

8 Edouard Calic, ed. Richard Breitling, Secret Conversations with Hitler, trans. Richard Barry, John Day & Co., New York, 1971, p. 28.

9 Ibid., p. 27.

10 William Jenks, Vienna and the Young Hitler, Columbia University Press, New York, 1960, p. 36.

11 Kubizek, p. 203.

12 Hanisch, p. 298.

13 Brigitte Hamann, Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship, trans. Thomas Thornton, Oxford University Press, New York, 1999, p. 178, op. cit. Mein Kampf, p. 41.
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Re: Hitler's Mentor: Dietrich Eckart, His Life, Times, & Mil

Postby admin » Sat Dec 22, 2018 1:09 am

15: Political Awakening

"Ignorance causes ruin in the world."

-- Buddha


Image
Hitler's drawing of Old Vienna, c. 1911

Hitler developed a keen interest in politics during his five and a half year Vienna period. The youthful bohemian closely read newspapers and magazines as if he were already a politician. Sebastian Haffner observed that 20 year old Hitler had already embraced "politics as a substitute for life."

Young Hitler admired Vienna's mayor, Karl Lueger (1844-1910) for his populist appeal. From Lueger's example Hitler learned to pander to the common people, since they had the numbers. "Handsome Karl," the son of a school janitor and cabinetmaker's daughter, won scholarships to Realschule, then law school. As an attorney he won several precedent-setting cases which pitted indigent plaintiffs against wealthy landlords and employers. Lueger got elected Mayor of Vienna in 1902 by promising to lower rents and utility bills. In his campaign he rallied blue-collar workers and small tradesmen by attacking Slavs, Jews, and decadent noblemen. When a Jewish Reichsrat deputy accused him of stating that he did not care "whether the Jews were hanged or shot," [1] Lueger corrected him: "beheaded, I said!" [2] When badgering reporters once pointed out that his friend Dr. Ignaz Mandl was Jewish, Lueger shouted: "I determine who's a Jew!" [3] In fact, he felt ambivalence about Vienna's Jews, calling them "beasts of prey in human form" [4] one moment, then qualifying that slur by adding:

" ... they're not all that bad, and we couldn't ... do without them. My Viennese constantly feel like taking a rest, and the Jews ... always feel like working." [5]


Lueger actually performed well as Vienna's Burgomeister. While in office, he oversaw an ambitious "Beautification Plan," and succeeded in purchasing municipal gas works, electrical plants, and transit lines through bond issues. After acquiring these utilities he reduced charges for trolley fares, electricity, and fuel, thus guaranteeing his own re-election. Lueger built well-designed public housing, improved schools, and pushed through a free lunch program for poor students. Under his administration Vienna adopted Europe's first municipal recycling program, which converted garbage into fertilizer.

But Hitler hated another popular icon -- Jewish Social Democrat Viktor Adler. The son of a wealthy businessman, Adler embarked on his political career in 1889 by supporting Vienna's first trolley drivers' strike. Shortly afterward he founded the Arbeiter Zeitung newspaper. In 1905 he ran for a Reichsrat seat and won. His party's platform included a national pension program, rent controls, pacifism, and equality for the Slavic and Jewish minorities. He made famous anti-war speeches in 1909 and 1912 which helped defuse the Balkan crises of those years. Although Adler was sincere in his espousal of humanitarian reforms, he epitomized "ersatz Jewish liberalism" to Germanophiles. In Mein Kampf Hitler maintained that "the masses will always ... follow the man who in economic matters offers the most shameless promises. And in this the Jew is a master." [6] He suspected Adler of secretly conspiring with "Jewish journalists and stock exchange bandits"? to overthrow native-born authority figures, and establish a "Jewish Republic." Exactly how pacifist Adler colluded with Gold International "war profiteers," Hitler never explained.

Alluding to Adler, Friedrich Austerlitz, Anton David and other Jewish socialists Hitler wrote:

"How come our German labor leaders belong almost exclusively to a nation one never sees working? ... What's the percentage of Jews among ... manual laborers, locksmiths, ... miners, sanitation coachmen, cobblers ... etc.?" [8]


Of course, former Mannerheim Hostel friend Reinhold Hanisch testified that he had

"never ... seen (Hitler) do any hard work, nor did I hear from him the story that he did a worker's job in the building industry ... " [9]


The clownish behavior of Austro-Hungary's Reichsrat intensified Hitler's low opinion of parliamentary government. Representatives spoke ten different languages in the chamber. They could agree on nothing. Many acted liked unruly schoolboys, shouting obscenities during speeches and throwing inkwells at one another. Fist fights broke out regularly. Assemblymen transacted no business of any consequence in this slapstick atmosphere. For national security reasons the Empire completely shut down its irresponsible legislature during World War I.

Hitler and August Kubizek visited the Reichsrat in 1908. They heard members whistling, pounding their desks, and cursing in German, Czech, Italian, and Polish. The proceedings reminded them of a Punch and Judy farce. Kubizek looked at his friend.

"... In the middle of this dreadful spectacle ... Adolf ... jumped up, his fingers clenched to fists, ... his face ... burning with excitement." [10]


In Mein Kampf Hitler described the disorderly mob scene as:

"a wildly gesticulating mass screaming all at once in every different key, presided over by a good-natured old uncle who was striving ... to revive the House's dignity by violently ringing his bell..." [11]


A different picture greeted the young spectator when he showed up a few weeks later.

"The hall was absolutely empty. Down below everybody was asleep. A few deputies were ... yawning at one another." [12]


The alternating pandemonium and torpor he witnessed in Austria's legislature reinforced his contempt for democratic government.

Hitler regarded Reichsrat Deputy Georg Ritter Schoenerer as a more profound thinker than Karl Lueger. Schoenerer's father amassed his fortune as a railroad contractor for the Rothschilds. In the 1870's this young man of privilege started out as a corruption-fighting friend of the poor. He lobbied for the building of schools, fire departments, and libraries. Somewhere along the way modern "swindle enterprises" disillusioned Schoenerer. He became convinced that investment banking and the stock market were Jewish-controlled scams. Within a few years this former idealist sunk into the ruts of four related "isms:" anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, Pan-Germanism, and alcoholism. He desired "Anschluss" (reunification) with Germany, not just an alliance. Schoeneret's paeans to Germany alternated with vicious attacks on non-Germans. He sponsored measures against street peddling and Russian immigration -- both aimed at Eastern Jews. With the slogan "through purity to unity!" [13] he sought to dispossess the Dual Monarchy's non-German subjects.

On March 9, 1888 Schoenerer undid his political career. The Neues Wiener Tagblatt newspaper had announced the death of German Emperor Wilhelm I. Schoenerer and his companions at the Skoda Tavern solemnly drank toasts and sung dirges. When a later edition retracted this story, admitting that Wilhelm had not yet exhaled his last breath, Schoenerer dried his tears and went ballistic. In a fury he recruited twenty-seven other boozers to accompany him to the Tagblatt's office for a showdown. They broke into the building and smashed furniture. Wild-eyed Schoenerer screamed at the mostly Christian employees:

"This is the day of vengeance! No mercy for you Jewish devils! By spreading lying reports you've tried to make capital out of the death of his Germanic Majesty!" [14]


With that, he and his party advanced upon them with brass knuckles and canes. Had not some burly printers from the press room come to their aid, Tagblatt staff members would have been beaten to a pulp and thrown out of windows. Karl Lueger excused Schoenerer on the grounds that he had perpetrated "a stupidity, not a crime," [15] but the judges saw otherwise, finding him guilty of assault and vandalism. On May 5, 1888 the court abolished his noble title, expelled him from parliament, and sentenced him to four months in prison. It took Schoenerer five years to recapture his Reichsrat seat. Between 1893 and 1901 he drummed up support for the pro-German New Lutheran Movement, while continuing to censure Jews and foreigners. After his political career ended in 1901, Schoenerer retired to the family estate in Rosenau and became Austria's leading Pan-German pundit. Between 1907 and 1913 Hitler read many of his articles, but faulted him for being anti-Catholic. How could one build a mass party in Austria without Catholic support? Though he respected Schoenerer's ideological purity, he considered Lueger a much savvier politician.

The most sensational newspaper story between October, 1907 and July, 1908 was Germany's Eulenburg Scandal, which involved former Ambassador to Austria Prince Philippe Eulenburg, a close friend of Kaiser Wilhelm II. On October 17, 1907 Jewish journalist Maxmilien Harden broke the story that Eulenberg had engaged in homosexual relationships with a variety of partners, including General Kuno von Moltke. This "Jewish smear campaign" discredited not only the German monarchy, but the Pan-German movement as well. Hitler denounced Harden and the "Jewish yellow press" for dragging Deutschland into the dirt. He positively loathed his chief source, gay rights pioneer Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, who posed as a "moralist" and champion of progressive values.

Hirschfeld's statements that homosexuals frequented the opera and men's hostels hit close to home. Privately, Hitler must have worried about the possibility of being "outed" himself. Even then he indulged in daydreams of being a "tribune of the German Volk." What if Jewish news hounds targeted him someday?

Lothar Machtan, Samuel lngra, and others allege that Hitler had homosexual affairs in Vienna. They mention August Kubizek, Reinhold Hanisch, Rudolf Hausler, and Jewish business associate Josef Neumann as possible partners. Kubizek, Hanisch, and Hausler later married. No documentary evidence can be adduced. Machtan reads much into Kubizek's account (published twelve years after Hitler's death.) For example, he interprets the story about Adolf and Gustl being forced to take refuge in a barn during a rainstorm as indicative of a homosexual encounter. Kubizek's statement about Hitler disappearing for days without explanation suggests to Machtan an escapade with a rich homosexual. Passages supporting Hitler's heterosexuality -- his infatuation with Stefanie and the burning of a homosexual's business card -- are dismissed as cover-ups ... These innuendoes, while interesting, don't rise to the level of proofs, as Machtan admits. He marshals more persuasive substantiation of Hitler's homosexuality between the years of 1915 and 1927, which will be discussed in Chapter 18.

Vienna was a seething cauldron of social ferment in the early 1900's. Its population had risen from 827,000 to 2,040,000 between 1890 and 1910, more than four times the growth rate of St. Petersburg and Paris. Like the American cities of New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, Vienna expanded primarily because of immigration. Slavs seeking employment poured in from outlying territories. Russian persecutions brought a stream of "Ostjuden" into the city. Border guard Alois Hitler viewed these new arrivals as interlopers or crooks. Adolf Hitler shared his father's xenophobic prejudices. By 1910 Vienna had 175,318 Jewish residents, who made up 8.6% of the population. The Brigittenau District where Hitler resided was 17% Jewish. Dr. Leo Goldhammer diced the statistics further. 27% of Vienna's Realschule students were Jewish. One out of six Jews married gentile women, though this seemed partly due to a ratio of 1,000 Jewish men to 965 Jewish females. Jews only committed 6.38% of Vienna's crimes, however they accounted for 28% of fiscal misdemeanors such as fraud, bankruptcy, forgery, and vending without a license.

Image
After Austria's 1910 census, the Little German finds himself overshadowed by Czechs and Jews. (Cartoon by Kikeriki)

Historian James Webb commented that Adolf Hitler's ideology took shape in the "sub-Bohemia of skid row" [16] between 1907 and 1913. The privation and rejection Hitler experienced in prewar Vienna bred feelings of resentment, isolation, and anxiety, which manifested as Judeophobia. This angst led to withdrawal, the creation of a tangible enemy, and projection of his own "shadow" (fallen nature) upon the scapegoat. Close study of anti-Semitic tracts nurtured these paranoid delusions, which crystallized by 1908.

During one of his prowls through Leopoldstadt Hitler beheld a sight which appalled him.

" ... As I was strolling through the Inner City, I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a Jew? was my first thought. For, to be sure, they had not looked like this in Linz. I observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form. Is this a German?" [17]


In his first newspaper article (Munchener Beobachter, August 13, 1919) Hitler stated that he first recognized the Jewish peril at age eighteen, thus changing from a "weakly cosmopolitan to a fanatical anti-Semite." [18] Thus, the incident mentioned above might have occurred in 1907 or early 1908.

Historians have variously dated the onset of Hitler's obsessive anti-Semitism as 1903 (due to exposure to Jewish boys at Linzer Realschule,) 1907 (when he arrived in Vienna and soon beheld the "apparition" of an Orthodox Jew in caftan,) 1910 (an impoverished period during which he intensively studied anti-Semitic literature,) 1913 (the year of his relocation to Munich,) and 1919 when he experienced both Germany's defeat and the Spartacist Revolt. It seems that his irrational hatred of Jews began prior to 1907 and progressively intensified over the years. He suppressed anti-Semitic outbursts during the election campaigns of 1930-1932, but the toned-down rhetoric of that period was merely a ploy to lure moderate voters.

As a boy Hitler had been exposed to the bigotries of his alcoholic father. In adolescence he read Linz's rabidly anti-Semitic Linzer Fliegende Blatter. Viennese tabloids further aggravated his anti-Semitism. Heinrich Class's Pan German weekly Alldeutsche Tageblatt attacked Jews, Slavs, and the Catholic Church. Whenever a rural curate seduced a peasant girl, banner headlines trumpeted juicy details to eager readers. Using the pseudonym Daniel Fryman, Class published "If I Were the Kaiser" in 1912, which advocated German expansion into neighboring states, press censorship, abridgement of voting rights, statutes prohibiting socialism, and anti-Semitic measures, including immigration quotas, job discrimination, and higher taxes on Jews. Alldeutsche Tageblatt ran a series on Reichsrat Deputy Karl Iro's campaign against "the gypsy scourge" in June, 1908. Since these "congenital criminals" usually went by first names rather than surnames, and shunned all forms of official registration -- such as birth, marriage, and death records -- Iro wanted the Austrian government to tattoo every gypsy on the right forearm. Hitler later applied this barbaric policy to Jews as well as gypsies.

Karl Vogelsang's Das Vaterland and Ernst Vergami's Deutsche Volksblatt held Jews accountable for all ills besetting Austria. Favorite targets were Jewish bankers who foreclosed on farms, grain dealers who ruined Austrian farmers by flooding the market with low-priced American wheat, and clothing merchants who milked the public by constantly inventing new fashions.

[Hitler also read anti-Jewish literature written by Paul De Lagarde, Theodor Fritsch, Eugen Durhring, Guido von List, and Adolf Josef Lanz. Timothy Ryback found Hitler's heavily-underlined copy of Paul De Lagarde's German Essays in the Library of Congress. One boldly bracketed passage cites the need for "a singular man with the ability and energy" to unify the Reich, and exile "Polish and Austrian Jews to Palestine." [19] Hitler especially savored the seeming erudition of Fritsch's Handbook on the Jewish Question, which went through twenty-five editions between 1887 and 1894. The author quoted anti-Semitic invective from recognized scholars such as Seneca, Erasmus, and Luther. Dietrich Eckart later imitated Fritsch's intellectual pretensions in his pamphlet "Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin." By reading Eugen Duhring Hitler acquired the erroneous idea that Jews were really a race, not a religion. Duhring mischaracterized them as being "not simply evil, but irremediably evil." [20] His view of Jewish incorrigibility provided Hitler with a "philosophical basis" for his "Final Solution." In Mein Kampf (1925), he wrote that the German Volk

" ... had to combat poison gas with poison gas. It is our duty to inform all weaklings that this is a question of to be or not to be." [21]


In spite of his growing Judeophobia Hitler continued to associate with Jews between 1907 and 1913, and did not seem to embrace eliminationist anti-Semitism. Reinhold Hanisch went so far as to claim that his bearded friend looked Jewish, and "preferred being around Jews," [22] who comprised one-tenth of the Meidling Men's Hostel in Brigiettenau.

" ... I often joked with him that he must be of Jewish blood, since such a beard rarely grows on a Christian chin; also he has big feet, as a desert wanderer must have." [23]


Jewish doctor Edouard Bloch not only treated Klara Hitler, but also served as Adolf's personal physician from 1904 to 1907. Hitler still had enough respect for Dr. Bloch in 1938 to grant him police protection, and a passport to the United States. August Kubizek testified that Hitler enjoyed Felix Mendelsohn's musical works, and "had the greatest admiration for (Gustav) Mahler" both as a conductor and composer. He occasionally visited museums with art shop owner Josef Neumann, who gave him an overcoat in 1910. A one-eyed Jewish locksmith from Galicia named Simon Robinsohn (born 1864) socialized with Hitler in the men's shelter, and once lent him money.

Hitler sold paintings through Jewish art dealers Siegfried Loeffner, Jacob Altenberg, Josef Neumann, and Samuel Landsberger. Jewish glazier Samuel Morgenstern (born in Budapest, 1875) bought several paintings from Hitler and referred him to lawyer Josef Feingold, who also became a regular customer.
On August 10, 1939 Morgenstern wrote Hitler a plaintive letter, citing their former association and pleading for mercy.

"Excellency!

I humbly ask your indulgence for daring to write to you, Mr. Reich-Chancellor, and submitting a request. For thirty-five years I had my own business as a glazier and frame manufacturer in Vienna, at 9 Liechtensteinerstrasse, and in the years before the war, Mr. Chancellor, was frequently in my store and had the opportunity to judge me to be a correct and honest man. I have no police record and for eight years served as a noncommissioned officer in the Austrian army and was on the Romanian front. On November 10 my store was closed ... and my commercial license revoked ... which made me totally indigent, ... since I have not received ... compensation for my store, which was worth 7,000 Reichsmarks. I am sixty-four and my wife is sixty years old ... It is my most humble request to Your Excellency to please direct the Department of Property to give me 4,000 in foreign currency so I have the necessary disembarkation money and my wife and I can live modestly until we have found work. Please have my application checked and ... approve it.

Faithfully Yours,
Samuel Morgenstern, Glazier
Vienna, 9.4 Liechtensteinerstrasse" [24]


By this time Morgenstern and his wife were enmeshed in a Kafkaesque nightmare. His letter never reached Hitler. He died four years later while confined to a work camp in Poland's Litzmannstadt ghetto. The SS gassed his wife Emma a year later at Auschwitz.

Hitler often engaged in political debates with other residents of the Men's Hostel. He doubted the good faith of his Jewish opponents there.

"The more I argued with them, the better I came to know their dialectic. First they counted on the stupidity of their adversary, and then, when there was no other way out, they themselves simply played stupid. If all this didn't help, they pretended not to understand or. .. changed the subject ... Whenever you tried to attack one of these apostles, your hand closed on a jelly-like slime which divided up and poured through your fingers, but in the next moment collected again ... If you really struck one of these fellows (a) telling ... blow ... your amazement was great the next day. The Jew had not the slightest recollection ... " [25]


If Josef Greiner can be believed, a fellow hostel inmate named Grill, the son of a Polish rabbi, tried to talk Hitler out of his growing anti-Semitism in 1911.

During the war Hitler fought beside Jewish soldiers such as Corporal Karl Lippert and Lt. Hugo Guttmann. He later rented rooms from Frau Erlanger in Munich, and took elocution lessons from Jewish magician Eric Jan Hanussen. From 1919 to 1926 Hitler's older half-sister Angela Raubal worked as a cook for Vienna's Mensa Academica Judaica. During the anti-Semitic riots of 1919 and 1920 "Angela defended Jewish students from attack and on several occasions beat ... Aryan students off the ... dining hall steps with a club." [26]

As late as 1944 Hitler exclaimed to Josef Goebbels: "I won't give Vienna a pfennig!" [27] His master plan mandated that Linz would be transformed into Austria's new capital. August Kubizek wrote that Hitler

"hated the typical Viennese from the bottom of his heart. He couldn't even stand their mellifluous ... melodious way of way of speaking. Above all, however, he hated the Viennese manner of always yielding and their dull indifference, ... of forever blundering along and living from one day to the next without a care in the world. Personally he was entirely the opposite in that respect." [28]


According to Hitler's stereotypical thinking, the Viennese were morally corrupt slackers. He condemned the city's prostitution industry, high rate of alcoholism, and general decadence. Vienna served as a major station of the white slave trade's "underground railroad," which transported penniless gentile and Jewish girls from Odessa, Galicia, and Serbia to Hamburg, Vienna, Amsterdam, Paris, and Buenos Aires. The "Phaecian City" harbored "apologists for libertinism" such as Richard Krafft-Ebbing, author of Psychopathia Sexual is (1886,) and Sigmund Freud, whose Civilization and its Discontents associated most of man's problems to sexual repression. Vienna had a reputation for being the German-speaking world's capital of pornography. The word "masochism" derives from the sado-masochistic novels of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Journalist Felix Salten, author of the children's classic Bambi, also wrote Josenne Mutzenbacher: A Viennese Whore's Life.

The Catholic Church waged campaigns against pornography and brothels. Hitler dismissed their hypocritical moralizing, preferring to view Vienna's debauchery from an "Ariosophical" perspective.

_______________

Endnotes

1 Brigitte Hamann, Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship, trans. Thomas Thornton, Oxford University Press, New York, 1999, p. 287.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid., p. 290.

4 Ibid., p. 288, op. cit. 2/13/1890 newspaper account.

5 Ibid., op. cit., Sigmund Mayer, Die Weiner Juden, Vienna, 1917, p. 475.

6 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Munich, 1925, trans. Ralph Manheim, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, MA, 1943, p. 322.

7 Ibid., p. 326.

8 Hamann, p. 181, op. cit. Adolf Hitler, "Some Questions for the German Worker," Auf Gut Deutsch, May 22, 1920.

9 Ibid., p. 155, op. cit. Reinhold Hanisch, "I Was Hitler's Buddy," New Republic, 4/19/1939.

10 August Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew, trans. E. V. Anderson, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1955, p. 290.

11 Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 77.

12 Ibid.

13 William Jenks, Vienna and the Young Hitler, Columbia University Press, 1960, p. 95.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 James Webb, The Occult Establishment, Open Court Publishing Co., LaSalle, IL, 1976, p. 299.

17 Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 56.

18 Eberhard Jackel, Hitler's Weltanschaung, trans. Herbert Arnhold, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 1972, p. 53.

19 Timothy W. Ryback, "Hitler's Forgotten Library: The Man, his Books, and his Search for God," Atlantic Monthly, May, 2003, p. 4 of 21 on-line.

20 Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, Scholars Press, Chico, CA, 1981, p. 171.

21 Hamann, p. 347, Hitler, Mein Kampf, (German Language edition,) p. 44.

22 Reinhold Hanisch, "I Was Hitler's Buddy," New Republic, 4/19/1939.

23 Hamann, pp. 357-358, op. cit. Vienna Administration of Property, Aryanization files, GEW. #2,755, box 216.

24 Hanisch, 4/12/1939 installment of "I Was Hitler's Buddy."

25 Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 62.

26 Walter C. Langer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler, Basic Books, New York, 1972, pp. 120-121.

27 Hamann, p. 5, op. cit. The Goebbels Diaries.

28 Kubizek, pp. 43 and 203 passim.
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