Today (20th April 2020) marks 131 years since the birth of Adolf Hitler – the man whose life and legacy form a stark outline, the shape of which the entire present world order was constructed against.
Within the dissident right, there is a perceptible reassessment of Hitler under way. For years, Hitler was seen by many as simply a meme – a kind of shorthand for the most radical defiance to oppressive PC culture. Some within white nationalist circles, reacting to the omnipresent specter of Hitler as psychological weapon of the mass media, have sought to minimize his importance, dismissing him as a figure of German history whose relevance is long past. A few have gone to the other extreme, elevating Hitler to a figure of esoteric religious veneration.
What seems to be changing is a more serious political assessment of Hitler as leader of a revolutionary party, as head of a real government with real policies, and as founder of a definite ideology with vast implications for our own time. Confronting the political issues and problems of the 21st century, there is a new interest in taking the politics of Hitler seriously. This trend is being driven by study and discovery of Hitler’s actual words and deeds, separated from popular myth and propaganda, partly made possible because of the increasing availability of accurate historical information.
Slowly but surely, the mountain of lies piled onto history by the victorious Allied powers is eroding down to nothing. One sure sign of this trend is the subtle, yet unmistakable ongoing revision of Hitler scholarship by mainstream historians. One of the most recent examples is the new book by Cambridge professor Brendan Simms, titled “Hitler: A Global Biography,” published by Basic Books in late 2019.
Simms’ biography of Hitler is far from perfect. He discounts critical biographical sources such as the memoirs of August Kubizek, and Hitler’s own autobiography, apparently only because they portray Hitler in a positive light. And in spite of the author’s generally unbiased tone, free from moralizing, he repeats some of the more outlandish propaganda horror stories about the Third Reich with an intellectual laziness unworthy of the rigorous revisionism he applies to other subjects. As a Cambridge professor, he has his career to protect. He also projects a bit too much of his own Anglocentrism onto Hitler. The Fuhrer certainly admired many aspects of both the British and American cultures, but it would be foolish to suggest his first love wasn’t only and always for his own German people.
Crucially, the book quietly drops or revises dozens of long-standing propaganda myths. Among them are the lies that Hitler was a “lazy dictator,” that he was a “mad rug-chewer,” that he set out with the intention to “exterminate” the Jews, that he deliberately encouraged “polycratic chaos” within the Reich to enhance his own power, that he was driven by megalomania or narcissism, that he ever issued a “Nero order” against his own people, and significantly that he never went after or desired “world domination.”
Most thoroughly demolished by this book is the myth that Hitler viewed Soviet communism as a greater threat than Anglo-American plutocracy.
The following passages speak for themselves:
“While the connection between Hitler’s anti-Semitism and his anti-capitalism is often noted, and has been the subject of some individual studies, its centrality to his world view, and the extent to which he was fighting a war against ‘international high finance’ and ‘plutocracy’ from start to finish, has not been understood at all.”
From the start of Hitler’s political career in the early 1920s:
“It was the ‘international Jewish newspaper corporations’, Hitler claimed, who had prevented a Russo-German rapprochement. It was they who owned the large American companies supplying the Allied war effort and who tricked the ‘peaceful’ American people into [WW1] with Germany against their better natures and best interests. It was the Jews who tried to manipulate Germany’s food supply and who ‘precipitated the [communist] revolution through hunger’. All this happened because the ‘New York Stock Exchange’ – the ‘Headquarters of World Jewry’ – was determined to crush Germany, the last remaining Nationalstaat which was ‘not yet completely ruled by stock exchanges’. In short, Hitler remained firmly wedded to the idea of a deadly synthesis between world Jewry, international capitalism and Anglo-America as Germany’s nemesis.”
As Germany suffered under the enemy blockade which starved hundreds of thousands, even after they laid down their weapons in November 1918, Hitler came to the following conclusions:
“Moreover, in Hitler’s view the war was by no means over. Germany was still the victim of international capitalism, whose continuing power he repeatedly attacked. He spoke of ‘international stock exchange and loan capital’ as the main ‘beneficiaries’ of the peace treaty [of Versailles]. Ever since the ‘collapse of the Reich’, Hitler claimed, the country had fallen under ‘the rule of international, fatherlandless capital, independent of person, place and Nation’. International conferences – such as Genoa in April 1922 – were simply condemned as ‘stock exchange conferences’. Hitler saw Jewish international capitalism and western democracy as linked. ‘International Jewish stock exchange capital,’ he believed, ‘was the driving force of these western-democratic states.’ He set up the ‘equation’ of ‘democracy-capitalism-Jew’. For all these reasons, he argued, National Socialism was a ‘new force whose aim could always only be anti-capitalist’.
The distinction is made between productive national and destructive international capital:
“Hitler was not completely opposed to all forms of capitalism, though he sometimes gave that impression. He contrasted the blanket hostility of Social Democrats and Marxists to capitalism in general with his own distinction between allegedly pernicious and largely Jewish ‘international loan capitalism’ and nationally oriented ‘productive industrial capitalism’. ‘Factories and industrial capital,’ he told an audience of SA, ‘is national’ and ‘the capital of every country remains national’. For clarity, he stressed that National Socialism ‘struggled against every form of big capital, irrespective of whether it is German or Jewish, if it is grounded not in productive work, but in the principle of interest, of income without work or toil’. .. In Hitler’s view it was the determination of international capitalism to subjugate independent national economies which had led to the world war and the brutal peace settlement.”
In the period immediately before and after the 1923 Munich Putsch:
“The main danger of Germany’s internal weakness was that it made her vulnerable to external attack, especially from the enemies that Hitler feared most: international capitalism, Anglo-America and the associated forces of world Jewry. Hitler critiqued the economics of inequality and exploitation, the ‘jarring juxtaposition of poor and rich so close to each other’, the ‘role of money’, in which ‘money [became] God’ and ‘the false God of Mammon was offered incense’. He became increasingly convinced that ‘the heaviest battle to be fought was no longer against enemy peoples but against international capital’. Here Hitler insisted more than ever on his earlier distinction between national capital, which the state could control, and pernicious international capital, which controlled states or sought to do so. One of its principal instruments of subjugation was revolutionary Marxism, which undermined national economies, societies and governments. Others were economic immiseration and racial contamination, both of which also reduced the capacity of nations to resist international takeover. For Hitler, maintaining an independent national economy was therefore absolutely central to the defense of national identity, sovereignty and racial purity.”
Just as modern leftist “woke” ideology, which is a form of cultural Bolshevism, only softens up communities for the predations of global corporations, so did Hitler perceive the communism of the 1930s as the softening up of nations for international capitalist exploitation, led by the Jews:
“Hitler violently objected to international capitalism even when it was not Jewish, but he assigned the Jews a particularly malevolent role within the global capitalist system. In Mein Kampf, as in his earlier rhetoric, Jews were inseparably linked with money and the whole capitalist system as ‘traders’, as ‘middlemen’, who levied an ‘extortionate rate of interest’ for their ‘financial deals’. Jewry, he claimed, aimed at nothing less than the ‘financial domination of the entire economy’. Yet because ‘a Bolshevized world can only survive if it encompasses everything’, a ‘single independent state’ – such as a revived Germany – could bring the whole juggernaut to a standstill.”
Hitler saw the League of Nations as a sham tool of the ruling capitalist powers: “This meant that the world was run in accordance not with international law, but the law of capital: ‘not the right of the peoples’, as he put it, ‘but the rights of the bankers of the peoples’.”
At times, this is framed explicitly in terms of what has recently been jokingly dubbed “the kosher sandwich”:
“Hitler had not changed his view that Bolshevism was allied with and subordinated to the forces of international capitalism. He claimed that while the Marxist parties condemned the capitalist economy in the strongest terms, they worked hand in hand with ‘the forces of international high finance, and supra-state world capital’.”
And in all cases, communism prepared the way for ultimate international capitalist takeover:
“The subordinate relationship of communism to capitalism was emphasized again during the Reichstag election campaign. ‘Marxism,’ one Nazi poster headlined, ‘is the guardian angel of capitalism’.”
This theme continued all the way through the start of the Second World War:
“Even at this early stage, therefore, the nature of the war was becoming clear. It was Hitler’s response to the German predicament at the heart of Europe, an attempt to escape what he saw as her historic encirclement and subjugation. Now that he had given up all hopes of a British alliance, and of accommodation with Anglo-America, his language shifted from that of Nordic solidarity to that of a global class conflict in which he substituted nations for the classic Marxist social categories. The United States and the British Empire, on this reading, were the ‘haves’, the lords of all they surveyed. The Germans, by contrast, were firmly among the ‘have-nots’, ground down by the forces of ‘plutocracy’, which were determined to extirpate the contagious social model of the Nazi Volksstaat.”
Later in the war:
“He inveighed against the ‘money magnates’, the ‘Jewish and non-Jewish international bank barons’ who were trying to destroy the Germany of the ‘welfare laws for workers’ which had ‘removed class distinctions’ in the Reich and eliminated unemployment. So fearful were Germany’s enemies of this model of ‘welfare and social compromise’, he claimed, that they fear ‘that their own people might be infected by it’. In this respect, apparently, Nazism was for export after all. The regime attached such importance to this passage in Hitler’s speech that it was reprinted in the official journal of the Reich Labor Ministry shortly afterwards.”
Hitler reiterated these themes over and over again:
“In his 1940 New Year’s Day address Hitler asserted that the aim of the ‘Jewish-capitalist world enemy’ was to ‘destroy Germany’ and ‘the German people’. This was because the Third Reich represented a youthful, dynamic and popular challenge to the international ruling elite, which he understood in national and generational rather than class terms. The Germans, Hitler claimed in late January 1940, were one of the ‘young peoples’ of the world. They were challenging the ‘so-called propertied classes among the people’ who had ‘robbed’ Germany and were simply sitting on their ill-gotten gains. On this reading, the Germans were, so to speak, at best the poor whites of the international system. In this spirit, Hitler professed sympathy with the other wretched of the earth who groaned under the weight of imperialism and capitalism, particularly that of the British Empire. His empathy extended to not merely the Nordic Boers, but also the decidedly non-Aryan Arabs. Hitler reminded his listeners again that it was the British who ‘invented the concentration camp’, and argued that the blockade of Germany was simply the latest version of the age-old method of waging war against women and children.”
Hitler’s relative tolerance towards nonwhite races can be seen in many other passages:
“[The approximately 120,000 black French soldiers captured in May and June 1940] were held in POW, not concentration camps. The only recorded intervention by Hitler in this question was an OKW directive requiring the transfer of non-white French captives to the unoccupied zone. His concern, which dated from the occupation of the Rhineland in the 1920s, was to prevent any ‘contamination’ of the German population. The general trend was that while conditions for blacks in the camps generally improved over time, those of Jews radically worsened. Hitler’s racial war was not primarily one of white against black, but of Aryan against Jew.”
The Fuhrer is shown throughout the book to be a foreign policy realist, whose primary goal was the safeguarding of Germany first, then European civilization as a whole, from the rising external threats of Jewish Anglo-America and Bolshevized Russia. His numerous peace overtures to Great Britain, even years into the war, are documented along with his extraordinary attempts to keep Germany out of war with the United States.
What might come as a surprise to most readers is that Hitler is shown to be extremely flexible on the question of Slavic peoples and eastern Europe. To be sure, Hitler identified both racially and culturally as a German, but he displayed none of the fanatical anti-Slav hatred which was later attributed to him. Hitler is shown to have had the greatest respect for the Polish head of state, Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, who ruled from 1918 until his death in 1935.
Hitler tried for years to form an alliance with Poland against the Soviet Union, and greatly lamented the British and American machinations which placed Poland in the role of an enemy by September 1939. He even briefly floated the idea, at a meeting with Molotov in mid November 1940, of greater long-term cooperation with Soviet Russia to keep the Americans out of Europe. In the event, the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Axis powers was not just about defeating Bolshevism, but of building up a continental bloc which could resist the Anglo-American Jewish world blockade indefinitely.
“Nazi moves to create a ‘continental bloc’ were flanked with another dose of anti-Anglo-American, anti-capitalist, anti-Semitic and anti-imperialist rhetoric. If the British Empire and the United States were the ‘haves’ of the world order, Hitler argued, the German Reich was the leadership of the ‘have-nots’… In Hitler’s reading, inequality was manifested at both the national and the class level, and the two were connected. Germany as a whole was subject to an international ruling class, which had divided Germans from each other….”
One could easily extend the breakdown of nations along class lines in the West, to the present breakdown even along lines of gender, with feminism waging its war against men, the embittered but understandable male backlash, and disturbed individuals further muddying the waters by claiming to be transgendered. All these divisions, sown by the left, serve only to atomize families and communities to make international capital stronger.
“The breaking-down of class barriers within Germany, division the Fuhrer believed to have been carefully cultivated by the external enemy, was part and parcel of national liberation. Hitler wanted to transcend, as he said in early September 1940, the ‘legacies of the past, of origin, of estate, and of profession’. For obvious reasons, the Fuhrer argued, this grand social project was a threat to the established order, especially the British, who would stop at nothing to frustrate it. This, Hitler told an audience of German armament workers in mid November 1940, was why ‘plutocratic-capitalist Britain’ had gone to war against the German ‘welfare state’. The British, Hitler repeated right at the end of the year, ‘hate us for our social convictions and our plans and actions [in the social field] seem dangerous to them.”
In the same way, the Anglo-American plutocratic powers could not allow a nationalist populist government in Iraq or Syria or Libya, nor can they tolerate nationalism or populism in Europe, from Hungary to Russia.
“This was why Hitler was determined to maintain as much as possible of his transformative socio-economic programme and to promise the German people a better life, at least after the war. In early 1940, even before the western campaign, he gave Robert Ley the task of looking into the idea of ‘a comprehensive and generous old-age pension for the German people’. Later in the year, after much deliberation, he issued his ‘Decrees for the Preparation of German Residential Construction after the War’. Victory, he explained, would confront the Reich with tasks ‘which it could only fulfill through an increase in population’. The purpose of the decree, therefore, was to promote the ‘health life of child-rich families’ and thereby bring about a larger birth rate.”
Even in wartime, Hitler was concerned with social problems which the capitalist powers have still only managed to make worse, even after 70 years of ruling the planet.
“In Hitler’s rhetoric, the Reich was the vanguard of a global war of liberation to free Germany, the European continent and ultimately the entire world from the clutches of international capitalist plutocracy.” Even in the Middle East, already there existed “hope that the Third Reich would provide a third way between Anglo-American capitalist imperialism and Soviet communism”.
At the peak of the war, the unequal nature of the contest emphasized why the “have-nots” were fighting in the first place:
“What was clear even at the time, in any case, was that whoever was in charge in Berlin, the chances of matching the production of the enemy coalition, especially that of the United States, were slim. The problem was not the level of mobilization, which was already very high, but the imbalance in resources and industrial capacity. Nobody was more aware of this than Hitler himself. As we have seen, the immense American industrial potential had been a staple of his thinking in the 1920s, and had dominated his strategy since the late 1930s. He did not know the extent of Allied deliveries to the Soviet Union, which were substantial, but he was well aware they were taking place. The basic problem, which Hitler identified quite clearly, was that whereas Germany controlled most of Europe, it was at war with most of (the rest of) the world, or at least with its resources. The enemy coalition controlled the global commons: the sea lanes and the financial system. The mines, factories and farms of the world were mobilized by Anglo-American capital, transported in Allied shipping and directed against the Reich. By contrast, the Third Reich was confined to a European reservation, whose economies were cut off from the world markets and raw materials they had depended on. Hitler’s New European Order was – economically – much less than the sum of its pre-war parts. It was no match for the Anglo-American global cartel.”
As the war turned against the Axis powers, they had no choice but to fight on or face total subjugation and eventual extinction. Meanwhile, Hitler himself started to outwardly show the years of strain against the world enemy:
“The stress of total war took its toll…. Hitler’s physical condition was deteriorating rapidly. This was visible even in the carefully edited newsreels. To those who saw him close up the decline was unmistakable. Goebbels noted after his visit on 20 March [1942] that Hitler had ‘already gone very grey’ and that he ‘looked much older’ when speaking of the winter crisis [of Stalingrad]. The Fuhrer struck him as ‘sick and frail’…. Yet, even in April 1945, his general Kesselring “spoke of his continuing ‘intellectual vigor,’ which stood ‘in conspicuous contradiction to his bodily feeling’. Donitz, whose final meeting with Hitler was nine days later, states that ‘there can be no question of any kind of reduction in his intellectual powers’. Hitler, he insisted, remained in full control of his senses.”
Simms’ even dares to acknowledge the huge emotional and spiritual toll the war took on Hitler, including the destruction of German cities such as Dresden, and the sacrifice of so many brave soldiers at the front.
“Conscious that he was asking ever more of his soldiers and the German people, the Fuhrer reminded them of what they were fighting for, and why young men were being sent thousands of miles away from their homes. In February 1942, he already let slip that they might have to fight their way to the Caucasus. Now, as the final touches were being put to the plan, he returned to his primary war aims in two speeches in April and May 1942. The Germans, Hitler argued, were a ‘subjugated’ people who had been put in ‘chains’ by ‘democracy’, the ‘Jewish brain trusts’ and ‘stock exchanges and banks’, supported by Bolshevism. In order to secure their ‘daily bread in order to live’ as ‘have-nots’, they would have to confront the international ‘propertied’ class. This was a global enemy, but Hitler announced it would be beaten in Russia. ‘The east is the battlefield,’ he explained, ‘in which the outcome will be decided.’ It was there, Hitler told another audience of officer cadets in late May 1942, that Germany would find the resources and the living space to prevent itself from disappearing off the face of the earth.”
Even at the greatest extent of his territorial power, Hitler conceived of his war aims in ultimately defensive terms:
“[In mid August 1942] the Lebensraum and resource objectives of the Russian campaign appeared on the verge of realization…. Yet even at the pinnacle of his power, as autumn loomed, and the decisive blow eluded him, the Fuhrer was beginning to draw back. His strategy, he explained to Raeder on 26 August 1942, was to crush Russia and thereby secure a ‘blockade-proof and defensible Lebensraum from which the war could be waged [against the Anglo-Americans] for many more years’. This would enable the Fuhrer to determine the ‘outcome and length’ of the broader war, which he defined as the ‘battle against the Anglo-Saxon seapowers’, in order to make them ‘ready for peace’. In other words, victory in Russia would pave the way not for world domination but for a negotiated peace with Anglo-America.”
Hitler didn’t set out to break up the British Empire or defeat the United States, and even after he shifted to a policy of alliances with the oppressed colonial peoples against the British, he never intended to conquer or occupy either England or America. What Hitler wanted was security for Germany and Europe, a security which, after the outbreak of hostilities, could only be bought by the conquest of land wrenched from the Soviet Union, which had to be confronted anyway because of the global military ambitions of world communism.
That the great Western powers were in the hands of criminals such as Roosevelt and Churchill is one of the great tragedies of history. There is no doubt Hitler would have sought out cooperation rather than confrontation with a nationalist Russia, just as there is no doubt war between Germany and Britain would have been averted had the wiser heads of Oswald Mosley and the Duke of Windsor prevailed over Eden and Churchill. There is also no doubt Germany would have fought shoulder to shoulder with Poland, had Marshal Pilsudski survived. By the same token, a United States run by a populist President Huey Long would never have waged another world war against Germany. Every Allied nation can at least be proud for having produced such patriots who stood up for reason and peace, against the global forces of capitalism and communism.
Hitler fought to the last, as the Simms biography correctly points out, not because of some nihilistic megalomania, but because the Germans continued to improvise desperate strategies right up until the end of the war, because they felt they had no choice. Even when an outright military victory became impossible, the hope was to hold out until either the enemy coalition broke apart, which it did as soon as the war ended, or until one side blinked due to war weariness, as America did in Vietnam. The demand for unconditional surrender and the exterminationist policies of blockade and mass terror bombing left not only Hitler, but the German people as a whole, with the impression they were fighting a war for existence or extinction. This is why the Germans fought with Hitler to the end.
Everything Hitler fought for, all his predictions and warnings, have been borne out since 1945. The victory of international capitalism and Bolshevism in the war set not only the Germans and Italians, but all Europeans on a path to extinction. The living space of all whites is threatened by a demographic invasion, while global plutocracy grows fatter and richer than ever before at the expense of working people everywhere.
Even in death, Hitler did not give up:
“On 23 April, Hitler let it be known through Goebbels that he had taken over personal command over the defense of Berlin’… Privately, in Hitler’s presence, Goebbels spelled out the thinking behind the decision to remain in Berlin. ‘If things go well,’ Goebbels continued, ‘and if the Fuhrer were to find an honorable death in Berlin and Europe were to become Bolshevik,’ then ‘in five years at the latest, the Fuhrer would be a legendary personality’. ‘National Socialism’, he went on, would become ‘a myth’ and the Fuhrer would be ‘hallowed by his last great action’, so that ‘everything human that they criticize in him today would be swept away with one blow.’”
Hitler did not intend that Europe or the German people should go down with him, but resisted to the last for the purpose of setting an example that would inspire the rebirth of National Socialism at some future date, when the peoples of the world had finally had enough of the Jews and their plutocratic world domination. As the world groans under the strain of this domination like never before, the example of Adolf Hitler and the state he created will only continue to inspire new generations, long after that domination is broken forever.