In Chapter 4 of his Unfinished Victory book, ‘The Dreamer of Munich,’ Arthur Bryant describes the rise of Adolf Hitler. This is the chapter that most of all came under attack from contemporary critics and from which later commentators draw their damning quotations. It should be noted that in the reproduction below this commentary we have removed most of the material from Mein Kampf which Bryant comments on.
What is left is Bryant’s summary of Hitler’s ideas and his comments on them. It should not be presumed that Hitler’s view is Bryant’s view. He makes that clear himself in attempting to explain Hitler’s mistaken understandings of the world, from an English point of view. But this has not stopped Bryant’s critics from making no distinction between the Englishman and the German and quoting out of context. For them, anyone even attempting to explain the popularity of Hitler is somehow evil and a “fellow traveller.”
It is important to understand, however, that this was very much a minority opinion of Bryant in early 1940 in England.
Also reproduced is the final chapter of the Unfinished Victory book, ‘Rise of the Men of Iron’ in which Bryant explains how the Nazis got a grip of Germany and the Germans. The book ends in 1933 with the Nazis about to consolidate power.
In his book What did you do in the War? The Last Throws of the Pro-Nazi British Right, 1940-1945 Richard Griffiths describes how, after its publication in January 1940, Unfinished Victory, aroused little adverse comment from the majority of its English reviewers, and positive enthusiasm from a good number of them. It was highly praised by the great and the good – The Times, The Illustrated London News, The Fortnightly Review, the New English Weekly, St. Martin’s Review, the Church of England Newsletter and the Catholic Herald.
This was despite the fact that Britain had been in a state of war with Germany for almost 6 months.
Only the Spectator, which had retreated from its previous fascist admiration, the New Statesman and the Guardian – all strongly anti-appeasement – were critical of Unfinished Victory.
A.J.P. Taylor in the Guardian headlined his review: “A Nazi Apologist.” Surveying the period after the War, from the British perspective, Taylor noted:
“It seems to me the story of the second world war begins as a practical proposition in June 1940… The readjustment of Europe had been achieved at fantastically low cost in men and in equipment. There had never been an Imperial conquest which had been achieved so easily as the way in which Hitler established German domination over Europe. In June 1940 Germany dominated the entire continent of Europe, either directly through her power or indirectly, as with the few remaining neutrals, by her influence and requirements. Europe was united for the first time in its history and there seemed little likelihood that this situation could ever be reversed from within Europe… The basic contribution which Great Britain made to the world war came later…” (How Wars Begin, pp.132-3)
In August 1914 there had been a massive moral campaign waged in Britain against everything German – or “Prussianism.” Prominent people who were thought to be too fond of German philosophy, or anything associated with the Hun were hounded from public life. The war was declared to be one of “Civilisation against the Barbarian.”
An interesting question is why there was not the same moral outrage directed at Herr Hitler and Nazi Germany, after 6 months of war than there had been against the Kaiser and Prussianism, at an instant?
Ireland was one of the neutrals A.J.P. Taylor referred to. It was in much greater danger from Britain than from Germany, due to its geographical position. And Britain was notorious for not respecting neutrality over the centuries and for having attacked neutral countries with no warning, for its own warring purposes. During wartime the British suspended any international principles they had advocated in their interest during peacetime. Sometimes there were ingenious methods employed for breaking what had been previously proclaimed as international law and often there had just been the brute force of Copenhagening.
Neutral Ireland had heard about European civilisation being at stake less than a generation before world war two when it had been part of the British Union. But in 1939 it had acquired an independent mind, if not complete independence from Britain. It could not respond to the British volte face by throwing itself enthusiastically into a new war for “Civilisation against the Barbarian.”
Unfinished Victory demonstrates why.
Britain was collaborating actively with Hitler since 1934 and had then suddenly declared him an enemy of civilisation in early 1939. Many in Britain, amongst them the great and the good, did not agree. A small and largely anti-Irish warmongering minority of anti-appeasers advocated a different course. Why would Ireland act as a reflex to the sudden turnabout when the warmongering prevailed?
Richard Griffiths describes how English reviewers, and the general British public, showed no hostility toward Bryant’s 1940 book. This would surely have convinced Bryant that he had done the right thing in publishing it. Bryant’s reactions to the few critical reviews of his book, and his correspondence with his publisher, reveal him confident of the rightness of his position. His decision, after the book’s appearance, to send complimentary copies to the Royal Family and the Prime Minister confirm this.
He, of course, did not realise his mistake at this point. Even after 6 months of war Britain had not fully re-orientated from appeaser of Nazi Germany to implacable enemy. It appeared to be hedging its bets.
It was only after the fall of Chamberlain and the advent of Churchill, and the arrests of “fellow travellers” of the Nazis in June 1940, that Bryant appears to have realised his error. It was at this point that he bought up copies of the book and started to write suitably patriotic works as penance for his sin.
An interesting aspect of the subject is Bryant’s relationship with his publisher Harold Macmillan. Richard Griffiths found it surprisingly, given his anti-appeasement attitudes, that Macmillan positively encouraged Bryant to produce the book and seems to have had little concern about its sympathetic position with regard to Germany, when Britain was at war with it.
It was only in May 1940, with the British Army put to flight from the continent that Unfinished Victory had to be exorcised from the record. Clear differences had to be put between it and England.
The undeniable truth is that Bryant represented the substance of England before it drastically changed course only 6 months into its war on Germany.
Bryant’s publisher, Harold Macmillan, mindful of the state of chassis that existed, said that if the English state had gone the way of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s it would have been a Fascism of Norfolk jackets, rather than one of Blackshirts or Brownshirts. And it most probably would have been Churchill who would have been at the head of it, since it was he who had gone into the wilderness to prepare for such an eventuality.
Churchill had written that if Germany had been in Germany’s position, defeated by war, he hoped a leader would emerge to restore it to its former honour and power among the nations. Churchill had no ideological antipathy to a period of fascism if that was necessary for Britain and one imagines he would have been ideally fitted to have supervised it. Instead Fascism was warded off by the period of National Government and Bryant’s hero, Stanley Baldwin.
One gets the impression that Britain had not quite transitioned between appeasement and anti-appeasement, even after it gave the fateful guarantee to Poland. It, therefore, up to at least June 1940, allowed for material that cultivated the understanding in Britain that there was sufficient reason within the parameters of Western European civilisation for the unusual form of state constructed by the Nazi Party, that might facilitate a rapprochement between England and Nazi Germany.
And so, there was no repeat of the “Civilisation against the Barbarian” hysteria of 1914, lest there be a doubt about where civilisation in Europe ended – at the French/German border or perhaps, at the Polish/Soviet frontier. For Bryant and Churchill Marxism/Communism represented an existential threat not only to Britain but to European civilisation as a whole and fascism was the bulwark to it in Italy, Spain and Germany and many other places in Europe.
Britain had to keep its civilisational options open to include fascism and national socialism.
That was the reason why Unfinished Victory was tolerated and even praised in early 1940 but became intolerable after June of this year, when Britain, defeated in Europe, embarked on a course of world war.
In fact, as late as 1942 a two-volume collection of Hitler’s speeches was published by Oxford University Press and Chatham House. The collection had a preface by Lord Astor, owner of the Observer and a board member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. In his preface Lord Astor wrote of Nazi Germany:
“It is well that those who detest the system should yet realize with what persuasiveness National Socialism can be presented, for the strength of the system lies in the fact that it has turned to base uses ideas and ideals which but await reinterpretation to serve as building stones in the reconstruction for which we hope.”
This was the corporatist system described by Bryant which became the economic model for the post-1945 British economy. And in another guise it was the economic policy of Sean South and Provisional Sinn Fein at the outset of the Northern war in 1970.
I checked to see if there were any copies of Unfinished Victory available in Northern Ireland. I could only locate one – held in Mount Stewart in Lord Londonderry’s effects. Bryant had sent Lord Londonderry, who had been Secretary of State for Air in the National Government of 1931-35, and who was responsible for keeping the RAF in being, during the years of cost-cutting disarmament pressure, a copy.
Bryant obviously took Londonderry to be a kindred spirit of the time.
Lord Londonderry, like Bryant, is now seen as an arch-appeaser of Nazi Germany, despite his efforts at the Air Ministry. He is another victim of British history writing and its wonderful hindsight.
Londonderry, like Bryant, was a critic of the Versailles Treaty. How could he have been otherwise? He, the 7th Marquess of Londonderry had got an understanding of the conduct of foreign policy through studying his famous ancestor, the 2nd Marquess, Lord Castlereagh. Castlereagh was the architect of the settlement of Europe made at the end of the Napoleonic wars by the Congress of Vienna (1815). Versailles could only look like narrow vengeance to the 7th Marquess of Londonderry compared to the treaty which had made the Pax Britannia of a century possible.
Lord Londonderry thought that if Versailles were the public law of Europe it should have been upheld. If it was bad law it should be formally amended by the Great Powers who had imposed it, while Germany was still at bay. That Germany one day would not be at bay and could not be held indefinitely at bay was obvious. So, it was important that revisions to the treaty be made to it by those who made it and executed it, while they were still dominant over Germany.
The worst thing to do was to tolerate breaches of the Versailles Treaty by Germany and then find that Germany became a Great Power again by its own devices by breaking the Treaty. But that is just what Britain did, to the advantage of the German leader who did it – Adolf Hitler.
All of this cannot be understood within the post-war Churchillian narrative of the period, because that history is a nonsense, constructed for a political purpose, to bring some honour to the incompetent disastrous handling of affairs of the British State that lost its Empire, and gave away the world to the US and USSR. It is why the academics and scholars struggle to make sense of it all and are forced into mindless abuse against “appeasers,” “Nazi fellow-travellers” and “anti-Semites.”
Unfinished Victory makes it uncomfortably clear that not only were there sufficient reasons within the parameters of Western European civilisation for the unusual form of state constructed by the Nazi Party, that might facilitate rapprochement but there were common historical traits, as Bryant pointed out, between Imperial Britain and Nazi Germany.
As Bryant noted:
“A strange farrago of pseudo-scientific theories, acquired at second-hand through books and lectures from a long line of thinkers, reaching from Darwin and Carlyle through Disraeli and Cecil Rhodes to the renegade Englishman, Houston Chamberlain, influenced Hitler’s powerful but untrained mind to state and elaborate his strange theory of race.”
And…
“In return for freedom to expand eastwards these remote and not very long held possessions could be willingly left in the hands of naval Britain. Germany’s enhanced destiny lay not in the Cameroons or Tanganyika but in the plains of Poland and the Ukraine. Only there could the annual increase in the German population, estimated by Hitler at 900,000, be supported in dignity and union.
The more of them there were, and the more of the earth they inhabited, the better it would be for the human race. It was half a century since an unusual Oxford undergraduate had come to a similar conclusion about another branch of the Aryan race. Cecil Rhodes in his first will and throughout his strange career made it his life’s work to give the English kind new areas of settlement where they could live, work and multiply. Only by doing so, he held, could he serve the divine purpose of evolving a higher type of man whose ultimate dominance would establish the reign of peace throughout the world. Hitler’s mind worked in the same way.”
And…
“That at least is what Hitler resolved to make the German people. Potentially they were already, as he believed, of earth’s best breed: with the English, Scots, Scandinavians and the old Anglo-Saxon stock of North America the purest surviving representatives of the Aryan race.”
And…
“… they (the Nazis) were ruthless and inhuman in their unappeasable hatred. They destroyed because they were shocked, much as Cromwell’s troopers slew the trollops in King Charles’s baggage lines or the Papists at Drogheda. In their megalomania they regarded Jews not as human beings but as purveyors of moral pestilence, who, with cynical commercialisation of the healthy progenitive instincts on which the future of the race depended, infected the nation with spiritual disease…”
Professor Manuel Sarkisyanz’s thesis, in his Hitler’s English Inspirers book (published by Athol Books in 2003), was that important elements which went into the making of Nazism, such as social uniformity, class deference, national superiority, critical double standards, social Darwinism, racism, imperialism, proposals for extensive ethnic cleansing of inferior races, xenophobia and genocide, had been pioneered in Britain and by its Empire. Sarkisyanz particularly singled out Burke, Carlyle, Disraeli, Baden-Powell, Churchill, Curzon, Milner, Kingsley, Kipling, G.B. Shaw and H.G. Wells as Hitler’s main – and all very mainstream – subjects of admiration.
Sarkisyanz’s work was untouchable by mainstream publishers, despite its application of incisive and critical methods providing insight into phenomena which explained what mainstream historians could not. So, it was left to Athol Books to translate and publish him.
Brendan Clifford investigated the same theme in Union Jackery – the pre-history of Fascism in Britain in 2005. Added to the inspirers of Hitler, noted by Professor Sarkisyanz, were Macaulay, Ruskin, Bagehot, Dilke, Rosebery, Trevelyan and Balfour, author of the Declaration.
These things were unsayable, as was what Bryant also said about Hitlers and the Jews:
“According to Hitler it was the Aryan’s degradation and ultimate extinction that the Jews were trying to achieve… This does not necessarily impair the significance of Hitler’s belief in the importance of preserving racial purity. It was one that was shared by the great Jewish lawgiver, Moses, and in recent times by another Jew of genius, Benjamin Disraeli. In one part of Mein Kampf Hitler makes the curious admission that the explanation of the Hebrew power he so much feared was that the Jews had kept their blood purer than any other race in the world. Nature, Hitler argued, never favoured the mongrel…”
Bryant saw the parallels between Hitler’s racial purity theory as a source of national regeneration and the Jews he detested. It follows from the way the Jews continued living, mostly as a separate nation, long after they had departed from the territorial base of their nationhood, as tight minorities in host nations, with which they did not merge, providing services to their host nations which aroused hostility, that they would become a target of the intensifying nationalism in Europe.
The Germans had become a target of the British because of their Anglo-Saxon similarity and so the Jews, with their similar practice of racial and religious purity, became a target of the Nazis, who took them, like the British took the Germans, as a threat. The smallness of the German Jewish community was beside the point due to their influence within the important parts of the state which Hitler saw as rotten and pitted against his project of German regeneration.
If pointing such a thing out is seen as “anti-Semitic” then reality itself is “anti-Semitic.”
After June 1940, when Britain had a war on its hands, the distinction between explanation and justification, which was tolerable within the elasticity of civilisational projection, became a distinction without difference. Explanation of enemy affairs was a thing to be thoroughly discouraged and condemnation was all that was tolerable.
After the war when an ideology grew up around the war in which Britain had broken the back of its Empire, and a great moral cause had to be seen within the blundering activity it had been engaged in, people like Bryant were easy targets of those who were carving out careers in the new moral setting, completely absent in 1939.
The impermissibility of pointing to the obvious similarities between the Nazi state and the Jewish state, and the associated application of the label of “anti-Semitism” to those who do, has now facilitated and provided cover for the actual practice of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
It should have been expected that those who had insisted on retaining a racial purity and tight, distinctive character long after they had been deprived of a territorial basis for their national distinctiveness should insist on the homogeneity of their state when provided with it anew by an Imperial Power of similar character.
But then such thinking has been suppressed, even at the cost of repetition!
The so-called “anti-Fascist” war, which Britain fought in alliance with Bolshevism against Nazi Germany, was in many ways a deviation from the more normal, inherent antagonism of the post 1918 world caused by the bungling and incoherent nature of British Foreign Policy which went off the rails in August 1914. The anti-Russian position was the British default, with England re-orientating in circumstances and employing Russia twice in a century to do down Germany in world wars. Afterwards the default was resumed.
The Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939 badly caught out Britain and put its policy into a tailspin. It is now noticeable that it is being nowadays reinterpreted as an authoritarian alliance rather than the holding operation it was, from both parties.
But the ideology of the “anti-Fascist” war seems to have now ran its course. It is being superseded in Britain and Europe by the old, more fundamental, anti-Russian impulse.
The new dispensation is characterised by German re-militarisation, support for the fascist driving force behind Ukrainian nationalism, which Richard Pipes has suggested began the Jewish Holocaust well before Hitler, as well as objective support for extreme ethnic cleansing and genocide inherent in the Jewish State that Britain created.
It was said that the Germans “needed to confront their past in order not to repeat it.” They duly did this with such success that it turned them into people who would unconditionally support similar things done by their victims to others.
It was supposed that the Germans had become politically mindless and harmless pursuers of business and prosperity in following the policy that they “needed to confront their past in order not to repeat it.”
However, they have now exposed themselves as something that is very dangerous to the future of Europe – fanatical haters of Russia and steadfast supporters of Zionism. Their only guilt is in killing European Jews. They express no guilt and pay no compensation to the 27 million Soviet citizens they slaughtered – Jew and non-Jew.
The head of the European Commission, a German woman, seems to have many of the traits Bryant saw in Hitler. She is the resurrection of the Hitlerite objective of cohering Europe together for a march East, to extend European lebensraum. She is very likely to finally put paid to European Civilisation if she is serious and pursues this to the end.
Harold Macmillan said that fascists would not come in Blackshirts or Brownshirts. Perhaps they now come in blue dresses and pearl necklaces under the flag of democracy. Europe was, after all, the originator and major exponent of fascism and now it returns to its roots.
Pat Walsh
ARTHUR BRYANT (1940) UNFINISHED VICTORY
CHAPTER 4
THE DREAMER OF MUNICH
When the war had ended… the world, it was universally predicted, had been made safe for democracy —that is, for the political system in which matters of economic life and death were left to the arbitrament of free international competition while the ring was kept by professional parliamentarians versed in the arts of soliciting popular votes for control of the police and the laws.
Yet within the span of a single generation — a pin-point in time measured by an historian’s rule — every major country in Europe, with the exception of Great Britain and France, had adopted in one form or another a system of government based on personal dictatorship. And had done so, to all appearance, not against the wishes of the majority of their peoples but with a large and, in most cases, overwhelming degree of popular acclamation. Russia, Italy, Germany, Poland, Jugoslavia, Spain, Turkey, Greece, Romania, Hungary and Portugal all assumed dictatorial rather than parliamentary constitutions. Mr. F.S. Oliver (The Anvil of War) would seem to have been right.
Yet in his own country what he predicted did not come to pass. By virtue of her victory, her established institutions and the phlegmatic calm of her national character, Britain escaped shipwreck in the tempests that submerged the traditional systems of her neighbours. Her strong political framework had not to be remade, for, unlike that of others, it was not destroyed. Her people thus escaped the pangs and throes that attend the sudden birth of things new…
Before Bismarck and the new industrialism had brought them power and prosperity the Germans had been a race of dreamers. They were famous as musicians, philosophers and scholars. Politically their land was still the Cinderella of Europe, a phantom realm divided into scores of states, most of them despotically and paternally ruled. The beloved fatherland with its forests and great rivers was still a mere geographical expression. At their highest —in men like Bach and Goethe and Beethoven—the Germans had transcended the furthest confines of human experience…
Their pride had its fall—a more terrible one than has yet come the way of any highly civilised nation in modern times. In the course of a dozen years they underwent three major national calamities — famine, defeat and bankruptcy. Their worldly possessions were torn from them: not, it should be remembered, through the greed of others but through their fear. By 1920 the German people were left with little else but their unity, and even this was threatened by their enemies.
In the hour of suffering, as is so often the way with men, they recovered their souls. They discovered — the best of them — how much a man who has nothing may still possess. They fell back on the spiritual keep of the imagination. Around them lay a landscape of ruin. But. from it, like Parsival, they derived a new and fearful strength.
An Englishman visiting Germany in the first shock of defeat, while famine still lay over the land, was astonished to find how little relation the German he discovered bore to the traditional, gross, beer drinking materialist of war and pre-war caricature and literature…
This was particularly true of those of the younger generation. Deprived of all apparent hope of prosperity or even of tolerable comfort, undernourished and with little or nothing in the way of worldly goods, denied the amusements that the cities of the modern world offer to those who have money to burn, they found their happiness in a rediscovery of Germany.
Their weekends and holidays were spent tramping the roads or sailing the rivers and lakes of their native land. Wandervogel became the youthful passion of the hour. With bare heads and legs, with a pack on the back and a guitar or fiddle slung over the shoulder, the German lad and his girl went singing out of the towns into the countryside. Here they slept in groups of half a dozen or a score in barns or mountain huts, washed in the rivers and built campfires for their concerts in the clearings of the forests.
From the vulgarity of the great cities, which they could not afford, they turned to the traditions and lore of the German country past. The gulf which divides townsman and countryman in the industrial nations of the modern age was bridged for them by a new sympathy born of that out-of-door life. The ruling passion of their young lives became love of country — the sweeter because of the contrast with the drab, cheerless life of the bankrupt towns from which they made their way so eagerly each recurring Saturday.
Such was the German Youth Movement of the immediate post-war years. It was romantic, emotional, often ridiculous but passionately sincere…
If any man with an instinct for leadership could but find it, there might be a key to open all doors. For the burning love of country engendered was unconsciously seeking an outlet. And as the years of famine and defeat receded and German youth grew stronger, the need to harness that love to fruitful action became the more intense.
The hour brought forth the man. No stranger revolutionary ever existed…
The war, which destroyed the lives and happiness of millions, caught him up, bore him into the core of its fiery furnace and made him… Throughout the war this man had no other existence but that of the army: received scarcely any letters and seemed to have no friendships but those of his comrades in arms. He was twice wounded and was temporarily blinded by chlorine gas in the fighting near Commines in October 1918. When the German Revolution broke out and the Central Powers surrendered, he was still lying sightless in hospital at Pasewalk in Pomerania. The news nearly broke his heart…
Living in the heart of Kurt Eisner’s Bavarian “pigstye,” Hitler, like Napoleon before him, was a disgusted witness of the phenomena of revolution — of armoured cars scattering leaflets like an ugly snow through the streets, of Spartacists firing untidily at their rivals, of strikes and arrests and barricades, of revolutionary chiefs passing the hours of opportunity in drunken orgies while 30,000 sullen unemployed stood on the unswept pavements and waited for the next starving horse to fall to offer them a meal. Through it all, while five hundred miles away the delegates of his country waited behind palings for the pleasure of the victors to be made known, passed the little nobody with his tragic angry eyes whose hoarded wrath was one day to shake the Old World to its foundations…
In these months of anarchy this strange and lonely being developed an intense hatred of the Marxist hypothesis. It was a hatred that had begun during the years of his youthful poverty in Vienna…
Hitler… had never been anything but a working man, had never known since his childhood’s home was broken up what it was to be certain of anything, had never possessed the smallest property. Even in the ranks of the army, though indubitably a brave and disciplined soldier, this undistinguished, unprepossessing and not very military-looking man had attained to no higher rank than that of lance corporal. If ever anyone merited the definition of a proletarian it was Adolf Hitler… The uncertainty of casual employment, the demoralisation of the slum, the pangs of hunger had all been his. He did not study the social problem of his age from above, but knew it at first hand…
Few of the more academic critics of his revolutionary philosophy have had his schooling. The Marxist drew attention, and in scathing terms, to these evils. But he did so, Hitler came to believe, not to remove but to exploit them. Marxism was a declaration of war against the existing order of things. But it was a crusade not only against the bad in society but against the good. It could destroy but it could not create because it denied as an article of its faith the realities on which all human creation must be based — individual responsibility and skill, the mastery of craft acquired through long specialised practice, the utilisation of accumulated tradition. Marxism repudiated the whole human past, all the painful and treasured achievements of man’s spirit and mind. In a world already beginning to decompose, its founder, a man of genius eaten up with hatred, had distilled a solvent to disintegrate the beliefs and ideals by which civilisation had grown and by which it might yet be redeemed and purified…
Hitler was acute enough to realise that the Marxists did not stand for the freedom they pretended but for a despotic uniformity, enforced by terror and the annihilation of all who opposed them. In this they differed only in their superior violence from the international financiers and exploiters they professed to supplant. Like Belloc and other earlier modern social philosophers, Hitler perceived the twin roads down which mankind was being herded toward the servile state. First came the economic development which transformed the social structure of the nation and substituted for its old feudal rulers, who at least had a certain sense of responsibility and noblesse oblige, the financier and the middleman who had none…
The small artisan class slowly disappeared and the factory worker, who took his place, had scarcely any chance to establish an independent existence of his own but soon sank to the proletariat level. His present and future passed into the sole power of the man of figures who, calling himself his employer or master, acknowledged no responsibility for his moral or physical wellbeing. The hungry sheep looked up and were not fed.
The members of the new social class so created were “disinherited” in a treble sense. They were deprived of their independence. They were herded together in vast factory towns under conditions of living and employment which not only ruined their health but robbed them of all faith in their country and its system of justice. And they were made to feel that the manual labour by which they lived was degrading and inferior to other forms of work. The ancient Order of the Peasantry, as Disraeli had once called it, had been transformed in the new towns into a herd of helots without privilege or status.
But the process of social levelling was not yet complete… The poor were enslaved but the higher and middle orders —the last repositories of the culture and national social tradition of the past — still remained independent. Their independence was the final barrier that stood between the architects of constructive chaos and their goal. To destroy it no effort could be too great. And here the archenemy of the nation and society, the eternal and denationalised Jew, whom Hitler in his strange obsession saw in all places working to destroy the living state, seized his opportunity… At first he had used the bourgeois class as a battering-ram against the feudal order; now he used the worker against the strongholds of the bourgeoisie…
To Hitler Jewish Marxism completed the process of social corrosion that Jewish joint-stock capitalism had begun.
Yet the ultimate objective of that sinister Movement was not, it appeared, the triumph of the Proletariat, but the domination of those who by exploitation had created the Proletariat — the Jews. The ultimate aims of Marxism and international Capitalism were in Hitler’s eyes the same: the concentration of all power in the hands of a few, and the elimination of every independent agency that could resist the process — religion, country, private property.
And the forces working for its success were very powerful. “The Marxist doctrine,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “is a mixture of human reason and human absurdity; but the combination is contrived in such a way that only the absurd part of it can ever be put into practice and never the reasonable part… The very absurdity of the economic and political theories of Marxism gives it its peculiar significance. Because of its half-baked logic, intelligent people refuse to support it, while all who are unaccustomed to use their intellectual faculties or who have only a rudimentary notion of economic principles, join the Cause with fiery enthusiasm. The intelligence behind the Movement… is supplied by the Jews… To all appearances, it strives to ameliorate the conditions under which the workers live; but in reality, its aim is to enslave and ultimately annihilate the non-Jewish races.”
For it was the Jews who, as always in Hitler’s coloured and melodramatic imagination, were planning to destroy a failing civilisation. They were the prime cause that had set working that machinery of logical destruction which he had detected in the operation of modern society. It never seemed even to occur to him that there were causes for the decadence and corruption he had observed in the slum-bred Jews of the modern industrial world as natural and explicable as those which he had also observed in his fellow Germans. His mystical and irrational hatred of all Jews was the first fatal flaw in his reasoning: the King Charles’s head that kept cropping up in the flow of his logic. Theirs was the envious hatred of the lower for the higher, of the decadent and corrupt for the purity and health of creative life, of the dead wood for the living tree…
To Hitler democracy itself was merely a process in an inevitable and organised scheme of social and racial destruction, and one which the Jewish intellectuals or the subconscious instinct of the Jewish race — it was never quite clear which he meant — utilised to aid their destroying purpose. Hitler could not believe that the timid parliamentarian with his bourgeois liberalism and his fear of action and himself infected with the Marxist virus — “the concentrated extract of the mentality which underlies the general concept of life today’’ — could combat a ruthless fighting organisation like Marxism. His own view of parliamentary democracy has been limited to Austria and Germany, where it had had little popular appeal…
Had Hitler spent his formative years in England or America, instead of in pre-war Vienna and Munich, he would have seen in operation a different kind of parliamentarianism whose foundations went deep down into national history and popular idealism. His experience had been pathetically different…
After the war, when parliamentary democracy superseded all other forms of government in Germany, Hitler’s contempt for a system so little able to aid his starving countrymen only deepened. Here, in an hour when men were in need of leadership as never before, was a sham government that tricked up bogus claimants to power in the trappings of honour and authority, yet never asked of them the one service they were there to perform. The first fundamental of popular control of government was wanting — the personal responsibility of those in power for the measures they advocated…
Hitler devoted many pages of his Mein Kampf to analysing the workings of the electoral system. In the crude but racy imagery of a man who was still a peasant at heart, he exposed the sterile and time-serving tricks of the parliamentary careerists…
To this largely self-educated but tragically, if narrowly experienced man the whole theory of free government that the great pragmatists had evolved out of the local and political experience of island England, seemed in the changed world of the industrial 20th century nothing but a heartless fraud. The people, herded into vast towns and without any real contact with their rulers, were deceived by a sham facade of political liberty which in practice, far from affording them the free disposal of their daily work and life, gave a virtual monopoly to a little minority of powerful financial and political manipulators to say and write whatever they chose.
Into this minority’s use of their freedom no question of the public good ever entered. Thus those who in a capitalist and mechanised age alone had the power and therefore the exclusive liberty to own, print and distribute great newspapers, used that freedom to publish everything, however harmful to society, that would increase their sales. Often their abuse of power was in Hitler’s belief deliberate. Here also he imagined he saw the sinister hand of the international Jew…
It seemed to Hitler that the modern democratic system, with its universal suffrage, its appeals to the basest passions of the helpless multitude, its interminable delaying forms of procedure, was a house built on sand. ‘‘Democracy in the West today is the forerunner of Marxism, which would be inconceivable without democracy. It is the feeding – ground of that world pestilence” …
Up to this point Hitler’s creed had been purely negative. Apart from violent racial prejudice, it was based on hatred of the industrial system under which he had suffered and of the Marxist system which was taking its place and under which he believed his country would suffer still more. His instinct — for all his warped theories that of natural genius — warned him that Marxism must lead to the ultimate extinction of the race. In his eyes it was the philosophy of the charnel-house.
If Hitler was that not uncommon phenomenon of the modern world — a potential and imperfectly educated intellectual caught in the cogs of the industrial machine and resentful at the lost opportunities of which it deprived him — he was by blood and sympathy a peasant. And it is an ineradicable habit of the peasant mind to wish to see things grow. Hitler’s real quarrel with the capitalist and Marxist system alike was that they stopped things from growing. They were concerned not with creation, but the one with making quick profits and the other with establishing an unnatural and sterile uniformity…
It was on this issue that Hitler, brooding in the crowded trench or in the slovenly back streets of Munich, made up his mind to raise a standard against the two chief powers of the modern world. His presumptuous challenge would seem ridiculous were it not for the fact that in some measure it succeeded. It was his profound conviction that he could do so, whatever the odds against him, because truth was on his side. Those who opposed him, for all their vast strength and established position, would be fighting against Nature.
For Nature taught that all progress came through the physical improvement of the breed. Men were not disembodied and denationalised intelligences, operating without relation either to their forebears or their posterity. All natural evolution had been effected through certain races: so long as they kept their virility unimpaired, human achievement remained cumulative. But once the purity of the blood and the capacity for healthful breeding of a people were impaired, whether through unhealthy conditions or miscegenation, the race deteriorated, and the quality of the individual declined with it.
A strange farrago of pseudo-scientific theories, acquired at second-hand through books and lectures from a long line of thinkers, reaching from Darwin and Carlyle through Disraeli and Cecil Rhodes to the renegade Englishman, Houston Chamberlain, influenced Hitler’s powerful but untrained mind to state and elaborate his strange theory of race. Much of it was absurd. Yet it was founded primarily on his own observation of the deformed bodies and disease-wrecked faces that throng the pavements of the great cities of the modern world. Pupil of the underworld that he was, he refused to accept them as an inevitable part of the universe. Instead, he reached back to his own country youth and the instinctive wisdom of his peasant forebears.
For Hitler knew the fatal consequences of neglecting the breed through having witnessed them at first hand. In the slums of the capitalist industrial cities, where the least happy products of every race were allowed to mingle and breed indiscriminately in enormous masses, the future of mankind was being mortgaged to the making of quick profits…
This damning indictment of modern society and “its original sin of racial corruption” constitutes the central theme of Hitler’s political philosophy. It has never been properly answered. Fortunately for Hitler’s critics, his charge has been confused by his own emotional obsession about the Jews. His chief count against this unfortunate people was that they were deliberately engaged in polluting the blood of other and superior races… “For as long as a people remains racially pure and is conscious of the treasure of its blood, it can never be overcome by the Jew.”
That at least is what Hitler resolved to make the German people. Potentially they were already, as he believed, of earth’s best breed: with the English, Scots, Scandinavians and the old Anglo-Saxon stock of North America the purest surviving representatives of the Aryan race. Hitler’s reading and his limited experience of the mixed races of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire had led him to the mystical, absurd, though characteristically German conclusion that all progress had sprung from the genius of this one race… According to Hitler it was the Aryan’s degradation and ultimate extinction that the Jews were trying to achieve…
This may possibly be true of Marxism: it is profoundly untrue of the historical philosophy of the Jewish race. For by a strange irony the creative achievements of Hebrew genius provide the chief argument against Hitler’s exclusive glorification of the Aryan. If modern civilisation owes half its inspiration to the Aryan Greek and Roman, it owes the other and diviner half to the Semitic. The Bible has fired more creative minds in northern Europe than the Odyssey or the Aeneid. Plato and Dante and Shakespeare were Aryans. Christ was a Jew.
This does not necessarily impair the significance of Hitler’s belief in the importance of preserving racial purity. It was one that was shared by the great Jewish lawgiver, Moses, and in recent times by another Jew of genius, Benjamin Disraeli. In one part of Mein Kampf Hitler makes the curious admission that the explanation of the Hebrew power he so much feared was that the Jews had kept their blood purer than any other race in the world. Nature, Hitler argued, never favoured the mongrel… Though there are many obvious exceptions, there is probably more in this than critics of Hitler allow. It is certainly strange, as he points out, that a civilisation that pays so much attention to the breeding of pedigree horses, dogs and cats should take so little care of the human race itself…
It was Hitler’s purpose to give the German people a new way of regarding the world — a Weltanschauung. For centuries they had lived on the sufferance of their neighbours — a people without frontiers, without unity, without the space to secure a free and stable life of their own choosing. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the nations of modern Europe had taken shape out of the decaying welter of mediaeval Christendom, the lot of the divided Germans had become wretched in the extreme.
Encircled by stronger powers, with no natural barriers of sea, mountain or river to bar their way, they had been subjected to constant invasion, and, lacking centrifugal direction, to internecine strife. In the eighteenth century the race which gave the world Bach and Handel, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, Goethe and Schiller, was still without nationhood and its people denied the protection and help which Frenchmen, Spaniards, Englishmen, Slavs and even Dutchmen received from their governments in the new lands of opportunity beyond the seas and the Urals. For many a German the only opportunity the era of oceanic imperialism offered was a mercenary’s wages in the armies of a foreign crown.
And when the ancien régime of Europe was submerged by the storms that blew out of revolutionary and resurgent France, it was a still divided Germany that bore the brunt of the aggressors’ bayonets as it had borne those of Louis XIV a century before…
The Great War — according to Allied computation a Teutonic bid for “a place in the sun” and, according to Hitler, a struggle against jealous encirclers —saw that young and imperfect union tested and found wanting. The lack of common purpose, the treachery of the Jew and the stranger within her too open gates, above all, the lack of consistent purpose in her leadership, had consigned Germany to the lowest hell of even her unhappy history. Her starving and defeated people had been subjected to insult, robbery and virtual enslavement. All their hard-earned possessions had been taken from them, and henceforward they were to pay — seemingly to all eternity — tribute to the conquering foreigner and submit in patience to whatever he ordained.
Against this conception, strange and false though it may seem to less tortured and warped minds, Hitler raised the standard of passionate and uncompromising rebellion… The foreigner with his supervisory Commissions, his Reparations, his unilateral interdictions against German rearmament, his encircling military alliances, his unjust and hypocritical hocus-pocus of international law, should be sent packing.
At the moment, of course, judged by any rational standard, the position seemed hopeless. There were four foreign armies on German soil, there were military powers of overriding strength on almost every frontier, while Germany was forbidden to manufacture heavy guns, tanks and military aeroplanes or to train her sons to defence. These things did not deter Hitler. The successive stages of Germany’s march to power, and with power to security to fulfil her high racial destiny, were logically and ruthlessly indicated.
First the inequalities of Versailles were to be redressed — by force if consent were still withheld — and the ten million Germans living outside the Reich were to be liberated from alien rule. Then the work of expansion was to be taken up with a new conviction and purpose. The long tide of Slavonic and oriental penetration of civilised Europe was to be stemmed, and the German tribes, unified at last, were to turn east to found a great colonial dominion where they could enjoy — 250 millions of them by the end of the century — all the means of supporting a full life without dependence on the foreigner.
It was no nineteenth-century, pseudo-commercial policy of recovering captured African swamps that would give the German people at long last its Lebensraum. In return for freedom to expand eastwards these remote and not very long held possessions could be willingly left in the hands of naval Britain. Germany’s enhanced destiny lay not in the Cameroons or Tanganyika but in the plains of Poland and the Ukraine. Only there could the annual increase in the German population, estimated by Hitler at 900,000, be supported in dignity and union.
The more of them there were, and the more of the earth they inhabited, the better it would be for the human race. It was half a century since an unusual Oxford undergraduate had come to a similar conclusion about another branch of the Aryan race. Cecil Rhodes in his first will and throughout his strange career made it his life’s work to give the English kind new areas of settlement where they could live, work and multiply. Only by doing so, he held, could he serve the divine purpose of evolving a higher type of man whose ultimate dominance would establish the reign of peace throughout the world. Hitler’s mind worked in the same way. He wanted, he said, to see ‘‘a peace based not upon the waving of olive branches and the tearful misery-mongering of pacifist old women, but one guaranteed by the triumphant sword of a people endowed with the power to master the world and administer it in the service of a higher civilisation.’’ What would happen to human liberty in the process Hitler did not even trouble to consider. He did not care much for human liberty…
Amid the wreckage, Hitler outlined point by point the Programme that was to carry the National Socialist Party to victory and redeem Germany… Despite much that has since been written to suggest the contrary, the Programme which Hitler gave his Party was nothing if not Socialist. It was Socialism purged of the Marxist gloss. And it was recognised as such by the German workers. The State was to confiscate profits from war and land speculation. Large industries were to be wholly or partly nationalised: the land was to be restored to those who could use it and ground rents were to be abolished. Old age pensions were to be increased, and equal facilities for education afforded to all. The only point where the programme diverged from the conventional objects of traditional Socialism was in its insistence on the importance of the small property holder — the yeoman and the petty shopkeeper — and its condemnation of the multiple store…
It was an ideal that was at once Socialist and Germanic — the creation of the State as an all-seeing and all-ruling central authority.
CHAPTER 5
RISE OF THE MEN OF IRON
What Hitler was out to run was a revolution. He was not, as some of his would-be allies made the mistake of supposing at the time, preaching a reactionary creed. He was not in the least inclined to reaction and little interested in the things reaction seeks. On the contrary he meant to smash the prevailing order of society because he held it no longer existed in order to serve men but merely to make men serve the class interests of the few. ‘‘The fundamental principle’’, he wrote, “is that the State is not an end in itself but the means to an end.”
For the bourgeois in possession, Hitler had the greatest contempt.
National Socialism was not, however, so much a revolution against the existing ruling class as against a corrupt social system. It was puritan rather than personal. It is this that accounts for its cruelty and inhumanity. Measured in terms of human destruction, the German Revolution was a trifling affair compared with the French Revolution and the Russian. Unlike the Bolsheviks, who were forced to slay millions of their internal foes before they triumphed, the Nazis did comparatively little killing in their own country. They had no need to, for they were appealing to instincts which nine out of ten Germans shared at heart. They had not to slay the bulk of their opponents, for with the Foreigner and the Slump as recruiting sergeants they were able to convert them.
Yet to the small minority against whom the popular instincts to which they appealed were directed, they were ruthless and inhuman in their unappeasable hatred. They destroyed because they were shocked, much as Cromwell’s troopers slew the trollops in King Charles’s baggage lines or the Papists at Drogheda. In their megalomania they regarded Jews not as human beings but as purveyors of moral pestilence, who, with cynical commercialisation of the healthy progenitive instincts on which the future of the race depended, infected the nation with spiritual disease worse than the Black Death…
He never stopped to consider what elemental forces of sadism he might be loosing on the world by his blind appeal to hatred. Nor did he remember that those whom he reviled as unclean beasts were human beings like himself, subject to ‘‘the same dimensions, senses, affections, passions, fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is.’’
But the National Socialists were rebels against a system of government that they believed to be destroying the national character and the future well-being of the race. Human rights, Hitler proclaimed, were above State rights: if rebellion was necessary to save a people from moral and spiritual decay, rebellion was justified. It was more: it was a duty. The defeat which Germany had suffered in 1918 was by itself nothing — for it could be repaired — compared with the moral rot which had been its cause and which was growing worse with every year. The whole system was rotten — commerce, education, democracy — for it was turning out men and women without willpower and the spirit of self-sacrifice. The rot had got to be stopped. It was Hitler’s conviction, and one that he succeeded in conveying to his countrymen, that he was the man to stop it…
As for those who openly opposed him there was no bottom to the lake of pitch assigned to them. The slums of Vienna and the trenches of Flanders had given this outspoken child of Austrian peasants a more than Marxist vocabulary, and when he met his enemies in the gate, he did not restrain it. Instead, he laid about him with a rude Cromwellian vigour that delighted those who shared his views. Hatred and vilification became the hallmark of his Movement — so much so that refined and peaceable onlookers often forgot that it had ever stood for anything else.
But it was not only temperament — the effect of bitter and prolonged suffering on an ultra-sensitive but inherently tough nature — that made Hitler ruthless. It was part of a logical and thought-out design. In the circumstances of the time and with such overwhelming odds against him, his crusade could never have achieved victory in any other way. He had to overcome gigantic physical forces of intolerance and inertia. He could not do so without a sword. He forged his Party as one.
For people who believed that victory could be won by talk alone, for those who thought that the reason which sways university debating societies and common rooms could intimidate Communist cudgels and revolvers, for those who put their faith in vague intellectual or international generalities, the Leader of the New German Faith had no use. He was out to run a Revolution… In this Hitler, the house painter, like Bismarck, the Junker squire, showed a grasp of the realities of statesmanship…
Hitler confronted the disciplined, simple and ruthless international ideal of Marxism with an ideal equally disciplined, simple and ruthless. A few elementary ideas, generalised, without distinction or subtlety, were all the ordinary man could understand. As without the ordinary man there could be no hope of victory, first things, however repugnant to cultured and refined people, had to come first.
And if the creed which was to win the masses needed the simplicity of the Marxist dogma, it needed also the same rigid intolerance and insistence on undeviating orthodoxy. In Hitler’s eyes it was all very well for people who lived under an ancient dispensation to complain that power was being stated in its basest and most elementary forms. In a long established and unbroken society such as that of England, it was no longer necessary to work the masses into a frenzy of crude enthusiasm to achieve political expression for a new idea. The unquestioning submission of the individual to the authority of the community without which no State can subsist was maintained there, even in a democratic age, by a kind of unbroken custom and prescription: rank, wealth and even gentleness of conduct still received a respect which might strike the theorist of the study as servile, but which in practice alone enables a complex and free society to exist. Such a society had been evolved by centuries of custom: only because its order had become second nature, could it dispense with intolerance without falling into anarchy.
To restore Germany’s vital order — the very life-blood of a community — intolerance was an indispensable preliminary. Unlike that of England, German society had been shattered and destroyed by the war and the disasters that followed. It could not be put together again without a rigid cement…
A fighting movement of flawless discipline and animated by the same unquestioning devotion to 1ts faith and leaders as the old Prussian Guard, was the instrument Hitler set out to create. It must place him among the great organisers of mankind that he was able to establish it so quickly. In 1919 it consisted of half a dozen men debating round a tavern table by candlelight; in 1933 it dominated Germany; by 1938 it was one of the most formidable forces in the world.
Hitler’s achievement was due to a wonderful and largely instinctive knowledge of his countrymen and to his own clear perception of the precise means essential to success. His racial theory may be repulsive gibberish, his ambitions barbarous and ridiculous, his motives cruel and sadistic, but only a man deliberately shutting his eyes to realities can deny his astonishing genius for leadership. With Lenin, Hitler was the answer the gods gave to the Marxist contention that events in this world are shaped solely by materialist circumstance and that men are helpless puppets in the hands of inevitable powers they cannot control. Cromwell was such an answer to the study theories of Calvin and Napoleon to those of Rousseau. It was the same terrible answer that God made to Job out of the whirlwind…
It was not only in the use of violence that Hitler copied and improved on Marxist methods. He stole their pageantry as well. Watching the sea of red flags, armlets and flowers at a Communist rally in the Berlin Lustgarten after the war, Hitler had learnt how the hypnotic influence of sound and colour could be turned to a political end. He organised the meetings of his own Party as though they were titanic theatrical performances, with forests of banners, clash of drums and martial music, exciting and elaborate ritual and, most grateful of all to the German soul, a wealth of uniforms. Like the Catholic Church, Hitler’s Movement made its appeal not only to the minds of the masses but to their aesthetic feelings and love of drama. Amid the drab bleakness of post-war commercial and republican Germany, the meetings of the National Socialist crusade offered to the man in the street the only colour and warmth and light he was likely to find.
To the dispossessed millions it offered something even more attractive — status and responsibility. The National Socialist Movement was organised in a way unknown to the “democratic” Parties…
For a time progress was slow. During the years between Hitler’s release at the end of 1924 and the Great Slump in 1929 certain sections of the German nation enjoyed a period of hectic but false commercial prosperity, paid for by the loans of British and American financiers, For the first time since 1916 the bulk of the German people were not hungry. Politically it was the era of Stresemann, Locarno and Reparation payments. The material incentives to enrol under Hitler’s standard were still small, the political advantages far from certain. In 1925 there were only 27,000 members, in the following year 49,000. Even as late as 1928 they did not exceed 100,000. In that year the Party polled 809,541 votes in a General Election and secured I2 seats in the Reichstag. Hitler himself was not allowed to stand on account of his technical lack of citizenship.
Yet all the while his apocalyptic teaching was finding its way into the hearts of two great classes of his countrymen. It appealed to youth and it appealed to those who had lost their all in the Inflation. To neither of these disinherited classes did the democratic-capitalist System offer any hope…
And the dispossessed — the lonely and dispirited men and women who had seen their homes, their savings and their livelihood sacrificed to the Jewish speculator when the currency collapsed — turned also to the new creed…
To millions the National Socialist crusade came to provide the one interest in a life of lonely and drab poverty. It gave them colour and glamour, hope for the future, and above all, the delight of companionship with others who shared their beliefs. The starved herd instincts of the middle class were suddenly released. The prolonged, losing battle of solitary respectability for appearances no longer mattered. They felt they had found something better. To many the Movement became the very bread of life. Hunger, cold, the aching remembrance of a happier past were all forgotten. To those in dire trouble — and in those years millions of Germans were — nothing can be so heartening as the cheerful society of comrades in misfortune…
Hitler turned the great and divided mass of post-war Germany’s aggrieved and disgruntled into an enthusiastic and disciplined army of good companions. That they were one day to become cruel masters and bad neighbours to others does not diminish the magnitude of his service to his own countrymen at the time. On a larger scale it was not incomparable to that which General Booth performed for the down-and-outs of industrial Britain. It explains their subsequent devotion and gratitude to the iron regimen of the revolutionary dictatorship…
After the World Slump set in in the autumn of 1929, the Nazis began to recruit in growing numbers from the working masses… Everything that Hitler had repeated so often against the capitalist system was now seen by the working man to be true. He stood before them in their hour of darkest suffering as a kind of Robin Hood, who also was ready to mulct their rich oppressors to give them bread and justice. To the six million unemployed proletarians he promised labour, decent conditions and a stake in the country at the expense of the international financier who first exploited and then neglected them. To the peasant he promised the freedom of his land, now mortgaged to the Jewish usurer; to the small shopkeeper and trader, a fair chance against the cut-throat competition of the big trusts and multiple stores. This ordinary German seemed to understand the troubles of all Germany and to be eager to take them on his own broad shoulders. The allegiance he won in these years of suffering cannot be measured in mere numbers…
Though still resolved to avoid any too violent measures that might risk drowning the young Revolution in a sea of blood, the Nazi leaders, as they felt the surge of renascent youth which they themselves had aroused, became increasingly bellicose and intransigent. Theirs was the pirates’ adage — we must advance or be undone…
Compromise was impossible: twice in 1932 Hitler, at the head of the largest parliamentary Party in the State, refused to take office as Vice-President without complete power to carry out his revolutionary plans, The aim of the Nazis was not Ministerial posts and salaries for their own sake but the means to create a revolutionary civilisation and society. To achieve that end, every means was justifiable in their stern, eager, humourless eyes — cruelty, intolerance, even the grossest injustice…
On January 30th, 1933, the awaited day came. After every expedient had been tried by the democratic politicians and the old ruling class to keep him out, Hitler, long the leader of the largest Party in the State, was invited by President Hindenburg to form a Government. The National Socialists had beaten the parliamentarians at their own game. A new one was now to begin. All night long the endless torchlight processions filed past the aged soldier President and the new Chancellor of the Reich standing motionless and smiling at his window…
Pat Walsh 