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- THE RISE OF THE FOURTH REICH -

 

Everyone likes to say, "Hitler did this", and, "Hitler did that". But the truth is Hitler did very little. He was a world class tyrant, but the evil actually done by the Third Reich, from the death camps to WW2 was all done by German citizens who were afraid to question if what they were told by their government was the truth or not, and who because they did not want to admit to themselves that they were afraid to question the government, refused to see the truth behind the Reichstag Fire, refused to see the invasion by Poland was a staged fake, and followed Hitler into national disaster.

 

The German people of the late 1930s imagined themselves to be brave. They saw themselves as the heroic Germans depicted by the Wagnerian Operas, the descendants of the fierce Germanic warriors who had hunted wild boars with nothing but spears and who had defeated three of Rome's mightiest legions in the Teutenberg Forest.

 

But in truth, by the 1930s, the German people had become civilized and tamed, culturally obsessed with fine details in both science and society. Their self-image of bravery was both salve and slavery. Germans were required to behave as if they were brave, even when they were not.

It's easy to look back and realize what a jerk Hitler was. But at the time, Hitler looked pretty good to the German people, with the help of the media. He was TIME Magazine's Man Of The Year in 1938. The German people assumed they were safe from a tyrant. They lived in a Republic, after all, with strict laws regarding what the government could and more importantly could not do. Their leader was a devoutly religious man, and had even sung with the boy's choir of a monastery in his youth.

German moderates and German elites underestimated Hitler, assuming that most people would not succumb to his Manichean unreason; they didn’t think that his hatred and mendacity could be taken seriously. They were proven wrong. People were enthralled by the Nazis cunning transposition of politics into carefully staged pageantry, into flag-waving martial mass. At solemn moments, the National Socialists would shift from the pseudo-religious invocation of Providence to traditional Christian forms: In his first radio address to the German people, twenty-four hours after coming to power, Hitler declared, “The National Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. They regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.”

 

Sound a bit familiar???

The reality was that the German people, as individuals, had lost their courage. The German government preferred it that way as a fearful people are easier to rule than a courageous one. But the German people didn't wish to lose their self-image of courage. So, when confronted with a situation demanding individual courage, in the form of a government gone wrong, the German people simply pretended that the situation did not exist. And in that simple self-deception lay the ruin of an entire nation and the coming of the second World War.

 

When the Reichstag burned down, most Germans simply refused to believe suggestions that the fire had been staged by Hitler himself. They were afraid to. But so trapped were the Germans by their belief in their own bravery that they willed themselves to be blind to the evidence before their eyes, so that they could nod in agreement with Der Führer while still imagining themselves to have courage, even as they avoided the one situation which most required real courage; to stand up to Hitler's lies and deceptions.

 

When Hitler requested temporary extraordinary powers, powers specifically banned under German law, but powers Hitler claimed he needed to have to deal with the "terrorists", the German people, having already sold their souls to their self-delusions, agreed. The temporary powers were conferred, and once conferred lasted until Germany itself was destroyed.

 

When Hitler staged a phony invasion from Poland, the vast majority of the German people, their own self-image dependent on continuing blindness to Hitler's deceptions, did not question why Poland would have done something so stupid, and found themselves in a war. But Hitler knew he ruled a nation of cowards, and knew he had to spend the money to make the new war something cowards could fight and win. He decorated his troops with regalia to make them proud of themselves, further trapping them in their self-image. Hitler copied the parade regalia of ancient Rome, to remind the Germans of the defeat of the legions at the Teutenberg Forest. Talismans were added from orthodox religions and the occult to fill the soldiers with delusions of mystical strengths and an afterlife if they fell in battle. Finally, knowing that it takes courage to kill the enemy face to face, Hitler spent vast sums of money on his wonder weapons, airplanes, submarines, ultra-long range artillery, the world's first cruise missile and the world's first guided missile, weapons that could be used to kill at a distance, so that those doing the killing need not have to face the reality of what they were doing.

 

The German people were lured into WW2 not because they were brave, but because they were cowards who wanted to be seen as brave, and found that shooting long range weapons at people they could not see took less courage than standing up to Hitler. Sent into battle by that false image of courage, the Germans were dependent on their wonder-weapons. When the wonder-weapons stopped working, the Germans lost the war.

 

 

The American people imagine themselves to be brave. They see themselves as the heroic Americans depicted by Western Movies, the descendants of the fierce patriot warriors who had tamed the frontier and defeated the might of the British Empire.

 

But in truth, by the dawn of the third millennium, the American people have become civilized and tamed, culturally obsessed with fine details in both science and society. Their self-image of bravery is both salve and slavery. Americans are required to behave as if they are brave, even when they are not.

 

The American people assume they are safe. They live in a Republic, after all, with strict laws regarding what the government can and more importantly cannot do. Their leader is a devoutly religious man.

 

The reality is that the American people, as individuals, have lost their courage. The government prefers it that way as a fearful people are easier to rule than a courageous one. But Americans don't wish to lose their self-image of courage. So, when confronted with a situation demanding courage, in the form of a government gone wrong, the American people simply pretend that the situation does not exist.

 

When the World Trade Towers collapsed, most Americans simply refused to believe suggestions that the attacks had been staged by parties working for the US Government itself. Americans were afraid to, even as news reports surfaced proving that the US Government had announced plans for the invasion of Afghanistan early in the year, plans into which the attacks on the World Trade Towers which angered the American people into support of the already-planned war fit entirely too conveniently. But so trapped are Americans by their belief in their own bravery that they will themselves to be blind to the evidence before their eyes, so that they can nod in agreement with the government while still imagining themselves to have courage, even as they avoid the one situation which most requires real courage; to stand up to the government's lies and deceptions. The vast majority of the American people, their own self-image dependent on continuing blindness to the government's deceptions, never question why Afghanistan would have done something so stupid as to attack the United States, and as a result, Americans find themselves in a war.

 

Now the US Government has requested temporary extraordinary powers, powers specifically banned under Constitutional law, but powers the government is claiming they need to have to deal with the "terrorists". The American people, having already sold their souls to their self-delusions, are agreeing. The temporary powers recently conferred will be no more temporary in America than they were in Germany.

 

The US Government knows they rule a nation of cowards. The government has had to spend the money to make the new war something cowards can fight. The government has decorated the troops with regalia to make them proud of themselves, further trapping them in their self-image. Talismans are added from orthodox religions and the occult to fill the soldiers with delusions of mystical strengths and an afterlife if they fall in battle. Finally, knowing that it takes courage to kill the enemy face to face, the United States government has spent vast sums of money on wonder weapons, airplanes, submarines, ultra-long range artillery, cruise missiles, and guided missiles, weapons that kill at a distance, so that those doing the killing need not have to face the reality of what they are doing.

Hitler was TIME Magazine's Man Of The Year in 1938. Stalin was TIME Magazine's Man Of The Year for 1939 and 1942. Both of these men, and many others also celebrated by the media, were unimaginable monsters. The lesson from these facts is that it isn't easy to spot a genocidal tyrant when you live with one, especially one whom the press supports and promotes. Tyrants become obvious only when looking back, after what they have done becomes known. The German people did not stand up to Hitler because their media betrayed them, just as the American media is betraying the American people by willingly, voluntarily, even proudly, abandoning its traditional role as watchdog against government abuse.

 

It is the very nature of power that it attracts the sort of people who should not have it. The United States, as the world's last superpower, is a prize that attracts men and women willing to do absolutely anything to win that power, and hence are also willing to do absolutely anything with that power once they have it. If one thinks about it long enough, one will realize that all tyrants, past and most especially present, MUST use deception on their population to initiate a war. No citizen of a modern industrialized nation will send their children off to die in a war to grab another nation's resources and assets, yet resources and assets are what all wars are fought over. The nation that wishes to initiate a war of conquest must create the illusion of an attack or a threat to start a war, and must always give their population of cowards an excuse never to question that carefully crafted illusion.

 

It is naive, not to mention racist to assume that tyrants appear only in other nations and that some how America is immune simply because we're Americans. America has escaped the clutches of a dictatorship thus far only through the efforts of those citizens who, unlike the Germans of the 1930s, have the moral courage to stand up and point out where the government is lying to the people. And unless more Americans are willing to have that kind of individual courage, then future generations may well look back on the American people with the same harshness of judgment with which we look back on the 1930s Germans.


Warfare Theology and The Coming 4th Reich!

 

Comparing America to the 3rd Reich seems to be becoming a pastime in America today. Why is that? What is it about America's New World Order, and it’s War on Terror, that reminds us of Germany in the 1930s? George W. Bush, with support from the religious right, and the Christian coalition, are waging a war. How did all this begin? What is the fuel for this new surge of military might? Where did this new "Warfare Theology" come from?


An Overview Of The War On Terrorism

 


The NAZI Mind-set in
America

By Jacob G. Hornberger

August 16, 1995


Before the end of World War II, in 1944, Friedrich A. Hayek, who was later to win the Nobel memorial prize in economic science, startled the Western world with a book entitled The Road to Serfdom. Hayek argued that despite the war against Nazi Germany, the economic philosophy of the Nazis and communists was becoming the guiding light for American and British policy makers. In his forward to the 1972 edition of the book, Hayek wrote:

But after war broke out I felt that this widespread misunderstanding of the political systems of our enemies, and soon also of our new ally, Russia, constituted a serious danger which had to be met by a more systematic effort. Also, it was already fairly obvious that England herself was likely to experiment after the war with the same kind of policies which I was convinced had contributed so much to destroy liberty elsewhere... Opinion moves fast in the United States, and even now it is difficult to remember how comparatively short a time it was before The Road to Serfdom appeared that the most extreme kind of economic planning had been seriously advocated and the model of Russia held up for imitation by men who were soon to play an important role in public affairs... Be it enough to mention that in 1934 the newly established National Planning Board devoted a good deal of attention to the example of planning provided by these four countries: Germany, Italy, Russia, and Japan.

 

As the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II approaches, Americans must ask themselves a troubling question: Did Hayek's concerns become reality - have Americans, in fact, traveled the road to serfdom the past fifty years? Or, put another way, did the Nazis lose the military battles but win the war for the hearts and minds of the American people?

 

Consider, for example, the Nazi economic system. Who can argue that the American people do not believe in and support most of its tenents? For example, how many Americans today do not unequivocally support the following planks of the Nationalist Socialist (NAZI) Party of Germany, adopted in Munich on February 24, 1920:

We ask that the government undertake the obligation above all of providing citizens with adequate opportunity for employment and earning a living. The activities of the individual must not be allowed to clash with the interests of the community, but must take place within its confines and be for the good of all. (My Note: It takes a Village, or Family Values). Therefore, we demand an end to the power of the financial interests. We demand profit sharing in big business. We demand a broad extension of care for the aged. We demand... the greatest possible consideration of small business in the purchases of the national, state, and municipal governments. In order to make possible to every capable and industrious (citizen) the attainment of higher education and thus the achievement of a post of leadership, the government must provide an all-around enlargement of our system of public education... We demand the education at government expense of gifted children of poor parents... The government must undertake the improvement of public health by protecting mother and child, by prohibiting child labor - by the greatest possible support for all clubs concerned with the physical education of youth. We combat the... materialistic spirit within and without us, and are convinced that a permanent recovery of our people can only proceed from within on the foundation of The Common Good Before the Individual Good. 
 

I repeat: How many Americans today do not unequivocally support most, if not all, of these Nazi economic and political principles?

And if there is any doubt whether the Nazi economic philosophy did, in fact, win the hearts and minds of the American people, consider the following description of the Nazi economic system by Leonard Peikoff in his book The Ominous Parallels:

 

Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation's economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of control. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to property - so long as the state reserves to itself the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property.


What American objects to these principles of the Nazi economic system? Don't most Americans favor the planned economy, the regulated economy, the controlled economy? Don't most Americans favor the type of economic controls, high taxes, government-business partnerships, licensing, permits, and a myriad other economic regulations?

 

The truth is that Hayek's warning was ignored. Having defeated the Nazis in battle, Americans became ardent supporters and advocates of Nazi economic policies.

 

Why? Part of the answer lies in another feature that was central to the Nazi way of life - public schooling: "On, No! You have gone too far this time," the average American will exclaim. "Public schooling is a distinctively American institution - as American as apple pie and free enterprise." The truth as Sheldon Richman documents so well in his new book, Separating School & State, 20th-century Americans adopted the idea of a state schooling system in the latter part of the 19th century from - you guessed it - Prussia! And as Mr. Richman points out, public schooling has proven as successful in the United States as it did in Germany. Why? Because it has succeeded in its goal of producing a nation of "good, little citizens" - people who pay their taxes on time, follow the rules, obey orders, condemn and turn in the rule breakers, and see themselves as essential cogs in the national wheel. Consider the words of Richard Ebeling, in his introduction to Separating School & State:

 

In the hands of the state, compulsory public education becomes a tool for political control and manipulation - a prime instrument for the thought police of the society. And precisely because every child passes through the same indoctrination process - learning the same "official history" the same "civic virtues," the same lessons of obedience and loyalty to the state - it becomes extremely difficult for the independent soul to free himself from the straight jacket of the ideology and values the political authorities wish to imprint upon the population under its jurisdiction. For the communists, it was the class struggle and obedience to the Party and Comrade Stalin; for the fascists, it was worship of the nation-state and obedience to the Duce; for the Nazis it was race purity and obedience to the Führer. The content has varied, but the form has remained the same. Through the institution of compulsory state education; the child is to be molded like wax into the shape desired by the state and its educational elite.


We should not believe that because ours is a freer, more democratic society, the same imprinting procedure has not occurred even here, in
America. Every generation of school-age children has imprinted upon it a politically correct ideology concerning America's past and the sanctity of the role of the state in society. Practically every child in the public school system learns that the "robber barons" of the 19th century exploited the common working man; that unregulated capitalism needed to be harnessed by enlightened government regulation beginning in the Progressive era at the turn-of-the-century; that wild Wall Street speculation was a primary cause of the Great Depression; that only Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal saved America from catastrophe; and that American intervention in foreign wars has been necessary and inevitable, with the United States government required to be a global leader and an occasional world policeman.

 

This brings us to the heart of the problem, the core of the Nazi mind-set: that the interests of the individual must be subordinated to the interests of the nation. This is the principle that controls the minds of the American people, just as it controlled the minds of the German people sixty years ago. Each person is viewed like a bee in a hive; his primary role in life is to serve the hive and the ruler of the hive, and to be sacrificed when the hive and its ruler consider it necessary. This is why Americans of our time, unlike their ancestors, favor such things as income taxation, Social Security, socialized medicine, and drug laws; they believe, as did Germans in the 1930's, that their bodies, lives, income, and property; in the final analysis, are subordinate to the interests of the nation.

 

As you read the following words of Adolf Hitler, ask yourself which American politician, which American bureaucrat, which American schoolteacher, which American citizen would disagree with the principles to which Hitler subscribed:

 

It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole; that pride and conceitedness; the feeling that the individual... is superior, so far from being merely laughable, involve great dangers for the existence of the community that is a nation; that above all the unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual; and that the higher interests involved in the life of the whole must here set the limits and lay down the duties of the interests of the individual.


Even though the average American enthusiastically supports the Nazi economic philosophy, he recoils at having his beliefs labeled as "Nazi". Why? Because, he argues, the Nazi government, unlike the
US government, killed six million people in concentration camps; and this mass murder of millions of people, rather than economic philosophy, captures the true essence of the Nazi label.

 

What Americans fail (or refuse) to recognize is that the concentration camps were simply the logical extension of the Nazi mind-set! It does not matter whether there were six million killed - or six hundred - or six - or even one. The evil, the terrible, black evil - is the belief that a government should have the power to sacrifice even one individual for the good of the nation. Once this basic philosophical premise and political power are conceded, innocent people, beginning with a few and inevitably ending in multitudes; will be killed, because "the good of the nation" always ends up requiring it.



No Tears for the Führer

 

By: Stephen Berry

 

Theories which have placed great emphasis on racial or national characteristics are out of favour with today's politicians in the West. This was not always so. The first half of the 20th century saw in Europe a rise of groups who espoused some form of racialism or nationalism, the most dramatic example of the trend being in Germany. Some commentators, seeking to account for the phenomenon, have looked at the qualities for which the Germans are famous - disciplined work, a love of order and a self-confidence bordering on arrogance - and produced reactions ranging from a mild distaste to an expression of their worst fears that here was a suitable breeding ground for totalitarianism and the party of the Master Race.

 

In 1912, Rupert Brooke, comparing England and Germany, wrote from Berlin:

 

Here tulips bloom as they are told;

Unkempt about those hedges blows

An English unofficial rose;

And there the unregulated sun

Slopes down to rest when day is done,

And wakes a vague unpunctual star,

A slippered Hesper; and there are

Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton

Where das Betreten's not verboten.1

 

Fifty years and two World Wars later, a less restrained Hannah Arendt weighed in with, "Even today, eighteen years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity and living a lie are an integral part of the German national character".2

 

There seem to be two variations on the theme of German national characteristics and their nastiness:

 

(i) The Germans are a bad lot and not to be trusted an inch.

 

(ii) The Germans would like to be good and occasionally are. Unfortunately as soon as some serious problem comes along (e.g. the 1929 crash) they revert to type and become nasty and totalitarian.

 

This second view - the 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' analysis of nation states - enjoyed a burst of popularity in West Germany in the 1980s. At the end of 1982, with 2.5 million unemployed, many West Germans were nervously drawing parallels with events 50 years earlier. The coalition switch of the German Liberal party in September 1982, for example, was closely examined in order to detect any possible signs that it would lead to the kind of political instability which had plagued Germany in the early 1930s.

 

Firmly opposed to theories (i) and (ii) is the idea, most eloquently propounded by David Hume in his essay Of the First Principles of Government, that politics is primarily a matter of opinion. Hume's analysis rules out the notion that there are latent urges in people which politicians can rapidly fashion into coherent political movements. The adoption by any country of a policy - say - of totalitarianism and extreme nationalism glorifying the state is dependent upon the successful development and propagation of an ideology of totalitarianism and extreme nationalism glorifying the state. The process of development and propagation will normally be measured in generations, that being the time required to alter a significant section of opinion in a given population. How does this theory square with the sudden and successful rise of the Nazi party between 1919 and 1933 and its equally startling disappearance from the German political scene after 1945?

 

The answer to this question can be found only after we have distinguished between a political party and an ideology. The British Liberal party of today bears little resemblance to the British Liberal party of the mid-nineteenth century. Previously a party of laissez faire capitalism, it now owes much of its ideology to socialism, a political philosophy which its members have done little to develop. Between 1919 and 1933 Hitler and the leading Nazis were able to produce a superbly efficient party machine, but they did not add substantially to the nationalist ideas which had been developed before the formation of the party. An examination of these ideas reveals the extent that the Nazis were in debt to their more refined precursors of the Wilbelmenian period.

 

Downfall of Liberalism

 

The ascendancy of Classical Liberalism throughout Europe in 1850 proved to be illusory. Ideas developed on the continent during the next 50 years attacked and successfully diminished the influence of the English model of state and society. The attack came at several points. 



German Labor Front (DAF) poster for the 1934 elections for positions on sham workers' councils, which had replaced true works councils.

Translation:

National Community  is the expression of the total unity and uniformity of a people …
The path leads directly from the community of common destiny to the Volksgemeinschaft. The Volksgemeinschaft leads to the achievement-oriented society. The highest aim of National Socialism is to give shape to this society, an aim shared by all working people.
  

"Führer" and  "Volksgemeinschaft"  were the central myths of the Third Reich. In Hitler's world view the Germans were a biological group of people, bound together and unified through the "Bluterbe", the common bloodlines of their forefathers. In order to achieve this inner unity - politically as well as socially - class distinctions, social rank, and group interests were to be shed and the rights of the individual subordinated to the interests of the community and nation.

The Volksgemeinschaft ideology was based on the supposedly "revolutionary and modern" racial doctrine. These ideas held that the Germans were the leading people of the "Aryan race", to be respected as the most superior race on earth. The Volksgemeinschaft was considered by Hitler, to be a community with a common history and destiny.

It was also a meritocracy, an achievement-oriented society in the service of its imperialistic goals. Only those who belonged to it were to have a share in social and economic progress.

 

German social scientists contrasted the Gemeinschaft (community) with the Gesellschaft (society). The 'Community' stressed that the individual could only live a meaningful existence through partnership in a group. The cohesion of such a group was believed to be shaped by unconscious factors, by deep vital forces of instinct, growing organically as part of nature and independent of man's free will. The 'Society' emphasized the individual and his rational motives. 'Society' in this sense was declared to be characteristic of Western bourgeois civilisation; it demanded as its foundation a contractual fidelity which was not needed for the existence of the more primeval and immediate vitality of the 'Community'. Some Germans regarded Gemeinschaft as being peculiarly German (though Pan-Slavs have claimed it as specifically Russian) and extolled it above the mechanistic and legal superficiality of Gesellschaft. A frequent complaint was made against the economic and political conflict which is part and parcel of Western bourgeois society. Moments of temporary unity were exalted.

 

Thus, August 1914 was welcomed by some for making politics unpolitical, i.e. without conflict. Friedrich Meinicke, the historian, wrote, " . . . by cleansing the idea of the nation of everything political and infusing it instead with all the spiritual achievements that have been won, the national idea was raised to the sphere of religion and the eternal".3  Naturally, after the initial euphoria had gone, politics and conflict returned to wartime Germany. At the root of the problem, of course, lay different human beings trying to achieve different things. How was this irritating aspect of the human condition to be minimised, or even abolished? Advanced societies have until now only produced one answer: the use by one group of state power to control their opponents.



Recruitment poster for the Hitler Youth/League of German Girls
(ca. 1940)

Translation:

Young People Serving the Führer

All 10-Year-Olds Join the Hitler Youth

Hitler's perception of this was typically radical. In 1938 he said, "These children come into our organisation at the age of 10 . . . four years later they come from the Youth Group [Jungvolk] into the Hitler Youth and there we hold them for four years ... Then we take them into the Party Workers' Group, then into the Wehrmacht, then back into the S.A. . . . They will never be free in their whole life!". 4

 

Linked to the Gemeinschaft v Gesellschaft dispute was the opposition between spiritual Kultur and Western technological civilisation. The latter began to take an ever more pejorative meaning. Treitschke, the father-figure of German nationalism, wrote, "No nation in the world can think so greatly and so humanly of its state as can Germany. None strives so seriously as the Germans to reconcile the ancient contrasts in the life of the peoples, the power of the state and the liberty of the people, well-being and armed strength, science and faith. And because the foreigners sense this, they hate us". 5  Thomas Mann also represented the contrast to the disadvantage of the West, which wanted to force upon Germany bourgeois democracy, a system which would make Germany stupid and un-German. He proclaimed the affinity between Russian and German culture. "Has anybody ever understood the human meaning of nationalism in a more German way than the greatest Russian moralist?", 6 he wrote of Dostoevsky. Later Mann managed to swallow his distaste for the West and condescended to emigrate to America in 1933. In 1914, this contradiction lay in the future. He welcomed the war as the best safeguard against the democratisation of Germany, as "purification, liberation, an enormous hope . . . The victory of Germany will be a paradox, nay a wonder, a victory of the soul over numbers. The German soul is opposed to the pacifist ideal of civilisation, for is not peace an element of civil corruption?".7

 

The militaristic strain in German nationalism was also reflected by Werner Sombart, a leading economist of his time. He compared the nation of shopkeepers (Great Britain) with the nation of heroes (Germany). "We must recognise everything which resembles Western European ideas or which is even distantly related to commercialism as something much inferior to us . .   Militarism is the supreme manifestation of the heroic spirit. It is the highest form of the union of Potsdam and Weimar. It is Faust and Zarathustra and the Beethoven scores in the trenches . . . ".8  It is normal now to stress the importance of intellectuals who left Germany after the Nazis came to power. In fact, the numbers of emmigrants were not to be compared with the leading figures in every field of intellectual activity who saw the Nazis as the solution to German cultural problems. Gottfried Benn, the poet, remarked, "There seems no doubt to me, that from this transformation [the Nazi take-over] a new man will come forth in Europe, half by mutation, half by breeding: the German man".9 It is clear that intellectuals both provided the ground for Nazism and remained true to the Nazi party when it took power.


The early totalitarian movements of the twentieth century - Communism, Fascism and National Socialism - all share a common utopian objective of remolding society, not merely taking over the state. They sought to shape worldviews and make " new men". They were militant, militarized, political movements - "non-state actors" - that went beyond the borders of the nation-state and sought to erase the distinction between the state and society.Fascism remained the most primitive and least ambitious; it failed because Mussolini's orientation ultimately adulated the state itself. Literally " statist", the Duce feared to disturb it overmuch with ideological innovations. Fascism left no deeper impression on Italy than it did in Spain, where Franco's Falange resembled little more than a brutish form of Spanish reactionary traditionalism.

Communism as envisioned by Lenin and Trotsky was a truly international and anti-state revolutionary force. Anyone who believes Lenin put much emphasis on the interests of the Russian state need only read the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Lenin grasped the reins of the state as head of Sovnarkom out of necessity; without a strong Soviet state, the revolution was doomed so Lenin laid the foundations of a Communist dictatorship that Stalin completed. In doing so, Josef Stalin shifted course dramatically. While remaining a committed builder of Utopia through terror inside the Soviet Union - making a "revolution from above" in the words of one eminent historian - in foreign policy, Stalin eschewed world revolution and gravitated to classic great power realpolitik, Russian chauvinism with a Bolshevik face, and the building of empire. Stalin, like Mussolini, was a true statist - only on a scale beyond the Italian dictator's dreams.

Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Worker's Party were another matter entirely.

Like his fellow totalitarian rulers, Hitler captured the state and made it his own, the dread Third Reich. But the Führer was not beguiled by it, was never satisfied with his Reich - and looked beyond it, even at the end in his Bunker. Hitler's eye was always elsewhere and he was contemptuous of the limited resiliency possessed by states:

For us the idea of the Volk is higher than the idea of the state... it is no accident that religions are more stable than forms of states...In the beginning was the Volk, and only then came the Reich...The state is only an enforced framework. (1)

Hitler subordinated the German state to the Nazi Party whenever possible - giving vast powers to party formations like the SS, SD and his local Nazi plenipotentiaries, the Gauleiters. He permitted state and party authorities to work at cross-purposes, remarking on the positive effects of "friction" and further personalized Nazi rule (thus degrading the prestige of state officials) by the use of the Führer Order.

Of greater import, was Hitler's radical vision that wrecked so much death and destruction but would have wrought still greater evils had Germany won the war. Hitler, as imprecisely as he framed it, was an apostle of the Racial State and genocide. Foremost, the genocide of the Jews. Later, when they were gone, others.

A sinister compound of mythic racism, anti-Semitism, geopolitics and Social Darwinism, Hitler spoke of a transnational "Aryan" superstate that incorporated Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Finland, much of Poland and Belarus (at times, Great Britain) into a new Greater German empire. On occasion, Hitler seemed to speak of a European confederation, at others, annexation. That the Führer aimed at superceding not only the borders but the form of the old Reich is difficult to doubt. Albert Speer's final chapter of Infiltration, his last book, was as chilling as anything one could imagine:

This eastern territory was to have a colonial character and reach all the way to the Urals, the Volga and Baku on the Caspian Sea...the Baltic States would be settled ' with consideration for the Germaification abilities of the Estonians...Ukraine was to be Germanized...the area he [Hitler] said..must lose the character of the Asiatic steppe; it must be Europeanized!

Where would the settlers come from ?

The two or three million people we need....Hitler continued in these nocturnal contemplations...we will have them faster than we think. We'll take them from Germany, the Scandinavian countries, the West European countries, and America.' (2)

Speer estimated that Himmler's "peacetime" program of building and construction in the East was predicated upon a continuous level of over 4 million slave laborers for the territory of the Old Reich alone. And in twenty years approximately 14 million of these slaves would have to be " replaced" having expired from maltreatment and exhaustion. Speer estimated a total human cost for the building program alone, approximately 29 million human beings. This does not count Hitler's intent to drive away or absorb "100 million Slavs ".

Hitler, fortunately, is dead and his genocidal Racial State died with him.....?



1. Lukacs, John. The Hitler of History.

2. Speer, Albert. Infiltration: how Heinrich Himmler Schemed to Build an SS Industrial Empire.

They also provided the socialism in 'National Socialism'. Oswald Spengler's book Prussianism and Socialism was a best seller in the years following World War One. "Only German socialism is real socialism!", he proclaimed. "The old Prussian spirit and socialism, although today they seem to be opposed to each other, are really one and the same. I call  upon all those who have marrow in their bones and blood in their veins ... Become men! We do not want any more chatter about culture and world citizenship and Germany's spiritual mission. We need hardness, a bold skepticism, a class of socialist mastermen".10  In his last published book, The Hour of Decision, Spengler in typically heroic prose exults in his rejection of the values which had dominated Europe since the Renaissance. "The cowardly security of the end of the last century is ended. The dangerous life, the stuff of which history is made, comes into its own once more. The time is coming - no, it is already here! - which has no place for tender souls and weakly ideals. Primitive barbarism, which for centuries lay hidden and fettered beneath the strict forms of culture, is breaking out once more now that culture is complete, and civilisation has turned to healthy warlike joy in one's own strength, which despises the past of rationalist thought".11

 

People who see the success of Nazism as the result of the 1929 economic crash, or some deeply ingrained characteristics and traditions in German society, or a combination of both, are not giving full due to one stark, simple fact; namely the development in Germany of ideas rejecting unashamedly the liberal-rationalist worldview. That these ideas should have been exploited by a more than competent politician who proceeded to give them a consistent application comes as a surprise only to those who have been reared on the compromises, the 'moderation' and the U-turns of post-war British politics. Germans (and in guilt-ridden , West Germany there are not a few) who search for revivals of Nazism in economically depressed conditions must explain where this revival will originate. And here, of course, they run into difficulties. There are in Germany today no substantial political movements committed to the overthrow of the typical 'Open' Western Society. In the 1920s both the Nazis and the communists were set on destroying it and one of them succeeded. In 2000 Neo-Nazis receive occasional headlines but can be expected to have as little significant effect on West German society as leftist terror groups like the Baader-Meinbof, and both movements are probably even less ideologically noteworthy than Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists of the 1930s.

 

Nazism after 1945

 

The disappearance of Nazism after 1945 has aroused much less interest than its growth up to 1933. This is probably largely due to the desire to equate Nazism and the Nazi party. Germany was defeated in 1945 and the Nazi party prohibited; therefore that was the end of Nazism (Q.E.D.). In fact, as I have tried to show, the basis of an ideology for the Nazi party existed and would have continued to be in existence whether the Nazis had taken power or not in 1933. Similarly, the banning of the Nazi party in 1945 did not necessarily mean the end of Nazi ideas. Their lack of influence after 1945 requires another explanation.

 

The importance of the Allied occupation in the years following 1945 must not be exaggerated. After the Second World War no one in the Allied camp questioned the necessity of a thorough purge of Nazis and their supporters. "It is a mistake to try and write out on little pieces of paper", wrote Churchill to Eden in 1944, "what the vast emotions of an outraged and quivering world will be, either immediately after the struggle is over or when the inevitable cold fit follows the hot ... ". 12

 

The hot fit came quickly. It is estimated that nearly 150,000 allegedly prominent Nazis, members of the S.S. or the Gestapo and high ranking officers of the armed forces, were thrown into internment camps immediately after capture. Conditions at the end of 1945 were bad and the execution of the spirit of J.S.C. 1067 (the military directive which Roosevelt had stiffened so that the German people should be made to realise that they had all connived at Nazi crimes) made matters worse. Various authors have given examples to show that the policy was pursued fairly rigorously: one should suffice here. 

 

Ernst von Salomon, a nationalist but never a Nazi, was flung into a camp with a Jewish woman with whom he had lived during the war (18 months later he was released without charges being preferred against him). On arriving at the camp von Salomon, along with others, was beaten up, his teeth knocked out and his face covered with blood. When he staggered to his feet he turned to the officer who had sat chewing gum whilst the beating went on and said, "You are no gentleman". (Another European falls victim to the propaganda that the English public school is the fountain of morality in the Anglo-Saxon world)  This remark was greeted with roars of laughter. "We are boys from Mississippi", the Military Police declared and kicked von Salomon through the door."13

 

De-nazification was at first pursued vigorously, particularly by the Americans. In their zone everyone over the age of 18 had to answer a questionnaire which contained questions about previous political affiliations. According to the results, a German could be classed in one of five categories, each, except the fifth which meant exemption, carrying penalties ranging from death to forfeiture of all property and exclusion from every job except that of manual labour. In all, 12,000,000 questionaires were issued in the American zone resulting in 930,000 sentences. The 'inevitable cold fit' forecast by Churchill followed however, and, linked with the desire of the Allies to build up West Germany as a bulwark against the Soviet Union, proved a moderating influence upon the prosecution of denazification. But the message was clear. The Allies would take strong measures to prevent a resurgence of Nazi activities in their area. The Russians took the same view: they only differed with the Allies about what they would like to replace Nazism with.

 

The old Nazis had therefore the pressing ground of physical safety for assimilating themselves into the democratic and communist systems west and east of the Iron Curtain. But the Allies could not claim that by forcing this 'assimilation' they thereby created a new intellectual climate. Russians failed to build up in Eastern Europe stable system reflecting their view of society. The development of ideas cannot be policed, not even by the most powerful states in the world. The thoroughgoing rejection of Nazism by post-war Germany must be found in a change of heart within Germans themselves.

 

In Foreign Affairs the continuation of Nazi visions of empire was simply not practicable. The results of the Second World War were quite different in Europe from those of the First. At the treaty of Versailles (1919), the Allies had fallen between two stools. They failed either to make Germany powerless or to integrate her fully into the European power structure as Metternich had done with France in 1815. Germany remained united and independent and, although temporarily weak, clearly the strongest power in Europe. The system of alliances which had been used in the previous hundred years to balance the power on Continental Europe was irretrievably smashed. The Soviet Union had bowed temporarily out of great power politics and the Austro-Hungarian Empire had become a group of East European nation states, weak and enticing. The demands exacted from Germany at Versailles were sufficiently strong to make her seek revenge. The safeguards against the break-up of the Versailles order were insufficient to deter it. The German state therefore possessed motive, opportunity and strength to expand after 1919. That the Nazi ideology of Lebensraum took advantage of these factors should have surprised no one. In 1945, although Germany was more harshly punished than in 1919, the splitting of Europe between America and the Soviet Union, the two clearly dominant powers after the war, left West Germany no scope for an adventurous foreign policy.

 

Considerations of Realpolitik were- not the only factors working against Nazism. The opening of the concentration camps at the end of the war provoked a widespread revulsion in the world and within Germany itself. This revelation was new to most Germans and particularly bitter and shaming for a people which had prided itself on a powerful cultural and humanitarian tradition.  The devastation at the end of the war and the years immediately after (it is estimated that 2 million Germans died as a result of the deprivation following the war) affected the German population in a way that was never the case between 1914 and 1919. If the catastrophe of 'year zero' (as some Germans called 1945) did play a significant role in discrediting Nazism and building those values which contributed to a non- totalitarian West Germany, then ironically Hitler should be given some credit, and that for a number of reasons.

 

Hitler's Final Bequest

 

One of the great myths about Hitler is that at the end he was a broken man, that he had lost control of events, that he directed armies which no longer existed, that he fantasized over victory in the ruins of Berlin, that, in short, the only place he was fit to command was the lunatic asylum. Hitler was ill at the end of the war and suffered (like Roosevelt and Churchill) from attacks of nerves, but this never constituted a collapse. In fact, if anything the contrary is true. In August 1944 Hitler emerged from what Göbbels in his diaries called the Führer-crisis of 1943 and early 1944 (the crisis consisted of indecisiveness and lack of interest in the war) and once more displayed his qualities of old.

 

In August 1944 Germany had reached a position akin to that of September 1918. In both instances it was clear that Germany had lost the war even though German territory had not yet been occupied. Allied troops were advancing everywhere against weaker German forces and internally Germany was beginning to suffer as a result of the Allied blockade. In 1918 Ludendorff, the German commander, had reacted by calling his political opponents into government in order to negotiate peace. On August 22nd 1944, Hitler arrested and detained 5,000 politicians and civil servants of the Weimar Republic, amongst them the two most important politicians of the immediate post-war Bundesrepublik - Adenauer and Schumacher. He thus destroyed the effectiveness of that group to whom Ludendorff had given power and confirmed his professed desire to fight until 'five minutes past midnight'.


Simultaneously he began a propaganda campaign which stressed the potential of the new wonder weapons, the Vls and the V2s, and reminded the Germans of the 'Miracle of Brandenburg', when the Prussia of Frederick the Great had been saved by the death of the Russian Tsar. The
Ardennes offensive, the last German attack of the war in winter 44/45, must be seen for its importance in both foreign and domestic affairs. By attacking in the West Hitler put the question to Churchill and Roosevelt, 'Whom do you wish to see standing at the Rhine, me or Stalin?'. More important, he also made clear to those elements of the German population who wanted to let the Western Allies in (and they were numerous) that even partial-defeatism was no part of his strategy.

 

The final steps toward national disaster came on 18th and 19th March. 1945. Hitler gave two orders for the evacuation of the civilian population from the battle areas and the destruction of all installations which might be of some use to the enemy. Such a scorched earth policy in Germany and the creation of countless thousands of refugees were attacked by Albert Speer, the German war production minister, as condemning a whole people to death. Hitler, replying with Caliban-like malignancy, gave some indication of his attitude towards the German people at the end of the war and the role, or lack of one, he saw for them after he had gone. "If the war is lost, so is the people. It is not necessary to pay respect to the basics which the German people need to eke out a primitive existence. On the contrary, it is better to destroy those very things. The German people has proven itself as the weaker and the future belongs to the stronger people of the East. The people who remain after the war are without exception the inferior; the best have died in battle".14 The spirit of these lines is fully in accord with Hitler's philosophy and reinforces a prophecy he made in November 1941 when, after the halt of the German armies before Moscow, he first considered failure. "I am, on this issue, as cold as ice. If the German people are not sufficiently strong or ready to sacrifice their blood to ensure their existence, then they should disappear and be extinguished by a stronger power. I will weep no tears for the German people".15  Nor have they for him.

 

After the First World War Hitler derived political capital from the idea that Germany had not been militarily defeated in 1918 - rather she had been 'stabbed in the back' by people in high places who had needlessly capitulated. The continuation of the war until the bitter end in 1945 meant that no Nazi group could delude Germans about the outcome and consequences of that war, that the thousand years of German history before 1933 would have more influence than the vision of the thousand years which Hitler had promised in 1933. Napoleon was the last person before Hitler to seriously undertake the building of an empire throughout Europe. 33 years after his downfall, his nephew came to power in France, not the least of whose attraction was that he carried the same name as his uncle, and with it some of the glitter. More than 33 years have passed since 1945, but a similar development in West Germany remains the remotest of possibilities.

  1. 'Where das Betreten's not verboten' means roughly 'Where taking a walk is not forbidden'. The lines are taken from the poem 'The Old Vicarage, Grantchester' in 1914 and Other Poems (Faber and Faber, 1941).
  2. Quoted in Amos Elon, Journey Through a Haunted Land
  3. Quoted in James J. Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (Methuen, London 1982)
  4. Christian Zentner: Adolf Hitler (Delplin Verlag GMBH, Munich 1979)
  5. Quoted in Hans Kohn, Wege und lrrwege (Droste Verlag, Duesseldorf 1962)
  6. Ibid. 
  7. Ibid. 
  8. Ibid. 
  9. Quoted in Gordon A. Craig, Germany 1866-1945 (Oxford University Press,
    1981)
  10. Kohn, op. cit.
  11. Leland Stowe, in the prophetically titled Nazi Germany Means War (Faber and Faber, London 1933)
  12. Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Vol 6.
  13. In Der Fragebogen; 'the questionnaire', Ernst von Salomon (Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg 1951). Quoted by Aidan Crawley, The Rise of West Germany 1945-72 (Collins, London 1973). Evidently Crawley was not convinced that Americans could behave naughtily, so he asked Carl Blessing, later President of the Federal Bank, who was in the same camp, if von Salomon's version was true. Blessing confirmed it and said he himself got the same treatment.



Susanne Heim. Kalorien, Kautschuk, Karrieren: Pflanzenzüchtung und landwirtschaftliche Forschung in Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituten 1933-1945. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2003. Reviewed by: Mark Finlay, Department of History, Armstrong Atlantic State University.


 
Yet Another Tool of Dictatorship: The Agricultural Sciences under NationalSocialism


It is uncommon for a history of the agricultural sciences to stir up issues in several branches of German historiography. Susanne Heim's Kalorien, Kautschuk, Karrieren is an exception to this pattern, for the work offers an important analysis of scientific practice under National Socialism, Nazi agricultural policy, Nazi autarkic strategies, and the regime's expansionist initiatives into the occupied territories of eastern Europe. This well-researched and convincingly argued book emerged from a project that is tracing the history of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (KWG), a leading center of German scientific research, during the era of National Socialism. The result is far more than an institutional history, however, for Heim offers an impressive addition to an understanding of the interplay of science and politics during the Nazi era.

 

The work is divided into three distinct sections. In the first, Heim focuses on KWG's research on plant breeding, nutrition, and other strategies to rationalize agricultural production. In the 1920s, these studies sought to improve agricultural productivity and reduce agitation in rural areas. After 1933, when Herbert Backe became state secretary in the Reich Ministry for Nutrition and Agriculture, this agenda evolved seamlessly into service for the Nazi state. Among other priorities, Backe hoped to develop and improve domestic plant varieties that could close the "gap" between Germany's production of and its demand for fats and proteins. Under the Four-Year Plan, Backe further mobilized KWG scientists and encouraged their research in the service of the National Socialists' autarkic strategy. Heim outlines a comprehensive nutritional and agricultural research program that prepared the nation for war in several ways: animal physiologists studied fodder crops that could improve the efficiency of livestock production; animal breeders mastered techniques of artificial insemination; experts in ecology sought new sources of protein from the fish in German lakes and rivers; and others investigated the European fiber crops that could reduce the regime's dependence upon imported jute, sisal, and other plants. As war approached, the KWG's agricultural scientists conducted their work with greater haste and intensity.

 

German victories on the eastern front in 1941 and 1942 brought new opportunities for this research agenda. Backe, who had been raised in the Black Sea city of Batumi, readily conceived of a Greater Germany that extended deep into the Soviet Union, and he used his position to transform the occupied East into a new laboratory for KWG scientists. Plant explorers went on expeditions into Poland, the Balkans, and the occupied Soviet Union in search of plants with useful characteristics. Breeders hoped to develop plant varieties that could adapt to the shorter growing seasons of Russia and the Baltic States. Nutrition experts carefully calculated the food requirements for the typical German worker, as well the minimal requirements of the increasingly large cadre of forced laborers. The scientists and bureaucrats who led the KWG readily and eagerly expanded their operations into the occupied East; in the wake of advancing German armies, the KWG quickly built or funded research facilities in Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece, and other areas newly under German control. In all, these projects comprised a systematic effort to rationally utilize human and agricultural resources of the East. If autarky was unrealistic within the 1933 borders of the Third Reich, it was becoming more feasible as the Nazis began to reshape the economic landscape of eastern and southeastern Europe.

 

In the second section, Heim focuses on the regime's increasingly desperate search for a natural rubber plant that could grow in continental Europe. Despite the attention awarded to "Buna" and other synthetic rubbers, natural rubber remained a wartime imperative. In the 1930s, Soviet scientists had achieved modest success in efforts to develop kok-sagyz, a plant related to the dandelion, as a potential rubber crop. As Soviet rubber research facilities fell into German hands in 1941 and 1942, Nazi leaders Albert Speer, Oswald Pohl, Heinrich Himmler, and Adolf Hitler himself all pushed for the rapid development of kok-sagyz.

 

Heim convincingly demonstrates that in this milieu, the scientific work of the KWG and the political aims of the SS became increasingly interconnected. Scientists tested kok-sagyz at experiment stations in Ukraine and Belarus, geneticists bred varieties at the KWG's institute in Brandenburg, and plant physiologists and forced laborers tended to the young plants that grew at nurseries at Auschwitz and other camps. Although the kok-sagyz project failed to produce rubber in any significant amounts, Heim does not attribute its failures to bureaucratic rivalries, anti-modern ideology, or any of the other flaws of the Nazi state. Instead, she convincingly portrays the project as a well-funded and systematic effort to coordinate the scientific agenda of the KWG with the political agenda of the Nazi regime.

 

In the third section, Heim surveys the long careers of two KWG scientists, Hans Stubbe and Klaus von Rosenstiel. Although this topic detours somewhat from the book's Nazi-era themes, Heim uses their careers to demonstrate the opportunities that Nazi expansionist policies presented for scientific research. For von Rosenstiel, an enthusiastic Nazi supporter, the regime brought him the chance to support and manage the Nazi scientific policies, particularly in the occupied East. After the war, however, von Rosenstiel remained on the fringes of his profession in the Federal Republic; he died in 1973, somewhat mysteriously, in an automobile accident soon after his first return to the USSR since the end of the war. Stubbe, in contrast, struggled to find a niche, during the Third Reich, in which he could pursue his research despite his reluctance to support the Nazi regime. After the war, however, Stubbe's career blossomed as one of the most acclaimed biologists of the German Democratic Republic. As with the other scientists that Heim has studied, these scientists managed to work under National Socialism, guided either by political convictions to advance the Nazi cause, by pragmatic goals to advance their careers, or by an assumption that important science could continue to advance despite the dominant political pressures.

 

Heim's seemingly narrow study of Nazi agricultural and nutritional science offers several contributions to the historiography. First, it should dismiss any lingering assumptions about Richard Walter Darre's leadership of a Nazi agricultural ideology based upon a romantic ideology of "Blood and Soil." Instead, Heim's study presents the KWG's agricultural scientific enterprise as one thoroughly committed to its version of modernity. Second, it challenges an older historiography of German science that focused on the mistakes of "Aryan physics" and other dead-ends. Heim offers a harsh indictment of the scientists' crimes against scientific integrity: they violated the human rights of forced laborers; they abused property and cultural resources in the occupied lands; they stole scientific results from others in order to advance their own careers. Yet the KWG's projects also demonstrate the Nazis' chilling ability to find congruence between science and power. Third, the book adds another layer to an understanding of the regime's plans for the occupied East. With the KWG's agricultural and nutritional experts as willing accomplices, the Nazis nearly reshaped the demographic and economic landscape of Eastern Europe even more than they did.

 


Copyright © 2005 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online.



Brochure for
"Degenerate Music" (1939)
by Hans Severus Ziegler

Ein Volk, Ein Reich ... Und Eine Disko
9/12/2005


A report, unread for 65 years, reveals the Nazis' top priority once they had destroyed the allies, exterminated the Jews and occupied
Europe. They were going to build a big, flash nightspot in Berlin.

For more than half a century, historians have wondered what the Nazis would have done had they won the Second World War. Now the matter can be settled. A report, unread for 65 years, reveals the Nazis' top priority once they had destroyed the allies, exterminated the Jews and occupied
Europe. They were going to build a big, flash nightspot in Berlin.

 

"It'll be the most beautiful, the most modern, the most elegant in Europe", enthused the report's author, Giuseppe Renzetti. "The project is said to have met with the ardent approval of the Führer."

 

Renzetti, Italy's consul in Berlin, told his superiors that already, in mid-1940, the Nazis were preparing their capital for the tourist boom they expected would follow victory. He understood "a manager has already been found for the nightclub and that it had been decided to restrict entry to foreigners, the diplomatic corps and the members of Berlin [high] society."

 

Extracts from the report, dated July 23 1940, were published in Corriere della Sera yesterday. Italy's former consul was as close as any foreigner to Hitler; Göbbels wrote that Renzetti could almost be seen as a Nazi. To compile his report the diplomat interviewed top officials including the SS leader, Heinrich Himmler.

 

But Renzetti found the Germans split over what to do with Britain. Some argued it should be "destroyed". Some wanted "an understanding". The Führer, he said, was with the doves. "Hitler has wanted to take into account the wishes of a large mass of the Germans who feel themselves to be related to the British [and] fear others could profit more than them from the British empire's destruction." He said Hitler also felt British and German industry could find a way to coexist.

 

Renzetti said the Nazis were anticipating a post-war Europe in which they would be "feared and respected". The economy would be run centrally in collaboration with the Italians, German colonists would be settled in areas such as Alsace and Lorraine, and society would be ruled with a strong hand. Himmler, he said, had indicated a "strong interior policy aimed at avoiding the sort of disturbances that often follow a war". The head of the SS aimed "to continue with surveillance operations both of the masses and individuals". But in passing, Himmler noted that he had been disappointed with the battlefield performance of SS troops. In the new order, Renzetti reported, Germany itself would be homogenised and its strong regional traditions ended.

 

Renzetti, who had acted as a go-between, carrying messages from Hitler to Mussolini, was consul in Berlin from 1938 until 1941 when he was posted to Stockholm. He died near Pisa in 1953.

 



The story of the world’s first sexdoll or ”gynoid,” built in 1941 by a team of craftsmen from Germany’s Hygiene Museum Dresden, first appeared in a Norwegian newspaper, The  The project  was supervised by the famous preparator and technician  Franz Tschakert. The ”Father of the woman of glass”, which happened to be the sensation in 1930’s II. International Hygiene-Exhibit, used his skills  and experience in order to create a kind of doll the world had never seen before.

 
The ”field-hygienic project” was an initiative of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, who regarded the doll as an ”counterbalance” (or regulating effect) for the sexual drive of his storm troopers.  In one of his letters, dated 20.11.1940 he mentions the ”unnecessary  losses” the Wehrmacht had suffered in France inflicted by street prostitutes:
 
The greatest danger in Paris are the wide-spread and uncontrolled whores, picking by clients in bars, dancehalls and other places. It is our duty to prevent soldiers from risking their health, just for the sake of a quick adventure.




Joachim Mrugowsky
(August 15, 1905 in Rathenow – June 2, 1948) Hygienist. Associate Professor, Medical Doctorate, Chief of Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS. Senior Hygienist at the Reich Physician SS, SS and Walfen SS Colonel, defendant in the Doctors Trial.


His father was a general practitioner, who was killed at the beginning of World War I.


In 1925, Joachim Mrugowdsky began his studies of natural sciences and medicine in Halle. He completed the studies in 1930-1931 with a medical doctorate and a doctorate of natural sciences.


After a two-year internship, he became an assistant at the Hygiene Institute of the University of Halle. Mrugowsky was made an associate professor in the area of hygiene at the University of Berlin, September 1944.


Since 1930, Mrugowsky had been involved in the Nazi ideology, first being the group leader of a local National Socialist German Students' Association then the NSDAP. In 1931, he joined the SS where he achieved the rank of colonel in both the General SS and the Waffen SS.


In 1940, as the troop physician of an SS "Das Reich" Division hospital company, Mrugowsky participated in the conquest of the Western Europe.

He was implicated in all medical experiments, with the exception of the aviation ones, which were conducted on concentration camp prisoners. He was prosecuted at the Nuremberg Medical Trial. Mrugowsky was condemned to death in August 1947, and executed on June 2, 1948.
 

The project – called Burghild in the first place – was considered ”Geheime Reichssache”, which was ”more secret than top secret” at the time.  Himmler put his commander-in-chief SS-Dr. Joachim Mrurgowsky in charge, the highest ranking officer of
Berlin's notorious SS-institute.

All members of the team – also Tschakert – ware bound to keep the secret.
 
In July 1941, when Hitler’s army attacked Russia, an unknown but ambitious Danish SS-Doctor Named Olen Hannussen took over from Mrurgowsky, as the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported. Perhaps he was the one who changed  Burghild to Borghild, which is nothing more than the Danish equivalent.
 
Hannussen pushed everybody forward to make the project a success. The ”galvonoplastical dolls” – manufactured in a bronze mold – were meant to follow the Storm troopers in ” disinfections-trailers” into the enemy’s land, in order to stop them visiting ”infection hearths  like front-brothels and ”loose women”. At least, this was Himmler‘s plan. A psychiatrist Dr. Rudolf Chargeheimer, befriended with Hannussen and also involved in the project, wrote him a letter to clearify the difficulties:
 
Sure thing, purpose and goal of the dolls is to relieve our soldiers. They have to fight and not be on the prowl or mingle with ”foreign womenfolk”. However:  no real men will prefer a doll to a real woman, until our technicians meet the following quality standards:

The synthetic flesh has to feel the same like real flesh
The doll’s body should be as agile and moveable as the real body
The doll’s organ should feel absolutely realistic.  


Between June 1940 – 1941  IG Farben had already developed a number of ”skin-friendly polymers” for the SS. Special characteristics:  high tensile strength and elasticity.

The cast of a suitable model proved to be more difficult.
Borghild was meant to reflect the beauty-ideal of the Nazis, i. e. white skin, fair hair and blue eyes. Although the team considered a doll with brown hair , the SS-Hygiene-Institute insisted on manufacturing a ”Nordish doll.”

Tschakert hoped to plastercast from a living model and a number of famous female athletes were invited to come to his studios, among them Wilhelmina von Bremen and Annette Walter. In the process Tschakert realized it was the wrong way. In a letter to Mrurgowsky he came to the conclusion:

Sometimes the legs are too short and look deformed, or the lady has a hollow back and arms like a wrestler. The overall appearance is always dreadful and I fear there is no other way than to combine.

While Mrurgowsky still favoured a ”whole imprint” of NS-diva Kristina Söderbaum, the Borghild-designer decided to build the doll’s mold in a ”modular way”. In Tschakerts view the doll should be nothing more than a ”female best form”, a ”perfect automaton of lust”, that would combine ”the best of all possible bodies”.

The team agreed on a cheeky and naughty face, a look-a-like of Käthe von Nagy, but the actress politely declined to borrow her face to Tschakert’s doll. After Mrurgowsky’s exit, Dr. Hannussen rejected the idea to cast a face from a living person. He believed in an ”artificial face of lust”, which would be more attractive to soldiers.

In his logbook he wrote:

The doll has only one purpose and she should never become a substitute for the honourable mother at home... When the soldier makes love to Borghild, it has nothing to do with love. Therefore the face of our anthropomorphic sexmachine should be exactly how Weininger described the common  wanton’s face.  
 
Today Arthur Rink, born 1919, a master of art and student of Hitler’s favourite sculptor Arno Breker, is the only living eye-witness of the most discreet kept project of the III. Reich.
 
After a short practical training at ”Puppenwerk Käthe Kruse” he worked since 1937 in Tschakerts studio at the German Hygiene-Museum in Dresden. He joined the Borghild-team as early as 1940: There was on sculptor (rink), a varnisher, a specialist for synthetic materials (Tschakert), a hair-dresser, a lathe operator and  - in the beginning -  a mechanic from ”Würtemberg’s Metallfabrik” in Friedrichshafen. The first construction-document  showed that Tschakert had planned to use” a simple aluminum-skeleton”. But soon he changed his mind and decided to use Elastolin. The synthetic flesh was another problem. Rink: 

The material was not easy to find. Tschakert, an expert on plastics, had tried several materials based on rubber or butyl-rubber: All came from IG Farben or from the Rheinische Gummi- und Celluloid Fabrik. One material was called Ipolex, it was extremly tearproof, but it developed yellow spots when cleaned with certain detergents.”
 
At this stage Rink gave the doll‘s  torso  the finishing touch, working with plaster and a mixture of ”Schwarzmehl (?) and glue” Under Hannussens strict directions  ”ten wanton-faces” (Rink) were modelled, and used by Dr. Chargeheimer in  psychological tests. Chargeheimer and Hannussen were convinced, Borghild’s success would depend in a major way on her ”facial expression”. Contrary to common believe , that men get only aroused through female sexual characteristics they thought it all would ”depend on the right face”. Rinks plasters were used to produce some model-heads in a showroom-factory in Königsberg. Varnished and hair-dressed they looked a bit like wigholders.
 
Purpose of this costly exercise was to find out what type of woman the soldiers would really fancy.  Or like Chargeheimer wrote to Hannussen – ”the idea of beauty harboured by the SS might not be shared by the majority of our soldiers.”  He even considered ”the vulgar could appeal to most ordinary men”. The results of  Dr. Chargeheimers tests at the barracks of Soldatenheim St. Helier  are not known.  Fact is, that at this time, Rink and Tschakert had already finished a complete model of the doll. Arthur Rink made a solemn declaration about what happened next.
 
Three types of dolls were planned : Typ A :168, Typ B : 176, Typ C : 182 cm.
 
Typ B would be the first to go into serial production. The members of the project were divided about Borghild’s breasts. The SS favoured them round and full, Dr. Hannussen insisted on “a rosehip form, that would grip well” and he won the dispute. The first model of Borghild was finished in September 1941. She was exactly the “Nordish type”"
 
The idea of our hairdresser to give the doll a “Schneckenfrisur”(earphones of hair) was rejected by Hannussen. He wanted her to have “a boyish hair-do” to underline that Borghild was “part of the fighting forces”– a field-whore and not an honourable Mother.
 
Borghild’s presentation in Berlin was a great success.  Himmler was there and Dr. Chargeheimer. While the gentlemen examined her artificial orfices, Franz Tschakert was very nervous, but Himmler was so enthusiast that he ordered 50 Borghilds on the spot. It was considered to move to a special production facility , because Tschakert’s studio was too small to cope with the production of 50 dolls. In the face of more and more unpleasant  developments in the east Himmler dropped his plans one week later and cut instead our budget.
 
In the beginning of 1942, some weeks after Stalingrad, the whole project was put on hold. All construction-documents had to be returned to the SS-Hygiene-Institute. The bronze-mold  for Type B was never finished. I have no clue of whereabouts of the doll, but I presume, that she  - like all my plasters and studies –  was send to Berlin. If she was kept in Tschakerts studio in Dresden, it is most likely that she was destroyed in February 1945, when allied bombers destroyed the city.



The Nazis did many odd things. It was as if all the dark dreamscape explored by Dr. Freud was brought into creation. The Nazis were a death cult. Just like any group of people who worship the Devil that is Death like the Skull and Bones students do at Yale, when they had no power, nobody really cared. But when they got power, people die, lots and lots of people.

Just like today, the Germans, in the twisted world of the Nazis, hid paperwork that tracked every single slave and slain human during the Blutfest, they hid this purposefully, to protect rich people.

This doll, for example, shows clearly how mental illness can twist the ability to appreciate living, breathing life forms. Instead of loving and appreciating that which Nature has wrought, people instead are attracted to ugly, deformed emanations like Barbie dolls, for example.

The Nazis wanted not only a perfect superman and superwoman, they wanted one that had no life to it but rather, a cartoon reproduction. So of course, to cut down the interactions of the SS with the slave populations, to sanitize sex and dehumanize the killers even more, the Nazi researchers tried to create out of clay, so to speak, a sex doll that wouldn't distract the future supermen from impregnating their wives by causing excessive attachment.

The committee that created several model dolls tried to reproduce Olympic champions. Only the dolls looked ugly so they patched together the "perfect" doll. They decided this doll had to be athletic, skinny but with big breasts and a frowning face, oddly enough.

This ideal but heartless doll reigns supreme today. She is in many video games as well as the infamous Barbie Dolls by Mattel. The Nazis wanted a lust doll that would be simultaneously unlovable.

Namely, no affection radiating from the face. Hyperbig tits and lips. Little else, the arms reduced to sticks and the legs very long.

Comparing this to Greek statues of Venus and one can see, they are not the same. The torso of the best Aphroditian statues ripple with life. This is because the artists were celebrating sex not denaturizing it. They wanted to inspire feelings of love not cold sexual fury.

In 1816 a superman/monster story was conceived by Mary Wollenstone Shelley, "Frankenstein."  This is a metaphor for the Nazis. They needed soldiers filled with inhuman desire to passionlessly kill inferior humans and to not cleave to anyone by showing even faint sympathy.

The miltiary works hard to instill a love of flag, Führer and comrades as well as death. But not to feel love or sympathy with anyone else. This madness is drilled into the soldier until they can't tell the jointed doll from the living human.

Just this week, a soldier goes on trial within the military because he came home from Iraq and within days, stabbed his 18 year old wife 71 times in the kitchen while playing extremely loud heavy metal neo-Nazi music to drown out her screams.

  

 

 





Under the Weimar Republic, women were able to vote; under the Nazis, nobody was able to vote.

Under Weimar, women's education was very poor; under the Nazis, it was very good.

From 1929 to 1933, following the Great Depression, women were forced to become the main breadwinners; from 1933, it was possible for the man to support his wife on his own wage alone.

Under Weimar, abortion was legal; under the Nazis, it was outlawed.

Under Weimar, birth control was encouraged; under the Nazis, a drive for motherhood was introduced.

Women played a full role in the Nazi Party from an early period. As early as 1928, the leader of the largest feminist organisation in Germany asked Hitler for permission to be incorporated into the Nazi Party. Guida Diehl, Lydia Gottschewski and Gertrud Scholtz-Klink were the three most important women Nazi leaders. They controlled the destinies of millions of German women.

Hanna Reitsch was one of the top German test pilots and many women scientists worked on vital projects for the Nazi regime. Sadly, many women were also among the cruellest of the concentration camp guards.

Overall, the position of women improved under the Nazis, however much it sticks in the throat to admit it. This was particularly true in the field of education.

The Nazis and the German Economy

Germany’s economy was in a mess when Hitler was elected Chancellor in January 1933. Hitler and Nazi propaganda had played on the population’s fear of no hope. Unemployment peaked at 6 million during the final days of the Weimar Republic – near enough 50% of the nation’s working population. Now Hitler decreed that all should work in Nazi Germany and he constantly played on the economic miracle Nazi Germany achieved.

This "economic miracle" was based on unemployment all but disappearing by 1939.

But was this true or did the Nazi propaganda machine move into overdrive to persuade the nation and Europe that she had achieved something that other European nations had not during the time of economic depression?

A number of policies were introduced which caused the unemployment figures to drop.

Women were no longer included in the statistics so any women who remained out of work under the Nazi’s rule did not exist as far as the statistics were concerned.

The unemployed were given a very simple choice: do whatever work is given to you by the government or be classed as "work-shy" and put in a concentration camp.

Jews lost their citizenship in 1935 and as a result were not included in unemployment figures even though many lost their employment at the start of Hitler’s time in power.

Many young men were taken off of the unemployment figure when conscription was brought in (1935) and men had to do their time in the army etc. By 1939, the army was 1.4 million strong. To equip these men with weapons etc., factories were built and this took even more off of the unemployment figure.

With these measures in place the unemployment figure had to fall drastically and many saw the Nazi figures as nothing more than a book-keeping trick. However, many would have been too scared to speak out against the Nazis or pass negative comments on the published figures - such was the fear of the Gestapo.

However, there is no doubt that work was created. The Nazis introduced public work schemes for men who worked in the National Labour Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst or RAD). Their work would have included digging ditches on farms to assist irrigation, building the new Autobahns, planting new forests etc. The men of the RAD wore a military style uniform, lived in camps near to where they were working and received only what we would term pocket money. However, compared to the lack of success of the Weimar government and the chronic misery of 1931 to 1932, these men felt that at least the Nazi government was making the effort to improve their lot.

To ‘protect’ those in work, the German Labour Front was set up. This was lead by Robert Ley. The GLF took the role of trade unions which had been banned. To an extent, the GLF did this. Ley ordered that workers could not be sacked on the spot but he also ordered that a worker could not leave his job without the government’s permission. Only government labour exchanges could arrange for a new job if someone did leave his employment.



Advertising poster for KdF (Kraft durch Freude, Strength Through Joy) Trips (after 1933).

Translation:

"Strength Through Joy"
Joy Through Travel
Travel Through Saving

However, the GLF increased the number of hours worked from 60 to 72 per week (including overtime) by 1939. Strikes were outlawed. The average factory worker was earning 10 times more than those on dole money and few complained – though to do so was fraught with potential difficulties.

The leisure time of the workers was also taken care of. An organisation called "Kraft durch Freude" (KdF) took care of this. Ley and the KdF worked out that each worker had 3,740 hours per year free for pursuing leisure activities - which the state would provide. The activities provided by the state were carefully and systematically recorded.

Cheap holidays and the offer of them was a good way to win the support of the average person in the street. A cruise to the Canary Islands cost 62 marks - easily affordable to many though most cruises were taken up by Nazi Party officials. Walking and skiing holidays in the Bavarian Alps cost 28 marks. A two-week tour of Italy cost 155 marks.

The KdF also involved itself in introducing a scheme whereby the workers could get a car. The Volkswagen - People's Car - was designed so that most could afford it. The Beetle, designed by Ferdinand Porsche, cost 990 marks. This was about 35 weeks wages for the average worker. To pay for one, workers went on a hire purchase scheme. They paid 5 marks a week into an account.

Theoretically, when the account had reached 750 marks the worker would be given an order number which would lead to them receiving a car. In fact, no-one received a car. The millions of marks invested into the scheme were re-directed into the rapidly expanding weapons factories. This accelerated as World War Two approached. No-one complained as to do so could lead to serious trouble with the secret police.

Did the Nazis produce an economic miracle for Germany?

The Minister of the Economy was Hjalmar Schacht. He introduced his "New Plan". This plan intended to reduce imports, reduce unemployment, channel government spending into a wide range of industries and make trade agreements with other nations. Hermann Göring also wanted Germany to become self-sufficient in all industries so that as a nation she could survive a war. Were these plans successful?

-By 1939, Germany still imported 33% of its required raw materials

-Government income had been 10 billion Reichsmarks in 1928. In 1939, it stood at 15 billion. However, government spending had increased from 12 billion Reichsmarks in 1928 to over 30 billion in 1939 - a difference of 15 billion Reichsmarks. From 1933 to 1939, the Nazi government always spent more than it earned so that by 1939, government debt stood at over 40 billion Resichsmarks.

-Balance of trade figures had gone into the red by 1939 by 0.1 billion Reichsmarks.

-Unemployment had fallen from 6 million in 1933 to 300,000 by 1939 and industrial production in 1939 was above the figure for Weimar Germany before the 1929 Wall Street Crash.

-Annual food consumption in 1937 had fallen for wheat bread, meat, bacon, milk, eggs, fish vegetables, sugar, tropical fruit and beer compared to the 1927 figures. The only increase was in rye bread, cheese and potatoes.


-Real earnings in 1938 were all but the same as the 1928 figure. Real earnings are wages adjusted to allow for inflation.