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March 5 - April 3, 2025
a final blast against the Jews as responsible for the war which he had started and which was now finishing him and the Third Reich.
He had become nothing, so far as anyone could see, but a vagabond—an eccentric, bookish one, to be sure.
The war, which now would bring death to so many millions, brought for him, at twenty-five, a new start in life.
his regiment was reduced in four days of combat from 3,500 to 600 men; only thirty officers survived, and four companies had to be dissolved.
German currency had become utterly worthless.
The life savings of the middle classes and the working classes were wiped out. But something even more important was destroyed: the faith of the people in the economic structure of German society.
The masses of the people, however, did not realize how much the industrial tycoons, the Army and the State were benefiting from the ruin of the currency. All they knew was that a large bank account could not buy a straggly bunch of carrots, a half peck of potatoes, a few ounces of sugar, a pound of flour.
he learned little afterward and altered nothing in his thinking.
a new kind of state, one which would be based on race and would include all Germans then living outside the Reich’s frontiers, and in which would be established the absolute dictatorship of the Leader—himself—with an array of smaller leaders taking orders from above and giving them to those below.
a grotesque hodgepodge concocted by a half-baked, uneducated neurotic goes without saying.
Germany, he said bluntly, must expand in the East—largely at the expense of Russia
The giant empire in the East,” he exults, “is ripe for collapse. And the end of Jewish rule in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state.” So the great steppes to the East, Hitler implies, could be taken over easily on Russia’s collapse without much cost in blood to the Germans.
Can anyone contend that the blueprint here is not clear and precise? France will be destroyed, but that is secondary to the German drive eastward. First the immediate lands to the East inhabited predominantly by Germans will be taken. And what are these? Obviously Austria,
Why was the world so surprised, then, when Chancellor Hitler, a bare few years later, set out to achieve these very ends?
beyond toying with the crackpot ideas of Gottfried Feder, the crank who was against “interest slavery.”
Hitler refrains from any expression of opinion on the economic foundation of the Third Reich.
This strange priest, of whom more will be heard in this history, corrected some of Hitler’s bad grammar, straightened out what prose he could and crossed out a few passages which he convinced the author were politically objectionable.
Chaff were the Jews and the Slavs,
Hitler would forbid the marriage of a German with any member of these races,
Through his sermons and his magnificent translation of the Bible, Luther created the modern German language, aroused in the people not only a new Protestant vision of Christianity but a fervent German nationalism and taught them, at least in religion, the supremacy of the individual conscience. But tragically for them, Luther’s siding with the princes in the peasant risings, which he had largely inspired, and his passion for political autocracy ensured a mindless and provincial political absolutism which reduced the vast majority of the German people to poverty, to a horrible torpor and a
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It doomed for centuries the possibility of the unification of Germany. The Thirty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which ended it, brought the final catastrophe to Germany,
It has been estimated that one third of the German people perished in this barbarous war.
In the end the German nation was forged by naked force and held together by naked aggression.
replaced it with Greater Prussia, or what might be called Prussian Germany.
by blood and iron.”
“Germany ceased to exist.” Prussia annexed outright all the German states north of the Main which had fought against her, except Saxony; these included Hanover, Hesse, Nassau, Frankfurt and the Elbe duchies.
the course of German history as a consequence was to run, with the exception of the interim of the Weimar Republic, in a straight line and with utter logic.
Richard Wagner harbored a fanatical hatred, as Hitler did, for the Jews, who he was convinced were out to dominate the world with their money,
It is not at all surprising that Hitler tried to emulate Wotan when in 1945 he willed the destruction of Germany so that it might go down in flames with him.
Despite all his pagan heroes he did not entirely despair of Christianity, as Nietzsche did.
But Hitler was not entirely wrong in saying that to understand Nazism one must first know Wagner.
that Chamberlain was the spiritual founder of the Third Reich.
was given to seeing demons
Since he felt himself goaded on by demons, his books (on Wagner, Goethe, Kant, Christianity and race) were written in the grip of a terrible fever, a veritable trance, a state of self-induced intoxication, so that, as he says in his autobiography, Lebenswege, he was often unable to recognize them as his own work, because they surpassed his expectations.
He then sets out to “prove” that Jesus was not a Jew.
Whoever claimed that Jesus was a Jew was either being stupid or telling a lie…. Jesus was not a Jew.” What was he then? Chamberlain answers: Probably an Aryan!
He invited Chamberlain to his palace at Potsdam and on their very first meeting a friendship was formed that lasted to the end of the author’s life in 1927.
“It was God who sent your book to the German people, and you personally to me,” the Kaiser wrote in one of his first letters.
In Mein Kampf he expresses the regret that Chamberlain’s observations were not more heeded during the Second Reich.
You have mighty things to do,”
Chamberlain became a member of the budding Nazi Party and so far as his health would permit began to write for its obscure publications.
one of the great armorers whose weapons have not yet found in our day their fullest use.”
in prison and discredited by the failure of his comic-opera putsch, had in mind to do. But Hitler had no doubts himself.
In Hitler’s utterances there runs the theme that the supreme leader is above the morals of ordinary man.
Such teachings, carried to their extremity by Nietzsche and applauded by a host of lesser Germans, seem to have exerted a strong appeal on Hitler.
A genius with a mission was above the law; he could not be bound by “bourgeois” morals. Thus, when his time for action came, Hitler could justify the most ruthless and cold-blooded deeds, the suppression of personal freedom, the brutal practice of slave labor, the depravities of the concentration camp, the massacre of his own followers in June 1934, the killing of war prisoners and the mass slaughter of the Jews.
the German people were beginning to have a normal life.
Social Democrats—the “November criminals,” as he called them—had increased their vote by 30 per cent
The storm troopers swarmed the streets seeking battle and blood and their challenge was often met, especially by the Communists.
461 pitched battles in the streets which cost eighty-two lives and seriously wounded four hundred men.
