II. National Socialism and the Third Reich

“I demand races of orbic bards, with unconditional and uncompromising sway. Come forth, sweet democratic despots of the West! — Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, London, 1888, p. 59. “Fascism is anything but a conservative form.”
— W. H. Chamberlin, Confessions of an Individualist.

TO MAKE generalizations about the Germanies is as hopeless as to make generalizations about a subcontinent like India. What holds the Germanies together are not common denominators (of which there are few) but a persistent sentiment of “belonging together.” In spite of a few common characteristics there is nevertheless a feeling of common tasks, of common duties, of common memories, and the will to form a characteriological mosaic in the heart of Europe. The German lives strongly in the categories of tasks and duties (Aufgaben und Pflichten); in these categories “different” Germans can cooperate. If Germans would try to form a “nation” in the western sense and to become eidetically similar or identical (and National Socialism apes the West with fanatical fervor in this respect as well as in others), the end of Germandom, as we have known it, would be imminent.* This danger must not be underestimated.

Still there are not a few “generalizes” at large, and every month we see, either in Britain or in the United States, a book published which deals with the “German Jekyll and Hyde,” the “Roots of Nazism,” the “German Question,” or other hopeless attempts to solve the painful riddle. The mistakes in the appraisal of the German character stem from two main sources.

Our authors forget, first of all, that Germandom on account of its geographical position participates in practically all European intellectual currents. If they try to find the roots of the Nazi enigma they forget to look outside the borders of the Reich. They concentrate on persons like General Haushofer, who is the last bogeyman of American journalism because he developed a new science whose principles were bitterly disregarded by National Socialists. But the principles of Geopolitik, shrouded in the mystery of scientific German, which is more difficult than Chinese, created the impression that this aged savant is another professor Moriarty in wickedness. Instead of denouncing geopolitics it would have been wiser to focus the attention on the deeper, moral issues. All these miserable professors at the Sorbonne, in Leyden, in Brussels, in the London School of Economics; all these essayists, pamphleteers, stump orators, editors, and politicians who believed in morals without religion, who wrote in behalf of a humanitarian, anthropocentric philosophy of life, who lectured on progress for progress’s sake, who fulminated against medievalism, broadcasted against the concept of free will, who eulogized and worshiped machinery, praised utilitarianism, ridiculed reverence and piety . . . they all are guilty, guilty, guilty . . . actively, passively, directly, indirectly . . . guilty as Hitler, as Göbbels, as Rosenberg, as Göring, and their docile followers. What are these new masters of Germany doing else than copying Émile Combes, Jeremiah Bentham, John Dewey, Robespierre, the “Imperial Wizzard”; what are they doing else than believing in the tenets of utilitarianism, environmentalism, biologism, the “survival of the fittest,” and the whole catechism of unrestrained modernity. Our “progressivists” are trying out the old trick of denouncing their murderous epigones as “survivals” of a past age, but the trick is beginning to outlive its usefulness.

The second mistake the critics of National Socialism commit in their analysis is to take a certain sector of Germandom under the microscope (or only certain stratifications). Our learned analysts usually have a fairly wide knowledge about Kant, Hegel, Marx, Wagner, Treitschke, and a few other thinkers and writers who undoubtedly had their influence and importance. But how many of the analytic investigators have taken pains to make an honest and objective evaluation of the Junker mind? How many of them are aware of the fact that 45 per cent of Germandom is Catholic?* How many of them have ever made an attempt to study Catholic Germany, to investigate the influence of the monasteries, to study the Catholic periodicals? What, after all is known to them, about Austria’s share in German culture? The influence of Bohemia and the Habsburgs, the German bishops, the East Prussian Catholics? Conservative Germany is almost totally unknown to them; all they do is hash and rehash their repertoire of Bismarck, Fichte, Treitschke, and Nietzsche (never, never understanding the latter). To “explain” National Socialism with the help of Nietzsche’s philosophy is as futile as to interpret French Canadian culture by means of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” How many of these benighted friends or enemies of the Germanies have ever read Przywara’s analysis of the German mind . . . when it would take at least ten years residence in the country to understand (or rather, intuitively, to guess) the meaning of Przywara’s language? And then there is still the broad question of the relationship between thinkers and culture, writers and masses in co-ordination with the German Scene. Do German philosophies explain the German mind? Does Hobbes, for instance, explain the Anglo-Saxon mind? All these are questions which cannot be easily answered.

We have already stressed the point that Parliamentarism in the classical sense never had a chance to survive in Germany. It is a working proposition in only such countries as have already achieved a great uniformity of thought.

This uniformity of thought has not even now been achieved in Germany. The brutal terror of the present rulers of the Third Reich is a clear indication that they have to cope with the same, age-old German personalism which, if coupled with a little more Zivilcourage,** courage of civilians in daily life — would be a very dynamic power.

It would be an interesting experiment to quiz all inmates of a large hotel in New York and of another such hotel in “identitarian” Berlin, and then to compare the political opinions of the guests as well as of the employees. There is little doubt that everybody living in the Waldorf-Astoria would declare himself for the Republican form of state and (often without being able to define it) for “democracy” in government and society. Even the Communists would agree in so far as they consider communism to be nothing else but “streamlined democracy” (or “Twentieth-century Americanism”). In a large hotel in Berlin we would find persons who believe in National Socialism and others who don’t, which fact they will confess only on condition that full secrecy is assured them. Some would be Communists, others religious Socialists, others again Catholic “Democrats” or Catholic Monarchists. Some of the latter would see a restoration of the Hohenzollerns and the revival of parlia mentarian liberalism, others again would like to go back to the Habs burgs and the First Reich. One would find adherents to the Weimar Republic, Social Democrats, Independent Socialists, Protestant Liberals of the Bismarckian type, Black Front Supporters, Stalinists, Anarchists and Trotzkyites.

One must not forget that there were about fourteen different parties in the Reichstag before Hitler, representing about four major and ten minor philosophies. On the other hand, one can invite an American Democrat to dine with a Republican, an English Laborite with a Conservative or a Liberal, and be quite sure that they will all agree on the essentials.

A Parliamentum is an arena for the airing of opinions which should not only show the numerical strength of group opinions, but also provide a platform for constructive discussion, persuasion, and compromise. The element of compromise is particularly necessary in parliaments which suffer from a great plurality of parties and where coalition governments are the rule. It is therefore of the utmost necessity for an ideal parliament that certain social conventions be kept up, that intellectual standards are alike and — and this is the most important requirement — that the members of the house speak a basically identical “language.” No fruitful discussion is possible if those engaged in a debate are miles apart, if they adopt a different terminology, if they thoroughly disagree on fundamentals. Controversies between people of extremely opposing views are, contrary to general belief, ordinarily neither interesting nor helpful. The British Parliament¹⁸³ as well as the American Congress meet these requirements, but Continental countries, so superintellectualized by their highly selective school system, were always characterized by a great measure of ideologism in the political sphere. Their parties, like their books, films, etc., are ordinarily based on a particular philosophy or Weltanschauung. This shows that the Industrial Revolution with its frantic herdism was in these parts of the Old World hitherto relatively ineffective and that the total uniformity of thought was, in spite of Prussian leadership, not yet achieved. The National Socialists still have in that respect a great task before them.

The German Reichstag of 1931 was deadly hampered by the problem of the “common language.” Catholic Centrists* wanted to create conditions in Germany which would make it easier for the individuals to save their souls; Socialists denied the existence of souls and divided people into classes; the German Nationalists were interested in language and culture; while the National Socialists put the main stress on race. Whereas some looked at pocketbooks, others at the pigmentation of the skin or the index of the skull, fruitful discussions became impossible. When the speaker of one party indulged in his oratory, the others walked out. It was not worth while to listen to somebody’s opinion when you knew that his premises were all wrong. The grim determination to silence the unconvincible enemy by execution or imprisonment already existed prior to 1933 in many parties. Even the “Liberals” advocated the jailing of National-Socialist leaders.¹⁸⁵

Another potent reason for the breakdown of German political ochlocracy is to be found in the hatred of the German bureaucracy for the control of a Parliament, which was after all a control by laymen. Bureaucracy, which consists, or at least should consist exclusively of experts, nourishes a natural contempt for the amateur, a contempt which may turn into violent loathing if the amateur is given controlling power over the expert. We must furthermore keep in mind that only countries with great per capita riches can afford a government by laymen and give them a chance and leisure to experiment. Yet unsuccessful experiments in poor countries can easily turn into national disasters. The German bureaucracy with its very Germanic contempt for the lay masses, was only waiting for the end of popular representation. This liquidation of an obsolete system could only be achieved by a return to monarchy, military dictatorship, or by a sweeping victory of a single party which would not be forced to compromise with other parties in a coalition government. Such a party could even destroy or amend the constitution and give a free hand to the Civil Service, which in turn would be able to increase the popularity of the party by running the country efficiently on utilitarian principles.*

Yet the monarchical sentiments were already too weakened and the efforts of General Schleicher to establish a military dictatorship supported by Civil Service and the trade-unions failed. The wishful dream of the bureaucracy was fulfilled in the least desirable way. By outlawing the Communist Party, the National Socialists gained 51 per cent of all votes, and the Third Reich was established to the great detriment of the Germanies and Europe.

Something similar happened in Russia and Italy where a bureaucracy works under the supervision of a party. In Russia it was obvious that the party would have the upper hand. In Italy and Germany the bureaucratic groups were bitterly disillusioned; they received a free hand in many domains but cultural affairs remained a prerogative of the party officials. And the cultural domain is the most important one in the eyes of Continentals.

All these three states — the Reich, the USSR, and Italy — are not dictatorships in the classic sense. They are one-party states and their dictators have as party bosses a “parliamentarian” past. Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini have (unlike Dionysos of Syracuse or Polycrates of Samos) a whole party machinery behind them, not just a police force. If one remembers that the word party comes from the Latin word pars (part), and that the NSDAP, the VKP(b) and the PNF** pretend to represent the whole nation, the paradoxical and evil aspects of the situation become apparent.

The Great Error of the Century (i.e., to consider nationalism, a Rightist idea) was largely due to the resentment against the destructive idea of Internationalism, prone to trample down every tradition, everything organically grown, eager to transform the world into a dull, uniform place without romantic variations, where everybody between Hammerfest and Capetown would wear long pants, inflammable celluloid collars and speak Esperanto.

Yet the National Socialists themselves established a “German Internationalism” by brutally persecuting all federal and centrifugal forces, by prohibiting the use of the provincial and city flags, by ridiculing local patriotism and branding everybody who dared to criticize centralization as a “separatist traitor.” Gleichschaltung — assimilating unification — is the sacred slogan of the National Socialists who already in their very name display two identitarian ideas. It must be borne in mind that nationalism and internationalism are (like capitalism and socialism — see p. 134), not antagonistic ideas but just one and the same idea, different only in the employment of means. The Internationalist wants identity over the whole world and to crush all “local” differences. The Nationalist similarly is out to eradicate all “local” (tribal, provincial) differences. But the ultimate issue is not between the monolithic nation of the Nationalists and the monolithic world of the Internationalist, because the true Nationalist who is always an expansionist wants to dominate the whole world and his herdist ideal is a world exclusively populated by his own race (after the extermination of all “inferior” races). The uniform world of the Internationalist, populated by a standardized race of mongrels, is only paralleled by the uniform world of the Nationalist populated by a standard race which has assimilated or exterminated all other linguistic or racial units.

There is another issue which needs elucidating: the National Socialist slogan of Blut und Boden (blood and soil). Soil is something personal; where I dwell and live nobody else can dwell; this is also the gist of the physical law that two bodies cannot be in the same place at the same time. But “blood” (nation, race) is something we possess with other people in common.* Soil has a personalist (romantic) value, blood has predominantly herdist aspects. In theory it is easy to reconcile these two ideals because they belong to two different categories (like “black” and “tall”), but in political practice they may frequently clash. The blood-and-soil dogma was therefore never sincerely accepted by the National Socialists; they were far too urban to look with reverence at the diversity of the soil, and the Boden part of their slogan was discarded as soon as they entered into world politics. After their sensible start with the reform of the laws of agrarian inheritance they immediately betrayed the South Tyrolean peasantry and the Baltic gentry and inaugurated a period of migratory Jewish Ahasverism such as was never witnessed before in Modern European History. Only a completely déraciné urbanite can rejoice in the idea of seeing people who dwelt for 500 years on the same spot being shipped, against their will, to some remote part of the Continent where they have to live as squatters in a world with which they have nothing in common. Baltic noblemen who were put into Polish castles with another family’s crest over the gate felt worse than thieves.

Blut und Boden embraces the same inner antagonism as “liberty and equality” or “patriotism and nationalism.” It is obvious that blood and nationalism on one hand and soil and patriotism on the other go well together. After some reflection we will come to the conclusion that blood-nationalism matches with equality, while soil patriotism matches with liberty. The soil makes free men (the peasant and the landed nobleman are free), but blood is an equalizing and generalizing factor. “The Germans,” “the Jews,” “the Negroes,” each names a species, but a plot of land is personal (property). The monarchical idea can only be reintroduced in connection with soil and patriotism, never with blood and equality which reeks of the French Revolution, of Robespierre, Hitler, Judge Lynch, and the slaughter of the modern mass wars. This whole question is of the utmost importance — not only to Germany but to the world at large. It is a burning problem in the United States where the love for the soil is almost absent among the large urban masses and the label “patriotism” actually denotes nationalism. This very war is one between liberty and soil on one side, as against equality (identity) and blood on the other. If equality and blood win over freedom and land, monotony instead of creative diversity will dominate the world and make life intolerable.

The Austrians of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg, incorporated in the Vaterländische Front (Patriotic Front), stood for the idea of Fatherland-Home (Vaterland-Heimat) as against the National Socialist Folk-Nation (Volk-Nation-Rasse). For the supercilious foreign observers it was just one form of “fascism” against another one. They always hoped for an unholy alliance between the “clericals” and the international Socialists against the National Socialists. Yet the events of February, 1934, showed clearly that the international Socialists never hesitated to help their national colleagues by attacking the “clericals” in the most critical moment of self-defense.

Before continuing the analysis of National Socialism it will be necessary to concentrate upon the person of its originator and leader.

Hitler was born and brought up in prewar Austria. His father belonged to the lowest layer of the bourgeoisie. He himself spent his childhood in the smaller towns of the Upper-Austrian plain, one of the very few flat parts of Austria. He never climbed mountains nor did he ever live a truly rural life. He is a purely “urban” type.

As a young man he came to Vienna, at that time a very cosmopolitan and aristocratic city with the best Catholic and European tradition around a German nucleus. This city was the synthesis of East and West. Built on the last extremities of the Hungarian plain, its western suburbs nevertheless touch the foot of the Alps. The inner city with its cathedral and the imperial palace — the Burg — is full of memories from the First Reich. In the Burg were, until recently, the crown and insignias of the Holy Roman Empire. But the boroughs outside the former walls showed eastern monotony; here many Jews, Czechs, Croats, Poles, Magyars, and Italians had their quarters. The castle of Schönbrunn reminds one somehow of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, for although built in the eighteenth century in imitation of Versailles, it is massive, robust, and has definitely something Eastern about it in its heaviness. The Burg was built at a time when the Habsburgs still remembered their having been at one time counts in Switzerland, whereas Schönbrunn distinctly belonged to a monarch who ruled over the melancholy plains of Hungary and Galicia.

Hitler was at least indifferent toward Catholicism; Europe meant for him nothing, he disliked the Habsburgs, hated the Austrian Idea, and loathed Vienna. He never understood the complex soul of the multicolored city. Like all men of a limited knowledge he had a violent, inborn hatred for things or ideas which surpassed his comprehension. He had the same dislike for Austria as all great “Liberals” of his time, and he viewed the dual monarchy in the same negative terms as Gladstone, Wickham Steed, Seton-Watson, and Mazzini, whose great objects of admiration were “enlightened” countries (like Prussia or Rumania). Hitler was shocked by the lack of homogeneity in his fatherland and its capital, and the universal character of the Habsburgs seemed to him a betrayal of the German essence of Austria. These “unpatriotic” monarchs and princes who spoke German, French, Hungarian, and Czech with equal ease, these descendants of the Holy Roman Emperors who regularly married foreigners, could not meet the approval of a young man thoroughly imbued (without knowing it) by the ideas of the French Revolution. The presence of Jews exasperated his sense of uniformity even more; how could he bear the thought that a part of the Viennese population belonged to another race. Their black, shabby coats, their papers printed in Hebrew letters, their strange accent and even stranger features outraged the desire for symmetry and identity of the young, hungry “artist.”

Prior to the outbreak of World War I Hitler gave up his domicile in Vienna and took quarters in Munich. This at least was a city after his own heart. Munich was the residence of the rulers of Bavaria who had been made kings by Napoleon’s grace. This country, though largely Catholic, had often accepted material and financial help from the French who played them up against the Emperor. Yet it must be admitted in all fairness that this treacherous attitude of the court of Munich was a less frequent and less dangerous enterprise than the dubious activities of the Prussians.

Munich itself had been largely rebuilt by King Louis I, a romanticist of the mildly anticlerical, nationalistic trend.* Maximilian and Louis II had added much to his work. The latter, famous for his support given to Richard Wagner, became the victim of insanity and his architectural extravaganzas are known the world over. Vienna, in spite of its obvious darker aspects and its frivolity, was and is at least a great city of immense human value and endowed with a great dramatic and tragic past.** Munich, on the other hand, looks like the petrified scenery of some musical comedy by Offenbach. It is crammed with buildings in an imitation Greek style and full of the memory of beautiful Lola Montez, of Fafner and the steaming stage dragon, of Lohengrin and Brunhilde in shining armor. Munich represents the pseudo-dramatic dreamworld of the German bourgeois. Here he finds houses and palaces built in the frightful style of the Hofbräuhaus, a morbidly sentimental interpretation of “medieval” architecture. Munich is also an inevitable starting point for all excursions into the Bavarian Alps, never missed by chartered accountants from Berlin parading their leather shorts. It is a mixture of Atlantic City, Denver, Greenwich Village, and Beverly Hills, in which Piloty and kindred spirits painted scenes from Alpine peasant life recalling cheap prints or advertisements for different brands of cheese.¹⁸⁶

Yet Munich had homogeneity and this was the thing the young starving painter was asking for. There were no Slavs, Magyars, or Eastern Jews in the Bavarian capital, and no historical break in the exterior picture of this city. Hitler was happy. He immediately felt the Prussian influence which made for greater efficiency and cleanliness. Electrification had made more progress and there seemed to be a greater number of hospitals, bathrooms, and trained nurses than in Vienna. Trains ran on schedule and more motorcars could be seen in the streets. Hitler admired Munich very much in the same way as a semieducated Iraqi official might admire London, or a hillbilly might marvel at New York. The mutual hostility of culture and civilization was unknown to him and one must add that he never succeeded in understanding either of these phenomena properly. Yet he was so deeply impressed by this new, more progressive and efficient Western World, that he gave himself up to it with love and enthusiasm.¹⁸⁷ When war came he enlisted in the Bavarian (German) Army, instead of the Austrian one. He had found his home. Ubi bene, ibi patria. He knew instinctively that here he had a chance to succeed. Southerners, on account of their superior oratorical faculties, are seldom failures in the North. And Hitler, the Austrian, a “clerc” through and through, served the Prussianized German Reich with all the fervor of his immature youth.

Still it must be borne in mind that the virus of National Socialism as a definite political organization came from outside the Second Reich. A Weltanschauung which combines the national with the social as well as with a “religious” outlook only existed in a concrete form in the Taborite wing of Hussitism. This Taborite tradition had always survived in the soul of the Czech people and it was no wonder when a group of Czech Socialists seceded in the last decade of the nineteenth century from the II Internationale because they were unable to share the antinationalistic outlook of that world-wide organization. The group in question called themselves Czech National Socialist Party, and survived until the breakdown of Czechoslovakia. Doctor Edward Beneš is one of its most important exponents. The character of this party is described by Karel Hoch in the following words:

Collectivizing by means of development; surmounting class struggle by national discipline; moral rebirth and democracy as the conditions of socialism; powerful, popular army, etc.*

The Germans of Bohemia and Moravia (the so-called “Sudeten Germans”) started early in the twentieth century a countermovement which was first called Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers Party). It was founded largely by Czech renegades who transplanted the Hussite ideas of anticlericalism, anti-Habsburgism, and “racial” mass sentiment into the Germans of the northwestern borderlands of the Austrian monarchy. Among these were men like Aloysius Cihula, Ferdinand Burschofsky, Proch, Kroy, and Dr. Walter Riehl (who became later leader of the Austrian National Socialists after the Armistice).

The Moravian local groups demanded repeatedly the adoption of the name “German National Socialist Workers Party,” but the Bohemian groups resisted because such a frank adaptation of the name of their Czech “opposite number” seemed too much of a recognition of their lack of originality.** The political tendency of the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei was naturally “liberal” and “democratic.” On their meeting in Trautenau (August 15, 1905) they declared solemnly that they were:

. . . a liberal, nationalistic party which fights with all powers at its disposal against all reactionary movements, against all feudal, clerical, and capitalistic privileges, as well as against all influences with an alien racial background.***

The efforts of the Moravian groups nevertheless bore fruit. The last great congress of the Arbeiterpartei before the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was held on the fifth of May, 1918, in Vienna and thus for the first time outside of Bohemia and Moravia. Then the name Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei was finally adopted and the new formulation of the program showed further steps in the direction which Hitler later on eagerly pursued. It was then decreed that:

. . . the German National Socialist Workers Party is not a party exclusively for laborers; it stands for the interests of every decent and honest enterprise. It is a liberal and strictly racial (völkische) Party fighting against all reactionary efforts, the clerical, feudal, and capitalistic privileges, but before all against the increasing influence of the Jewish commercial mentality which encroaches on public life. . . .

. . . The Party demands the introduction of plebiscites for all important laws. . . . The Party demands the abolition of the rule of Jewish banks over our economical life and the establishment of People’s Banks under democratic control.*

We see here the cant of continental “democracy,” the racialistic appeal, the plebiscitarian tendencies.

The party was naturally rather small in the beginning but it was nevertheless able to score 42,000 votes in the first elections of Czechoslovakia in June, 1919. There was a certain stagnation in the movement which watched the rise of its younger sister organization in Germany with keen interest and enthusiasm. After Hitler’s release from his internment, in December, 1924, the National Socialists of the Czechoslovak Republic accepted the leadership of the numerically superior group in the German Reich. The masters had submitted to their pupils.**

The power and secret of the Third Reich lies exactly in the fact that it was never anything else but an exaggeration of the Second Reich. National Socialism hardly brought any new ideas to the Germanies. There are certain traits in the German character which might be called “eastern,”*** but National Socialism itself is not in the least eastern. It is imposed upon a background which has eastern elements, but the very ideas (not the character)* of the unfortunate Austrian lowlander, who leads the Germanies, are essentially western. They are a logical concoction of concepts of the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, biologism, Richard Wagner, and Amerikanismus.

In order to look them over more clearly we shall analyze in succession their various aspects:

I. The mechanical material conception of the Reich. The Reich, instead of being a spiritual entity with a world mission, becomes an introvert state which, for its existence, has no need of a metaphysical or supranational justification. The only and ultimate reason for its existence is the life of the German people. It feeds, nourishes, protects, and regulates the people. It is no less a utilitarian organization than the Imperial Chemical Industries, Ltd., or General Motors, Inc. The bigger the Reich, the better for the German people. A bigger Reich means more food, automobiles, railways, elastic garters, and radio sets. To achieve this bigger Reich a military success is necessary. The ideal Reich — the commercial industrial Lebensraum, populated by the German people as well as their metics (Czechs) and helots (Poles) — guarantees the highest living standards in the world. The perfected Third Reich is supposed to be some sort of paradise — rather like the Soviet Millennium** or the ochlocratic Brave New World where milk and honey flow. Germany must top Europe, Europe the world. Deutschland über Alles, über Alles in der Welt. Germany must become the biggest, widest, cheapest, happiest country in the world. Germany must become another “America.”

II. The Third Reich will be collectivistic. Its perfection will necessitate a terrific collective effort. The person does not count. This collective effort is not only a means but also an end. Collectivism is going to stay for good. “One German is as good as any other German,” is a slogan which can be frequently heard. National Socialism — like Communism in the eyes of the Stalinists — is the most modern form of democracy. When Hitler and Mussolini attack the “western democracies” they insinuate that their “democracy” is not genuine. National Socialism envisages abolishing the difference in wealth, education, intellect, taste, philosophy, and habits by a leveling process which necessitates in turn a total control over the child and the adolescent. Every personal attitude will be branded — after communist pattern — as “bourgeois,” and this in spite of the fact that the bourgeois is the representative of the most herdist class in the world, and that National Socialism is a basically bourgeois movement.

Hitler in Mein Kampf repeatedly speaks of the “masses” and the “herd” referring to the people. The German people should probably, in his view, remain a mass of identical “individuals” in an enormous sand heap or ant heap, identical even to the color of their shirts, the garment nearest to the body.

III. To achieve even greater identity the tentative effort has been made to identify nation — i.e., the linguistic-cultural nation — with biological race. The Nordic race (less represented among Germans than among Poles if the anthropological measurements and statistics are correct) was singled out to be synonymous with Germandom.*

The emphasis on race was so strong, because it is the only factor that cannot be altered by mere education, coercion, persuasion, or propaganda. A Catholic might become a Protestant, a painter turn into a dictator, a New Dealer into a Republican, but a Negro cannot become a “Caucasian,” a Semite, or a Mongol. There always was at least a certain similarity between the races and racial mixtures within the borders of the Reich, but the Jews were and are “different.” The natural, romantic man, regardless of whether he liked or disliked the Jews, saw in them the representants of an interesting and ancient race, blood brothers of our Lord. Yet the true herdist resented the baptized or unbaptized sons of Abraham violently, and for the identitarian National Socialist, with his latent inferiority complex and his petit bourgeois lack of worldly experience, they were the worst offenders against the sacred law of uniformity. Racial laws, prohibiting the intermarriage between “Aryans” and “non-Aryans” were issued in order to achieve a more uniform breed. But the final solution of the “problem” is only extermination or emigration.

IV. The Third Reich is fundamentally secular. The first steps toward a secularization and despiritualization of modern culture were made by the nineteenth-century “liberals” of the etatistic brand* who started the downward trend by the institution of the obligatory civil marriage. Thus marriage became primarily a legal affair, a “free” and therefore dissolvable contract between two persons.** The omnipotent state, which “sanctified” the marital bed with revenue stamps and legal permits, did not stop at that point.*** The modern Leviathan goes even further and investigates the racial and sanitary background of those concerned and then nods approval or raises a prohibiting warning finger.****

V. The Third Reich is not only extremely race conscious but equally health conscious. Mein Kampf deals extensively with health problems and the doctor worshiping spirit of the “men in white” atmosphere thus finds its counterparts in the Germanies. The German “men in white” and “brown sisters” are reinforced by storm troopers, Gestapo, and the entire mighty Arm of the State. The Guillotine — adopted from the older Democracy — the castrating and sterilizing knife, the firing squad in the concentration camps are all busy creating a “New Race” full of health, vigor, and pep. Education weeds out the weaklings, the super-intellectuals, and the romantics with personal ideas. Göring’s Rechte Kerle are nothing but the “regular guys” of America or the “ordinary decent chaps” of England. Needless to say that people like Beethoven with his ear troubles; Schiller and Novalis with pulmonary tuberculosis; Kleist suffering from cyclic melancholia; Heine, Schubert, Dostoyevski, Nietzsche, St. Augustine, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, St. Paul, or Milton would all have come under the knife for reasons of hereditary ailments, race, or “general health.”

The ideal German youth of tomorrow is the beaming boy of the soap advertisements, a young man, healthy, simple, stupid, “decent,” neither good nor bad, the very subject of Ödön von Horvath’s Age of the Fish.

VI. The Third Reich is Machiavellian as well as utilitarian.* State abortion for the “unfit,” sterilization for eugenic reasons, euthanasia for the hopelessly insane, the entire vocabulary of a progressive world which prefers to spend money on popular cars and howitzers rather than on insane asylums or hospitals for the incurable, characterize National Socialist practice.

Hitler himself has a deep and almost religious respect for science and technical “progress.” In that respect he could match most American professors. In one of his speeches in Nuremberg (September, 1938) he said very clearly:

Der Nationalsozialismus ist keine kultische Religion, sondern eine auf exakter Wissenschaft aufgebaute Volksbewegung. (National socialism is not a religion founded on a cult, but a popular movement based on exact sciences.)**

The very spirit embodied in such magazines as, for instance, Popular Science is embodied in National Socialism. This is backed up by a strong and holy belief that we are in the maelstrom of a steadily faster moving scientific progress and that Germany must lead, in that noble competition, all other states. International statistics are carefully watched in order to keep in step. Every German should therefore not only possess the identical brown shirt and the identical education but also an identical car — the Volkswagen, an identical wireless set, the Volksempfänger, etc. Hitler wants a Germany more progressive than any other country; bigger and better factories, highways, laboratories, steamships, railways, public buildings, bicycles, and airplanes. And Germany really became more progressive and more uniform. To every unprejudiced Leftist the Third Reich must be a paradise; jealousy and envy alone for the achievement of a competing group may dampen his or her enthusiasm or generate an unwarranted dislike.

VII. The Third Reich is majoritarian like every true ochlocracy. The suppression of minorities is illiberal but not undemocratic (in the classical sense). Yet the Third Reich never pretended to be liberal, neither did the Soviet Union. Stalin even took pains to establish a “Finnish Democratic People’s Republic” in Terijoki during the Finnish war. Thousands of Russians died in order to “increase the realm” of this “little democracy.”

There is (as in all other ochlocracies) from time to time a checking up of “public opinion” in the Germanies, in the Soviet Union, and even in Italy. The results of these plebiscites or elections may be correct or faked. But the important thing is the fact that they give to the respective governments ample opportunity to boast in front of the people and the whole world that the government in these countries is supported by a majority.¹⁸⁸ Even the Soviet Union, solemnly preaching the Marxist gospel of the dictatorship of the proletariat, cannot get rid of the “democratic” idea of majority rule. We live in an age of organized hypocrisy. Dictators in antiquity freely called themselves “tyrants” or “despots.” The modern usurpers crouch prudently behind the backs of the knavish, trembling masses, and the unassuming name of “leader” is thought to be more appropriate in a thorough ochlocratic age with whose traditions and principles nobody dares to make a final break.¹⁸⁹

VIII. The Third Reich not only stands for an “inner democracy” and identity, but also for material equality with other nations. “The Germanies,” say the National Socialists, “have to keep up with the Joneses” — not referring, of course, to the individuals, but to the inhabitants of the Reich in relation to those of other countries. Hitler repeatedly boasted that the standard of living of the German working class is superior to that of the corresponding class in England. This probably held true for the two first years of his regime. Unemployment, without doubt, was a very grave problem in the Reich, but a mere comparison between British and German industrial areas gave to the impartial observer the impression that the German standards were definitely superior. It may be true that the Germans lived largely on borrowed money, but they lived well and the proletariat was obviously on its way to reach the material level of the bourgeoisie. The middle class, on the other hand, had no reasonable hope of ever reaching or surpassing British middle-class standards. A substantial part of the German peasantry was far better off than the English tenants. The differences were only spectacular in the high income brackets. But income differences in the upper classes merely indicate that the standards of luxuries, and not of necessities, are at variance. Thus, taking the German people as a whole, one can say (if one is permitted to generalize) that it was one of the richest in Europe, second only to the Scandinavians, Dutch, and, perhaps, the English. German standards were incomparably higher than those of France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Hungary, or the Balkans. Yet a mass spirit of collective competition, collective envy, and collective jealousy was whipped up. As if there were not greater values than banking accounts, per-capita consumption of coffee and similar capitalistic criteria!

National Socialism started as a social ideology in the national framework and developed into a socialistic ideology of nations. Today it is a political philosophy demanding a very democratic identity of wealth between the nations, just as communism puts more stress on the uniformity of the living standards of individuals. National Socialism is therefore in a sense even more identitarian than Communism, which clamors for identical ants, whereas National Socialism demands identical ant hills.

IX. But even within the ant heap there is total uniformity. At the present moment there are still privileges and “aristocracies” in existence for the mere reason that uniformity has not yet been fully achieved. If the Jews form an underprivileged (or even outlawed) class and thus interrupt the uniformity, it is only because they are literally a survival from the old “chaotic disorder.” The ideal Third Reich of tomorrow has only Aryans, National Socialists, members of the unified State Church,* and perhaps, after centuries of eugenic measures, sterilizations and artificial inseminations, only Nordics of the cranial index x, with a light-blue colored iris and fair hair. The proposal to breed Germans like dogs or rabbits in kennels or studs has repeatedly been made before and after Hitler came to power.** It would certainly be a logical step if the axioms of National Socialism are not going to be questioned or successfully challenged from within. And there is also the problem about the “Revolution in Permanence.” If Nazism should win the present war something must be done in order to keep the masses “occupied.” But similar measures (from a more “eugenic” than racialist type) may be expected in the Soviet Union, or for that sake, in very health conscious, progressive, terroristic ochlocracies without a sound, liberal tradition.*

X. Another typically ochlocratic trait (intrinsically connected with the one mentioned before) is the emphasis on size and the reverence for quantity. Only in a bourgeois-commercial age did countries begin to boast of the number of their inhabitants and the square miles of their surface. It became one of the characteristics of the American Republic to refer continually to the size of the country, yet these references were scanty in comparison with those of the great number worshipers, the Russian Communists, who loved to point out at every occasion that they control “one-sixth of the earth.” Mayakovski’s famous poem-song, 150 Millions, reflects the same arithmetic spirit. No well-bred Englishman, Chinese, or eighteenth-century Spaniard would be permanently conscious of belonging to empires with so and so many millions of inhabitants and square miles. Neither would they use these statistics in recurrent phrases. Yet just this quantitative consciousness has been so deeply inoculated into countless Germans by the National Socialists and their forerunners.

XI. Chesterton was the first to point out the Jewish essence of National Socialism. The overindustrious and indiscriminate reading of books with such a strong nationalistic keynote as the Talmud, has planted many fundamentally Jewish conceptions into the heads of the present masters of Germany. A distortion of the old Jewish racialism is: Recht ist was dem Deutschen Volke nutzt — “Whatever is of advantage to the German people is just and lawful.”** Dr. Göbbel’s order in November, 1938, not to sell any more goods to the Jews reminds one of the Talmudian law not to sell anything to the Christians during the Jewish feast days. The Nuremberg laws have their parallels in the prescriptions of the Old Testament which strictly prohibited the intermarriage with non-Jews, regardless of their faith. Offspring resulting from the union between Hebrews and the Canaanites (the autochthonous population) was considered to be illegitimate. The Samaritans, who prayed to the same God as the Jews, were practically outcasts and even more despised than the Bââl worshipers because their ancestors had intermarried during the Babylonian captivity with “racially impure” Chaldeans. The conception of the Chosen People (once theologically justified) is of Jewish origin.* And it is equally true that the “Fall of the Germans” can only be compared with the tragedy of the Fall of the Jews from their exalted position of a “Chosen People” to their Ahasveric existence since the terrible night of Golgotha. Only a very great people, like the Germans or Russians, with an imperial past, can experience such utter degradation. Corruptio optimi pessima. In order to produce a Lenin or a Göbbels, a Cheka or a Gestapo, one must have had a great past with an Albertus Magnus, a Dostoyevski, a Tauler, or a Solovyev. To fall deep and to crush fatally one must have jumped from a tower or a mountain.

XII. The Third Reich is furthermore the most modern state of the world.** Nothing could be more incorrect than to speak about Germany putting the clock back. This mistake has arisen due to the wrong interpretation of nationalism and to the mistreatment of Jews.*** Yet the attitude toward Jews in the Middle Ages sprung from purely religious reasons. Individual conversion completely changed their status which was in any case better than generally assumed. They enjoyed a far-reaching autonomy and very few of them objected to the institution of the Ghetto. There was no desire of the Jews to “assimilate,” and a symbiosis between Jews and Gentiles is impossible for the Orthodox Jew who is not permitted by his religion to live in a Christian (trefen) house. Jews were treated far better than heretics and it was definitely better to be a Jew in Rome than a Jesuit in Elizabethan England.

Intelligent observers who witnessed the annexation of Austria in 1938 were impressed by the fact of a large-scale “modernization” of that country. The French Revolution was suddenly let loose on that part of the First Reich which had so far pretty successfully withstood the onslaught of the philosophy of Rousseau. Racial discrimination of American intensity was ordered by law, divorce was made possible, and civil marriage obligatory, conscription reached its high pitch, local flags were abolished, and mass arrests of members of the nobility set in. The governor of Austria, Herr Bürckel, declared solemnly that he extended a friendly hand to everybody — Socialist, Liberal, Democrat, or Communist — but not to the aristocrats, who never ceased to try to restore the Old Order by intrigues.* Religious instruction, hitherto obligatory, was made an optional subject approaching Horace Mann’s ideas, monasteries were confiscated, and the general will was ascertained in a plebiscite.** Students were trained in labor camps for “honest, straight, manual work,” intellectuals were assailed and great care was given to the improvement of communications. Even the very name of Austria was abolished. The feeling was general that a great, popular revolt of the masses against the First and the Second Estate, who had conspired to sell the honest, hardworking people to the internationally minded Habsburgs, had succeeded. The government-regulated press fostered the notion that Austria had barely escaped a sinister fate.

XIII. The people who suffer genuinely in majoritarian dictatorships are “only” minorities. The plebiscitarian dictatorship always favors (or intends to favor) the majorities. If the herdist spirit is strong the minorities will be automatically disliked for the mere fact that they dare to be “different.” The hatred of the democratic masses for the minorities is the driving force and the cement for these “democratic” dictatorships under popular leaders (in Greek: δημαγογός). Such minorities are the members of royal families, capitalists, priests, Jews, aristocrats, intellectuals, artists, highbrows, cripples, nuns, criminals, and lunatics. The persecution of the middle classes in Russia was only possible because this class was small. In Germany this class is strong. It may be educated to hate all “irregular” people without pity.

XIV. There is a very small minority in the Germanies deadly set against the regime. We must first of all realize that ninety-five per cent of modern people have no ideas or convictions of their own. Five per cent have views and convictions but again ninety-five per cent of these do not dare to stand up for them. There are five per cent of five per cent who have courage and convictions. These make history for good or evil. And if we ask ourselves why there is such little evidence of the three to four millions who have convictions without having the determination to stand up for them we must come to the clearcut conclusion that the civilized and cultured Europeans* of the Northwest have become trembling cowards. We must never underestimate the influence of a whole century of materialism, love of comfort, and determinism which deprived us, almost all of us (Christians and materialists alike), of our personal dignity, our courage, our honor, our élan. We are afraid of death, torture, exile, and concentration camps, but we are even more afraid of the deadliest weapon in the hands of the totalitarian state — loss of employment, poverty, destitution. With a stroke of the pen the totalitarian state can deprive us (mainly the city dwellers) of every possibility to earn our livelihood, the grimmest damnation in urban civilization. The menace of no employment, no salary, no food, and no roof has created in our day a dearth of great saints like Edmund Campion, St. Thomas More, or the Christians of the Arena. Only at the “periphery,” in Macedonia, Spain, Finland, Russia, are things different. Only there do we witness the will to rebellion, self-sacrifice, and freedom from time to time. The “civilized” Europeans are homines oeconomici and the homo oeconomicus is born to be a slave. Only the saints are free. Il n’y qu’une tristesse, c’est de n’être pas des saintes, “There is but one sadness: lack of sanctity,” says Leon Bloy’s Femme pauvre. And that, exactly, is the great calamity of modern society.

One has only to compare (the more cultured and less civilized) Austrians with their northern blood brothers. While the National Socialists were able to dissolve the parties of the Reich by mere decrees, the Austrian Socialists fought bravely to the death. It was a foolish and suicidal stand which benefited only the Nazis, but it was honorable. The Austrian National Socialists instead of waiting for “elections” fought with the same insistence. The Spaniards on both sides rather wanted to die than to submit.¹⁹⁰ The Finns and Greeks fought like lions, while the Danes put down their arms after losing twenty-eight men. The Poles were not crushed until the Russians attacked them in the back, while the more progressive Czechs (in an equally hopeless situation) never fired a shot.

For greater convenience we shall put these fourteen points, just listed, and the elementary facts about the Germanies, in a shorter syllabus:

1. Prussia was nourished by France and England for selfish and psychological reasons into greatness. When they wanted to stop her it was too late.

2. Prussia was not a typically feudal country but a bureaucratic middle-class state. Not the Junkers but the Huguenot refugees became the basis of modern commercial and industrial Prussia*

3. Frederick II followed a traitorous, anti-German policy. His education, mind, and ancestry was largely French. Brutal, militaristic, agnostic, and “progressive,” he had a deep admiration for the civilized West.

4. Prussian militarism is not “aristocratic.” Neither is conscription a Prussian invention. Militarism and conscription are phenomena of the French Revolution. Modern militarism is fundamentally connected with nationalism, ochlocracy, and industrialism.

5. The greatest mistake of the century — committed by certain Prussian noblemen, American columnists, and English bankers — was to see in nationalism a Rightist idea.

6. Capitalism is not less “leftish” than socialism. Capitalism as well as socialism accept technical “progress” unreservedly. Between excessive private capitalism and state capitalism there is a relationship as between nationalism and internationalism. This difference is one of intensity but not of essence.

7. The Austrians are Germans and probably the “best” ones. The Germanic character of the Prussians is doubtful. When the Nibelungen Saga was first sung in the Austro-Bavarian dialect the Old Prussians and Pomeranians still worshiped their Slavic and Baltic gods.

8. Even Francis Joseph considered himself to be a “German Prince.” In 1866 he headed a German coalition against Prussians and Italians. The rule of progressive, Protestant Prussia finally affected the German character.

9. National Socialism is the bureaucratic, Germanized version of the French Revolution.**

10. Practically all ideas in National Socialism can be traced back to the following sources:

a) The French Revolution and its immediate offshoots.

b) The Old Testament (misapplied) and the Talmud (part of it).

c) The Industrial Revolution.

d) Calvinism.¹⁹¹

e) Karl Marx and Socialism.

f) Biologism (Darwin, Grant, Stoddard, Chamberlain, Gobineau).

g) Richard Wagner.

It lacks though one “modern” influence — whiggish, pre-Manchesterian liberalism.

11. There is no “putting the clock back” in the Third Reich which is the millennium of modernity.

12. World War I was a struggle concerning Austria-Hungary.

13. Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest were not brutal treaties.

14. Germany won the war when Austria-Hungary was dismembered.

15. The Treaty of Versailles itself is not the cause of National Socialisms, its rise and its victory. But the circumstances of the treaty accelerated the development.¹⁹²

16. The Third Reich is not less a democracy in the classical and scholastic sense than the Soviet Union.¹⁹³

17. The leaders of these totalitarian superdemocracies frequently acknowledge the “democratic” character of their governments, but the “Fascists” will seldom confess to be “Leftists.”

18. The German character — outside of urban Prussia — is not in the least herdist by nature. Prussia and Austria alone have a truly military tradition. One must not forget that the Germans still preserved their individualistic separatism and federalism long after all other European nations had been united for some time into centralistic, unilingual states.

19. National Socialism is the fulfillment of Continental “liberalism” which stems largely from Rousseau and the ideas of Adam Smith in a collectivized version. The continental Liberals never were liberals in the English sense; their “liberalism” was nothing else but the struggle against the existing order and the old tradition. Foolishly enough the English Liberals supported their continental “coreligionists,” never being fully aware of the abyss which actually divided them.

The continental Liberals were the most narrow-minded and destructive intriguers between Calais and Constantinople. With their appeal to the upper middle classes they never foresaw the day when the masses would take over their ideas (after having twisted them about to suit their own taste). The great ideas of Nazidom — utilitarianism, anticlericalism, anti-Catholicism, compulsory education, mass production, regimentation — were taken from their catechism. They had fought grimly against the great medieval heritage and they have succeeded in destroying the bulk of it, thus paving the way for the Fascists and National Socialists who did nothing but popularize the continental brand of liberalism, which in turn was nothing else than democratism in disguise.* The modern Anglo-Saxon type of liberalism, on the other hand, with its relativism in the matters of ideas, philosophies, and religions will hardly ever appeal to the Continental who will never be induced to believe that if A is true and B contrary to A, B nevertheless can represent truth. If Catholicism is right then Protestantism is wrong and vice versa. Things on the Continent are white or black and if they are actually gray they are worse than black because they might cause confusion. There is a grim and inescapable logic in this attitude.

The only people who were liberal in Europe were old-fashioned Conservatives of aristocratic stock with an eighteenth-century mentality. They were not “liberal” but generous. They were far too haughty and self-confident to get excited about the propagation of untruth. They had as little personal grievance about Protestants as Dr. Johnson about Catholics. Yet even their personal generosity did not alter the fact that they considered themselves (in religious as well as political matters) dead right and their opponents dead wrong. It was always the privilege of the bourgeois to invoke the law and the police. It is true that “liberal” governments on the continent, though despotic because of the lack of the old liberal tradition, which countries like England and the United States enjoyed, never went as far as to execute their adversaries (with the exception of the liberal terror in Rumania a generation ago where thousands of peasants were slaughtered). Yet to see an illiberal article in a “liberal” paper, or praise bestowed upon a nonliberal book in a “liberal” literary review, was out of the question. Comparing a “liberal” editor of the nineteenth century with a Roman Cardinal of the eighteenth century it would not have been difficult to point out which of these two could be called a genuine Liberal. The followers of the “liberal” politicians and writers have had finally to drop their farcical name. They are now proud to be Nazis.

The new synthetic heresy of Germany and her ugly betrayal of the Occident will probably cause endless “scientific” investigations into the basic depravity of the German character. But all nations fall into error and sin from time to time. The Germanies are at present gravely ill and suffer from a terrific attack of herdism as no other European nation has experienced it before.¹⁹⁴ Ideologies are able to obscure inherent national characteristics for a long time but not forever. In relation to the Germanies with their strong tradition of political personalism, National Socialism is clearly a counter idea (Gegenidee). No country in Europe cared less for political uniformity, unity, and central control, and no country became a more hopeless and helpless victim of exactly the same tendencies, forming integral aspects of a devastating identitarian totalitarianism.

One could imagine, of course, one hundred and fifty years ago, an English gentleman in Hampshire talking after dinner with his Prussian guest about the intrinsic wickedness of the French character. Let us assume for argument’s sake that we are writing in the year 1794. Queen Marie Antoinette has just been beheaded and the Terror is at its worst. These two men would suddenly remember all sinister parts of French history; Louis XI, Philip the Handsome and the brutal suppression of the Templars, the Armagnacs, the atrocities of the Albigenses, the Jacquerie and the Secrets of the Bastille, the lettres de cachet and the chambres ardentes, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the many shady characters in French history. Our friends, in consequence, would now definitely be tempted to attribute the hideous atrocities of the Great “Democratic” Dawn to the inherent wickedness of the French national character.

More outspoken views would have been expressed by the less educated people. The men in the pubs of Southampton and the roadmakers around Dover would have hardly bothered to explain the happenings with ideological or historical explanations. For them the French were a bad lot altogether; nothing but untrustworthy, Popish rabble with grubby faces, loud mouths, and closed purses.

The upper layer of the English population, however, keeping up contacts with the most cultured émigrés, who often stayed in their houses, would never have arrived at such summary conclusions. We have practically no printed evidence for any fundamentally anti-French turn of mind among educated Europeans. Neither, of course, were books and pamphlets written for the masses. Nor were educated people imbued by nationalism, racialism, or the more modern excesses of anthropology or biology. To fall as low as to make the French character responsible for the excesses or brutalities of the Revolution was almost impossible for any person of culture, education, and savoir-vivre.

Today the situation has entirely changed. We live in a time when even the aristocracy in the eager desire to be good clercs and executors of the general will goes the way of innkeepers, roadmakers, or chimney sweeps. There is Mr. Duff Cooper who, forgetting that this war is a crusade, made a start with a violent anti-German (not anti-Nazi) speech in April, 1940. Another protagonist of the idea of racial superiorities and inferiorities is Lord Vansittart, G.C.B., G.C.M., M.V.O., author of the incredible booklet The Black Record.¹⁹⁵ He received, as chief diplomatic adviser of the foreign office, 3000 pounds a year to propagate Nazi racialism. And the same attitude can be seen in the letters of H. M. Harwood¹⁹⁶ or in an even more plastic way in the booklet of Mr. Theodore Kaufman, entitled Germany Must Perish.*

All these gentlemen, wielding such a mighty pen, should remember the words of Alexander Hamilton, that the people are a great beast. There were Danes who in April, 1940, cheered the first German troops, and also Austrians who had been stanch members of the “Patriotic Front” displayed the same attitude toward their “liberators.” The same Russian mob who plundered the defenseless German Embassy in 1914 out of sheer patriotism fought three years later on the barricades for International Revolution. The same people cheered Louis XVI, Robespierre, Napoleon, the rulers of the Holy Alliance, and Louis XVIII successively. Napoleon himself was loudly acclaimed by the brave Berliners after the battle of Jena. The same Londoners who cheered James II tweny-four hours later bowed to William III.¹⁹⁷ One sees that the ochlocratic habit of taking the masses seriously must finally lead to international hatred. The words of Christ in relation to the mob, who crucified him, still has validity for the mob all over the world: “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”

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* This is exactly the bone of contention with a Franco-American friend of mine who cannot help to deplore the fact that the Germans do not form an “ordinary nation” in the western sense. France of the Bourbons, Bonapartes as well as the Third Republic have done everything to “nationalize” the Germans. But collectivized Germany of 1940 is hardly a more amiable neighbor than the Holy Roman Empire of 1525.

* Catholicism (and its culture) is in a way a closed world. It is almost impossible for the outsider to appreciate and understate its values in the right proportion and relation. Adults have a certain ability (in varying degrees) to understand children; children can never understand old people. Neither can the fragment understand the total. Continentals can understand Anglo-Saxons, Anglo-Saxons very seldom Continentals; Catholics may understand Protestants, but Protestants in order to understand Catholics (as Catholics) have to cope with an obstacle of 1500 years. This is the reason why Anglo-Saxons have sometimes made quite successful interpretations of Protestant Northern Germany, but one could hardly ever expect a good Protestant monograph on a Catholic subject or person, not even on a Catholic renegade like Hitler. The Catholic world has seven seals of which not even one can be easily broken.

** It was curiously enough Bismarck who was the first to point out the great lack of Zivilcourage among the Germans.

* The Catholic Centrists made a mistake similar to that committed by the Jews. They favored republicanism and political ochlocracy in Germany because they (justly) disliked the Hohenzollerns. Yet they forgot the fact that the Catholics of Germany were a minority in the Second Reich and that they could easily be crushed by an overwhelming victory of a party which rallies the majority of the country with an anti-Catholic (or anti-Christian) battle cry. The more intelligent Centrists like Brüning had more “perspective” and finally worked for the return of the monarchy.

* In the good old days, before he signed the grandiloquent demo-nazi manifesto, the City of Man, Herr Thomas Mann had a less beclouded vision. In his well-known book Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, written under the impact of the First World War (Berlin, 1922, pp. 285–287), he not only recognizes the burning antithesis between lay and expert rule, but he senses also the ochlocratic danger of popular envy and the even greater danger of “democratic” (and postdemocratic) totalitarianism in the form of the “politicized” nation.

** NSDAP — Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; VKP(b) — Vsyesoyuzni Kommunističeski Part (bol’ševiki) All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks); PNF — Partito Nazionale Fascista. Yet the Vaterländische Front (Patriotic Front) of Austria, and the “Portuguese Legion” (Legiāo Portugueza) are not former parties.

* God is unique. Souls are unique. Rare things are precious. Hence the twofold meaning of the word common.

* See the excellent biography Ludwig I, by Caesar Conte Corti.

** There are the revolutions of 1848 and the rebellions in 1919, 1927, 1934 (February and July), the attempted assassination of Seipel, the assassination of Dollfuss, the murders of 1938, the assassination of Count Stürgkh.

* See tabulation at the end of his The Political Parties in Czechoslovakia. Čechoslovak Sources and Documents, No. 9. Orbis, Praha, 1936.

** It is interesting to note that Robert Hohlbaum, a leading National Socialist, in his poetic collection Deutschland, addressed a hymn to Hus whom he considers to be German “in spirit.”

*** A. Ciller, Vorläufer des Nationalsozialismus, Ertl-Verlag, Wien, 1932, p. 135.

*Ibid., pp. 141–142.

** See also Hans Knirsch: Aus der Geschichte der deutschen nationalsozialistischen Arbeiterbewegung Alt-Österreichs und der Tschechoslowakei,” Aussig, 1931, and H. C. Kaesgel, Ein Sudetendeutscher ergibt sich nicht, Karlsbad, 1939, p. 145.

It must be emphasized that an intensive study of national socialistic “prehistory” reveals a curious lack of original thought in Hitler’s concepts; Hitler’s strength consists solely in the clever use of already existing trends, ideas, and situations. It lies in the very nature of mass leaders that they cannot be “original”; the mass leader is necessarily a virtuoso of commonplaces which he may or may not repeat in the guise of a “new discovery.” The modern dictator is not out to contradict but to confirm already existing views (and prejudices). This is another, subtle form of flattery of the masses. Original “controversial” ideas seldom get an immediate mass response. Originality implies the (discourteous) affirmation that opinions held recently on certain subjects are wrong. Mass man (i.e., the inferior man) cannot tolerate being scolded, or laughed at.

*** Brutality and cruelty are not limited to the East. English laws at the beginning of the past century were far more brutal than those in Russia. (Hanging for every theft of 40 shillings and over.) France had in Cayenne an equivalent to the concentration camps of Germany and Russia. The treatment of civilians during the last war (see Aladàr Kuncz’ Black Monastery and E. E. Cummings’ The Enormous Room, 1922) finds its parallel in the mistreatment of refugees during the present one. (See Arthur Koestler’s Scum of the Earth, New York, 1941.)

* His sticking to friends (Freunderlwirtschaft) is no less typical an Austrian characteristic than this preference of intuition to logic. He remains for North Germany the “magic stranger.”

** Hitler always repeats that he builds for “the next 1000 years.”

* The craze which this Nordic mania caused had sometimes the most startling consequences. One saw, for instance, after the Anschluss, boys of the Hitlerjugend discoloring their hair with hydroxide.

* The continental “liberals” were always strongly etatistic and seldom troubled by the “prejudices” of civil liberties. After having secured the key position in society and state they used the latter to enforce their views, persecuting brutally all nonliberals and specially the “clericals.” The liberal parties of Hungary, France, and Italy had sad records, yet these are widely surpassed by the atrocious horrors of Spanish and Rumanian Liberals. Every ideology becomes on the Continent inevitably a dogmatic, uncompromising philosophy. Professor Carlton Hayes speaks in his A Generation of Materialism (New York, 1941), about “General Liberalism” and “Sectarian Liberalism.”

** The Church always opposed civil marriage bitterly. The state created willfully, by the introduction of civil marriage, a distorted view about the basically sacramental character of marriage. Often civil marriage is nothing else than a legalized love affair.

*** Even a so-called “conservative” state like Hungary jails a priest if he presides at the sacrament of marriage mutually administered by the contracting parties without the preceding ridiculous ceremony of civil marriage, where a miserable little scribe arrogantly declares a couple to be “husband and wife.” The most intolerable aspect about this act is its intentionally solemn and ceremonial character.

**** The State of New York, for instance, prohibits a priest to assist at the spending of the sacrament of marriage if it does not give to the couple a certificate of health. The Church was very little aware of this fantastic encroachment upon her rights because she was at that time too intensively occupied with the defeat of the Child Labor Amendment Act.

* The utilitarian inheritance (Jeremiah Bentham) of our culture and civilization is stronger than one may admit. Utilitarianism is the cancer which has destroyed most fundamentals. The man or woman who considers his or her marriage as “inconvenient” flatly breaks the solemn oath of honor and contracts a new one. We find men and women in modern society who have given, three or four times during their lifetime, an oath of “loyalty and fidelity until death do us part” and it is amusing to see the same creatures protesting against Hitler’s serialized breaches of promises. Only a regenerated world will be able to cope successfully with this Great Challenger.

** This has strongly been re-emphasized by Martin Bormann, Hess’s successor. His much advertised speech against the Churches had all “scientific” arguments one could find in our Leftist Weeklies. See London Tablet, January 27, 1942.

* The National Socialists not only dislike the two Christian Churches in Germany because they try to escape state control and thwart the totalitarian effort but also because they divide the nation into [two or three] groups.

** Walter Darré, Minister of Agriculture, proposed such measures seriously in 1923.

* See Erik and Christiane von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s novel, Moscow 1979.

** Which, of course, is nothing but the ultimate consequence of the Manchesterian “enlightened self-interest” and the Sacro egoismo of pre-Fascist Italy

* On pages 349–350, Lewis Mumford drops, in his The Culture of Cities, New York, 1938, the hint that the National Socialists copied their racialism from the Jews. See also Esdras 9:10, and Nehemias 13:23–30.

** The word modern is today almost a eulogy. Once things old were preferred. Everything old had lasted longer. Chronologically they came nearer to eternity. Old people were nearer to the grave and therefore nearer to God. Today the accent is on Youth.

*** It is almost touching to read the exchange of letters between the Duchess of Brabant and St. Thomas Aquinas. The Duchess inquired whether she would be justified to tax the Jews — justified morally and legally. Our modern “leaders” are less squeamish about these matters.

*The Conservatives were after all the only people who had (a) a political ideology which could not be assimilated on account of its basic hostility to modern ideas, and (b) a definite tradition going back to the First Reich and the hated Middle Ages.

** There is little doubt that: (a) a real majority voted for Hitler (under considerable pressure); (b) a real majority would also have voted for Schuschnigg if he would have been able to carry out his plebiscite. Only tiny minorities have real convictions.

* There is little doubt that the most untotalitarian American is not the straphanger of New York (in spite of his ubiquitous “democratic” creed) but the pioneering backwoodsman, the fishers of Cape Cod, or the Indians of the Southwest.

* As to the middle-class character of the Nazi Party, see F. Neumann, Behemoth, New York, 1942, p. 399.

** Guglielmo Ferrero in his recent work, The Reconstruction of Europe (New York, 1941), emphasizes the fact (p. 323) that the French Revolution reaped in Italy a full victory only as late as 1922 (Mussolini’s March to Rome!).

* Similarly continental writers made the mistake of confusing the labels “democratic” and “liberal” entirely. German essayists coined the term “demoliberal” which was used as a label for all sorts of democrats who sailed under the liberal flag. The support given to these continental Liberals by their naive English confreres strengthened the belief on the Continent that half of England was basically “Left” and that most of the English tradition was “Left.” European Conservatives coming to liberal England for the first time were puzzled to find a country far more aristocratic (and undemocratic) than any other European country with the possible exception of Poland, Hungary, and San Marino.

* Mr. Theodore Kaufman, an American resident, tries to calculate how many doctors and how much time it would take to sterilize all Germans. This idea was eagerly taken up by Mr. Ernest Hemingway who defended it in his preface to Men at War on pp. xxiii-xxiv. (New York, 1942.) Scratch a “democrat” and you always find a Nazi.