Sources for Hitler's racial theories in Mein Kampf

A new critical edition of Hitler's Mein Kampf has been published this month in Germany. It's the first edition allowed to be published legally there after the expiration of the postwar ban on its publication. (Alison Smale, Scholars Unveil New Edition of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ New York Times 12/01/2015; "Mein Kampf". Hitlers Buch wird neu aufgelegt Focus Online 04.01.2016)

This has occasioned new research into the book and its significance. One example is Roman Töppel's
"„Volk und Rasse“. Hitlers Quellen auf der Spur" Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 64:1 (2016). Töppel investigates the likely sources of the racial ideas elaborated in the "Volk und Rasse" chapter of Mein Kampf. And he gives every evidence of having approached the task with stereotypical German thoroughness.

In the process, he finds that the following are the most likely influences on the racial ideas in the "Volk und Rasse" chapter.

• Paul Bang (1879–1945), author of Judas Schuldbuch. Eine deutsche Abrechnung (1919)
• Erwin Baur (1875–1933)
• Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), one of the better-known anti-Semitic racial ideologues, author of The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1911)
• Heinrich Claß (1868–1953), author of Wenn ich der Kaiser wär(1912)
• Dietrich Eckart (1868–1923), who was an ideological mentor for Hitler in Munich, an early editor of the Völkischen Beobachter and author of Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin (published 1927)
• Hans F. K. Günther (1891–1968), author of Ritter, Tod und Teufel (1920)
• Eugen Fischer (1874–1967)
• Theodor Fritsch (1852-1933), author of Handbuch der Judenfrage (1907)
• Otto Hauser (1876–1944), author of Geschichte des Judentums (1921)
• Julius Langbehn (1851–1907), author of Rembrandt als Erzieher (1906)
• Fritz Lenz (1887–1976)
• Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946), longtime editor of the Nazi Party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter
• Richard Wagner (1813-1833), the brilliant but notoriously anti-Semitic composer, author of "Das Judenthum in der Musik“ ("Judaism in Music") (1850)

Yes, it's a real rogues' gallery.

Baur, Fischer and Lenz were all three geneticists, who published a 1923 study called, "Grundriß der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene“ ("Outline of human hereditary tenets and racial hygiene"). They promoted such ideas as the notion that the less valuable races breed more prolifically than the more valuable ones, a notion that White Power politicians like Pat Buchanan still promote. They also advocated the idea that "true genius" was inherited and never the result of upbringing and education. That concept will be all too familiar to anyone who has listened to the tedious "heredity vs. upbringing" assertions typically of white racists in America. I learned long ago that when someone poses the rhetorical question "What's more important, inheritance or upbringing?" that you're about two sentences away from a lesson on how "us white folks sure are smarter than them blacks."

Dietrick Eckart (1868-1923), one of the nasty characters who influenced Hitler's racial propaganda in Mein Kampf

That's part of the reason I have to admire someone who can wade through this gutter literature and then write about it coherently and professionally. Because that's mostly what Hitler scooped up into his writing and speeches. There's no doubt that Hitler was shrewd and extremely talented as a politician. But his literary talents were not marked by brilliance. What he provided in Mein Kampf was a propagandist recycling of the anti-Semitic and radical right nationalist idea that he absorbed particularly in prewar Vienna and postwar Munich.

And as Töppel emphasizes repeatedly, it's not easy to track exactly which influences were most important for Hitler at the time he wrote Mein Kampf. Hitler's own claims are unreliable. He claimed, for instance, that all during his service in the German Army during the First World War, he carried around the five volume of Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea in his backpack. But Töppel explains that there is little evidence that Hitler had much if any direct acquaintance with the 19th-century philosopher's work. And that he probably learned much of what he did know of him before writing Mein Kampf was through Dietrich Eckart.

Töppel argues that the scholarship on Hitler's racial ideology has tended to overestimate the influence of several mostly unsavory characters: "geopolitical" theorist Karl Haushofer (1869-1946),; the American segregationist Madison Grant (1865-1937), at least not for the "Volk und Rasse" chapter; French anthropologist Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1936); Joseph Adolf Lanz, aka, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954), leader of a small Austrian esoteric racist religious sect he called the New Templar Order; and, Viennese occultist Guido von List (1848-1919). The groups of Lanz von Lebenfels and of List used the swastika as a favorite symbol; the swastika was adopted more widely by German-nationalist groups in Austria in the years before the First World War. As Brigitte Hamann notes in Hitlers Wien. Lehrjahre eines Ditators (1996), there is some evidence that Hitler may have been particularly impressed by List's valuation of the swastika as a Germanic symbol.

Töppel also rejects the idea that the novelist Karl May, who wrote cowboy-and-Indian stories set in the American Old West, was any significant influence on Hitler's racial ideology. Hitler's own claim to have read many Karl May novels as a child is totally credible. Because Karl May was incredibly popular among young German and Austria readers. To this day, any German or Austrian under 50 or so probably grew up reading Karl May stories. And those younger are familiar with him through the TV and movies based on his tales, like those of his American Indian character Winnetou.

Töppel stresses that Hitler was highly selective in the ideas he drew from his sources. He took the ones that fit the framework of his notion of the superior "Aryan" race whose most important enemy was the Jewish race. Töppel cites several instances in which sources important for him on some points explicitly rejected other ideas on which Hitler's racial narrative depended. And Hitler didn't care whether there was any actual scientific basis for the ideas on which he relied. He was doing hate propaganda, not scholarly work.

Töppel also notes, "„Mein Kampf“ enthält im Vergleich zu Hitlers Reden und zu völkischen Schriften des späten 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts weder überraschend Neues noch viel Originäres." ("In comparison to Hitler's speeches and to völkish writings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Mein Kampf contains neither anything surprisingly new nor much original.")

Hitler's racial propaganda was particularly focused on making "the Jews" the scapegoat for all resentments:

So entwickelten sich „Jude“ und „jüdisch“ letztendlich zu Chiffren für alles, was die Nationalsozialisten bekämpften. Laut einer Aufzeichnung des Unternehmers Eduard August Scharrer (1880–1932) sagte Hitler bereits im Dezember 1922: „Kampf gegen das Judentum ist eines der Hauptmomente in der Orientierung der Massen der nationalsozialistischen Partei. Dieses Schlagwort kann nicht aufgegeben werden, denn dadurch wird erreicht, daß die Massen in jedem Gegner, der aufgezeigt wird, ihren Todfeind sehen und sich danach einstellen.“

[So "Jew" and "Jewish" developed in the end to code words for everything that the National Socialists were fighting against. According to a record of the businessman Eduard August Scharrer (1880–1932) said that Hitler as early as December 1922 said: "Fighting against Judaism is one of the chief moments in the orientation of the masses of the National Socialist Party. This slogan cannot be given up, because through it will be achieved that the masses will see their mortal enemy {the Jews} in every opponent that is designated {for them} and then direct their fire at them.]

Hitler's and the NSDAP's employment programs during the Great Depression

Charles Kindleberger in his classic, The World in Depression 1929-1939 (1973) described the measures taken by Hitler and his NSDAP (Nazi Party) to combat unemployment after he took power in January 1933.

Kindleberger's description is deficient in two respects that are worth mentioning before getting to his text. The NSDAP was interested in creating jobs for so-called Aryan Germans, i.e., non-Jews. Jews were increasingly restricted in their employment and progressively pushed out of the civil service, the professions and eventually from the whole country. Most Jews who lived in Germany in January 1933 had passed away or emigrated by 1940, when Jews were completely banned from leaving the country. Those who did emigrate had most of their money and property confiscated by the Reich government. Both the restriction of employment by German Jews and the confiscations were significant factors in providing employment to "Aryan" Germans. Kindleberger's book omits discussions of the racial policy aspect of the NSDAP recovery program.

Kindleberger also makes the mistake that is still too common of assuming that the famous Autobahn highway project was primarily a civilian program. Originally planned under the Weimar Republic, the Autobahn construction was seen by Hitler first and foremost in its military aspect. Hitler's primary jobs program was war, and the Autobahn was part of that. In his very first cabinet meeting as Chancellor, he instructed his ministers to consider all such projects primarily with reference to their usefulness in rebuilding Germany's war capacity. The official record of the meeting relates the Führer's direction, "Dieser Gedanke müsee immer und überall im Voerdergrund stehen." ("This thought must always and everywhere stand in the forefront.") The Autobahn project was specifically discussed in that context at the same meeting. The transportation advantages offered by a good national highway system to a war economy was the priority reason for Hitler in building the Autobahn. (The ministerial meeting protocol is quoted by Hans-Henning Scharsach in Haiders Clan. Wie Gewalt entsteht, 1995)

Despite those two significant omissions, Kindleberger's description does a good job of showing how Hitler's employment policies were embedded in a system of coercion and far-reaching denial of rights to German workers, "Aryan" or otherwise. On the first International Workers Day that Hitler was in power, May 1, 1933, the Nazi government banned all independent trade unions and required workers to join a nationwide company union directed by the regime.

Kindleberger refers in the following to "socialist" aspect of the program of the NSDAP, the "S" standing for "socialist". The Nazis never took the "S" more seriously than a superficial, and failed, attempt to appeal to industrial workers. The working-class vote was largely divided between the two parties that understood themselves as distinctively representative of the working class, the Social Democratic (SPD) and Communist (KPD) Parties. The Röhm-Strasser wing of the NSDAP did call for more drastic curbing of the powers of the German capitalist class to be taken over by the German national state and the Nazi Party, which presented itself as the party of the Aryan race, not of the working class. Given the almost exclusively polemical usage of "socialist" in contemporary American politics, understanding the "socialist" rhetoric as used by the NSDAP is no doubt puzzling to most Americans who first encounter it.

Kindleberger refers to the purge of Ernst Röhm, the head of the SA (Brownshirts) paramilitary group, a purge that came in 1934 and became known as the Night of the Long Knives:

Hitler's accession to full power in March 1933 was a forecast of far-reaching changes in the German economic system. In Munich, in 1920, the National Socialist party had laid down a list of twenty-five points, largely economic and social, directed against capitalism, 'interest slavery', and the like, and in favour of colonies, land reform, pensions for old people and the development of the middle class through assistance to shopkeepers.

Those 1920 program demands were long retained but offer little actual guide to the policies the NSDAP pursued. The Party had allied throughout the twenties with other rightwing parties. And made a deal with German conservatives to get Hitler appointed as Reichskanzler in January 1933:

A four-year plan announced in the spring of 1933 promised the rescue of the peasant and the worker, the latter by an attack on unemployment. Agriculture was to be reformed through the establishment of the Reichsnährstand (Food Estate), which controlled prices and then production. Unemployment was attacked through conscription (in March 1935), the development of parastatal bodies, such as the storm troopers and the S.A., and especially in spending on public works and armaments. But the anti-capitalism of the initial stages did not survive for long. The purge of 30 June 1934 was not economic in origin, but it none the less had the effect of moving party doctrine in a more conservative direction in respect of income distribution, if not of control of industry. Control was provided by the law of 27 February 1934, 'Gesetz zur Vorbereitung des organischen Aufbaus der deutsche Wirtschaft' (Law for the Preparation of the Organic Constitution of the German Economy), which laid out a criss-crossed pattern of industrial and regional Überwachungsstellen (Control Offices). Initially, these Control Offices regulated imports on the basis of goods quantities, but this task was eventually turned over to the Reichsbank and operated through foreign-exchange controls. [my emphasis in bold]

The mechanisms used by the NSDAP government were not always in themselves dictatorial or distinct to the German regime. But, as Kindleberger notes there, public employment was provided to a major extent through military and paramilitary organizations, which Hitler planned to use for war, and much of the public spending was for armaments.

On 2 May 1933, the S.S. seized all offices of trade unions in Germany; officials were arrested, and union property was confiscated. The property was incorporated into the Nazi-controlled Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labour Front), which included entrepreneurs and professional men as well as workers. Wages and working conditions were regulated'by Treuhänder der Arbeit (Labour Trustees), appointed for each district. The German Labour Front included Social Honour Courts to deal with abuses by employers or agitation by workers; and Kraft durch Freude ('Strength through Joy'), which organized workers and youth in holidays through taxes on workers' salaries. In particular, workers were required to carry a work book by which both their jobs and movements were controlled.

A great deal of historical works has been done in recent years on institutions like those acted as mechanisms of political and social control under the direction of the Nazi government, e.g., Götz Aly, Hitler Volksstaat. Raub Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus (2005) and Götz Aly (ed), Volkes Stimme. Skepsis und Führervertrauen im Nationalsozailismus (2006). But the topic had received excellent treatment in much earlier studies as well, like Franz Neumann's Behemoth: The Structure and Function of National Socialism 1933-1944 (1942/1944).

Continuing with Kindleberger; he refers here to Hjalmar Schacht (1877-1970), former German central banker who later served as Economics Minister under Hitler and as director of the office to develop a war economy:

Since an early task was to eliminate unemployment, the National Labour Service was established for a variety of projects ranging from agriculture, reclamation, road construction and,ultimately, military installations. It was made compulsory in June 1935. Workers with agricultural training were dismissed and sent back to farms. All labour was frozen in its jobs in 1934. A campaign was undertaken to drive women from gainful employment and back to the hearth. These efforts, it was later thought, prevented Germany from undertaking full mobilization after 1938 and during the Second World War.

Hjalmar Schacht fought hard to prevent deficit financing rising above a dangerous level until 1938,when he resigned. But spending for public works, including Autobahnen, was undertaken through special paper discounted by banks. The effect was rapidly to reduce unemployment from 6 million in October 1933 to 4·1 million a year later, 2·8 million in February 1935, 2·5 million in February 1936, and 1·2 million in February 1937. At the time when the Second Four-Year Plan was introduced, by Hitler in a speech at Nuremberg in September 1936, and formally in October of that year by Herman Goring, anti-depression policy was a thing of the past. Women who had received marriage loans were allowed to take jobs. The forty-hour week was ignored, although the forty-eight-hour week did not come in until August 1938. In June 1938,the Compulsory Labour Decree (Dienstverpflichtverordnung) provided that any inhabitant of the Reich had to accept any work or vocational training assigned to him or her by the Labour Front.

The Second Four-Year Plan also turned policy definitely away from unemployment towards preparation for war. It still [sic] contained schemes for public buildings and Autobahnen, but the emphasis was on providing synthetic industries in rubber, oil, fats, etc., to protect Germany against blockade in time of war. [my emphasis in bold]

John Kenneth Galbraith approached the German actions to combat the Great Depression from a different angle in The Age of Uncertainty (1977). Even Galbraith overstates the civilian nature of the Autobahn construction. But he points out how some of the technical levers used by the German government produced useful results in generating employment:

The Nazis were not given to books. Their reaction was to circumstance, and this served them better than the sound economists served Britain and the United States. From 1933, Hitler borrowed money and spent - and he did it liberally as Keynes would have advised. It seemed the obvious thing to do, given the unemployment. At first, the spending was mostly for civilian works - railroads, canals, public buildings, the Autobahnen. Exchange control then kept frightened Germans from sending their money abroad and those with rising incomes from spending too much of it on imports.

The Nazis weren't aiming at a "socialism" that would have put the means of production under the control of a workers' state, a definition that the SPD and KPD could presumably have agreed upon at the proverbial 30,000-ft. level in 1933. But the Nazis also weren't willing to confine themselves to the conventional advice that had been followed faithfully by the Weimar government from 1930 and whose results had brought the NSDAP to power.

Galbraith:

The results were all a Keynesian could have wished. By late 1935, unemployment was at an end in Germany. By 1936, high income was pulling up prices or making it possible to raise them. Likewise wages were beginning to rise. So a ceiling was put over both prices and wages, and this too worked. Germany, by the late thirties, had full employment at stable prices. It was, in the industrial world, an absolutely unique achievement.

Again, restrictions on non-"Aryan" workers and professionals and confiscation of money and property from emigrating Jews played a part in that result.

Galbraith suggests that a less doctrinaire examination of the German experience by foreign observers in the 1930s could have provided some useful empirical lessons.l :

The German example was instructive but not persuasive. British and American conservatives looked at the Nazi financial heresies - the borrowing and spending - and uniformly predicted a breakdown. Only Schacht, the banker, they said, was keeping things patched together. (They did not know that Schacht, so far as he was aware of what was happening, was opposed.) And American liberals and British socialists looked at the repression, the destruction of the unions, the Brownshirts [SA], the Blackshirts [the SS], the concentration camps, the screaming oratory, and ignored the economics. Nothing good, not even full employment, could come from Hitler. It was the American case that was influential.

Tags: hitler,

john kenneth galbraith, kindleberger, nazism, nsdap, great depression

Indo-Europeans, language and the myth of the "Aryan" race

Guido von List (1848-1919)

Earlier this year I spent some time looking at the relation between what was once commonly called the ancient Aryan language and the 19th- and 20th-century concepts of the "Aryan race" that the Nazis made so infamous.

This article, Arier, from the Glossar Rechextremismus of the German state of Brandenburg gives a very good summary (in German) of the concept of "Aryan" as it came to be used by the Nazis.

As they employed the term, "Aryan" actually meant little other than "not Jewish". Although the Nazis considered Germans a superior race to Slavs and others, as well. But my focus in this post is not the Nazi concept but the much older history that racist thinkers and propagandists have claimed as a background for the so-called Aryan race.

As the Glossar Rechtsextremismus notes, the Nazis so discredited the word "Aryan" that the ancient langauge that was once described neutrally as Aryan is now called "Indo-European."

The Indo-European languages are many, extant and otherwise: the proto-Indo-European language gave birth to the following languages, in alphabetical order: Afrikaans, Albanian, Armenian, Avestan, Bengali, Celtic, Czech, English, Faliscan, French, Gaelic, German, Greek, Hindi, Hittite, Illyrian, Italian, Lithuanian, Latin, Latvian, Luvian, Messapic, Oscan, Persian, Phrygian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Sanskrit, Spanish, Swedish, Thracian, Tocharian, Romany, Welsh, and Yiddish.

J.P. Mallory in his text In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth (1989) argues that the most plausible location of the original Indo-European "homeland" is in the steppes of the "Pontic-Caspian" area, very roughly the area north and northeast of the Black Sea. The primary evidence for this reconstruction of prehistory is linguistic and archaeological, but primarily linguistic. He dates the development of the original Proto-Indo-European language as no latter than 2500 BCE and with evidence of an existing "cultural vocabulary consistent with a date of roughly the fourth millennium BC." Language and archaeology are related in examining the evidence. He describes, for instance, how the Proto-Indo-European word for horse, *ek'wos, correlates with the archaeological evidence of the spread of horses in Central Europe and the types of terrains which would have been most congenial for them.

Mallory writes:

Proto-Indo-European probably evolved out of the languages spoken by hunter-fishing communities in the Pontic-Caspian region. It is impossible to select which languages and what areas, though a linguistic continuum from the Dnieper east to the Volga would be possible. Settlement would have been confined primarily to the major river valleys and their tributaries, and this may have resulted in considerable linguistic ramification. But the introduction of stockbreeding, and the domestication of the horse, permitted the exploitation of the open steppe. With the subsequent development of wheeled vehicles in this area, highly mobile communities would have interacted regularly with the more sedentary river valley and forest-steppe communities. During the period to which we notionally assign Proto-Indo-European (4500-2500 BC), most of the Pontic-Caspian served as a vast interaction sphere. ... Words would have passed freely between different dialects, and the later isoglosses which seem to leap geographical boundaries, such as Greek or German and Tocharian, may have been the result of these interactions. In addition, higher versus lower variants of Indo-European languages may have been spoken, which would further account for why some linguistic groups preserve certain words and others lack such reflexes. In the east, both Proto-Indo-Europeans and later ancestors of the Indo-Iranians were in contact with Finno-Ugric speakers. In the west, the shared agricultural vocabulary of the European languages may have developed along the middle Dnieper or in contact with the numerous Tripolyean settlements of the western Ukraine.

This common linguistic background reflects a cultural background. But it can't be considered a "race" in any meaningful sense of the word. Much less a group of pure descent from some original proto-Indo-European speakers 4500 years ago. Whatever their distinctive physical characteristics may have been in 2500 BCE, their genes have been widely shared since then, and other genes widely shared with theirs.

Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954)

The racial theories of the 19th century were largely pseudo-science, or just plain bad science. The late Stephen Jay Gould did a fascinating book called The Mismeasure of Man (1981) describing how white scientific researchers on race who appeared to be seriously trying to ground their work solidly in evidence were nevertheless heavily influenced in their interpretations by their cultural assumptions on race. He does so by re-examining the original data from which they were drawing there conclusions.

But pseudoscientific theories of race like those elaborated by Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau (1816-1882) and Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927) cannot be assumed to have been based on scientific good intentions. Those influences heavily formed the Nazi brand of racism and anti-Semitism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes Chamberlain's view in its article on Race:

The apogee of post-Darwinian race-thinking was arguably reached in the book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century by Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), the son-in-law of German opera composer Richard Wagner. Chamberlain argued in the evolutionary terms of sexual selection that distinct races emerged through geographical and historical conditions which create inbreeding among certain individuals with similar traits ... Moving from this initial specification, Chamberlain then argued that the key strands of western civilization - Christianity and ancient Greek philosophy and art – emerged from the Aryan race. Jesus, for instance, was held to be of Aryan stock, despite his Jewish religion, since the territory of Galilee was populated by peoples descended from Aryan Phonecians as well as by Semitic Jews. Similarly, Aristotle's distinction between Greeks and Barbarians was reinterpreted as a racial distinction between Aryans and non-Aryans. These Greek and Christian strands became united in Europe, particularly during the Reformation, which allowed the highest, Teutonic strain of the Aryan race to be freed from constraining Roman Catholic cultural fetters. But while Roman institutions and practices may have constrained the Teutonic Germans, their diametric opposite was the Jew, the highest manifestation of the Semitic Race. The European religious tensions between Christian and Jew were thus transformed into racial conflicts, for which conversion or ecumenical tolerance would have no healing effect. Chamberlain's writings, not surprisingly, have come to be seen as some of the key intellectual foundations for twentieth century German anti-Semitism, of which Adolf Hitler was simply its most extreme manifestation.

This wasn't science or good-faith inquiry. It was crass anti-Semitism and racism cooked up to meet the prejudices to which Chamberlain wished to pander.

But pseudoscience isn't the only source of misinformation about the fictional "Aryan race". Esoteric groups also promoted racist notions about the "Aryans", particularly the theosophists. The Austrian cranks Guido von List (1848-1919) und Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954) were two esoteric racial theorists whose work influenced Hitler's thinking and the racial/historical writing in his book Mein Kampf.

Tags: indo-european language, national socialism, nazism, racism

Watching what's happening (1934 version)

Der Jüdische Arbeiter 09.02.1934, a Zionist weekly newspaper published in Vienna, ran this short piece:

Die Gefahr des Hitlerismus und des Krieges

In einer gefahrerfüllten Stunde hat unsere Bewegung eine schwere Verantwortung für das Schicksal des Zionismus übernommen, schwerer als jede zuvor. Das Ungluck, das das deutsche Judentum betroffen hat, macht nicht Halt an den deutschen Grenzen[.] Hitlers Macht bringt das ganze jüdische Volk und nicht nur dieses in Gefahr.

Der Nationalsozialismus kampft nicht nur gegen die deutschen Juden, sondern gegen die Juden der ganzen Welt. Hitler breitet ein Netz von Agenten aus, um in allen Ländern das antisemitische Gift zu verbreiten.

Aber Hitler attackiert nicht nur die Juden. Das Hakenkreuzregime kann nicht lange bestehen, ohne Revanchekrieg gegen Frankreich und die übrigen Nachbarländer, oder ohne Krieg gegen Sowjetrussland. Heute wird Deutschland keinen Krieg beginnen, da es ungerüstet ist — aber es rüstet fur morgen.

[In an hour full of danger, our movement has taken upon ourselves a heavy responsibility for the fate of Zionism, heavier than ever before. The misfortune that has struck German Judaism, doesn't stop at the German borders. Hitler's power brings the entire Jewish people in danger, and not only they.

National Socialism [Nazism] doesn't fight only against the German Jews but also against the Jews of the entire world. Hitler is unfolding a net of agents to spread the anti-Semitic poison to all countries.

But Hitler will attack not only the Jews. The swastika regime cannot long survive without a revanchist war against France and the other neighboring countires, or without a war against Soviet Russia. Today German will not start a war because it is unarmed - but it is arming itself for tomorrow.]

Tags: anti-semitism, austria, germany, national socialism,, nazism, third reich

Robert Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism

The Anatomy of Fascism (2004) has gotten quite a bit of attention from political observers concerned over the painfully obvious authoritarianism of today's Republican Party.

But Paxton's book is much stronger on its description of the historical fascist regimes in Germany and Italy than on describing the sort of warning signs of present-day versions that one might expect to find.

As a bit of a skeptic about how much we actually learn from history, that doesn't particularly surprise me. And maybe my own view gets caught up in my mind's poli-sci screens that remind me than even defining fascism is a difficult and controversial task. In fact, probably the only one on which everyone can agree to apply the term is that of Mussolini's Italy, because his party was called Fascist and he described his regime that way.

Most people would use the term for Hitler's Third Reich, as well. But even that is actually a question on which serious historians and political scientists have no consensus. The question there is whether National Socialism (Nazism) actually shared enough fundamental characteristics of the Mussolini regime that they can be meaningfully classified together, or whether it represented something distinct enough that it was qualitatively different. Virtually no one would dispute that in terms of its toll on human life and freedom, that National Socialism was worse than Mussolini's regime.

Paxton ducks the problem of defining fascism until the final chapter by saying its much more informative to compare the fascisms that we know about. It may be a wise approach. But it also brings to mind Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famous 1964 definition of pornography: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced ... [b]ut I know it when I see it."

When he finally gets there, on the third page before the end of the book, he comes up with this:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Paxton examines the history of the Third Reich and Italian Fascism in five stages:

I propose to examine fascism in a cycle of five stages: (i) the creation of movements; (2) their rooting in the political system; (3) their seizure of power; (4) the exercise of power; (5) and, finally, the long duration, during which the fascist regime chooses either radicalization or entropy. Though each stage is a prerequisite for the next, nothing requires a fascist movement to complete all of them, or even to move in only one direction. Most fascisms stopped short, some slipped back, and sometimes features of several stages remained operative at once. Whereas most modern societies spawned fascist movements in the twentieth century, only a few had fascist regimes. Only in Nazi Germany did a fascist regime approach the outer horizons of radicalization.

This five-stage approach serves him well in describing those two regime. His account reminds us that these movements and regimes went through a definite evolution. This may sound obvious in the abstract. But in practice, very much of the discussion about those regimes, especially the Hitler regime, takes place with the Second World War and the Holocaust as the main point of reference. Understandably so.

But it's also important to understand that those regimes did not look like what they later came to be in 1935 or 1937. They were clearly dictatorships, and often brutal ones. And there were danger signs about the directions in which they were going. But it was only in war that the Hitler regime especially could become the true horror that we now know it was.

Paxton doesn't adduce new factual discoveries but rather concentrates on analyzing the familiar histories. And his analyses of those two regimes is refreshingly insightful. He doesn't fall into the haze of "totalitarianism", a term originally used by Western conservatives to blur the distinctions between fascist regimes and Soviet Communism. If the notion brought more fog than light to the subject, that was the purpose of the "totalitarian" idea.

His brief description of the changes in European politics that set the stage for fascism is a good one. His observation about their leadership is perceptive:

The fascist leaders were outsiders of a new type. New people had forced their way into national leadership before. There had long been hard-bitten soldiers who fought better than aristocratic officers and became indispensable to kings. A later form of political recruitment came from young men of modest background who made good when electoral politics broadened in the late nineteenth century. One thinks of the aforementioned French politician Leon Gambetta, the grocer's son, or the beer wholesaler's son Gustav Stresemann, who became the preeminent statesman of Weimar Germany. A third kind of successful outsider in modern times has been clever mechanics in new industries (consider those entrepreneurial bicycle makers Henry Ford, William Morris, and the Wrights).

But many of the fascist leaders were marginal in a new way. They did not resemble the interlopers of earlier eras: the soldiers of fortune, the first upwardly mobile parliamentary politicians, or the clever mechanics. Some were bohemians, lumpen-intellectuals, dilettantes, experts in nothing except the manipulation of crowds and the fanning of resentments; Hitler, the failed art student; Mussolini, a schoolteacher by trade but mostly a restless revolutionary, expelled for subversion from Switzerland and the Trentino; Joseph Goebbels, the jobless college graduate with literary ambitions; Hermann Goering, the drifting World War I fighter ace; Heinrich Himmler, the agronomy student who failed at selling fertilizer and raising chickens.

He also emphasizes that for both Hitler and Mussolini, the support of conservatives was important both in coming to power and to consolidating their regimes. But he also reminds us that there was a populist element to those regimes that made them different from simple reactionaries.

Paxton is also right in seeing war as a central factor of fascism:

War provided fascism's clearest radicalizing impulse. It would be more accurate to say that war played a circular role in fascist regimes. Early fascist movements were rooted in an exaltation of violence sharpened by World War I, and war making proved essential to the cohesion, discipline, and explosive energy of fascist regimes. Once undertaken, war generated both the need for more extreme measures, and popular acceptance of them. It seems a general rule that war is indispensable for the maintenance of fascist muscle tone (and, in the cases we know, the occasion for its demise).

It seems clear that both Hitler and Mussolini deliberately chose war as a necessary step in realizing the full potential of their regimes. They wanted to use war to harden internal society as well as to conquer vital space. Hitler told Goebbels, "the war ... made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times."

War was not an incidental feature of National Socialism and Italian Fascism. It was at the core of the movements and the regimes they formed. That's why it makes no sense to speculate counter-factually about what things would have been like if those regimes hadn't sought war. Even as a speculation, it makes no sense. Had those regimes not sought war, they wouldn't have been the regimes that they were. Some things were accidental features of those regimes. War was the core of them:

Expansionist war lies at the heart of radicalization. Insofar as Fascist Italy radicalized, it did so most fully in conquered East Africa and in the final paroxysm of the Italian campaign. The Nazi regime reached the outer limits of radicalization with its war of extermination against the Soviet Union. In that specially charged situation Nazi officials felt free to take more violent action than they had done in the western campaigns of 1940, first against the enemies of the regime, then against fascism's conservative allies, and eventually against the German people themselves, in an ecstasy of terminal destruction.

Whereas in traditional authoritarian war regimes, the army tends to extend its control, as it did in the German Reich during 1917-18 and in Franco's Spain, the German army lost control of occupation policy in the east after 1941, as we have seen, to the Nazi Party's parallel organizations. Party radicals felt free to express their hatreds and obsessions in ways that were foreign to the traditions of the state services. The issue here is not simply one of moral sensitivity; some officers and civil servants were appalled by SS actions in the conquered territories, while others went along because of group solidarity or because they had become hardened. It was to some degree an issue of turf. It would be unthinkable for a traditional military dictatorship to tolerate the incursions of amateurish party militias into military spheres that Hitler — and even, in Ethiopia, Mussolini—permitted.

Paxton here also makes a distinction between the behavior of the Hitler and Mussolini regimes:

The Nazi and Soviet cases shared a rejection of the state of law and due process; both subordinated them to the imperatives of History [and, he might have added to the Party]. In other respects, however, fascist radicalization was not identical to the Stalinist form. Fascism idealized violence in a distinctive way, as a virtue proper to a master race.

Communism was a radical form of democracy which emerged as the far left wing of the European democratic movements of the 1840s. However much the Soviet practice departed from democratic ones, Communist ideology did emerge from democratic thought and practice originally, and always used the language of democracy. Fascism in both its Nazi and Italian variants explicitly rejected democracy as a decadent ideology. And those differences did manifest themselves in the actual behaviors and self-understandings of the regime. As Paxton writes, fascism idealized violence and war in a way that neither Soviet Communism nor Western democracy did.

When Paxton moves beyond his analyses of the German and Italian movements, though, his observations are not so solidly grounded. And here we stumble again on the problem of defining fascism. Francisco Franco's regime in Spain is often regarded as fascist, but Paxton argues that it was not. Even more surprising, he argues the the Austrian dictatorship of 1933-1938 under Engelbert Dollfuss and later Schuschnigg was not a fascist regime. That government is commonly referred to as "clerical-fascist", and its own self-description as a Standestaat (corporate state) reflected the fact that it was largely modeled on Mussolini's Fascist regime, though Austria's variety had a more distinct Catholic touch. (Hence the "clerical" in "clerical-fascist".) German and Austrian writers are more likely to refer to it as Austrofascism.

Paxton writes about some of the rightwing organizations in the United States in the 1930s that were more directly inspired by the German and Italian models, such as the Silver Shirts led by William Dudley Pelley. He's correct in arguing:

Much more dangerous are movements that employ authentically American themes in ways that resemble fascism functionally. The Klan revived in the 19205, took on virulent anti-Semitism, and spread to cities and the Middle West. In the 19305, Father Charles E. Coughlin gathered a radio audience estimated at forty million around an anticom-munist, anti-Wall Street, pro-soft money, and—after 1938—anti-Semitic message broadcast from his church in the outskirts of Detroit. For a moment in early 1936 it looked as if his Union Party and its presidential candidate, North Dakota congressman William Lemke, might overwhelm Roosevelt. The plutocrat-baiting governor Huey Long of Louisiana had authentic political momentum until his assassination in 1935, but, though frequently labeled fascist at the time, he was more accurately a share-the-wealth demagogue. The fundamentalist preacher Gerald L. K. Smith, who had worked with both Coughlin and Long, turned the message more directly after World War II to the "Judeo-Communist conspiracy" and had a real impact. Today a "politics of resentment" rooted in authentic American piety and nativism sometimes leads to violence against some of the very same "internal enemies" once targeted by the Nazis, such as homosexuals and defenders of abortion rights.(my emphasis)

Whether Huey Long represented an American variety of fascism is still disputed, as we see in Paxton's quote here. But I disagree with him on that point, as well; Long was a down-home American fascist type. If there was an American Hitler during the 1930s, it was Huey Long. Franklin Roosevelt once remarked that Long was one of the two most dangerous men in America. When asked who the other was, he replied, "Douglas MacArthur".

On the whole, Paxton's generalizations about other varieties of fascism or not-fascism are interesting but don't tell us that much about political dynamics. The real value in the book is in its descriptions and analysis of the Third Reich and Italian Fascism.

Tags: authoritarianism, anatomy of fascism, fascism, national socialism, nazism, robert paxton

Leni Riefenstahl: Dead at Last

One shouldn't "speak ill of the dead," the saying goes. But Leni Riefenstahl was no good. She died this week at age 101, lending some credence to another saying: "Only the good die young."

Riefenstahl did many other things in her life than make propaganda movies for Hitler. But the main reason she is world-[in]famous, the main reason newspapers all over the world are running prominent obituaries for her, is that she made the film Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), a documentary about the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, starring her friend, admirer and Leader Adolf Hitler.

The film is still commonly referred to as the greatest propaganda film ever made. A present-day audience may find that somewhat surprising. The booming, melodramatic rhetoric that was common in those days when politicians still had to depend heavily on projecting their voices in live appearances often comes off as histrionic today. And the long segment of marchers carrying banners and insignia to the sound of martial music is dull to almost anyone today.

But in those pre-television days, it was spectacularly successful. It would be a mistake, though, to think that Triumph des Willens was Rifenstahl's only service to the Hitler regime. Susan Sontag did a 1975 essay called "Fascinating Fascism" to counter Riefenstahl's effort to reinvent herself as some kind of pioneering feminist filmmaker.

Sontag debunked Riefenstahl's ridiculous claim that she made Triumph des Willens as pure art, a claim that Riefenstahl made until the end. Sontag describes how the 1934 rally was organized around Riefenstahl's filming, and how senior Party officials made great efforts to accomodate her directorial demands.

To use a more recent example, saying that Triumph des Willens was pure art would be like saying that George W. Bush's May 1 appearance on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln wearing a flight suit and featuring a giant "Mission Accomplished" banner was routine daily bureaucratic business. It was an event staged entirely for the cameras.

Moreover, Riefenstahl's second most famous movie, Olympiad, a record of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, was also a Nazi propaganda film. (Actually, it was two movies, Fest der Völker and Fest der Schönheit.) The event itself was meant to showcase the superiority of "Aryan" athletes, although the African-American runner Jesse Owens famously upset that goal. You don't have to go into philosophical discussion of what "Nazi aesthetics" were about to know that Riefenstahl intended the film to glorify the Nazi ideal and the Hitler government.

Hitler himself referred to Riefenstahl as the ideal German woman. Although, like some female Christian Right activists in America today, her own life as a professional woman hardly fit the traditional mold of "Kinder, Küche, Kirche" that the Nazis idealized for "Aryan" women. That means "children, kitchen, church," although the Nazis weren't as big on the "church" part as the other two.

She was never a member of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party, but Riefenstahl willingly promoted Hitler's regime. For instance, after the annexation of Austria in 1938, she went as Hitler's emissary to occupied Austria to help put a nice public-relations face on the new regime.

After the war Riefenstahl remained an unrepentant old Nazi. The 1994 film Die Macht der Bilder (The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl) allowed the elderly filmmaker to tell her story at great length, with minimal critical challenge. She portrayed herself as a kindly old grandmotherly type who just had no idea about all those horrible things Hitler was doing. Why, she was shocked, shocked, when she heard about it.

The master propagandist hadn't lost her touch. In that film, she carefully tailored her comments to minimize the evils of (verharmlosen) the Third Reich as much as she could without running afoul of the German anti-Nazi laws.

Even at age 100, she was still at it:

Speaking to The Associated Press just before her 100th birthday on Aug. 22,
2002, Riefenstahl dramatically said she has "apologized for ever being born" but
that she should not be criticized for her masterful films.

"I don't know
what I should apologize for," she said. "I cannot apologize, for example, for
having made the film 'Triumph of the Will' -- it won the top prize. All my films
won prizes."

The woman may never have been a Party member. But she was an incorrigible Nazi to the end. That's who she was, that's what she stood for. And that's how we should remember her.

- Bruce Miller

Hearing: Pete Seeger, "Last Train to Nuremberg"

Tags: leni riefenstahl, nazism, national socialism