The second part of Mr. Hitler's outline of his poison dart in the heart of humanity delves more into the politics involved in his plot...His intended divisiveness is exemplified as he continues his belief that the large scale hatred displayed against his party was good as a sign of recognition, saying indifference to their cause was its reason for its slow start under the direction of a more timid leadership...
My theory is that the violence and vitriol his fledgling party caught was thrown as a general display of the unhappiness felt by so many Germans who expected victory in the recent war, and would have felt some relief no matter who caught the mud bouquets...As evidence I offer the constantly changing tide of political current as Germans switched parties and directions in their attraction to the loudest jeering voices in the years following their military defeat in the First World War...
Hitler demonstrated his own theory of lumping his adversaries together to appear as one by calling communism a tool of the Jews hoping to incite the "masses" that hated one or the other to think of them as inseparable...It is supposed that he thought of the generic "masses" as being formless and having no direction, waiting only to be led to a vague promised land...
Hitler talked of the various meetings in the beer halls of Munich where politicians of every stripe vied for the attention of the miserable mobs looking to be led from their deep forest of blue funk...He added literary dramatic effect to one gathering in particular in February 1920 at the Hofbrauhaus, where the Nazi Party's Twenty Five Points were read to the crowd...Politics were not unknown here as The Communist Party was headquartered in the building, and Vladimir Lenin made regular visits during his residency in Munich...
Hitler had previously penned at the end of his Part I dissertation that he had insisted the party's meager treasury be emptied and spent on flyers and posters advertising the meeting because of his pre-destined vision of making a great impact with his oratory...They did pick up considerable steam afterward, the credit to which I imagine Hitler in his retrospect attached his own vision and powers of speech...It didn't hurt that the gang of low-brow goons which would soon form the Sturmabteilung, or SA, used their highly effective rubber club methods to quiet the outcry of dissenters who disagreed with the presentation...
I feel sure that the subject matter of the 25 Points appealed to the vocal remainder of the crowd who had not joined those who had been stunned into silence...The largely anti-Semitic portion of the beer hall gathering was certainly encouraged by the specific exclusion of Jews in what was described as "the race," the only ones fit to exist in their Nazified world...
This surely came as no surprise to anyone who had followed his ever-broadening target of race as his recipient of blame for the ills of the world...As early as 1919, he had committed to paper in a military report to his Army unit commander concerning his characterization of the "Jewish menace," that all legal means should be exhausted in depriving Jewish people of a place in German society, "but the final aim must unquestionably be the irrevocable Entfernung of the Jews"...John Toland, in his thoroughly researched and extensively annotated biography, "Adolf Hitler," explained that "entfernung" has more than one meaning in the German language, but that Hitler likely meant "amputation" in this reference...
As the author gets down to his perception of the state's role in the governance of people, he is emphatic that its main focus and almost its only reason for existence is in the preservation of racial purity...It is left for supposition that he expected other nations to wait patiently by for their inferior races to be overrun and plundered for whatever items of value could be taken by the "superior Aryans"...
His likening of the state as a bottle sealing its contents, "the race," from the rest of the world could be extended to its utilization as a Molotov Cocktail thrown against the wall of resistance of the "inferior" remainder of the world...In this allegory the energy contained by his master race is spent without gain on an enemy which kept the scar as a lasting warning against another rise of similar danger...
Deeper into his treatise on his perfect "state," he proposes controls over families and education, all harkening back to his familiar rant on racial construction...Here he introduces his state-imposed restrictions on marriage:
"A race-based nationalist state, will, therefore, have to first raise marriage from the level of constant racial contamination and to bless it as an institution that is appointed to reproduce mankind in the image of the Lord, not monsters that are half man and half ape."A bare decade later the Nazi's Nuremburg Laws took effect as Hitler's ideal society began to take form...But not content with dictating who might be permitted to marry whom, in the next pages he outlined what he deemed as necessary for the proper education of the healthy children produced by these favored marriages...
I specified "healthy" as Hitler did not believe educational resources should be wasted on those children unfortunate enough to be born in a sickly body:
"A decayed body is not made even a tiny bit more beautiful by a brilliant mind. In fact, the highest intellectual training could not be justified at all if it were possessed by one who was physically degenerate and crippled, weak-willed, indecisive, and cowardly in character."Given those limitations, Hitler himself and his later devoted lackey, Joseph Goebbels, would both be denied an education...Again using John Toland for reference, young Adolf (registered in the church's baptismal ledger as Adolfus Hitler) was a sickly child from birth, and in his own regime of later years would likely have been euthanized by nurses...He would probably have been denied even a primary education, at which his marks were graded as "excellent"...
Joseph Goebbels, as another example, suffered from inflamed lungs as a small child, and walked with a permanent limp from a clubbed left foot, the result of a congenital birth defect...Rejected for military service for his physical deformity, he never grew taller than five feet, five inches...Under his Fuehrer's guidelines, such a child would never have received his advanced university education, and might have even been euthanized as an infant...
Never an athlete himself, although he enjoyed outdoor activities, whether with other children or by himself, Hitler dedicated quite a few words in this chapter in the encouragement of boxing as a school sport...He seemed almost gleeful in his thoughts of two young men duking it out to settle a difference, and rather disparaging of those he termed as "intellectual" who might see the violence as unnecessary...
Eventually he boiled down his proposed changes in the German educational system to these three:
- His belief that young heads were being filled with more information than they could ever process or retain, he proposed only a generic "basic overview" of scholastic subjects with more attention on physical training and idealism...
- He urged less coverage of "pure science" and foreign languages, saying the subjects were too specialized to be absorbed by students of whom a large percentage would never need the subject matter in their future worklives...
- His belief that great achievers were only great because of their association with their national identity led to his recommendation that only significant developments by German nationalists be given study priority...
As for expending any resources on educating those who are not of "Aryan blood," he equated such a feat to training a dog to jump through a hoop, admitting that it can be done, but the exercise was pointless and without benefit...He exemplified his belief in the following quote:
"It is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator to let hundreds and thousands of His most gifted creatures decay in the modern worker-laborer swamp while Hottentots and Zulus are being tamed for intellectual professions. As with the poodle, it is just animal training and not scholastic education."Overlooking the obvious inaccuracies in his words, I'm reminded of his own history in Vienna in which he was twice denied entrance to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, and forced to prevent starvation by accepting work as a day laborer...The taste of sour grapes must have been strong in his mouth as he dictated his resentment to his fawning stooge, Rudolf Hess...He may have been composing these words in his short-circuited mind since his supposed unfair rejection...
He followed his dream of the future state with his depiction of its inhabitants...This short, confusing chapter proposes conferring citizenship upon native German men following successful schooling and completion of military service...Females would be eligible for citizenship only through marriage (to a citizen presumably), or by way of an essential career...All other inhabitants were to be accorded the title of "subject" having no political status, and none of the privileges of citizenship...
Given these narrow (and understandably tentative at that early date) confines, it is unclear whether future henchmen Joseph Goebbels and Albert Speer would have been eligible for citizenship since neither served in the military, Goebbels having been rejected as unsuitable and Speer neither being drafted nor volunteering...Equally unclear is the possibility of potential citizenship for future SD commandant Reinhard Heydrich who was forced to leave his naval career in the Reichsmarine in disgrace...
But that's mere speculation on this reviewer's part as I feel confident that Herr Hitler would have found some pathway to citizenship for such talented individuals...He also proposed taking away the status of citizenship from convicted criminals, although he may have planned special exemptions for those convicted of crimes such as murder or treason as in the cases of Martin Bormann, Rudolf Hess and, of course, himself...
Moving on to his discussion of state governing concepts, Mein Kampf's author returns again to one of his central themes, in which a majority of voting citizens can't rule as efficiently as one brilliant mind possessing a driving will to accomplish a preset goal...He suggests here that his upstart political organization become accustomed to such one-man-rule by adopting the principle to its own leadership...We are left to speculate that he intended the position of supreme leader for himself...
His concept of a "World-Concept" may have been crystal clear somewhere in the whirling thoughts racing around and around in Herr Hitler's brain, but he had a serious problem transferring it to paper to share with the waiting world...Although titled "World-Concept and Organization" in the Ford translation, I found little in this chapter resembling organization, and I'm still struggling for a clear picture of his world concept...Another source (claiming to be unbiased), which does not identify its translator, titles this chapter "Philosophy and Organization"...I do not know which version is clearer to a mind born to the English language, but in either case the chapter may have been more aptly titled "World Subjugation and Organization"...
In his stated attempt here to separate the ideas of world concept and political party, Hitler has again erroneously lumped his opponents into a single target zone, saying that Social Democracy (one of the Nazis' main antagonists in the battle for control of the Reichstag), Marxism and Jewry are all one and the same...The goal of his pursuit in this chapter seems to aim for swaying his readers into thinking of Nazi idealism in grander terms as a "World-Concept," and less as just another political manifesto...
In this effort, he eventually drags out his previously mentioned 25 Points as a summation of guiding principles calculated to lure the large German working class into his net as a basis for his organization...He stated correctly that an army of generals is useless in battle, as the foot soldiers must fight, kill and die before any general can take credit...It is also clear that he believed in only one real general, and the remainder of the army were only in place to follow his orders...
Hitler's discussion on the power of speech left me scratching my head until I remembered the time-frame in which he wrote his thesis...His loud, vindictive harangues were part of the vehicle which landed him in prison where these writings were assembled...His chapter detailing the strength of the spoken word over the weakness of the printed media would not become a moot point until his regime's takeover when dissenting newspapers, writers and publishers were liquidated, and his were the only words dared spoken aloud...
He wrote here of the usual Jew/Marxist/Capitalist controlled newspapers whose lies were shattered by the richly intoned truth when he began to speak (pardon my sarcasm)...He also mentioned in passing that the best time to force his hate message into the empty heads in the beer halls was after dark, when the mouth-breathers were well lubricated with the local Bavarian joy juice...He said that the same word-for-word speeches he used in mid-morning or afternoons were met by cold silence from the mostly sober ditch-digging crowds...
He attributed his more favorable evening reception by the masses in this way:
"A man of dominating force, a man who has the character of an apostle, and a man who is an outstanding speaker will be the one who succeeds in winning over men whose resistance has already been weakened. Their resistance is more easily overcome than those who are still in full possession of their force of will and their intellectual strength."What he neglected to mention was the fact that the "outstanding speaker" was still cold sober (Hitler did not drink), and the men in the audience, having traded in their pay envelopes for an equal amount of alcohol were ready to agree with anyone promising more freedom, more money and mostly more beer...The next morning as the antagonist newspapers printed their opposing opinions, his listeners of the previous evening were too hungover and bleary-eyed to suffer through reading it...
Naturally after he assumed his totalitarian power, his voice and the mimicry of his stooges became the only voices heard as German citizens began to notice that those who spoke up in opposition were suddenly carted away to the concentration camps for "re-education"...And formerly busy newspaper publishers printing alternate views were reduced to smoldering ashes...
However, Hitler's point in this chapter was in representing how he best got his opinions out to the people whose support he sought...He wanted massive backing by large numbers of souls...To do this, he had to know his audience, and talk at their level on subjects of primary interest to them...In this aspect he was successful, and he knew why and how to expand that success...
After his assumption of total power in Germany, he also knew that he was not the only forceful speaker with powers of persuasion...Since keeping power is often much harder than acquiring it, he began in 1933 to eliminate not only the freedom of speech in Germany, but the freedom to listen to foreign broadcasts and read foreign news reports, or any other sources which were contradictory to his goals...
In the few years prior to Hitler's imprisonment resulting from his failed Beer Hall Putsch, the Weimar Republic was splintered politically by several parties all wanting dominance, but none having the majority needed to gain control...The largest were the democracy and religion based parties which usually formed a coalition to push through their own agendas...The loudest, and most boisterous were the Communists and the National Socialists, or Nazis, who each saw the other as their biggest threat to attaining more power...
The author's discussion of struggle against the "Red Front" is more a how-to article in either attaining or defeating control of a scheduled rally or meeting...He talked of attending meetings of the mainstream "privileged class" parties and dismissing them as incapable of stirring enough emotion to increase or even keep their own numbers...
But one thing did impress him, and that was the symbolism used by the Communists in their red flags, red armbands and red flowers displayed as they marched and demonstrated in the streets...He saw how this could draw the curious into the crowds, who saw it as a sign of power...He also noted that the more mainstream parties had no symbolic flag, and therefore no rallying point for new converts...
He noted there were several submissions for his party's own flag, but there were no designs which pleased him...He then designed his own black, white and red banner complete with swastika, which he ramrodded through to acceptance...He said it was an instant success as female party members began sewing flags together, and he ordered armbands for everyone...
At this point he began waxing nostalgic as he recalled the head-cracking good times at the meetings where a few dozen of his storm troop goons held off several hundred Marxists...He fondly recalled both Emil Maurice, who served as the first SA commander, and Rudolf Hess, his prison secretary and later Deputy Fuehrer, both of whom were instrumental in maintaining order...[It is thought by this reviewer that his memory of the huge numerical odds of storm troops vs. Marxists may have been slightly skewed to make his boys appear more fearsome than they actually were]...
Also at this early date, despite his self-assumed clairvoyant powers, he did not yet know of his future betrayal by the single-browed Hess after the outbreak of WWII, in which he flew to Scotland in one of the Luftwaffe fighters with an unauthorized peace plea, nor of Maurice's future romantic entanglements with Hitler's niece/ersatz paramour, Geli Raubal...Perhaps at this point his foresight was more closely concentrated on political events, rather than personal duplicities...
To digress for just a paragraph, little hard evidence exists even 80 years after Geli Raubal's death, but much speculation has been written of surrounding her alleged suicide...Today historians almost universally believe that Hitler, if he did not participate personally in her death, almost certainly agreed to its necessity...Heinrich Muller, later Chief of the Gestapo, was said to have been the first Munich policeman at the scene of her death...Key witnesses were conveniently eliminated during the Night of the Long Knives...
Herr Hitler has referred several times in this book to the importance of a great cause being directed by just one man, and not a committee, certainly not a democracy...In his next chapter he outlines his reasons why Germany can only move forward with one man in control, presumably himself...He illustrates in this quote:
"However, the best proof of a people's strength and of its being fated to survive is the fact that one day, Fate grants it the brilliant man who can fulfill their long held desire. It may be the release from some long held oppression, elimination of bitter distress, or contentment of the people's soul which has become restless from their insecurity."...or, if this reviewer may add from retrospect, it may signal the beginning of a calamity of incalculable harm to nations and humanity, and can only be seen as a weakness in that people which allowed it...In such a case, Fate didn't take a liking to that nation at all...
Hitler's strong belief in fate and destiny is seen throughout this chapter as he talks of a leader being selected by unseen forces to bring Germany to the forefront of nations...He speaks constantly in the third person of the strong, brilliant man whose divinely-inspired will must rise to guide his "race" to the victory of which it was robbed in the previous war...Naturally that one man can only be him...
He spoke of the many various groups and movements started in Germany with the same vague goal in mind, and told of his belief that combining them in the quest for strength only weakens them as they have no common leader...He talked of Nature pitting these groups against one another, while favoring the one on the surest path to victory...It's clear he inferred that the favored one was Nazism and Adolf Hitler...
Hitler also describes in this chapter a personality which he says often leads the unsuccessful movements to their own failures:
"It originates in the sorry mixture of envy, jealousy, ambition and a desire to take what belongs to others. This kind of ambition is unfortunately often found in individual members of the human race"If the German Workers Party and the German nation had been able to recognize the above traits in Hitler, they and the world around them might have been spared the misery and destruction which befell them...Instead he drew in others of his ilk, such as the sexual pervert and anti-Semitic publisher, Julius Streicher, along with the membership of Streicher's German Socialist Party, saying this was the honorable way for Streicher to dissolve his party...
The other "racialist" parties which refused to capitulate to the Nazis were accused here by Hitler of stealing his platforms and policies, and using them as their own...But he said the resulting worker party coalitions failed to make the weaker parties stronger, only draining the existing strength from the stronger ones, while his retained its strength by staying pure...The author arrogantly closed his chapter championing self-sufficiency with this quote:
"Above all, the new race-based state will never be created by the compromising indecisiveness of a racialist worker-coalition, but only by the iron will of a single movement that has fought its way through all that opposed it"I'm reminded here that Hitler wrote these words from his prison cell following the failure of his party's coup against the Weimar Republic...After his capture by authorities he was imprisoned along with his iron will and those stalwart souls who stood with him in unity...
In another chapter, this one titled to lure the reader into thinking it a dissertation on the need and assembly of his corps of bodyguards, Hitler spends pages of brain-wearying words explaining how the Jew/Bolshevik/privileged-class member created the 1918 Revolution, then couldn't hold it against the returning army veterans without a plan of deceit...His twisted mind then linked the formation of the Weimar Reichswehr into being the creation of the Jews who turned it against his own Storm Troops, as he had begun to refer to his bodyguards...
He noted that other political entities had begun to recruit their own paramilitary divisions from what was known then as the Freicorps, largely drawn from restless, unemployed war veterans...Most of these were somewhat understandably disheartened to come home in defeat to find only unemployment and frustrated anger...Some even felt entitled to engage freely in violence and criminal behavior...
Seizing on this the Nazis and other political factions began recruiting them as enforcers of their particular governing tenets...In defense of his own hooligans, Hitler said they were a cut above the other thugs opposed to them, since they were thoroughly indoctrinated with Nazi idealism, and adhered to their code of ethics...To be sure, they were devoted little ruffians, willing to rough up anyone who did not agree with their adored leader...
Both Hitler and his followers found the true worth of each other's value when all bets were finally down and the cards were on the table the evening of November 8, 1923...The archives of a British newspaper, The Guardian, reported that Hitler, along with General Ludendorff and the Nazi faithful, marched in on a meeting in Munich's Burgerbrau Keller and announced:
"Today begins the national revolution, which is solely directed against the Berlin Jewish Government."After firing his revolver into the ceiling for attention, and nominating himself as the head of a provisional government, he continued:
"The task of the Provisional Government is to begin the march against the den of iniquity in Berlin. Tomorrow there will either be a National Government in Germany or we shall be dead."As it turned out, when tomorrow dawned, sixteen of his faithful followers were dead, and an injured Hitler was on the run just like any other criminal...William Shirer, telling of the event in his book, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," reported that the origin of the first shot, whether from one of Hitler's band or a policeman in the opposing force, was never determined, but the very first to rise and run, before the smoke or noise had dissipated, was Adolf Hitler...
It was reported later he was wounded, and feeling this added to his persona as a revolutionary, he did not make it public that he had only dislocated a shoulder when diving for the ground in fear of being shot...His route to safety led him to the home of the ridiculously named and self-important socialite, Putzi Hanfstaengl, where, two days later, hiding behind Hanfstaengl's wife and sister, Hitler surrendered to arrest...
The only members of the rebellious group who did not duck for cover or run away turned out to be the only professional soldiers present, General Erich Ludendorff, and his adjutant, Major Streck...Shirer reported that both remained calm, marching with heads erect straight into the line of firing policemen, where they turned to find themselves alone and unharmed by the gunfire...Both were arrested, and after their acquittal at trial, Ludendorff condemned the empty courage of both the Nazis and the Army for not following his leadership...He vowed he would never again recognize a German officer, nor wear an officer's uniform...
Hitler's memory was apparently affected by the traumatic events as his recollections did not match those of reporters, nor of eyewitnesses, including members of his Nazi cohorts who were present with him at the time of the incident...
Discussing the unique appearance and training of the SA, and its readiness as a military arm, may have been the kernel of the ill-fated Ernst Rohm's idea to take over as commander of the Reichswehr by integrating it with his brown-shirted SA...In his discussion thereof, Hitler said in his description of the SA:
"If the German nation is given six million athletically-trained bodies, all of which are excited with a fanatical love for their country and all of them trained to the highest pitch of aggressive spirit, then a national state will have the ability to create an army in less than two years if necessary"In Rohm's defense, it might be said that the homosexual thug may have become enraptured reading of the "athletically-trained bodies" "excited with a fanatical love," and misinterpreted Hitler's intention...But, no matter, as it became a moot point in 1934 when Rohm was executed on the order of his friend, Adolf Hitler, to whom he was loyal to his dying breath...Left to speculation is the question of whether Hitler would have also consigned his idol, Frederick the Great, to the same fate as punishment for the same crime...
Hitler waxed poetic at describing the effectiveness of the training of his storm troops, telling of the Reds being "scattered with bloody heads" during parades in Munich and Coburg...But he was saddened by the fact his beloved SA was disbanded, and his party forced into dissolution after his conviction for treason...He ended this chapter trying to see the bright side of his failed coup by saying it put his movement on a different path to the same goal...
Again, in a new chapter, Hitler let his old paranoia run unfettered as he accused his favorite nemesis of orchestrating a plot during the First World War to set the Prussians of Northern Germany against the Bavarians of Southern Germany...He accused the Jews of stirring up thoughts of Federalism, and separating the states by planting the seeds of rumor in Bavaria that the Prussians in Berlin were responsible for the capitulation of Germany in the war, and the resulting formation of the Weimar Republic...
Of course the ever elusive Jews were always just out of reach as they gleefully gobbled up the profits from an unjust war forced upon the German people, and its bloody aftermath in the hated Weimar Republic...It has always amazed me how, if Hitler could know of these dastardly plans, he could never call any of the culprits by name, or provide any specific evidentiary trail...It was always a vague shadow group who, in his studied opinion, just had to be Jewish...
He drew others into his imaginary cabal as he further accused the Jews of taking the heat off themselves by somehow convincing the Catholics to raise the public specter of Ultramontanism, thus alarming the Protestants that their influence would dwindle...To give credit where due, Hitler showed some scholastic ability when he described the state/nation relationship as it applies to federalism, centralized republics and monarchies, but that could be the subject of a separate article...
However, all Hitler's arguments become lost in the darkness as he reveals the aim of National Socialism to create a totalitarian state...In 1934 new law abolished the existence of the sovereign states he once championed, and replaced them with administrative districts (Gaue) governed by mini-dictators (Gauleiters) responsible only to him...He even admits that individual liberties and states' rights will be taken away, but justifies this with the thought that all citizens will see this as necessary in making a greater nation...
In this same paragraph, I also note what I believe to be a Freudian slip as he refers to the resulting state as an "Empire," twice...Sigmund Freud, born into a Jewish family in Austria, would have almost certainly delighted in a chance to psychoanalyze Hitler's empirical dreams, especially in regard to Freud's studies of the death drive, but wisely fled the regime before making that first appointment...
Hitler next took another dip in the propaganda pool, this time in comparison with recruitment of new converts...He claimed personal responsibility for all party propaganda from the time of his initial membership, and of course claimed credit for any success in adding new members...In this chapter his focus is on the effectiveness of propaganda as a tool in attracting followers...
He defines a "follower" as one who accepts the party doctrine and its principles...A "member" is defined as someone who will actively work to spread that doctrine as gospel, without becoming a hindrance to the party...He describes the "propagandist" as one who must try to compel all people to accept the doctrine, while the "organizer" selects the best (read as "most rabidly convinced") from the followers to become members...
At the time of his writing, Hitler's plans call for a small organization, only large enough to execute the movement's plan...This is in direct contradiction to the later events in which a very large bureaucracy was employed to carry out his orders...This bloated government, the increase in size of the military and paramilitary organizations, all added to the burgeoning re-armament program resulted in an artificial reduction in unemployment figures from 6 million in January 1933 to 302,000 in 1939 out of a population of 70 million...
All this was paid for from confiscated property and businesses, deficit spending and outright theft from victims of pogroms launched against Jews...The Reich Minister of Economics, Hjalmar Schracht, introduced Mefo Bills, a form of government sponsored fraud, as payment to business owners who gave up control of their companies under the Nazi-administered Four Year Plan...
Equally contradictory is his statement that the party must limit membership to only essential numbers after achieving success...In later years, almost every German citizen felt compelled to become a badge-carrying (and dues paying) member for fear of criticism and persecution for non-membership...
As Hitler addresses the issue of trade unions in a new chapter, he begins on a note of sympathy and solidarity with the working man, saying he understands the need of the fight for living wages...In his attempt to define a role for trade unions in his Nazi utopia, he says unions do not represent a class of people, but only identify different occupations...He adds that his movement seeks a "class-free society" only recognizing two groups - citizens and subjects...
Since his "class-free society" seems taken directly from the Marxist mantra, he attempts to polarize them by saying the Marxists use the unions as a tool by organizing workers to fight against all other forms of government...Predictably, he goes on to say their true goal is to enslave free nations in a Jewish super-state...
He then points out that unions organized under the National Socialist banner would only work to increase the safety of the national economy, thereby increasing its power...He points out that employees and employers alike would be trustees of the national economy...In my own view, this points to his demand that business owners and workers must yield to his authority, having no other purpose than to serve the state...
At this point, Hitler recognized that his party did not have the funds to openly compete with established unions, and he knew of no one with the talents necessary to build a new union which could challenge the others for members and power...He recommended at that time that a wait-and-see strategy was best, hoping for a rising star to present himself for the role...
After assumption of power in 1933, such an opportunity arose with the formation of the German Labor Front under the direction of the fanatical and alcoholic Nazi, Robert Ley...The German Labor Front, or DAF, abolished all other trade unions and worker representatives, making itself responsible for all labor needed in the Reich, including slave labor...
Ley's increasing public drunkenness and outrageous outbursts embarrassed the Nazi government, and he was eventually removed from authority, his offices being absorbed by Armaments Minister, Fritz Todt, then Albert Speer...After the end of WWII, Ley strangled himself to death in his cell while awaiting trial in an Allied prison on four counts of war crimes...
Hitler's treatise on foreign policy boils down to one thing - foreign countries only exist to be conquered and plundered...If the strength isn't sufficient to do so, then make an alliance with another country and double-team them...He had previously said his first choice would be an alliance with Great Britain against the Soviet Union...Failing that, he could accept Russia as a partner against England...
In his chapter covering alliances, he underscores those same choices again...Joe Stalin took the bait in 1939, and paid the price...Neville Chamberlain lost his bet with Der Fuehrer also, and was replaced by the one man in England who had consistently opposed the appeasement of the Nazi war lord, Winston Churchill, taking the job scant hours before the invasion of France...
Hitler claims to have analyzed the world situation from his prison cell, and determined that Germany's best bets for an alliance aimed at increasing territory were England and Italy...But he offered no empirical data to support his position, leaving this reviewer to suggest his "analysis" was mostly guesswork based on his long-standing admiration of British success in foreign relations, and his swelling affection for Benito Mussolini and his Fascist advances...
From here his arguments deteriorate into the customary indictments against the Jews who, as usual, work behind the scenes to distract the German people, and drive a wedge between Germany and its potential allies...The remainder of this chapter deals with breaking the supposed bondage in which the Jews hold the British will hostage...
In his next to last chapter, Hitler exposes his own plan for the expansion of German territory at the expense of his largest rival...Knowing the fight he would have invading in any direction, he chose the east believing the land was not only more fertile and rich with minerals, but that the Slavic people would be easier to kill, and less mourned by a shocked watching world...
He states flatly that the Soviet Union was doomed the moment it allowed a takeover by Bolsheviks, ousting the upper ruling classes which he said stemmed from a Germanic nucleus...His belief was that the Russian monarchist state only existed so long by the intelligent leadership from the Romanovs, and their successors, the Holstein-Gottorps...
His conclusion that communism, or bolshevism as he termed it, was a Jewish scheme likely originated from the knowledge that Karl Marx had Jewish ancestors even though he was an ethnic German, born in Trier, a pleasant city in the Moselle Valley where this reviewer spent many off-duty hours while stationed there with the USAF...His thought at that time was that slow-witted Russians would welcome his assistance in shedding the yoke of Marxism, after which the Germans could easily take the resources-rich lands they coveted...
In his few coherent moments, Hitler did manage to analyze a possible Germany/Russia alliance, saying it would likely touch off another world war...His fears were that any retaliation from other powers, no matter which way Germans led an attack, would come against Germany first as Russia is already insulated against attack by climate and great distances...He would have been wise to remember that as later events unfolded...
He also correctly foresaw that Russia did not have the manufacturing capacity to quickly gear up in war production...But he was mistaken in thinking they could never manufacture anything more advanced than rudimentary automobiles...Their WWII tank and munitions production proved overwhelming to Axis forces in later years...
This quote:
"Even if a miracle should happen and combat under these conditions did not end with the utter destruction of Germany, the final result would still mean we had been bled white. Afterwards, Germany would be the same as she was before, and we would remain surrounded by large military states - there would have been absolutely no change in conditions at all."...was chillingly accurate...As history shows, Germany's size after WWII remained roughly the same as when he took power, while its resources and humanity had indeed been "bled white"...It was not only surrounded by "large military states," it was occupied by them...For once, he should have listened to his own advice...
He also correctly explained that just because an alliance was forged between Germany and Russia, it does not mean there would be no war between the two...He warned that such a treaty would probably exist on paper only, a prediction which turned out to be deadly accurate as the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact was quickly breached when German forces attacked Russia soon after decimating Poland at the outset of the Second World War...He further warned:
"An alliance that is not ultimately about war is foolish and worthless. Alliances are made for the purpose of battle. Even though the friction is not apparent when the alliance is formed, war is the fundamental motivation and the expected result."I join the many other students of Nazi aggression who have said he wrote categorically of his war plans fifteen years before they were implemented only to have them ignored by a clueless world...Hitler went on to detail the reasons why a German/Russian treaty could never work; Stalin and Molotov would have been well advised to read a copy of the book before signing any contracts with him...
In his final chapter, Herr Hitler makes the attempt to justify his future aggression as self defense by invoking the words of Carl von Clausewitz, a prodigious military thinker whose works were often misinterpreted because of incomplete analysis...His praise for the towering thoughts of Clausewitz as he wrote of the high honor in dying for a cause, seems to underscore the later words of Captain B.H. Liddell Hart who warned against the literal metaphrasing of the abstract thoughts penned by Clausewitz...It is almost certain that Clausewitz would have approved of living to continue the fight for one's beliefs...
Hitler's aim in this final chapter was his call for aggression in the name of self defense against what he would always refer to as "the stab in the back," demanding revenge and reparations for Germany's loss of power and territory resulting from the Treaty of Versailles, the Ruhr Occupation and the Treaty of Locarno...He says the best chance for this occurred in the spring of 1923 when the French occupied the Ruhr Valley...
But Hitler only uses these references as reinforcement for his idea of re-fighting the First World War until it ends in a manner befitting his own ranking of Germany's place in the family of nations...Such a family could only find its destiny in a branchless tree as the last twig fell having no shelter from other branches...Adolf Hitler was a man born into the defeat of his own dysfunctional family, a man who lived his entire life in search of victory by gathering the other emotional cripples he found who sought to cure their ills by blaming a convenient grouping of commonly hated people...Victory stood before him his entire life beckoning him to build on its shoulders, but instead he chose to tear down what others had built in the hope that his view would improve when he could no longer see the happiness of others in the distance...
Truckman's conclusions from having read and reviewed Mein Kampf will be posted in a follow-up article...
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